The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above
Novy Petrograd. Some of them had half melted in the heat of re-entry; others pinged and ticked, cooling
rapidly in the postdawn chill. An inquisitive pigeon hopped close, head cocked to one side; it pecked at
the shiny case of one such device, then fluttered away in alarm when it beeped. A tinny voice spoke:
"Hello? Will you entertain us?"
The Festival had come to Rochard's World.
A skinny street urchin was one of the first victims of the assault on the economic integrity of the New
Republic's youngest colony world. Rudi-nobody knew his patronymic, or indeed his father-spotted
one of the phones lying in the gutter of a filthy alleyway as he went about his daily work, a malodorous
sack wrapped around his skinny shoulders like a soldier's bedroll. The telephone lay on the chipped
stones, gleaming like polished gunmetal: he glanced around furtively before picking it up, in case the
gentleman who must have dropped it was still nearby. When it chirped he nearly dropped it out of fear: a
machine! Machines were upper-class and forbidden, guarded by the grim faces and gray uniforms of
authority. Nevertheless, if he brought it home to Uncle Schmuel, there might be good eating: better than
he could buy with the proceeds of the day's sackful of dog turds for the tannery. He turned it over in his
hands, wondering how to shut it up, and a tinny voice spoke: "Hello? Will you entertain us?"
Rudi nearly dropped the phone and ran, but curiosity held him back for a moment: "Why?"
"Entertain us and we will give you anything you want."
Rudi's eyes widened. The metal wafer gleamed with promise between his cupped hands. He
remembered the fairy stories his eldest sister used to tell before the coughing sickness took her, tales of
magic lamps and magicians and djinn that he was sure Father Borozovski would condemn as infidel
nonsense; and his need for escape from the dull brutality of everyday life did battle with his natural
pessimism-the pessimism of barely more than a decade of backbreaking labor. Realism won. What he
said was not, I want a magic flying carpet and a purse full of gold roubles or I want to be Prince Mikhail
in his royal palace, but, "Can you feed my family?"
"Yes. Entertain us, and we will feed your family."
Rudi racked his brains, having no idea how to go about this exotic task; then he blinked. It was obvious!
He held the phone to his mouth, and whispered, "Do you want me to tell you a story?"
By the end of that day, when the manna had begun to fall from orbit and men's dreams were coming to
life like strange vines blooming after rain in the desert, Rudi and his family- sick mother, drunken
uncle, and seven siblings-were no longer part of the political economy of the New Republic.
War had been declared.

Deep in the outer reaches of the star system, the Festival's constructor fleet created structure out of dead
mass. The Festival fleet traveled light, packed down into migratory starwisps that disdained the
scurrying FTL of merely human clades. When it arrived, fusion pods burned bright as insectile A-life
spawned furiously in the frigid depths of the outer system. Once the habitats were complete and moved
into orbit around the destination planet, the Festival travelers would emerge from aestivation, ready to
trade and listen.
Rochard's World was a backwater colony of the New Republic, itself not exactly the most forward looking
of post-Diaspora human civilizations. With a limited industrial base to attract trade-limited by
statute, as well as by ability-few eyes scanned the heavens for the telltale signatures of visiting ships.
Only the spaceport, balanced in ground-synchronous orbit, kept a watch, and that was focused on the
inner-system ecliptic. The Festival fleet had dismantled a gas giant moon and three comets, begun work
on a second moon, and was preparing to rain telephones from orbit before the Imperial Traffic Control
Bureau noticed that anything was amiss.
Moreover, there was considerable confusion at first. The New Republic was, if not part of the core
worlds, not far out of it; whereas the Festival's origin lay far outside the light cone of the New
Republic's origin, more than a thousand light-years from old anarchist Earth. Although they shared a
common ancestry, the New Republic and the Festival had diverged for so many centuries that everything