Leonov turned white. “I–I—”
“I don’t have time for this,” Robard said brusquely. To the Admiral; “My lord?” Kurtz stared at him with narrowed eyes. “How long?”
Robard shrugged. “All the time I’ve been with you, my lord. For your own protection. As I was saying, a crowd is moving in our direction from the south bank, over the old bridge. We have about five minutes to decide what to do, but I doubt we will make any friends by shooting at them.” Kurtz nodded. “I will go and talk to them, then.”
Now it was Robard’s turn to stare. “Sir, I believe you should be in a wheelchair, not arguing with revolutionaries. Are you quite sure—”
“Haven’t felt this good in, oh, about eight years, young feller. The bees around here pack a damned odd sting.”
“Yes, you could say that. Sir, I believe you may have been compromised. The Festival apparently has access to a wide range of molecular technologies, beyond the one that’s done such a sterling job on your cerebrovascular system. If they wanted—”
Kurtz raised a hand. “I know. But we’re at their mercy in any event. I will go down to the people and talk. Were any of the crowd old?”
“No.” Robard puzzled for a moment. “None that I saw. Do you suppose—”
“A cure for old age is a very common wish,” Kurtz observed. “Dashed slug-a-beds want to be shot by a jealous husband, not a nurse bored with emptying the bedpan. If this Festival has been granting wishes, as our intelligence put it …” He stood up. “Get me my dress uniform, Rob — oh. You, yes you, Kossov.
You’re my batman now Robard here outranks you all. And my medals!” Leonov, white as a sheet, still hadn’t stopped shaking. “It’s alright,” Robard said sepulchrally. “I don’t usually have people executed for being rude to me.”
“Sir! Ah — yes, sir! Um, if I may ask—”
“Ask away.”
“Since when is an Invigilator of the Curator’s Office required to disguise himself as a manservant?”
“Since”—Robard pulled out his pocket watch and glanced at it—“about seven years and six months ago, at the request of the Archduke. Really. Nobody notices a servant, you know. And His Excellency—” Kossov returned bearing the trappings of high office. Leonov ushered Robard out onto the landing while the Admiral dressed. “His Excellency is not in direct line to the throne. If you take my meaning.” Leonov did, and his sharp intake of breath — combined with the stress analyzers wired into his auditory nerves — told Robard everything he needed to know. “No, His Majesty had no expectation of a coup; the Admiral is unquestionably loyal. But his personal charisma, fame as a hero of the Republic, and wide popularity, made his personal safety a matter of some importance. We can use him here.”
“Oh.” Leonov thought for a while. “The revolutionaries?”
“If he pushes them, they’ll crumble,” Robard said decisively. “All their strongest supporters have long since fled; that’s the nature of a singularity. If they don’t”—he tapped his pocket—“I am licensed to take extraordinary measures in the defense of the Republic, including the use of proscribed technologies.” Leonov dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Then it’s all over. You’ll break the revolutionaries by force or by politics, install His Excellency as governor pro tern, and in six months time it will all be over, bar the shouting.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Even if the woman from Earth was right — and I am inclined to think she was telling the truth about the Festival not being interested in planetary conquest as we understand it, in which case this whole expedition has been a monstrously expensive mistake — we’ve lost two-thirds of the population. We can never get rid of the pernicious virus of bandwidth that they’ve infected this planet with; we may have to abandon the colony, or at the very least institute quarantine procedures. The bloody revolutionaries have won, here, the djinn is well and truly out of the bottle. Everything our ancestors fought for, torn up and scattered to the winds! A virus of eternal youth is loose in the bees, and the streets are paved with infinite riches. It devalues everything!” He stopped and took a deep breath, disturbed by the degree of his own agitation. “Of course, if we can suppress the revolutionary cadres here in New Petrograd, we can mop up the countryside at our leisure …” The door to the Star Chamber opened to reveal Admiral Kurtz standing there, resplendent in the gold braid, crimson sash, and chestful of medals that his rank dictated. He looked a decade younger than his age, not two decades older: patrician, white-haired, the very image of a gentleman dictator, reassuringly authoritarian. “Well, gentlemen! Shall we review the crowds?” He did not stride — wasted leg muscles saw to that — but he walked without a hand at either elbow.
“I think that would be a very good idea, sir,” said Robard.
“Indeed.” Leonov and the senior Curator fell into step behind the admiral as he walked toward the staircase. “The sun is setting on anarchy and disarray, gentlemen. Only let my tongue be silver and tomorrow will once again be ours.”
Together, they stepped into the courtyard to address the sheep who, did they but know it, had already returned to the fold.
An amber teardrop the size of a charabanc perched on the edge of a hillside covered in the mummified bones of trees. Ashy telegraph poles coated in a fine layer of soot pointed at the sky; tiny skeletons crunched under Burya Rubenstein’s boots as he walked among them, following a man-sized rabbit.
“Master in here,” said Mr. Rabbit, pointing at the weirdly curved lump.
Rubenstein approached it cautiously, hands clasped behind his back. Yes, it was definitely amber — or something closely resembling it. Flies and bubbles were scattered throughout its higher layers; darkness shrouded its heart. “It’s a lump of fossilized vegetable sap. Your master’s dead, rabbit. Why did you bring me here?”
The rabbit was upset. His long ears tilted backward, flat along the top of his skull. “Master in here!” He shifted from one foot to the other. “When Mimes attack, master call for help.” Burya decided to humor the creature. “I see—” He stopped. There was something inside the boulder, something darkly indistinct. And come to think of it, all the trees hereabouts were corpses, fried from the inside out by some terrible energy. The revolutionary guards, already spooked by the Lysenkoist forest, had refused to enter the dead zone. They milled about downslope, debating the ideological necessity of uplifting non-human species to sapience — one of them had taken heated exception to a proposal to giving opposable thumbs and the power of speech to cats — and comparing their increasingly baroque implants.
Burya stared closer, feeling himself slip into a blurred double vision as the committee for state communications’ worms fed their own perspective to him. There was something inside the boulder, and it was thinking, artlessly unformed thoughts that tugged at the Festival’s cellular communications network like a toddler at its mother’s skirt.
Taking a deep breath, he leaned against the lump of not-amber. “Who are you?” he demanded noiselessly, feeling the smooth warm surface under his hands. Antennae beneath his skin radiated information into the packetized soup that flooded in cold waves through the forest, awaited a reply.
“Me-Identity: Felix. You-Identity:???”
“Come out of there with your hands above your head and prepare to submit your fate to the vanguard of revolutionary justice!” Burya gulped. He’d meant to send something along the lines of