Accelerando

Chapter 4: Halo

The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier,

of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the

needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s

ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “Let me give you a big hug …”

 

A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors

together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and

reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The

animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her

viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead.

Sarcastically: “Big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang

somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the

cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her

enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating

surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before

reuptake sets in. It doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But

the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It’s her

rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.

 

The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t

belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump

and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps

wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a

crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra.

(Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s

bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the

projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a

glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or

four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across

its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat

is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring

in a high-pitched tone.

 

Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from

the rest of the hive: “I’ve got it!” she shouts. “It’s all mine! I

rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but

it’s the first that she’s tagged by herself, and that makes it

special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one

of Oscar’s cane toads - which should be locked down in the farm, it’s

not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the incoming

signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants’ video

shows.

 

*

 

“You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she corners him in the

canteen.

 

“Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of

delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a

long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don’t care about that kind of

thing. “I’m brilliant, me,” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”

 

“Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t

have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”

 

“Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”

 

“Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so

I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll

take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”

 

“You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes

at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under

her gaze. He’s only twelve, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you

don’t welsh on a deal. “I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces,

“but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”

 

He sighs. “What base rate are you -”

 

“No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.

 

And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t

make me clean the litter tray again. You aren’t planning on doing

that, are you?”

 

*

 

Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system

now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not

dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot,

pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward

negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are

now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about

10^28 MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is

mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that

surround the meat machines with a haze of computation -

individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively

they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are

doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 10^33 MIPS and

rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system

is fully awake.

 

Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago

predicted that there’d be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter

by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business

models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by

the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected

fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of

the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the

core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under

way.

 

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage

ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural

abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic

recombination, thanks to her mother’s early ideals she has to rely

on brute computational enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior

parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior

superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but

she’s grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as

lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on

an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by

quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal

metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite

incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the

generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar

system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first

century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station

that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when

you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere

you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to

a baby boomer.

 

Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who

think that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with

a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally

brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine

languages by the age of six, only two of them human and six of them

serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school

psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final

straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her

father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn’t

occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner …

 

*

 

Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: Orange

and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated

horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas

giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the

tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the

magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is

cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a

fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and

groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the

drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward

Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea,

Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the

Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to

Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private

ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw,

with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant

hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind

by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk

of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: The news

is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.

 

Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in

fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial

cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a

large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The

far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the

planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as much mass as

possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic

envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly. “Just imagine,

diving into that sea …” Her avatar appears in the window, riding a

silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

 

“Nice case of wind-burn you’ve got there,” someone jeers - Kas.

Suddenly Lilly’s avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic

swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage

fingers up at them in warning.

 

“Same to you and the window you climbed in through!” Abruptly the

virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them

human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the

kids pitch into the virtual death match. It’s a gesture in the face of

the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an

environment that really is as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would

indicate.

 

Amber turns back to her slate: She’s working through a complex mess of

forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and

figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating.

Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 1027 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian

moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of

rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - debris above the size

of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as

prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made

it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all

but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human

expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by

a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a M-commerce bus that

scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now

the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from

Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to

explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand

Plans for what to do with old Jove’s mass.

 

Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

 

She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s Su Ang. “Look, we’re

going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we

have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It’s insane.”

 

Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection

Agency?”

 

“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page

Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing water within five

kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the

water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within

depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to

a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of

bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or

listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant

living within ten kilometers -’”

 

” - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty

thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you

can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour

on the surface.” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling.

Amber glances up.

 

On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has

pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She’s

being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and

an improbably large erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable

suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked

out of her distraction - and angry - Amber drops her stack of

paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers

dreamed up overnight. It’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike

rips off the dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is

anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around,

trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks

around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

 

“Children! Chill out.” She glances round - one of the Franklins (this

is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them.

“Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

 

Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight; it’s a forceful exchange of opinions.”

 

“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression

of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one

before. Anyway” - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - “I’ve

got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts

work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the

paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance to earn our upkeep …”

 

*

 

Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time

line. In her replay, she’s in some kind of split-level ranch house out

West. It’s a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent

fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for

Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom

leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone

earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that.”

 

Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS’s most

productive bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by

blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a

confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary

between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively.

After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest:

“Don’t want to!” One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the

wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “They’ll beat up on me,

Mom. I’m too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with

my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can socialize

real good at home.”

 

Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on

eye-level with Amber. They’re on the living room carpet, all

seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and

for once, they’re alone: The domestic robots are in hiding while the

humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy,

laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the

eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her

client’s fear. “I know that’s what your father’s writing to you, but

it isn’t true. You need the company - physical company - of children

your own age. You’re natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even

with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they

grow up all weird. Socialization isn’t just about texting your own

kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who’re

different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won’t happen if

you don’t learn to get on with children your own age. You’re not going

to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy,

you’ve got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway,

that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

 

It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as

hell, but Amber’s corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite

miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait:

Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some

vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her

skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is

mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal

punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to

put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in

a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s

still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

 

Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his

engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes

on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work, and I’ve got a

treat for you; we’re going to check out a new church together this

evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes: Amber has already

figured out she’s going through the motions in order to give her the

simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately

needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn’t like the

churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won’t work. “You

be a good little girl, now, all right?”

 

*

 

The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

 

His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays

on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He

also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in

trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits

his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship.

A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq

collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a

revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for

exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective -

one they’ll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in

communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the

vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated

consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter,

these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.

 

Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a

perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship

to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a

Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space-station module

tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike - a glittering

aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a weirdly contoured

M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in

orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and

his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing

on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but

he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his compact

observatory’s mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by

its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s superior size speaks of

the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous

investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols

that make possible the development of commercial space exploration.

The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might

well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation

demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

 

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra

minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this

environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of

ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste

of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach

God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia

to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who

have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine.

They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who’s to say

if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this

swollen alien giant of a planet?

 

Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the

solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches

at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a

student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the

station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete

apartment his parents - a car factory worker and his wife - raised him

in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every

surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers

of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like

stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him

grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for

this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of

his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it’s

time to fix the leaky joint for good.

 

An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb

stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong

tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by

maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further

system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his

research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after

tomorrow there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to

watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their

insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn’t easy,

being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It’s even harder

for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the

communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way - and

as far as he knows, he’s the only believer within half a billion

kilometers.

 

*

 

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the

phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom

calls her “your father’s fancy bitch” with a peculiar tight smile.

(The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her -

not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

 

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like

Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut

really short, and her skin is dark.) “Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles

tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You

want to talk to ‘im?”

 

It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone

like a lifesaver: It’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the

cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let

me, Auntie ‘Nette -”

 

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice

as long as her mother, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your

mother does not know of it?”

 

Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the restroom because it

isn’t break time, and she told teacher she had to go ‘right now’: “I’m

sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells

her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has

never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It

can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?

 

“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for

you.”

 

Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks

younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old

glasses. “Hi - Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re

calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

 

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

 

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where

your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after

me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you

call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out.

Understand?”

 

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Even though that’s not true, I know. Don’t

you want to know why I called?”

 

“Um.” For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully.

Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she

talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her

classmate’s phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad

doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything just because she’s only a

kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest?

How’ve things been, anyway?”

 

She’s going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the

international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going

to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting

loopier every week - she’s dragging me round all these churches now,

and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She

wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what

she wants - I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she

tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt - I

can’t even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears

starting. “Get me out of here!”

 

The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette

looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The

divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

 

Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

 

“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the

break bell rings.

 

*

 

An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claim jumper drone

and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below.

Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist

wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he

concentrates on steering it.

 

Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a

giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on

Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing

table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an

interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that

nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have

been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth).

They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by

the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling:

The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they’re

lighter on the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids

twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future.

(When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich,

but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from

sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else

work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

 

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly; “how you doing?”

 

Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her,

Amber notices. He’s thirteen. Isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with

girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a

stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing

it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise

speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and

diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three

hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me, there’s a three-second

lag, and I don’t want to get into a feedback control loop with it.”

 

“I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

 

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face

serious - “Are we supposed to be doing this?”

 

“You cover your ass, and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright

red. “You know what I mean.”

 

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console:

“Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve

given control of your speech centers to - they’re putting out way too

much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

 

“You stick to your business, and I’ll stick to mine,” she says,

emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

 

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the

screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then

there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch

down. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and

starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles

with that?”

 

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air,

staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way

through her day shift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to

see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her

a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right

now, just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is

doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms,

the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this

whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go

in for -

 

The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he

says drily. “You want me to read it for you?”

 

“What the -” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left

snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged

safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a

grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to

take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts

swearing, loudly and continuously.

 

“You bitch, Mom, why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

 

*

 

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to

Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she

remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

 

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the

deliveryman’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers

sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab

on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact

3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink,

and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat

hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her.

“You’re Amber?” it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the

meaning is clear - it’s able to talk directly to her linguistic

competence interface.

 

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tante ‘Nette?”

 

“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts

her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt.

“Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

 

“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber. “It’s all foreign-farmed

muck these days, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

 

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic.

“Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me

along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the

fucker. No good will come of it.”

 

Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully;

“So what is it?” she demands: “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex

toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

 

“Naah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to

the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out

of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality

is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to

undermine it if she learns about how it works.”

 

“Wow. Like, how totally cool.” In truth, Amber is delighted because it

is her birthday; but Mom’s at work, and Amber’s home alone, with just

the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill

since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an

essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the

best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam

programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn’t work, Mom will

take her to Church tonight, and she’s certain she’ll end up making a

scene again. Amber’s tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing

rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real

reason Mom’s forcing this shit on her - it’s always hard to tell with

Mom - things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday

school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

 

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. “Why doncha fire it

up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn,

and plugs it in. There’s a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear

as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and

registers her ownership.

 

“What do I do now?” she asks.

 

“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the

cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an

exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME, il sont contain directions

pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of

perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification.” The

cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible

insect: “Warning: Don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a

perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme

base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while:

“Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll

molt in her bidet …”

 

“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments

are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any

standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the

intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus.

Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of

subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of

international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds

the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are

written in Arabic that bothers her - that’s what her grammar engine is

for - or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible

chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the

sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.

 

“What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s this all about?”

 

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot.

Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots

because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or

maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit

she’s putting you through. He thinks she’s a control freak, and he’s

not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of

another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to

cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them

to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right

around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and

this printer - which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your

mom’s - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s

what you want to do.”

 

Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring

legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is

one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law

and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves

is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the

indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow

faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies

are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this

company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally

liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument -

about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying

corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit

Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership

shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell

game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and

shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire

total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve

her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially

owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from

hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an

extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s

assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

 

“You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to

tell how smart the cat really is - there’s probably a yawning vacuum

behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a

pretty convincing tale.

 

The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m

saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live

with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a

horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of

handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get

aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ

on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market,

cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you

wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch,

they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat

like me, now I think of it. They’re working all day for the Senator,

and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera,

that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your

mom, and your Tante ‘Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain

when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your

style, kid. You shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of

a life than you do.”

 

“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s

transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better

think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many

directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband.

Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company

structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong,

while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular

biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy

again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have

sex - isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins?

Are they married? Singular?”

 

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat

from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its

guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein

condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing

interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram,

building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to

the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to

break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the

printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down

to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The

cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust

ducts.

 

“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born -

your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks

of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to

re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants.

They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got

into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of

your father whipped up for him, and now they’re building a spacehab

that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can

dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three

refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve

got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your

dad’s friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows

about. It’s a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router

that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there

and talk to some aliens.”

 

This is mostly going right over Amber’s head - she’ll have to learn

what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away

to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks

around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small

wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was

- the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner

box designed to train her to be normal. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I

know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?

Are there any aliens there?”

 

“It’s the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the

aliens eventually,” says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a

fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved

with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on

Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the

three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going. We’ve

got a flight to catch, slave.”

 

*

 

Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit

rolls in.

 

Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the

plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude

machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly

- claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature

of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to

finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he

gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently

not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely

qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

 

A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she

shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper

understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a

feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was

raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but

pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior,

which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that

this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but

not by legitimate means: He doesn’t take the child into his own

household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with

his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her

wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her

into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of

self-proclaimed “progress”. The same forces Sadeq has been sent to

confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter.

 

Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what

can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a reply to this supplicant:

My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail

to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for

help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for

the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb.” He pauses: Or is it? he

wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find

your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy

of shari’a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a

case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his

name). Ends, sigblock, send.”

 

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats

up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The

controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic

clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They’re already

freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner

ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few

moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the

telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship

of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating

realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s e-mail:

there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs

the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he

waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the

poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.

 

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with

them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will

be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans

are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of

Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what

she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the

worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues

and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart

of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

 

*

 

“I’m sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit,” says

the receptionist. “Will you hold?”

 

“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her

eye and glances round at the cabin. “That is so last century,” she

grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”

 

“Dr. Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the cat. “It’s a losing

proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there’s this

whole hippy group mind that’s grown up using his state vector as a

bong -”

 

“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for

yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): “Sorry.” She

spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control,

tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple more to go forth and

become fuqaha, expert on shari’a law. She realizes she’s buying up way

too much of the orphanage’s scarce bandwidth - time that will have to

be paid for in chores, later - but it’s necessary. “Mom’s gone too

far. This time it’s war.”

 

She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis

of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on.

A tantrum would be good -

 

But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a

drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and

she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really

mad anymore. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her

getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school

district - she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better,

Mom asked for it - just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a

control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever

since she lost Dad, she’s been working her claws into Amber, making

her upbringing a life’s work - which is tough, because Amber is not

good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But

now, Mom’s found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter

orbit, and if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber

would be totally out of control.

 

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins,

Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den.

 

There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the

Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s

posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of

running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com

billionaire’s mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading

age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a

woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with

raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can

corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than any of the others

at running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she’s no

slouch when she’s being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in

public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader

of the expedition.

 

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing

surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toad spawn. She’s almost

buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the

breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

 

“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the

antitorque wrench and a number six hex head.”

 

“Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its

contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel

counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself - Amber passes it

under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is engaged.”

 

“I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

 

“Yes!”

 

There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A

plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of

hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

 

A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by

a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t

care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He

can’t,” she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

 

“Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag: “Here, catch.”

 

Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers

the hard way that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous

ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the

compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian

confetti. “Eew!”

 

Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks

off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper

from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the

sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and

paper - by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the

spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the

algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was not good,” Monica says

emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You

wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

 

“No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift

before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

 

“I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe.

“I’m going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you

want me to be Bob?”

 

“Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

 

“All right, Bob coming on-line.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then

her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your

mother kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

 

“Yes.” Amber frowns.

 

“So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

 

Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down,

alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I

ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights

and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into

slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m

the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel,

the company tells me what to do - legally - but the shell company is

set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

 

“That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica/Bob

says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley

drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

 

“Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery, they just dress

it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do

mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much

less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad

picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of

shari’a law - and a crap human rights record - but they’re just about

conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to

EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out.”

 

“So.”

 

“Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her

Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an

Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to

shi’ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she

picked her sect carefully and chose one that’s got a progressive view

of women’s rights: They’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal

constructionists, ‘what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and

had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories’ and that

sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like

legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the

Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow

his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and

under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a

company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery

of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral

well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -” She

shrugs helplessly.

 

“Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks

Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to

mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress

code?”

 

“Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he

may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this

whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration,

that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply

fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit

implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that

stuff, I’ll end up believing it.”

 

“Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. “Now tell me

why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

 

“Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam,

which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture

to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the

instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I

signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or

I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the

imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me - but she gets to appoint my

chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber,

suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking

like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast

every day - it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box.

Think your way outside it: What can you do?”

 

“Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest

like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the

jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I

suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The

jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair

streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about

getting myself a new jurisdiction?”

 

Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab

yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other

ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good

conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I

think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why

don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may

surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom

decided to use him to make a point.”

 

*

 

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of

potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos,

ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of

reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the

barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty

thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the

gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face,

for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The

Sanger’s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the

ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human

miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser

circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy

electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the

circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through

Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and

imperceptibly sapping the moon’s orbital momentum).

 

Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam

plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and

told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand

seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of

Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t

looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of

the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble:

Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage

experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s

detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share

this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and

flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber

audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a

starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

 

She sighs again. “Pierre?”

 

“Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her

room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he

drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock

has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike,

bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The

rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown

with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the

surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

 

“You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next

burn.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking,

stolen. It’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although

she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve

found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

 

“Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it’s

dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is

crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid

with fullerenes.”

 

Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That’s good news. Once

the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay

superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s only a kilometer

and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of

juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the payload can

will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed goods

at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free

hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll have

a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a

rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great

dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then

adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth,

Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a

million seconds.

 

The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?” The

incoming call nags at her attention. “Yeah? Who are you?”

 

The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space

capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned

face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit

liner. He’s floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a

gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at Mecca. “Good evening to you,”

he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?”

 

“Uh, yeah? That’s me.” She stares at him: He looks nothing like her

conception of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly,

black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”

 

“I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is

it convenient for you that we talk now?”

 

He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. “Sure. Did my Mom

put you up to this?” They’re still speaking English, and she notices

that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn’t using a

grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she

realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. “You want to be careful how you

talk to her. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what

she wants.”

 

“Yes, I spoke to - ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second

apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I see.

Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?”

 

Amber breathes deeply. “Adults can get divorced. If I could get

divorced from her, I would. She’s -” She flails around for the right

word helplessly. “Look, she’s the sort of person who can’t lose a

fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law

on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”

 

Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,”

He says. “Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”

 

“Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems

to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult.

The sensation is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years

old - that she almost lets herself forget that he’s only talking to

her because Mom set her up.

 

“Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh,

jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very

junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your

mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of

it?”

 

“Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

 

“Hmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out,

yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes

you the child of a Moslem, and she claims -”

 

“She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold

myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I

enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership.

She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I

don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is

me!”

 

“A mother’s love -”

 

“Fuck love,” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”

 

Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head,

child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this

situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your

interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly.

“Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she

did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You

must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what

is the right thing to do.”

 

“My mother -” Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory

retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the

tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and

class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats

them at the webcam’s tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the

memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full

office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical

enhancements forcibly if she doesn’t work on her grammar without them.

Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her

away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like.

The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to

Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the

kitchen table, forcing her to eat - “My mother likes control.”

 

“Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about

her? How long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for

asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know?

Did you talk to them?”

 

“My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead.

Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him - they like Mom.

They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and

customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m

not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t

understand. You know the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the

churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think

their kids are possessed.”

 

“Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say,

this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam,

don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an

adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you

my problem. Hmm.”

 

“I’m not a Muslim.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child,

either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind

her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a

stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your

law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say

about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, Mr.

Judge. I don’t believe in limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do

anything, and she sure can’t speak for me. All she can do is challenge

my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can’t touch me,

what does that matter?”

 

“Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.”

He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor

considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the

meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always

available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I

would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you

care for.”

 

“Same to you, too,” she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead.

“Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall,

begging for attention.

 

“I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

 

She rounds on him: “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

 

“What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a

new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody …”

 

*

 

Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s

surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering

platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new

printers (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the

size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles - just the

bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated

Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold

machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they

slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s

momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,

scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s

garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according

to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland,

with barely any need for human guidance.

 

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed

and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating

trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected

eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal

gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in

California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter

space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred

gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to

creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of

a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading

their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the

industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three

from Jupiter. They’re so focused that they spend much of their time

being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity

that gives them their messianic drive.

 

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to

its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is

considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to

prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular

level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be

treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a

computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its

synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so,

what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the

urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.

 

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also

underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap

anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of

disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of

Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t

handle implants aren’t really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled

only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom,

their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but

their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The

faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool,

but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new

millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by

deflationary time.

 

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth

rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control

bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers

harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study

mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing

eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is

finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and

beginning to develop: In another generation, they’ll be richer than

Japan.

 

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth,

speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI,

communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and

quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial

instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure

(which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like

gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock

markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and

biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of

matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look

set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their

future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a

visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the

silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

 

An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that

eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian

outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF

subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places

them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on

self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest

pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an

empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The

news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of

the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of

bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

 

*

 

“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your

heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

 

“Shut the fuck up, ‘Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles

with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The

gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more

than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and

help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt

she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen

layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It’s Chernobyl

weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming

through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. “Got it.”

She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on

the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she’s tying

herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty

space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

 

The ground sings to her moronically: “I love you, you love me, it’s

the law of gravity -”

 

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of

the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and

she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past

the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely

bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with

environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain

antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” someone says over the

intercom.

 

“Of course I -” She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron

maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels

claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don’t work. When she

was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west.

When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground,

she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and

touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the

lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no

minds, and even on the surface there’s only the moronic warbling of

‘bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly

seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just

behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed

her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to

the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though

she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it.

“It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

 

There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the

sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops.

She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the

sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her

pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

 

“Let’s go,” she says, “Time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in

the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets

go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging

vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

 

“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks.

Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

 

“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

 

“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

 

“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat; she isn’t

sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity

cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching

over her as she falls.

 

“Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this

time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

 

“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up

- up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship’s

still visible.

 

“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave?”

 

“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her

overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads.

People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought

about missing. “Listen, are you going to come visiting?”

 

“You want us to visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

 

“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter

output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of

stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator

to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It’s all lying

around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home.

“Once the borg get back from Amalthea.”

 

“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

 

“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the

reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the

other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of

million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

 

“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that

sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

 

“You too,” she says, a little too fast: “Come visit when I’ve got the

life-support cycle stabilized.”

 

“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the

capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring

blue laser line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

 

*

 

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

 

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic

control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed

spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded.

When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now

there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the

heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply

- trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the

map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

 

“Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five

seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers,

drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of

forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red,

gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the

area.

 

Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is

active?”

 

“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

 

“Praise Allah.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s

menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly

reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look

after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived

in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems

real.

 

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One

One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

 

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the

cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s

subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

 

“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four,

airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to

seven-four-zero and slaved to our control.”

 

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s

settings. “Control, all in order.”

 

“Bravo One One, stand by.”

 

The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his

Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one

optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies

himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might

fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor

in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes

closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what

comes next.

 

Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered module like a

rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is

buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid

brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs,

fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main

collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like

seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already

he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole

of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a

rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

 

At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq

watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into

his visual field. There’s an external camera view of the rockpile and

grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he

licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again -

but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough

to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the

ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump,

then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking

ring fire - and he’s down.

 

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity

here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the

life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end

of the docking node. Turning, he’s just in time to see the hatch

opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then -

 

*

 

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting

with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It’s a lump

of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band

of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet

speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to

being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of

the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the

edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants

and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but

her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful,

and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in

microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a crown. And there’s

a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it’s a cat, sleeping on the

back of her throne.

 

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to

the doorway, then floats back. “If you need anything, please say,” she

says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne,

orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save

for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and

waits to be noticed.

 

“Dr. Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at him, neither the innocent

grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm

greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any

necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay.”

 

Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still

retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity

moon-face - but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. “I

am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs, formulaic.

Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope

vision. It’s already the biggest offshore - or off-planet - data haven

in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the

top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction

rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet,

invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her

head. Like a halo.

 

“Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle

squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and

waiting. “You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is

exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. “Two years is

nearly unprecedented.”

 

“Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself

and faces her. “Your labors have been fruitful, I trust.”

 

She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any

frontier …” A momentary grin. “This isn’t the Wild West, is it?”

 

“Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later:

“My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say

your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be

something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder,

is not justice.”

 

The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can’t

sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new

frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn’t it? Our

bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and

arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to

abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they’re

close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal

framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian

space, than any earthbound one.” A note of steel creeps into her

voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from

the walls of the throne room.

 

Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an

engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the

walls and floor of this huge construct. “There is law revealed by the

Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we can establish by

analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans

live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those

who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet,

can you provide a moral compass?”

 

“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s

heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claim jumpers and

boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the

earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration

here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out

through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst

mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the

queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and

energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology,

and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain

experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy

intersection. She has force majeure - even the Pentagon’s infowarriors

respect the Ring Imperium’s autonomy for now. In fact, the body

sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction

of her identity. She’s by no means the first upload or partial, but

she’s the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when

the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and

turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the

observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the

rectitude of her vision, in her presence.

 

The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin.

Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq

through narrowed eyes.

 

“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m

full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”

 

It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a

judgment,” he says slowly.

 

“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she

looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could

possibly do to make her comply with any decree -

 

“To summarize: Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.

 

“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.

 

Sadeq breathes deeply again: “Yes, I think so.”

 

Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.

 

He raises a dark eyebrow: “Only if you can prove to me that you can

have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”

 

Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part

of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”

 

“What! From the alien?”

 

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and

waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him.

“Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin Trust to

loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some

legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from

Brussels. We’ve known for years there’s a whole alien packet-switching

network out there, and we’re just getting spillover from some of their

routers. It turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real

space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization

on Io - there is a purpose to all this activity.”

 

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a

reply?”

 

“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay

cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a

crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to

pay for the exercise.”

 

The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid

girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something

so smart it might as well be a god,” it says. “And she needs to

convince the peanut gallery back home that she’s got one, being a

born-again atheist and all. Which means, you’re it, monkey boy.

There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian on the first

starship out of Jupiter system. I don’t suppose I can convince you to

turn the offer down?”