Singularity Sky (29 page)

But somewhere along the way, the little duke had begun to regain his sense of purpose—and with it, a great depth of despair. Everywhere he looked, crops rotted in the fields. Once-sober peasants upped stakes and took to the skies in mile-high puffball spheres of spun-sugar glass and diamond. Wise-women aged backward and grew much wiser, unnaturally so—wise until their wisdom leaked out into the neighborhood, animating the objects around them with their force of will. Ultimately, the very wise lost their humanity altogether and fled their crumbling human husks, migrating into the upload afterlife of the Festival. Intelligence and infinite knowledge were not, it seemed, compatible with stable human existence.

The little duke had talked to some of the people, tried to get them to understand that this wasn’t going to last forever; sooner or later, the Festival would be over, and there would be a dreadful price to pay. But they laughed at him, calling him names when they discovered who he had been in his previous existence. And then someone set the Mimes on him.

A crash of branches and a caw of alarm; Raven crunched down onto his shoulder, great claws gripping his arm hard enough to draw blood. “Mimes!”

hissed the bird. “Nevermore!”

“Where?” Felix looked around, wide-eyed.

Something crackled in the underbrush behind him. Felix turned, dislodging Raven, who flapped heavily upward, cawing in alarm. A human shape lurched into view on the other side of the clearing. It was male, adult in size, powdery white in color from head to foot. It moved jerkily like damaged clockwork, and there was no mistaking the circular, yellowish object it held in its right hand.

“Pie-ie-ie!” croaked Raven. ‘Time to die!“

Felix turned away from the Mime and put his head down. He ran blindly, branches tearing at his head and shoulders, shrubbery and roots trying to trip him up. Distantly, he heard the screaming and cawing of Raven mobbing the Mime, flapping clear of the deadly flan and pecking for eyes, ears, fingers. Just one sticky strand of orange goo from the pie dish would eat clear through bone, its disassembly nanoware mapping and reintegrating neural paths along its deadly way, to convert what was left of the body into a proxy presence in realspace.

The Mimes were broken, a part of the Fringe that had swung too close to a solar flare and succumbed to bit rot several Festival visits ago. They’d lost their speech pathways, right down to the Nucleus of Chomsky, but somehow managed to piggyback a ride on the Festival starwisps. Maybe this forcible assimilation was their way of communicating, of sharing mindspace with other beings. If so, it was misguided at best, like a toddler’s attempt to communicate with a dog by hitting it; but nothing seemed to deter them from trying.

A wordless scream from behind told him that Raven had certainly distracted that particular Mime. But Mimes traveled in packs. Where were the others? And where was Mr. Rabbit, with his trusty twelve-bore and belt of dried farmer’s scalps?

Noise ahead. Felix staggered to a stop. He was still holding the phone.

“Help,” he gasped into it.

“Define help parameters.”

A fuzzy white shape moved among the trees in front of him. It had once been a woman. Now it was powder white, except for blood-red lips and bobble nose: layers of white clothing shrouded its putrefying limbs, held together with a delicate lacework of silvery metallic vines that pulsed and contracted as it moved. It swayed from side to side as it approached, bending coquettishly at the hips, as if the base of its spine had been replaced by a universal joint. It clutched a large pie dish in both bony hands.

Collapsed eye sockets lined with black photoreceptive film grinned at him as it bowed and extended the bowl, like a mother offering her spoiled son his favorite dessert.

Felix gagged. The smell was indescribable. “Kill it. Make it go away,” he whimpered. He fell back against a tree. “Please!”

“Acknowledged.” The Festival voice remained dusty and distant, but somehow its tone changed. “Fringe security at your service. How may we be of assistance?”

The Mimes were closing in. “Kill them!” Felix gasped. “Get me out of here!”

“Target acquisition in progress. X-ray laser battery coming online. Be advised current orbital inclination is not favorable for surgical excision.

Cover your eyes.”

He threw an arm across his face. Bones flashed in red silhouette, followed a split second later by a crash of thunder and a blast of heat, as if someone had opened the oven door of hell right in front of his face. His skin prickled as if Mrs. Hedgehog was embracing him, only all over. Trees falling in the forest, a flapping of panic-stricken wings. The flash and bang repeated itself a second later, this time behind him; then three or four more times, increasingly distant.

“Incident Control stand down. Threat terminated. Be advised you have received an ionizing radiation dose of approximately four Greys, and that this will be life-threatening without urgent remediation. A medical support package has been dispatched. Remain where you are, and it will arrive in twenty-two minutes. Thank you for your custom, and have a nice day.”

Felix lay gasping at the base of his tree. He felt dizzy, a little sick: afterimages of his femur floated in ghostly purple splendor across his eyes.

“I want Mr. Rabbit,” he mumbled into the phone, but it didn’t answer him.

He cried, tears of frustration and loneliness. Presently, he closed his eyes and slept. He was still asleep when the spider slipped down from the stars and wove him into a cocoon of silvery not-silk to begin the task of dissolving and re-forming his radiation-damaged body yet again. This was the third time so far; it was all his own fault for making that third wish. Youth, true friends … and what every little boy wished for in his heart, without quite grasping that an adventure-filled life isn’t much fun when you’re the person who has to live it.

Martin sat on the thin mattress in his cell, and tried to work out how many days he had left before they executed him.

The fleet was six days out from the final jump to Rochard’s World. Before that, they’d probably transfer supplies from the remaining support freighters and put any supernumeraries— conscripts who’d gone mad, contracted crippling diseases, or otherwise become superfluous to requirements—on board. Maybe they’d move him over and send him back with the basket cases, back to the New Republic to face trial on the capital charge of spying in the dockyard. Somehow, he doubted that his defense (of shipyard necessity) would do him much good; that snot-nosed assistant from the Curator’s Office had it in for him, quite obviously, and would stop at nothing to see him hang.

That was one option. Another was that he’d be kept in the brig aboard ship until it arrived. At which point they’d realize that the cumulative clock-delay he’d bodged into the Lord Vanek’s fourspace guidance system had screwed the pooch, completely buggering their plan to sneak up on the Festival via a spacelike trajectory. In which case, they’d logically assume sabotage, and they’d have the saboteur already in the cells, trussed like a turkey for Thanksgiving.

Somehow, the fact that he’d succeeded, that his mission was accomplished and the threat of a wider causality violation averted, did not fill Martin with happiness. There might, he supposed, be heroes who would go to the airlock with a spring in their step, but he wasn’t one of them; he’d rather be opening Rachel’s bedroom door than opening that other door, learning to breathe in her muff rather than learning to inhale vacuum. It was, he supposed dismally, typical of the pattern of his life to fall in love—the kind of annoying obsession that won’t go away—just before stumbling irremediably into the shit. He’d been around enough to think he had few illusions left; Rachel had edges rough enough to use as a nail file, and in some ways, they had very little in common. But being banged up alone in a tiny cell was a frighteningiy lonely experience, all the lonelier for knowing that his lover was almost certainly less than thirty meters away—and completely unable to help him. Probably under suspicion herself. And however much he needed her, he didn’t, in all honesty, want her in here with him. He wanted to be with her on the outside—preferably somewhere many light-years from the New Republic, acquiring a long history of having absolutely nothing to do with it.

He lay back, rolled over on his stomach, and closed his eyes. Then the toilet began talking to him in a faint, buzzing voice.

“If you can hear me, tap one finger on the deck next to the base of the toilet, Martin. Just one.”

I’ve lost it, he thought. They won’t bother executing me; they’ll put me in one of their psychiatric zoos and let the children throw bananas. But he reached out a hand and tapped at the base of the stainless-steel toilet that extruded from the wall of his cell.

“That’s—” he sat up, and the voice went away abruptly.

Martin blinked and looked around. No voices. Nothing else had changed in the cell; it was still too hot, stuffy, with a constant background smell of bad drains and stale cabbage. (The cabbage was inexplicable; the menu had long since shifted to salt beef and ship’s biscuit, a recipe perversely retained by the New Republic’s Navy despite the ready availability of vacuum and extreme cold millimeters beyond the outer pressure hull of the ship). He lay down again.

“—just one. If you can—”

He closed his eyes and, as if at a stance, rapped once, hard, on the base of the toilet.

“Received. Now tap—” The voice paused. “Tap once for each day you’ve been in the tank.”

Martin blinked, then rapped out an answer.

“Do you know Morse code?”

Martin racked his brains. It had been quite a long time— “yes,” he tapped out. A mostly obsolete skill, that low-bandwidth serial code set, but one that he did know, for a simple reason: Herman had insisted he learn it. Morse was human-accessible, and a sniff for more sophisticated protocols might easily miss something as mundane as the finger-tapping back channel in a video call.

“If you lie with your head up against the side of the toilet bowl, you will hear me better.”

He blinked. Bone conduction? No, something else. The induction wires around his auditory nerves—some high-frequency source must be shorting out against the metal of the toilet, using it as an antenna! Inefficient, but if it wouldn’t carry far …

“Identify yourself,” he signaled.

The reply came in Morse. “AKA Ludmilla. Who watched us over dinner?”

“The boy wonder,” he tapped out. He slumped against the floor, shivering in relief. Only two people could reasonably be on the other side of the pipe, and the Curator’s Office wasn’t likely to authenticate his identity that way.

“What’s your relay?”

“Spy drone in sewage system jammed against effluent valve. One of batch accidentally released by idiot subcurator. Told them to find you. Fuel cells in drone very low, drained by conduction telephone. Prefer Morse. Martin, I am trying to get you out. No luck so far.”

“How long till arrival?” he tapped urgently.

‘Ten days to low-orbit arrival. If not released first, expect rescue day of arrival. Attempting to assert diplomatic cover for you.“

Ten days. Rescue—if they didn’t stick him on a freighter under armed guard and ship him back to execution dock, and if Rachel wasn’t whistling in the face of a storm. “Query rescue.”

“Diplomatic life belt big enough for two. Power level approaching shutdown: will try to send another relay later. Love you. Over.”

“I love you, too,” he tapped hopefully, but there was no reply.

A miriad of tiny gears whirred, clucked, and buzzed in a background hum of gray noise beneath a desktop. Optical transducers projected a magic-lantern dance of light on the wall opposite. The operator, gold-leafed collar unbuttoned, leaned back in his chair and dribbled smoke from his nostrils: a pipe dangled limply between his knuckles as he stared at the display.

There was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” he called. The door opened. He blinked: came to his feet. “Ah, and what can I do for you, Procurator?”

“A m-moment of your time if I may, sir?”

“By all means. Always a pleasure to be of service to the Basilisk. Have a seat?”

Vassily settled down behind the desk, visibly uncomfortable. The shadow play of lights danced on the wall, thin blue smoke catching the red-and-yellow highlights and coiling lazily in midair. “Would this be the, ah, our state vector?”

For a moment Security Lieutenant Sauer considered hazing the lad; he reluctantly shelved the idea. “Yes. Not that there’s much to be made of it, unless you’re interested in the topology of five-dimensional manifolds. And it’s only theoretical, until we arrive at the far end and relativistics come out with a pulsar map to confirm it. I’m trying to study it; promotion board ahead you know, once this affair is straightened out.”

“Hmm.” Vassily nodded. Sauer wasn’t the only Navy officer expecting a promotion to come out of this campaign. “Well, I suppose you could look on the bright side; we’re most of the way there now.”

Sauer pursed his lips, raised his pipe, and sucked. “I would never say that.

Not until we know the enemy’s dead and buried at a crossroads with a mouthful of garlic.”

“I suppose so. But your lads will take care of that, won’t they? Meanwhile it’s my people who have to come in afterward and do the tidying up, keep this sort of thing from happening again.”

Sauer looked at the young policeman, maintaining a polite expression despite his mild irritation. “Is there something I can help with?”

“Er, yah, I think so.” The visitor leaned back. He reached into his tunic pocket and withdrew a cigar case. “Mind if I smoke?”

Sauer shrugged. “You’re my guest.”

“Thank you!”

For a minute they were silent, lighters flaring briefly and blue-gray clouds trailing in the airflow to the ceiling vents. Vassily tried to suppress his coughing, still not quite accustomed to the adult habit. “It’s about the engineer in the brig.”

“Indeed.”

“Good.” Puff. “I was beginning to wonder what is going to happen to him. I, er, gather that the last supply ships will be dropping off their cargo and heading home in a couple of days, and I was wondering if … ?”