Iron Sunrise s-2 Read online

  Well, now is the time to peel back the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment to this mass of sticky half-truths and lies. The truth hurts, but not as much as the consequences of willful ignorance.

  I was on New Moscow nine years ago, doing the usual peripatetic long-haul circuit climb out through the fleshpots of Septagon, the rural sprawl of Two Rivers, and whatever wild overgeneralizations you prefer to pin on places like Al-Assad, Brunei, and Beethoven. New Moscow was — I tell you three times — not a bucolic rural backwater. It’s kind of hard to be a bucolic rural backwater planet when you’ve got six continental-scale state governments participating in a planetary federation, cities the size of Memphis, Ajuba, and Tokyo, and an orbital infrastructure capable of building fusion-powered interplanetary freighters.

  Insular is a word you might want to try pinning on New Moscow — how cosmopolitan can you be, with only two hundred million citizens and no shipyards capable of manufacturing FTL drive kernels? — but they maintained their core industrial competences better than many postintervention colonies, and they lived pretty well. Just because your ancestors came from Iowa and Kansas and you talk like you’re yawning the whole time, it does not follow that you are stupid, primitive, inbred, or a mad imperialist set on galactic conquest. I found the people of New Moscow to be generally as tolerant, friendly, open-minded, outward-looking, energetic, funny and humane as any other people I’ve known. If you were looking for the stereotypical McWorld, Moscow would be it: settled by unwilling refugees from the twenty-first-century Euro-American mainstream culture, people who took enlightenment values, representative democracy, mutual tolerance, and religious freedom as axioms, and built a civilization on that basis. A McWorld, we call them — bland, comfortable, tolerant, heirs to the Western historical tradition. Another description that fits would be: boring.

  Except, someone fucking murdered them.

  “Edbot: tweak my scat-profile down to point seven. I think I’m laying it on a bit heavily here.”

  Shocked at the bad language? Good: I wanted to get your attention. What happened on New Moscow is shocking because it could have happened anywhere. It could have happened right here, on Earth — where you probably are right now, seeing how 70 percent of you readers are left-behinds — or on Marid’s world. It could even have happened to the obnoxious imperialist fuckwits from Orion’s Law or the quiet enlightened muslim technocrats of Bohraj. We are all vulnerable, because whoever vaped New Moscow has gotten clean away with a monstrous crime, and as long as there’s no formal investigation, they’re going to think maybe they can do it again. And I’m telling you now, whoever they are they are not a Muscovite.

  The Times has managed to secure exclusive access to the Sixfold State Commission’s last available internal government budget, passed just under two years before the Zero Incident. (The most recent budget was not publicly released prior to the disaster.) We believe these data to be accurate, and I can assure you that military spending which might have provoked an Eschatological incursion was not even on the radar. A detailed audit [Edbot: add hyperlinks for supplementary material] shows that the official military spend was 270 million a year on maintaining the STL deterrent fleet, and another 600 mil on civil defense: mostly against natural disasters. There was not enough slack in the budget to buy more than another 100 mil in black project spend, and New Moscow’s shipyards — crucially — lacked the expertise and tooling to build or repair FTL fabrications. No causality-violation warfare here, folks, there’s nothing to see, nothing that might have caught the attention of the big E, no infrastructure for developing forbidden weapons or violating Rule Three. Accusing these guys of secretly building a causality-violation weapon just doesn’t hold water. On the other hand, they had just signed a cooperation and collaboration treaty with their nasty neighbors in Newpeace, which suggests several unpleasant possibilities, but nothing firm enough to print in a newsblog. At least, not yet.

  Bottom line, someone did it to them. Probably some nasty sneaky human faction with weapons of mass destruction and an axe to grind against Moscow’s government, a perceived grudge that drove them to massacre millions of innocents purely to avenge some slight inflicted, no doubt, in complete ignorance of the fact that it was a slight. In other words, an act of genocide.

  Finally: to the gradgrind scum in the feedback forum who says that the destruction of New Moscow by Act of Weakly Godlike Being means we should withhold funds from the aid and hardship budget to help resettle the refugees, all I can say is fuck off and die. You fill me with contempt. I am so angry that I shouldn’t really be writing this; I’m surprised the keyboard isn’t melting under my fingertips. I’m appalled that the question ever arose in the first place. You aren’t fit to be allowed to read the Times, and I’m canceling your subscription forthwith. You are a disgrace to the human species — kindly become extinct.

  Ends (Times Leader)

  Frank stubbed out his cigar angrily, grinding what was left of it into the ashtray with his thumb. “Fuck ’em,” he grumbled to himself. “Fuck ’em.” He took a deep breath, sucking in the blue soup that passed for air in his cramped stateroom. Sooner or later he’d have to turn the ventilation back on and pull down the plastic film he’d spread all over the smoke detector — otherwise, the life-support stewards would come round and give him their usual patronizing-but-polite lecture on shipboard life-support systems — but for now he took an obscure comfort in his ability to inhale the smog of his choice. Everything else about this ship was out of his grasp, locked down like a mobile theme park, and as a compulsive control-twiddler, Frank was pathologically uncomfortable with any environment he couldn’t mess up to his heart’s content.

  Frank was pissed. He was so angry he had to get up and walk, before he gave in to the temptation to start banging his head on the bulkhead. It was one of his biggest problems, he admitted: he had an appalling capacity to feel other people’s pain. If he’d been able to have it surgically removed, he’d have done so — maybe he’d then have been able to make a career for himself in politics. But as it was, given his vocation, it just gave him violent conscience-aches. Especially when, as on this cruise, he was going to have to exorcise some of his own ghosts. So he blinked away the workflow and copy windows, folded up his keyboard and dropped it in a pocket, stood up, took a final deep breath of the blue toxic waste cloud — then opened the door for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.

  Somewhere in the crew quarters of the Romanov an alarm siren was probably whooping: “Danger! The troll in suite B312 has emerged! Send deodorant spray and prepare to decontaminate corridor B3! Danger! Danger! Chemical warfare alert!” He sniffed the unnaturally pure air, nostrils flaring. A big man, with a beetling brow and an expressive nose, one of his ex-lovers had described him as resembling a male silverback gorilla, a resemblance that his silver-and-black close-cropped hair only emphasized. Right then his skin glowed with youthful vigor, and he was almost vibrating with energy: he’d had his first telomere reset and aging fix only six months before, and was filled with a restless teenage exuberance that he’d almost forgotten existed. It was overflowing into his work by way of pugnacious editorials and take-no-prisoners prose, and after a few hours of writing it nearly had him bouncing off the ceiling.

  The corridor was lined with doorways and walled with plush beige carpet, recessed handholds, and safety nets ready to turn it into a series of safety cubes in event of off-axis acceleration. Here and there, recessed false windows looked out onto scenes of bucolic harmony, desert sunsets and sandy beaches, vying with lush tropical rain forests and breathtaking starscapes. Indirect lighting turned it into a shadowless tube, bland as a business hotel and twice as boring. And it smelled of synthetic pine.

  Frank snorted as he ambled along the corridor. He detested and despised this aspect of interstellar travel. What was the point of embarking on a perilous journey to far-off worlds if the experience was much like checking into one of those expensively manicured ra
cks of self-contained service apartments designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator shit-for-brains salesdrone? Hotels with carefully bland hand-painted artwork on the walls, a cupboard where the ready-meal of your choice would appear in a prepack ready to eat, and the ceiling above the emperor-sized bed was ready to screen a hundred thousand crap movies or play a million shit immersives.

  Well, fuck ’em! Fuck the complacent assholes, and their trade-mission-to-the-stars quick buck mentality. Inward-looking, pampered, greedy, and unwilling to look at anything beyond the end of their noses that doesn’t come with a reassuringly expensive price tag attached. Fuck ’em and their consumer demand for bland, boring flying hotels with supercilious or patronizing hired help, and absolutely nothing that might give them any sign they weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, that they might actually be aboard a million tons of smart matter wrapped around a quantum black hole slipping across the event horizon of the observable universe on a wave of curved space-time. Gosh, if they realized what was happening, they might be disturbed, frightened, even! And that might make them less inclined to buy a ticket with WhiteStar in future, thus impacting the corporate bottom line, so …

  Frank had traveled by oxcart. He’d traveled on antiquated tramp freighters that had to spin their crew quarters like a wheel to provide a semblance of gravity. He’d spent one memorable night huddling with other survivors on the back of an armored personnel carrier thundering across desert sands, neck itching in the edgily imagined sights of the victor’s gunships, and he’d spent a whole week huddled in the bottom of a motorized vaporetto in a swampy river delta near the town of Memphis, on Octavio. Compared to any of those experiences this was the lap of luxury. It was also puerile, bland, and — worst of all — characterless.

  At the end of the gently curving corridor Frank pushed through a loose curtain that secured access onto a landing that curved around the diamond-walled helix of a grand staircase, spacecraft-style. The staircase itself was organic, grown painstakingly from a single modified mahogany tree that had been coaxed into a spiral inside its protective tube, warped into a half-moon cross-section, then brutally slain and partially dissected by a team of expert carpenters. It led up through the eleven passenger decks of the ship, all the way to the stellarium with its diamond-phase optically clean dome — covered, now, because the aberration of starlight from the ship’s pilot wave had dimmed everything except gamma-ray bursters to invisibility. He glanced around, puzzled by the lack of passengers or white-suited human stewards, then did a double take as he checked his watch. “Four in the morning?” he grunted at nobody in particular. “Huh.” Not that the hour meant much to him, but most people lived by the ship’s clocks, trying to keep a grip on the empire time standard that bound the interstellar trading circuits together, which meant they’d be asleep, and most of the public areas would be shut for maintenance.

  The night bar on F deck was still open, and Frank was only slightly breathless from hauling himself round fifteen hundred degrees of corkscrewing staircase when he arrived, pushed through the gilt-and-crystal doors, and looked around.

  A handful of night owls hung out in the bar even at this late hour: one or two lone drinkers grimly tucked away the hard stuff, and a circle of half a dozen chattering friends clustered around a table in the corner. It was often hard to judge people’s age, but there was something that looked young about their social interaction. Maybe they were students on the Grand Tour, or a troupe of workers caught up in one of those unusual vortices of labor market liquidity that made it cheaper to take the workers where the work was rather than vice versa. Frank had seen that before — he’d been on the receiving end himself once, back when he was young and clueless. He snorted to himself and slouched onto one of the barstools. “I’ll have a Wray and Nephew on ice, no mixer,” he grunted at the bartender, who nodded silently, realized that Frank didn’t want a whole lot of chatter with his drink, and turned away to serve it up.

  “Good voyage so far, eh, what-what?” chirped a voice from somewhere by his left shoulder.

  Frank glanced round. “Good for some,” he said, biting back his first impulsive comment. You never could tell who you’d run across in a bar at four in the morning, as at least one senior government bureaucrat had discovered after being mugged by the Times and left for dead in the Appointments pages. Frank had no intention of giving anything away, even to an obvious weirdo. Which this guerrilla conversationalist clearly was, from the tips of his ankle boots — one of which was red, and the other green — to the top of his pointy plush skull cap (which was electric blue with a dusting of holographic stars). Soulfully deep brown eyes and crimson moustache notwithstanding, he looked like an escapee from a reeducation camp for fashion criminals. “You’ll pardon me for saying this, but I didn’t come down here for a co-therapy session,” Frank rumbled. The bartender punctuated his observation with a clink of crystal on teak; Frank picked up his shot glass and sniffed the colorless liquid.

  “That’s all right, I didn’t come here for a good laugh, either.” The colorful squirt nodded in exaggerated approval then snapped his fingers at the bartender. I’ll have one of whatever he’s having,” he piped.

  Frank stifled a sigh and glanced at the gaggle of youths. They had a depressingly clean-cut, short-haired, brutally scrubbed look: there was not a single piercing, chromatophore, braid, or brand among the whole lot. It reminded him of something disturbing he’d seen somewhere, but in thirty-odd years of traveling around the settled worlds he’d seen enough that the specifics were vague. They seemed suspiciously healthy in a red-cheeked outdoors kind of way. Probably Dresdener students, children of the hereditary managementariat, off on their state-funded wanderjahr between high gymnasium studies and entry into the government bureaucracy. They all wore baggy brown trousers and gray sweaters, as identically cut as a uniform, or maybe they just came from a world where fashion victims were run out of town on a rail. There was just enough variation to suggest that they’d actually chosen to dress for conformity rather than having it thrust upon them. He glanced back at the technicolor squirt. “It’s cask-strength,” he warned, unsure why he was giving even that much away.

  “That’s okay.” The squirt took a brief sniff, then threw back half the glass. “Wheel Hey, I’ll have another of these. What did you say it was called?”

  “Wray and Nephew,” Frank said wearily. “It’s an old and horribly expensive rum imported direct from Old Earth, and you are going to regret it tomorrow morning. Um, evening. Or whenever you get the bill.”

  “So?” The paint factory explosion picked up his glass, twirled it around, and threw the contents at the back of his throat. “Wow. I needed that. Thank you for the introduction. I can tell we’re going to have a long and fruitful relationship. Me and the bottle, I mean.”

  “Well, so long as you don’t blame me for the hangover…” Frank took a sip and glanced around the bar, but with the exception of the Germanic diaspora clones there didn’t seem to be any prospect of rescue.

  “So where are you going, what-what?” asked the squirt, as the bartender planted a second glass in front of him.

  “Septagon, next.” Frank surrendered to the inevitable. “Then probably on to New Dresden, then over to Vienna — I hear they’ve taken in some refugees from Moscow. Would you know anything about that? I’m skipping Newpeace.” He shuddered briefly. “Then when the ship closes the loop back to New Dresden, I’m coming aboard again for the run back to Septagon and Earth, or wherever else work takes me.”

  “Ah! Hmm.” A thoughtful look creased the short guy’s face. “You a journalist, then?”

  “No, I’m a warblogger,” Frank admitted, unsure whether to be irritated or flattered. “What are you here for?”

  “I’m a clown, and my stage name’s Svengali. Only I’m off duty right now, and if you ask me to crack a joke, I’ll have to make inquiries as to whether your home culture permits dueling.”

  “Erm.” Frank focused on the short man properly, and s
omewhere in his mind a metaphorical gear train revolved and locked into place with a clunk. He took a big sip of rum, rolled it around his mouth, and swallowed. “So. Who are you really? Uh, I’m not recording this — I’m off duty too.”

  “A man after my own heart.” Svengali grinned humorlessly. “There’s nothing funny about being a clown, at least not after the first six thousand repetitions. I can’t even remember my own name. I’m working my way around the fucking galaxy entertaining morons who live in shitholes and stashing away all the blat I can manage. People who don’t live in shitholes I don’t perform for because I might want to retire to a non-shithole one of these days.”

  “Oh. So you’re working for WhiteStar?”

  “Yes, but strictly contract. I don’t hold with industrial serfdom.”

  “Oh. So is there much call for clowns on a liner?”

  Svengali took another sip of rum before replying in a bored monotone: “The WhiteStar liner Romanov carries 2,318 passengers, 642 cabin crew, and 76 engineering and flight crew. By our next port of call, in eleven days’ time, that number will have increased by one — two births and, according to the actuaries, there’s a 70 percent probability of at least one death on this voyage, although there hasn’t been one yet. There are thirty-one assorted relatives and hangers-on of crew members aboard, too. Now, most of this mob are well into their extended adulthood, but of the total, 118 are prepubertal horrors suffering from too much adult attention — they’re mostly single children, or have siblings more than twenty years older than them, which makes for much the same species of spoiled brat. Someone has to keep the yard apes entertained, and they’re far more demanding than adults: cheap passives and interactives only go so far. In fact” — Svengali raised his glass and tipped the bartender a wink — “they’re exhausting. And that’s before you get me started on the so-called adults.”