Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“The New Republic seems to think you have, and I’m the best you’ll find around here. Unless you’d prefer the other choice on offer?”

Martin grimaced. “Hardly.” He staggered. “Got some 4-3-1 in left pocket. Think I need it.” He staggered, fumbling for the small blister pack of alcohol antagonists. “No need to get nasty.”

“I wasn’t getting nasty; I was just providing you with an inertial reference frame for your own good.

‘Sides, I thought we were going to look out for each other. And I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t get you out of here and into a cabin before someone notices. Drunkenness is a flogging offense, did you know that?” Rachel took him by one elbow and began gently steering him toward the door. Martin was sufficiently wobbly on his legs to make this an interesting experience; she was tall, and had boosters embedded in her skeletal muscles for just such events, but he had the three advantages of mass, momentum, and a low center of gravity. Together, they described a brief drunkard’s walk before Martin managed to fumble his drug patch onto the palm of one hand, and Rachel managed to steer the two of them into the corridor.

By the time they reached her cabin, he was breathing deeply and looking pale. “In,” she ordered.

“I feel like shit,” he murmured. “Got any drinking water?”

“Yup.” She pulled the hatch shut behind them and spun the locking wheel. “Sink’s over there; I’m sure you’ve seen one before.”

“Thanks, I think.” He ran the taps, splashed water on his face, then used the china cup to take mouthful after mouthful. “Damned alcohol dehydration.” He straightened up. “You think I should have more sense than to do that?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said drily. She crossed her arms and watched him. He shook himself like a bedraggled water rat and sat down heavily on Rachel’s neatly folded bunk.

“I needed to forget some things very badly,” he said moodily. “Maybe too badly. Doesn’t happen very often but, well, being locked up with nobody for company but my own head isn’t good for me. All I get to see these days are cable runs and change schematics, plus a few naive young midshipmen at lunch.

That spook from the Curator’s Office is hanging around all the time, keeping an eye on me and listening to whatever I say. It’s like being in a fucking prison.”

Rachel pulled out the folding chair and sat on it. “You’ve never been in prison, then. Consider yourself lucky.”

His lips quirked. “You have, I suppose? The public servant?”

“Yeah. Spent eight months inside, once, banged up for industrial espionage by an agricultural cartel.

Amnesty Multinational made me a prisoner of commerce and started up a trade embargo: that got me sprung pretty quick.” She winced at the memories, grey shadows of their original violent fury, washed out by time. It wasn’t her longest stretch inside, but she had no intention of telling him that just yet.

He shook his head and smiled faintly. “The New Republic is like a prison for everyone, though. Isn’t it?”

“Hmm.” She stared through him at the wall behind. “Now you mention it, I think you could be stretching things a bit far.”

“Well, you’ll at least concede they’re all prisoners of their ideology, aren’t they? Two hundred years of violent suppression hasn’t left them much freedom to distance themselves from their culture and look around. Hence the mess we’re in now.” He lay back, propping his head against the wall. “Excuse me; I’m tired. I spent a double shift on the drive calibration works, then four hours over on Glorious , troubleshooting its RCS oxidant switching logic.”

“You’re excused.” Rachel unbuttoned her jacket, then bent down and slid off her boots. “ Ow .”

“Sore feet?”

“Damned Navy, always on their feet. Looks bad if I slouch, too.” He yawned. “Speaking of other things, what do you think the Septagon forces will do?” She shrugged. “Probably track us the hell out of here at gunpoint, while pressing the New Republic for compensation. They’re pragmatists, none of this babble about national honor and the virtues of courage and manly manhood and that sort of thing.”

Martin sat up. “If you’re going to take your boots off, if you don’t mind—” She waved a hand. “Be my guest.”

“I thought I was supposed to be your loyal subject?”

She giggled. “Don’t get ideas above your station! Really, these damned monarchists. I understand in the abstract, but how do they put up with it? I’d go crazy, I swear it. Within a decade.”

“Hmm.” He leaned forward, busy with his shoes. “Look at it another way. Most people back home sit around with their families and friends and lead a cozy life, doing three or four different things at the same time — gardening, designing commercial beetles, painting landscapes, and bringing up children, that sort of thing. Entomologists picking over the small things in life to see what’s twitching its legs underneath. Why the hell aren’t we doing that ourselves?”

“I used to.” He glanced up at her curiously, but she was elsewhere, remembering. “Spent thirty years being a housewife, would you believe it? Being good God-fearing people, hubby was the breadwinner, two delightful children to dote over, and a suburban garden. Church every Sunday and nothing — nothing — allowed to break with the pretense of conformity.”

“Ah. I thought you were older than you looked. Late-sixties backlash?”

“Which sixties?” She shook her head, then answered her own rhetorical question: “Twenty-sixties. I was born in forty-nine. Grew up in a Baptist family, Baptist town, quiet religion — it turned inward after the Eschaton. We were all so desperately afraid, I think. It was a long time ago: I find it hard to remember.

One day I was forty-eight and the kids were at college and I realized I didn’t believe a word of it. They’d gotten the extension treatments nailed down by then, and the pastor had stopped denouncing it as satanic tampering with God’s will — after his own grandfather beat him at squash — and I suddenly realized that I’d had an empty day, and I had maybe a million days just like it ahead of me, and there were so many things I hadn’t done and couldn’t do, if I stayed the same. And I didn’t really believe : religion was my husband’s thing, I just went along with it. So I moved out. Took the treatment, lost twenty years in six months. Went through the usual Sterling fugue, changed my name, changed my life, changed just about everything about me. Joined an anarchist commune, learned to juggle, got into radical antiviolence activism. Harry — no, Harold — couldn’t cope with that.”

“Second childhood. Sort of like a twentieth-century teenage period.”

“Yes, exactly—” She stared at Martin. “How about you?”

He shrugged. “I’m younger than you. Older than most everyone else aboard this idiotic children’s crusade. Except maybe the admiral.” For an instant, and only an instant, he looked hagridden. “You shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here.”

She stared at him. “You’ve got it bad?”

“We’re—” He checked himself, cast her a curious guarded look, then started again. “This trip is doomed. I suppose you know that.”

“Yes.” She looked at the floor. “I know that,” she said calmly. “If I don’t broker some sort of cease-fire or persuade them not to use their causality weapons, the Eschaton will step in. Probably throw a comet made of antimatter at them, or something.” She looked at him. “What do you think?”

“I think—” He paused again and looked away, slightly evasively. “If the Eschaton intervenes, we’re both in the wrong place.”