Sister Seventh lost herself for a while in the flux of knowledge from the Festival. It let a filtered feed of its awareness escape, titillating the Critic colony in orbit, who relayed choice tidbits her way. The Festival propagated by starwisp, that much was true. It also relied on causal channels to relay its discoveries home. Now, great Higgs boson factories were taking shape in the rings of machinery orbiting Sputnik, icy gas and dust congealing into beat-wave particle accelerators on the edge of planetary space. Thousands of huge fusion reactors were coming on-stream, each pumping out enough energy to run a continental civilization. The first batch of new starwisps was nearing readiness, and they had a voracious appetite, a tonne of stabilized antimatter each; then there were the causal channels, petabytes and exabytes of entangled particles to manufacture and laboriously, non-observationally, separate into matching batches.
The first starwisps would soon take on their payloads, point their stubby noses at the void, and accelerate at nearly half a million gees, sitting atop the neutral particle beams emitted by vast launch engines in high orbit above Rochard’s World. Their primary destinations were the last two stops on the Festival’s route, to deliver fresh channels and a detailed report on the current visit; their other destinations — well, the Festival had been encamped for three months. Soon the traders would arrive.
Traders followed the Festival everywhere. A self-replicating, natural source of causal channels, the Festival laid down avenues of communication, opening up new civilizations to trade — civilizations which, in the wake of a visitation, were usually too culture-shocked to object to the Traders’ abstraction of the huge structures the Festival had constructed and abandoned for its own purposes. More than a thousand megafortunes had been made by natives of dirt-based trader civilizations with FTL ships and just enough nous to follow the trail of the Festival; like birds in the wake of a plow turning over rich farm soil, they waited to pounce on juicy nuggets of intellectual property turned up by the passing farmer.
Now something new tickled Sister Seventh’s hindbrain. She stopped beside a font and stooped to drink.
A message from She Who Observes the First. Ships coming. Festival notices. Many ships coming in silence. Now that was interesting; normally, the traders would appear like a three-ring circus, flashing lights and loud music playing on all available wavelengths, trying to attract attention. Stealth meant trouble. Forty-two vessels itemized. All with drive kernels, all with low emissions: query thermal dump to stern, reduce visibility from frontal aspect. Range seven light-seconds.
How peculiar. Sister Seventh straightened up. Someone — no, some construct of the Festival, human-child-high, but with long, floppy ears and a glossy fur coat, eyes mounted on the sides of its rodent face — was coming in through the side door.
Sister mine. What reflex of Festival? she asked silently. Hardwired extensions patched her through the Festival’s telephonic nervous system, building a bridge to her sibling.
Festival has noticed. Current activities not over; will not tolerate interference. Three Bouncers have been dispatched.
Sister of Stratagems the Seventh shivered and bared her teeth. There were few things about the Festival that scared her, but Bouncers were second on the list, right behind the Fringe. The Fringe might kill you out of random pique. The Bouncers were rather less random …
The leporine apparition in the aisle bounced toward her, a panicky expression on its face. Burya stopped lecturing Timoshevski and looked around. “What is it?” he demanded.
Timoshevski rumbled forward. “Am thinking is rabbit stew for dinner.”
“No! Please, sirs! Help!” The rabbit stopped short of them, pushing two aggrieved babushkas aside, and held out its front limbs — arms, Sister Seventh noticed, with disturbingly human hands at their extremities.
It was wearing a waistcoat that appeared to consist entirely of pockets held together by zip fasteners.
“Master in trouble!”
“Are no masters here, comrade,” said Timoshevski, apparently categorizing the supplicant as inedible.
‘True revolutionary doctrine teaches that the only law is rationalism and dynamic optimism. Where are you from, and where is your internal passport?“
Rabbits have little control over their facial muscles; nevertheless, this one made a passable show of being nonplussed. “Need help,” it bleated, then paused, visibly gathering self-control. “My master is in trouble.
Mime hunt! They got between us, a village ago; I escaped, but I fear they’re coming this way.”
“Mimes?” Timoshevski looked puzzled. “Not clowns?” A metallic tentacle tipped in gun-muzzle flanges uncurled from his back, poked questing into the air. “Circus?”
“Circus of death,” said Sister Seventh. “Fringe performance, very poor. If coming this way, will interfere with popular acclaim of your revolution.”
“Oh, how so?” Timoshevski focused on Sister Seventh suspiciously.
“Listen to her, Oleg,” growled Burya. “She came with the Festival. Knows what’s going on.” He rubbed his forehead, as if the effort of making that much of a concession to her superior knowledge was painful.
“Oh?” Wheels turned slowly behind Timoshevski’s skull; evidently his plethora of augmentations took a goodly amount of his attention to run.
Sister Seventh stamped, shaking the floor. “Mimes are boring. Say help rabbit. Learn something new, maybe stage rescue drama?”
“If you say so.” Burya turned to Oleg. “Listen, you’re doing a reasonable job holding things down. I’d like to take six of your finest — who do I talk to? — and go sort these Mimes out. We really don’t need them messing things up; I’ve seen what they do, and I don’t like it.” A sallow-faced commissar behind Oleg shouldered his way forward. “I don’t see why we should listen to you, you pork-fed cosmopolitan,” he snarled in a thick accent. “This isn’t your revolution; this is the independent Plotsk soviet soyuz community, and we don’t take any centralist reactionary shit!”
“Quiet, Babar,” said Oleg. The tentacle sticking out of his back rotated to face the easterner: a dim red light glowed from its tip. “Burya is good comrade. If wanted force centralism on us, am thinking he would have come with force, no?”
“He did,” said Sister Seventh, but the revolutionaries ignored her.
“He go with detachment of guards. End to argument,” Oleg continued. “A fine revolutionary; trust him do right by this— rabbit.”
“You better be right, Timoshevski,” grunted Babar. “Not fools, us. Am not tolerating failure.” Sauer was out of the wardroom and into the security watch office less than a minute after regaining consciousness, cursing horribly, blinking back a painful chloroform headache, and tugging creases from his rumpled and spattered tunic. The petty officer on duty sprang to his feet hastily, saluting; Sauer cut him off. “General security alert. I want a full search for the UN spy and the shipyard engineer immediately, all points. Pull all the surveillance records for the UN spy in the past hour on my workstation, soon as you’ve got the search started. I want a complete inventory on all off-duty personnel as soon as you’ve done that.” He flung himself down behind his desk angrily. He ran fingers through his razor-cut hair and glared at the screen set into his desktop, then hit the switchboard button. “Get me the duty officer in ops,” he grunted. Turning around, “Chief, what I said — I need it now. Grab anyone you need.”