Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

The door swung open. Martin ran through inside, but it was too late for Rachel: she couldn’t see, and her knees were beginning to give way. The combat acceleration stopped, and she felt herself floating, a bruised impact along one side.

Someone was dragging her over gravel and it hurt like hell. Her heart sounded as if it was about to explode. She couldn’t get enough air.

Sound of a door slamming.

Darkness.

The committee for the Revolution had taken over the onion-domed orthodox cathedral in Plotsk, making it the headquarters of the Commissariat for Extropian Ideology. All those who rejected the doctrine of revolutionary optimization and refused to flee the town were dragged before the tribunal and instructed boringly and at length about the nature of their misdemeanor; then they were shot, minds mapped and uploaded into the Festival, and sentenced to corrective labor— usually all at once. There weren’t many of them; for the most part, the population had fled into the wilderness, transcended, or happily adopted the revolutionary cause.

Sister Seventh’s hut, spun from local memories of myth and legend uploaded into the noosphere of the Festival, squatted in the courtyard outside the Revolutionary Commissariat and defecated massively.

Presently, the house stood and ambled in the direction of the cherry trees that fringed the square: it was hungry, and the Bishop’s liking for cherry blossom wouldn’t stop it eating.

Sister Seventh wrinkled her snout with displeasure and ambled indoors. The floor of the church was full of plaintiffs, queuing to demand this or appeal that. They stood before a kitchen table parked in the middle of the nave, behind which sat half a dozen bored-looking revolutionary functionaries. The small, frenetic human called Rubenstein waved his arms and exhorted their chairman, who was so heavily augmented with mechanical add-ons that he clanked when he walked. The subject of the exhortation seemed to be something to do with the need to reverse the previous policy of destroying the artistically illiterate. True, that priority rated low in the estimates of the Critics — after all, you can’t win an argument over esthetics with a corpse — but Rubenstein’s willingness to change his mind after only a day or two in her company didn’t commend his artistic integrity to her. These curious, lumpen humans were so impossibly gnomic in their utterances, so lacking in consistency, that sometimes she despaired of understanding their underlying esthetic.

Sister Seventh lost herself for a while in the flux of knowledge from the Festival. It let a filtered feed of its awareness escape, titillating the Critic colony in orbit, who relayed choice tidbits her way. The Festival propagated by starwisp, that much was true. It also relied on causal channels to relay its discoveries home. Now, great Higgs boson factories were taking shape in the rings of machinery orbiting Sputnik, icy gas and dust congealing into beat-wave particle accelerators on the edge of planetary space. Thousands of huge fusion reactors were coming on-stream, each pumping out enough energy to run a continental civilization. The first batch of new starwisps was nearing readiness, and they had a voracious appetite, a tonne of stabilized antimatter each; then there were the causal channels, petabytes and exabytes of entangled particles to manufacture and laboriously, non-observationally, separate into matching batches.

The first starwisps would soon take on their payloads, point their stubby noses at the void, and accelerate at nearly half a million gees, sitting atop the neutral particle beams emitted by vast launch engines in high orbit above Rochard’s World. Their primary destinations were the last two stops on the Festival’s route, to deliver fresh channels and a detailed report on the current visit; their other destinations — well, the Festival had been encamped for three months. Soon the traders would arrive.

Traders followed the Festival everywhere. A self-replicating, natural source of causal channels, the Festival laid down avenues of communication, opening up new civilizations to trade — civilizations which, in the wake of a visitation, were usually too culture-shocked to object to the Traders’ abstraction of the huge structures the Festival had constructed and abandoned for its own purposes. More than a thousand megafortunes had been made by natives of dirt-based trader civilizations with FTL ships and just enough nous to follow the trail of the Festival; like birds in the wake of a plow turning over rich farm soil, they waited to pounce on juicy nuggets of intellectual property turned up by the passing farmer.

Now something new tickled Sister Seventh’s hindbrain. She stopped beside a font and stooped to drink.

A message from She Who Observes the First. Ships coming. Festival notices. Many ships coming in silence . Now that was interesting; normally, the traders would appear like a three-ring circus, flashing lights and loud music playing on all available wavelengths, trying to attract attention. Stealth meant trouble. Forty-two vessels itemized. All with drive kernels, all with low emissions: query thermal dump to stern, reduce visibility from frontal aspect. Range seven light-seconds .

How peculiar . Sister Seventh straightened up. Someone — no, some construct of the Festival, human-child-high, but with long, floppy ears and a glossy fur coat, eyes mounted on the sides of its rodent face — was coming in through the side door.

Sister mine. What reflex of Festival ? she asked silently. Hardwired extensions patched her through the Festival’s telephonic nervous system, building a bridge to her sibling.

Festival has noticed. Current activities not over; will not tolerate interference. Three Bouncers have been dispatched.

Sister of Stratagems the Seventh shivered and bared her teeth. There were few things about the Festival that scared her, but Bouncers were second on the list, right behind the Fringe. The Fringe might kill you out of random pique. The Bouncers were rather less random …

The leporine apparition in the aisle bounced toward her, a panicky expression on its face. Burya stopped lecturing Timoshevski and looked around. “What is it?” he demanded.

Timoshevski rumbled forward. “Am thinking is rabbit stew for dinner.”

“No! Please, sirs! Help!” The rabbit stopped short of them, pushing two aggrieved babushkas aside, and held out its front limbs — arms, Sister Seventh noticed, with disturbingly human hands at their extremities.

It was wearing a waistcoat that appeared to consist entirely of pockets held together by zip fasteners.

“Master in trouble!”

“Are no masters here, comrade,” said Timoshevski, apparently categorizing the supplicant as inedible.

‘True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism. Where are you from, and where is your internal passport?“

Rabbits have little control over their facial muscles; nevertheless, this one made a passable show of being nonplussed. “Need help ,” it bleated, then paused, visibly gathering self-control. “My master is in trouble.

Mime hunt! They got between us, a village ago; I escaped, but I fear they’re coming this way.”

“Mimes?” Timoshevski looked puzzled. “Not clowns?” A metallic tentacle tipped in gun-muzzle flanges uncurled from his back, poked questing into the air. “Circus?”

“Circus of death,” said Sister Seventh. “Fringe performance, very poor. If coming this way, will interfere with popular acclaim of your revolution.”

“Oh, how so?” Timoshevski focused on Sister Seventh suspiciously.

“ Listen to her, Oleg,” growled Burya. “She came with the Festival. Knows what’s going on.” He rubbed his forehead, as if the effort of making that much of a concession to her superior knowledge was painful.