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

the

scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is

empty.

 

“Since I became curator here, I’ve turned the museum’s structural

supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe

benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion

avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth

and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if

that was what interested me.”

 

Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening,

providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of

Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it’s downtown Baghdad.

 

“Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I

spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,” Sirhan

continues. “And it struck me, then, that there’s only one commodity

that is going to appreciate in value as time continues:

reversibility.”

 

“Reversibility? That doesn’t make much sense.” Pierre shakes his head.

He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He’s only been awake

an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe

that doesn’t bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and

worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing

bodies. “Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?”

 

“Hiding, probably,” Sirhan says, without rancor. “Her mother’s about,”

he adds. “Why do you ask?”

 

“I don’t know what you know about us.” Pierre looks at him askance:

“We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.”

 

“Oh, don’t worry on my behalf. I know you’re not the same people who

stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium’s collapse,” Sirhan

says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to

search for the history he’s alluding to. What they discover shocks him

to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.

 

“We didn’t know about any of that!” Pierre crosses his arms

defensively. “Not about you, or your father either,” he adds quietly.

“Or my other … life.” Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a

thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an

introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.

 

“I’m sure this must come as a big shock to you,” Sirhan says

condescendingly, “but it’s all to do with what I was talking about.

Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You

are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made

your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the

backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a

light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you’re

technically a different person saved you. And now, you’re alive, and

he’s dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn’t apply to you.

Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself.

The fittest version of you survives.”

 

He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow

from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating

as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into

taxonomic fault lines. “Life on Earth, the family tree, what

paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us,” he says pompously.

“The vertebrates begin there” - a point three quarters of the way up

the tree - “and we’ve got an average of a hundred fossil samples per

megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades,

as exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle at the

micrometer level has become practical. What a waste.”

 

“That’s” - Pierre does a quick sum - “fifty thousand different

species? Is there a problem?”

 

“Yes!” Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He

struggles visibly to get himself under control. “At the beginning of

the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of

vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of

multicellular organisms - it’s hard to apply the same statistical

treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of

them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears.

It used to be thought to be about one, but that’s a very

vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over

deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of

only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of

thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we

know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed

on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse.”

 

“Aha! So you’re after memoriesy yes? What really happened when we

colonized Barney. Who released Oscar’s toads in the free-fall core of

the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?”

 

“Not exactly.” Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out

devalues the significance of his insight. “I’m after history. All of

it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my

grandfather’s help - and you’re here to help me get it.”

 

*

 

Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus

hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures

from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this

distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above

the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the

naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly

organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan

(or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has

provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and

bandwidth, they’re all copiously available. A small town of bubble

homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility

foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.

 

Sirhan isn’t the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others

keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and

reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole

light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The

network of lily-pad habitats isn’t yet ready for the Saturnalian

immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it’s time

for the Worlds’ Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber’s flying

circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases

literally: Sirhan’s neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly

about the bustle and noise (“Forty immigrants! An outrage!”), has

wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of

a spidersilk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings

of the city.

 

But that isn’t going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for

the visitors. He’s moved his magnificent dining table outside, along

with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he’s built a dining room

within the dinosaur’s rib cage. Not that he’s planning on showing his

full hand, but it’ll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And

maybe it’ll flush out the mystery benefactor who’s been paying for all

these meatbodies.

 

Sirhan’s agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the

second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He

discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his

silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. “I’m sure

they’ll listen when the situation is made clear to them,” he says. “If

not, well, they’ll soon find out what it means to be paupers under

Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited

to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms

and metareligions - it’s no picnic out there!”

 

“You don’t have the resources to set this up on your own,” his

grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. “If this was the old

economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and

other risk management mechanisms -”

 

“There’s no risk to this venture, in purely human terms,” Sirhan

insists. “The only risk is starting it up with such a limited

reserve.”

 

“You win some, you lose some,” Pamela points out. “Let me see you.”

With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised.

“Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur.

I’m proud of you, darling.”

 

Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. “I’ll see

you in a few minutes,” he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest

valet: “Bring my carriage, now.”

 

A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and

disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver

Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It

drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the

sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus

stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the

orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already

present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of

earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted

from the starwhisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body

language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital

hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics

it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze.

“Welcome to my abode,” he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested

faces. “My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor

in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming

project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and

design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I’d like to offer you the

comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed

circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you

want to go next.”

 

He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that

floats beneath the dead dinosaur’s rib cage, slowly turns to take in

faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who’s who in this

gathering. He frowns slightly; there’s no sign of his mother. But that

wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can’t be - “Father?” he

asks.

 

Sadeq blinks owlishly. “Have we met?”

 

“Possibly not.” Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although

Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there’s something

wrong - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression,

the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement.

This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the

Ring’s axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast

Jupiter’s face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a

boy’s hair stand on end. “I won’t hold it against you, I promise,” he

blurts.

 

Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the

center of an uncomfortable silence. “Well then,” he says hastily. “If

you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there’ll be

plenty of time to talk later.” Sirhan doesn’t believe in forking

ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for

confusion are embarrassing - but he’s going to be busy working the

party.

 

He glances round. Here’s a bald, aggressive-looking fellow,

beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cutoffs and a top

made by deconstructing a space suit. Who’s he? (Sirhan’s agents hint:

“Boris Denisovitch.” But what does that mean?) There’s an

amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent

colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger

woman, dressed head to