Singularity Sky (8 page)

Has true libertarianism arrived yet?”

“Welcome, comrades!” Burya opened his arms toward the soldier. “Yes, it is true! With help from our allies of the Festival, the iron hand of the reactionary junta is about to be over-thrown for all time! The new economy is being born; the marginal cost of production has been abolished, and from now on, if any item is produced once, it can be replicated infinitely. From each according to his imagination, to each according to his needs! Join us, or better still, bring your fellow soldiers and workers to join us!”

There was a sharp bang from the roof of the Corn Exchange, right at the climax of his impromptu speech; heads turned in alarm. Something had broken inside the spork factory and a stream of rainbow-hued plastic implements fountained toward the sky and clattered to the cobblestones on every side, like a harbinger of the postindustrial society to come. Workers and peasants alike stared in open-mouthed bewilderment at this astounding display of productivity, then bent to scrabble in the muck for the brightly colored sporks of revolution. A volley of shots rang out and Burya Rubenstein raised his hands, grinning wildly, to accept the salute of the soldiers from the Skull Hill garrison.

The Evening News bulletin. And now for today’s headlines. The crisis over the invasion of Rochard’s World by the so-called Festival continues.

Attempts at diplomatic intermediation having been rebuffed, it now appears that military action is inevitable. Word from the occupied territory is hard to obtain, but to the best of our knowledge, the garrison under Duke Politovsky continue to fight valiantly to defend the Imperial standard.

Ambassador Al-Haq of Turku said earlier on this program that the government of Turku agreed that the expansionist policies of the so-called Festival represent an intolerable threat to peace.

‘The woman who chained herself to the railings of the Imperial residence yesterday morning, demanding votes and property rights for ladies, has been found to have a long history of mental disorders characterized by paranoid hysteria. Leaders of the Mothers’ Union today denied any knowledge of her actions and decried them as unfeminine. She is expected to be charged with causing a public disturbance later this week.

“Baseless rumors circulating on Old Earth about the Admiralty’s planned rolling series of upgrades to our naval capability caused numerous extraplanetary investment companies to sell stocks short, resulting in a plummeting exchange rate and the withdrawal of several insurance companies from the New Republic market. No announcement has yet been made by the chairman of the Royal Bank, but officials from the chamber of trade are currently drawing up charges against those companies participating in the stampede, accusing them of slander and conspiracy to establish a trade cartel using the current defense alert as a pretext.

“The four anarchists hanged at Krummhopf Prison today were attended by—”

Click.

“I hate this fucking planet,” Martin whispered, sinking deeper into the porcelain bathtub. It was the only good feature of the poky little two-room dockside apartment they’d plugged him into. (The bad features, of course, included the likelihood of bugging devices.) He stared at the ceiling, two meters above him, trying to ignore the radio news.

The phone rang.

Cursing, Martin hauled himself out of the bath and, dripping, hopped into the living room. “Yes?” he demanded.

“Had a good day?” A woman’s voice; it took him a second to place it.

“Lousy,” he said with feeling. And hearing from you doesn’t make it any better, he thought: the idea of being sucked into some kind of diplomatic scam didn’t appeal. But the urge to grumble overrode minor irritation. “Their list of embargoed technology includes cranial interfaces. It’s all crappy VR

immersion gloves and keyboards: everything I look at now is covered in purple tesseracts, and my fingers ache.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve had a really good day, compared to mine. Have you had anything to eat yet?”

“Not yet.” Suddenly Martin noticed that he was starving, not to mention bored. “Why?”

“You’re going to like this,” she said lightly. “I know a reasonable restaurant on C deck, two up and three corridors over from security zone gateway five.

Can I buy you dinner?”

Martin thought for a moment. Normally he’d have refused, seeking some way to avoid contact with the UN diplomatic spook. But he was hungry; and not just for food. The casual invitation reminded him of home, of a place where people were able to talk freely. The lure of company drew him out, and after dressing, he followed her directions, trying not to think too deeply about it.

The visiting officers’ quarters were outside the security zone of the base, but there was still a checkpoint to pass through before he reached the airlock to the civilian sections of the station. Outside the checkpoint, he stepped into a main corridor. It curved gently to the left, following the interior of the station’s circumference: more passages opened off it, as did numerous doorways. He walked around a corner and out onto the street—

“Martin!” She took his arm. “So pleased to see you!”

She’d changed into a green dress with a tight bodice and long black gloves.

Her shoulders and upper arms were bare, but for a ribbon around her throat, which struck him as odd; something in his customs briefing nagged at his memory. “Pretend you’re pleased to see me,” she hissed. “Pretend for the cameras. You’re taking me out to buy me dinner. And call me Ludmilla in public.”

“Certainly.” He forced a smile. “My dear! How nice to see you!” He took her arm and tried to follow her lead. “Which way?” he muttered.

“You’re doing fine for an amateur. Third establishment on the right. There’s a table in your name. I’m your companion for the night. Sorry about the cloak-and-dagger bit, but you’re being monitored by base security, and if I were officially here as me, they’d start asking you questions. It’s much more convenient if I’m a woman of easy virtue.”

Martin flushed. “I see,” he said. The penny dropped, finally: in this straitlaced culture, a woman who displayed bare skin below her chin was a bit racy, to say the least. Which meant, now he thought about it, that the hotel was full of—

“You haven’t used the hotel facilities since you arrived?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

Martin shook his head. “I don’t believe in getting arrested in foreign jurisdictions,” he mumbled to cover his discomfort. “And the local customs here are confusing. What do you think of them?”

She squeezed his arm. “No comment,” she said lightly. “Ladies here aren’t supposed to swear.” She gathered her skirts in as he opened the door for her. “Still, I doubt this social order will last many more years. They’ve had to invest a lot of energy to maintain the status quo so long.”

“You sound like you’re looking forward to its collapsing.” He held out his card to a liveried waiter, who bowed and scurried off into the restaurant.

“I am. Aren’t you?”

Martin sighed quietly. “Now that you come to mention it, I wouldn’t shed any tears. All I want to do is get this job over with and go home again.”

“I wish my life were that simple. I can’t afford to be angry: I’m supposed to help protect this civilization from the consequences of its own stupidity. It’s hard to fix social injustices when the people you’re trying to help are all dead.”

“Your table, sir,” said the waiter, reappearing and bowing deeply. Rachel emitted an airheaded giggle; Martin followed the waiter, with Rachel in tow behind him.

She kept up the bubbleheaded pose until they were seated in a private booth and had ordered the menu of the day. As soon as the waiter disappeared, she dropped it. “You want to know what’s going on, who I am, and what this is all about,” she said quietly. “You also want to know whether you should cooperate, and what’s in it for you. Right?”

He nodded, unwilling to open his mouth, wondering how much she knew of his real business.

“Good.” She stared at him soberly. “I take it you already decided not to turn me in to base security. That would have been a bad mistake, Martin; if not for you, then for a lot of other people.”

He lowered his gaze, staring at the place setting in front of her. Silver cutlery, linen napkin, starched tablecloth overflowing on all sides like a waterfall. And Rachel’s breasts. Her dress made it impossible to ignore them, even though he tried not to stare: woman of easy virtue, indeed. He settled for looking her in the face. “There’s something I don’t understand going on here,” he said. “What is it?”

“All will be explained. The first thing I’m going to say is, after you hear my pitch, you can walk away unless you decide to involve yourself. I mean it; I came on heavily earlier, but really, I don’t want you around unless you’re a willing participant. Right now, they think you’re just a loud-mouthed engineer. If they look too closely at me—” She paused. Her lips thinned a little. “I’m female. I’ll get precious little mercy if they trip over me by accident, but they don’t really think of women as free agents, much less defense intelligence specialists, and by this time tomorrow, I should have my diplomatic credentials sorted out and be able to go public. Anyway: about what’s going on here. Are you going to get up and walk out right now, or do you want in?”

Martin thought for a moment. What should I do ? The solution seemed obvious: “I’ll settle for some answers. And dinner. Anything’s better than being locked up in that pesthole of a base.”

“Okay.” She leaned back comfortably. “First.” She held up a gloved finger.

“What’s going on? That’s actually a bit tricky to say. The UN has no jurisdiction here, but we’ve got enough clout to wreck the New Republic’s trade treaties with half their neighbors if the New Republic was, for instance, found to be breaking conventions on warfare or application of forbidden technologies.”

Martin snorted. “Forbidden tech? Them?”

“Do you really think they’d pass up the chance to steal an edge? The royal family, that is?”

“Hmm.” Martin rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Okay, so they’re pragmatic rejectionists, is that what you’re saying?”

“In a nutshell.” She shrugged. Against his better judgment, Martin found himself staring somewhere below her chin: he forced himself to look up.

“Our arms limitation arrangements have no authority here, but things are different closer to home, and a lot of the New Republic’s trade flows in that direction. There’s some recognition: once I get official accreditation, I’ve got diplomatic immunity, if they catch me and I live long enough to assert it.

Two”—she held up another ringer—“the arms limitation controls are to protect people from provoking intervention by the Eschaton. And they work both ways. As long as people stick to boring little things like planet-busting relativistic missiles and nerve gas or whatever, the big E doesn’t get involved. But as soon as someone starts poking around the prohibited—for her coming-out party Daddy gave her an emerald this big!” She simpered, and Martin stared back, puzzled. Then he smiled fixedly as the waiter deposited a bowl of soup in front of him.

The waiter finished up, poured glasses of wine, and disappeared; Rachel pulled a face. “Huh, where was I? You wouldn’t believe how fast the girly-girl routine gets tiresome. Having to act like a retarded ten-year-old all the time … ah yes, the big E. The big E disapproves strongly of people who develop autonomous, self-replicating weapons, or causality-violation devices, or a whole slew of other restricted tools of mass destruction.

Bacteria: out. Gray goo: out. Anything that smacks of self-modifying command software: out. Those are all category two forbidden weapons. A planetary civilization starts playing with them, sooner or later the big E

comes looking, and then it’s an ex-planetary civilization.”

Martin nodded, trying to look as if all this was new to him; he nipped his tongue to help resist the temptation to correct her last statement. Her engagement with the subject was infectious, and he found it hard to keep from contributing from his own knowledge of the field.

Rachel took a mouthful of soup. “The big E can be extremely brutal. We’ve got definite confirmation of at least one atypical supernova event about five hundred light-years outside our—the terrestrial—light cone. It makes sense if you’re trying to wipe out an exponentially propagating threat, so we figure that’s why the Eschaton did it. Anyway, do you agree that it’s bad policy to let the neighbor’s toddler play with strategic nukes?”

“Yeah.” Martin nodded. He took a mouthful of soup. “Something like that could really stop you getting to claim your on-time completion bonus.”

She narrowed her eyes, then nodded to him. “Sarcasm, yet. How have you kept out of trouble so far?”

“I haven’t.” He put his spoon down. “That’s why, if you don’t mind me saying so, I was worried by your approach. I can do without getting myself slung in prison.”

Rachel took a breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know if that’ll go very far with you, but … I mean it. I’d just like to put it in a bigger perspective, though. The New Republic is only 250 light-years from Earth. If the big E

decided to pop the primary here, we’d need to evacuate fifty star systems.”

She looked uncomfortable. “That’s what this is about. That’s why I had to drag you in.”

She looked down and concentrated on her soup bowl with single-minded determination. Martin watched her fixedly; his appetite was gone. She had done a robust job of destroying it by reminding him of why he was here. His parents, he didn’t much care for, but he had a sister he was fond of on Mars, and too many friends and memories to want to hear any more about this. It was easier to watch her eat, to admire the flawless blush of the skin on her arms and her dicolletage—he blinked, picked up his wineglass, and drained it in one. She looked up, caught him watching, grinned widely—theatrically, even—and licked her lips slowly. The effect was too much; he turned away.

“Shit and corruption, man, we’re supposed to look as if you’re buying me dinner as a prelude to taking me home and fucking me senseless!” she said quietly. “Can’t you at least fake some interest?”