Accelerando (44 page)

“Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her,” says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair—carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms—her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. “It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it.”

“Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke,” Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. “Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?”

“If you will excuse me?” asks Sadeq. “We have a shortage of insight
here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions—and how they convinced the
ulama
to go along with
that
I would very much like to know—concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?”

“Do bears shit in woods?” asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. “Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you—”

“Boris, can it!” Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died—
incurred child support payments
? “I don't hold you responsible for this,” she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.

“This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon.” Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber—and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer—as he laces his fingers.

“Drop it. I said I
don't
blame you.” Amber forces a smile. “We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out.”

“We could keep going.” This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. “The
Field Circus
is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light years . . .”

“We've lost too much sail mass,” says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. “We ejected half our original launch sail to
provide the braking mirror at Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
, and almost eight megaseconds ago we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target.” Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. “There's nowhere to run.”

“Nowhere to—” Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. “Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?”

“I know you do.” And Pierre really
does
know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore—it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) “I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?”

“My
mother
.” Amber nods thoughtfully. “Where's Donna?”

“I don't—”

There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. “Hiding in corners again?” Amber says disdainfully.

“I am a camera!” protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. “I am—”

Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens. “You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once.
Merde
!”

The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. “Go fuck yourself!”

“I don't like being spied on,” Amber says sharply. “Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?”

“I'm the archivist.” Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. “
You
said I should—”

“Yes,
well
.” Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass
the Queen in her audience chamber. “You heard what we were discussing. What do
you
know about my mother's state of mind?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. “I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?”

“I—” For once, Amber's speechless.

“I'll schedule you for facial surgery,” offers the cat.
Sotto voce
: “It's the only way to be sure.”

Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the
Field Circus
. It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide. “What is the lawsuit, anyway?” Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying. “I did not that bit see.”

“It's horrible,” Amber says vehemently.

“Truly evil,” echoes Pierre.

“Fascinating but wrong,” Sadeq muses thoughtfully.

“But it's still horrible!”

“Yes, but what
is
it?” Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks.

“It's a demand for settlement.” Amber takes a deep breath. “Dammit, you might as well tell everyone—it won't stay secret for long.” She sighs. “After we left, it seems my other half—my original incarnation, that is—got married. To Sadeq, here.” She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. “And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time—we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home—
that
is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox
as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels.

“This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the
Field Circus
several times over. And my accounts are wiped out—I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble.”

A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous
Argentinosaurus
and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. “Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?” she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky.

Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against him. “Which childhood would you like to know about?” he asks.

“What do you mean, which?” Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity.

“I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better.” It's his turn to frown.

“She did, did she,” breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. “Why do you think she did that?”

“It was the only way she knew to raise a child,” Sirhan says defensively. “She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own character flaws.”
When
I
have children there will be more than one,
he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side.

Pamela flinches. “It's not my fault,” she says quietly. “Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what—what different childhoods did you have?”

“Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly—she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam—at least, his parents thought it was the hidden imam—and—” Sirhan shrugs. “Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history.”

“Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?” asks his grandmother.

“Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it.”
Or rather, decided it was unlawful,
he recalls. “I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways.”