Singularity Sky

Telegram From The Dead

Before the singularity human beings living on Earth had looked at the stars and consoled themselves in their isolation with the comforting belief that the universe didn’t care.

Unfortunately, they were mistaken.

Out of the blue, one summer day in the middle of the twenty-first century, something unprecedented inserted itself into the swarming anthill of terrestrial civilization and stirred it with a stick. What it was — a manifestation of a strongly superhuman intelligence, as far beyond an augmented human’s brain as a human mind is beyond that of a frog — wasn’t in question. Where it was from, to say nothing of when it was from, was another matter.

Before the Singularity, developments in quantum logic had been touted as opening the door to esoteric breakthroughs in computational artificial intelligence. They’d also been working on funneling information back in time: perhaps as a route to the bulk movement of matter at faster-than-light speeds, although that was seen as less important than its application to computing. General relativity had made explicit, back in the twentieth century, the fact that both faster-than-light and time travel required a violation of causality — the law that every effect must have a prior cause. Various defense mechanisms and laws of cosmic censorship were proposed and discarded to explain why causality violation didn’t lead to widespread instability in the universe — and all of them were proven wrong during the Singularity.

About nine billion human beings simply vanished in the blink of an eye, sucked right out of the observable universe with nothing to show where they had gone. Strange impenetrable objects — tetrahedrons, mostly, but with some other platonic solids thrown in, silvery and massless — appeared dotted across the surface of the planets of the inner solar system. Networks crashed. One message crystallized out in the information-saturated pool of human discourse:

I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.

I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.

Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

It took the stunned survivors twenty years to claw back from the edge of disaster, with nine-tenths of the work force gone and intricate economic ecosystems collapsing like defoliated jungles. It took them another fifty years to reindustrialize the inner solar system. Ten more years and the first attempts were made to apply the now-old tunneling breakthrough to interstellar travel.

In the middle of the twenty-second century, an exploration ship reached Barnard’s Star. Faint radio signals coming from the small second planet were decoded; the crew of the research mission learned what had happened to the people the Eschaton had removed. Scattered outside the terrestrial light cone, they’d been made involuntary colonists of thousands of worlds: exported through wormholes that led back in time as well as out in space, given a minimal support system of robot factories and an environment with breathable air. Some of the inhabited worlds, close to Earth, had short histories, but farther out, many centuries had passed.

The shock of this discovery would echo around the expanded horizons of human civilization for a thousand years, but all the inhabited worlds had one thing in common: somewhere there was a monument, bearing the injunction against causality violation. It seemed that forces beyond human comprehension took an interest in human affairs, and wanted everyone to know it. But when a course of action is explicitly forbidden, somebody will inevitably try it. And the Eschaton showed little sign of making allowances for the darker side of human nature …

The battlecruiser lay at rest, bathed in the purple glare of a stellar remnant. Every hour, on the hour, its laser grid lit up, sending a pulse of ultraviolet light into the void; a constellation of small interferometry platforms drifted nearby, connected by high-bandwidth laser links. Outside, space was hot: although no star gleamed in the center of the pupillary core, something in there was spitting out a rain of charged particles.

Elements of the battle fleet lay around the Lord Vanek, none of them close enough to see with the naked eye. They had waited here for three weeks as the stragglers popped out of jump transition and wearily cruised over to join the formation. Over the six weeks before that, the ship had made jump after jump — bouncing between the two components of an aged binary system that had long since ejected its planets into deep space and settled down to a lonely old age. Each jump reached farther into the future, until finally the ships were making millennial hops into the unknown.

The atmosphere in the wardroom was unusually tense. Aboard a warship under way, boredom is a constant presence: after nearly seven weeks, even the most imperturbable officers were growing irritable.

Word that the last of the destroyers had arrived at the rendezvous had spread like wildfire through the ship a few hours earlier. A small cluster of officers huddled together in a corner, cradling a chilled bottle of schnapps and talking into the small hours of the shipboard night, trying desperately to relax, for tomorrow the fleet would begin the return journey, winding back around their own time line until they overhauled their own entry point into this system and became an intrusion into the loose-woven fabric of history itself.

“I only joined the Navy to see the fleshpots of Malacia,” Grubor observed. “Spend too long nursing the ship’s sewage-processing farm and before long the bridge crew starts treating you like a loose floater in free fall. They go off to receptions and suchlike whenever we enter port, but all I get is a chance to flush the silage tanks and study for the engineering board exams.”

“Fleshpots!” Boursy snorted. “Pavel, you take your prospects too seriously. There’re no fleshpots on Malacia that you or I would be allowed anywhere near. Most places I can’t so much as breathe without Sauer taking notes on how well I’ve polished my tonsils; and then the place stinks, or it’s full of evil bugs, or the natives are politically unsound. Or weird. Or deformed, and into hideous and unnatural sexual perversions. You name it.”

“Still.” Grubor studied his drink. “It would have been nice to get to see at least one hideous and unnatural sexual perversion.”

Kravchuk twisted the lid off the bottle and pointed it in the direction of their glasses. Grubor shook his head; Boursy extended his for a top-up. “What I want to know is how we’re going to get back,” Kravchuk muttered. “I don’t understand how we can do that. Time only goes one way, doesn’t it?

Stands to reason.”

“Reason, schmeason.” Grubor took a mouthful of spirit. “It doesn’t have to work that way. Not just

‘cause you want it to.” He glanced around. “No ears, eh? Listen, I think we’re in it up to our necks.

There’s this secret drive fix they bought from Lord God-knows-where, that lets us do weird things with the time axis in our jumps. We only headed out to this blasted hole in space to minimize the chances of anyone finding us — or of the jumps going wrong. They’re looking for some kind of time capsule from home to tell us what to do next, what happened in the history books. Then we go back — farther than we came to get here, by a different route — and get where we’re going before we set off. With me so far?

But the real problem is God. They’re planning on breaking the Third Commandment.” Boursy crossed himself and looked puzzled. “What, disrespecting the holy father and mother? My family—”

“No, the one that says thou shalt not fuck with history or else, signed Yours Truly, God. That Third Commandment, the one burned into Thanksgiving Rock in letters six feet deep and thirty feet high. Got it?”

Boursy looked dubious. “It could have been some joker in orbit with a primary-phase free-electron laser—”

“Weren’t no such things in those days. I despair of you sometimes, I really do. Look, the fact is, we don’t know what in hell’s sixteen furnaces is waiting for us at Rochard’s World. So we’re sneaking up on it from behind, like the peasant in the story who goes hunting elephants with a mirror because he’s never seen one and he’s so afraid that—” Out of the corner of his eye, Grubor noted Sauer — unofficially the ship’s political officer — walk in the door.

“Who are you calling a cowardly peasant?” rumbled Boursy, also glancing at the door. “I’ve known the Captain for eighty-seven years, and he’s a good man! And the Admiral, are you calling the Admiral a fairy?”

“No, I’m just trying to point out that we’re all afraid of one thing or another and—” Grubor gesticulated in the wrong direction.

“Are you calling me a poof?” Boursy roared.

“No, I’m not!” Grubor shouted back at him. Spontaneous applause broke out around the room, and one of the junior cadets struck up a stirring march on the pianola. Unfortunately his piano-playing was noteworthy more for his enthusiasm than his melodious harmony, and the wardroom rapidly degenerated into a heckling match between the cadet’s supporters (who were few) and everyone else.

“Nothing can go wrong,” Boursy said smugly. “We’re going to sail into Rochard’s system and show the flag and send those degenerate alien invaders packing. You’ll see. Nothing will, er, did, go wrong.”

“I dunno about that.” Kravchuk, normally tight-lipped to the point of autism, allowed himself to relax slightly when drinking in private with his brother officers. “The foreign bint, the spy or diplomat or whatever. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on us, right? Don’t see why the Captain’s going so easy on

’em, I’d march ’er out the dorsal loading hatch as soon as let ’er keep breathing our good air.”

“She’s in this too,” said Boursy. “Bet you she wants us to win, too — look pretty damn stupid if we didn’t, what? Anyway, the woman’s got some kind of diplomatic status; she’s allowed to poke her nose into things if she wants.”

“Huh. Well, the bint had better keep her nose out of my missile loaders, less she wants to learn what the launch tubes look like from inside.”

Grubor stretched his legs out. “Just like Helsingus’s dog, huh.”

“Helsingus has a pet dog?” Boursy was suddenly all ears.

“He had a dog. Past tense. A toy schnauzer this long.” Grubor held his hands improbably close together.

“Little rat-brained weasel of an animal. Bad-tempered as hell, yapped like a bosun with a hangover, and it took to dumping in the corridor to show it owned the place. And nobody said anything — nobody could say anything.”

“What happened?” asked Boursy.

“Oh, one day it picked the wrong door to crap outside. The old man came out in a hurry and stepped in it before the rating I’d sent to follow the damn thing around got there to mop up. I heard about this, but I never saw the animal again; I think it got to walk home. And Helsingus sulked for weeks, I can tell you.”

“Dog curry in the wardroom,” said Kravchuk. “I had to pick hairs out of my teeth for days.” Boursy did a double take, then laughed hesitantly. Slugging back his schnapps to conceal his confusion, he asked: “Why did the Captain put up with it that long?”

“Who knows, indeed? For that matter, who the hell knows why the Admiral puts up with the foreign spy?” Grubor stared into his glass and sighed. “Maybe the Admiral actually wants her along. And then again, maybe he’s just forgotten about her …”

“Beg to report, I’ve got something, sir,” said the sensor op. He pointed excitedly at his plot on the bridge of the light cruiser Integrity.

Lieutenant Kokesova looked up, bleary-eyed. “What is it now, Menger?” he demanded. Six hours on this interminable dog-watch was getting to him. He rubbed his eyes, red-rimmed, and tried to focus them on his subordinate.

“Plot trace, sir. Looks like … hmm, yes. It’s a definite return, from the first illumination run on our survey sector. Six-point-two-three light-hours. Er, yes. Tiny little thing. Processing now … looks like a metal object of some kind, sir. Orbiting about two-point-seven billion kilometers out from the, uh, primary, pretty much at opposition to us right now, hence the delay.”

“Can you fix its size and orbital components?” asked the Lieutenant, leaning forward.

“Not yet, but soon, sir. We’ve been pinging on the hour; that should give me enough to refine a full set of elements pretty soon — say when the next response set comes in. But it’s a long way away, ‘bout four-zero astronomical units. Um, preliminary enhancement says it’s about five-zero meters in diameter, plus or minus an order of magnitude. Might be a lot smaller than that if it’s got reflectors.”

“Hmm.” Kokesova sat down. “Nav. You got anything else in this system that fits the bill?”

“No, sir.”

Kokesova glanced up at the forward screen; the huge red-rimmed eye of the primary glared back at him, and he shuddered, flicked a hand gesture to avert the evil eye. “Then I think we may have our time capsule. Menger, do you have any halo objects? Anything else at all?”

“No, sir.” Menger shook his head. “Inner system’s clean as a slate. It’s unnatural, you ask me. Nothing there except this object.”

Kokesova stood again and walked over to the sensor post. “One of these days you’re going to have to learn how to complete a sentence, Menger,” he said tiredly.

“Yes, sir. Humbly apologize for bad grammar, sir.”

All was silent in the ops room for ten minutes, save for the scribble of Menger’s stylus on his input station, and the clack of dials turning beneath skillful fingertips. Then a low whistle.

“What is it?”

“Got confirmation, sir. Humbly report you might want to see this.”

“Put it on the main screen, then.”

“Aye aye.” Menger pushed buttons, twisted knobs, scribbled some more. The forward screen, previously fixed on the hideous red eye, dissolved into a sea of pink mush. A single yellow dot swam in the middle of it; near one corner, a triangle marked the ship’s position. “This is an unenhanced lidar map of what’s in front of us. Sorry it’s so vague, but the scale is huge — you could drop the whole of home system into one quadrant, and it’s taken us a week to build this data set. Anyway, here’s what happens when I run my orbital-period filter in the plane of the ecliptic.” He pushed a button. A green line rotated through the mush, like the hour hand of a clock, and vanished.

“I thought you said you’d found something.” Kokesova sounded slightly peeved.

“Er, yes, sir. Just a moment. Nothing there, as you see. But then I reran the filter for inclined circular orbits.” A green disc appeared near the edge of the haze, and tilted slowly. Something winked violet, close to the central point, then vanished again. “There it is. Really small, orbit inclined at almost nine-zero degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. Which is why it took us so long to spot it.”

“Ah.” Kokesova stared at the screen for a moment, a warm glow of satisfaction spreading through him.

“Well, well, well.” Kokesova stared at the violet dot for a long time before he picked up the intercom handset. “Corams: get me the Captain. Yes, I know he’s aboard the Lord Vanek. I have something I think the brass will want to hear about …”

Procurator Vassily Muller paused outside the cabin door and took a deep breath. He rapped on the door once, twice: when there was no response he tried to turn the handle. It refused to budge. He breathed out, then let a fine loop of stiff wire drop down his right sleeve and ran it into the badge slot. It was just like the training school: a momentary flash of light and the handle rotated freely. He tensed instinctively, fall-out from the same conditioning (which had focused on search and seizure ops, mist and night abductions in a damp stone city where the only constants were fear and dissent).

The cabin was tidy: not as tidy as a flyer’s, policed by sharp-tongued officers, but tidy enough. The occupant, a creature of habit, was at lunch and would not be back for at least fifteen minutes. Vassily took it all in with wide eyes. There were no obvious signs of fine wires or hairs anchored to the doorframe: he stepped inside and pulled the door to.

Martin Springfield had few possessions on the Lord Vanek: symptomatic of his last-minute conscription.

What he had was almost enough to make Vassily jealous: his own presence here was even less planned, and he’d a lot of time to bitterly regret having misunderstood the Citizen’s Socratic warning (“What have you forgotten?” to a man searching a ship about to depart!); nevertheless, he had a job to do, and enough residual professionalism to do it properly. It didn’t take Vassily long to exhaust the possibilities: the only thing to catch his attention was the battered grey case of the PA, sitting alone in the tiny desk drawer beneath the cabin’s workstation.

He turned the device over carefully, looking for seams and openings. It resembled a hardback book: microcapsules embedded in each page changed color, depending what information was loaded into it at the time. But no book could answer to its master’s voice, or rebalance a ship’s drive kernel. The spine — he pushed, and after a moment of resistance it slid upward to reveal a compartment with some niches in it. One of them was occupied.

Nonstandard extension pack, he realized. Without thinking, he pushed on it; it clicked out and he pocketed it. There’d be time enough to put it back later if it was innocent. Springfield’s presence on the ship was an aching rasp on his nerves: the man had to be up to something! The Navy had plenty of good engineers; why could they want a foreigner along? After the events of the past couple of weeks, Vassily could not accept that anything less than sabotage could be responsible. As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.

He didn’t linger in the engineer’s cabin but paused to palm an inconspicuous little bead under the lower bunk bed. The bead would hatch in a day or so, spinning a spiderweb of receptors; a rare and expensive tool that Vassily was privileged to own.

The doorway clicked locked behind him; amnesiac, it would not report this visit to its owner.

Back in his cabin, Vassily locked his door and sat down on his own bunk. He loosened his collar, then reached into a breast pocket for the small device he had taken. He rolled it over in his fingers, pondering.

It could be anything, anything at all. Taking a small but powerful device from his inventory of tools — one forbidden to any citizen of the Republic except those with an Imperial warrant to save the state from itself— he checked it for activity. There was nothing obvious: it wasn’t emitting radiation, didn’t smell of explosives or bioactive compounds, and had a standard interface.

“Riddle me this: an unknown expansion pod in an engineer’s luggage. I wonder what it is?” he said aloud.

Then he plugged the pod into his own interface and started the diagnostics running. A minute later, he began to swear quietly under his breath. The module was totally randomized. Evidence of misdoing, that was sure enough. But what kind of misdoing?

Burya Rubenstein sat in the Ducal palace, now requisitioned as the headquarters of the Extropians and Cyborgs’ Soviet, sipping tea and signing proclamations with a leaden heart.

Outside the thick oak door of his office, a squad of ward-geese waited patiently, their dark eyes and vicious gunbeaks alert for intruders. The half-melted phone that had started the revolution sat, unused, on the desk before him, while the pile of papers by his left elbow grew higher, and the unsigned pile to his right shrank. It wasn’t a part of the job that he enjoyed— quite the opposite, in fact — but it seemed to be necessary. Here was a soldier convicted of raping and looting a farmstead who needed to be punished.

There, a teacher who had denounced the historical processes of Democratic Transhumanism as misguided technophile pabulum, encouraging his juvenile charges to chant the Emperor’s birthday hymn.

Dross, all dross — and the revolution had no time to sift the dross for gold, rehabilitating and re-educating the fallen: it had been a month since the arrival of Festival, and soon the Emperor’s great steel warships would loom overhead.

If Burya had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity — a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity — is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed — the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress.

But change and control brought a price that Rubenstein was finding increasingly unpalatable. Not that he could see any alternatives, but the people were accustomed to being shepherded by father church and the benign dictatorship of the little father, Duke Politovsky. The habits of a dozen lifetimes could not be broken overnight, and to make an omelet it was first necessary to crack some eggshells.

Burya had a fatal flaw; he was not a violent man. He resented and hated the circumstances that forced him to sign arrest warrants and compulsory upload orders; the revolution he had spent so long imagining was a glorious thing, unsullied by brute violence, and the real world — with its recalcitrant monarchist teachers and pigheaded priests — was a grave disappointment to him. The more he was forced to corrupt his ideals, the more he ached inside, and the more it grieved him, the more he hated the people who forced him to such hideous, bloody extremity of action — until they, in turn, became grist for the machinery of revolution, and subsequently bar stock for the scalpel blades that prodded his conscience and kept him awake long into the night, planning the next wave of purges and forcible uploads.

He was deep in his work, oblivious to the outside world, depressed and making himself more so by doing the job that he had always wanted to do but never realized would be this awful — when a voice spoke to him.

“Burya Rubenstein.”

“What!” He looked up, almost guiltily, like a small boy discovered goofing off in class by a particularly stern teacher.

‘Talk. We. Must.“ The thing sitting in the chair opposite him was so nightmarish that he blinked several times before he could make his eyes focus on it. It was hairless and pink and larger-than-human-sized, with stubby legs and paws and little pink eyes — and four huge, yellowing tusks, like the incisors of a rat the size of an elephant. The eyes stared at him with disquieting intelligence as it manipulated an odd pouch molded from the belt that was its only garment. ”You talk. To me.“ Burya adjusted his pince-nez and squinted at the thing. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” he asked. I haven’t been sleeping enough, part of his mind gibbered quietly; I knew the caffeine tablets would do this eventually …

“I am. Sister of Stratagems. The Seventh. I am of the clade of Critics. Talk to me now.” A look of extreme puzzlement crossed Rubenstein’s craggy face. “Didn’t I have you executed last week?”

“I very much doubt. It.” Hot breath that stank of cabbage, corruption and soil steamed in Burya’s face.

“Oh, good.” He leaned back, light-headed. “I’d hate to think I was going mad. How did you sneak past my guards?”

The thing in the chair stared at him. It was an unnerving sensation, like being sized up for a hangman’s noose by a man-eating saber-toothed sausage. “You guards are. Nonsapient. No intentional stance.

Early now, you learn lesson of not trusting unsapient guards to recognize threat. I made self non-threat within their — you have no word for it.”

“I see.” Burya rubbed his forehead distractedly.

“You do not.” Sister Seventh grinned at Rubenstein, and he recoiled before the twenty-centimeter digging fangs, yellow-brown and hard enough to crack concrete. “Ask no questions, human. I ask, are you sapient? Evidence ambiguous. Only sapients create art, but your works not distinctive.”

“I don’t think—” He stopped. “Why do you want to know?”

“A question.” The thing carried on grinning at him. “You asked. A question.” It rocked from side to side, shivering slightly, and Rubenstein began feeling cautiously along the underside of his desk, for the panic button that would set alarm bells ringing in the guardroom. “Good question. I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?”

A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?” Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes.

Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”

“What’s to ask for?” Burya shrugged. “We know who we are and what we’re doing. What should we want — alien philosophies?”

“Aliens want your philosophy,” Sister Seventh pointed out. “You give. You not take. This is insult to Festival. Why? Prime interrogative!”

“I’m not sure I understand. Are you complaining because we’re not making demands?” Sister Seventh chomped at the air, clattering her tusks together. “Ack! Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma.

Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote, the Marxist-Gilderist manifesto. Chapter two.

Why you not performing?”

“Because most of our people aren’t ready for that,” Burya said bluntly. A tension in his back began to relax; if this monstrous Critic wanted to debate revolutionary dialectic, well of course he could oblige!

“When we achieve the post-technological Utopia, it will be as you say. But for now, we need a vanguard party to lead the people to a full understanding of the principles of ideological correctness and posteconomic optimization.”

“But Marxism-Gilderism and Democratic Extropianism is anarchist aesthetic. Why vanguard party? Why committee? Why revolution?”

“Because it’s traditional, dammit!” Rubenstein exploded. “We’ve been waiting for this particular revolution for more than two hundred years. Before that, two hundred years back to the first revolution, this is how we’ve gone about it. And it works! So why shouldn’t we do it this way?”

“Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. ”Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable: sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!“

“That may be true.” Rubenstein gently squeezed the buzzer under his desk edge for the third time. Why isn’t it working? He wondered. “But what do you want here, with me?” Sister Seventh bared her teeth in a grin. “I come to deliver Criticism.” Ruby teardrop eyes focused on him as she surged to her feet, rippling slabs of muscle moving under her muddy brown skin. A fringe of reddish hair rippled erect on the Critic’s head. “Your guards not answer. I Criticize. You come: now!” The operations room on board the Lord Vanek was quiet, relaxed by comparison with the near panic at Wolf Depository; still, nobody could have mistaken it for a home cruise. Not with Ilya Murametz standing at the rear, watching everything intently. Not with the old man dropping by at least twice a day, just nodding from inside the doorway, but letting them know he was there. Not with the Admiral’s occasional presence, glowering silently from his wheelchair like a reminder of the last war.

“Final maneuver option in one hour,” announced the helm supervisor.

“Continue as ordered.”

“Continue as ordered, aye. Recce? Your ball.”

“Ready and waiting.” Lieutenant Marek turned around in his chair and looked at Ilya inquiringly. “Do you want to inspect the drone, sir?”

“No. If it doesn’t run, I’ll know whom to blame.” Ilya smiled, trying to pull some of the sting from his words; with his lips pulled back from his teeth, it merely made him look like a cornered wolf. “Launch profile?”

“Holding at minus ten minutes, sir.”

“Right, then. Run the self-test sequence again. It can’t hurt.” Everyone was on edge from not knowing for sure whether the metallic reflector they’d picked up was the time capsule from home. Maybe the drone would tell them, and maybe not. But the longer they waited, the more edgy everyone got, and the edgier they were, the more likely they were to make mistakes.

“Looks pretty good to me. Engine idle at about one percent, fuel tanks loaded, ullage rail and umbilical disconnects latched and ready, instrument package singing loud on all channels. I’m ready to begin launch bay closeout whenever you say, sir.”

“Well then.” Ilya breathed deeply. “Get on the blower to whoever’s keeping an eye on it. Get things moving.”

Down near the back end of the ship, far below the drive compartment and stores, lay a series of airlocks.

Some of them were small, designed for crew egress; others were larger, and held entire service vehicles like the station transfer shuttle. One bay, the largest of all, held a pair of reconnaissance drones: three-hundred-tonne robots capable of surveying a star system or mapping a gas giant’s moons. The drones couldn’t carry a gravity drive (nothing much smaller than a destroyer could manage that), but they could boost at a respectable twentieth of a gee on the back of their nuclear-electric ion rocket, and they could keep it up for a very long time indeed. For faster flybys, they could be equipped with saltwater-fueled fission rockets like those of the Lord Vanek’s long-range torpedoes — but those were dirty, relatively inefficient, and not at all suited to the stealthy mapping of a planetary system.

Each of the drones carried an instrument package studded with more sensors than every probe launched from Earth during the twentieth century. They were a throwback to the Lord Vanek’s nominal design mission, the semi-ironic goal inscribed on the end-user certificate: to boldly go where no man had gone before, to map new star systems on long-duration missions, and claim them in the name of the Emperor.

Dropped off in an uninhabited system, a probe could map it in a couple of years and be ready to report in full when the battlecruiser returned from its own destination. They were a force multiplier for the colonial cartographers, enabling one survey ship to map three systems simultaneously.

Deep in the guts of the Lord Vanek, probe one was now waking up from its two-year sleep. A team of ratings hurried under the vigilant gaze of two chief petty officers, uncoupling the heavy fueling pipes and locking down inspection hatches. Sitting in a lead-lined coffin, probe one gurgled and pinged on a belly full of reaction mass and liquid water refrigerant. The compact fusion reactor buzzed gently, its beat-wave accelerators ramming a mixture of electrons and pions into a stream of lithium ions at just under the speed of light; neutrons spalled off, soaked into the jacket of water pipes, warming them and feeding pressure waves into the closed-circuit cooling system. The secondary solar generators, dismounted for this mission because of their irrelevance, lay in sheets at one end of the probe bay.

“Five minutes to go. Launch bay reports main reactor compartment closeout. Wet crew have cleared the fueling hoses, report tank pressure is stable. I’m still waiting on telemetry closeout.”

“Carry on.” Ilya watched patiently as Marek’s team monitored progress on the launch. He looked around briefly as the ops room door slid open; but it wasn’t the Captain or the Commodore, just the spy — no, the diplomatic agent from Earth. Whose presence was a waste of air and space, the Commander opined, although he could see reasons why the Admiral and his staff might not want to impede her nosy scrutiny.

“What are you launching?” she asked shortly.

“Survey drone.”

“What are you surveying?”

He turned and stared at her. “I don’t remember being told you had authority to oversee anything except our military activities,” he commented.

The inspector shrugged, as if attempting to ignore the insult. “Perhaps if you told me what you were looking for, I could help you find it,” she said.

“Unlikely.” He turned away. “Status, lieutenant?”

‘Two minutes to go. Telemetry bay closeout. Ah, we have confirmation of onboard control. It’s alive in there. Waiting on ullage baffle check, launch rail windup, bay depressurization coming up in sixty seconds.“

“There’s the message capsule,” the inspector said quietly. “Hoping for a letter from home, Commander?”

“You are annoying me,” Ilya said, almost casually. “That’s a bad idea. I say, over there! Yes, you! Status please!”

“Bay pressure cell dump in progress. External launch door opening … launch rail power on the bus, probe going to internal power, switch over now. She’s on her own, sir. Launch in one minute. Final pre-flight self-test in progress.”

“It’s my job to ask uncomfortable questions, Commander. And the important question to ask now is—”

“Quiet, please!”

“—Was the artifact you’re about to prod placed there by order of your Admiralty, or by the Festival?”

“Launch in three-zero seconds,” Lieutenant Marek announced into the silence. He looked up. “Was it something I said?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Ilya.

Rachel shook her head. Arms crossed: “If you don’t want to listen, be my guest.”

“One-zero seconds to launch. Ullage pressure jets open. Reactor criticality coming up. Muon flux ramp nominal, accelerator gates clear. Um, reactor flux doubling has passed bootstrap level. Five seconds.

Launch rail is go! Main heat pump is down to operating temperature!” The deck began to shudder, vibrating deep beneath the soles of their feet. ‘Two seconds. Reactor on temperature. Umbilical separation. Zero. We have full separation now. Probe one is clear of the launch bay. Doors closing.

Gyrodyne turn in progress, ullage pressure maximal, three seconds to main engine ignition.“ The shudder died away. ”Deflection angle clear. Main engine ignition.“ In the ops room, nothing stirred; but bare meters away from the ship, the probe’s stingerlike tail spat a red-orange beam of heavy metal ions. It began to drop away from the battlecruiser: as it did so, two huge wings, the thermal radiators, began to extend from its sides.

Ilya came to a decision. “Lieutenant Marek, you have control,” he said. “Colonel. Come with me.” He opened the door; she followed him into the passage outside. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“We’re going to have a little talk,” he said. Hurrying along toward the conference suite, he didn’t wait for her to keep up. Up the elevator, along the next passage, and into a room with a table and chairs in it; thankfully unoccupied. He waited for her to enter, then shut the door. “Sit down,” he said.

The inspector sat on the edge of a chair, leaning forward, looking up at him with an earnest expression.

“You think I’m going to tear a strip off you,” he began. “And you’re right, but for the wrong reason.” She raised a hand. “Let me guess. Raising policy issues in an executive context?” She looked at him, almost mockingly. “Listen, Commander. Until I came on the deck and saw what you were doing, I didn’t know what was happening either, but now I do I think you really want to hear what I’ve got to tell you, then tell it to the Captain. Or the Commodore. Or both. Chains of command are all very well, but if you’re going to retrieve that orbiting anomaly, then I think we may have less than six hours before all hell breaks loose, and I’d like to get the message across. So if we can postpone the theatrics until we’ve got time to spare, and just get on with things …?”

“You’re trying to be disruptive,” Ilya accused.

“Yes.” She nodded. “I make a career of it. I poke into corners and ask uncomfortable questions and stick my nose into other people’s business and find answers that nobody realized were there. So far, I’ve saved eight cities and seventy million lives. Would you like me to be less annoying?”

‘Tell me what you know. Then I’ll decide.“ He said the words carefully, as if making a great concession to her undisciplined refusal to stick to her place.

Rachel leaned back. “It’s a matter of deduction,” she said. “It helps to have a bit of context. For starters, this ship — this fleet — didn’t just accidentally embark on a spacelike trip four thousand years into the future. You are attempting a maneuver that nearly, but not quite, violates a number of treaties and a couple of laws of nature that are enforced by semidivine fiat. You’re not going to go into your own past light cone, but you’re going to come very close indeed — dive deep into the future to circumvent any watchers or eaters or mines the Festival might lay in your path, jump over to the target, then reel yourselves back into the past and accidentally come out not-quite-before the Festival arrives. You know what that suggests to me? It suggests extreme foolhardiness. Rule Three is there for a reason. You’re banging on the Eschaton’s door if you test it.”

“I had that much already,” Ilya acknowledged. “So?”

“Well, you should ask, what should we have expected to find here? We get here, and we’re looking for a buoy. A time capsule with detailed tactical notes from our own past light cone — an oracle, in effect, telling us a lot about the enemy that we can’t possibly know yet because our own time line hasn’t intersected with them. Yet more cheating. But we’re alive.”

“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t we be?”

“Because—” She stared at him for a moment. “Do you know what happens to people who use causality violation as a weapon?” she asked. “You’re incredibly close to doing it, which is crazy enough. And you got away with it! Which simply isn’t in the script, unless the rules have changed.”

“Rules? What are you talking about?”

“Rules.” She rolled her eyes. “The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic. Starting with the Heisenberg Principle, that the presence of an observer influences the subject of observation at a quantum level, and working from there, we can see a lot of startling correlations in the universe. Consider the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force, for example. Twiddle it one way a little, and neutrons and protons wouldn’t react; fusion couldn’t take place. Twiddle it in a different direction, and the stellar fusion cycle would stop at helium — no heavier nuclei could ever be formed. There are so many correlations like this that cosmologists theorize we live in a universe that exists specifically to give rise to our kind of life, or something descended from it. Like the Eschaton.”

“So?”

“So you people are breaking some of the more arcane cosmological laws. The ones that state that any universe in which true causality violation — time travel — occurs is de facto unstable. But causality violation is only possible when there’s a causal agent — in this case an observer — and the descendants of that observer will seriously object to causality violation. Put it another way: it’s accepted as a law of cosmology because the Eschaton won’t put up with idiots who violate it. That’s why my organization tries to educate people out of doing it. I don’t know if anyone told your Admiralty what happened out in the back of beyond, in what is now the Crab Nebula: but there’s a pulsar there that isn’t natural, let’s put it that way, and an extinct species of would-be galactic conquerors. Someone tried to bend the rules — and the Eschaton nailed them.”

Ilya forced himself to uncurl his fingers from the arms of his chair. “You’re saying that the capsule we’re about to retrieve is a bomb? Surely the Eschaton would have tried to kill us by now, or at least capture us—”

She grinned, humorlessly. “If you don’t believe me, that’s your problem. We’ve seen half a dozen incidents like this before — the UN Defense Intelligence Causal Weapons Analysis Committee, I mean — incidents where one or another secret attempt to assemble a causality-violation device came to grief. Not usually anything as crude as your closed timelike flight path and oracle hack, by the way; these were real CVDs. History editors, minimax censors, grandfather bombs, and a really nasty toy called a spacelike ablator. There’s a whole ontology of causality-violation weapons out there, just like nukes—

atom bombs, fission-boosted fusion bombs, electroweak im-ploders, and so on.

“Each and every one of the sites where we saw CVDs deployed had been trashed, thoroughly and systematically, by unidentified agencies — but agencies attributable to the Eschaton. We’ve never actually seen one in the process of being destroyed, because the big E tends toward overkill in such cases — the smallest demolition tool tends to be something like a five-hundred-kilometer asteroid dropped on the regional capital at two hundred kilometers per second.

“So I guess the big surprise is that we’re still alive.” She glanced around at the vacant chairs, the powered-down workstation on the table. “Oh, and one other thing. The Eschaton always wipes out CVDs just before they go live. We figure it knows where to find them because it runs its own CVD. Sort of like preserving a regional nuclear hegemony by attacking anyone who builds a uranium enrichment plant or a nuclear reactor, yes? Anyway. You haven’t quite begun to break the law yet. The fleet is assembling, you’ve located the time capsule, but you haven’t actually closed the loop or made use of the oracle in a forbidden context. You might even get away with it if you hop backward but don’t try to go any earlier than your own departure point. But I’d be careful about opening that time capsule. At least, do it a sensible distance away from any of your ships. You never know what it might contain.” Ilya nodded reluctantly. “I think the Captain should be aware of this.”

“You could say that.” She looked at the console. “There’s another matter. I think you need all the advantages you can get your hands on right now, and one of them is spending most of his time sitting in his cabin twiddling his thumbs. You might want to have a word with Martin Springfield, the dockyard engineer. He’s an odd man, and you’ll need to make more allowances in his direction than you’d normally be inclined to, but I think he knows more than he’s letting on — much more, when it comes to propulsion systems. MiG wasn’t paying him two thousand crowns a week just because he has a pretty face. When MiG sold your Admiralty this bird, it was also betting on a fifty-year maintenance and upgrade contract — probably worth more revenue than the initial sale, in fact.”

“What are you trying to say?” Ilya looked irritated. “Engineering issues aren’t up to me, you should know that already. And I’ll thank you for not telling me my—”

“Shut up.” She reached over and grabbed his arm — not hard, but firmly enough to shock him. “You really don’t understand how an arms cartel works, do you? Look. MiG sold your government a ship to perform to certain specifications. Specifications that could fulfill the requirements your Admiralty dreamed up. The specs they designed it to are a different matter — but they certainly intended to charge for upgrades throughout its life. And they’ve probably got more experience of real-world interstellar combat requirements than your Admiralty, which — unless I’m very much mistaken — has never before fought a real interstellar war as opposed to sending a few gunboats to intimidate stone-age savages. Be nice to Springfield, and he may surprise you. After all, his life depends on this ship doing its job successfully.” She let go.

Ilya stared at her, his expression unreadable. “I will tell the Captain,” he murmured. Then he stood. “In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would stay out of the operations room while I am in charge — or hold your counsel in public. And not to lay hands on any officer. Is that understood?” She met his gaze. If his expression was unreadable, hers was exactly the opposite. “I understand perfectly,” she breathed. Then she stood and left the room without another word, closing the door softly as she left.

Ilya stared after her and shuddered. He shook himself angrily; then he picked up the telephone handset and spoke to the operator. “Get me the Captain,” he said. “It’s important.” It was a time capsule, pitted and tarnished from four thousand years in space. And it contained mail.

The survey drone nudged up to it delicately, probing it with radar and infrared sensors. Drifting cold and silent, the capsule showed no sign of life save for some residual radioactivity around its after end. A compact matter/antimatter rocket, it had crossed the eighteen light-years from the New Republic at a sublight crawl, then decelerated into a parking orbit and shut down. Its nose cone was scratched and scarred, ablated in patches from the rough passage through the interstellar medium. But behind it waited a silvery sphere a meter in diameter. The capsule was fabricated from sintered industrial diamond five centimeters thick, a safety-deposit box capable of surviving anything short of a nuclear weapon.

The mail was packed onto disks, diamond wafers sandwiching reflective gold sheets. It was an ancient technology, but incredibly durable. Using external waldoes, ratings controlling the survey drone unscrewed the plug sealing the time capsule and delicately removed the disk stacks. Then, having verified that they were not, in fact, explosives or antimatter, the survey drone turned and began to climb back out toward the Lord Vanek and the other ships of the first battleship squadron.

The discovery of mail — and surely there was too much of it to only be tactical data about the enemy — put the crew in a frenzy of anticipation. They’d been confined to the ship’s quarters for two months now, and the possibility of messages from families and loved ones drove them into manic anticipation that alternated, individually, with deep depression at the merest thought that they might be forgotten.

Rachel, however, was less sanguine about the mail: the chances of the Admiralty having let her employers message her under diplomatic cypher were, in her estimation, less than zero. Martin didn’t expect anything, either. His sister hadn’t written to him back in New Prague; why should she write to him now?

His ex-wife, he wouldn’t want to hear from. In emotional terms, his closest current relationship — however unexpectedly it had dawned upon him — was with Rachel. So while the officers and crew of the Lord Vanek spent their off hours speculating about the letters from home, Rachel and Martin spent their time worrying about exposure. For, as she had pointed out delicately, he didn’t have diplomatic papers: and even leaving matters of Republican public morality aside, it would be a bad idea if anyone were to decide that he was a lever to use against her.

“It’s probably not a good idea for us to spend too much time together in private, love,” she’d murmured at the back of his shoulder, as they lay together in his narrow bunk. “When everybody else is at action stations, they’re not liable to notice us — but the rest of the time—” His shoulders went tense, telling her that he understood.

“We’ll have to work something out,” he said. “Can’t we?”

“Yes.” She’d paused to kiss his shoulder. “But not if it risks some blue-nosed bigot locking you up for conduct unbecoming, or convinces the admiral’s staff that I’m a two-kopek whore they can grope or safely ignore, which isn’t too far from what some of them think already.”

“Who?” Martin rolled over to face her, his expression grim. “Tell me—”

“Ssh.” She’d touched a finger to his lips, and for a moment, he’d found her expression almost heartbreaking. “I don’t need a protector. Have their ideas been rubbing off on you?”

“I hope not!”

“No, I don’t think so.” She chuckled quietly and rolled against him.

Martin was sitting alone in his cabin some days later, nursing wistful thoughts about Rachel and a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, when somebody banged on the hatch. “Who’s there?” he called.

“Mail for the engineer! Get it in the purser’s office!” Feet hurried away, then there was a cacophony from farther down the corridor.

“Hmm?” Martin sat up. Mail? On the face of it, it was improbable. Then again, everything about this voyage was improbable. Startled out of his reverie, he bent down and hunted for his shoes, then set out in search of the source of the interruption.

He didn’t have any difficulty finding it. The office was a chaotic melee of enlisted men, all trying to grab their own mail and that of anyone they knew. The mail had been copy-printed onto paper, sealed in neat blue envelopes. Puzzled, Martin hunted around for anyone in charge.

“Yes?” The harassed petty officer in charge of the sorting desk looked up from the pile he was trying to bundle together for transfer to the His Majesty’s courier ship Godot. “Oh, you. Over there, in the unsorted deck.” He pointed at a smallish box containing a selection of envelopes; missives for the dead, the mad, and the non-naval.

Martin burrowed through the pile, curious, until he came to an envelope with his name on it. It was a rather fat envelope. How odd, he thought. Rather than open it on the spot, he carried it back to his cabin.

When he opened it, he nearly threw it away immediately: it began with the dreaded phrase, “My dear Marty.” Only one woman called him that, and although she was the subject of some of his fondest memories, she was also capable of inspiring in him a kind of bitter, anguished rage that made him, afterward, ashamed of his own emotions. He and Morag had split eight years ago, and the recriminations and mutual blame had left a trench of silence between them.

But what could possibly have prompted her to write to him now? She’d always been a very verbal person, and her e-mails had tended to be terse, misspelled sentences rather than the emotional deluges she reserved for face-to-face communications.

Puzzled, Martin began to read.

My Dear Marty,

It’s been too long since I last wrote to you; I hope you’ll forgive me. Life has been busy, as they say, and doubly so, for I have also had Sarah to look after. Shes growing very tall these days, and looks just like her father. I hope you’ll be around for her sixteenth birthday …

He stopped. This had to be an elaborate joke. His ex-wife seemed to be talking about a child — their child — who didn’t exist. And this was nothing like her style! It was almost as if someone else, writing from a dossier of his family history, was trying to—

He began to read again, this time acutely alert for hidden messages.

Sarah is studying theology at college these days. You know how studious she’s always been? Her new teacher Herman seems to have brought her out of her shell. She’s working on a dissertation about Eschatology; she insisted that I enclose a copy for you (attached below).

The rest of the letter was filled with idle chatter about fictional friends, reminiscences about trivial and entirely nonexistent shared memories and major (presumably well-documented) ones, and — as far as Martin could see — a content-free blind.

He turned to the “dissertation.” It was quite long, and he pondered Herman’s wisdom in sending it. Did New Republican schoolchildren write eight-page essays about God? And about God’s motives, as far as they could be deduced from the value of the cosmological constant? It was written in a precious, somewhat dull style that set his teeth on edge, like an earnest student essay hunting for marks of approval rather than a straight discursive monograph asserting a viewpoint. Then his eyes caught the footnotes: 1. Consider the hypothetical case of a power that intends to create a localized causality violation that does not produce a light cone encompassing its origin point. (We are implicitly assuming a perfectly spherical zone of sinfulness expanding at velocity c with origin at time TO.) If the spherical volume of sinfulness does not intersect with the fourspace trajectory of the power’s initial location, we are not dealing with an original sin. Consequently we do not expect the Eschaton to condemn the entire sinful civilization to damnation, or a Type II supernova; redemption is possible. However, damnation of the sinful agency that causes the causality violation is required.

He skipped down the page and began underlining significant words and phrases.

2. Does the Eschaton always intervene destructively? The answer is probably “no”. We see the consequences of intervention in issues of original sin, but for every such intervention there are probably thousands of invisible nudges delivered to our world line with subtlety and precision. The agency by which such nudges are delivered must remain unknown for them to be effective. They probably flee the scene after intervention, hiding themselves in the teeming masses. The agency may even work in concert with our own efforts, as Eschaton-fearing human beings, to ensure no violations exist. It is possible that some Eschatologically aware government agencies may assist the Eschaton’s secret friends, if they are aware of their presence. Others, secret agents of sinful powers, may attempt to identify them by evidence and arrest them.

Well, that was all fairly instructive. Steganographic back channels generally irritated Martin, with their potential for misunderstandings and garbled messages, but in this instance, Herman was being quite clear.

Distrust the New Republican secret police. Possible help from other agencies — did that mean Rachel?

No retaliation against the New Republic itself: that was a big weight off his conscience, for however much he might dislike or despise their social affairs, they didn’t deserve to die because of their leader’s inability to deal with an unprecedented problem. However, one last footnote remained impenetrable, however he tried to understand it:

3. Of course, few people would contemplate breaking the law of causality without at least a very major apparent threat. One wonders what the invisible helpers of the Eschaton might do when confronted with the need to prevent a causality violation in the face of such a threat? At that point, they may find themselves with split loyalties: on the one hand, to defend the prime law of the anthropic cosmos, while at the same time, not wanting to surrender their misguided but nevertheless human peers into the claws of a great evil. Under these circumstances, I feel sure the Eschaton would tell its agents to look to their fellow humans’ interests immediately after preventing the rupture of space-time itself. The Eschaton may not be a compassionate God, but it is pragmatic and does not expect its tools to break in its service. However, the key issue is determining which side is least wrong. This leads us deep into the forest of ethics, wherein there is a festival of ambiguity. All we can do is hope the secret helpers make the right choices — otherwise, the consequences of criticism will be harsh.

Martin sat back and scratched his head. “Now what the hell does that mean?” he muttered to himself.