Accelerando (53 page)

But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving.

H
ALF A YEAR PASSES ON
S
ATURN
—
MORE THAN A
decade on Earth, and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years—four presingularity lifetimes—before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops. And the refugees have begun to move in.

There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces—what
is
it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania?—around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling and in a
few cases getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spider-palanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.

Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blond, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T-shirt) points to an elaborately retro dress. “Wouldn't my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.

“
Ma chérie,
you have but to try it—” The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her posture and expression.

“I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with
shops
. 'S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long.” Amber twists her hips, experimenting. “You get out of the habit of
foraging
. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it . . .” She trails off.

“You are a twenty-first-century platform selling to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But—” Annette looks thoughtful.

“Hmm.” Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. “If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons—”

“—They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them,
ma chérie.
The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first
venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach—they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?”

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. “Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thought,
that
”—Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice—“is just too much.”

She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion—a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy—isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. “I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation. I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat-trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers.”

“Like your coronation robe?”

Amber winces. “Touché.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then.”

“Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory. “You don't
feel
older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here.”

“That birdbrain,” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I'm
sending out fractional me's tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector—”

“Perhaps.” The door re-forms behind them. “But you need a core identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's—ah,
bonjour
!”

“Hello. How can we help you?” The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays—cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion—are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

“
Mais oui
. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here.” Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant. “She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important.”

“We would be
delighted
to help you,” purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward. “Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?”

“Oh. Well.” Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking.
It's your head,
she sends. “I'm involved in the
accelerationista
administrative program. Are you familiar with it?”

The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. “I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics,” she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. “Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?”

“Yes.” Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual
rags. “She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with—I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it.”

“What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?” asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. “If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe . . .”

“I'm running for the assembly,” Amber says bluntly. “On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized.” She manages to smile. “That means, I think, per-haps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats—enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now.” She grins. “Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful.”

“I think we can do better than that.” The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. “Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam . . . ?”

“Macx. Amber Macx.”

“—Macx's requirements.” She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. “If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements—”

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care. Because for now, he's alone.

Except that he isn't, really.

“Excuse me, are you real?” someone asks him in American-accented English.

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. “What?” he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a postsingularity nativity play. “I say, what?” Outrage simmers at the back of his mind—
Is nowhere private?
—but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.

“I can't find my implants,” the Anglo male says, shaking his head. “But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?” He glances round at the other pods. “This isn't a sim.”

Sirhan sighs—
another exile
—and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much—unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. “You've been dead. Now you're alive. I
suppose
that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?”

“When is—” The newcomer stops. “Can you direct me to the processing center?” he asks carefully. “I'm disoriented.”