“Ah,” said the Citizen. He laid his pen down very carefully beside his blotter and looked directly at Martin. “I see you fail to understand. I am going to do you a great favor and pretend that I did not hear the last thing you said. Vassily?”
His young assistant looked up. “Yah?”
“Out.”
The assistant — little more than a boy in uniform — stood and marched over to the door. It thudded shut solidly behind him.
“I will say this once, and once only.” The Citizen paused, and Martin realized with a shock that his outward impassivity was a tightly sealed lid holding down a roiling fury: “I do not care what silly ideas the stay-behinds of Earth maintain about their sovereignty. I do not care about being insulted by a young and insolent pup like you. But while you are on this planet you will live by our definitions of what is right and proper! Do I make myself clear?”
Martin recoiled. The Citizen waited to see if he would speak, but when he remained silent, continued icily. “You are here in the New Republic at the invitation of the Government of His Majesty, and will at all times comport yourself accordingly. This includes being respectful to Their Imperial Highnesses, behaving decently, legally, and honestly, paying taxes to the Imperial Treasury, and not spreading subversion. You are here to do a job, not to spread hostile alien propaganda or to denigrate our way of life! Am I making myself understood?”
“I don’t—” Martin paused, hunted for the correct, diplomatic words. “Let me rephrase, please. I am sorry if I have caused offense, but if that’s what I’ve done, would you mind telling me what I did? So I can avoid doing it again. If you won’t tell me what not to do, how can I avoid causing offense by accident?”
“You are unaware?” asked the Citizen. He stood up and paced around Martin, behind his chair, around the desk, and back to his own seat. There he stopped pacing, and glowered furiously. “Two nights ago, in the bar of the Glorious Crown Hotel, you were clearly heard telling someone — a Vaclav Hasek, I believe — about the political system on your home planet. Propaganda and nonsense, but attractive propaganda and nonsense to a certain disaffected segment of the lumpenproletariat. Nonsense verging on sedition, I might add, when you dropped several comments about — let me see—‘the concept of tax is no different from extortion,’ and ‘a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.’ After your fourth beer, you became somewhat merry and began to declaim on the nature of social justice, which is itself something of a problem, insofar as you expressed doubt about the impartiality of a judiciary appointed by His Majesty in trying cases against the Crown.”
“That’s rubbish! Just a conversation over a pint of beer!”
“If you were a citizen, it would be enough to send you on a one-way trip to one of His Majesty’s frontier colonies for the next twenty years,” the Citizen said icily. “The only reason we are having this little tete-a-tete is because your presence in the Royal Dockyards is considered essential. If you indulge in any more such conversations over pints of beer, perhaps the Admiralty may be persuaded to wash their hands of you. And then where will you be?“
Martin shivered; he hadn’t expected the Citizen to be quite so blunt. “Are conversations about politics really that sensitive?” he asked.
“When held in a public place, and engaged in by an off-worlder with strange ideas, yes. The New Republic is not like the degenerate anarchist mess your fatherworld has sunk into. Let me emphasize that.
Because you are a necessary alien, you are granted certain rights by Their Imperial Highnesses. If you go outside those rights, you will be stamped on, and stamped on hard. If you find that difficult to understand, I suggest you spend the remainder of your free time inside your hotel room so that your mouth does not incriminate you accidentally. I ask you for a third time: Do I make myself understood?” Martin looked chastened. “Y-yes,” he said.
“Then get out of my office.”
Evening.
A man of medium height and unremarkable build, with brownish hair and a close-cropped beard, lay fully clad on the ornate counterpane of a hotel bed, a padded eyeshade covering his face. Shadows crept across the gloomy carpet as the sun sank below the horizon. The gas jets in the chandelier hissed, casting deep shadows across the room. A fly buzzed around the upper reaches of the room, pursuing a knife-edged search pattern.
Martin was not asleep. His entire inventory of countersur-veillance drones were out on patrol, searching his room for bugs in case the Curator’s Office was monitoring him. Not that he had many drones to search with: they were strictly illegal in the New Republic, and he’d been forced to smuggle his kit through customs in blocked sebaceous glands and dental caries. Now they were out in force, hunting for listening devices and reporting back to the monitors woven into his eyeshade.
Finally, concluding he was alone in the room, he recalled the fly — its SQUID-sensors untriggered — and put the fleas back into hibernation. He stood up and shuttered the window, then pulled the curtains closed. Short of the Curator’s Office having hidden a mechanical drum-recorder in the back of the wardrobe, he was unable to see any way that they could listen in on him.
He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket (rumpled, now, from being lain upon) and pulled out a slim, leather-bound book. ‘Talk to me.“
“Hello, Martin. Startup completed, confidence one hundred percent.”
“That’s good.” He cleared his throat. “Back channel. Execute. I’d like to talk to Herman.”
“Paging.”
The book fell silent and Martin waited impassively. It looked like a personal assistant, a discreet digital secretary for a modern Terran business consultant. While such devices could be built into any ambient piece of furniture — clothing, even a prosthetic tooth — Martin kept his in the shape of an old-fashioned hardback. However, normal personal assists didn’t come with a causal channel plug-in, especially one with a ninety-light-year reach and five petabits of bandwidth. Even though almost two petabits had been used when the agent-in-place passed it to him via a dead letter drop on a park bench, it was outrageously valuable to Martin. In fact, it was worth his life — if the secret police caught him with it.
A slower-than-light freighter had spent nearly a hundred years hauling the quantum black box at the core of the causal channel out from Septagon system; a twin to it had spent eighty years in the hold of a sister ship, en route to Earth. Now they provided an instantaneous communications channel from one planet to the other; instantaneous in terms of special relativity, but not capable of violating causality, and with a total capacity limited to the number of qubits they had been created with. Once those 5 billion megabits were gone, they’d be gone for good — or until the next slower-than-light freighter arrived.
(Not that such ships were rare — building and launching a one-kilogram starwisp, capable of carrying a whopping great hundred-gram payload across a dozen light-years, wasn’t far above the level of a cottage industry — but the powers that ran things here in the New Republic were notoriously touchy about contact with the ideologically impure outside universe.)
“Hello?” said the PA.
“PA: Is that Herman?” asked Martin.
“PA here. Herman is on the line and all authentication tokens are updated.”
“I had an interview with a Citizen from the Curator’s Office today,” said Martin. “They’re extremely sensitive about subversion.” Twenty-two words in five seconds: sampled at high fidelity, about half a million bits. Transcribed to text, that would make about one hundred bytes, maybe as few as fifty bytes after non-lossy compression. Which left fifty fewer bytes in the link between Martin’s PA and Earth. If Martin went to the Post Office, they would charge him a dollar a word, he’d have to queue for a day, and there would be a postal inspector listening in.