Singularity Sky

Delivery Service

The husks of two spent Bouncer ships drifted toward the edge of the system, tumbling end over end at well over stellar escape velocity. They didn’t matter anymore; they’d done their job.

Behind them, the wreckage of the New Republican home fleet scattered like ashes on a searing hot wind.

Two-thirds of the ships bubbled and foamed, engineering segments glowing red-hot as the disassembler goop stripped them down; bizarre metallic fuzz sprawled across their hulls, like fungal hyphae drilling through the heart of dead and rotting trees. Almost all of the other warships were boosting at full power, pursuing escape trajectories that would take them back into deep space. The space around Rochard’s World was full of screaming countenneasure signals, jammers and feedback howlers and interferometry decoys and penaids that — unknown to their owners — were proving as effective as shields slung over the backs of tribesmen fleeing in the face of machine-gun fire. A scattering of much smaller, slower ships continued to decelerate toward the planet ahead, or coasted slowly in. For the most part the remaining Bouncers ignored these: lifeboats weren’t generally troublemakers. Finally, coasting in from a range of astronomical units, came the first trade ships of the merchant fleet that followed the Festival around. Their signals were gaily entertaining, flashy and friendly: unlike the New Republic, these were not ignorant of the Festival, its uses and hazards.

But the Festival barely noticed the approaching trade fleet. Its attention was directed elsewhere: soon it would give birth to its next generation, wither, and die.

Antimatter factories the size of continents drilled holes in the fiery solar corona, deep in the curved-space zone just outside the photosphere of Rochard’s star. Huge accelerator rings floated behind their wake shields, insulated by kilometers of vacuum; solar collectors blacker than night soaked up solar energy, megawatts per square meter, while masers dumped waste heat into the interstellar night overhead. Every second, milligram quantities of antimatter accumulated in the magnetic traps at the core of the accelerators. Every ten thousand seconds or so, another hazardous multigram payload shipped out on a beamriding cargo pod to the starwisp assembly zone around Sputnik. There were a hundred factories in all; the Festival had dismantled a large Kuiper body to make them and placed the complex barely a million kilometers above the stellar surface. Now the investment was paying off in raw energy, a million times more than the planetary civilization had been able to muster.

The starwisps weren’t the Festival’s only cargo, nor were the Fringe and the Critics the only passengers to visit the planetary surface. Deep in the planetary biosphere, vectors armed with reverse transcriptase and strange artificial chromosomes were at work. They’d re-entered over the temperate belt of the northern continent, spreading and assimilating the contents of the endogenous ecology. Complex digestive organs, aided by the tools of DNA splicing and some fiendishly complicated expression control operons, assimilated and dissected chromosomes from everything the package’s children swallowed. A feedback system — less than conscious but more than vegetable — spliced together a workable local expression of a design crafted thousands of years ago; one that could subsist on locally available building blocks, a custom saprophyte optimized for the ecology of Rochard’s World.

Huge Lamarckian syncitia spread their roots across the pine forest, strangling the trees and replacing them with plants shaped like pallid pines. They were fruiting bodies, mushrooms sprouting atop the digested remains of an entire ecosystem. They grew rapidly; special cells deep in their cores secreted catalytic enzymes, nitrating the long polysaccharide molecules, while in the outer bark long, electrically conductive vessels took shape like vegetable neurons.

The forest parasite grew at a ferocious rate, fruiting bodies sprouting a meter a day. It was a much longer-term project than the rewiring of the incommunicado civilization that the Festival had stumbled across; and one more grand than any of the sentient passengers could have imagined. All they were aware of was the spread of intrusive vegetation, an annoying and sometimes dangerous plague that followed the Festival as closely as did the Mimes and other beings of the Fringe. Come the dry season, and the Festival forest would become a monstrous fire hazard; but for now, it was just a sideshow, still sprouting slowly toward its destiny, which it would reach around the time the Festival began to die.

Fifty kilometers above the ocean, still traveling at twelve times the speed of sound, the naval lifeboat spread its thistledown rotors behind the shock front of reentry and prepared to autorotate.

“Makes you wish the Admiralty’d paid for the deluxe model,” Lieutenant Kossov muttered between gritted teeth as the capsule juddered and shook, skipping across the ionosphere like a burning sodium pellet on a basin of water. Commander Leonov glared at him: he grunted as if he’d been punched, and shut up.

Thirty kilometers lower and fifteen hundred kilometers closer to the coast of the northern continent, the plasma shock began to dissipate. The rotors, glowing white at their tips, freewheeled in the high stratosphere, spinning in a bright blurring disk. Lying in an acceleration couch in the cockpit, the flight crew grappled with the problem of landing a hypersonic autogyro on an airfield with no ground control and no instrument guidance, an airfield that was quite possibly under siege by hostiles. Robard’s blood ran cold as he thought about it. Reflexively, he glanced sideways at his master: a life dedicated to looking after the Admiral had brought him to this fix, but still he looked to him for his lead, even though the old warhorse was barely conscious.

“How does he look?” Robard asked.

Dr. Hertz glanced up briefly. “As well as can be expected,” he said shortly. “Did you bring his medications with you?”

Robard winced. “Only his next doses. There are too many pill bottles—”

“Well then.” Hertz fumbled with his leather bag, withdrew a preloaded syringe. “Was he taking laudanum? I recall no such prescription, but …”

“Not to my knowledge.” Robard swallowed. “Diabetes, a dyskinesia, and his um, memory condition.

Plus his legs, of course. But he was not in pain.”

“Well, then, let’s see if we can wake him up.” Hertz held up the syringe and removed the protective cap.

“I would not normally so brutalize an old man before landing, especially one who has suffered a stroke, but under the circumstances—”

Twelve kilometers up, the autogyro dropped below Mach 2. Rotors shedding a disk of thunderous lightning, its ground track angled across the coast; where it passed, animals fled in panic. The lifeboat continued to lose altitude while Hertz administered his wake-up injection. Less than a minute later, the craft dropped to subsonic speed, and a new keening note entered the cabin. Robard glanced up instinctively.

“Just restarting the aerospikes,” Kossov mumbled. “That way we can make a powered touchdown.” The Admiral groaned something inarticulate, and Robard leaned forward. “Sir. Can you hear me?” The lifeboat flew sideways at just under half the speed of sound, a bright cylinder of fire spurting from the tips of the rotor disk that blurred around its waist. The copilot repeatedly tried to raise Imperial Traffic Control, to no avail; he exchanged worried glances with his commander. Trying to land under the missile batteries of the Skull Hill garrison, with no word on who was holding the city below, would be nerve-racking enough. To do so in a lifeboat short on fuel, with a desperately sick admiral aboard—

But there was no breath of search radar bouncing off the lifeboat’s hull. Even as it rose over the castle’s horizon, drifting in at a sedate four hundred kilometers per hour, there was no flicker of attention from the ground defense batteries. The pilot keyed his intercom switch. “The field’s still there even though nobody’s talking to us. Visual approach, stand by for a bumpy ride.” The Admiral muttered something incoherent and opened his eyes. Robard leaned back in his seat as the rotor tip aerospikes quietened their screeching roar, and the pilot fed the remaining power into the collective pitch, trading airspeed against altitude. “Urk.” Lieutenant Kossov looked green.

“Hate ’copters,” mumbled the Admiral.

The motors shut down, and the lifeboat dropped, autorotating like a fifty-ton sycamore seed. There was a brief surge of upward acceleration as the pilot flared out before touchdown, then a bone-jarring crunch from beneath the passenger compartment. A screech of torn metal told its own story; the lifeboat tilted alarmingly, then settled back drunkenly, coming to rest with the deck tilted fifteen degrees.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” asked Robard.

“Shut up and mind your business,” grated Commander Leonov. He hauled himself out of his couch and cast about. “You! Look sharp, man the airlock! You and you, break open the small-arms locker and stand by to clear the way.” He began to clamber down the short ladder to the flight deck, hanging on tight despite the fifteen-degree overhang, still barking out orders. “You, Robot or whatever your name is, get your man ready to move, don’t know how long we’ve got. Ah, Pilot-captain Wolff. I take it we’re on the field. Did you see any sign of a welcoming committee?”

The pilot waited while Leonov backed down the ladder, then followed him down to the deck. “Sir, humbly report we have arrived at Novy Petrograd emergency field, pad two. I was unable to contact traffic control or port air defense control before landing, but nobody shot at us. I didn’t see anyone standing around down there, but there are big changes to the city — it’s not like the briefing cinematograph. Regret to report that on final approach we ran a little short of fuel, hence the bad landing.”

“Acceptable under the circumstances.” Leonov turned to the airlock. “You there! Open the hatch, double quick, ground party will secure the perimeter immediately!” The Admiral seemed to be trying to sit up. Robard cranked up the back of his wheelchair, then leaned down to release the cables securing it in place. As he did so, the Admiral made a curious chuckling noise.

“What is it, sir?”

“Heh—’omit commit. Heh!”

“Absolutely, sir.” Robard straightened up. Fresh air gusted into the confines of the lifeboat; someone had tripped the override on the airlock, opening both hatches simultaneously. He could smell rain and cherry blossoms, grass and mud.

Lieutenant Kossov followed the ground party through the airlock, then ducked back inside. “Sir. Humbly report, ground party has secured the site. No sign of any locals.”

“Hah, good. Lieutenant, you and Robot can get the old man down. Follow me!” Leonov followed the last of the officers— the flight crew and a couple of lieutenant commanders Robard didn’t recognize, members of the Admiral’s staff or the bridge crew — into the airlock.

Together, Robard and Lieutenant Kossov grunted and sweated the Admiral’s wheelchair down a flimsy aluminum stepladder to the ground. Once his feet touched concrete, Robard breathed in deeply and looked around. One of the lifeboat’s three landing legs looked wrong, a shock absorber not fully extended. It gave the craft an oddly lopsided appearance, and he knew at once that it would take more than a tank-ful of fuel to get it airborne again, much less into orbit. Then his eyes took in what had happened beyond the rust-streaked concrete landing pad, and he gasped.

The landing field was less than two kilometers from the brooding walls of the garrison, on the outskirts of the scantily settled north bank of the river. South of the river, there should have been a close-packed warren of steep-roofed houses, church spires visible in the distance before a knot of municipal buildings.

But now the houses were mostly gone. A cluster of eldritch silvery ferns coiled skyward from the former location of the town hall, firefly glimmerings flickering between their fractally coiled leaves. The Ducal palace showed signs of being the worse for wear; one wall looked as if it had been smashed by a giant fist, the arrogant bombast of heavy artillery.

The Admiral slapped feebly at the arm of his chair. “’Ot right!”

“Absolutely, my lord.” Robard looked around again, this time hunting the advance landing party. They were halfway to the control tower when something that glowed painfully green slashed overhead, making the ground shake with the roar of its passage.

“Enemy planes!” shouted Kossov. “See, they’ve followed us here! We must get the Admiral to cover, fast!” He pushed Robard aside and grabbed the handles of the wheelchair, nearly tipping it over in his haste.

“I say!” Robard snapped, angry and disturbed at his position being usurped. He cast a worried glance at the sky and decided not to confuse the issue further; the Lieutenant’s behavior was unseemly, but the need to get the admiral to safety was pressing. “I say, there’s a path there. I’ll lead. If we can reach the tower—”

“You! Follow us!” Kossov called to the perimeter guards, confused and worried ratings who, thankful at being given some direction, shouldered their carbines and tagged along. It was a warm morning, and the Lieutenant wheezed as he pushed the wheelchair along the cracked asphalt path. Robard paced along beside him, a tall, sepulchrally black figure, hatchet-faced with worry. Weeds grew waist high to either side of the path, and other signs of neglect were omnipresent; the field looked as if it had been abandoned for years, not just the month since the invasion. Bees and other insects buzzed and hummed around, while birds squawked and trilled in the distance, shamefully exposing the locals’ neglect of their DDT spraying program.

A distant rumble prompted Robard to glance over his shoulder. Birds leapt into the sky as a distant green brightness twisted and seemed to freeze, hovering beneath the blind turquoise dome of the sky. “Run!” He dashed forward and threw himself into the shade of a stand of young trees.

“What?” Kossov stopped and stared, jaw comically dropping. The green glare grew with frightening, soundless rapidity, then burst overhead in an emerald explosion. A noise like a giant door slamming shut pushed Robard into the grass: then the aircraft thundered past, dragging a freight train roar behind it as it made a low pass over the parked lifeboat and disappeared toward the far side of the city. Bees buzzed angrily in his ears as he picked himself up and looked wildly around for the Admiral.

The Lieutenant had been knocked off his feet by the shock wave; now he was sitting up, cradling his head gingerly. The wheelchair had remained upright, and a loud but slurred stream of invective was flowing from it. “’Orson swiving ’role’erian cocksu’ing ba-a-stards!" Kurtz raised his good arm and shook a palsied fist at the sky. “You ’evolushunary shit’ll get yours! Ouch!” The arm flopped.

“Are you alright sir?” Robard gasped nervously.

“’Astard stung me,” Kurtz complained, drooling on the back of his wrist. “Damn bees.” An angry buzzing veered haywire around Robard, and he whacked at it with his dirt-stained gloves.

“I’m sure you’ll be alright, sir, once we get you to the control tower and then the castle.” He inspected the mashed insect briefly, and froze. Red, impact-distorted letters ridged its abdomen with unnatural clarity. He shuddered and smeared the back of his glove on the ground. “We’d better move fast, before that plane decides we’re the enemy.”

“You take over,” said Kossov, clutching a reddened handkerchief to his forehead. “Let’s go.” Together they turned and pushed on toward the control tower, and beyond it the uncertainties of the Ducal palace and whatever had become of the capital city under the new order.

Eighty kilometers away, another lifeboat was landing.

Rachel shook herself groggily and opened her eyes. It took her a moment to realize where she was.

Reentry had been alarmingly bumpy; the capsule was swinging back and forth with a regular motion that would have made her nauseous if her vestibular dampers hadn’t kicked in. There was a moan from behind her seat and she glanced sideways. Martin was waking up visibly, shaking his head, his face going through a horrible series of contortions and twitches. Behind her, Vassily moaned again. “Oh, that was terrible.”

“Still alive, huh?” She blinked at the viewscreen. Black smears obscured much of it, remnants of the ablative heat shield that had melted and streaked across the cameras on the outside of the hull. The horizon was a flat blue line, the ground half-hidden beneath a veil of clouds as they descended beneath the main parasail. An altimeter ticked down the last two thousand meters. “Say yes if you can wriggle your toes.”

“Yes,” said Martin. Vassily just moaned. Rachel didn’t bother to inquire further after their health; she had too many things to do before they landed. It could all get very messy very fast, now they didn’t have an engine.

Pilot: Plot range and heading to rendezvous waypoint omega. A map overlay blinked on the viewscreen. They were coming down surprisingly close, only a few kilometers out from the target. Pilot: Hard surface retromotor status, please. More displays; diagnostics and self-test maps of the landing motor, a small package hanging in the rigging halfway between the rectangular parachute and the capsule roof. Triggered by radar, the landing turbine would fire a minute before touchdown, decelerating the capsule from a bone-crushing fifty-kilometer-per-hour fall and steering them to a soft touchdown.

“I could do with a drink,” said Martin.

“You’ll have to wait a minute or two.” Rachel watched the screen intently. One thousand meters.

“I can’t feel my toes,” Vassily complained.

Oh shit. “Can you wriggle them?” asked Rachel, heart suddenly in her mouth. She’d never expected a third passenger, and if the hammock had landed him with a spinal injury—

“Yes.”

“Then why the fuck did you say you couldn’t feel them?”

“They’re cold!”

Rachel yawned; her ears popped. “I think we just depressurized. You must have your toes on top of the vent or something.” The outside grew hazy, whited out. Ten more seconds, and the wispy cloud thinned, peeling back to reveal trees and rivers below. A dizzying view, the ground growing closer. She gritted her teeth. Next to her, Martin shuffled for a better view.

“Attention. Landing raft inflation.” A yellow python wrapped itself around the bottom of the capsule and bloated outward, cutting off her view of the ground directly below. Rachel cursed silently, looked for a clearing in the trees. The forest cover was unusually dense, and she tensed.

“Over there.” Martin pointed.

“Thanks.” Using the side stick, she pointed out the opening to the autopilot. Pilot: make for designated landing ground. Engage autoland on arrival.

“Attention. Stand by for retromotor ignition in five seconds. Touchdown imminent. Three seconds.

Main canopy separation.” The capsule dropped sickeningly. “Motor ignition.” A loud rumbling from above, and the fall stopped. The clearing below lurched closer, and the rumbling grew to a shuddering roar. “Attention. Touchdown in ten seconds. Brace for landing.” Trees slid past the screen, implacable green stems exfoliating purple-veined leaves the size of books.

Martin gasped. They dropped steadily, like a glass-walled elevator on the side of an invisible skyscraper.

Finally, with a tooth-rattling bump, the capsule came to rest.

Silence.

“Hey, guys.” Rachel shakily pushed the release buckle on her seat belt. “Thank you for flying Air UN, and may I take this opportunity to invite you to fly with us again?” Martin grunted and stretched his arms up. “Nope, can’t reach it from here. Got to unbelt first.” He let his arms flop down again. “Feel like lead. Funny.”

“All it takes is eight hours in zero gee.” Rachel rummaged in the storage bins next to her leg well.

“I think I understand you Terrans now,” Vassily began, then paused to let the tremor out of his voice before continuing. “You’re all mad!”

Martin looked sidelong at Rachel. “He’s only just noticed.” She sat up, clutching a compact backpack. “Took him long enough.”

“Well. What do we do now? Make with the big tin opener, or wait for someone to pass by and yank the ring pull?”

“First”—Rachel tapped icons busily on the pilot’s console—“we tell the Critics that we’re down safely.

She said she’d try to help us link up. Second, I do this.” She reached up and grabbed the top edge of the display screen. It crumpled like thin plastic, revealing the inner wall of the capsule. A large steamer trunk was half-embedded in the bulkhead, incongruous pipes and cables snaking out of its half-open lid.

“I knew it!” Vassily exclaimed. “You’ve got an illegal—”

“Shut up.” Rachel leaned forward and adjusted something just inside the lid. “Right, now we leave.

Quickly.” Standing up, she unlocked the overhead hatch and let it slide down into the capsule, taking the place of the screen. “Give me a leg up, Martin.”

“Okay.” A minute later, all three of them were sitting on top of the lander. The truncated cone sat in a puddle of yellow inflatable skirts, in the middle of a grassy meadow. To their left, a stream burbled lazily through a thick clump of reeds; to their right, a row of odd, dark conifers formed a wall against the light.

The air was cold and fresh and smelled unbearably clean. “What now?” asked Martin.

“I advise you to surrender to the authorities.” Vassily loomed over him. “It will go badly with you if you don’t cooperate, but if you surrender to me I’ll, I’ll—” He looked around wildly.

Rachel snorted. “What authorities?”

“The capital—”

Rachel finally blew her top. “Listen, kid, we’re stuck in the back of beyond with a dead lifeboat and not a lot of supplies, on a planet that’s just been hit by a type three singularity, and I have just spent the past thirty-six hours slaving my guts out to save our necks — all of them, yours included — and I would appreciate it if you would just shut up for a while! Our first priority is survival; my second priority is linking up with the people I’ve come here to visit, and getting back to civilization comes third on the list.

With me so far? Because there are no civil authorities right now, not the kind you expect. They’ve just been dumped on by about a thousand years of progress in less than a month, and if your local curator’s still sitting at his desk, he’s probably catatonic from future shock. This planetary civilization has transcended. It is an ex-colony; it has ceased to be. About the only people who can cope with this level of change are your dissidents, and I’m not that optimistic about them, either. Right now, we are your best hope of survival, and you’d better not forget it.” She glared at Vassily, and he glared right back at her, obviously angry but unable to articulate his feelings.

Behind her, Martin had clambered down to the meadow. Something caught his attention, and he bent down. “Hey!”

“What is it?” Rachel called. The spell was broken: Vassily subsided with a grumble and began hunting for a way down off the capsule. Martin said something indistinct. “What?” she called.

“There’s something wrong with this grass!”

“Oh shit.” Rachel followed Vassily down the side of the pod — two and a half meters of gently sloping ceramic, then a soft landing on a woven spider-silk floatation bed. “What do you mean?” Martin straightened up and wordlessly offered her a blade of grass.

“It’s—” She stopped.

“Rochard’s World is supposed to have an Earth-normal biosphere, isn’t it?” Martin watched her curiously. “That’s what it said in my gazetteer.”

“What is that?” asked Vassily.

“Grass, or what passes for it.” Martin shrugged uncomfortably. “Doesn’t look very Earth-normal to me.

It’s the right color and right overall shape, but—”

“Ouch. Cut myself on the damned thing.” Rachel dropped it. The leaf blade fluttered down, unnoticed: when it hit the ground it began to disintegrate with eerie speed, falling apart along radial seams. “What about the trees?”

“There’s something odd about them, too.” A crackling noise from behind made Martin jump. “What’s that?”

“Don’t worry. I figured we’d need some ground transport, so I told it to make some. It’s reabsorbing the capsule—”

“Neat luggage,” Martin said admiringly. The lifeboat began to crumple inward, giving off a hot, organic smell like baking bread.

“Yeah, well.” Rachel looked worried. “My contact’s supposed to know we’re here. I wonder how long

…” She trailed off. Vassily was busily tramping toward the far side of the clearing, whistling some sort of martial-sounding tune.

“Just who is this contact?” Martin asked quietly.

“Guy called Rubenstein. One of the more sensible resistance cadres, which is why he’s in internal exile here — the less sensible ones end up dead.”

“And what do you want with him?”

“I’m to give him a package. Not that he needs it anymore, if what’s happened here is anything to go by.”

“A package? What kind of package?”

She turned and pointed at the steamer trunk, which now rested on the grass in the middle of a collapsing heap of structural trusses, belching steam quietly. “That kind of package.”

“That kind of—” His eyes gave him away. Rachel reached out and took his elbow.

“Come on, Martin. Let’s check out the tree line.”

“But—” He glanced over his shoulder. “Okay.”

“It’s like this,” Rachel began, as they walked. “Remember what I said about helping the people of the New Republic? A while ago — some years, actually — some people in a department you don’t really need to know much about decided that they were ripe for a revolution. Normally we don’t get involved in that kind of thing; toppling regimes is bad ju-ju even if you disapprove of them or do it for all the right moral reasons. But some of our analysts figured there was a chance, say twenty percent, that the New Republic might metastasize and turn imperial. So we’ve been gearing up to ship power tools to their own home-grown libertarian underground for a decade now.

“The Festival … when it arrived, we didn’t know what it was. If I’d known what you told me once we were under way, back at Klamovka, I wouldn’t be here now. Neither would the luggage. Which is the whole point of the exercise, actually. When the aristocracy put down the last workers’ and technologists’

soviet about 240 years ago, they destroyed the last of the cornucopiae the New Republic was given at its foundation by the Eschaton. Thereafter, they could control the arbeiter classes by restricting access to education and tools and putting tight bottlenecks on information technology. This luggage, Martin, it’s a full-scale cornucopia machine. Design schemata for just about anything a mid-twenty-first-century postindustrial civilization could conceive of, freeze-dried copies of the Library of Congress, all sorts of things. Able to replicate itself, too.” The tree line was a few meters ahead. Rachel stopped and took a deep breath. “I was sent here to turn it over to the underground, Martin. I was sent here to give them the tools to start a revolution.”

“To start a—” Martin stared at her. ”But you’re too late.“

“Exactly.” She gave him a moment for it to sink in. “I can still complete my mission, just in case, but I don’t really think …”

He shook his head. “How are we going to get out of this mess?”

“Um. Good question.” She turned and faced the melting reentry capsule, then reached into a pocket and began bringing out some spare optical spybots. Vassily was aimlessly circling the perimeter of the clearing. “Normally, I’d go to ground in the old town and wait. In six months, there’ll be a merchant ship along. But with the Festival—”

“There’ll be ships,” Martin said with complete assurance. “And you’ve got a cornucopia, you’ve got a whole portable military-industrial complex. If it can make us a lifeboat, I’m sure I can program it to manufacture anything we need to survive until we’ve got a chance to get off this godforsaken hole.

Right?”

“Probably.” She shrugged. “But first I really ought to make contact, if only to verify that there’s no point in handing the luggage over.” She began to walk back toward the lander. “This Rubenstein is supposed to be fairly levelheaded for a revolutionary. He’ll probably know what—” There was a distant cracking sound, like sticks breaking. At the other side of the clearing, Vassily was running back toward the luggage. “Shit!” Rachel dragged Martin to the ground, fumbled for the stunner in her pocket.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“Damn. Well, looks like they’ve found us, whoever they are. Nice knowing you.” A large, hunched thing, hugely, monstrously bipedal, lurched into the clearing: a vast mouth like a doorway gaped at them.

“Wait.” Rachel held him down with one hand. “Don’t move. That thing’s wired like a fucking tank, sensors everywhere.”

The thing swung toward the lander, then abruptly squatted on its haunches. A long, flat tongue lolled groundward; something big appeared at the top of it and stepped down to the meadow. It swept its head from side to side, taking in the decrepitating lifeboat, Vassily hiding behind it, the rest of the clearing.

Then it called out, in a surprisingly deep voice. “Hello? We arrive not-warfully. Is there a Rachel Mansour here?”

Well, here goes. She stood up and cleared her throat. “Who wants to know?” The Critic grinned at her, baring frighteningly long tusks: “I am Sister Seventh. You come in time! We a crisis have!”

People began gathering outside the Ducal palace around evening. They came in ones and twos, clumped shell-shocked beneath the soot-smeared outer walls. They looked much like any other citizens of the New Republic; perhaps a bit poorer, a bit duller than most.

Robard stood in the courtyard and watched them through the gates. Two of the surviving ratings stood there, guns ready, a relic of temporal authority. Someone had found a flag, charred along one edge but otherwise usable. The crowd had begun to form about an hour after they raised it to fly proudly in the light breeze. The windows might be broken and the furniture smashed, but they were still soldiers of His Imperial Majesty, and by God and Emperor there were standards, and they would be observed — so the Admiral had indicated, and so they were behaving.

Robard breathed in deeply. Insect bite? A most suspicious insect, indeed. But since it had stung the Admiral, his condition had improved remarkably. His left cheek remained slack, and his fingers remained numb, but his arm—

Robard and Lieutenant Kossov had borne their ancient charge to the control tower, cursing and sweating in the noon-day heat. As they arrived, Kurtz had thrown a fit; choking, gasping, choleric, thrashing in his wheelchair. Robard had feared for the worst, but then Dr. Hertz had come and administered a horse syringe full of adrenaline. The Admiral subsided, panting like a dog: and his left eye had opened and rolled sideways, to fix Robard with a skewed stare. “What is it, sir? Is there anything I can get you?”

“Wait.” The Admiral hissed. He tensed, visibly. “’M all hot. But it’s so clear.” Both hands moved, gripping the sides of his wheelchair, and to Robard’s shock the old man rose to his feet. “My Emperor! I can walk!”

Robard’s feelings as he caught his employer were impossible to pin down. Disbelief, mostly, and pride.

The old man shouldn’t be able to do that; in the aftermath of his stroke, he’d been paralyzed on one side.

Such lesions didn’t heal, the doctor had said. But Kurtz had risen from his chair and taken a wobbly step forward—

From the control tower to the castle, events had moved in a dusty blur. Requisitioned transport, a bouncing ride through a half-deserted town, half the houses in it burned to the ground and the other half sprouting weird excrescences. The castle, deserted. Get the Admiral into the Duke’s bedroom. Find the kitchen, see if there’s anything edible in the huge underground larders. Someone hoisted a flag. Guards on the gate. Two timid serving women like little mice, scurrying from hiding and curtsying to the service they’d long since been broken to. A cleaning detail, broken furniture ruthlessly consigned to the firewood heap that would warm the grand ballroom. Emergency curtains — steel-mesh and spider-silk — furled behind the tall and shattered windows. Guards on the gate, with guns. Check the water pipes. More uniforms moving in the dusty afternoon heat. Busy, so busy.

He’d stolen a minute to break into Citizen Von Beck’s office. None of the revolutionary cadres had got that far into the castle, or survived the active countermeasures. All the Curator’s tools lay handy; Robard had paused to check the emergency causal channel, but its entropy had been thoroughly maximized even though the bandwidth monitor showed more than fifty percent remaining. His worst suspicions confirmed, he made liberal use of the exotic insecticides Von Beck had stocked, spraying his person until the air was blue and chokingly unbreathable. Then he pocketed a small artifact — one that it was illegal on pain of death for anyone not of the Curator’s Office to be in possession of — left the room, locked it behind him, and returned to the duties of the Admiral’s manservant.

The aimless cluster outside the Ducal palace had somehow metamorphosed into a crowd while he’d been busy. Anxious, pinched faces stared at him: the faces of people uncertain who they were, bereft of their place in the scheme of things. Lost people, desperately seeking reassurance. Doubtless many would have joined the dissident underground; many more would have made full use of the singular conditions brought about by the arrival of the Festival to maximize their personal abilities. For years to come, even if the Festival vanished tomorrow, the outback would be peopled by ghouls and wizards, talking animals and sagacious witches. Some people didn’t want to transcend their humanity; a life of routine reassurance was all they craved, and the Festival had deprived them of it. Was that an army greatcoat lurking at the back of the square? A sallow-faced man, half-starved, who in other circumstances Robard would have pegged for a highwayman; here he was just as likely to be the last loyal dregs of a regiment that had deserted en masse. Snap judgments could be treacherous.

He looked farther. Dust, rising in the distance, perhaps half a mile away. Hmm.

The grand hallway opened from the front doors and led to the main staircase, the ballroom, and numerous smaller, more discreet destinations. Normally, a manservant would have used a small side entrance. Today, Robard strode in through the huge doors that normally would have welcomed ambassadors and knights of the realm. Nobody watched his dusty progress across the floor, treading dirt into shattered tiles and bypassing the shattered chandelier. He didn’t stop until he reached the entrance to the Star Chamber.

“—other leg of lamb. Damn your eyes, can’t you knock, man?” Robard paused in the doorway. The Admiral was sitting at the Governor’s desk, eating a platter of cold cuts — very cold, preserved meats and pickles from the cellar — with Commander Leonov and two of the other surviving staff officers standing attentively by. “Sir. The revolutionary guards are approaching. We have about five minutes to decide whether to fight or talk. Can I suggest you leave the rest of your meal until after we have dealt with them?”

Leonov rounded on him. “You bounder, how dare you disturb the Admiral! Get out!” Robard raised his left hand and turned it over, revealing the card he held. “Have you ever seen one of these before?”

Leonov turned white. “I–I—”

“I don’t have time for this,” Robard said brusquely. To the Admiral; “My lord?” Kurtz stared at him with narrowed eyes. “How long?”

Robard shrugged. “All the time I’ve been with you, my lord. For your own protection. As I was saying, a crowd is moving in our direction from the south bank, over the old bridge. We have about five minutes to decide what to do, but I doubt we will make any friends by shooting at them.” Kurtz nodded. “I will go and talk to them, then.”

Now it was Robard’s turn to stare. “Sir, I believe you should be in a wheelchair, not arguing with revolutionaries. Are you quite sure—”

“Haven’t felt this good in, oh, about eight years, young feller. The bees around here pack a damned odd sting.”

“Yes, you could say that. Sir, I believe you may have been compromised. The Festival apparently has access to a wide range of molecular technologies, beyond the one that’s done such a sterling job on your cerebrovascular system. If they wanted—”

Kurtz raised a hand. “I know. But we’re at their mercy in any event. I will go down to the people and talk. Were any of the crowd old?”

“No.” Robard puzzled for a moment. “None that I saw. Do you suppose—”

“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan. If this Festival has been granting wishes, as our intelligence put it …” He stood up. “Get me my dress uniform, Rob — oh. You, yes you, Kossov.

You’re my batman now Robard here outranks you all. And my medals!” Leonov, white as a sheet, still hadn’t stopped shaking. “It’s alright,” Robard said sepulchrally. “I don’t usually have people executed for being rude to me.”

“Sir! Ah — yes, sir! Um, if I may ask—”

“Ask away.”

“Since when is an Invigilator of the Curator’s Office required to disguise himself as a manservant?”

“Since”—Robard pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it—“about seven years and six months ago, at the request of the Archduke. Really. Nobody notices a servant, you know. And His Excellency—” Kossov returned bearing the trappings of high office. Leonov ushered Robard out onto the landing while the Admiral dressed. “His Excellency is not in direct line to the throne. If you take my meaning.” Leonov did, and his sharp intake of breath — combined with the stress analyzers wired into his auditory nerves — told Robard everything he needed to know. “No, His Majesty had no expectation of a coup; the Admiral is unquestionably loyal. But his personal charisma, fame as a hero of the Republic, and wide popularity, made his personal safety a matter of some importance. We can use him here.”

“Oh.” Leonov thought for a while. “The revolutionaries?”

“If he pushes them, they’ll crumble,” Robard said decisively. “All their strongest supporters have long since fled; that’s the nature of a singularity. If they don’t”—he tapped his pocket—“I am licensed to take extraordinary measures in the defense of the Republic, including the use of proscribed technologies.” Leonov dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Then it’s all over. You’ll break the revolutionaries by force or by politics, install His Excellency as governor pro tern, and in six months time it will all be over, bar the shouting.”

“I wouldn’t say that. Even if the woman from Earth was right — and I am inclined to think she was telling the truth about the Festival not being interested in planetary conquest as we understand it, in which case this whole expedition has been a monstrously expensive mistake — we’ve lost two-thirds of the population. We can never get rid of the pernicious virus of bandwidth that they’ve infected this planet with; we may have to abandon the colony, or at the very least institute quarantine procedures. The bloody revolutionaries have won, here, the djinn is well and truly out of the bottle. Everything our ancestors fought for, torn up and scattered to the winds! A virus of eternal youth is loose in the bees, and the streets are paved with infinite riches. It devalues everything!” He stopped and took a deep breath, disturbed by the degree of his own agitation. “Of course, if we can suppress the revolutionary cadres here in New Petrograd, we can mop up the countryside at our leisure …” The door to the Star Chamber opened to reveal Admiral Kurtz standing there, resplendent in the gold braid, crimson sash, and chestful of medals that his rank dictated. He looked a decade younger than his age, not two decades older: patrician, white-haired, the very image of a gentleman dictator, reassuringly authoritarian. “Well, gentlemen! Shall we review the crowds?” He did not stride — wasted leg muscles saw to that — but he walked without a hand at either elbow.

“I think that would be a very good idea, sir,” said Robard.

“Indeed.” Leonov and the senior Curator fell into step behind the admiral as he walked toward the staircase. “The sun is setting on anarchy and disarray, gentlemen. Only let my tongue be silver and tomorrow will once again be ours.”

Together, they stepped into the courtyard to address the sheep who, did they but know it, had already returned to the fold.

An amber teardrop the size of a charabanc perched on the edge of a hillside covered in the mummified bones of trees. Ashy telegraph poles coated in a fine layer of soot pointed at the sky; tiny skeletons crunched under Burya Rubenstein’s boots as he walked among them, following a man-sized rabbit.

“Master in here,” said Mr. Rabbit, pointing at the weirdly curved lump.

Rubenstein approached it cautiously, hands clasped behind his back. Yes, it was definitely amber — or something closely resembling it. Flies and bubbles were scattered throughout its higher layers; darkness shrouded its heart. “It’s a lump of fossilized vegetable sap. Your master’s dead, rabbit. Why did you bring me here?”

The rabbit was upset. His long ears tilted backward, flat along the top of his skull. “Master in here!” He shifted from one foot to the other. “When Mimes attack, master call for help.” Burya decided to humor the creature. “I see—” He stopped. There was something inside the boulder, something darkly indistinct. And come to think of it, all the trees hereabouts were corpses, fried from the inside out by some terrible energy. The revolutionary guards, already spooked by the Lysenkoist forest, had refused to enter the dead zone. They milled about downslope, debating the ideological necessity of uplifting non-human species to sapience — one of them had taken heated exception to a proposal to giving opposable thumbs and the power of speech to cats — and comparing their increasingly baroque implants.

Burya stared closer, feeling himself slip into a blurred double vision as the committee for state communications’ worms fed their own perspective to him. There was something inside the boulder, and it was thinking, artlessly unformed thoughts that tugged at the Festival’s cellular communications network like a toddler at its mother’s skirt.

Taking a deep breath, he leaned against the lump of not-amber. “Who are you?” he demanded noiselessly, feeling the smooth warm surface under his hands. Antennae beneath his skin radiated information into the packetized soup that flooded in cold waves through the forest, awaited a reply.

“Me-Identity: Felix. You-Identity:???”

“Come out of there with your hands above your head and prepare to submit your fate to the vanguard of revolutionary justice!” Burya gulped. He’d meant to send something along the lines of

“Can you come out of there so we can talk?”, but his revolutionary implants evidently included a semiotic dereferencing stage that translated anything he said — through this new cyberspatial medium — into Central Committee sound bites. Angry at the internal censorship, he resolved to override it next time.

“Badly hurt. No connection previous incarnation. Want/ need help metamorphosis.” Burya turned and leaned his back against the boulder. “You. Rabbit. Can you hear any of this?” The rabbit sat up and swallowed a mouthful of grass. “Any of what?”

“I’ve been talking to, ah, your master. Can you hear us?”

One ear flicked. “No.”

“Good.” Burya closed his eyes, settled back into double vision, and attempted to communicate. But his implant was still acting up. “How did you get here? What are you trying to achieve? I thought you were in trouble” came out as “Confess your counterrevolutionary crimes before the tribunal! What task are you striving to accomplish in the unceasing struggle against reactionary mediocrity and bourgeois incrementalism? I thought you were guilty of malicious hooliganism!”

“Fuck,” he muttered aloud. “There’s got to be a bypass filter—” Ah. “Sorry about that, my interface is ideologically biased. How did you get here? What are you trying to achieve? I thought you were in trouble.”

An answer slowly burbled up and out of the stone; visual perceptions cut in, and for a few minutes Burya shook in the grip of a young lad’s terrified flight from the Fringe.

“Ah. So. The Festival mummified you pending repairs. And now you’re ready to go somewhere else — where? What’s that?”

Another picture. Stars, endless distance, tiny dense and very hot bodies sleeping the dreamless light-years away. Bursting in a desert storm of foliage on a new world, flowering and dying and sleeping again until next time.

“Let me get this straight. You used to be the governor. Then you were an eight-year-old boy with some friendly talking animals under some kind of geas to ‘lead an interesting life’ and have lots of adventures.

Now you want to be a starship? And you want me, as the nearest delegate of the Central Committee for the revolution, to help you?”

Not exactly. Another vision, this time long and complex, burdened by any number of political proposals that his implant irritatingly attempted to convert into plant-yield diagrams indicating the progress toward fruition of an agricultural five-year plan. “You want me to do that?” Burya winced. “What do you think I am, a free agent? Firstly, the Curator’s Office would shoot me as soon as look at me, much less listen to what they’d view as treason. Secondly, you’re not the governor anymore, and even if you were and proposed something like this, they’d sack you faster than you can snap your fingers. In case you didn’t notice those fireworks yesterday, that was the Imperial fleet — what’s left of it — shooting it out with the Festival. Thirdly, the revolutionary committee would be queuing up to shoot me, too, if I proposed something like this. Never underestimate the intrinsic, as opposed to ideological, conservatism of an idea like revolution once it’s got some momentum behind it. No, it’s not practical. I really don’t see why you wasted my time with such a stupid proposal. Not at—”

He stopped. Something downslope was making a lot of noise, thrashing through the kill zone left by the X-ray laser battery. “Who’s there?” he asked, but Mr. Rabbit had vanished in a tuft of panicky white tail fur.

A telephone-pole tree toppled slowly over before the thrashing, and a strange, chicken-legged mound lurched into view. Sister Seventh sat in the hut’s doorway, glaring intently at him. “Burya Rubenstein!” she yelled. “Come here! Resolution achieved! Cargo retrieved! You have visitors!” Expecting a momentous meeting, Rachel cast her eyes around the hillside: they took to the air and flew on insectile wings, quartering the area for threats.

The trees hereabouts were dead, charred by some terrible force. Martin watched anxiously as she rummaged in the corpulent steamer trunk. “What’s that?” he asked.

“Cornucopia seed,” she said, tossing the fist-sized object at him. He caught it and inspected it curiously.

“All engineering is here,” he marveled. “In miniature.” Several million billion molecular assemblers, a kilowatt of thin-film solar cells to power them, thermodynamic filtration membranes to extract raw feedstocks from the environment, rather more computing power than the whole of the preSingularity planetary Internet. He pocketed the seed, then looked at her. “You had a reason …?”

“Yup. We’re not going to have the original for much longer. Don’t let the kid see it, he might guess what it is and flip his lid.” She continued forward. There was some kind of boulder near the crest of the hill, and a man was leaning against it. The Critic’s house lurched forward, crashing and banging toward it. “If that’s who I hope it is—”

They started up the rise. The trees hereabouts were all dead. Martin stumbled over a rounded stone and kicked at it, cursing: he stopped when it revealed itself to be a human skull, encrusted with metallic fibrils.

“Something bad happened here.”

“Big surprise. Help me steer this thing.” The steamer trunk, now running on fuel cells, was proving balky and hard to control on the grassy slope: half the time they had to drag it over obstacles. “You got any holdouts?”

Martin shrugged. “Do I look like a soldier?”

She squinted at him for a moment. “You’ve got enough hidden depths, dearie. Okay, if it turns nasty, I’ll handle things.”

“Who’s this guy you’re supposed to be seeing, anyway?”

“Burya Rubenstein. Radical underground journalist, big mover and shaker in the underground. Ran a soviet during a major worker’s strike some years ago; got himself exiled for his pains, lucky they didn’t shoot him.”

“And you’re planning to hand—” Martin stopped. “Ah, so that’s what you were planning. That’s how you were going to start a revolution here, before the Festival made it all last year’s news.” He glanced over his shoulder, but Vassily was nowhere to be seen.

“Not exactly. I was just going to give them the tools to do so if they wanted to.” She wiped her forehead on the back of a hand. “Actually, it’s been a contingency plan for years, only we never quite had a good enough reason to do it — initiation of force, that kind of thing. Now, well, the whole game’s changed. Far as I can tell, Rubenstein’s lot survived the transition to a postscarcity economy; they may be the nearest thing to civil authorities on this two-bit backwater colony right now. When the Festival gets bored and moves on, they may not be able to survive without a cornucopia. Assuming, of course, that they didn’t ask the Festival for one straight off.” The luggage surged forward, getting a grip on the ground, and she stopped talking for a while to concentrate on steering it up the hill.

“So what was your exit strategy?” Martin asked, walking along behind her.

“Exit strategy? We don’t need no stinking exit strategy! Just — deliver this. Then melt into the chaos. Find somewhere to live. Settle down till trade resumes. Ship out. You?”

“About the same. Herman has a way of catching up after a while. Uh, did you have anywhere in mind to—”

“Small town called Plotsk.” She jerked her head sharply. “First things first. I need to deliver the package.

Then we need to ditch laughing boy somewhere safe where he can’t follow us, hmm? Aside from that, I was wondering if — well. About us.”

Martin reached out and took her free hand. “Wondering if you were going to get rid of me?” She stared at him. “Mm. Why — am I going to have to?”

Martin took a deep breath. “Do you want to get rid of me?” She shook her head.

Martin gently pulled her toward him, until she leaned against him. “Me neither,” he murmured in her ear.

“Two of us stand a better chance than one, anyway,” she rationalized. “We can watch each other’s backs, it’s going to be hairy for a while. Plus, we may be stuck here for some time. Years, even.”

“Rachel. Stop making excuses.”

She sighed. “Am I that transparent?”

“You’ve got a worse sense of duty than—” She pulled back a little, and he stopped, seeing the warning glint in her eyes. Then she began to laugh quietly, and after a moment he joined her.

“I can think of much worse people to be stranded with in the middle of a backwater recovering from a revolution, Martin, believe me—”

“Okay, I believe you, I believe you!” She leaned forward and kissed him, hard, then let go with a smile.

The luggage was rolling smoothly now, and the slope of the ground was flattening out. The boulder above them glowed yellow in the afternoon light; and the man who’d been leaning against it was deep in animated arm-waving conversation with the huge Critic. As they approached, he turned to face them: a wiry, short man with bushy hair, a goatee, and the antique affectation of pince-nez. Judging by the state of his clothing he’d been on the road for some time. “Who are you?” he demanded aggressively.

“Burya Rubenstein?” Rachel asked tiredly.

“Yes?” He glared at her suspiciously. “You have countermeasures!”

“Parcel for Burya Rubenstein, care of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, Rochard’s World. You wouldn’t believe how far it’s come or how many hoops I’ve had to jump through to get it to you.”

“Ah—” He stared at the trunk, then back at Rachel. “Who did you say you were?”

“Friends from Old Earth,” Martin grunted. “Also hungry, dirty, shipwrecked survivors.”

“Well, you won’t find any decent hospitality here.” Rubenstein swept a hand around the clearing. “Old Earth, did you say? Now that is a long way to come with a parcel! Just what exactly is it?”

“It’s a cornucopia machine. Self-replicating factory, fully programmable, and it’s yours. A gift from Earth.

The means of production in one handy self-propelled package. We hoped you might feel like starting an industrial revolution. At least we did before we found out about the Festival.” Rachel blinked as Rubenstein threw back his head and laughed wildly.

“Just what exactly is that meant to mean?” she demanded irritably. “I’ve come forty light-years, at not inconsiderable risk, to deliver a message you’d have murdered for six months ago. Don’t you think you could explain yourself?”

“Oh, madam, please accept my apologies. I do you a disservice. If you’d delivered this even four weeks ago, you’d have changed the course of history — of that I have no doubt! But you see”—he straightened up and his expression grew sober—“we have had such devices since the first day of the Festival. And for all the good they’ve done us, I’d just as soon never have set eyes on one.” She looked back at Rubenstein. “Well, that confirms it. I suppose you’ve got time to fill me in on what’s been going on here while I’ve been engaged in this fool’s errand?” she demanded.

“We held the revolution about, ah, three weeks ago.” Burya circled the steamer trunk, inspecting it.

“Things did not go according to plan, as I’m sure our friend the Critic here will explain.” He sat down on the chest. “Eschaton only knows what the Critics are doing here in the first place, or indeed the Festival.

We — nobody — was ready for what happened. My dreams are co-opted by committee meetings, did you know that? The revolution ran its course in two weeks: that’s how long it took for us to realize nobody needed us. Emergent criticality. The Sister here has been showing me the consequences — bad consequences.” He hung his head. “Survivors of the fleet have landed at the capital, they tell me. People are flocking to them. They want security, and who can blame them?”

“So let me get this straight.” Rachel leaned against the huge amber boulder. “You changed your mind about wanting to change the system?”

“Oh no!” Burya stood up agitatedly. “But the system no longer exists. It wasn’t destroyed by committees or Soviets or worker’s cadres; it was destroyed by people’s wishes coming true. But come, now. You look as if you’ve been through a battle! There are refugees everywhere, you know. Once I sort out my business here, I will return to Plotsk and see what I can do to ensure stability. Perhaps you’d like to come along?”

“Stability,” Martin echoed. “Um, what business? I mean, why are you here? We seem to be quite a way from civilization.” That was a huge understatement, as far as Rachel could see. She leaned back and looked down at the forest dispiritedly. To come all this distance, only to find that she was three weeks too late to change history for the better: that the Festival had dropped an entire planetary society, such as it was, into an informational blender and dialed the blades to FAST; it was all a bit too much to appreciate. That, and she was tired, mortally tired. She’d done her best, like Martin. Three weeks. If Martin had failed …

“There’s someone inside that boulder,” said Rubenstein.

“What?” A complex three-dimensional model of the hillside spread out before Rachel’s distributed spy-eyes. There was Vassily, working his way up the far side of the slope. Here was Martin. And the boulder—

“The occupant.” Burya nodded. “He’s still alive. Actually, he wants to join the Festival as a passenger. I can see why; from his point of view, it makes sense. But I think the emergency committee might disagree — they’d rather see him dead.

“The reactionary forces in the capital would disagree for other reasons: they’d want him back. He used to be the planetary governor, you see, until too many of his private, personal wishes came true.

Dereliction of duty.” Rubenstein blinked. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but.”

“Ah. So what’s the real problem with him joining the Festival?”

“Getting their attention. The Festival trades information for services. He’s told it everything he knows. So have I. What are we to do?”

“That’s preposterous,” said Martin. “You mean, the Festival will only accept fare-paying passengers?”

“Strange as this may seem, it’s how the Fringe and the Critics first came aboard. The Critics still pay their way by providing higher-level commentary on whatever they find.” Burya sat down again.

Martin yelled. “Hey! Critic!”

On the lower slopes of the hill, Sister Seventh sat up. “Question?” she boomed.

“How are you going home?” Martin shouted at her.

“Finish Critique! Exchange liftwise.”

“Can you take a passenger?”

“Ho!” Sister Seventh ambled up the slope of the hill. “Identity interrogative?”

“Whoever’s in this vitrification cell. Used to be the planetary governor, I’m told.” The Critic shambled closer. Rachel tried not to recoil from her clammy vegetable-breathy presence. “Can take cargo,” Sister Seventh rumbled. “Give reason.”

“Um.” Martin glanced at Rachel. “The Festival assimilates information, no? We came from the fleet. I have an interesting story to tell.”

Sister Seventh nodded. “Information. Useful, yes, low entropy. Is passenger—”

“Vitrified,” Burya interrupted. “By the Festival, apparently. Please be discreet. Some of my colleagues would disapprove, and as for the reactionaries—”

Some sixth sense made Rachel turn around. It was Vassily: he’d circled around the far side of the hill for some reason, and now she saw that he was clutching a seemingly bladeless handle. His expression was wild. “Burya Rubenstein?” he gasped.

“That’s me. Who are you?” Rubenstein turned to face the new arrival.

Vassily took two steps forward, half-staggering, like a marionette manipulated by a drunk. “I’m your son, you bastard! Remember my mother yet?” He raised his power knife.

“Oh shit.” Rachel suddenly noticed the fuzz of static that was even now plucking at her implants, trying to tell them this wasn’t happening, that there was nobody there. Things became clearer, much clearer. She wasn’t the only person with high-level implants hereabouts.

“My son?” Rubenstein looked puzzled for a moment, then his expression cleared. “’Milla was allowed to keep you after I was exiled?” He stood up. “My son—”

Vassily swung at Rubenstein, artlessly but with all the force he could muster. But Burya wasn’t there when the knife came down; Martin had tackled him from behind, ramming him headfirst into the ground.

With a shrill screech, the power knife cut into the lid of the cornucopia, slicing through millions of delicate circuits. A numinous flickering light and a smell of fresh yeast rose up as Vassily struggled to pull the blade out. A superconducting monofilament, held rigid by a viciously powerful magnetic field, the knife could cut through just about anything. Martin rolled over on his back and looked up just as Vassily, his face a slack mask, stepped toward him and raised the knife. There was a brief buzzing sound, and his eyes rolled up: then Vassily collapsed across the chest.

Arms and chest burning, Rachel lowered the stun gun and dropped back into real-world speed. Panting, heart racing. Do this too often and die. “Bloody hell, wasn’t there anybody aboard the fleet without a covert agenda?” she complained.

“Doesn’t look like it.” Martin struggled to sit up.

“What happened?” Burya looked around, dazed.

“I think—” Rachel looked at the trunk. It was outgassing ominously: the power knife had cut through a lot of synthesis cells, and evidently some of the fuel tanks were leaking faster than the repair programs could fix them. “It could be a bad idea to stay here. Talk about it on the road to Plotsk?”

“Yes.” Burya rolled Vassily off the trunk and dragged him a few paces. “Is he really my son?”

“Probably.” Rachel paused to yawn for air. “I wondered a bit. Why he was along. Couldn’t have been a mistake. And then, the way he went for you — programmed, I think. Curator’s Office must have figured, if revolution, you’d be central. Bastard child, disgraced mother, easily recruited. Credible?” Sister Seventh had ambled up and was sniffing at the vitrification cell occupied by the nearly late Duke Felix Politovsky. “I told Festival passenger upload now-soon,” she rumbled. “You tell story? Honor credit?”

“Later,” said Martin.

“Okay.” Sister Seventh gnashed at the air. “You got overdraft at the mythology bank. I fix. Go Plotsk, now-soonish?”

“Before the luggage goes bang,” Martin agreed. He stood up a trifle drunkenly, winced as he transferred his weight onto one knee. “Rachel?”

“Coming.” The dark spots had almost vacated her visual field. “Okay. Um, if we can tie him up and put him in that walking hut of yours, we can work on his brainwashing later. See if there’s anything more to him than a programmed assassin.”

“I agree.” Burya paused. “I didn’t expect this.”

“Neither did we,” she said shortly. “Come on. Let’s get away before this thing blows.” Together they stumbled away from the fizzing revolutionary bomb and the last unchanging relic of the ancient regime, back down the hillside that led toward the road to Plotsk.