Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗

It hardly seems

real.

 

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One

One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

 

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the

cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s

subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

 

“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four,

airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to

seven-four-zero and slaved to our control.”

 

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s

settings. “Control, all in order.”

 

“Bravo One One, stand by.”

 

The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his

Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one

optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies

himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might

fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor

in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes

closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what

comes next.

 

Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered module like a

rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is

buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid

brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs,

fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main

collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like

seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already

he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole

of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a

rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

 

At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq

watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into

his visual field. There’s an external camera view of the rockpile and

grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he

licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again -

but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough

to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the

ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump,

then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking

ring fire - and he’s down.

 

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity

here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the

life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end

of the docking node. Turning, he’s just in time to see the hatch

opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then -

 

*

 

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting

with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It’s a lump

of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band

of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet

speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to

being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of

the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the

edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants

and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but

her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful,

and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in

microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a crown. And there’s

a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it’s a cat, sleeping on the

back of her throne.

 

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to

the doorway, then floats back. “If you need anything, please say,” she

says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne,

orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save

for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and

waits to be noticed.

 

“Dr. Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at him, neither the innocent

grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm

greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any

necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay.”

 

Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young - her face still

retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity

moon-face - but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. “I

am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs, formulaic.

Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope

vision. It’s already the biggest offshore - or off-planet - data haven

in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the

top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction

rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet,

invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her

head. Like a halo.

 

“Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle

squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and

waiting. “You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is

exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. “Two years is

nearly unprecedented.”

 

“Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself

and faces her. “Your labors have been fruitful, I trust.”

 

She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any

frontier …” A momentary grin. “This isn’t the Wild West, is it?”

 

“Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later:

“My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say

your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be

something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder,

is not justice.”

 

The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree - I can’t

sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new

frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn’t it? Our

bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and

arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to

abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they’re

close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal

framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian

space, than any earthbound one.” A note of steel creeps into her

voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from

the walls of the throne room.

 

Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an

engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the

walls and floor of this huge construct. “There is law revealed by the

Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we can establish by

analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans

live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those

who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet,

can you provide a moral compass?”

 

“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s

heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claim jumpers and

boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the

earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration

here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out

through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst

mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the

queen - the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and

energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology,

and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain

experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy

intersection. She has force majeure - even the Pentagon’s infowarriors

respect the Ring Imperium’s autonomy for now. In fact, the body

sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction

of her identity. She’s by no means the first upload or partial, but

she’s the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when

the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and

turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the

observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the

rectitude of her vision, in her presence.

 

The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin.

Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq

through narrowed eyes.

 

“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m

full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”

 

It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a

judgment,” he says slowly.

 

“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she

looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could

possibly do to make her comply with any decree -

 

“To summarize: Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.

 

“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.

 

Sadeq breathes deeply again: “Yes, I think so.”

 

Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.

 

He raises a dark eyebrow: “Only if you can prove to me that you can

have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”

 

Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part

of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”

 

“What! From the alien?”

 

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and

waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him.

“Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin Trust to

loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some

legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from

Brussels. We’ve known for years there’s a whole alien packet-switching

network out there, and we’re just getting spillover from some of their

routers. It turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real

space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization

on Io - there is a purpose to all this activity.”

 

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a

reply?”

 

“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay

cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a

crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to

pay for the exercise.”

 

The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid

girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something

so smart it might as well be a god,” it says. “And she needs to

convince the peanut gallery back home that she’s got one, being a

born-again atheist and all. Which means, you’re it, monkey boy.

There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian on the first

starship out of Jupiter system. I don’t suppose I can convince you to

turn the offer down?”