Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
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2024-12-06
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Singularity Sky
SINGULARITY SKY
c
Charles Stross
CONTENTS
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Singularity Sky
The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above
Novy Petrograd. Some of them had half melted in the heat of re-entry; others pinged and ticked, cooling
rapidly in the postdawn chill. An inquisitive pigeon hopped close, head cocked to one side; it pecked at
the shiny case of one such device, then fluttered away in alarm when it beeped. A tinny voice spoke:
“Hello? Will you entertain us?”
The Festival had come to Rochard’s World.
A skinny street urchin was one of the first victims of the assault on the economic integrity of the New
Republic’s youngest colony world. Rudi—nobody knew his patronymic, or indeed his father—spotted
one of the phones lying in the gutter of a filthy alleyway as he went about his daily work, a malodorous
sack wrapped around his skinny shoulders like a soldier’s bedroll. The telephone lay on the chipped
stones, gleaming like polished gunmetal: he glanced around furtively before picking it up, in case the
gentleman who must have dropped it was still nearby. When it chirped he nearly dropped it out of fear: a
machine! Machines were upper-class and forbidden, guarded by the grim faces and gray uniforms of
authority. Nevertheless, if he brought it home to Uncle Schmuel, there might be good eating: better than
he could buy with the proceeds of the day’s sackful of dog turds for the tannery. He turned it over in his
hands, wondering how to shut it up, and a tinny voice spoke: “Hello? Will you entertain us?”
Rudi nearly dropped the phone and ran, but curiosity held him back for a moment: “Why?”
“Entertain us and we will give you anything you want.”
Rudi’s eyes widened. The metal wafer gleamed with promise between his cupped hands. He
remembered the fairy stories his eldest sister used to tell before the coughing sickness took her, tales of
magic lamps and magicians and djinn that he was sure Father Borozovski would condemn as infidel
nonsense; and his need for escape from the dull brutality of everyday life did battle with his natural
pessimism—the pessimism of barely more than a decade of backbreaking labor. Realism won. What he
said was not, I want a magic flying carpet and a purse full of gold roubles or I want to be Prince Mikhail
in his royal palace, but, “Can you feed my family?”
“Yes. Entertain us, and we will feed your family.”
Rudi racked his brains, having no idea how to go about this exotic task; then he blinked. It was obvious!
He held the phone to his mouth, and whispered, “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
By the end of that day, when the manna had begun to fall from orbit and men’s dreams were coming to
life like strange vines blooming after rain in the desert, Rudi and his family— sick mother, drunken
uncle, and seven siblings—were no longer part of the political economy of the New Republic.
War had been declared.
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Singularity Sky
Deep in the outer reaches of the star system, the Festival’s constructor fleet created structure out of dead
mass. The Festival fleet traveled light, packed down into migratory starwisps that disdained the
scurrying FTL of merely human clades. When it arrived, fusion pods burned bright as insectile A-life
spawned furiously in the frigid depths of the outer system. Once the habitats were complete and moved
into orbit around the destination planet, the Festival travelers would emerge from aestivation, ready to
trade and listen.
Rochard’s World was a backwater colony of the New Republic, itself not exactly the most forward-
looking of post-Diaspora human civilizations. With a limited industrial base to attract trade—limited by
statute, as well as by ability—few eyes scanned the heavens for the telltale signatures of visiting ships.
Only the spaceport, balanced in ground-synchronous orbit, kept a watch, and that was focused on the
inner-system ecliptic. The Festival fleet had dismantled a gas giant moon and three comets, begun work
on a second moon, and was preparing to rain telephones from orbit before the Imperial Traffic Control
Bureau noticed that anything was amiss.
Moreover, there was considerable confusion at first. The New Republic was, if not part of the core
worlds, not far out of it; whereas the Festival’s origin lay far outside the light cone of the New
Republic’s origin, more than a thousand light-years from old anarchist Earth. Although they shared a
common ancestry, the New Republic and the Festival had diverged for so many centuries that everything
—from their communications protocols to their political economies, by way of their genome—was
different. So it was that the Festival orbiters noticed (and ignored) the slow, monochromatic witterings
of Imperial Traffic Control. More inexplicably, it did not occur to anybody in the Ducal palace to
actually pick up one of the half-melted telephones littering their countryside, and ask, “Who are you and
what do you want?” But perhaps this was not so surprising; because by midafternoon Novy Petrograd
was in a state of barely controlled civil insurrection.
Burya Rubenstein, the radical journalist, democratic agitator, and sometime political prisoner (living in
internal exile on the outskirts of the city, forbidden to return to the father planet—to say nothing of his
mistress and sons—for at least another decade) prodded at the silvery artifact on his desk with a finger
stained black from the leaky barrel of his pen. “You say these have been falling everywhere?” he stated,
ominously quietly.
Marcus Wolff nodded. “All over town. Misha wired me from the back country to say it’s happening
there, too. The Duke’s men are out in force with brooms and sacks, picking them up, but there are too
many for them. Other things, too.“
“Other things.” It wasn’t phrased as a question, but Burya’s raised eyebrow made his meaning clear.
“Things falling from the skies—and not the usual rain of frogs!” Oleg Timoshevski bounced up and
down excitedly, nearly upsetting one of the typecases that sat on the kitchen table beside him, part of the
unlicensed printing press that Rubenstein has established on peril of another decade’s internal exile.
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Singularity Sky
“The things—like a telephone, I think, at least they talk back when you ask them something—all say the
same thing; entertain us, educate us, we will give you anything you want in return! And they do! I saw a
bicycle fall from the skies with my own eyes! And all because Georgi Pavlovich said he wanted one, and
told the machine the story of Roland while he waited.”
“I find this hard to believe. Perhaps we should put it to the test?” Burya grinned wolfishly, in a way that
reminded Marcus of the old days, when Burya had a fire in his belly, a revolver in his hand, and the ear
of ten thousand workers of the Rail-yard Engineering Union during the abortive October Uprising
twelve years earlier. “Certainly if our mysterious benefactors are happy to trade bicycles for old stories,
I wonder what they might be willing to exchange for a general theory of postindustrial political
economy?”
“Better dine with the devil with a long, long spoon,” warned Marcus.
“Oh, never fear; all I want to do is ask some questions.” Rubenstein picked up the telephone and turned
it over in his hands, curiously. “Where’s the—ah. Here. Machine. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” The voice was faint, oddly accentless, and slightly musical.
“Good. Who are you, where are you from, and what do you want?”
“We are Festival.” The three dissidents leaned closer, almost bumping heads over the telephone. “We
have traveled many two-hundred-and-fifty-sixes of light-years, visiting many sixteens of inhabited
planets. We are seekers of information. We trade.”
“You trade?” Burya glanced up, a trifle disappointed; interstellar capitalist entrepreneurs were not what
he had been hoping for.
“We give you anything. You give us something. Anything we don’t already know: art, mathematics,
comedy, literature, biography, religion, genes, designs. What do you want to give us?”
“When you say you give us anything, what do you mean? Immortal youth? Freedom?” A faint note of
sarcasm hovered on his words, but Festival showed no sign of noticing.
“Abstracts are difficult. Information exchange difficult, too—low bandwidth here, no access. But we can
make any structures you want, drop them from orbit. You want new house? Horseless carriage that flies
and swims as well? Clothing? We make.”
Timoshevski gaped. “You have a Cornucopia machine?” he demanded breathlessly. Burya bit his
tongue; an interruption it might be, but a perfectly understandable one.
“Yes.”
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Singularity Sky
“Will you give us one? Along with instructions for using it and a colony design library?” asked Burya,
his pulse pounding.
“Maybe. What will you give us?”
“Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the
dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and
exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-
replicating means of production?”
There was a pause, and Timoshevski exhaled furiously. Just as he was about to speak, the telephone
made an odd bell-like noise: “That will be sufficient. You will deliver the theory to this node.
Arrangements to clone a replicator and library are now under way. Query: ability to deliver postulated
proof of validity of theory?”
Burya grinned. “Does your replicator contain schemata for replicating itself? And does it contain
schemata for producing direct fusion weapons, military aircraft, and guns?”
“Yes and yes to all subqueries. Query: ability to deliver postulated proof of validity of theory?”
Timoshevski was punching the air and bouncing around the office. Even the normally phlegmatic Wolff
was grinning like a maniac. “Just give the workers the means of production, and we’ll prove the theory,”
said Rubenstein. “We need to talk in private. Back in an hour, with the texts you requested.” He pressed
the OFF switch on the telephone. “Yes!”
After a minute, Timoshevski calmed down a bit. Rubenstein waited indulgently; truth be told, he felt the
same way himself. But it was his duty as leader of the movement—or at least the nearest thing they had
to a statesman, serving his involuntary internal exile out on this flea-pit of a backwater—to think ahead.
And a lot of thinking needed to be done, because shortly heads would be brought into contact with
paving stones in large numbers: the Festival, whoever and whatever it was, seemed unaware that they
had offered to trade for a parcel of paper the key to the jail in which tens of millions of serfs had been
confined for centuries by their aristocratic owners. All in the name of stability and tradition.
“Friends,” he said, voice shaking with emotion, “let us hope that this is not just a cruel hoax. For if it is
not, we can at last lay to rest the cruel specter that has haunted the New Republic since its inception. I’d
been hoping for assistance along these lines from a—source, but this is far better if it is true. Marcus,
fetch as many members of the committee as you can find. Oleg, I’m going to draft a poster; we need to
run off five thousand copies immediately and get them distributed tonight before Politovsky thinks to
pull his finger out and declare a state of emergency. Today, Rochard’s World stands on the brink of
liberation. Tomorrow, the New Republic!”
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Singularity Sky
The next morning, at dawn, troops from the Ducal palace guard and the garrison on Skull Hill,
overlooking the old town, hanged six peasants and technicians in the market square. The execution was
a warning, to accompany the Ducal decree: Treat with the Festival and you die. Someone, probably in
the Curator’s Office, had realized the lethal danger the Festival posed to the regime and decided an
example must be made. They were too late to stop the Democratic Revolutionary Party from plastering
posters explaining just what the telephones were all over town, and pointing out that, in the words of the
old proverb, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day— teach him to fish, feed him for life.” More radical
posters exhorting the workers to demand the means of constructing self-replicating tools rang a powerful
chord in the collective psyche, for whatever the regime might have wished, folk memories lived on.
At lunchtime, four bank robbers held up the main post office in Plotsk, eighty kilometers to the north of
the capital. The bank robbers carried exotic weapons, and when a police Zeppelin arrived over the scene
it was shot to pieces. This was not an isolated incident. All over the planet, the police and state security
apparat reported incidents of outrageous defiance, in many cases backed up with advanced weapons that
had appeared as if from thin air. Meanwhile, strange, dome-like dwellings mushroomed on a thousand
peasant farms in the outback, as palatially equipped and comfortable as any Ducal residence.
Pinpricks of light blossomed overhead, and radios gave forth nothing but hissing static for hours
afterward. Sometime later, the glowing trails of emergency re-entry capsules skidded across the sky a
thousand kilometers south of Novy Petrograd. The Navy announced that evening, with deep regrets, the
loss of the destroyer Sakhalin in a heroic attack on the enemy battle fleet besieging the colony. It had
inflicted serious damage on the aggressors; nevertheless, reinforcements had been requested from the
Imperial capital via Causal Channel, and the matter was being treated with the utmost gravity by His
Imperial Majesty.
Spontaneous demonstrations by workers and soldiers marred the night, while armored cars were
deployed to secure the bridges across the Hava River that separated the Ducal palace and the garrison
from the city proper.
And most sinister of all, an impromptu fair began to grow in the open space of the Northern Parade Field
—a fair where nobody worked, everything was free, and anything that anybody could possibly want
(and a few things that nobody in their right mind would desire) could be obtained free for the asking.
On the third day of the incursion, His Excellency Duke Felix Politovsky, Governor of Rochard’s World,
entered the Star Chamber to meet with his staff and, by way of an eye-wateringly expensive
teleconference, to appeal for help from his Emperor.
Politovsky was a thick-set, white-haired man of some sixty-four years, unpreserved by contraband anti-
aging medical treatments. It was said by some that he was lacking in imagination, and he had certainly
not been appointed governor of a raw backwater dumping ground for troublemakers and second sons
because of his overwhelming political acumen. However, despite his bull-headed disposition and lack of
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insight, Felix Politovsky was deeply worried.
Men in uniform and the formal dress of his diplomatic staff stood to attention as he entered the richly
paneled room and marched to the head of the conference table. “Gentlemen. Please be seated,” he
grunted, dropping into the armchair that two servants unobtrusively held out for him. “Beck, have there
been any developments overnight?”
Gerhard Von Beck, Citizen, head of the local office of the Curator’s Office, shook his head gloomily.
“More riots on the south bank; they didn’t stay to fight when I sent a guard detachment. So far, morale
in the barracks seems to be holding up. Molinsk is cut off; there have been no reports from that town for
the past day, and a helicopter that was sent to look in on them never reported back. The DR’s are raising
seven shades of merry hell around town, and so are the Radicals. I tried to have the usual suspects taken
into custody, but they’ve declared an Extropian Soviet and refuse to cooperate. The worst elements are
holed up in the Corn Exchange, two miles south of here, holding continuous committee meetings, and
issuing proclamations and revolutionary communique on the hour, every hour. Encouraging people to
traffic with the enemy.”
“Why haven’t you used troops?” rumbled Politovsky.
“They say they’ve got atomic weapons. If we move in—” He shrugged.
“Oh.” The Governor rubbed his walrus moustache lugubriously and sighed. “Commander Janaczeck.
What news of the Navy?”
Janaczeck stood. A tall, worried-looking man in a naval officer’s dress uniform, he looked even more
nervous than the otherwise controlled Von Beck. “There were two survival capsules from the wreck of
the Sakhalin; both have now been recovered, and the survivors debriefed. It would appear that the
Sakhalin approached one of the larger enemy intruders and demanded that they withdraw from low orbit
immediately and yield to customs inspection. The intruder made no response, so Sakhalin fired across
her path. What happened next is confused—none of the survivors were bridge officers, and their reports
are contradictory—but it appears that there was an impact with some sort of foreign body, which then
ate the destroyer.”
“Ate it?”
“Yes, sir.” Janaczeck gulped. “Forbidden technology.”
Politovsky turned pale. “Borman?”
“Yes, sir?” His adjutant sat up attentively.
“Obviously, this situation exceeds our ability to deal with it without extra resources. How much acausal
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bandwidth does the Post Office have in hand for a televisor conference with the capital?”
“Um, ah, fifty minutes’ worth, sir. The next consignment of entangled qubits between here and New
Prague is due to arrive by ramscoop in, ah, eighteen months. If I may make so bold, sir—”
“Speak.”
“Could we retain a minute of bandwidth in stock, for text-only messages? I realize that this is an
emergency, but if we drain the current channel we will be out of touch with the capital until the next
shipment is available. And, with all due respect to Commander Janaczeck, I’m not sure the Navy will be
able to reliably run dispatch boats past the enemy.”
“Do it.” Politovsky sat up, stretching his shoulders. “One minute, mind. The rest available for a televisor
conference with His Majesty, at his earliest convenience. You will set up the conference and notify me
when it is ready. Oh, and while you’re about it, here.” He leaned forward and scribbled a hasty signature
on a letter from his portfolio. “I enact this state of emergency and by the authority vested in me by God
and His Imperial Majesty I decree that this constitutes a state of war with—who the devil are we at war
with?”
Von Beck cleared his throat. “They seem to call themselves the Festival, sir. Unfortunately, we don’t
appear to have any more information about them on file, and requests to the Curator’s Archives drew a
blank.”
“Very well.” Borman passed Politovsky a note, and the Governor stood. “Gentlemen, please stand for
His Imperial Majesty!”
They stood and, as one man, turned expectantly to face the screen on the far wall of the conference room.
The Gathering Storm
“May I ask what I’m charged with?“ asked Martin.
The sunshine filtering through the skylight high overhead skewered the stuffy office air with bars of
silver: Martin watched dust motes dance like stars behind the Citizen’s bullet-shaped head. The only
noises in the room were the scratching of his pen on heavy official vellum and the repetitive grinding of
gears as his assistant rewound the clockwork drive mechanism on his desktop analytical engine. The
room smelled of machine oil and stale fear.
“Am I being charged with anything?” Martin persisted.
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The Citizen ignored him and bent his head back to his forms. His young assistant, his regular chore
complete, began unloading a paper tape from the engine.
Martin stood up. “If I am not being charged with anything, is there any reason why I should stay?”
This time the Citizen Curator glared at him. “Sit,” he snapped.
Martin sat.
Outside the skylight, it was a clear, cold April afternoon; the clocks of St Michael had just finished
striking fourteen hundred, and in the Square of the Five Corners, the famous Duchess’s Simulacrum was
jerking through its eternal pantomime. The boredom grated on Martin. He found it difficult to adapt to
the pace of events in the New Republic; it was doubly infuriating when he was faced with the eternal
bureaucracy. He’d been here for four months now, four stinking months on a job which should have
taken ten days. He was beginning to wonder if he would live to see Earth again before he died of old age.
In fact, he was so bored with waiting for his work clearance to materialize that this morning’s summons
to an office somewhere behind the iron facade of the Basilisk came as a relief, something to break the
monotony. It didn’t fill him with the stuttering panic that such an appointment would have kindled in the
heart of a subject of the New Republic—what, after all, could the Curator’s Office do to him, an off-
world engineering contractor with a cast-iron Admiralty contract? The summons had come on a plate
borne by a uniformed courier, and not as a night-time raid. That fact alone suggested a degree of
restraint and, consequently, an approach to adopt, and Martin resolved to play the bemused alien visitor
card as hard as he could.
After another minute, the Citizen lowered his pen and looked at Martin. “Please state your name,” he
said softly.
Martin crossed his arms. “If you don’t know it already, why am I here?” he asked.
“Please state your name for the record.” The Citizen’s voice was low, clipped, and as controlled as a
machine. He spoke the local trade-lingua—a derivative of the nearly universal old English tongue—with
a somewhat heavy, Germanic accent.
“Martin Springfield.”
The Citizen made a note. “Now please state your nationality.”
“My what?”
Martin must have looked nonplussed, for the Citizen raised a gray-flecked eyebrow. “Please state your
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