"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.

The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing.

The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains. "There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?"

"Welcome to the human physical s.p.a.ce-traveling interface unit Field Circus," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?"

Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.

"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yours.p.a.ce, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?"

"He means twenty years," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. "They've confused s.p.a.ce and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?"

"Relatively little," comments someone else - Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly.

"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?"

Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she says quietly.

Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You accept our translation?" asks the leader.

"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber.

The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send."

"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future a.n.a.lysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species."

Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier."

Amber raises a hand. "You said untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?"

"We, like you, are not untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. The network is for untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier. We are to the untranslatable concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable ent.i.ty signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable concept #1."

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

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

"Wrong with - how?" asks Su Ang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

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

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

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

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

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

A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter s.p.a.ce; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, n.o.body can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence.

"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not G.o.ds."

Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.

Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris."

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

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

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

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

"I can find her." Boris frowns.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old b.a.s.t.a.r.d - if I'd known I'd grow up to become that, I'd have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his gla.s.s, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their s.h.i.t, and I'll disa.s.semble it. Disa.s.sembly is the future of industry, y'know?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's big?"

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

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

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

"Stop."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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