Singularity Sky

Preparations for Departure

His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Ivan Hasek III, by grace of God the protector of the people of the New Republic, growled exasperatedly. “Get the Admiral out of bed and make him presentable — I have a cabinet meeting at noon, and I need to talk to him now.”

“Yes, sir! I most humbly beg your pardon, and beg leave to be excused to do as Your Majesty commands.” The butler virtually bowed and scraped his way off the telephone.

“What’s the implied ‘or else’?” Duke Michael, the Emperor’s brother, inquired drily. “You’d have him clapped in irons?”

“Hardly.” The Emperor snorted, showing as much amusement as his dignity permitted. “He’s over eighty; I suppose he’s entitled to stay in bed once in a while. But if he’s so ill he can’t even rise for his Emperor in time of war, I’d have to force him to retire. And then there’d be an uproar in the Admiralty. You can’t imagine the waves it would make if we started forcing admirals to retire.” He sniffed. “We might even have to think about giving them all pensions! That’d go down as well as suggesting to Father that he abdicate.”

Duke Michael coughed, delicately. “Perhaps somebody should have. After the second stroke—”

“Yes, yes.”

“I still think offering him the fleet is unreasonable.”

“If you think that is unreasonable, I don’t suppose you’d care to discuss the likely response of their naval lordships if I didn’t give him first refusal?” The priority telephone rang again before his brother had a chance to answer the pointed question; a liveried servant offered the ivory-and-platinum handset to His Majesty. The Duke picked up a second earpiece, to listen in on the call.

“Sire? My Lord Admiral Kurtz is ready to talk to you. He extends his deepest apologies, and—”

“Enough. Just put him on, there’s a good fellow.” Ivan tapped his fingers irritably on the arm of his chair, a Gothic wooden monstrosity only one step removed from an instrument of torture. “Ah, Admiral. Just the man! Capital, how splendid to talk to you. And how are we today?”

‘Today-ay?“ A reedy, quavering voice echoed uncertainly over the copper wires. ”Ah-hum, yes, today.

Indeed, yes. I’m very well, thank you, milady, I don’t suppose you’ve seen any chameleons?“

“No, Admiral, there are no chameleons in the palace,” the Emperor stated with firm, but resigned, persistence. “You know who you are speaking to?”

In the momentary silence he could almost hear the elderly admiral blinking in confusion. “Ah-hum. Your Majesty? Ah, Ivan, lad? Emperor already? How time flies!”

“Yes, Uncle. I’m phoning you because—” A thought struck the Emperor. “Are you up and about?”

“Yes, ahuhuhum. I’m, ah, in my bath chair. It’s my old legs, you know. They’re awfully fragile. Got to wrap them up in lots of blankets in case they shatter. They don’t blow legs the way they used to, when I was a lad. But I’m out of bed now.”

“Oh, good. You see, um—” The Emperor’s brain went into a wheel-spin as he considered and reconsidered the options. He’d heard, of course, about the Admiral’s indisposition, but he hadn’t actually encountered it directly until now. A strong case could be made, he supposed, for dismissing the Admiral; the man was patently ill. Charging him with this duty would be unfair, and more importantly, not in the best interests of the state.

But he was still the senior fighting admiral, war hero of the New Republic, defender of the empire, slaughterer of the infidels, conqueror of no less than three bucolic and rather backward colony worlds — and, not to put too much of a point on it, the Emperor’s uncle by way of his grandfather’s second mistress. Because of the long-standing tradition that admirals never retired, nobody had ever thought to make provisions for pensioning off old warhorses; they usually died long before it became an issue. To dismiss him was unthinkable, but to expect him to lead a naval expedition — Ivan struggled with his conscience, half hoping that the old man would turn it down. No dishonor would accrue — nobody expected an octogenarian in a bath chair to die for the fatherland — and meantime they’d find a hard-headed young whippersnapper to lead the fleet into battle.

Coming to a decision, the Emperor took a deep breath. “We have a problem. Something abominable has happened, and Rochard’s World is under siege. I’m going to send the fleet. Are you too ill to lead it?” He winked at his brother the Duke, hoping—

“War!” The old man’s bellow nearly deafened Ivan. “Victory to the everlastingly vigilant forces of righteousness waging unceasing struggle on enemies of the New Conservatives! Death to the proponents of change! A thousand tortures to the detractors of the Emperor! Where are the bastards? Let me at them!” The clattering in the background might have been the sound of a walking frame being cast aside.

Duke Michael grimaced unhappily at his brother. “Well I suppose that answers one question,” he mouthed. “I’m not going to say I told you so, but who are we going to send to push his wheelchair?” New Prague was only a thousand kilometers north of the equator (this planet being notoriously cold for a water-belt terraform) and the train pulled into the Klamovka station shortly after lunchtime. Martin disembarked and hailed a cab to the naval depot at the foot of the beanstalk, pointedly ignoring Rachel — or whatever her real name was. Let her make her own way: she was an unwelcome, potentially disastrous complication in his life right now.

The beanstalk loomed over the military depot like the ultimate flagpole; four tapered cones of diamondoid polymers stretching all the way to geosynchronous orbit and a bit beyond, a radical exception to the New Republic’s limitations on technology. Bronzed, bullet-nosed elevator carriages skimmed up and down the elevator cables, taking a whole night to make the journey. Here there was no fin-de-sidcle ambience: just rugged functionality, sleeping capsules manufactured to a template designed for Kobe’s ancient salarymen, and a stringent weight limit. (Gravity modification, although available, was another of the technologies that the New Republic shunned — at least, for non-military purposes.) Martin hurried aboard the first available pod and, to his relief, saw no sign of Rachel.

Upon arrival, he disembarked into the military sector of the space station, presented himself to the warrant officer’s checkpoint, and was ushered straight through a crude security scan that probably exceeded his annual allowed dose of X-rays in one go. There was one bad moment when a master sergeant asked him to demonstrate his PA, but the explanation — that it was a personal assist, that it stored all his working notes, and that he’d be unable to cope without it — was accepted. After which he cooled his heels for half an hour in a spartan guardroom painted institutional green.

Eventually a rating came to collect him. “You’d be the engine man?” said the flyer. “We been waiting for you.”

Martin sighed unhappily. “And I’ve been waiting, too.” He stood up. ‘Take me to your CO.“ The New Republic had paid Mikoyan-Guerevitch-Kvaerner back on Luna to design them a battlecruiser fit to bear the name of their Navy’s founder: one that looked the way a warship ought to look, not like a cubist’s vision of a rabies virus crossed with a soft drink can (as most real warships did). Style imposed strictures on functionality: despite which, it was still worthy of a degree of respect — you could be killed by its baroque missile batteries and phased-array lasers just as surely as by a more modern weapon.

Besides, it looked good, which had enabled MiG to make a killing selling knockoffs to gullible juntas everywhere, demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.

In Martin’s opinion, the Lord Vanek was cut from the same comic-opera fabric as the rest of the New Republic — a comic opera that was far less funny once it had you in its jaws. The ceremonials, flags and Imperial logos splashed across every available surface, the uniformed flunkies, and elaborate pyramid of military etiquette, all suggested to Martin that taking this job had not been a good idea: the gibbeted dissidents hanging from the eaves of the Basilisk had confirmed it. Right now, he’d happily repay his entire fee just to be allowed to go home — were it not for the call of duty.

After a confusing tour of the station’s docking facilities and the warship’s transit tubes, he fetched up in the doorway of a crowded, red-lit, octagonal space, maintained in zero gee by a local relaxation of the laws of physics. A squat, balding engineering officer was bawling out a frightened-looking teenager in front of an open access panel. “That’s the last bloody time you touch anything without asking me or Chief Otcenasek first, you bumbling numb-fingered oaf! See that panel? That’s the backup master bus arbitration exchange, there. And that” — he pointed at another, closed panel—“is the backup master circuit breaker box, which is what chief told you to check out. That switch you were about to throw—

Martin saw where the officer’s finger was pointing and winced. If some idiot conscript did something like that to him, he reflected, he probably wouldn’t stop at threatening to strangle him with his own intestines.

Although if the idiot had started playing with the MBAX, strangling him would be redundant: it didn’t usually have much effect on a charred corpse.

“Engineering Commander Krupkin?” he asked.

“Yes? Who? Oh. You must be the shipyard mechanic?” Krupkin turned toward him, leaving the hapless rating to scramble for cover. “You’re late.”

“Blame the Curator’s Office,” snapped Martin. As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them.

“I’m sorry. I’ve had a bad week. What can I do for you?”

“Secret state police, hmm? Won’t get many of those around here,” Krupkin grunted, abruptly conciliatory. “You know something about this toy box, then?”

“MiG sells them. You keep them running. People break them. I fix them. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“That’s a good start.” Krupkin suddenly grinned. “So let’s try another question. What do you know about preferential-frame clock-skew baseline compensators? Specifically, this model K-340, as currently configured. Tell me everything you can see about how it’s set up.” Martin spent the next hour telling him all the different ways it was out of alignment. After that, Krupkin showed him a real K-340, not a bodged test article. And then it was time for a working lunch while Krupkin picked his brains, and then a long working afternoon figuring out where everything went and going over change orders to make sure everything was where the paperwork said it was supposed to be.

And then back to base for the evening …

Rachel Mansour stood naked in the middle of the handwoven rug that covered the floor of the hotel room she had rented two hours earlier, in the naval port city of Klamovka: even though it was expensive, it smelled of damp and dry rot, carbolic soap and firewood. She breathed slowly and evenly as she stretched arms and legs in ritual sequence, limbering up. The curtains were drawn, the door locked, and her sensors stationed outside to warn her of intruders: for she was not inclined to explain her state to any hotel staff who might see it.

Rachel was not inclined to explain a lot of things to the people she moved among. The New Republic filled her with a bitter, hopeless anger — one which she recognized, understood to be a poor reflection on her professionalism, but nevertheless couldn’t set aside. The sheer waste of human potential that was the New Republic’s raison d’etre offended her sensibilities as badly as a public book-burning, or a massacre of innocents.

The New Republic was 250 years old, 250 light-years from Earth. When the Eschaton had relocated nine-tenths of Earth’s population via wormhole — for reasons it hadn’t deigned to explain — it had sorted some of them on the basis of ethnic or social or psychological affinity. The New Republic had picked up a mixed bag of East-European technorejectionists and royalists, hankering for the comforting certainties of an earlier century.

The founders of the New Republic had suffered at the hands of impersonal technological change. In the market-oriented democracies of preSingularity Earth, they’d seen people cast by their millions on the scrap heap of history. Given a new world to tame, and the tools to do it with, they had immediately established a conservative social order. A generation later, a vicious civil war broke out between those who wanted to continue using the cornucopia machines — self-replicating nano-assembler factories able to manufacture any physical goods — and those who wanted to switch to a simpler way of life where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everyone. The progressives lost: and so the New Republic remained for a century, growing into its natural shape— Europe as it might have been during the twentieth century, had physics and chemistry been finalized in 1890. The patent offices were closed; there were no homes for dreaming relativists here.

Standing naked in the middle of the carpet, she could set it aside for a while. She could ignore the world while her implants ran through their regular self-defense practice sequence. It started with breathing exercises, then the isometric contraction of muscle groups under the direction of her battle management system, then finally a blur of motion as the embedded neural network controllers took over, whirling her body like a marionette through a series of martial arts exercises. A ten-minute cycle performed twice a week kept her as ready for personal defense as an unaugmented adept who spent an hour or more every day.

Whirling and jerking on invisible strings she threw and dismembered intangible demons; it was no great effort to project her frustrations and anger onto them. This for the blind beggar she had passed in the street, his affliction curable in a culture that didn’t ban most advanced medical practices. That for the peasants bound to the soil they tilled by a law that saw them as part of the land, rather than as human beings. This for the women condemned to die giving birth to unwanted children. That for the priests who pandered to the prejudices of the ruling elite and offered their people the false consolation of the hereafter, when most of the horrors that besieged them had long since been banished from the civilized worlds. And this and this and that for treating her like a third-class citizen. Anger demanded many kata.

I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world, I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me …

There was a small bathroom next door — an expensive extra in this society. She used it to clean herself as efficiently as possible, sweat and grime washing away like memories. And some of the pessimism went with it. Things around here are going to get better, she reminded herself. That’s what I’m here for.

Once dry, she wandered back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she picked up her battered PA. “Get me the UN Consensus Ambassador,” she ordered. There was only one UN

ambassador in the New Republic; George Cho, permanent representative of the Security Council, to which she was ultimately answerable. (The New Republic persistently refused to recognize any of Earth’s more subtle political institutions.)

“Processing. Beep. Rachel, I’m sorry, but I’m not available right now. Waiting for information to become available about the incident at Rochard’s. If you’d like to leave a message after the tone … beep.”

“Hi, George. Rachel here. Calling from Klamovka. Give me a call back; I think I ought to go public, and I want diplomatic backup. Let’s talk. Message ends.”

She closed the PA and put it down again. Stared moodily at the dresser. Her costume (she found it hard to think of it as regular clothing, even after months of wearing it daily) lay heaped around the dressing table. There were visits to make, forms to be observed, before she could act openly. Fuck this for a game of soldiers, she thought. Living by the New Republic’s rules had gotten old fast. I need some civilized company before I go out of my skull. Speaking of which, there was that engineering contractor to call. A bit of a cold fish, and not very cooperative, but she be damned if she’d let him throw her off; she could probably dig more out of him in an hour over a restaurant table than she’d be able to get from the Admiralty office in a month of diplomatic cocktail parties and formal memoranda.

She picked up the PA again. “PA, page engineer Springfield’s voice mail for me. Speech only. I have a message for him. Message begins …”

George Cho, Ambassador Plenipotentiary from the United Nations Security Council to the court of His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Ivan Hasek in (by grace of God, et cetera), sweated under his high collar and nodded politely. “Yes, Your Excellency, I quite understand your point. Nevertheless, although the territory in dispute is annexed to the New Republic, I must state again that we believe the situation falls within our remit, if only because it is not a purely domestic affair— unless this Festival is some peculiar tradition of yours that I have not hitherto been apprised of? — and consequently, the ugly matter of Clause Nineteen rears its head again.”

His Excellency the Archduke Michael Hasek shook his head. “We cannot accept that,” he stated. He stared at Cho from watery but piercing blue eyes. Bloody foreign busybodies, he thought. Not that Cho was a bad sort, for a degenerate Terran anarchist technophiliac. He reminded Michael of a bloodhound; baggy-eyed, jowly, perpetually sad-looking, and a mind like a spring-steel trap.

George Cho sighed and leaned back in his chair. He stared past the Archduke, at the portrait of the Duke’s father that hung on the wall. Emperor at forty, dead of old age at sixty, Emperor Hasek II: something of a prodigy, a force for progress in an insanely conservative milieu. The man had pulled the New Republic far enough out of its shell to acquire a navy and colonize three or four utterly benighted backwaters. A good student of history. Dangerous.

“I notice you looking at my father. He was a very stiff-necked man. It’s a trait that runs in the family,” Michael observed wryly. “We don’t like outsiders sticking their noses into our affairs. Maybe this is short-sighted of us, but—” He shrugged.

“Ah.” Cho brought his eyes back to the Duke. “Yes, of course. However, I am wondering if perhaps the advantages of UN involvement haven’t been made clear to you? I believe we have quite a lot to offer; I wouldn’t dream of approaching you about this if I didn’t think you could benefit from it.”

“There are benefits and there are side-effects. Did you have anything specific in mind?” Michael leaned forward.

“As a matter of fact … yes. It comes back to Clause Nineteen; the injunction against use of causality-violation weapons. ‘Whosoever shall cause to be deployed a weapon capable of disrupting the et cetera shall be guilty of a crime against humanity and subject to the internationally agreed penalties for that offense.’ We know perfectly well that you wouldn’t dream of using such weapons against one of your own worlds. But we have insufficient evidence about the intentions of the, ah, aggressor party, this Festival. There’s a marked shortage of information about them, which is in itself worrying. What I’m suggesting is that it might be advantageous to you to have independent observers from the UN in train with your expedition, to rebut any accusations that the New Republic is committing crimes against humanity and to act as witnesses in the event that your forces are themselves attacked in such a manner.”

“Aha.” Michael gritted his teeth and smiled at the ambassador. “And what makes you think there’s an expedition?”

It was Cho’s turn to smile: tiredly, for he had been awake for nearly forty-eight hours at this point, collating intelligence reports, monitoring media, and trying to put together the big picture single-handedly — the New Republic had strictly limited the size of his diplomatic staff. “Come, Your Excellency, are we to believe that the New Republic will allow an insult to its honor, let alone its territorial integrity, to stand without response? Some sort of reaction is inevitable. And given the loss of your Navy’s local presence, and the increased state of alert and heavy engineering activity around your bases at Klamovka, Libau, and V-l, a naval expedition seems likely. Or were you planning to get your soldiers there by ordering them to click their heels three times while saying ‘there’s no place like home’?” Michael pinched the bridge of his nose, attempting to cover his frown. “I can neither confirm nor deny that we are considering naval action at this time.”

Cho nodded. “Of course.”

“However. Do you know anything about this Festival? Or what has been going on at Rochard’s World?”

“Surprisingly little. You’ve been keeping a lid on whatever’s going on — not very subtly, I’m afraid, the dispatches from the Fourth Guards Division’s desperate defense of the colonial capital would be more convincing if the Fourth Guards’ relocation from New Prague to Baikal Four hadn’t been mentioned in dispatches a month ago. But you’re not the only people keeping the lid on it. My people have been unable to unearth any information about this Festival anywhere, which is distinctly worrying. We even broadcast a request for help from the Eschaton, but all that came back was a cryptogram saying, ‘P. T.

Barnum was right.’” (A cryptogram which had been encoded with a key from a secured UN diplomatic onetime pad, the leakage of which had already caused a major security panic.)

“I wonder who this T. P. Barney was,” Duke Michael commented. “No matter. The Festival has had an, ah, catastrophic impact on Rochard’s World. The economy is in ruins, there’s widespread civil disorder and outright rebellion. In fact—” He stared sharply at the ambassador. “You understand what this means for the guiding principles of our civilization?”

“I’m here strictly as an ambassador to represent the interests of all UN parties in the New Republic,” Cho stated neutrally. “I’m not here to pass judgment on you. That would be presumptuous.”

“Hmm.” Michael glanced down at his blotter.

“It is true that we are considering an expedition,” said the Archduke. Cho struggled to conceal his surprise. “But it will be difficult,” Michael continued. “The enemy is already well entrenched in the destination system. We don’t know where they come from. And if we send a fleet there directly, it may well suffer the same fate as the naval squadron on station. We are therefore considering a rather, ah, desperate stratagem.”

Cho leaned forward. “Sir, if you are contemplating a causality violation, I must advise you—” The Archduke raised a hand. “I assure you, Ambassador, that no global causality violation will take place as a result of actions of the New Republican Navy. We have no intention of violating Clause Nineteen.” He grimaced. “However, localized causality violations are sometimes permitted within tactical situations confined to the immediate light cone of an engagement, are they not? I think that … hmm, yes. A UN

observer would be able to assure all parties that our own conduct was legal and correct, would he not?”

“A UN observer will scrupulously tell the truth,” Cho stated, sweating slightly.

“Good. In that case, I think we may be able to accommodate your request, if a decision is made to prepare a task force. One inspector only, with diplomatic credentials, may accompany the flagship. His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.”

Cho nodded. “I think that would be acceptable. I shall notify Inspector Mansour, who is currently staying in Klamovka.”

Michael smiled, fleetingly. “Send my secretary a note. I shall pass it to Admiral Kurtz’s staff. I think I can guarantee that he will cooperate to the best of his abilities.” Junior Procurator Vassily Muller, of the Curator’s Office, stood in front of the great panoramic window that fronted Observation Bay Four and looked out across a gulf of light-years. Stars wheeled past like jewels scattered on a rotating display table. The spin of the huge station created a comfortably low semblance of gravity, perhaps eighty percent of normal; immediately outside the double wall of synthetic diamond lay the shipyard, where the great cylindrical bulk of a starship hung against a backdrop of cosmic beauty.

Shadows fell across the gray cylinder like the edge of eternity, sharp-edged with the unnatural clarity of vacuum. Inspection plates hung open at various points along the hull of the ship; disturbingly intestinal guts coiled loose, open to the remote manipulator pods that clung to it by many-jointed limbs. It resembled a dead, decaying whale being eaten by a swarm of lime green crabs. But it wasn’t dead, Vassily realized: it was undergoing surgery.

The ship was like a marathon runner, being overhauled by surgeons in hope of turning him into some kind of cyborg prodigy to compete in the ultimate winner-take-all sporting event. The analogy with his own, slightly sore head did not escape Vassily: it struck him that the most radical preparation was essential for the struggle ahead. He could already feel the new connections, like a ghost of an undefined limb, firming up somewhere just beyond the edge of his perceptions. Another three days, the medic had assured him in the morning, and he’d find himself able to start training the cranial jack. They’d given him a briefcase full of instructions, a small and highly illegal (not to say horrifically expensive) tool kit, and a priority travel pass to the orbital station on an Air Defense shuttle, bypassing the slow space elevator.

“Procurator Muller, I presume?” He turned. A trim-looking fellow in the pale green uniform of His Majesty’s Navy, a lieutenant’s rings on his cuffs. He saluted. “At ease. I’m Second Lieutenant Sauer, shipboard security officer for the Lord Vanek. Is this your first time up here?” Vassily nodded, too tongue-tied to articulate a response. Sauer turned to face the window. “Impressive, isn’t she?”

“Yes!” The sight of the huge warship brought a great wave of pride to his chest: his people owned and flew such ships. “My stepbrother is on one of them, a sister ship — the Skvosty.”

“Oh, very good, very good indeed. Has he been there long?”

“Three — three years. He is second fire control officer. A lieutenant, like yourself.”

“Ah.” Sauer tipped his head on one side and regarded Vassily with a brightly focused gaze. “Excellent.

But tell me, how good is this ship, really? How powerful do you think it is?” Vassily shook his head, still dazzled by his first sight of the warship. “I can’t imagine anything grander than a ship like that one! How can anyone build better?”

Sauer looked amused. “You are a detective, and not a cosmonaut,” he said. “If you had been to naval college, you would be aware of some of the possibilities. Let us just say, for the moment, that they wouldn’t have named it after old Ernst Ironsides if it wasn’t the best ship we’ve got — but not everyone plays by the same rules as we do. I suppose it’s only fair, then, for us to play a different game — which is of course precisely why you are here and we are having this conversation. You want to protect that ship, and the Republic, don’t you?”

Vassily nodded eagerly. “Yes. Did my CO let you know why I’m here?”

“I have a full briefing. We take anything that might compromise shipboard security extremely seriously; you won’t be able to work in restricted areas, but as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to go anywhere that isn’t controlled — and by arrangement, I’m sure we can help you keep an eye on your yard-ape. To tell the truth, it’s good for us that you are available for this duty. We have more than enough other problems to keep track of without stalking contractors on the job, and as long as the problem gets wrapped up satisfactorily in the end, who cares whose turf is turned over, eh?” At this point, Vassily realized that something odd was going on, but being inexperienced, he didn’t know quite what could be the matter. Nor did he want to push Sauer, at least not this soon in their acquaintance. “Can you show me where Springfield is working?”

“Unfortunately”—Sauer spread his hands—“Springfield is actually on board at this very minute. You realize that he is working on the interstellar propulsion system itself?”

“Oh.” Vassily’s mouth made a round “O.” “You mean I’ll have to go aboard?”

“I mean you can’t go aboard — not until you’ve been checked out by medical, received security clearance, gone to three orientation briefings, and been approved by the old man — which won’t be until tomorrow at the earliest. So, for the time being, I had better show you to the transient officers’

quarters — you have the same privileges as a midshipman while you are on Admiralty turf.”

“That would be great,” Vassily agreed earnestly. “If you’d lead the way …?” Meanwhile, the first of the Festival’s entourage of Critics was arriving in orbit around Rochard’s World.

Once part of a human civilization that had transmigrated into its own computing network, the Festival was a traveling embassy, a nexus for the exchange of cultural information between stars. It was primarily interested in other upload cultures, but anyone would do at a pinch. It had zigged and zagged its way through the sphere of inhabited worlds for a thousand t-years, working its way inward from the periphery, and all the time it had asked only one thing of its willing or unwilling hosts: Entertain us!

The Festival was sharply constrained by the density of information that could be crammed into the tiny starwisps that carried it across the interstellar gulf. Unlike a normal upload civilization, the Festival couldn’t manufacture its own reality with sufficient verisimilitude to avoid the normal hazards of life in a virtual universe; it was a desert plant, existing as a seed for years at a time between frantic growth spurts when the correct conditions arose.

Like most circus caravans, the Festival accumulated hitchhikers, hangers-on, and a general fringe of camp followers and parasites. There was room for millions of passengers in the frozen mind-cores of the starwisps, but no room for them to think between stations. Trueminds aestivated during the decade-long hops between planetary civilizations; simple, subsentient supervisors kept the starwisps on course and ran the autonomic systems. On arrival, the servitors built the necessary infrastructure to thaw and load the trueminds. Once contact had been achieved and a course of action decided upon, any residual capacity would be made available to the passengers, including the Critics.

A foam of diamond was growing in orbit around Sputnik, the outer moon of Rochard’s World. Strange emulsions stirred within some of the bubbles, a boiling soup of nanomachine-catalyzed chemical reactions. Other bubbles faded to black, soaking up sunlight with near-total efficiency. A steady stream of tanks drifted toward the foam on chaotic orbits, ejecta from the mining plants in the outer system.

Within the bubbles, incarnate life congealed, cells assembled by machine rather than the natural cycle of mitosis and differentiation. Thousands of seconds passed, an aeon to the productive assemblers: skeletons appeared, first as lacy outlines and then as baroque coral outcroppings afloat in the central placentory bubbles. Blood, tissues, teeth, and organs began to congeal in place as the nano-assemblers pumped synthetic enzymes, DNA, ribosomes, and other cellular machinery into the lipid vesicles that were due to become living cells.

Presently, the Critics’ bodies began to twitch.