Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“Well, then.” Bauer looked around the conference table. “I believe if you would be so good as to return His Excellency to his cabin, I will continue as his proxy and prepare a minuted report of this meeting for him to review later, when he’s feeling better. Unless anyone has any comments that specifically require the Admiral’s ear?” Nobody demurred. “Very well then. Recess for five minutes.” Robard and an enlisted man gingerly rolled the Admiral’s chair away from the table; then, using the lift just outside the room, disappeared with him in the direction of his quarters. Everybody stood, and saluted, while the snoring officer was wheeled out of the meeting. Rachel held her face expressionless, trying to conceal the disgust and pity the sight pulled from her. He’s young enough to be my grandson.

How can they do this to themselves ?

Eventually, Bauer, assuming the admiral’s position at the head of the table, rapped his hand on the brass bell. “Meeting will resume. The Terran attache has the floor. You were saying?”

“The third possibility is that the New Republic no longer exists,” Rachel said bluntly. She continued, ignoring the outraged gasps around the table. “You are facing an enemy about whose capabilities you are largely ignorant. I’m afraid to say, the UN knows little more about them than you do. As I noted, there are three reasons for the New Republic not to have contacted you, and their total defeat in the intervening time is only one of them, but not one it’s safe to ignore. We’re now in the outbound leg of a closed, timelike loop, which will eventually clip itself out of the world line of this universe if you succeed in looping back into our relative past — but the New Republic’s absolute immediate future — and taking the intruders by surprise. This has some odd implications. History reaching us inside this loop may not bear any relationship to the eventual outcome we seek, for one thing. For another—” She shrugged. “If I’d been consulted prior to this expedition, I would have strongly counseled against it. While it is not technically a breach of the letter of Clause Nineteen, it is dangerously close to the sort of activity that has brought down intervention by the Eschaton in the past. The Eschaton really doesn’t like time travel in the slightest, presumably because, if things go too far, someone might edit it out of existence. So there’s the possibility that what you’re up against isn’t just the Festival, but a higher power.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” Bauer nodded politely, but his face was set in a mask of disapproval. “I believe that, for now, we shall disregard that possibility. If the Eschaton chooses to involve itself, there is nothing we can do in any case, so we must work on the assumption that it will not. And in that case, all we are up against is the Festival. Kossov. What did we know about it before we left?”

“Ah, um, well, that is to say—” Kossov looked around wildly, shuffled the papers on his blotter, and sighed. “Ah, good. Yes. The Festival—”

“I know what it’s called, Lieutenant,” the Commodore said reprovingly. “What is it and what does it want?”

“Nobody knows.” Kossov looked at his supreme commander’s deputy like a rabbit caught in the blinding headlights of an oncoming express train.

“So, Commissioner.” Bauer cocked his head on one side and stared at Rachel, with the single-minded analytical purpose of a raptor. “And what can the esteemed government-coordinating body of Earth tell me about the Festival?” he asked, almost tauntingly.

“Uh.” Rachel shook her head. Of course the poor kid had done his best — none of these people could know anything much about the Festival. Even she didn’t. It was a big yawning blank.

“Well?” Bauer prodded.

Rachel sighed. “This is very provisional; nobody from Earth has had any direct contact with the agency known as Festival until now, and our information is, therefore, secondhand and unverifiable. And, frankly, unbelievable. The Festival does not appear to be a government or agency thereof, as we understand the term. In fact, it may not even be human. All we know is that something of that name turns up in distant settled systems — never closer than a thousand light-years, before now — and it, well, the term we keep hearing used to describe what happens next is ‘Jubilee’, if that makes any sense to you. Everything …

stops. And the Festival takes over the day-today running of the system for the duration.” She looked at Bauer. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

Bauer shook his head, looking displeased. “No it wasn’t,” he said. “I was after capabilities.” Rachel shrugged. “We don’t know,” she said bluntly. “As I said, we’ve never seen it from close-up.” Bauer frowned. “Then this will be a first for you, won’t it? Which leads us to the next issue, updates to navigation plan Delta …”

A few hours later, Rachel lay facedown on her bunk and tried to shut the world out of her head. It wasn’t easy; too much of the world had followed her home over the years, crying for attention.

She was still alive. She knew, somehow, that she should feel relieved about this, but what she’d seen in the briefing room screen had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The admiral was a senile vacuum at the heart of the enterprise. The intelligence staff were well-meaning, but profoundly ignorant: they were so inflexible that they were incapable of doing their job properly. She’d tried to explain how advanced civilizations worked until she could feel herself turning blue in the face, and they still didn’t understand! They’d nodded politely, because she was a lady — even if a somewhat scandalous one, a lady diplomat —and immediately forgotten or ignored her advice.

You don’t fight an infowar attack with missiles and lasers, any more than you attack a railway locomotive with spears and stone axes. You don’t fight a replicator attack by throwing energy and matter at machines that will just use them for fuel. They’d nodded approvingly and gone on to discuss the virtues of active countermeasures versus low-observability systems. And they still didn’t get it; it was as if the very idea of something like the Festival, or even the Septagon system, occupied a mental blind spot ubiquitous in their civilization. They could accept a woman in trousers, even in a colonel’s uniform, far more easily than they could cope with the idea of a technological singularity.

Back on Earth, she had attended a seminar, years ago. It had been a weeklong gathering of experts; hermeneutic engineers driven mad by studying the arcane debris of the Singularity, demographers still trying to puzzle out the distribution of colony worlds, a couple of tight-lipped mercenary commanders and commercial intelligence consultants absorbed in long-range backstop insurance against a return of the Eschaton. They were all thrown together and mixed with a coterie of Defense SIG experts and UN

diplomats. It was hosted by the UN, which, as the sole remaining island of concrete stability in a sea of pocket polities, was the only body able to host such a global event.

During the seminar, she had attended a cocktail party on a balcony of white concrete, jutting from a huge hotel built on the edge of the UN city, Geneva. She’d been in uniform at the time, working as an auditor for the denuclearization commission. Black suit, white gloves, mirrorshades pulsing news updates and radiation readings into her raw and tired eyes. Hyped up on a cocktail of alcohol antagonists, she sipped a bitter (and ineffective) gin with a polite Belgian cosmologist. Mutual incomprehension tinged with apprehension bound them in an uncomfortable Ping-Pong match of a conversation. “There is so much we do not understand about the Eschaton,” the cosmologist had insisted, “especially concerning its interaction with the birth of the universe. The big bang.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.