Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  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 père or Amber, but it’s not a choice he wants to make. The shame. “I didn’t – I have some issues.”

  “It was the other night?”

  He nods. Now she takes a step forwards. “We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want,” she says.

  And she leans toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn’t feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?

  “It made me uncomfortable,” he mumbles into her hair. “Need to sort myself out.”

  “Oh, Pierre.” She strokes the down at the back of his neck. “You should have said. We don’t have to do it that way if you don’t want to.”

  How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything’s wrong? Ever? “You didn’t drag me here to tell me that,” he says, implicitly changing the subject.

  Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. “What is it?” she asks.

  “Something’s wrong?” he half asks, half asserts. “Have we made contact yet?”

 
; “Yeah,” she says, pulling a face. “There’s an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That’s the problem.”

  “An alien trade delegation.” He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he’s been trying to avoid uttering. It’s his fault for changing the subject.

  “A trade delegation,” says Amber. “I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren’t we?”

  He sighs. “We thought we were going to do that.” A quick prod at the universe’s controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. “A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That’s what the brochure said, right? That’s what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. “Except there’s a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they’re coming aboard already. And I don’t buy it – something about the whole setup stinks.”

  Pierre’s brow wrinkles. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” he says, finally. “Doesn’t make sense at all.”

  Amber nods. “I carry a ghost of Dad around. He’s really upset about it.”

  “Listen to your old man.” Pierre’s lips quirk humorlessly. “We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?”

  “I don’t like it.” Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. “And then there’s the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later.”

  He lets go of her fingers. “I’d really be much happier if you hadn’t named me as your champion.”

  “Hush.” The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she’s sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. “Listen. I had a good reason.”

  “Reason?”

  “You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn’t just ‘hit ‘em with a sword until they die’ time.” She grins, impishly. “The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who’s a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It’s crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth’s light cone.”

  Pierre blinks. “Um.” Blinks again. “I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer the guy?”

  “Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?” She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. “Shit, Pierre, I know you’re not some kind of macho psychopath!”

  “But your mother’s lawyers -”

  She shrugs dismissively. “They’re lawyers. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works.” She leans against his chest. “You’ll make mincemeat of them.

  Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor.” His hands meet around the small of her back. “My hero!”

  *

  The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.

  Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters – each the size of a small pony -

  shuffle out of the loop’s baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn’t be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation.

  Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. “Can’t trust that cat with anything,” she mutters.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber’s train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered.

  “To let the cat have its way, yes,” Amber is annoyed. “But I didn’t mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won’t have it!”

  “I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before,” Ang observes. “It’s not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past.” Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.

  “It looks good,” Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up.

  Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. “It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court’s activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we’ve come from… and it doesn’t give away anything about where we’re going.”

  “But that doesn’t make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters,” points out Su Ang. “They lack the reference points to understand it.” She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over.

  Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn’t that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That’s Boris, sitting behind the bishop.

  “You tell her,” Ang implores him.

  “I can’t,” he admits. “We’re trying to establish communication, aren’t we? But we don’t want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we’re leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì – it’s a matter of national security.”

  “Humph.” Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.

  The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing.

  The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. “Am inconsistent,” it complains. “There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inc
onsistency, explain?”

  “Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit Field Circus,” Amber replies calmly. “I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don’t normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you’re not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?”

  Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.

  “We are the Wunch,” announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. “This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?”

  ” He means twenty years,” Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. ” They’ve confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something? “

  ” Relatively little,” comments someone else – Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly.

  “We are the Wunch,” the lobster repeats. “We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?”

  Faint frown lines appear on Amber’s forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. “We consider it impolite to ask,” she says quietly.

  Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. “You accept our translation?” asks the leader.

  “Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?” asks Amber.

  The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. “True. We send.”

  “We cannot integrate that network,” Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face.

  (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they’ll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future analysis.) “They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species.”