Accelerando (51 page)

“Well, you'd better
make
time.” Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. “Crazy,” she mutters. “
tante
Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being
friendly
! This can't be a good sign.” She glances round, sees the ape. “You. Come
here
. Bring the cat.”

“The cat's—” Sirhan trails off. “I've heard about your cat,” he says, lamely. “You took him with you in the
Field Circus
.”

“Really?” She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. “Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?”

“Ah,” Sirhan says faintly. “Then the bailiffs—”

“No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think she keeps a cat's body?”

“I have no idea.”

“Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute,” says the orangutan.

“Thanks, Aineko,” says Amber. She nods at the ape. “How are you finding it?”

Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. “Different,” she says, after a bit. “Not better.”

“Oh.” Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of
a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum.

“Annette was right about one thing,” she says quietly. “Trust no one. I think it's time to raise Dad's ghost.” She relaxes her grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. “Do you know who the bailiffs are?” she asks.

“The usual.” He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. “Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City.”

The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. “Greetin's an' salutations,” he drawls. “We is da' Californiuhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica.”

“He sounds drunk!” Amber's eyes are wide. “What's this—”

“Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you
do
have to be mad to work there. Listen.”

City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. “Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit. You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you.”

The screen goes dead. “That was a fake, of course,” Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem. “They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While
that
was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar. A human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped.”

“So the bailiffs are—” Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation.

“They're not human,” Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of—no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment—toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. “They've absorbed a lot of
what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies.”

“So what do they want?” asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly.

“They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality—that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but—” He shrugs. “Obsolete food is stale food.”

“Hah.” Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.

“What?” asks Sirhan.

“Where's the—uh, cat?” asks Pierre.

“I think Aineko's got it.” She looks thoughtful. “Are you thinking what I'm thinking?”

“Time to drop off the hitcher.” Pierre nods. “Assuming it agrees . . .”

“Do you mind explaining yourselves?” Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself.

Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. “The conspiracy theorists were half-right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find
something
out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko—it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature—it's nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes.”

“Hang on.” Sirhan's eyes bulge. “You
found
something out there? You brought back a real-live
alien
?”

“Guess so.” Amber looks smug.

“But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!”

“
Oui
. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles,” Pierre interrupts cynically. “It seems to me that you are making two assumptions—that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive.”

“But, but—” Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will.

“Let's go ask it what it wants to do,” says Amber. “Cooperate,” she warns Sirhan. “We'll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first—we need to get out from under these pirates.”

As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system—from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the
Field Circus
's crew. It seems that news of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy.

“City,” he mutters, “where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother's cat.”

“Cat? What cat?” replies City. “I see no cats here.”

“No, it looks
like
a cat, it—” A horrible thought dawns on him. “Have you been hacked again?”

“Looks like it,” City agrees enthusiastically. “Isn't it tiresome?”

“Shi—oh dear. Hey,” he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat
in loco personae
—a
tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic—“have you been messing with my security infrastructure?”

“Us?” Amber looks annoyed. “No.”

“
Someone
has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toehold here, they don't need to burn us—just take the whole place over.”

“That's the least of your worries,” Amber points out. “What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?”

“Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days. It's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to it.”

“Right.” She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them. “Pigeons,” she says, almost tiredly. “Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?”

“Group?” Sirhan turns round. “
What
did you just say?”

There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean.

“It's the flocking behavior,” Amber explains, looking up. “If you track the elements—birds—you'll see that they're not following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don't
do
that. How long?”

Sirhan stops cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist. “I'll get you, see if I don't—”

“I don't think so.” Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. “You don't think it's just a coincidence, do you?” she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. “They're one of the players here.”

“I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate-crashed my party! I don't care
who
they are, they're not welcome.”

“Famous last words,” Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the
Argentinosaurus
skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet—then the skeleton of the hundred-ton plant-eater, taller than a six-story building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage.

“It's
my
party and
my
business scheme!” Sirhan insists plaintively. “Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!”

“That's true,” Amber points out, “but in case you hadn't noticed, you've offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people—not to put too fine a point on it, myself included—who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying ‘scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need Aineko.”

“Your cat.” Sirhan fastens on to this. “It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?”

“Only indirectly.” Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. “Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?”

The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. “The cat's with your mother.”