“That’s me. Who are you?” Rubenstein turned to face the new arrival.
Vassily took two steps forward, half-staggering, like a marionette manipulated by a drunk. “I’m your son, you bastard! Remember my mother yet?” He raised his power knife.
“Oh shit.” Rachel suddenly noticed the fuzz of static that was even now plucking at her implants, trying to tell them this wasn’t happening, that there was nobody there. Things became clearer, much clearer. She wasn’t the only person with high-level implants hereabouts.
“My son?” Rubenstein looked puzzled for a moment, then his expression cleared. “’Milla was allowed to keep you after I was exiled?” He stood up. “My son—”
Vassily swung at Rubenstein, artlessly but with all the force he could muster. But Burya wasn’t there when the knife came down; Martin had tackled him from behind, ramming him headfirst into the ground.
With a shrill screech, the power knife cut into the lid of the cornucopia, slicing through millions of delicate circuits. A numinous flickering light and a smell of fresh yeast rose up as Vassily struggled to pull the blade out. A superconducting monofilament, held rigid by a viciously powerful magnetic field, the knife could cut through just about anything. Martin rolled over on his back and looked up just as Vassily, his face a slack mask, stepped toward him and raised the knife. There was a brief buzzing sound, and his eyes rolled up: then Vassily collapsed across the chest.
Arms and chest burning, Rachel lowered the stun gun and dropped back into real-world speed. Panting, heart racing. Do this too often and die. “Bloody hell, wasn’t there anybody aboard the fleet without a covert agenda?” she complained.
“Doesn’t look like it.” Martin struggled to sit up.
“What happened?” Burya looked around, dazed.
“I think—” Rachel looked at the trunk. It was outgassing ominously: the power knife had cut through a lot of synthesis cells, and evidently some of the fuel tanks were leaking faster than the repair programs could fix them. “It could be a bad idea to stay here. Talk about it on the road to Plotsk?”
“Yes.” Burya rolled Vassily off the trunk and dragged him a few paces. “Is he really my son?”
“Probably.” Rachel paused to yawn for air. “I wondered a bit. Why he was along. Couldn’t have been a mistake. And then, the way he went for you — programmed, I think. Curator’s Office must have figured, if revolution, you’d be central. Bastard child, disgraced mother, easily recruited. Credible?” Sister Seventh had ambled up and was sniffing at the vitrification cell occupied by the nearly late Duke Felix Politovsky. “I told Festival passenger upload now-soon,” she rumbled. “You tell story? Honor credit?”
“Later,” said Martin.
“Okay.” Sister Seventh gnashed at the air. “You got overdraft at the mythology bank. I fix. Go Plotsk, now-soonish?”
“Before the luggage goes bang,” Martin agreed. He stood up a trifle drunkenly, winced as he transferred his weight onto one knee. “Rachel?”
“Coming.” The dark spots had almost vacated her visual field. “Okay. Um, if we can tie him up and put him in that walking hut of yours, we can work on his brainwashing later. See if there’s anything more to him than a programmed assassin.”
“I agree.” Burya paused. “I didn’t expect this.”
“Neither did we,” she said shortly. “Come on. Let’s get away before this thing blows.” Together they stumbled away from the fizzing revolutionary bomb and the last unchanging relic of the ancient regime, back down the hillside that led toward the road to Plotsk.
Epilogue
Once news of Admiral Kurtz’s miraculous appearance in the Ducal palace spread into the city, a tenuous curtain of normality began to assert itself. The revolutionary committees centered on the Corn Exchange watched the situation with alarm, but the common people were less unenthusiastic. Most of them were bewildered, disoriented, and deeply upset by the strangeness of the times. Those who weren’t had for the most part already left the city; the survivors huddled together for comfort amidst the ruins of their certainties, eating manna from the Festival’s machines and praying.
Kurtz’s mysterious burst of good health continued; as Robard had noticed earlier, diseases of senescence were extremely rare among the survivors of the Festival, and for good reason. Acting on the Curator’s advice, the Admiral magnanimously announced an amnesty for all progressive elements and a period of reconstruction and collective introspection. Many of the remaining revolutionaries took the opportunity to melt into the crowded camps or leave the city, in some cases taking cornucopia seeds with them.
Rochard’s World was thinly colonized, an almost unknown wilderness starting just three hundred kilometers beyond the city. Those who could not stand to watch a return to the old status quo took to the roads.
Also at the behest of the Curator’s Office, the Admiral made no attempt to send militia forces after them.
There would be time for dealing with miscreants later, Robard pointed out. Time enough after they’d starved through the coming winter.
A few more lifeboats made it down intact, cluttering the landing field behind the palace. Regular light shows lit up the sky with blue streaks of light; departing spawn of the Festival. Babushkas in the street looked up, made the sign of the evil eye, and spat in the gutter as the evil time passed. Some of the passing wisps bore the encoded essence of the old Duke; but few people knew and fewer cared.
Gradually, the Festival’s orbiting factories reached the end of their design life and shut down: slowly, the telephones stopped ringing. Now, people used them to call each other up. It was good to talk, and scattered families and friends rediscovered one another through the directionless medium of the phone network. The Curator fretted, and finally concluded that there was nothing to be done about it. Not until contact with the father planet resumed, in any event.
Things happened differently in Plotsk. The outlying township lay cut off from the capital by landslides and bizarre, dangerous structures that had rendered the roads impassable. Here, the revolutionary committee wound down until it was now a local provisional council, now a town governance. Peasants began to squat in the many abandoned farms around the town, second and third sons gifted by a sudden superfluity of soil. Strangers drifted in, fleeing chaos in smaller settlements, and there was space for everybody. Comrade Rubenstein of the Central Committee announced his intention to settle; after a heated row with the governance, he agreed to stick to publishing a newsletter and leave matters of ideology to less mercurial souls. He moved into Havlicek the Pawnbroker’s apartment above the gutted shop on Main Street, along with a young man who said little and was not seen in public for the first week, providing much fertile material for wagging tongues. Strange structures burbled and steamed in the small courtyard behind the shop, and rumor had it that Rubenstein dabbled in the strange arts of technological miracle-working that had so upset the state sometime ago — but nobody disturbed him, for the local constabulary were in the pay of the governance, who had more sense than to mess with a dangerous wizard and revolutionary ideologue.
Another strange couple took over a tenement above Markus Wolff’s old hardware store. They didn’t talk much, but the bearded man demonstrated a remarkable aptitude with tools. Together they rebuilt the store, then opened for business. They kept a small stock of locks and clocks and rebuilt telephones and more exotic gadgets, racked in the age-blackened oak cabinets within the shop. These they traded for food and clothing and coal, and tongues wagged about the source of the miraculous toys that they sold so cheap — items that would have cost a fortune in the capital of the father world, never mind a backwoods colonial town. The supply seemed never-ending, and the sign they hung from the shop front was daringly close to subversive: access to tools and ideas. But this didn’t provoke as much comment as the conduct of his partner; a tall, thin woman with dark hair cut short, who sometimes went about bareheaded and unaccompanied, and frequently ran the shop when her husband was absent, even serving strangers on her own.