Accelerando (47 page)

“Oh, but—” Sirhan stops, his skin crawling.
She may be mad,
he realizes abruptly.
Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.
“I'd hoped for a reconciliation,” he says quietly. “Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?”

“Why spoil it?” She looks at him pityingly. “It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be
human,
and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still—” She trails off. “That's odd.”

“What is?”

Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. “I'll swear I saw a lobster out there . . .”

Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning. For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight.

The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the
Field Circus
anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit.
More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. “Thank you,” she finally manages to gasp. “I can breathe now.”

She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed—then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person—also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair.

“Are you awake yet,
ma chérie
?” asks the orangutan.

“Um.” Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze—she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and un-embedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that for a moment she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic.
Help! I'm trapped in the real universe!
Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to
something
outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside. Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. “I'm in a
museum
? On Saturn? Who are you—have we met?”

“Not in person,” the ape says carefully. “We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos.”

“Auntie—” A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message:
Your father sends you this escape package
. The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. “Is Dad here?” she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty years have passed in linear time. In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge.

“I am not sure.” The orangutan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. “He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone
until the dust settles.” She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. “This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for.”

“Not—” Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired. “What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going on?”

“I still
am
human, where it counts,” says Annette. “I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason.” She gestures fluidly at the open door. “You will find big changes. Your son has organized—”

“
My
son.” Amber blinks. “Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?” A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. “Oh
shit
! Tell me she isn't here already!”

“I am very much afraid that she is,” says Annette. “Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his
grandmère
. Who he, of course, invited to his party.”

“His
party
?”

“Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here—even me.” The ape-body smirks at her: “I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress.”

“Tell me about this library,” Amber says, narrowing her eyes. “And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never fucked.”

“What, you would know everything?” asks Annette.

“Yeah.” Amber pushes herself creakily upright. “I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?”

“I'll show you,” says the orangutan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. “Drinks, first.”

While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orangutan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows
constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight.

“What is this?” Amber asks, entranced. “Some kind of aerogel?”

“No—” Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. “Make a chair,” she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. “And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes.” The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. “That's it.” The ape grins at Amber. “You are comfortable?”

“But I—” Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. “You brought the whole thing? Just for me?”

“You can never tell with future shock.” Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. “We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time.” Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time.

“You, I—I wasn't expecting. This.” Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.

“Don't be unhappy,” Annette says warmly. “I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness. She lacks the courage of her convictions.”

“She does?” This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.

“Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child.
He
thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before.”

“Backward.” Amber takes a deep breath. “You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing
old
? Isn't that a bit slow?”

Annette shakes her head lugubriously. “She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is more than eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind. She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see?
That
is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys.”

“She's cornered me!”

“Oh, I would not
say
that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend, but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we—”

“Is he still alive?” Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half-wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad.

“Yes.” Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. “As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she'll still talk to
me. You
will
do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father.”

“Yeah, but.” Amber nods to herself. “He may be able to help me.”

“Oh? How so?”

“You remember the original goal of the
Field Circus
? The sapient alien transmission?”

“Yes, of course.” Annette snorts. “Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads.”

Amber licks her lips. “How susceptible to interception are we here?”