Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

“Caaww?” Raven looked up at him. The thing in the ditch was still wearing a little girl’s dress.

“Hungrrry.”

“You might be — but I we’ve got to find Pyotr. Before the Mimes catch us.” Felix looked over his shoulder nervously. They’d been running scared, one jump ahead of the Mimes, for the past three days. The Mimes moved slowly, frequently fighting an invisible wind or trying to feel their way around intangible buildings, but they were remorseless. Mimes never slept, or blinked, or stopped moving.

A hundred meters closer to the village, the phone woke up. It chirped like a curious kitten until Felix rummaged through his bag and pulled it out. “Leave me alone!” he exclaimed, exasperated.

“Felix? It’s Mr. Rabbit.”

“What?” He looked at the phone, startled. Chrome highlights glinted beneath grubby oil-slick fingerprints.

“It’s me. Your flop-eared friend. I’m in the village. Listen, don’t come any closer.”

“Why not?” He frowned and carried on walking.

“They’re here. My luck ran out; don’t think I can get away. You—” The giant lagomorph’s voice broke into something utterly inhuman for a moment, a rodent squeal of rage and fright. “—Behind you, too! Go cross-country. Run, boy .”

The phone buzzed, disconnected. Felix raised it angrily, meaning to dash it to the ground, then stopped.

Ahead of him. Raven stared at him, beady-eyed and bloody-beaked. “Fly over the village,” Felix ordered the bird. “Tell me what you see.”

“Caaaw!” Raven took a running leap into the air, lumbering heavily over the grass, then climbing up over the treetops. Felix looked at the phone again, mingled rage and grief in his eyes. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair! All he wanted was to be young and carefree, and to have fun. The companions came later; at first there had been Mrs. Hedgehog as well, but she’d been killed by a random Fringe performance, electrical discharges flashing to ground from an ionosphere raped by induced solar flares. The Fringe was like that; a mindless thing, infinitely dangerous and fickle, as trustworthy as a venomous snake but sometimes capable of producing works of great beauty. (The auroral displays had lasted for weeks.) Felix looked around, nervously. Over the hedgerow, back down the road, something seemed to move.

He held the phone to his cheek. “Somebody talk to me?”

“ Will you entertain us?”

“I don’t know how!” he burst out.

“Tell story. Provide entertaining formal proof of correctness. Sing, dance, clap your hands.”

“What will you do for me in return?”

“ What do you require ?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded tinny, distant, compressed through the bandwidth ligature of a causal channel.

“Bad men are after me. They throw custard pies, turn me into one of them. Can you stop them? Protect me from the Mimes?”

“ Tell story .” It wasn’t a statement or a question, it was an order.

Felix took a deep breath. He glanced up and saw Raven circling overhead. He jumped the ditch, then ducked under the first branches and began to weave his way into the woods. He talked as he walked.

“In the beginning there was a duke who lived in a palace, on the banks of the river, overlooking the only city on the world. He wasn’t a very wise duke, but he did what he thought was best for his people. Then one morning, it began to rain telephones, and the world changed. This is the duke’s story.” It was a long and rambling story, and it went on for some time. How the duke’s palace had been besieged by anarchist terrorists, who unleashed chaos and plastic cutlery on the town. All his soldiers deserted after looting the palace and the zoo; he escaped through a secret passage under the Curator’s waiting rooms in the sub-sub-basement. The elderly duke had escaped with three trusty retainers.

Grief-stricken, he had barely been able to understand what had happened to his world. Why had everything changed? A telephone chirped at him, like a curious kitten, from the rubbish in a back alley.

He bent to pick it up and the motion saved his life for two renegade soldiers shot at him with their rifles.

They killed Citizen Von Beck, but not before the Citizen marked them with his slow gun — for the Citizens of the Curator’s Office were allowed to use forbidden weapons in the course of their duties.

(Bullets from a slow gun flew on hummingbird wings, seeking their prey wherever they might flee. Bullets from a slow gun killed by stinging with their neurotoxin barbettes, like wasps with secret police insignia.

They were a terror weapon, to demonstrate the horrors of unrestricted technology.) Felix slipped down a root-woven embankment and crossed a clearing studded with green-sprouting stumps as he continued. The duke talked to the phone in his despair, and it offered him three wishes. He asked to be made young again, thinking it a bitter joke; to his surprise, his youth was magically restored.

Next, he asked for companions; and he was given friends, wonderful friends, who would do anything for him and ask nothing in return. Even the third wish, the little-boy wish made in the first flush of restored youth, had been granted. None of which was exactly what he’d wanted, or would have asked for had he not been in a very disturbed state of mind at the time, but it was better than the wishes some people he’d met subsequently had made. (The kulak whose wish had been a goose that laid golden eggs, for example. It was a wonderful animal, until you held it close to a railway man’s dosimeter and discovered the deluge of ionizing radiation spewing invisibly from the nuclear alchemist’s stone in its gizzard. Which you only thought to do when the bloody stools became too much to bear, and your hair began to fall out in clumps.)

The duke-turned-child had walked across three hundred kilometers in the past month, living from hand to mouth. His friends had looked after him, though. Raven, who could see over and around things, told him of traps or ambushes or deadfalls before he walked into them. Mr. Rabbit hopped along at his side, and with his acute hearing, nose for trouble, and plain, old-fashioned common sense, kept him from starving or freezing to death. Mrs. Hedgehog had helped, too, bustling around, cooking and cleaning and keeping camp, occasionally fending off beggars and indigent trash with her bristles and sharp teeth. That was before the lightning storm took her.

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.