Accelerando (24 page)

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 tons, 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 rock pile 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—