“Is not sounding good to me,” Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe.
“Has it really gone that far?” asks Amber.
“There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system,” Pamela says bluntly. “After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat – hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties – being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go.”
She grins, frighteningly. “Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“What’s that?” asks a voice from below knee level.
Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. “Why should I tell you?” she asks, leaning on her cane: “After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you’ve got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job.”
The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn’t responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. “Through the domain wall.
Outside this biome. So cold. What’s that?”
Amber turns to follow the cat’s gaze, and her jaw drops. “Were you expecting visitors?” she asks Sirhan, shakily.
“Visit -” He looks round to see what everybody’s gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a deorbiting spacecraft.
“It’s bailiffs,” says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece.
“They’ve come for your memories, dear,” she explains, frowning. “They say we’ve got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they’re going to blow us apart…”
*
“You’re all in big trouble,” says the orangutan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan.
Sirhan recoils in disgust. “You again! What do you want from me this time?”
“Nothing.” The ape ignores him: “Amber, it is time for you to call your father.”
“Yeah, but will he come when I call?” Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: “Hey, you’re not my -”
“You.” Sirhan glares at the ape. “Go away! I didn’t invite you here!”
“More unwelcome visitors?” asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, you did.” The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons tothe cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors.
“Manfred isn’t welcome here. And neither is that woman,” Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela’s eye: “Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?” He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It’s dropping toward the horizon as it deorbits – next time it comes into view, it’ll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery.
“Me?” Pamela snorts. “Grow up.” She eyes the ape warily. “I don’t have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn’t set them on my worst enemies. I’ve seen what those things can do.” For a moment her eyes flash anger: “Grow up, why don’t you!” she repeats.
“Yes, please do,” says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented – he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man’s suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses.
“Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time no cat fight.” She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.
Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. “You look just the same,” she says gravely. “I can see why I was afraid of you.”
“You.” Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. “What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you trying to start a thermonuclear war?”
“Don’t ask me,” he says helplessly, “I don’t know why they came! What’s this about -” He focuses on the orangutan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. “Your cat?”
“I don’t think the orange hair suits Aineko,” Amber says slowly. “Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?”
Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. “I don’t think we’ve got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They’re armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we’ll be in trouble – it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn’t work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen.”
“Well, you’d better make time.” Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. “Crazy,” she mutters. “Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they’re being friendly! This can’t be a good sign.” She glances round, sees the ape: “You. Come here. Bring the cat.”
“The cat’s -” Sirhan trails off. “I’ve heard about your cat,” he says, lamely. “You took him with you in the Field Circus.”
“Really?” She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it’s cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. “Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn’t just a robot cat?”
“Ah,” Sirhan says faintly. “Then the bailiffs -”
“No, that’s all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat’s body?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because humans always underestimate anything that’s small, furry, and cute,” says the orangutan.
“Thanks, Aineko,” says Amber. She nods at the ape. “How are you finding it?”
Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. “Different,” she says, after a bit. “Not better.”
“Oh.” Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan’s confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum.
“Annette was right about one thing,” she says quietly. “Trust no one. I think it’s time to raise Dad’s ghost.”
She relaxes her grip on Sirhan’s elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. “Do you know who the bailiffs are?”
she asks.
“The usual.” He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. “Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City.”
The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot’s seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. “Greetins an’ salutations,” he drawls. “We is da’ Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an’ we-are got lett-uhz o’ marque an’ reprise from da’ ledgish-fuckn’ congress o’ da excited snakes of uhhmerica.”
“He sounds drunk!” Amber’s eyes are wide. “What’s this -”
“Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you do have to be mad to work there. Listen.”
City, which paused the replay for Amber’s outburst, permits it to continue. “Youse harbbring da’ fugitive Amber Macx an’ her mag
ic cat. We wan’ da cat. Da puta’s yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an’ we no’ zap you.”
The screen goes dead. “That was a fake, of course,” Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city’s orbital mechanics subsystem: “They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While that was sent afterward. It’s just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped.”
“So the bailiffs are -” Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation.
“They’re not human,” Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of – no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment – toward this young woman who isn’t the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. “They’ve absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show.
Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they’ve got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they’re not human: They’re limited liability companies.”
“So what do they want?” asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn’t realized Pierre could move that quietly.
“They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality – that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn’t mind eating your brains, too, but -” He shrugs. “Obsolete food is stale food.”
“Hah.” Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.
“What?” asks Sirhan.
“Where’s the – uh, cat?” asks Pierre.
“I think Aineko’s got it.” She looks thoughtful. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Time to drop off the hitcher.” Pierre nods. “Assuming it agrees…”
“Do you mind explaining yourselves?” Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself.
Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. “The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren’t totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn’t Aineko – it’s our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it’s got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature – it’s nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router’s power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That’s as far as it goes.”
“Hang on.” Sirhan’s eyes bulge. “You found something out there? You brought back a reallive alien?”
“Guess so.” Amber looks smug.
“But, but, that’s marvelous! That changes everything! It’s incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that’s got to be worth a gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!”
” Oui. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles,” Pierre interrupts cynically. “It seems to me that you are making two assumptions – that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the bailiffs arrive.”
“But, but -” Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will.
“Let’s go ask it what it wants to do,” says Amber. “Cooperate,” she warns Sirhan. “We’ll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First things first – we need to get out from under these pirates.”
*
As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan’s inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system – from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they’re mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the Field Circus’s crew. It seems that news of the starship’s arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now someone’s blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy.
“City,” he mutters, “where’s this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother’s cat.”
“Cat? What cat?” replies City. “I see no cats here.”
“No, it looks like a cat, it -” A horrible thought dawns on him. “Have you been hacked again?”
“Looks like it,” City agrees enthusiastically. “Isn’t it tiresome?”
“Shi – oh dear. Hey,” he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae – a tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the ghosts autistic – “have you been messing with my security infrastructure?”
“Us?” Amber looks annoyed. “No.”
” Someone has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s a big problem. If the bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don’t need to burn us – just take the whole place over.”
“That’s the least of your worries,” Amber points out. “What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?”
“Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it’s probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days, it’s too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to it.”
“Right.” She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them.
“Pigeons,” she says, almost tiredly. “Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?”
“Group?” Sirhan turns round. ” What did you just say?”
There’s a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him.
Amber dodges nimbly, but Sirhan isn’t so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean.
“It’s the flocking behavior,” Amber explains, looking up. “If you track the elements – birds – you’ll see that they’re not following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It’s a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real birds don’t do that. How long?”
Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky.
He waves his fist: “I’ll get you, see if I don’t -”
“I don’t think so.” Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. “You don’t think it’s just a coincidence, do you?” she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. “They’re one of the players here.”
“I don’t care. They’ve hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don’t care who they are, they’re not welcome.”
“Famous last words,” Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them.
Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet – then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-e
ater, taller than a six-storey building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There’s a pigeon standing proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage.
“It’s my party and my business scheme!” Sirhan insists plaintively. “Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from me!”
“That’s true,” Amber points out, “but in case you hadn’t noticed, you’ve offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people – not to put too fine a point on it, myself included – who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying ‘scam artists welcome here’? Dammit, I need Aineko.”
“Your cat.” Sirhan fastens on to this: “It’s your cat’s fault! Isn’t it?”
“Only indirectly.” Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. “Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?”
The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. “The cat’s with your mother.”
“Oh shit!” Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. “Where’s Pamela? Find her!”
Sirhan is stubborn. “Why should I?”
“Because she’s got the cat! What do you think she’s going to do but cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can’t you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes from?”
“You’re too late,” echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. “She’s kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It’s not flightworthy, but you’d be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog.”
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