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

“I

found the casting a trifle disturbing.”

 

“I’m no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role … let’s just say,

the cap fits.” Amber leans back in her chair. “Mind you, Marguerite

had an interesting life,” she muses.

 

“Don’t you mean depraved and debauched?” her neighbor counters.

 

“Sadeq.” She closes her eyes. “Let’s not pick a fight over absolute

morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry

out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I’m

feeling very tired. Drained.”

 

“Ah - I apologize.” He inclines his head carefully. “Is it your young

man’s fault? Has he slighted you?”

 

“Not exactly -” Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along

as ship’s theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her

pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly

oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the

quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium,

he’s outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an

unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah

by the time they get home. He’s circumspect in dealing with cultural

differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids

antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral

development. “It’s a personal misunderstanding,” she says. “I’d rather

not talk about it until we’ve sorted it out.”

 

“Very well.” He looks unsatisfied, but that’s normal. Sadeq still has

the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to

his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don’t mirror

in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early

twenty-first centuries. “But back to the here and now. Do you know

where this router is?”

 

“I will, in a few minutes or hours.” Amber raises her voice,

simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. “Boris! You got any

idea where we’re going?”

 

Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he’s wearing a

velociraptor, and they don’t turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls

irritably: “Give me some space!” He coughs, a threatening noise from

the back of his wattled throat, “Searching the sail’s memory now.” The

back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny

nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors

and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array

detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is

feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the

unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as

visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an

aborted sun.

 

“But where is it going to be?” asks Sadeq. “Do you know what you are

looking for?”

 

“Yes. We should have no trouble finding it,” says Amber. “It looks

like this.” She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows

that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and

something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the

seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and

whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in

space above a darkling planet. “Looks like a William Latham sculpture

made out of strange matter, doesn’t it?”

 

“Very abstract,” Sadeq says approvingly.

 

“It’s alive,” she adds. “And when it gets close enough to see us,

it’ll try to eat us.”

 

“What?” Sadeq sits up uneasily.

 

“You mean nobody told you?” asks Amber: “I thought we’d briefed

everybody.” She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he

catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits

in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. “Damn,” she

adds mildly.

 

Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with

ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he’s busy in

another private universe.

 

“Hrrrr! Boss! Found something,” calls Boris, drooling on the bridge

floor.

 

Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router, she thinks. “Put it on

the main screen.”

 

“Are you sure this is safe?” Su Ang asks nervously.

 

“Nothing is safe,” Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck.

“Here. Look.”

 

The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish

horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white

methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by

Hyundai +4904/[-56]‘s residual rotation. The image-intensification

level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness.

Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk:

Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost

planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms

in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and

dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far

horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of

frigid darkness.

 

“That’s it,” Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the

terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around

her; “That’s it!” Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment

with everybody she values. “Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned

cat in here! Where’s Pierre? He’s got to see this!”

 

*

 

Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and

rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Fireworks

burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of

cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a

tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a

prarranged rendezvous. He’s been drinking, and his best linen shirt

shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to

breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of

hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I doing this? he

wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around -

 

He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a

vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside

into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the

threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement.

Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an

unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness

lower down that makes him cry out, “where are you?”

 

“Over here.” He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She’s

partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested

corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes.

Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He’s full

of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight,

the taste in her mouth. She’s the magnet for his reality, impossibly

alluring, so tense she could burst. “Is it working for you?” she asks.

 

“Yes.” he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and

desire as he walks toward her. They’ve experimented with gender play,

trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is

the first time they’ve done it this way. She opens her mouth: He

kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips,

the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.

 

She leans against him, feeling his erection. “So this is how it feels

to be you,” she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but

she doesn’t have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new

sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive

sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing

deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she

feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly

faints with the rich sensations of her body - it’s as if he’s

dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning

to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist -

so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She’s

whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: “Do it to

me!” she demands, “Do it now!”

 

Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts

bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against

him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and

there’s a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts,

so inside out it takes his breath away. It’s hot and as hard as rock,

and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it’s an

intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of

his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and

terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he

begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his

own head, I didn’t know it felt like this -

 

Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, “How was it

for you?” Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have,

too.

 

But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting

into him, and of how good it felt. All he can hear is his father

yelling (“What are you, some kind of queer?”) - and he feels dirty.

 

*

 

Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

 

The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33 MIPS - thoughts

bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented

human minds. Saturn’s rings glow with waste heat. The remaining

faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space

of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to

resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in

equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves

of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small,

crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black

slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass

drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around

the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of

copious solar power and determined mining robots.

 

The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high

orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter

trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner

Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are

shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and

crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below,

skimming the edges of Jupiter’s turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic

glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of

superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas

giant’s magnetosphere. It’s trading momentum for electrical

current, diverting it into a fly’s eye grid of lasers that beam it

toward Hyundai +4904/[-56]. As long as the original Amber and her

incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue

its mission of discovery, but they’re part of the posthuman

civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system,

part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control

engine of history.

 

Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in

the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto,

supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming

structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.

 

There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s

getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the

twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic

malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic