"Charles Stross - Singularity Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)
Singularity Sky
The next morning, at dawn, troops from the Ducal palace guard and the garrison on Skull Hill,
overlooking the old town, hanged six peasants and technicians in the market square. The execution was
a warning, to accompany the Ducal decree: Treat with the Festival and you die. Someone, probably in
the CuratorтАЩs Office, had realized the lethal danger the Festival posed to the regime and decided an
example must be made. They were too late to stop the Democratic Revolutionary Party from plastering
posters explaining just what the telephones were all over town, and pointing out that, in the words of the
old proverb, тАЬGive a man a fish, feed him for a dayтАФ teach him to fish, feed him for life.тАЭ More radical
posters exhorting the workers to demand the means of constructing self-replicating tools rang a powerful
chord in the collective psyche, for whatever the regime might have wished, folk memories lived on.
At lunchtime, four bank robbers held up the main post office in Plotsk, eighty kilometers to the north of
the capital. The bank robbers carried exotic weapons, and when a police Zeppelin arrived over the scene
it was shot to pieces. This was not an isolated incident. All over the planet, the police and state security
apparat reported incidents of outrageous defiance, in many cases backed up with advanced weapons that
had appeared as if from thin air. Meanwhile, strange, dome-like dwellings mushroomed on a thousand
peasant farms in the outback, as palatially equipped and comfortable as any Ducal residence.
Pinpricks of light blossomed overhead, and radios gave forth nothing but hissing static for hours
afterward. Sometime later, the glowing trails of emergency re-entry capsules skidded across the sky a
thousand kilometers south of Novy Petrograd. The Navy announced that evening, with deep regrets, the
inflicted serious damage on the aggressors; nevertheless, reinforcements had been requested from the
Imperial capital via Causal Channel, and the matter was being treated with the utmost gravity by His
Imperial Majesty.
Spontaneous demonstrations by workers and soldiers marred the night, while armored cars were
deployed to secure the bridges across the Hava River that separated the Ducal palace and the garrison
from the city proper.
And most sinister of all, an impromptu fair began to grow in the open space of the Northern Parade Field
тАФa fair where nobody worked, everything was free, and anything that anybody could possibly want
(and a few things that nobody in their right mind would desire) could be obtained free for the asking.
On the third day of the incursion, His Excellency Duke Felix Politovsky, Governor of RochardтАЩs World,
entered the Star Chamber to meet with his staff and, by way of an eye-wateringly expensive
teleconference, to appeal for help from his Emperor.
Politovsky was a thick-set, white-haired man of some sixty-four years, unpreserved by contraband anti-
aging medical treatments. It was said by some that he was lacking in imagination, and he had certainly
not been appointed governor of a raw backwater dumping ground for troublemakers and second sons
because of his overwhelming political acumen. However, despite his bull-headed disposition and lack of
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Singularity Sky
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