Singularity Sky (2 page)

Spontaneous demonstrations by workers and soldiers marred the night, while armored cars were deployed to secure the bridges across the Hava River that separated the Ducal palace and the garrison from the city proper.

And most sinister of all, an impromptu fair began to grow in the open space of the Northern Parade Field—a fair where nobody worked, everything was free, and anything that anybody could possibly want (and a few things that nobody in their right mind would desire) could be obtained free for the asking.

On the third day of the incursion, His Excellency Duke Felix Politovsky, Governor of Rochard’s World, entered the Star Chamber to meet with his staff and, by way of an eye-wateringly expensive teleconference, to appeal for help from his Emperor.

Politovsky was a thick-set, white-haired man of some sixty-four years, unpreserved by contraband anti-aging medical treatments. It was said by some that he was lacking in imagination, and he had certainly not been appointed governor of a raw backwater dumping ground for troublemakers and second sons because of his overwhelming political acumen. However, despite his bull-headed disposition and lack of insight, Felix Politovsky was deeply worried.

Men in uniform and the formal dress of his diplomatic staff stood to attention as he entered the richly paneled room and marched to the head of the conference table. “Gentlemen. Please be seated,” he grunted, dropping into the armchair that two servants unobtrusively held out for him. “Beck, have there been any developments overnight?”

Gerhard Von Beck, Citizen, head of the local office of the Curator’s Office, shook his head gloomily. “More riots on the south bank; they didn’t stay to fight when I sent a guard detachment. So far, morale in the barracks seems to be holding up. Molinsk is cut off; there have been no reports from that town for the past day, and a helicopter that was sent to look in on them never reported back. The DR’s are raising seven shades of merry hell around town, and so are the Radicals. I tried to have the usual suspects taken into custody, but they’ve declared an Extropian Soviet and refuse to cooperate. The worst elements are holed up in the Corn Exchange, two miles south of here, holding continuous committee meetings, and issuing proclamations and revolutionary communique on the hour, every hour.

Encouraging people to traffic with the enemy.”

“Why haven’t you used troops?” rumbled Politovsky.

“They say they’ve got atomic weapons. If we move in—” He shrugged.

“Oh.” The Governor rubbed his walrus moustache lugubriously and sighed.

“Commander Janaczeck. What news of the Navy?”

Janaczeck stood. A tall, worried-looking man in a naval officer’s dress uniform, he looked even more nervous than the otherwise controlled Von Beck. “There were two survival capsules from the wreck of the Sakhalin; both have now been recovered, and the survivors debriefed. It would appear that the Sakhalin approached one of the larger enemy intruders and demanded that they withdraw from low orbit immediately and yield to customs inspection. The intruder made no response, so Sakhalin fired across her path. What happened next is confused—none of the survivors were bridge officers, and their reports are contradictory—but it appears that there was an impact with some sort of foreign body, which then ate the destroyer.”

“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 lumpen-proletariat. 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 tete-a-tete 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.