“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.”
“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!”
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 reentry 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 antiaging 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 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.”