Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Ilya stared at her, his expression unreadable. “I will tell the Captain,” he murmured. Then he stood. “In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you would stay out of the operations room while I am in charge — or hold your counsel in public. And not to lay hands on any officer. Is that understood?” She met his gaze. If his expression was unreadable, hers was exactly the opposite. “I understand perfectly,” she breathed. Then she stood and left the room without another word, closing the door softly as she left.

Ilya stared after her and shuddered. He shook himself angrily; then he picked up the telephone handset and spoke to the operator. “Get me the Captain,” he said. “It’s important.” It was a time capsule, pitted and tarnished from four thousand years in space. And it contained mail.

The survey drone nudged up to it delicately, probing it with radar and infrared sensors. Drifting cold and silent, the capsule showed no sign of life save for some residual radioactivity around its after end. A compact matter/antimatter rocket, it had crossed the eighteen light-years from the New Republic at a sublight crawl, then decelerated into a parking orbit and shut down. Its nose cone was scratched and scarred, ablated in patches from the rough passage through the interstellar medium. But behind it waited a silvery sphere a meter in diameter. The capsule was fabricated from sintered industrial diamond five centimeters thick, a safety-deposit box capable of surviving anything short of a nuclear weapon.

The mail was packed onto disks, diamond wafers sandwiching reflective gold sheets. It was an ancient technology, but incredibly durable. Using external waldoes, ratings controlling the survey drone unscrewed the plug sealing the time capsule and delicately removed the disk stacks. Then, having verified that they were not, in fact, explosives or antimatter, the survey drone turned and began to climb back out toward the Lord Vanek and the other ships of the first battleship squadron.

The discovery of mail — and surely there was too much of it to only be tactical data about the enemy — put the crew in a frenzy of anticipation. They’d been confined to the ship’s quarters for two months now, and the possibility of messages from families and loved ones drove them into manic anticipation that alternated, individually, with deep depression at the merest thought that they might be forgotten.

Rachel, however, was less sanguine about the mail: the chances of the Admiralty having let her employers message her under diplomatic cypher were, in her estimation, less than zero. Martin didn’t expect anything, either. His sister hadn’t written to him back in New Prague; why should she write to him now?

His ex-wife, he wouldn’t want to hear from. In emotional terms, his closest current relationship — however unexpectedly it had dawned upon him — was with Rachel. So while the officers and crew of the Lord Vanek spent their off hours speculating about the letters from home, Rachel and Martin spent their time worrying about exposure. For, as she had pointed out delicately, he didn’t have diplomatic papers: and even leaving matters of Republican public morality aside, it would be a bad idea if anyone were to decide that he was a lever to use against her.

“It’s probably not a good idea for us to spend too much time together in private, love,” she’d murmured at the back of his shoulder, as they lay together in his narrow bunk. “When everybody else is at action stations, they’re not liable to notice us — but the rest of the time—” His shoulders went tense, telling her that he understood.

“We’ll have to work something out,” he said. “Can’t we?”

“Yes.” She’d paused to kiss his shoulder. “But not if it risks some blue-nosed bigot locking you up for conduct unbecoming, or convinces the admiral’s staff that I’m a two-kopek whore they can grope or safely ignore, which isn’t too far from what some of them think already.”

“Who?” Martin rolled over to face her, his expression grim. “Tell me—”

“ Ssh .” She’d touched a finger to his lips, and for a moment, he’d found her expression almost heartbreaking. “I don’t need a protector. Have their ideas been rubbing off on you?”

“I hope not!”

“No, I don’t think so.” She chuckled quietly and rolled against him.

Martin was sitting alone in his cabin some days later, nursing wistful thoughts about Rachel and a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, when somebody banged on the hatch. “Who’s there?” he called.

“Mail for the engineer! Get it in the purser’s office!” Feet hurried away, then there was a cacophony from farther down the corridor.

“Hmm?” Martin sat up. Mail ? On the face of it, it was improbable. Then again, everything about this voyage was improbable. Startled out of his reverie, he bent down and hunted for his shoes, then set out in search of the source of the interruption.

He didn’t have any difficulty finding it. The office was a chaotic melee of enlisted men, all trying to grab their own mail and that of anyone they knew. The mail had been copy-printed onto paper, sealed in neat blue envelopes. Puzzled, Martin hunted around for anyone in charge.

“Yes?” The harassed petty officer in charge of the sorting desk looked up from the pile he was trying to bundle together for transfer to the His Majesty’s courier ship Godot . “Oh, you. Over there, in the unsorted deck.” He pointed at a smallish box containing a selection of envelopes; missives for the dead, the mad, and the non-naval.

Martin burrowed through the pile, curious, until he came to an envelope with his name on it. It was a rather fat envelope. How odd , he thought. Rather than open it on the spot, he carried it back to his cabin.

When he opened it, he nearly threw it away immediately: it began with the dreaded phrase, “My dear Marty.” Only one woman called him that, and although she was the subject of some of his fondest memories, she was also capable of inspiring in him a kind of bitter, anguished rage that made him, afterward, ashamed of his own emotions. He and Morag had split eight years ago, and the recriminations and mutual blame had left a trench of silence between them.

But what could possibly have prompted her to write to him now? She’d always been a very verbal person, and her e-mails had tended to be terse, misspelled sentences rather than the emotional deluges she reserved for face-to-face communications.

Puzzled, Martin began to read.

My Dear Marty,

It’s been too long since I last wrote to you; I hope you’ll forgive me. Life has been busy, as they say, and doubly so, for I have also had Sarah to look after. Shes growing very tall these days, and looks just like her father. I hope you’ll be around for her sixteenth birthday …

He stopped. This had to be an elaborate joke. His ex-wife seemed to be talking about a child — their child — who didn’t exist. And this was nothing like her style! It was almost as if someone else, writing from a dossier of his family history, was trying to—

He began to read again, this time acutely alert for hidden messages.

Sarah is studying theology at college these days. You know how studious she’s always been? Her new teacher Herman seems to have brought her out of her shell. She’s working on a dissertation about Eschatology; she insisted that I enclose a copy for you (attached below).

The rest of the letter was filled with idle chatter about fictional friends, reminiscences about trivial and entirely nonexistent shared memories and major (presumably well-documented) ones, and — as far as Martin could see — a content-free blind.

He turned to the “dissertation.” It was quite long, and he pondered Herman’s wisdom in sending it. Did New Republican schoolchildren write eight-page essays about God? And about God’s motives, as far as they could be deduced from the value of the cosmological constant? It was written in a precious, somewhat dull style that set his teeth on edge, like an earnest student essay hunting for marks of approval rather than a straight discursive monograph asserting a viewpoint. Then his eyes caught the footnotes: 1. Consider the hypothetical case of a power that intends to create a localized causality violation that does not produce a light cone encompassing its origin point. (We are implicitly assuming a perfectly spherical zone of sinfulness expanding at velocity c with origin at time TO.) If the spherical volume of sinfulness does not intersect with the fourspace trajectory of the power’s initial location, we are not dealing with an original sin. Consequently we do not expect the Eschaton to condemn the entire sinful civilization to damnation, or a Type II supernova; redemption is possible. However, damnation of the sinful agency that causes the causality violation is required.