Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning
orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge
is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his
imagination at work - there's little chance of any gas exchange taking
place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He
feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape.
There's nobody else around, this close to the edge - it's an icy
sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so
cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that
there's nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers.
The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this
far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for
comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.

Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling
and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma
growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane
and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize,
and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the
sapphire dome of the city's gasbag, an azure star glares with the
speckle of laser light; humanity's first - and so far, last -
starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light
sail.

He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering
her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and
unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in
front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up
angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him
away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. "I mean it," he
warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in
a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped
nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an
umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming,
leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.

Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from
the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum
buildings. It's far enough from other humans that he can sit
undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge
without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city,
despite being the product of an advanced technology almost
unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity
and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as
a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an
infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable
problem this biosphere harbors.)

In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature
out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds
around him. "When is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them,
speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where
everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for
its own reasons.

"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body
will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds." The city's
avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced
and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an
eighteen-year-old, he's conservative to the point of affectation,
favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible
splicing of virtual neural nets.

"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks
anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very
little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot
more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be
subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her
current age.

"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on
sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line
backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my
remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?"

"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even
through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix,
and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it.
"As long as you're sure she'll arrive before the ship?" Tuning his
eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow
strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that's all the starship
can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within
range of the system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely
repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that
it's been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to
supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.

"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of
that," City replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain also that
your grandmother will revive comfortably."

"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal
person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take
courage, he decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her
for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course."

"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely.

"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into
servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring
blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for
his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused
on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity
that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp's
Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the
family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles,
inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use
this time.

* * *

"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if
they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks
Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers
and thumb.

"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the
log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the
dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he
could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he
wanted to.)

"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that
Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I
could get jealous." His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern.

"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to
you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever."

"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the
bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump
of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.

"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out,
then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table.
Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing
most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying
down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb
matter extend past Jovian orbit now?"

"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That
might explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the
lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown,
the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of
seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router,
leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.

"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still
alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following
thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am
telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into
computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone
already?"

"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls,
"are you listening?"

"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the
suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an idea I was
sleeping furiously."

Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch
munch," he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.

"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you
hadn't noticed."

"I enjoy sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its
just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?"

"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff
the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray
mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of
a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the
passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control
system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris's entertainment
partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the
Field Circus, it was downright conservative. "Look, do you have any
updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective days
out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see -"

"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large
orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an
@-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on
the table tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. "No
propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in
Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know." (Which is an insult,
given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is
Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the
size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications
bandwidth.) "Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.
Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it."

"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?"

The cat sniffs. "I'm wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily,
"but no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the
snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.

"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty
wants with us today."

* * *

Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the
phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally
becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various
states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of
them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in
the water zone around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the
intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning
replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization
can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great
transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has
collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of
superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively
known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well
on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy
stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so
thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red
ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian
evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use
converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient
in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn't held
by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread
to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are
qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a
thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly
between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in
the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal
neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in
most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray
matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral
theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the
panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to
imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious
theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of
Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in
real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains
recognizably human is open to question. The informational density
of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of
bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter
of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a
picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is
converted into computronium. And it's not just the inner system.
The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and those of
Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere
decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire
solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to
orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive
thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished
completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the
solar Matrioshka brain is finished.

It won't be long now ...

* * *

Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well.

Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible
sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with
a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas
bag above. It's one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles
floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper
atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative
Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair.

The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords
long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a
bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have
paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the
growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to
fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant's turbid depths,
but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on
Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually
Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second
squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred
times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this
will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion
fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's burned down.

This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk
rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of
the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its
backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even
the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted
it into orbit wouldn't have stretched to bringing its framing context
along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop
out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands
proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile
from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.

"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was
this, anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.

"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've
got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies
wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear
that?"

"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it.
Pulls a face: "It's not right."

"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods.
"What was it like then?"

"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had
plenty for bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would be okay.
If it hadn't been for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists -" Her
wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from
underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he
senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn't understand.
"Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and piss
on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he has a
grave," she adds, almost fondly.

Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts.
As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both
before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are
the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some
future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably
consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new
modalities.

"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs.

"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just
preserving my memories for future generations."

"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a
bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, you'll see, darling. I won't
be around to be disappointed."

"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan.

"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask
his ghost yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two sides to every
story, child, and he's had more than his fair share of ears, the
sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing
but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits
from the Mafiya to do it with. I don't know what I ever saw in him."
Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in
this assertion. "He's worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy
idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give
it all away, all the fruits of his genius."

While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization
with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering
stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they're
standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. "He should
have tried real communism instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel
into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams
loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake.
Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were
just things that did as we told them. And then, when she went to the
bad, that was all his fault, too, you know."

"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium
back to Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story
that he isn't completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in
so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the
bailiffs go in to repossess Amber's mind.

"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright
dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat
was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded
admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I'm
sure you'd agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral
absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don't like it
much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can't function as
an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she'd
never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd end up more
machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood,
mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to
meddle."

"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the
loading bay door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A thin
patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges,
flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal
behind. "Didn't it go missing or something?"

Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her
starwhisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had
the guts - or maybe it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile
witness. Or, and I can't rule this out, your grandfather gave it a
suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that,
after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal
enemy."

"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay
behind? Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't bother adding how
suicidal. Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural
state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of
the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of
returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the
object factory.

"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply,
mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan,
craning her neck back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you
are."

"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't
presume."

"Person, thing, boy, whatever - you're engendered, aren't you?" she
asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never trust anyone
who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says
gloomily. "You can't rely on them." Sirhan, who has placed his
reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. "That
damn cat," his grandmother complains. "It carried your grandfather's
business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black.
It poisoned her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy
of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that
brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it -"

"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.

"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to
interview it, too, huh?"

Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And
that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen.
It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on
the occupants, but ..." He shrugs. "Business is business, and my
business lies in ruins."

"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She
leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like
bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it
adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. "You'll get yours,
kid." The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of
saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. "And
I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's
hit her."

* * *

"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the
cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of
a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely
on the sapphire-plated arms - her minions, lovers, friends, crew,
shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out
around her. And the Slug. "It's just another lawsuit. You can deal
with it."

"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily.
Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over
the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a
dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she
doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that
matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition.
"Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's
got any suggestions?"

"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight
here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions
- and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very
much like to know - concerning the rights and responsibilities of the
undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the
code to their claim?"

"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry
clatter of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal
code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer
gibberish! If you -"

"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She
didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition
to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She
doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit
about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of
herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the
music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died - incurred
child support payments? "I don't hold you responsible for this," she
added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.

"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him,
to serve judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the
implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room,
looking anywhere but at Amber - and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy
astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers.

"Drop it. I said I don't blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all
tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell
Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove.
We'll sort a way out."

"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room.
Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good
reason. "The Field Circus is in good condition, isn't it? We could
divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise
speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable
brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years ..."

"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's
gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken
narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to
notice his embarrassment. "We ejected half our original launch sail to
provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904/[-56], and almost eight
megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final
deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't
have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our
final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after
boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch
beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you
can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's
nowhere to run."

"Nowhere to -" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I
really wonder about you, you know?"

"I know you do." And Pierre really does know, because he carries a
little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far
more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly
have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a
little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head,
part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she
doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore - it's not good
to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know that
you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong
metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?"

"My mother." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?"

"I don't -"

There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with
something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its
tripod legs. "Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully.

"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as
it picks itself up off the floor. "I am -"

Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens:
"You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once. Merde!"

The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari
suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than
a CNN outside broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!"

"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you
weren't invited to this meeting. Right?"

"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit
anything. "You said I should -"

"Yes, well." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass
the Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we were discussing.
What do you know about my mother's state of mind?"

"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and
prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation.
"I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you
know that?"

"I -" For once, Amber's speechless.

"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. Sotto voce:
"It's the only way to be sure."

Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however
slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within
the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the Field Circus.
It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the
cat's impertinence slide. "What is the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks,
nosy as ever and twice as annoying: "I did not that bit see."

"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently.

"Truly evil," echoes Pierre.

"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully.

"But it's still horrible!"

"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera
manqué asks.

"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit,
you might as well tell everyone - it won't stay secret for long." She
sighs. "After we left, it seems my other half - my original
incarnation, that is - got married. To Sadeq, here." She nods at the
Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first
time she heard this part of the story. "And they had a child. Then the
Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance
payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that
the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their
incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people
from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy.
Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a
point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time
- we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be
out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the
payment order. But compound interest applies back home - that is to
stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape
liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of
wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous
levels.

"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the Field
Circus several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don't
even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of
you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after
we left, we're all in deep trouble."

* * *

A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor
of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous
Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a
century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver
cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite
ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a
triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in
the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell
me about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above them,
Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint
splash thrown across the midnight sky.

Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself
with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he
tells her against him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?"
he asks.

"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of
perplexity.

"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn
out better." It's his turn to frown.

"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as
ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you think she did
that?"

"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says
defensively. "She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was
reacting against her own character flaws." When I have children there
will be more than one, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has
adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional
maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme
caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors
on the maternal side.

Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father
had quite a bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods
did you have?"

"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and
Father arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was
too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and
between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable
death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and
reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days
of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an
all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got
to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents
thought it was the hidden imam - and -" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's
where I acquired my taste for history."

"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his
grandmother.

"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." Or
rather, decided it was unlawful, he recalls. "I had a very
conservative upbringing in some ways."

"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there
was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no
escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who
you were?"

The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits
patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. "The
more people you are, the more you know who you are," says Sirhan. "You
learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps
it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a
woman." And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that, he adds
for his own stream of consciousness.

"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that
might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the
alarming sharkishness of her expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan
covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth,
forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn
him if he's about to commit some faux pas. "So, how did you enjoy your
childhoods?"

"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can,
laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. As if childhood is
something that ever ends, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably
less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at
least a terasecond - if not in exactly this molecular configuration,
then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he
has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span - even
into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then,
megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer
interest him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your
old age, Grandmama?"

Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The
flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan
through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the
table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm
enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly.

"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the
table removes the entrees.

"Why, you little -" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very
bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about revenge?" she asks.

"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from
two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth
birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother
realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling
everything."

"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to
cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a
tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd never do something like
that to any child of mine."

"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson.
"For the family history, of course."

"I'll -" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she
states.

"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book
covering three generations, living through interesting times," he
suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that
- how do you document people who fork their identities at random,
spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments
with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace
the history further, of course - if you tell me about your parents,
although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly
- but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup
surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps
as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the
family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't
it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped
future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of
the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home."

"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face.

"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow
old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have
difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the
procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?"

"Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived
long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken,
lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for?
If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and
old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all
the resources you're taking up that younger people need! Even uploads
face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously
egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if
there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the
obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control."

Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves
up the main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed
potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy - when there's a loud bump
from overhead.

"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously.

"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of
the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous
cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the
Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms.
"Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum."

"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air
above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up
unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?"

"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks
up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury
capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a
bundle of rubbery something covered in umber hair lurches out from the
handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic,
then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al
Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an ape! City, I say, City!
What's a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?"

"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to
identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for reasons of
privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice.

There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep
exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he demands,
focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury
capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its
eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It
hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons
over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his
grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to
tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously,
then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's
face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front
of her nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the
ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond.

"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City.

"Invisible -" he stops.

"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just
defecated all over the main course!"

"I see nothing," City says uncertainly.

"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to
focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and
patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires'
attachment points.

"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be
possible."

"Well it fucking is," hisses Pamela.

"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses
on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping
itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from
behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face. "City please
supply my grandmama with an environment suit now. Make it completely
autonomous."

The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline
security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out
around her. "If you've been hacked, the first question is, who did
it," Sirhan states. "The second is 'why,' and the third is 'how.'" He
edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign of inconsistencies in his
own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping lightly at
scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike
pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively immune to murder-simple. "If
this is just a prank -"

Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and
subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter
circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of
countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad habitat.
Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into
defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of itinerant
passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and
every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its
trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured
kernel and working outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye,
heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking
the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the
safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. "Who do you
think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" Sirhan yells as
he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!"

The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting
the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin.
"Remember me?" it asks, in a sibilant French accent.

"Remember -" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? What are you doing in
that orangutan?"

"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider,
then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. "I am sorry,
I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello
and pass on a message."

"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she
finds out you're here -"

"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape - Annette - sits up.
"Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In
the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her
passengers. That is all. Have you a message for him?"

"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed.

"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand
over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to
the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled
egg impacting concrete.

"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!"

"Yes, oh master?"

"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble
you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular,
don't tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her." The perils of
having a long-lived posthuman family, he thinks; too many mad aunts in
the space capsule. "If you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from
growing any more apes, that might be a good idea." A thought strikes
him. "By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?"

"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?"

Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the
intruder. "Not according to his second wife's latest incarnation."

* * *

Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber
discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the
passengers and crew of the Field Circus.

She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's
some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its
bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty
syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her
return. She's duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of
her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns
about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a
thirty-years-obsolete starwhisp massing less than twenty kilograms
including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of
uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that
has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of
ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of
incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's
passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ...

Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled
with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a
ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with
hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter
feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is
about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and
arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling.
Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground
underfoot is dry but feels swampy.

Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the
quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years,
existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show
run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such
self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire
compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from
its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem
with incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat - the ecosystem it
evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated
steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow
sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it's melting, not
because it's damp.

"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains,
laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a
giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and
infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the
simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly
environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other.
"This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported
environments where we're going."

"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available
worlds of our destination?"

"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is
at a bit of a loss. "The physics model could be supported, but the
energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able
to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now." She
forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated
tank rolling across the Slug's backyard, crushing coral and hissing
and clanking noisily. "You'd be like this."

"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out.

"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber
shrugs. "We can't exercise the same level of control over the
underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can't simply
magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three
hundred degrees."

"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp
rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.

"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality
we're about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be,
because it's consistent and stable, and if we could create new local
domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably.
It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?"

"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you
have a body I can use?"

"I think -" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!"

A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between
the two embedded realities. "Hey, human."

"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend
here's got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets
are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got
a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?"

"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by
the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed
sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it.
"I've been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to
change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can
borrow my old template until something better comes up. How's that?"

"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering
to donate her body to you. Will that do?" Without waiting, she winks
at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and
a smile: "See you on the other side ..."

* * *

It takes several minutes for the Field Circus's antique transceiver to
download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of
each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with
most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced
genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish
list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there's enough
data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city's body shop
goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.

It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of
relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons
for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and
desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney),
then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like
ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they
have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so
small they're as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape
that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature
evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots
in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated
secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue
with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the real
cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a
megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction 'bots gives
way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by
ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing
out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central
nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the
invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of
synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.

(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent
technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there,
they'd just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a
fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport
some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized
meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But
then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room for flesh
anymore ...)

Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and
churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body
in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing
corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily
twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and
aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him
anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary
prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he
has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.

He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their
mental archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the post-wetware
age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third
and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a
backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar
intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no
longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting
nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of
the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan
is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be
invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.)

So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody
hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping
the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family
knowledge base.

"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her
cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the
world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here
hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on
honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming
up is bile.) "It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first,
and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more,
if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something
back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all in
your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got
no way of patching things up."

"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't,
but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over
love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with
Manfred. This is great family history, and he's having the time of his
flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion
he's hosting.

"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his
grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're
part of a larger pattern of life." She stares out across the
troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches
the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old gives way to the
new," She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with
the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal
pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes
and silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way
of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago."

"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her
lengthy, self-justifying confession: "but what if you're just saying
this because you feel old? If it's just a physiological malfunction,
we could fix it and you'd -"

"No! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong,
Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think
it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural
order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you
young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If
you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker."

"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?"

"I - think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so
many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which
version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your
grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have
been wrong all along. But now -" She leans on her cane. "When he
announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had
was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The
rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I
don't buy it."

"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he
can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away
- it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale
indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he's not
sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting
antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and
beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it
clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really
believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening.
Especially as you're doing it so slowly."

Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's
perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to
believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools.
Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our entire universe
is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the
universe. Probably this" - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of
the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere,
holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn
- "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon,
rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion
trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as
someone bigger, that's all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll
just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for."

"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 orang-utan.

"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 unembedded. 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-five 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 orang-utan 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 orang-utan, 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 orang-utan
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 over 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?"

"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in
a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance."

"Well, then ..."

Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of
her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an
encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head.
Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and
whimpers quietly. "You must ask your father," she says, growing
visibly agitated. "I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It
is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my primary
sister-identity and warn her."

"Your - wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body
will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent
ladder in the air.

"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no
one else!" She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories
down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull
touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating
utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the
greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.