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

enthuses.

“Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?”

 

“They’re Amber’s friends,” Ang explains. “Years ago, Amber’s father

did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know?

Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some

random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their

lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in

return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way

back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly

properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract -

that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam

them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking

at what’s happened to the solar system since then, who can blame

them?”

 

Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. “The cat,” he says.

 

“The cat -” Donna’s head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out

again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of

this public space. “What about the cat?”

 

“The family cat,” explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris’s pitcher

of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: “Aineko wasn’t

conscious back then, but later … when SETI@home finally received

that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the

lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still

thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented

programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly

with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a

high-level interface to a communications network we’re going to

visit.” She squeezes Boris’s fingertips. “SETI@home logged these

coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public

word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away - they

didn’t want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our

cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to

come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster

and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we’re

about to open.”

 

“Ah, this is all a bit clearer now,” says Donna. “But the lawsuit - “

She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.

 

“Well, there we have a problem,” Ang says diplomatically.

 

“No,” says Pierre. “I have a problem. And it’s all Amber’s fault.”

 

“Hmm?” Donna stares at him. “Why blame the Queen?”

 

“Because she’s the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting

time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat

for resolving corporate conflicts,” he grumbles. “And compurgation,

but that’s not applicable to this case because there isn’t a

recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by

combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her

champion.” In the most traditional way imaginable, he remembers with a

warm frisson of nostalgia. He’d been hers in body and soul before that

disastrous experiment. He isn’t sure whether it still applies, but -

“I’ve got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial

stance.”

 

He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly,

pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.

 

“Trial by combat,” Su Ang explains to Donna’s perplexed ghost-swarm,

which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion.

“Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a

good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring

Imperium, but the Queen Mother’s lawyers are very persistent. Probably

because it’s taken on something of a grudge match quality over the

years. I don’t think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat

lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don’t think he liked

what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there’s a

bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I

mean everything.”

 

*

 

Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai +4904/[-56] looms beyond the

parachute-shaped sail of the Field Circus like a rind of darkness

bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational

contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred

degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the

eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the

stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.

 

Planets aren’t the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of

hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand

kilometers, Boris’s phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic

and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by

the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of

reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the

starscape: their destination, the router.

 

“That’s it,” says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning

the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he’s been present

in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still

wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. “Closest

approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand.

Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to

achieve a stable orbit.”

 

Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the

mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of

two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its

reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The

temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just

motor on in and squat on the router’s cosmic doorstep. But the risk of

beam interruption is too dangerous. It’s happened before, for seconds

to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She’s

not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort

cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it’s more likely to

be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power

while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more

serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar

flight. “Let’s just play it safe,” she says. “We’ll go for a straight

orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We’ve got enough

gravity wells to play pinball with. I don’t want us on a free-flight

trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can’t get

the sail back.”

 

“Very prudent,” Boris agrees. “Marta, work on it.” A buzzing presence

of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the

job. “I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in

about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now …?”

 

“No need for protocol analysis,” Amber says casually. “Where’s - ah,

there you are.” She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round

sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. “What do you

think?”

 

“Do you want fries with that?” asks the cat, focusing on the artifact

at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge.

 

“No, I just want a conversation,” says Amber.

 

“Well, okay.” The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing

power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. “Opening port

now.”

 

A subjective minute or two passes. “Where’s Pierre?” Amber asks

herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her

privileged viewpoint are worrying. The Field Circus is running at

almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in

order to establish the interface to the router, it’s taking up an

awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. “And where’s the bloody

lawyer?” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

 

The Field Circus is small, but its light sail is highly controllable.

Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from

straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the

ship’s hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the

beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a

coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router.

Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels

using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of

preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level

data.

 

“Leave the lawyer to me.” She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq

watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. “Lawyers do not mix

with diplomacy,” he explains.

 

“Huh.” Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous

spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and

turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of

recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser

light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly,

reflecting data back at the ship. “Ah!”

 

“Contact,” purrs the cat. Amber’s fingertips turn white where she

grips the arms of her chair.

 

“What does it say?” she asks, quietly.

 

“What do they say,” corrects Aineko. “It’s a trade delegation, and

they’re uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they

sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want.”

 

“Wait!” Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. “Don’t give them free

access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and

we’ll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours.” She pauses.

“That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to

us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping

system?”

 

The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: “You’d do better

loading the network yourself -”

 

“I don’t want anybody on this ship running alien code before we’ve

vetted it thoroughly,” she says urgently. “In fact, I want them

bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I

want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got

that?”

 

“Clear,” Aineko grumbles.

 

“A trade delegation,” Amber thinks aloud. “What would Dad make of

that?”

 

*

 

One moment he’s in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the

Journalist’s ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he’s abruptly

precipitated into a very different space.

 

Pierre’s heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces

himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled

chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major

systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to

his realm. The only person aboard who’s entitled to those privileges

is -

 

“Pierre?”

 

She’s behind him. He turns angrily. “Why did you drag me in here?

Don’t you know it’s rude to -”

 

“Pierre.”

 

He stops and looks at Amber. He can’t stay angry at her for long, not

to her face. She’s not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but

she’s disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside

him feels shriveled and wrong in her presence. “What is it?” he says,

curtly.

 

“I don’t know why you’ve been avoiding me.” She starts to take a step

forward, then stops and bites her lip. Don’t do this to me! he thinks.

“You know it hurts?”

 

“Yes.” That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his

father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent,

elder brother: It’s a choice between p�re or Amber, but it’s not a

choice he wants to make. The shame. “I didn’t - I have some issues.”

 

“It was