A shiver ran up and down Burya’s spine. “I think I’m sapient,” he said cautiously. “Of course, I’d say that even if I wasn’t, wouldn’t I? Your question is unanswerable. So why ask it?” Sister Seventh leaned forward. “None of your people ask anything,” she hissed. “Food, yes. Guns, yes.
Wisdom? No. Am beginning think you not aware of selves, ask nothing.”
“What’s to ask for?” Burya shrugged. “We know who we are and what we’re doing. What should we want — alien philosophies?”
“Aliens want your philosophy,” Sister Seventh pointed out. “You give. You not take. This is insult to Festival. Why? Prime interrogative!”
“I’m not sure I understand. Are you complaining because we’re not making demands?” Sister Seventh chomped at the air, clattering her tusks together. “Ack! Quote, the viability of a postsingularity economy of scarcity is indicated by the transition from an indirection-layer-based economy using markers of exchange of goods and services to a tree-structured economy characterized by optimal allocation of productivity systems in accordance with iterated tit-for-tat prisoner’s dilemma.
Money is a symptom of poverty and inefficiency. Unquote, the Marxist-Gilderist manifesto. Chapter two.
Why you not performing?”
“Because most of our people aren’t ready for that,” Burya said bluntly. A tension in his back began to relax; if this monstrous Critic wanted to debate revolutionary dialectic, well of course he could oblige!
“When we achieve the post-technological Utopia, it will be as you say. But for now, we need a vanguard party to lead the people to a full understanding of the principles of ideological correctness and posteconomic optimization.”
“But Marxism-Gilderism and Democratic Extropianism is anarchist aesthetic. Why vanguard party? Why committee? Why revolution?”
“Because it’s traditional, dammit!” Rubenstein exploded. “We’ve been waiting for this particular revolution for more than two hundred years. Before that, two hundred years back to the first revolution, this is how we’ve gone about it. And it works! So why shouldn’t we do it this way?”
“Talk you of tradition in middle of singularity.” Sister Seventh twisted her head around to look out the windows at the foggy evening drizzle beyond. ”Perplexity maximizes. Not understand singularity is discontinuity with all tradition? Revolution is necessary; deconstruct the old, ring in the new. Before, I questioned your sapience. Now, your sanity questionable: sapience not. Only sapient organism could exhibit superlative irrationality!“
“That may be true.” Rubenstein gently squeezed the buzzer under his desk edge for the third time. Why isn’t it working? He wondered. “But what do you want here, with me?” Sister Seventh bared her teeth in a grin. “I come to deliver Criticism.” Ruby teardrop eyes focused on him as she surged to her feet, rippling slabs of muscle moving under her muddy brown skin. A fringe of reddish hair rippled erect on the Critic’s head. “Your guards not answer. I Criticize. You come: now!” The operations room on board the Lord Vanek was quiet, relaxed by comparison with the near panic at Wolf Depository; still, nobody could have mistaken it for a home cruise. Not with Ilya Murametz standing at the rear, watching everything intently. Not with the old man dropping by at least twice a day, just nodding from inside the doorway, but letting them know he was there. Not with the Admiral’s occasional presence, glowering silently from his wheelchair like a reminder of the last war.
“Final maneuver option in one hour,” announced the helm supervisor.
“Continue as ordered.”
“Continue as ordered, aye. Recce? Your ball.”
“Ready and waiting.” Lieutenant Marek turned around in his chair and looked at Ilya inquiringly. “Do you want to inspect the drone, sir?”
“No. If it doesn’t run, I’ll know whom to blame.” Ilya smiled, trying to pull some of the sting from his words; with his lips pulled back from his teeth, it merely made him look like a cornered wolf. “Launch profile?”
“Holding at minus ten minutes, sir.”
“Right, then. Run the self-test sequence again. It can’t hurt.” Everyone was on edge from not knowing for sure whether the metallic reflector they’d picked up was the time capsule from home. Maybe the drone would tell them, and maybe not. But the longer they waited, the more edgy everyone got, and the edgier they were, the more likely they were to make mistakes.
“Looks pretty good to me. Engine idle at about one percent, fuel tanks loaded, ullage rail and umbilical disconnects latched and ready, instrument package singing loud on all channels. I’m ready to begin launch bay closeout whenever you say, sir.”
“Well then.” Ilya breathed deeply. “Get on the blower to whoever’s keeping an eye on it. Get things moving.”
Down near the back end of the ship, far below the drive compartment and stores, lay a series of airlocks.
Some of them were small, designed for crew egress; others were larger, and held entire service vehicles like the station transfer shuttle. One bay, the largest of all, held a pair of reconnaissance drones: three-hundred-tonne robots capable of surveying a star system or mapping a gas giant’s moons. The drones couldn’t carry a gravity drive (nothing much smaller than a destroyer could manage that), but they could boost at a respectable twentieth of a gee on the back of their nuclear-electric ion rocket, and they could keep it up for a very long time indeed. For faster flybys, they could be equipped with saltwater-fueled fission rockets like those of the Lord Vanek’s long-range torpedoes — but those were dirty, relatively inefficient, and not at all suited to the stealthy mapping of a planetary system.
Each of the drones carried an instrument package studded with more sensors than every probe launched from Earth during the twentieth century. They were a throwback to the Lord Vanek’s nominal design mission, the semi-ironic goal inscribed on the end-user certificate: to boldly go where no man had gone before, to map new star systems on long-duration missions, and claim them in the name of the Emperor.
Dropped off in an uninhabited system, a probe could map it in a couple of years and be ready to report in full when the battlecruiser returned from its own destination. They were a force multiplier for the colonial cartographers, enabling one survey ship to map three systems simultaneously.
Deep in the guts of the Lord Vanek, probe one was now waking up from its two-year sleep. A team of ratings hurried under the vigilant gaze of two chief petty officers, uncoupling the heavy fueling pipes and locking down inspection hatches. Sitting in a lead-lined coffin, probe one gurgled and pinged on a belly full of reaction mass and liquid water refrigerant. The compact fusion reactor buzzed gently, its beat-wave accelerators ramming a mixture of electrons and pions into a stream of lithium ions at just under the speed of light; neutrons spalled off, soaked into the jacket of water pipes, warming them and feeding pressure waves into the closed-circuit cooling system. The secondary solar generators, dismounted for this mission because of their irrelevance, lay in sheets at one end of the probe bay.
“Five minutes to go. Launch bay reports main reactor compartment closeout. Wet crew have cleared the fueling hoses, report tank pressure is stable. I’m still waiting on telemetry closeout.”
“Carry on.” Ilya watched patiently as Marek’s team monitored progress on the launch. He looked around briefly as the ops room door slid open; but it wasn’t the Captain or the Commodore, just the spy — no, the diplomatic agent from Earth. Whose presence was a waste of air and space, the Commander opined, although he could see reasons why the Admiral and his staff might not want to impede her nosy scrutiny.