Singularity Sky

The Telephone Repairman

Sitting in a highly eccentric polar orbit that drifted almost sixty thousand kilometers above the provincial township of Plotsk, the Festival’s prime node basked fat and happy at the heart of an informational deluge. The pickings in this system were sparse compared to some of the previous ports of call on its itinerary, but Rochard’s World was still unusual and interesting. The Festival had chanced upon few primitive worlds in its travel, and the contrast with its memories of them was great.

Now, as the first starwisps departed — aimed forward at new, unvisited worlds, and back along its track to the hot-cores of civilization where it had stopped before — the Festival took stock. Events on the ground had not gone entirely satisfactorily; while it had accrued a good body of folklore, and not a little insight into the social mores of a rigidly static society, the information channels on offer were ridiculously sparse, and the lack of demand for its wares dismaying. Indeed, its main source of data had been the unfortunate minds forcibly uploaded by some of the more dissolute, not to say amoral, fringe elements.

The Critics, with their perennial instinct to explain and dissect, were moaning continuously — something about the colony succumbing to a disastrous economic singularity — but that sort of thing wasn’t the Festival’s problem. It would soon be time to move on; the first tentative transmissions from Trader clades had been detected, burbling and chirping in the Oort cloud, and the job of opening up communications with this civilization was nearly done.

Each of the hundreds of starwisps the high-orbit launchers were dispatching carried one end of a causal channel: a black box containing a collection of particles in a quantum-entangled state with antiparticles held by the Festival. (By teleporting the known quantum state of a third particle into one of the entangled particles, data could be transmitted between terminals infinitely fast, using up one entangled quantum dot for each bit.) Once the starwisps arrived at their destinations, the channels would be hooked into the communications grid the Festival’s creators had set out to construct. No longer limited by the choke point of the Festival’s back channel to its last destination, the population of Rochard’s World would be exposed to the full information flow of the polity it belonged to.

Out toward Sputnik, the Festival took note of some activity by Bouncers. They seemed to be clearing up a small mess: a handful of slow, inefficient ships that had approached without warning and opened fire on the Bouncers with primitive energy weapons. The Bouncers responded with patient lethality; anything that menaced them died. Some small craft slipped by, evidently not involved in the assault; a number of the second wave broke and ran, and they, too, were spared. But for the most part, the Festival ignored them. Anyone so single-mindedly hostile as to attack the Festival was hardly likely to be a good source of information: as for the others, it would have a chance to talk to them when they arrived.

The air in the lifeboat was foul with a stench of sweat and stale farts. Rachel sat hunched over her backup console, staring unblinkingly at the criticality monitors while the rocket howled and rumbled beneath them: while a single output jitter might kill them before she could even blink, it made her feel better to go through the motions. Besides, she was totally exhausted: as soon as they touched down she had every intention of sleeping for three days. It had been fourteen hours since they escaped from the Lord Vanek; fourteen hours on top of a day and a sleepless night before. If she stopped making the effort to stay awake—

“Riddle this interrogative.” The creature on the screen snapped its tusks, red light gleaming off fangs like blood. “Why not you Bouncers accept?”

“I couldn’t possibly place myself further in their debt,” she said as smoothly as she could manage.

Neutron flux stable at ten kilobecquerels per minute, warned her implants. A hundred chest X rays, in other words, sustained for four hours during the deceleration cycle. The lifeboat’s motor shuddered beneath her like something alive. Vassily’s hammock swung behind her. He’d fallen asleep surprisingly fast once she convinced him they weren’t going to throw him overboard, exhausted by the terror of four hours adrift spent waiting to die. Martin snored softly in the dim red light of the comms terminal, similarly tired. Nothing like learning you aren’t about to die to make you relax, she thought. Which was why she couldn’t sleep yet—

“No debt for payment in kind,” said the strange creature. “You bear much reduction of entropy.”

“Your translation program is buggy,” she muttered.

“Is so interrogative? Suppose, we. Reiterate and paraphrase: question why you do not attack Bouncers like other ships?”

Rachel tensed. “Because we are not part of their expedition,” she said slowly. “We have different intentions. We come in peace. Exchange information. We will entertain you. Is that understood?”

“Ahum. Skreee—” the thing in the screen turned its head right around to look over its shoulder. “We you understand. Will Bouncers of notify peaceful intent. You part are not of not-old administrative institution territoriality of planet?”

“No, we’re from Earth.” Martin stopped snoring: she glanced sideways. One eye was open, watching her tiredly. “Original world of humans,” she clarified.

“Know about Dirt. Know about you-mans, too. Information valuable, tell all!”

“In due course,” Rachel hedged, acutely aware of the thickening air in the capsule. “Are we safe from the Bouncers?”

“Am not understanding,” the thing said blandly. “We are will notify Bouncers of your intent. Is that not safety?”

“Not exactly.” Rachel glanced at Martin, who frowned at her and shook his head slightly. “If you notify the Bouncers that we are not attacking them, will that stop them from eating us?”

“Ahum!” The creature blinked at her. “Maybe not.”

“Well, then. What will stop the Bouncers from attacking us?”

“Skree—why worry? Just talk.”

“I’m not worrying. It’s just that I am not going to tell you everything you want to know about me until I am no longer at risk from the Bouncers. Do you understand that?”

“Ha-frumph\ Not entertaining us. Humph. A-okay, Bouncers will not eat you. We have dietary veto over theys. Now tell all?”

“Sure. But first—” She glanced at the autopilot monitor. “We’re running low on breathable air. Need to land this ship. Is that possible? Can you tell me about conditions on the ground?”

“Sure.” The creature bounced its head up-down in a jerky parody of a nod. “You not problem, land.

May find things changed. Best dock here first. We Critics.”

“I’m looking for a man,” Rachel added, deciding to push her luck. “Have you installed a communications net? Can you locate him for us?”

“May exist. Name?”

“Rubenstein. Burya Rubenstein.” A noise behind her; Vassily rolling over, his hammock swinging in the shifting inertial reference frame of the lifeboat.

“Excuse.” The creature leaned forward. “Name Rubenstein? Revolutionary?”

“Yes.” Martin frowned at her inquiringly: Rachel glanced sideways. I’ll explain later, she thought at him.

“Knows Sister Burya. Sister Seventh of Stratagems. You business with have the Extropian Underground?”

“That’s right.” Rachel nodded. “Can you tell me where he is?”

“Do better.” The thing in the screen grinned. “You accept orbital elements for rendezvous now. We take you there.”

Behind her, Vassily was sitting up, his eyes wide.

The Admiral didn't want to board the lifeboat.

“D-d-d-d-” he drooled, left eye glaring, right eye slack and lifeless.

“Sir, please don’t make a fuss. We need to go aboard now.” Robard looked over his shoulder anxiously, as if half-expecting red-clawed disaster to come stooping and drooling through the airlock behind him.

“N-ever surrr—” Kurtz found the effort too much; his head flopped forward onto his chest.

Robard hefted his chair, and pushed forward, into the cramped confines of the boat. “Is he going to be alright?” Lieutenant Kossov asked fussily.

“Who knows? Just show me somewhere to lash his chair and we’ll be off. More chance of getting help for him down—”

Sirens honked mournfully in the passage outside, and Robard winced as his ears popped. Kossov reached past another officer wearing the braid of a lieutenant commander and yanked the emergency override handle: the outer door of the lifeboat hissed shut. “What’s going on?” someone called from up by the cockpit.

“Pressure breach in this section! Doors tight!”

“Aye, doors tight. Is the Admiral aboard?”

“Yes to that. You going?”

In answer, the deck heaved. Robard grabbed a stanchion and held on one-handed, bracing the Admiral’s wheelchair with another hand as the lifeboat lurched. A rippling bang of explosive bolts severed its umbilical connection to the stricken warship, then it was falling — falling through a deliberately opened gap in the ship’s curved-space field, which was otherwise strong enough to rip the small craft apart. Officers and a handful of selected enlisted men struggled to seize anchor points as whoever was in the hot seat played a fugue on the attitude thrusters, rolling the lifeboat out from behind the warship. Then the drive cut in with a gentle buzzing hiss from underfoot, and a modicum of weight returned them to the correct plane.

Robard bent to work on the wheelchair with a length of cable. “Someone help me with the Admiral,” he asked.

“What do you need?” Lieutenant Kossov peered at him, owlish behind his pince-nez.

“Need to tie this chair down. Then — where are we landing? Is there a doctor aboard this boat? My master really needs to be taken to a hospital, as soon as possible. He’s very ill.”

“Indeed.” The Lieutenant glanced at him sympathetically, then his gaze wandered to the somnolent Admiral. “Give me that.”

Robard passed him the other end of the cable, and together they secured the wheelchair to four of the eye bolts that dotted the floor. Around them, the other surviving officers were taking stock of the situation, neatly unfolding emergency deceleration hammocks from overhead lockers and chatting quietly.

The atmosphere aboard the lifeboat was subdued, chastened; they were lucky to be alive, ashamed not to be aboard the stricken battlecruiser. The fact that most of the survivors were officers from the admiral’s staff didn’t go amiss; the real warriors remained at their posts, trying valiantly to halt the plague that was eating the ship around them. In one corner, a junior lieutenant was sobbing inconsolably at the center of an embarrassed circle of silence.

The Admiral, oblivious to everything around him, mumbled and coughed querulously. Kossov leaned forward attentively. “Is there anything I can do for you, my Admiral?” he asked.

“I fear he’s beyond our help,” Robard said sadly. He rested a gentle hand on Kurtz’s shoulder, steadying the Admiral in his chair. “Unless the surgeons can do something—”

“He’s trying to talk,” Kossov snapped. “Let me listen.” He leaned close to the old warrior’s face. “Can you hear me, sir?”

“A-a—” The Admiral gargled in the back of his throat.

“Don’t excite him, I implore you! He needs rest!”

Kossov fixed the servant with a baleful eye. “Be silent for a minute.”

“—Aah, arr — we—’oing?”

Robard started. “Humbly report we are on our way down to the planetary surface, sir,” said the Lieutenant. “We should be arriving in the capital shortly.” Nothing about the rest of the fleet, the disposition of which was anything but likely to arrive in the colonial capital.

“’Ood.” The Admiral’s face relaxed, eyelids drooping.

“’Amprey. I’ve’m wha’ for.” He subsided, evidently exhausted by the effort of speaking.

Robard straightened up: his eyes met those of the Lieutenant. “He never gives up,” he said calmly. “Even when he ought to. It’ll be the death of him one of these days …” Riding a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent posthumanism without an intervening stage, Burya Rubenstein drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.

The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence that they hadn’t fully understood — until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had warned them.

They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology — but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.

Imagine not growing up with telephones — or faxes, video conferencing, on-line translation, gesture recognition, light switches. Tradition said that you could send messages around the world in an eyeblink, and the means to do so was called e-mail. Tradition didn’t say that e-mail was a mouth morphing out of the nearest object and speaking with a friend’s lips, but that was a more natural interpretation than strange textual commands and a network of post-office routers. The Festival, not being experienced in dealing with Earth-proximate human cultures, had to guess at the nature of the miracles being requested.

Often, it got them wrong.

Burya knew all about communications; his grandfather had dandled him on his knee and passed on legends his own grandfather had told him, legends about management information systems that could tell the management everything they could possibly know about the world and more, legends about the strange genii of human resources that could bring forth any necessary ability at will. Some of the more wired dissidents of Novy Petrograd had cobbled together something which they, in turn, called a management information system: cameras squatted with hooded cyclopean eyes atop the garrets and rooflines of the city, feeding images into the digital nervous system of the revolution.

Before he’d left Plotsk, Burya had spent some time with Timoshevski. Oleg had applied the leeches to Burya’s engorged sense of importance, reminding him that he was only a high official within the Novy Petrograd soviet, that the soviet, in turn, was only a benign parasite upon the free market, a load-balancing algorithm that would be abandoned when the true beauty of the level playing field could be established. Oleg had also applied the worms, which itched furiously (and occasionally burned) as they established contact with Burya’s nervous system. He’d had to inquire pointedly as to the origins of Burya’s strange sense of bourgeois incrementalism in order to goad his erstwhile colleague into accepting the upgrade, but in the end, Rubenstein had seen no alternative. Given his currently peripatetic occupation, he’d be sidelined by the Central Committee if he stayed out of touch much longer. And so it was that his head itched abominably, and he was plagued by strange visions as the worms of the Committee for State Communications forged a working relationship with his brain.

When Burya slept, he dreamed in rasterized false-color images, scanned from the rooftops of the capital.

The revolution, eternally vigilant, multitasked on his lateral geniculate body, rousting slumbering synapses to recognize suspicious patterns of behavior. Burya found it both disturbing and oddly reassuring to see that the city, for all the changes wrought by the revolution, continued. Here a youth darted from shadow to shadow, evidently on a midnight assignation with his sweetheart; there a grimmer kind of conspiracy fomented, dogs fighting over the bones of temporal responsibility as a block warden stalked a resented houseowner with murder in his eye. Houses grew and fissioned in slow motion, great sessile beasts prodded hither and yon by their internal symbionts. It was all unspeakably alien to him: an eerie half-life crawling over the once-familiar city, echoes of the way he’d lived for years, lying like a corpse in an open casket. Even the searing light of a nighttime shuttle landing at the field outside the city couldn’t bring it back to a semblance of the life he’d known.

Burya dreamed, too, of his own family; a wife he hadn’t seen in fourteen years, a five-year-old son whose chubby face blurred with distance. (Internal exile was not a sentence of exclusion from family, but she came from solid middle-class stock, had disowned him upon hearing of his sentence and been granted a legal separation.) A helpless, weak loneliness— which he cursed whenever he noticed it in waking life— dogged his heels. The revolutionary junta had barely affected the course of events; it provided a nucleus for the wilder elements to coagulate around, a lens to focus the burning rays of resentment on the remains of the ancient regime, but in and of itself, it had achieved little. People suddenly gifted with infinite wealth and knowledge rapidly learned that they didn’t need a government — and this was true as much for members of the underground as for the workers and peasants they strove to mobilize. Perhaps this was the message that the Critic had been trying to drum into him ever since his abduction from the offices of the revolutionary soviet — the revolution he had been striving for didn’t need him.

On the second morning of the search for Felix, Burya awakened exhausted, limbs aching and sore, feet half frozen, in one corner of the walking hut. Sister Seventh was elsewhere, snuffling and crashing in the undergrowth beside the path. Bright polymer-walled yurts clung to the fringes of the clearing they’d camped in. A growth of trees around them struggled defiantly beneath huge shelf fungi that threatened to turn them into many-colored outcroppings. All around them grew gigantic ferns and purple-veined cycads, interstellar colonists planted by the unseen gardeners of the Festival fleet. Small mouselike creatures tended the ferns, bringing them scraps of decaying matter and attaching them to the sundew-like feeding palps that sprouted from their stems.

According to the presingularity maps, they should have passed a village two kilometers ago, but they’d seen no sign of it. Instead, they’d passed beneath a huge drifting geodesic sphere that had turned the sunset to flame overhead, making one of the cyborg militia shout and fire wildly into the air until Sergeant Lukcas yelled at him and took his gun away. “It’s a farm, pighead,” he’d explained with heavy-handed irony, “like what you grew up on, only rolled into a ball and flying around the sky. And if you don’t stop shooting at it, we’ll use your head the same way.” Some of the guards had muttered and made signs to avert the evil eye — in one case using a newly functional set of mandibles — and the rabbit walked with his ears laid flat along his head for half a kilometer before they made camp, but there were no further untoward incidents before the end of the road. But now the road had definitely come to an end.

The posse had made good progress along the Emperor’s metaled highways to reach this point; but ahead of them, the Lysenkoist forest was attempting to assimilate the road. Small, eyeless rodents with fine pelts gnawed mindlessly at the asphalt surface, extruding black pellets that were swarmed over by not-ants the size of grasshoppers. Tall clay structures not unlike termite mounds dotted the open spaces between the ferns: they hummed quietly with a noise like a million microscopic gas turbines.

The campfire crackled ominously and belched steam as Mr. Rabbit threw scraps of dead, fungus-riddled wood on it. Burya yawned and stretched in the cold air, then stumbled off to find a tree to piss behind.

Bedrolls stirred on the ground, militiamen grumbling and demanding coffee, food, and sexual favors from a nonexistent cook. There was a gout of flame and the rabbit jumped backward, narrowly missing a soldier who howled curses; the road castings were highly inflammable.

After pissing, Burya squatted. It was in this undignified position that Sister Seventh, in an unusually avuncular mood, found him.

“Greetings of morning and good micturations to you! News of outstandingness and grace bring I.”

“Harrumph.” Burya glared at the giant rodent, his ears meanwhile flushing red with the effort of evacuation. “Has anybody told you it isn’t polite to stare?”

“At what?” Sister Seventh looked puzzled.

“Nothing,” he muttered. “What’s this news?”

“Why, of importance nothing.” The Critic turned away innocently. “Of pleasing symmetry—” Burya gritted his teeth, then began fumbling about for leaves. (This was something that had never been mentioned in the biographies of the famous revolutionaries, he noted vaguely; being attacked by bears and pursued by bandits or Royal mounted police was all very exciting and noteworthy, but the books never said anything about the shortage of toilet paper in the outback, or the way there were never any soft leaves around when you needed them.) “Just the facts.”

“Visitors! My sibling’s nest overflows with a bounty of information.”

“Visitors? But—” Burya stopped. “Your siblings. In orbit?”

“Yes!” Sister Seventh rolled forward and over, waving her stubby legs in the air briefly before tumbling over with a loud thud. “Visitors from space!”

“Where from?” Burya leaned forward eagerly.

“The New Republic.” Sister Seventh grinned amusedly, baring huge, yellowed tusks. ”Sent fleet. Met Bouncers. There were survivors.“

“Who, dammit!” He gritted his teeth angrily as he yanked his trousers up.

“Ambassador from Earth-prime. One other-else-who component-wise is part of her hive. And ambiguosity. They inquire for you, yourself. Want to meet?” Burya gaped. “They’re coming here?”

“They land at our destination. Soon.”

The lifeboat was dark, hot, and stank of methane; the waste gas scrubber had developed an asthmatic wheeze. By any estimate, the life-support loop was only good for another day or so of breathable air before they had to retreat into their suits — but long before then, the passengers would have to face the perils of reentry.

“Are you sure this is safe?” asked Vassily.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Safe, he asks,” muttered Martin. “Kid, if you wanted safe, you should have stayed home when the fleet left port.”

“But I don’t understand — you’ve been talking to those aliens. They’re the enemy! They just killed half our fleet! But you’re taking orbital elements and course correction advisories from them. Why are you so trusting? How do you know they won’t kill us, too?”

“They’re not the enemy,” Rachel said, patiently prodding away at the autopilot console. “They never were the enemy— at least, not the kind of enemy the Admiral and his merry band expected.”

“But if they’re not your enemy, you must be on their side!” Vassily glanced from one of them to the other, thoroughly spooked now.

“Nope.” Rachel carried on prodding at the autopilot. “I wasn’t sure before, but I am, now: the Festival isn’t anything like you think it is. You guys came out here expecting an attack by a foreign government, with ships and soldiers, didn’t you? But there are more things out in this universe than humans and their nations and multinational organizations. You’ve been fighting a shadow.”

“But it destroyed all those ships! It’s hostile! It—”

“Calm down.” Martin watched him cautiously. Ungrateful little shit: or is he just terminally confused

? Rachel’s easy conversation with the Critics had unsettled Martin more than he liked to admit, almost as much as her unexpectedly successful rescue attempt. There were wheels within wheels here, more than he’d expected. “There are no sides. The Critics aren’t enemies; they aren’t even part of the Festival. We tried to tell your people to expect something totally alien, but they wouldn’t listen.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Festival isn’t human, it isn’t remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations; that’s wrong, and it’s been clear that it’s wrong from the start. You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It’s a self-replicating information network. Probe enters a system: probe builds a self-extending communications network and yanks the inhabited worlds of that system into it. Drains all the information it can get out of the target civilization, then spawns more probes. The probes carry some parasites, uploaded life-forms that build bodies and download into them whenever they reach a destination — but that’s not what it exists for.” Vassily gaped. “But it attacked us!”

“No it didn’t,” Martin replied patiently. “It isn’t intelligent; analyzing its behavior by adopting an intentional stance is a mistake. All it did was detect an inhabited planet with no telephone service at a range of some light-years and obey its instructions.”

“But the instructions — it’s war!”

“No, it’s a bug fix. It turns out that the Festival is just a — a telephone repairman. Like a robot repairman.

Only it doesn’t repair mere telephones — it repairs holes in the galactic information flow.” Martin glanced sideways at Rachel. She was wrestling with the autopilot, getting the landing burn sequence keyed in. It was a bad idea to distract her at a time like this; better keep the young nuisance occupied.

“Civilizations rise and fall from time to time; the Festival is probably a mechanism set in place a few millennia ago to keep them in touch, built by an interstellar culture back in the mists of time. When it detected a hole in the net it maintains, it decided to fix it, which is why it set up to do business in orbit around Rochard’s World, which is about as isolated and cut off as it’s possible to be.”

“But we didn’t ask for it,” Vassily said uncertainly.

“Well, of course not. Actually, I think it’s strayed outside its original maintenance zone, so every system it discovers in this sector warrants a repair job: but that’s not necessarily all there is to it. Part of the repair process is a rapid exchange of information with the rest of the network it connects to, a flow that runs in two directions. Over time, the Festival has become more than a mere repair service; it’s become a civilization in its own right, one that blooms like a desert flower — briefly flourishing in the right environment, then curling up into a seed and sleeping as it migrates across the deserted gulf light-years between oases. Telephone switches and routers are some of the most complicated information-processing systems ever invented — where do you think the Eschaton originally came from?

“When the Festival arrived at Rochard’s World, it had a 250-year communications deficit to make good.

That repair — the end of isolation, arrival of goods and ideas restricted by the New Republic — caused a limited local singularity, what in our business we call a consensus reality excursion; people went a little crazy, that’s all. A sudden overdose of change; immortality, bio-engineering, weakly superhuman AI arbeiters, nanotechnology, that sort of thing. It isn’t an attack.”

“But then — you’re telling me they brought unrestricted communications with them?” he asked.

“Yup.” Rachel looked up from her console. “We’ve been trying for years to tell your leaders, in the nicest possible way: information wants to be free. But they wouldn’t listen. For forty years we tried. Then along comes the Festival, which treats censorship as a malfunction and routes communications around it.

The Festival won’t take no for an answer because it doesn’t have an opinion on anything; it just is.”

“But information isn’t free. It can’t be. I mean, some things — if anyone could read anything they wanted, they might read things that would tend to deprave and corrupt them, wouldn’t they? People might give exactly the same consideration to blasphemous pornography that they pay to the Bible! They could plot against the state, or each other, without the police being able to listen in and stop them!” Martin sighed. “You’re still hooked on the state thing, aren’t you?” he said. “Can you take it from me, there are other ways of organizing your civilization?”

“Well—” Vassily blinked at him in mild confusion. “Are you telling me you let information circulate freely where you come from?”

“It’s not a matter of permitting it,” Rachel pointed out. “We had to admit that we couldn’t prevent it.

Trying to prevent it was worse than the disease itself.”

“But, but lunatics could brew up biological weapons in their kitchens, destroy cities! Anarchists would acquire the power to overthrow the state, and nobody would be able to tell who they were or where they belonged anymore. The most foul nonsense would be spread, and nobody could stop it—” Vassily paused. “You don’t believe me,” he said plaintively.

“Oh, we believe you alright,” Martin said grimly. “It’s just — look, change isn’t always bad. Sometimes freedom of speech provides a release valve for social tensions that would lead to revolution. And at other times, well — what you’re protesting about boils down to a dislike for anything that disturbs the status quo. You see your government as a security blanket, a warm fluffy cover that’ll protect everybody from anything bad all the time. There’s a lot of that kind of thinking in the New Republic; the idea that people who aren’t kept firmly in their place will automatically behave badly. But where I come from, most people have enough common sense to avoid things that’d harm them; and those that don’t, need to be taught. Censorship just drives problems underground.“

“But, terrorists!”

“Yes,” Rachel interrupted, “terrorists. There are always people who think they’re doing the right thing by inflicting misery on their enemies, kid. And you’re perfectly right about brewing up biological weapons and spreading rumors. But—” She shrugged. “We can live with a low background rate of that sort of thing more easily than we can live with total surveillance and total censorship of everyone, all the time.” She looked grim. “If you think a lunatic planting a nuclear weapon in a city is bad, you’ve never seen what happens when a planet pushes the idea of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship to the limit. There are places where—” She shuddered.

Martin glanced at her. “You’ve got somewhere specific in mind to—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said tersely. “And you should be ashamed of yourself, winding the boy up like that. Either of you two noticed the air stinks?”

“Yeah.” Martin yawned widely. “Are we about—”

“—I am not a—” A thundering chorus of popping noises sounded outside the cabin. “—boy!” Vassily finished with a squeak.

“Belt up, kid. Main engine coming on in five seconds.”

Martin tensed, unconsciously tightening his belt. “What’s our descent curve?”

“Waypoint one coming up: ten-second course adjustment, one-point-two gees. We sit tight for four minutes or so, then we hit waypoint two, and burn for two hours at two and a quarter gees — this ends

’bout four thousand klicks elevation relative to planetary surface, and we’ll hit atmosphere sixteen minutes later at about four k.p.s. We’ll have some reaction mass left, but I really don’t want to power up the main engine once we’re in air we’ll have to breathe afterward; so we’re going to drop the propulsion module once we’re suborbital and it’ll kick itself back into a graveyard orbit with the last of its fuel.“

“Er.” Vassily looked puzzled. “Four k.p.s. Isn’t that a bit fast?”

“No it’s—” A high-pitched roar cut into Rachel’s explanation, jolting everything in the capsule back toward the rear bulkhead. Ten seconds passed. “It’s only about Mach 12, straight down. And we’ll have dropped the engines overboard, first. But don’t worry, we’ll slow up pretty fast when we hit the atmosphere. They used to do this sort of thing all the time during the Apollo program.”

“The Apollo program? Wasn’t that back in the days when space travel was experimental?” Martin noticed that where Vassily was gripping the back of his chair, the lad’s knuckles had turned white. How interesting.

“Yeah, that was it,” Rachel said casually. “’Course, they didn’t have nuclear power back then — was it before or after the Cold War?”

“Before, I think. The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn’t it?”

“Cold War?” piped Vassily.

“Back on Earth, about four, five hundred years ago,” Rachel explained.

“But they were doing this, and they couldn’t even build a steam engine?”

“Oh, they could build steam engines,” Martin said airily. “But they powered them by burning rock oil under the boilers. Fission reactors were expensive and rare.”

“That doesn’t sound very safe,” Vassily said dubiously. “Wouldn’t all that oil explode?”

“Yes, but Earth is an early population three planet, and quite old; the isotope balance is lousy, not enough uranium-235.”

“Too damn much if you ask me,” Rachel muttered darkly.

“I think you’re trying to confuse me, and I really don’t like that. You think you’re so sophisticated, you Terrans, but you don’t know everything! You still can’t keep terrorists from blowing up your cities, and for all your so-called sophistication you can’t control your own filthy impulses — meddling fools by politics, meddling fools by nature!”

Another burp from an attitude control thruster. Rachel reached over and grabbed Martin’s shoulder.

“He’s got us nailed.”

“Aye up, ’e’s got us bang to rights. It’s a fair cop, guv.” Vassily glanced from one of them to the other in bewilderment; his ears began to glow bright red. Rachel laughed. “If that’s meant to be a Yorkshire accent, I’m a Welsh ferret, Martin!”

“Well, I’d be pleased to stuff you down my trousers any day of the week, my dear.” The engineer shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Vassily’s glow spreading from ears to neck. “You’ve got a lot to learn about the real world, kid. I’m surprised your boss let you out on your own without a minder.”

“Will you stop calling me a child!”

Rachel hunched around in her chair and stared at him. “But you are, you know. Even if you were sixty years old, you’d still be a child to me. As long as you expect someone or something else to take responsibility for you, you’re a child. You could fuck your way through every brothel in New Prague, and you’d still be an overgrown schoolboy.” She looked at him sadly. “What would you call a parent who never let their children grow up? That’s what we think of your government.”

“But that’s not why I’m here! I’m here to protect the Republic! I’m here because—” The main motor went critical and spooled up to full power with a deep bass roar, rattling the capsule like a tin can in a hurricane. Vassily was shoved back into his hammock, gasping for breath; Rachel and Martin subsided into their seats, slugged by a solid twenty meters per second of acceleration— not the five-hundred-kilo chest-squishing gorilla of reentry, but enough force to make them lie back and concentrate on breathing.

The engine burned for a long time, carrying them away from the drifting wreckage of battle, toward an uncertain rendezvous.