A few hours later, Rachel lay facedown on her bunk and tried to shut the world out of her head. It wasn’t easy; too much of the world had followed her home over the years, crying for attention.
She was still alive. She knew, somehow, that she should feel relieved about this, but what she’d seen in the briefing room screen had unnerved her more than she was willing to admit. The admiral was a senile vacuum at the heart of the enterprise. The intelligence staff were well-meaning, but profoundly ignorant: they were so inflexible that they were incapable of doing their job properly. She’d tried to explain how advanced civilizations worked until she could feel herself turning blue in the face, and they still didn’t understand! They’d nodded politely, because she was a lady — even if a somewhat scandalous one, a lady diplomat—and immediately forgotten or ignored her advice.
You don’t fight an infowar attack with missiles and lasers, any more than you attack a railway locomotive with spears and stone axes. You don’t fight a replicator attack by throwing energy and matter at machines that will just use them for fuel. They’d nodded approvingly and gone on to discuss the virtues of active countermeasures versus low-observability systems. And they still didn’t get it; it was as if the very idea of something like the Festival, or even the Septagon system, occupied a mental blind spot ubiquitous in their civilization. They could accept a woman in trousers, even in a colonel’s uniform, far more easily than they could cope with the idea of a technological singularity.
Back on Earth, she had attended a seminar, years ago. It had been a weeklong gathering of experts; hermeneutic engineers driven mad by studying the arcane debris of the Singularity, demographers still trying to puzzle out the distribution of colony worlds, a couple of tight-lipped mercenary commanders and commercial intelligence consultants absorbed in long-range backstop insurance against a return of the Eschaton. They were all thrown together and mixed with a coterie of Defense SIG experts and UN
diplomats. It was hosted by the UN, which, as the sole remaining island of concrete stability in a sea of pocket polities, was the only body able to host such a global event.
During the seminar, she had attended a cocktail party on a balcony of white concrete, jutting from a huge hotel built on the edge of the UN city, Geneva. She’d been in uniform at the time, working as an auditor for the denuclearization commission. Black suit, white gloves, mirrorshades pulsing news updates and radiation readings into her raw and tired eyes. Hyped up on a cocktail of alcohol antagonists, she sipped a bitter (and ineffective) gin with a polite Belgian cosmologist. Mutual incomprehension tinged with apprehension bound them in an uncomfortable Ping-Pong match of a conversation. “There is so much we do not understand about the Eschaton,” the cosmologist had insisted, “especially concerning its interaction with the birth of the universe. The big bang.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.
“The big bang. Not, by any chance, an unscheduled fissile criticality excursion, was it?” She said it deadpan, trying to deflect him with humor.
“Hardly. There were no licensing bodies in those days — at the start of space-time, before the era of expansion and the first appearance of mass and energy, about a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of a second into the life of the universe.”
“Surely the Eschaton can’t have been responsible for that. It’s a modern phenomenon, isn’t it?”
“Maybe not responsible,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “But maybe circumstances arising then formed a necessary precondition for the Eschaton’s existence, or the existence of something related to but beyond the Eschaton. There’s a whole school of cosmology predicated around the weak anthropic principle, that the universe is as it seems because, if it was any other way, we would not exist to observe it. There is a … less popular field, based on the strong anthropic principle, that the universe exists to give rise to certain types of entity. I don’t believe we’ll ever understand the Eschaton until we understand why the universe exists.”
She smiled at him toothily, and let a Prussian diplomat rescue her with the aid of a polite bow and an offer to explain the fall of Warsaw during the late unpleasantness in the Baltic. A year or so later, the polite cosmologist had been murdered by Algerian religious fundamentalists who thought his account of the universe a blasphemy against the words of the prophet Yusuf Smith as inscribed on his two tablets of gold. But that was typical of Europe, half-empty and prey to what the formerly Islamic world had become.
Somewhere along the line she, too, had changed. She’d spent decades — the best part of her second, early-twenty-second-century life — fighting the evils of nuclear proliferation. Starting out as a dreadlocked direct-action activist, chaining herself to fences, secure in the naive youthful belief that no harm could befall her. Later, she’d figured out that the way to do it was wearing a smart suit, with mercenary soldiers and the threat of canceled insurance policies backing up her quiet voice. Still prickly and direct, but less of a knee-jerk nonconformist, she’d learned to work the system for maximum effect. The hydra seemed halfway under control, bombings down to only one every couple of years, when Bertil had summoned her to Geneva and offered her a new job. Then she’d wished she’d paid more attention to the cosmologist — for the Algerian Latter-Day Saints had been very thorough in their suppression of the Tiplerite heresy — but it was too late, and in any event, the minutiae of the Standing Committee’s investigations into chronological and probabilistic warfare beckoned.
Somewhere along the line, the idealist had butted heads with the pragmatist, and the pragmatist won.
Maybe the seeds had been sown during her first marriage. Maybe it had come later; being shot in the back and spending six months recovering in hospital in Calcutta had changed her. She’d done her share of shooting, too, or at least directing the machinery of preemptive vengeance, wiping out more than one cell of atomic-empowered fanatics — whether central-Asian independence fighters, freelance meres with a bomb too many in their basement, or on one notable occasion, radical prolifers willing to go to any lengths to protect the unborn child. Idealism couldn’t coexist with so many other people’s ideals, betrayed in their execution by the tools they’d chosen. She’d walked through Manchester three days after the InterCity Firm’s final kickoff, before the rain had swept the sad mounds of cinders and bone from the blasted streets. She’d become so cynical that only a complete change of agenda, a wide-angle view of the prospects for humanity, could help her retain her self-respect.
And so to the New Republic. A shithole of a backwater, in her frank opinion; in need of remodeling by any means necessary, lest it pollute its more enlightened neighboring principalities, like Malacia or Turku.
But the natives were still people — and for all that they tampered with the machineries of mass destruction in apparent ignorance of their power, they deserved better than they’d receive from an awakened and angry Eschaton. They deserved better than to be left to butt heads with something they didn’t understand, like the Festival, whatever it was: if they couldn’t understand it, then maybe she’d have to think the unthinkable for them, help them to reach some kind of accommodation with it — if that was possible. The alarming aspect to the UN’s knowledge of the Festival — the only thing she hadn’t told Bauer about — was that antitech colonies contacted by it disappeared, leaving only wreckage behind when the Festival moved on. Just why this might be she didn’t know, but it didn’t bode well for the future.