Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Vassily turned pale. Perhaps it hadn’t really sunk in until now; he’d overstepped his authority already, rummaging in Rachel’s cabin, and either he must find a justification, or his future was in jeopardy. “I’ll gamble, sir. Do you have any recommendations, though? It seems like an awfully big step; I wouldn’t want to make any mistakes.”

Sauer grinned, not unpleasantly. “Don’t worry, you won’t. There’re others who want her out of the way and are willing to stick their necks out a bit to help. Here’s how we’ll flush her cover …”

A ragged row of crucifixes capped the hill overlooking the road to Plotsk. They faced the narrow river that ran along the valley, overlooking Boris the Miller’s waterwheel: their brown-robed human burdens stared sightlessly at the burned-out shell of the monastery on the other bank. The abbot of the Holy Spirit had gone before his monks, impaled like a bird on a spit.

“Kill them all, God will know his own,” Sister Seventh commented mockingly as she turned the doorway to face the grisly row. “Not is what their nest father-mother’s said in times gone before?” Burya Rubenstein shivered with cold as the bird-legged hut strode along the road from Novy Petrograd.

It was a chilly morning, and the fresh air was overlaid with a tantalizingly familiar odor, halfway between the brimstone crackle of gunpowder and something spicy-sweet. No smell of roast pork: they’d burned the monastery after killing the monks, not before. “Who did this?” he asked, sounding much calmer than he felt.

“You-know-who,” said the Critic. “Linger not thisways: understand Fringe performers hereabout more so deranged than citywise. Mimes and firewalker bushbabies. Very dangerous.”

“Did they—” Burya swallowed. He couldn’t look away from the fringe on the hilltop. He was no friend of the clergy, but this festival of excess far outstripped anything he could have condoned. “Was it the Fringe?”

Sister Seventh cocked her head on one side and chomped her walrus tusks at the air. “Not,” she declared. “This is human work. But headlaunchers have herewise been seeding corpses with further life.

Expect resurrection imminently, if not consensually.”

“Headlaunchers?”

“Fringeoids with fireworks. Seed brainpan, cannibalize corpus, upload and launch map containing mindseeds to join Festival in orbit.”

Burya peered at the row of crosses. One of them had no skull, and the top of the crucifix was charred.

‘“I'm going to be sick—”

He just made it to the edge of the hut in time. Sister Seventh made it kneel while he hung head down over the edge, retching and dry-heaving on the muddy verge below.

“Ready to continue? Food needed?”

“No. Something to drink. Something stiff.” One corner of the hut was stocked with a pyramid of canned foodstuffs and bottles. Sister Seventh was only passingly familiar with human idiom; she picked up a large tin of pineapple chunks, casually bit a hole in it, and poured it into the empty can that Burya had been using as a cup for the past day. He took it silently, then topped it up with schnapps from his hip flask. The hut lurched slightly as it stood up. He leaned against the wall and threw back the drink in one swallow.

“Where are you taking me now?” he asked, pale and still shivering with something deeper than a mere chill.

“To Criticize the culprits. This is not art.“ Sister Seventh bared her fangs at the hillside in an angry gape.

”No esthetics! Zip plausibility! Pas de preservatives!”

Rubenstein slid down the wall of the hut, collapsing in a heap against the pile of provisions. Utter despair filled him. When Sister Seventh began alliterating she could go on for hours without making any particular sense.

“Is it anyone in particular this time? Or are you just trying to bore me to death?” The huge mole-rat whirled to face him, breath hissing between her teeth. For a moment he flinched, seeing grinning angry death in her eyes. Then the fire dimmed back to her usual glare of cynical amusement. “Critics know who did this thing,” she rasped. “Come judge, come Criticize.” The walking hut marched on, carrying them away from the execution ground. Unseen from the vestibule, one of the crucified monk’s habits began to smolder. His skull exploded with a gout of blue flame and a loud bang as something the size of a fist flew up from it, a glaring white shock contrail streaming behind.

One more monk’s mind — or what had been left of it after a day of crucifixion, by the time the headlaunch seed got to it — was on its way into orbit, to meet the Festival datavores.

The hut walked all day, passing miracles, wonders, and abominations on every side. Two thistledown geodesic spheres floated by overhead like glistening diadems a kilometer in diameter, lofted by the thermal expansion of their own trapped, sun-heated air. (Ascended peasants, their minds expanded with strange prostheses, looked down from their communal eyrie at the ground dwellers below. Some of their children were already growing feathers.) Around another hill, the hut marched across a spun-silver suspension bridge that crossed a gorge that had not been there a month before — a gorge deep enough that the air in its depths glowed with a ruddy heat, the floor obscured by a permanent Venusian fog. A rhythmic thudding of infernal machinery echoed up from the depths. Once, a swarm of dinner-plate-sized, solar-powered silicon butterflies blitzed past, zapping and sputtering and stealing any stray electrical cabling and discrete components in their path: a predatory Stuka the size of an eagle followed them, occasionally screaming down in a dive that ended with one of their number crumpled and shredded in the claws sprouting from its wheel fairings. “Deep singularity,” Sister Seventh commented gnomically.

“Machines live and breed. Cornucopia evolution.”

“I don’t understand. What caused this?”

“Emergent property of complex infocology. Life expands to fill environmental niches. Now, machines reproduce and spawn as Festival maximizes entropy, devolves into way station.”

“Devolves into—” He stared at the Critic. “You mean this is only a temporary condition?” Sister Seventh looked at him placidly. “What made you think otherwise?”

“But—” Burya looked around. Looked at the uncared-for fields, already tending toward the state of weed banks, at the burned-out villages and strange artifacts they were passing. “Nobody is prepared for that,” he said weakly. “We thought it would last!”

“Some will prepare,” said the Critic. “Cornucopiae breed. But Festival moves on, flower blossoming in light of star before next trip across cold, dark desert.”

Very early the next day, they came within sight of Plotsk. Before the Festival incursion, Plotsk had been a sleepy gingerbread market town of some fifty thousand souls, home to a regional police fortress, a jail, two cathedrals, a museum, and a zeppelin port. It had also been the northernmost railhead on the planet, and a departure point for barges heading north to the farms that dotted the steppes halfway to the Boreal Ocean.

Plotsk was barely recognizable today. Whole districts were burned-out scars on the ground, while a clump of slim white towers soared halfway to the stratosphere from the site of the former cathedral.

Burya gaped as something emerald green spat from a window halfway up a tower, a glaring light that hurtled across the sky and passed overhead with a strange double boom. The smell, half gunpowder and half orchids, was back again. Sister Seventh sat up and inhaled deeply. “One loves the smell of wild assemblers in the morning. Bushbot baby uploads and cyborg militia. Spires of bone and ivory. Craving for apocalypse.”