One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the
Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly
precipitated into a very different space.

Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces
himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled
chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major
systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to
his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges
is -

"Pierre?"

She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here?
Don't you know it's rude to -"

"Pierre."

He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not
to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but
she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside
him feels shriveled and wrong in her presence. "What is it?" he says,
curtly.

"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step
forward, then stops and bites her lip. Don't do this to me! he thinks.
"You know it hurts?"

"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his
father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent,
elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a
choice he wants to make. The shame. "I didn't - I have some issues."

"It was 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 Albì - 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 signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable
concept #1."

Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang,
Pierre, the other members of her primary team. "Opinions, anyone?"

Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the
dais. "I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that
there's something wrong with their semantics."

"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang.

The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber.

Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind:
not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and
incomprehensibly complicated. "The untranslatable entity concept #1
when mapped onto the lobster's grammar network has elements of 'god'
overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike
incomprehensibility. But I'm pretty sure that what it really means is
'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A
type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The
implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat
fades back in. "Any takers?"

"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big - or using a dodgy
metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the
hayseeds new to the big city."

"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.

"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang.

"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that
chops a decade off her apparent age: "We're going to mess with their
heads!" She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no
change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot
of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. "We
understand your concern," Amber says smoothly, "but we have already
given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies
that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us
your real selves or your real language?"

"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are
metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity
of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue
optimized for your comprehension."

"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a
coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use
the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the
language module you're using for an exchange? And you want to trade
with us."

"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its
legs. "Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations.
Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who
are not untranslatable entity signifier. Able to control risks of
communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular
level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum
entanglement."

"Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the
primitives," Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "How
backward do they think we are?"

"The physics model in here is really overdone," comments Boris. "They
may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it on
the back of the lobsters' efforts."

Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the
Wunch's representatives. "I have appointed two representatives who
will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own
court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial
representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan
Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others
may come forward in due course if that is acceptable."

"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and
disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place.
Request resumption of negotiations later?"

"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but
impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality
threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at
an end.

* * *

Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of
the spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion
and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's
entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.

Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind
surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of
personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of
utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as
aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with
high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped
in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every
living human, a thousand million software agents carry information
into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has
vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow
belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged,
on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer
present, having been dismantled completely and turned into
solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light
falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon
crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet
via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This
planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus -
all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of
cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the
small rocky bodies of the inner system.

The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system
remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium.
Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of
meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a
goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated
communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the
ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of
every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the
most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the
discovery of speech.

A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions
- threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically.
They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system
fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder
catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud.
Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows
all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant
blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin
problems on a human adolescent.

The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both
capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a
protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of
kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too.
Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging
respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the
Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being
human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great
simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the
solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar
system into processors, they can accommodate as many
human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten
billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.

A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of
near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he
has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still
sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a
way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the Field Circus
returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed
for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real
universe between this moment and the end of the era of star
formation, many billions of years hence.

* * *

"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods."

Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.

Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris."

Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is
right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to
get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model
we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not
crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess,
they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much
smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they
are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great
upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to
themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets
they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but
others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers,
deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum
game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves
and transcend."

Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge.
In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal
queen whose role she plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a
big risk. I'm not happy about it."

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles
crookedly. "We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are
dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding."

"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we
aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these
body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our
human-style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?"

"I can find her." Boris frowns.

"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an
afterthought. "They're close - too close. And they showed up too damn
fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are
flawed. The real owners of this network we've plugged into probably
use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to
build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably
lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the
school gate. I don't want to give them that opportunity before we make
contact with the real thing!"

"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without
insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their
environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they
created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us.
It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more
gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?"

"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build
propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a
favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever
heard of Newspeak?"

"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn
spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of
Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel
novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she re-integrates the memories.
"Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" - she snaps her
fingers, trying to remember Dad's favorite - "Dilbert."

"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in
charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a
revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and
these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us."

"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I
certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's my job."

* * *

Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy
talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview
both sides at the same time.

Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who
evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol
dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the
way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She
finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his
youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.

"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm
one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime
who has any clout. The old bastard - if I'd known I'd grow up to
become that, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist
commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal
integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning
to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my
youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority
stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The
bastard."

"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are,
stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -"

"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands.
"One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris facing total
humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his
slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm on the carpet in front of
my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's
seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was
getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in
the outer office taking research notes because
myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him.
It's humiliating, that's what it is."

"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig
from the bottle.

"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it's not like
being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your
work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with
another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn't just
distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went
back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and
ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I
volunteered to come out here. He's still handling her account, and I
figured -" Glashwiecz shrugged.

"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna,
spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she
wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields
over Amber's mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of
attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent
lawsuits than a simple family feud?

Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says
dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the contemptuous
twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd
be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder - I'm still here,
right? - and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd
be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself."

"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your
take on that?"

Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't
she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she's
imposed is evil - it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place
for too long, but in the short run, it's a major advantage. So she
wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim
against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from
Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full
disclosure." He lifts his bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that cat.
One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to
queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom,
Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And she gave me
the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains
and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob.
Then I can talk to them straight."

The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit,
and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry,
y'know?"

"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted
fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.

"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies
disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is
going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew
this econo-economist, that's what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds,
rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had
a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes'd roll in
at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the
disk drives, memory, processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job.
Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the
manufact'rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to
buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell,
they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that
disassembly was the wave of the future."

"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes
away.

Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across
the ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about" (hic)
"ten years 'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But
disassembly - production line cannibalism - it'sa way to go. Take old
assets an' bring new life to them. A fully 'preciated fortune." He
grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. "'S'what I'm gonna do to those
space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know what hit
'em."

* * *

The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of
atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai +4904/[-56], it's a
speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant
sapphire stare of Amber's propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the
emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange
matter.

The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a
meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre
is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to
focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that
Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is
present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity,
six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor
maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump
of naked singularities.

There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su
Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence
for a minute. "Do you have a moment?"

Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the
front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits
for her to speak.

"I know you're busy -" she begins, then stops. "Is it that important?"
she asks.

"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router -
there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each
of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is
carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's
at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of
self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that
is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from
home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes -" he
shakes his head.

"It's big?"

"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a low-bandwidth link
compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of
her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front
panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre,
sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional
easily. "I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi
paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get
enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes
would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they
are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out,
too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -"

He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and
lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself."

"I can't!" He really is agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out
the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit,
then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is
seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it."

"Stop."

He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single
identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?"

"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to
deal with stress more appropriately."

"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three
sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I
need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace,
wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new
environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm
a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up."

"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think
something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks
they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us.
Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them.
Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out,
and talk to anyone else who'll listen."

"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other
gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?"

Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of
all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a
trading network, yes?" she asks.

"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as
cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service
environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a
compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the
corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate
with a blackboard system - a souk - and I'm bringing up a link to the
router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to
anyone who's listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are at
least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy
quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with
distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the
development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when
Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted
rates -"

"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen
to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going
to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?"

"Got it." There's a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells.
"Hey, that's interesting."

"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see
the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in
the air before him.

"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from
the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of
light. "... about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to
talk." He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey
again. I wonder what that says."

It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the
translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to
correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster
network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he says.

"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go
tell Amber."

"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her,
but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's
wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their
translator didn't want to pass that message along."

"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in
the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually
making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad
reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know.

* * *

Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's
only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the
intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his
brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he
confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's
mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of
control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat
dragged in.

"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to
grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?"

"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get
rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like.
Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially
when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside.
"They are not telling you the truth about this system."

"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its
mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside
its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?"

"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to
provide it on credit."

They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a
trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the
Wunch negotiator.

"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says
the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted
to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating
species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade
information for self-advantage."

"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy
species."

"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head.

"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the
lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the
new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your
thoughts, and we will dream you over."

"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you
want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is
that?"

"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told
us to."

"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is
your true form?" he asks.

"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder.

"What are you doing -"

"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly
businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch.
Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous
armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice curiously
muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries,
yes?"

"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly
what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will
prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat.
"You're going to deal with us directly without using that shell
interface?"

"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little
crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears
footsteps behind him on the gravel path.

"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre,
back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there's
a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!"

"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun.

Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front
inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side
to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black,
acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on counsel's privilege,"
Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest
in the strongest terms -"

Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear
legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny
hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!"

Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over
him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a
sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus
shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to
scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down
toward the churning mandibles.

Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster
that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't
cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing
body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from
its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model
here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.

"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and
there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion.

More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the
lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and
shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.

Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "Shit!" he screams. He glances
back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There
are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. "Amber, emergency!" he
sends over their private channel. "Hostiles in the Louvre!"

The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and
quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled
to check that it's loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder.
They've sprung the biophysics model, he sends. I could die in here, he
realizes, momentarily shocked. This instance of me could die forever.

The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage
splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it,
pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to
side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its
two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes
forth.

Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells.

The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's
mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She
hisses "Equity!" and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.

Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and
smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman's
chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and
staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting
shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.

"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls,
dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his
direction and raises arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit!
Lots of guns!"

"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder.

"You can't be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping
the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's in a nunnery in
Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories -
he worked for her, didn't he?"

Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!"
screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!"
It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.

"I don't fucking believe this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature
jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade,
claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin
on the rough bricks of the wall - and what's good for one is good for
all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker
to groan and collapse.

Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder,
whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking
until there's blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on
his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck
nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.

He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to
empty itself into the mess. "Where the hell is everybody?" he
broadcasts on the private channel. "Hostiles in the Louvre!"

He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels alive, frightened and
appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting
shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries
adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. "They don't
seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space," he
adds. "Maybe we already are untranslatable concept number #1 as far as
they're concerned."

"Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection," sends Su Ang.
"This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are being
filtered out."

Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the
lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal
palace like confused Huguenot invaders.

Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands,
pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.

"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional
damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion
reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He
stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a
covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris
looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the
mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.

Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill
them, but they're handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of
crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When
they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.

"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully
- everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don't-care, except
for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying
their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization
facilities of this universe. There's no need for reinforcements; the
Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe,
making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no
attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual
space permits.

Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands
and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the back of Amber's
throne. There's only one of him now. One of Boris - the only one? - is
standing near the doorway. He can barely remember what has happened,
the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his
long-term memory by a high-pass trauma filter. "It looks clear," he
calls aloud. "What shall we do now?"

"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin
materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber always finds a
way to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?"

Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the
first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did for her, I
think." He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity
edited out. "The family resemblance was striking," the thread that
still remembers her in working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only
skin-deep." Then he forgets the act of apparent murder forever. "Tell
the Queen I'm ready to talk."

* * *

Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of
accelerating progress.

Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in
space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest
of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric
shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost
planets.

Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage
of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty
superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information
leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is
shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no bodies
anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers
larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human
civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines.
Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and
portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization,
mistaking acceleration for collapse.

The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric
clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by
sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka
doll - are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the
physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a
classical computational density of 10^42 MIPS; enough to support a
billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed
immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet
reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain
independent - Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate
entity, and will do so for some years to come - but the inner solar
system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized
more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the
space age could have envisaged.

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible
to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While
it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of
computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration
dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion
or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond
human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A
million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked
in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is
triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted
where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are
forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is
finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted
to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human
skulls.

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in
furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay
attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to
act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for
access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium
prospers, at least for a while.

But first, the operating software on the human side of the network
link will require an upgrade.

* * *

The audience chamber in the Field Circus is crammed. Everybody aboard
the ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian
intruders - is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings
of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last
conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now
the time has come for decisions.

"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her
court; "just, it's what we came here for. We've established that
there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary
support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other
end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about
the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. I propose to copy myself through
and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm
going to suspend myself on this side and hand over to whichever
instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I
haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?"

Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over
her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes
at him. Funny, he thinks, we're talking about jumping down a rabbit
hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end with our
personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense?

"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi
paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable,
with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien
visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think
will wait here and see what comes back. Then make up mind to drink the
poison kool-aid."

"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up,"
says someone else - "but that's okay; half a mind is all we've got the
bandwidth for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports
a flagging determination to press through.

"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye:
Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head
minutely. You never had a chance - I belong to Amber, he thinks, but
deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another
instantiation his issues with the Queen's droit de seigneur would have
bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world
it has already happened? "I think this is very rash," she says in a
hurry. "We don't know enough about post-singularity civilizations."

"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief
burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation."

"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of
consciousness," purrs the cat. "Don't I get a vote?"

"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?"

Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you."

She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave
the universe?"

Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.

"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future,
to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back
in the intervening time," she announces gravely, taking in the
serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't
think this was your type of -"

He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to
bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never
have heard his name?"

Amber nods. "I guess."

"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off
forever."

Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!"

"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's do -"

She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.

* * *

At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real
space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity
before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit
around Hyundai +4904/[-56], for a while ...

* * *