Nonstandard extension pack, he realized. Without thinking, he pushed on it; it clicked out and he pocketed it. There’d be time enough to put it back later if it was innocent. Springfield’s presence on the ship was an aching rasp on his nerves: the man had to be up to something! The Navy had plenty of good engineers; why could they want a foreigner along? After the events of the past couple of weeks, Vassily could not accept that anything less than sabotage could be responsible. As every secret policeman knows, there is no such thing as a coincidence; the state has too many enemies.
He didn’t linger in the engineer’s cabin but paused to palm an inconspicuous little bead under the lower bunk bed. The bead would hatch in a day or so, spinning a spiderweb of receptors; a rare and expensive tool that Vassily was privileged to own.
The doorway clicked locked behind him; amnesiac, it would not report this visit to its owner.
Back in his cabin, Vassily locked his door and sat down on his own bunk. He loosened his collar, then reached into a breast pocket for the small device he had taken. He rolled it over in his fingers, pondering.
It could be anything, anything at all. Taking a small but powerful device from his inventory of tools — one forbidden to any citizen of the Republic except those with an Imperial warrant to save the state from itself— he checked it for activity. There was nothing obvious: it wasn’t emitting radiation, didn’t smell of explosives or bioactive compounds, and had a standard interface.
“Riddle me this: an unknown expansion pod in an engineer’s luggage. I wonder what it is?” he said aloud.
Then he plugged the pod into his own interface and started the diagnostics running. A minute later, he began to swear quietly under his breath. The module was totally randomized. Evidence of misdoing, that was sure enough. But what kind of misdoing?
Burya Rubenstein sat in the Ducal palace, now requisitioned as the headquarters of the Extropians and Cyborgs’ Soviet, sipping tea and signing proclamations with a leaden heart.
Outside the thick oak door of his office, a squad of ward-geese waited patiently, their dark eyes and vicious gunbeaks alert for intruders. The half-melted phone that had started the revolution sat, unused, on the desk before him, while the pile of papers by his left elbow grew higher, and the unsigned pile to his right shrank. It wasn’t a part of the job that he enjoyed— quite the opposite, in fact — but it seemed to be necessary. Here was a soldier convicted of raping and looting a farmstead who needed to be punished.
There, a teacher who had denounced the historical processes of Democratic Transhumanism as misguided technophile pabulum, encouraging his juvenile charges to chant the Emperor’s birthday hymn.
Dross, all dross — and the revolution had no time to sift the dross for gold, rehabilitating and re-educating the fallen: it had been a month since the arrival of Festival, and soon the Emperor’s great steel warships would loom overhead.
If Burya had anything to do with it, they wouldn’t find anyone willing to cooperate in the subjugation of the civil populace, who were now fully caught up in the processes of a full-scale economic singularity. A singularity — a historical cusp at which the rate of change goes exponential, rapidly tending toward infinity — is a terrible thing to taste. The arrival of the Festival in orbit around the pre-industrial colony world had brought an economic singularity; physical wares became just so many atoms, replicated to order by machines that needed no human intervention or maintenance. A hard take-off singularity ripped up social systems and economies and ways of thought like an artillery barrage. Only the forearmed — the Extropian dissident underground, hard men like Burya Rubenstein— were prepared to press their own agenda upon the suddenly molten fabric of a society held too close to the blowtorch of progress.
But change and control brought a price that Rubenstein was finding increasingly unpalatable. Not that he could see any alternatives, but the people were accustomed to being shepherded by father church and the benign dictatorship of the little father, Duke Politovsky. The habits of a dozen lifetimes could not be broken overnight, and to make an omelet it was first necessary to crack some eggshells.
Burya had a fatal flaw; he was not a violent man. He resented and hated the circumstances that forced him to sign arrest warrants and compulsory upload orders; the revolution he had spent so long imagining was a glorious thing, unsullied by brute violence, and the real world — with its recalcitrant monarchist teachers and pigheaded priests — was a grave disappointment to him. The more he was forced to corrupt his ideals, the more he ached inside, and the more it grieved him, the more he hated the people who forced him to such hideous, bloody extremity of action — until they, in turn, became grist for the machinery of revolution, and subsequently bar stock for the scalpel blades that prodded his conscience and kept him awake long into the night, planning the next wave of purges and forcible uploads.
He was deep in his work, oblivious to the outside world, depressed and making himself more so by doing the job that he had always wanted to do but never realized would be this awful — when a voice spoke to him.
“Burya Rubenstein.”
“What!” He looked up, almost guiltily, like a small boy discovered goofing off in class by a particularly stern teacher.
‘Talk. We. Must.“ The thing sitting in the chair opposite him was so nightmarish that he blinked several times before he could make his eyes focus on it. It was hairless and pink and larger-than-human-sized, with stubby legs and paws and little pink eyes — and four huge, yellowing tusks, like the incisors of a rat the size of an elephant. The eyes stared at him with disquieting intelligence as it manipulated an odd pouch molded from the belt that was its only garment. ”You talk. To me.“ Burya adjusted his pince-nez and squinted at the thing. “Who are you and how did you get in here?” he asked. I haven’t been sleeping enough, part of his mind gibbered quietly; I knew the caffeine tablets would do this eventually …
“I am. Sister of Stratagems. The Seventh. I am of the clade of Critics. Talk to me now.” A look of extreme puzzlement crossed Rubenstein’s craggy face. “Didn’t I have you executed last week?”
“I very much doubt. It.” Hot breath that stank of cabbage, corruption and soil steamed in Burya’s face.
“Oh, good.” He leaned back, light-headed. “I’d hate to think I was going mad. How did you sneak past my guards?”
The thing in the chair stared at him. It was an unnerving sensation, like being sized up for a hangman’s noose by a man-eating saber-toothed sausage. “You guards are. Nonsapient. No intentional stance.
Early now, you learn lesson of not trusting unsapient guards to recognize threat. I made self non-threat within their — you have no word for it.”
“I see.” Burya rubbed his forehead distractedly.
“You do not.” Sister Seventh grinned at Rubenstein, and he recoiled before the twenty-centimeter digging fangs, yellow-brown and hard enough to crack concrete. “Ask no questions, human. I ask, are you sapient? Evidence ambiguous. Only sapients create art, but your works not distinctive.”
“I don’t think—” He stopped. “Why do you want to know?”
“A question.” The thing carried on grinning at him. “You asked. A question.” It rocked from side to side, shivering slightly, and Rubenstein began feeling cautiously along the underside of his desk, for the panic button that would set alarm bells ringing in the guardroom. “Good question. I Critic am. Critics follow Festival for many lifetimes. We come to Criticize. First want I to know, am I Criticizing sapients? Or is just puppet show on cave wall of reality? Zombies or zimboes? Shadows of mind? Amusements for Eschaton?”