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

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 Alb� - 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. Inconsistency, 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.”

 

Concern, alarm, agitation. “You cannot do that! You are not

untranslatable entity signifier.”

 

Amber raises a hand. “You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did

not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”

 

“We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is

for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable

concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we

cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable

entity