Singularity Sky Read online

  “Ate it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Janaczeck gulped. “Forbidden technology.”

  Politovsky turned pale. “Borman?”

  “Yes, sir?” His adjutant sat up attentively.

  “Obviously, this situation exceeds our ability to deal with it without extra resources. How much acausal bandwidth does the Post Office have in hand for a televisor conference with the capital?”

  “Um, ah, fifty minutes’ worth, sir. The next consignment of entangled qubits between here and New Prague is due to arrive by ramscoop in, ah, eighteen months. If I may make so bold, sir—”

  “Speak.”

  “Could we retain a minute of bandwidth in stock, for text-only messages? I realize that this is an emergency, but if we drain the current channel we will be out of touch with the capital until the next shipment is available. And, with all due respect to Commander Janaczeck, I’m not sure the Navy will be able to reliably run dispatch boats past the enemy.”

  “Do it.” Politovsky sat up, stretching his shoulders. “One minute, mind. The rest available for a televisor conference with His Majesty, at his earliest convenience. You will set up the conference and notify me when it is ready. Oh, and while you’re about it, here.” He leaned forward and scribbled a hasty signature on a letter from his portfolio. “I enact this state of emergency and by the authority vested in me by God and His Imperial Majesty I decree that this constitutes a state of war with—who the devil are we at war with?”

  Von Beck cleared his throat. “They seem to call themselves the Festival, sir. Unfortunately, we don’t appear to have any more information about them on file, and requests to the Curator’s Archives drew a blank.”

  “Very well.” Borman passed Politovsky a note, and the Governor stood. “Gentlemen, please stand for His Imperial Majesty!”

  They stood and, as one man, turned expectantly to face the screen on the far wall of the conference room.

  the gathering storm

  “may I ask what I’m charged with?” asked Martin.

  The sunshine filtering through the skylight high overhead skewered the stuffy office air with bars of silver: Martin watched dust motes dance like stars behind the Citizen’s bullet-shaped head. The only noises in the room were the scratching of his pen on heavy official vellum and the repetitive grinding of gears as his assistant rewound the clockwork drive mechanism on his desktop analytical engine. The room smelled of machine oil and stale fear.

  “Am I being charged with anything?” Martin persisted.

  The Citizen ignored him and bent his head back to his forms. His young assistant, his regular chore complete, began unloading a paper tape from the engine.

  Martin stood up. “If I am not being charged with anything, is there any reason why I should stay?”

  This time the Citizen Curator glared at him. “Sit,” he snapped.

  Martin sat.

  Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished striking fourteen hundred, and in the Square of the Five Corners, the famous Duchess’s Simulacrum was jerking through its eternal pantomime. The boredom grated on Martin. He found it difficult to adapt to the pace of events in the New Republic; it was doubly infuriating when he was faced with the eternal bureaucracy. He’d been here for four months now, four stinking months on a job which should have taken ten days. He was beginning to wonder if he would live to see Earth again before he died of old age.

  In fact, he was so bored with waiting for his work clearance to materialize that this morning’s summons to an office somewhere behind the iron facade of the Basilisk came as a relief, something to break the monotony. It didn’t fill him with the stuttering panic that such an appointment would have kindled in the heart of a subject of the New Republic—what, after all, could the Curator’s Office do to him, an off-world engineering contractor with a cast-iron Admiralty contract? The summons had come on a plate borne by a uniformed courier, and not as a night-time raid. That fact alone suggested a degree of restraint and, consequently, an approach to adopt, and Martin resolved to play the bemused alien visitor card as hard as he could.

  After another minute, the Citizen lowered his pen and looked at Martin. “Please state your name,” he said softly.

  Martin crossed his arms. “If you don’t know it already, why am I here?” he asked.

  “Please state your name for the record.” The Citizen’s voice was low, clipped, and as controlled as a machine. He spoke the local trade-lingua—a derivative of the nearly universal old English tongue—with a somewhat heavy, Germanic accent.

  “Martin Springfield.”

  The Citizen made a note. “Now please state your nationality.”

  “My what?”

  Martin must have looked nonplussed, for the Citizen raised a gray-flecked eyebrow. “Please state your nationality. To what government do you owe allegiance?”

  “Government?” Martin rolled his eyes. “I come from Earth. For legislation and insurance, I use Pinkertons, with a backup strategic infringement policy from the New Model Air Force. As far as employment goes, I am incorporated under charter as a personal corporation with bilateral contractual obligations to various organizations, including your own Admiralty. For reasons of nostalgia, I am a registered citizen of the People’s Republic of West Yorkshire, although I haven’t been back there for twenty years. But I wouldn’t say I was answerable to any of those, except my contractual partners—and they’re equally answerable to me.”

  “But you are from Earth?” asked the Citizen, his pen poised.

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. Then you are a subject of the United Nations.” He made a brief note. “Why didn’t you admit this?”

  “Because it isn’t true,” said Martin, letting a note of frustration creep into his voice. (But only a note: he had an idea of the Citizen’s powers, and had no intention of provoking him to exercise them.)

  “Earth. The supreme political entity on that planet is the United Nations Organization. So it follows that you are a subject of it, no?”

  “Not at all.” Martin leaned forward. “At last count, there were more than fifteen thousand governmental organizations on Earth. Of those, only about the top nine hundred have representatives in Geneva, and only seventy have permanent seats on the Security Council. The UN has no authority over any non-governmental organization or over individual citizens, it’s purely an arbitration body. I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government.”

  “Ah,” said the Citizen. He laid his pen down very carefully beside his blotter and looked directly at Martin. “I see you fail to understand. I am going to do you a great favor and pretend that I did not hear the last thing you said. Vassily?”

  His young assistant looked up. “Yah?”

  “Out.”

  The assistant—little more than a boy in uniform—stood and marched over to the door. It thudded shut solidly behind him.

  “I will say this once, and once only.” The Citizen paused, and Martin realized with a shock that his outward impassivity was a tightly sealed lid holding down a roiling fury: “I do not care what silly ideas the stay-behinds of Earth maintain about their sovereignty. I do not care about being insulted by a young and insolent pup like you. But while you are on this planet you will live by our definitions of what is right and proper! Do I make myself clear?”

  Martin recoiled. The Citizen waited to see if he would speak, but when he remained silent, continued icily. “You are here in the New Republic at the invitation of the Government of His Majesty, and will at all times comport yourself accordingly. This includes being respectful to Their Imperial Highnesses, behaving decently, legally, and honestly, paying taxes to the Imperial Treasury, and not spreading subversion. You are here to do a job, not to spread hostile alien propaganda or to denigrate our way of life! Am I making myself understood?”

  “I don’t—” Martin paused, hunted for the correct, diplomatic words. “Let me rephrase, please. I am sorry if I
have caused offense, but if that’s what I’ve done, would you mind telling me what I did? So I can avoid doing it again. If you won’t tell me what not to do, how can I avoid causing offense by accident?”

  “You are unaware?” asked the Citizen. He stood up and paced around Martin, behind his chair, around the desk, and back to his own seat. There he stopped pacing, and glowered furiously. “Two nights ago, in the bar of the Glorious Crown Hotel, you were clearly heard telling someone—a Vaclav Hasek, I believe—about the political system on your home planet. Propaganda and nonsense, but attractive propaganda and nonsense to a certain disaffected segment of the lumpenproletariat. Nonsense verging on sedition, I might add, when you dropped several comments about—let me see—‘the concept of tax is no different from extortion,’ and ‘a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.’ After your fourth beer, you became somewhat merry and began to declaim on the nature of social justice, which is itself something of a problem, insofar as you expressed doubt about the impartiality of a judiciary appointed by His Majesty in trying cases against the Crown.”

  “That’s rubbish! Just a conversation over a pint of beer!”

  “If you were a citizen, it would be enough to send you on a one-way trip to one of His Majesty’s frontier colonies for the next twenty years,” the Citizen said icily. “The only reason we are having this little tête-à-tête is because your presence in the Royal Dockyards is considered essential. If you indulge in any more such conversations over pints of beer, perhaps the Admiralty may be persuaded to wash their hands of you. And then where will you be?”

  Martin shivered; he hadn’t expected the Citizen to be quite so blunt. “Are conversations about politics really that sensitive?” he asked.

  “When held in a public place, and engaged in by an off- worlder with strange ideas, yes. The New Republic is not like the degenerate anarchist mess your fatherworld has sunk into. Let me emphasize that. Because you are a necessary alien, you are granted certain rights by Their Imperial Highnesses. If you go outside those rights, you will be stamped on, and stamped on hard. If you find that difficult to understand, I suggest you spend the remainder of your free time inside your hotel room so that your mouth does not incriminate you accidentally. I ask you for a third time: Do I make myself understood?”

  Martin looked chastened. “Y-yes,” he said.

  “Then get out of my office.”

  evening.

  A man of medium height and unremarkable build, with brownish hair and a close-cropped beard, lay fully clad on the ornate counterpane of a hotel bed, a padded eyeshade covering his face. Shadows crept across the gloomy carpet as the sun sank below the horizon. The gas jets in the chandelier hissed, casting deep shadows across the room. A fly buzzed around the upper reaches of the room, pursuing a knife-edged search pattern.

  Martin was not asleep. His entire inventory of countersurveillance drones were out on patrol, searching his room for bugs in case the Curator’s Office was monitoring him. Not that he had many drones to search with: they were strictly illegal in the New Republic, and he’d been forced to smuggle his kit through customs in blocked sebaceous glands and dental caries. Now they were out in force, hunting for listening devices and reporting back to the monitors woven into his eyeshade.

  Finally, concluding he was alone in the room, he recalled the fly—its SQUID-sensors untriggered—and put the fleas back into hibernation. He stood up and shuttered the window, then pulled the curtains closed. Short of the Curator’s Office having hidden a mechanical drum-recorder in the back of the wardrobe, he was unable to see any way that they could listen in on him.

  He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket (rumpled, now, from being lain upon) and pulled out a slim, leather-bound book. “Talk to me.”

  “Hello, Martin. Startup completed, confidence one hundred percent.”

  “That’s good.” He cleared his throat. “Back channel. Execute. I’d like to talk to Herman.”

  “Paging.”

  The book fell silent and Martin waited impassively. It looked like a personal assistant, a discreet digital secretary for a modern Terran business consultant. While such devices could be built into any ambient piece of furniture—clothing, even a prosthetic tooth—Martin kept his in the shape of an old-fashioned hardback. However, normal personal assists didn’t come with a causal channel plug-in, especially one with a ninety-light-year reach and five petabits of bandwidth. Even though almost two petabits had been used when the agent-in-place passed it to him via a dead letter drop on a park bench, it was outrageously valuable to Martin. In fact, it was worth his life—if the secret police caught him with it.

  A slower-than-light freighter had spent nearly a hundred years hauling the quantum black box at the core of the causal channel out from Septagon system; a twin to it had spent eighty years in the hold of a sister ship, en route to Earth. Now they provided an instantaneous communications channel from one planet to the other; instantaneous in terms of special relativity, but not capable of violating causality, and with a total capacity limited to the number of qubits they had been created with. Once those 5 billion megabits were gone, they’d be gone for good—or until the next slower-than-light freighter arrived.

  (Not that such ships were rare—building and launching a one-kilogram starwisp, capable of carrying a whopping great hundred-gram payload across a dozen light-years, wasn’t far above the level of a cottage industry—but the powers that ran things here in the New Republic were notoriously touchy about contact with the ideologically impure outside universe.)

  “Hello?” said the PA.

  “PA: Is that Herman?” asked Martin.

  “PA here. Herman is on the line and all authentication tokens are updated.”

  “I had an interview with a Citizen from the Curator’s Office today,” said Martin. “They’re extremely sensitive about subversion.” Twenty-two words in five seconds: sampled at high fidelity, about half a million bits. Transcribed to text, that would make about one hundred bytes, maybe as few as fifty bytes after non-lossy compression. Which left fifty fewer bytes in the link between Martin’s PA and Earth. If Martin went to the Post Office, they would charge him a dollar a word, he’d have to queue for a day, and there would be a postal inspector listening in.

  “What happened?” asked Herman.

  “Nothing important, but I was warned off, and warned hard. I’ll put it in my report. They didn’t question my affiliation.”

  “Any query over your work?”

  “No. No suspicion, as far as I can tell.”

  “Why did they question you?”

  “Spies in bars. They want the frighteners on me. I haven’t been on board the Lord Vanek yet. Dockyard access control is very tight. I think they’re upset about something.”

  “Any confirmation of unusual events? Fleet movements? Workup toward departure?”

  “Nothing I know about.” Martin bit back his further comment: talking to Herman via the illegal transmitter always made him nervous. “I’m keeping my eyes on the ball. Report ends.”

  “Bye.”

  “PA: shut down link now.”

  “The link is down.” Throughout the entire conversation, Martin noted, the only voice he had heard was his; the PA spoke in its owner’s tones, the better to be a perfect receptionist, and the CC link was so expensive that sending an audio stream over it would be a foolish extravagance. Talking to himself across a gulf of seventy light-years made Martin feel very lonely. Especially given the very real nature of his fears.

  So far, he’d successfully played the gormless foreign engineering contractor with a runaway mouth, held overlong on a two-week assignment to upgrade the engines on board His Majesty’s battlecruiser Lord Vanek. In fact, he was doing such a good job that he’d gotten to see the inside of the Basilisk, and escaped alive.

  But he wasn’t likely to do so twice, if they learned who he was working for.

  “do you think he is a spy?” asked trainee procurator Vas
sily Muller.

  “Not as far as I know.” The Citizen smiled thinly at his assistant, the thin scar above his left eye wrinkling with satanic amusement. “If I had any evidence that he was a spy, he would rapidly become an ex-spy. And an ex-everything else, for that matter. But that is not what I asked you, is it?” He fixed his subordinate with a particular expression he had perfected for dealing with slow students. “Tell me why I let him go.”

  “Because . . .” The trainee officer looked nonplussed. He’d been here six months, less than a year out of gymnasium and the custody of the professors, and it showed. He was still a teenager, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and almost painfully unskilled in the social nuances: like so many intelligent men who survived the elite boarding school system, he was also inclined to intellectual rigidity. Privately, the Citizen thought this was a bad thing, at least in a secret policeman—rigidity was a habit that would have to be broken if he was ever to be of much use. On the other hand, he seemed to have inherited his father’s intelligence. If he’d inherited his flexibility, too, without the unfortunate rebelliousness, he’d make an excellent operative.

  After a minute’s silence, the Citizen prodded him. “That is not an acceptable answer, young man. Try again.”

  “Ah, you let him go because he has a loose mouth, and where he goes, it will be easier to see who listens to him?”

  “Better, but not entirely true. What you said earlier intrigues me. Why don’t you think he is a spy?”

  Vassily did a double take; it was almost painful to watch as he tried to deal with the Citizen’s abrupt about-face. “He’s too talkative, isn’t he, sir? Spies don’t call attention to themselves, do they? It’s not in their interests. And again, he’s an engineer contracted to work for the fleet, but the ship was built by the company he works for, so why would they want to spy on it? And he can’t be a professional subversive, either. Professionals would know better than to blab in a hotel bar.” He stopped and looked vaguely self-satisfied.