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

Chapter 9: Survivor

This time, more than a double handful of years passes between

successive visits to the Macx dynasty.

 

Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void,

carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long

spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells

that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that

Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of

oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred

trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters

like a gem in the darkness.

 

Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human

beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to

meatbodies.

 

I wonder who we’ll find here?

 

*

 

There’s an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat

cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at

one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs

made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice.

Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid

waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A

group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their

big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic

rifles - there’s no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a

minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are

few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and

the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They’re all

genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single

wendypan among them.

 

A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms

is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner

of the square. He’s passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls

when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and

arches its back, stretching luxuriously.

 

The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses

on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts

for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) “City, what’s that?” he

asks without moving his lips.

 

“What are you looking at?” replies City, which puzzles him somewhat,

but not as much as it should.

 

The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It

looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there’s something subtly

wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise - and

those paws - “You’re sharp,” he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling

in disapproval.

 

“Yeah, whatever.” The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at

it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It’s got sharp teeth,

too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears.

Innerspeech is for people, not toys.

 

“Who are you?” he demands.

 

The beast looks at him insolently. “I know your parents,” it says,

still using innerspeech. “You’re Manni Macx, aren’t you? Thought so. I

want you to take me to your father.”

 

“No!” Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. “I don’t like you! Go

away!” He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast’s nose.

 

“I’ll go away when you take me to your father,” says the beast. It

raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it

pauses. “If you take me to your father I’ll tell you a story

afterward, how about that?”

 

“Don’t care!” Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old - seven

old Earth-years - but he can tell when he’s being manipulated and gets

truculent.

 

“Kids.” The cat-thing’s tail lashes from side to side. “Okay, Manni,

how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I’ve got

claws, you know.” A brief eyeblink later, it’s wrapping itself around

his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat

- but he can see that it’s got sharp nails all right. It’s a wild

pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman

upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild

pussycat-thing that talks.

 

“Get away!” Manni is worried. “Mom!” he hollers, unintentionally

triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. “There’s this thing

-”

 

“Mom will do.” The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against

Manni’s legs and looks up at him. “There’s no need to panic. I won’t

hurt you.”

 

Manni stops hollering. “Who’re you?” he asks at last, staring at the

beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his

mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off

folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.

 

“I’m Aineko.” The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind

leg. “And you’re Manni, right?”

 

“Aineko,” Manni says uncertainly. “Do you know Lis or Bill?”

 

Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni,

head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know

that Aineko’s proportions are those of a domestic cat, Felis catus, a

naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and

companionables he’s used to. Reality may be fashionable with his

parents’ generation, but there are limits, after all. Orange-and-brown

stripes and whorls decorate Aineko’s fur, and he sprouts a white

fluffy bib beneath his chin. “Who are Lis and Bill?”

 

“Them,” says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko

and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a

pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids

and scampers round Manni’s feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and

tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass,

crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands.

 

“Now that wasn’t very friendly, was it?” says Aineko, a menacing note

in his voice. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to -”

 

The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives,

breathless and angry: “Manni! What have I told you about playing -”

 

She stops, seeing Aineko. “You.” She recoils in barely concealed

fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman

demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal

interaction for people to focus on.

 

The cat grins back at her. “Me,” he agrees. “Ready to talk?”

 

She looks stricken. “We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

 

Aineko lashes his tail. “Oh, but we do.” The cat turns and looks

pointedly at Manni. “Don’t we?”

 

*

 

It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the

meantime the space around Hyundai +4904/[-56] has changed out of

all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept

out of Sol’s Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the

unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their structured

excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random

dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long

time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to

an anthropic infestation.

 

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for

only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But

in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead

brown dwarf system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets

to make environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life.

They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of

asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the routers and

turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned

how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched

polities over them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding

mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness

between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with

the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer temerity of the

project is