“First”—Rachel tapped icons busily on the pilot’s console—“we tell the Critics that we’re down safely.
She said she’d try to help us link up. Second, I do this.” She reached up and grabbed the top edge of the display screen. It crumpled like thin plastic, revealing the inner wall of the capsule. A large steamer trunk was half-embedded in the bulkhead, incongruous pipes and cables snaking out of its half-open lid.
“I knew it!” Vassily exclaimed. “You’ve got an illegal—”
“Shut up.” Rachel leaned forward and adjusted something just inside the lid. “Right, now we leave.
Quickly.” Standing up, she unlocked the overhead hatch and let it slide down into the capsule, taking the place of the screen. “Give me a leg up, Martin.”
“Okay.” A minute later, all three of them were sitting on top of the lander. The truncated cone sat in a puddle of yellow inflatable skirts, in the middle of a grassy meadow. To their left, a stream burbled lazily through a thick clump of reeds; to their right, a row of odd, dark conifers formed a wall against the light.
The air was cold and fresh and smelled unbearably clean. “What now?” asked Martin.
“I advise you to surrender to the authorities.” Vassily loomed over him. “It will go badly with you if you don’t cooperate, but if you surrender to me I’ll, I’ll—” He looked around wildly.
Rachel snorted. “What authorities?”
“The capital—”
Rachel finally blew her top. “Listen, kid, we’re stuck in the back of beyond with a dead lifeboat and not a lot of supplies, on a planet that’s just been hit by a type three singularity, and I have just spent the past thirty-six hours slaving my guts out to save our necks — all of them, yours included — and I would appreciate it if you would just shut up for a while! Our first priority is survival; my second priority is linking up with the people I’ve come here to visit, and getting back to civilization comes third on the list.
With me so far? Because there are no civil authorities right now, not the kind you expect. They’ve just been dumped on by about a thousand years of progress in less than a month, and if your local curator’s still sitting at his desk, he’s probably catatonic from future shock. This planetary civilization has transcended. It is an ex-colony; it has ceased to be. About the only people who can cope with this level of change are your dissidents, and I’m not that optimistic about them, either. Right now, we are your best hope of survival, and you’d better not forget it.” She glared at Vassily, and he glared right back at her, obviously angry but unable to articulate his feelings.
Behind her, Martin had clambered down to the meadow. Something caught his attention, and he bent down. “Hey!”
“What is it?” Rachel called. The spell was broken: Vassily subsided with a grumble and began hunting for a way down off the capsule. Martin said something indistinct. “What?” she called.
“There’s something wrong with this grass!”
“Oh shit.” Rachel followed Vassily down the side of the pod — two and a half meters of gently sloping ceramic, then a soft landing on a woven spider-silk floatation bed. “What do you mean?” Martin straightened up and wordlessly offered her a blade of grass.
“It’s—” She stopped.
“Rochard’s World is supposed to have an Earth-normal biosphere, isn’t it?” Martin watched her curiously. “That’s what it said in my gazetteer.”
“What is that?” asked Vassily.
“Grass, or what passes for it.” Martin shrugged uncomfortably. “Doesn’t look very Earth-normal to me.
It’s the right color and right overall shape, but—”
“Ouch. Cut myself on the damned thing.” Rachel dropped it. The leaf blade fluttered down, unnoticed: when it hit the ground it began to disintegrate with eerie speed, falling apart along radial seams. “What about the trees?”
“There’s something odd about them, too.” A crackling noise from behind made Martin jump. “What’s that?”
“Don’t worry. I figured we’d need some ground transport, so I told it to make some. It’s reabsorbing the capsule—”
“Neat luggage,” Martin said admiringly. The lifeboat began to crumple inward, giving off a hot, organic smell like baking bread.
“Yeah, well.” Rachel looked worried. “My contact’s supposed to know we’re here. I wonder how long
…” She trailed off. Vassily was busily tramping toward the far side of the clearing, whistling some sort of martial-sounding tune.
“Just who is this contact?” Martin asked quietly.
“Guy called Rubenstein. One of the more sensible resistance cadres, which is why he’s in internal exile here — the less sensible ones end up dead.”
“And what do you want with him?”
“I’m to give him a package. Not that he needs it anymore, if what’s happened here is anything to go by.”
“A package? What kind of package?”
She turned and pointed at the steamer trunk, which now rested on the grass in the middle of a collapsing heap of structural trusses, belching steam quietly. “That kind of package.”
“That kind of—” His eyes gave him away. Rachel reached out and took his elbow.
“Come on, Martin. Let’s check out the tree line.”
“But—” He glanced over his shoulder. “Okay.”
“It’s like this,” Rachel began, as they walked. “Remember what I said about helping the people of the New Republic? A while ago — some years, actually — some people in a department you don’t really need to know much about decided that they were ripe for a revolution. Normally we don’t get involved in that kind of thing; toppling regimes is bad ju-ju even if you disapprove of them or do it for all the right moral reasons. But some of our analysts figured there was a chance, say twenty percent, that the New Republic might metastasize and turn imperial. So we’ve been gearing up to ship power tools to their own home-grown libertarian underground for a decade now.
“The Festival … when it arrived, we didn’t know what it was. If I’d known what you told me once we were under way, back at Klamovka, I wouldn’t be here now. Neither would the luggage. Which is the whole point of the exercise, actually. When the aristocracy put down the last workers’ and technologists’
soviet about 240 years ago, they destroyed the last of the cornucopiae the New Republic was given at its foundation by the Eschaton. Thereafter, they could control the arbeiter classes by restricting access to education and tools and putting tight bottlenecks on information technology. This luggage, Martin, it’s a full-scale cornucopia machine. Design schemata for just about anything a mid-twenty-first-century postindustrial civilization could conceive of, freeze-dried copies of the Library of Congress, all sorts of things. Able to replicate itself, too.” The tree line was a few meters ahead. Rachel stopped and took a deep breath. “I was sent here to turn it over to the underground, Martin. I was sent here to give them the tools to start a revolution.”
“To start a—” Martin stared at her. ”But you’re too late.“
“Exactly.” She gave him a moment for it to sink in. “I can still complete my mission, just in case, but I don’t really think …”
He shook his head. “How are we going to get out of this mess?”
“Um. Good question.” She turned and faced the melting reentry capsule, then reached into a pocket and began bringing out some spare optical spybots. Vassily was aimlessly circling the perimeter of the clearing. “Normally, I’d go to ground in the old town and wait. In six months, there’ll be a merchant ship along. But with the Festival—”