Accelerando by Charles Stross (books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📖

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