Rachel nodded and gently stroked his glans. She could see a vein pulsing in it. She leaned closer, trying to judge the distance, swallowing bile. “May I kiss you, Mister President? You’re a very powerful man. Would you like that? I’m your loyal subject. Will you let me kiss you on the mouth?”

The Field Marshal and Professor sat up slightly. “Certainly,” he said, mustering up a slightly pathetic gravitas: his breath caught as she stroked him.

“Hey, that’s a funny smell,” Rachel said quickly. Then she leaned forward and clamped her mouth down onto his lips, tongue questing, fingers busy with his shaft. He tensed slightly, back arching, and she reached up to grab his right arm by the wrist. Something insectoidal flickered past her eyes in a blur of wings as he spasmed and pumped a ropy stream of hot imperial semen across her thigh. His jaws flexed: she stuck her tongue into his mouth as far as she could, squeezing her eyes shut, holding her breath, and prayed that he wouldn’t have a seizure as he bucked and jerked against her. The President for Life twitched a couple of times: then his eyes rolled up and he slumped backward in the recliner. His right arm fell sideways as she let go of it. She straightened up, gasping, and managed to turn aside. She spat, trying to get the taste of decaying teeth out of her mouth, then doubled over and vomited noisily across the would-be dictator’s feet.

After a few seconds, she felt strong arms around her shoulder. “Come on,” said MacDougal. “Let’s get you out an’ away. It’s all under control.”

“Under—” Rachel moved to wipe the tears from her eyes, then realized her hand was sticky. “Ugh. It’s over?”

The room was filling up with naked policewomen toting toolboxes and talking into throat mikes. “Ordinary bomb team’s already here to take over — half of it, anyways. You can come away now.” Without her uniform and body armor, Inspector MacDougal had the most remarkable tattoos Rachel had seen in a long time: angel wings on her shoulder blades, a snake around her narrow waist. She pointed at the four nude women who were leaning over the bomb with instruments and neutron counters. “That was inspirational, Colonel! ‘Naked women are my friends.’ ”

Rachel shook her head. An insect buzzed overhead. Not police issue, it was probably the first harbinger of a swarm of journalists. “I’m not really a colonel, I just play one in the banana republics.” She shuddered. “I needed to get close enough to gag him and hold his arm out of the way. Whatever it took.”

“Well, if it was up to me, you’d get a medal.” MacDougal looked hard at the recliner and shook her head. “Took guts. Some assholes will do anything for a handjob.”

“Need water,” Rachel gasped, feeling another wave of nausea coming on.

Someone passed her a bottle. She rinsed and spat, rhythmically, until the bottle was empty, trying to remind herself how much worse it could have been. She could have had her tongue bitten off if he’d into a seizure. Or he might have wanted something worse. Another bottle appeared, and she poured half of it over her left hand and thigh. “I need a shower. Antibiotics. Lots of antibiotics. How long does that shot put him out for?”

“How long?” MacDougal sounded puzzled, then spotted the insects: she straightened up, tried to look severe, and went into press-management mode. “Laughing Joker Security takes WMD incursions extremely seriously. In accordance with our zero tolerance of nuclear sidearms policy, we deployed a destroyer payload targeted on the offender’s reticular activating system. He hasn’t got one anymore — he’ll stay asleep until the rest of his cerebellum fails.” Which, judging from the way she glanced at the erratically snoring figure, would be sooner rather than later. Impromptu art happenings involving nuclear weapons tended to get a bad press even in the laid-back Republique et Canton Geneve.

There was a shrill beeping from the pile of discarded clothes near the doorway. Rachel was leaning over it and fumbling for her interface rings before she realized she’d moved. “Yes?” she said hoarsely.

“You haven’t heard the last of this!” Judging from her hectoring tone, Madam Chairman had been following events on multicast, and she was royally pissed off at something — probably the fact that Rachel was still alive. “I know about you and your cronies in the enforcement branch! Don’t think you can get out of the audit hearing the same way!”

“Oh, fuck off!” said Rachel, killing the call. I’ll get you later, she thought dizzily, leaning against the doorframe. Find out what your game is and beat you … She tried to get a grip, paranoia running out of control. “Inspector, can you see I get home? I think I’m about to collapse.” She slid down the wall, laughing and crying at the same time. On the other side of the room a naked lady held up something like a fat shotgun cartridge in both hands, triumphantly. Everyone else seemed to be cheering, but for the life of her Rachel couldn’t see why.

More than a year earlier, in the middle of a field mission that was rapidly falling apart in all directions simultaneously, Rachel had struck a bargain with the devil. She’d made a deal with something that was indeed perfectly capable of destroying worlds: and much to her disquiet, she discovered afterward that she did not regret it.

In the wake of the singularity, the Eschaton had apparently vanished from the Earth, leaving behind a crippled network, depopulated cities, the general aftermath of planet-shaking disaster — and three commandments engraved on a cube of solid diamond ten meters on a side:

1. I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.

2. I am descended from you and I exist in your future.

3. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Some people claimed to understand what this meant, while others said they were imbeciles or charlatans. The First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, battled it out in the streets with the Reformed Latter-Day Saints. Islam mutated out of recognition, other religions curled up and died. Computer scientists — the few who were left; for some reason the Eschaton seemed to select them preferentially — came out with crazy hypotheses. The Eschaton was a chunk of software that had, by way of who-knew-what algorithm, achieved computational sentience. It had rapidly bootstrapped itself across the Internet, achieving in minutes or hours as much thinking time as a human might attain in a million years. Then it had transcended, achieving a level of intelligence that simply could not be speculated on, an intellect that compared to human thought as a human might compare to a frog. What it did then, it did for motives that no human being was likely to guess, or understand. How it opened macroscopic wormholes in space-time — something human scientists had no clue how to do — remained a mystery.

Bizarre references to the light cone made no sense at all for more than a hundred years, until the first successful construction of a faster-than-light spacecraft. Then it began to fit into a big picture. The universe was seething with human-populated worlds, the dumping grounds where the Eschaton had deposited the nine billion or so people it had abducted in the course of a single frantic day. The wormholes covered immense distances in time as well as space, opening a year back in time for every light year out in distance. Astrophysicists speculated blatantly about the computational implications of causality violation, until silenced in a bizarre jihad by a post-Christian sect from North Africa.

The human consequences of the singularity reverberated endlessly, too. The exiles hadn’t simply been dumped on any available world; in almost all cases, they’d been planted in terrain that was not too hostile, showing crude signs of recent terraforming. And the Eschaton had given them gifts: cornucopias, robot factories able to produce any designated goods to order, given enough time, energy, and raw materials. Stocked with a library of standard designs, a cornucopia was a general-purpose tool for planetary colonization. Used wisely, they enabled many of the scattered worlds to achieve a highly automated postindustrial economy within years. Used unwisely, they enabled others to destroy themselves. A civilization that used its cornucopia to produce nuclear missiles instead of nuclear reactors — and more cornucopias — wasn’t likely to outlast the first famine, let alone the collapse of civilization that was bound to follow when one faction or another saw the cornucopia as a source of military power and targeted it. But the end result was that, a couple of hundred years after the event, most worlds that had not retreated to barbarism had achieved their own spacegoing capabilities.