"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!"

"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?"

"My -" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested."

"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. a.s.suming people still use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners."

Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd a.s.sumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.

"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat."

"The -" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through that furry head right now? I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber ... "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud.

"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then, without breaking step: "Do you believe in the singularity?"

"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face.

"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?"

"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang.

"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as the bartender places a ceramic stein in front of her.

"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: Don't play with her, this is serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that."

"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing."

"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly.

"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."

"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."

"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. That's the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time."

"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds."

"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated - while still awake - right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?"

"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The singularity is nonsense, not uploading or -"

"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.

Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?"

"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-a.s.sembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract - that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-s.p.a.ce tracking network beam them out into interstellar s.p.a.ce. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?"

Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says.

"The cat -" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public s.p.a.ce. "What about the cat?"

"The family cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later ... when [email protected] finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "[email protected] logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away - they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about to open."

"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit - " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.

"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically.

"No," says Pierre. "I have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault."

"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?"

"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And compurgation, but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." In the most traditional way imaginable, he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but - "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance."

He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.

"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a compet.i.tion of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are very persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this a.s.s-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean everything."

Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai +4904/[-56] looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the Field Circus like a rind of darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.

Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the ma.s.sive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router.

"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit."

Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back."

"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now ...?"

"No need for protocol a.n.a.lysis," Amber says casually. "Where's - ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?"

"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge.

"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber.

"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now."

A subjective minute or two pa.s.ses. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The Field Circus is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. "And where's the b.l.o.o.d.y lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought.

The Field Circus is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cl.u.s.ter of cells in its surface, turning them from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data.

"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains.

"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that sp.a.w.n waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!"

"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair.

"What does it say?" she asks, quietly.

"What do they say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want."

"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?"

The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself -"

"I don't want anybody on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?"

"Clear," Aineko grumbles.

"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?"

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 s.p.a.ce.

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 ent.i.tled 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 pere 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 a.s.serts. "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 pa.s.sion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject.

"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have antic.i.p.ated. 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 ma.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 bulls.h.i.t while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum compet.i.tive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. a.s.suming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some d.a.m.n 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. "s.h.i.t, 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 f.u.c.k 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 pa.s.sage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pa.s.s 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 f.u.c.k 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-s.p.a.ce of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to a.n.a.lyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century d.u.c.h.ess from Alb - it's a matter of national security."