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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"This is good to know," the lobster a.s.sures him. "We like to buy species."

"You buy species?" Glashwiecz c.o.c.ks his head.

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

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

"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. G.o.d told us to."

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

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

"What are you doing -"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.

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

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

Amber nods. "I guess."

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

Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!"

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

She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.

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

Chapter 6.

: Nightfall.

A synthetic gemstone the size of a c.o.ke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp.

Eight Earth years have pa.s.sed since the good ship Field Circus slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56]. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the a.s.sumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.

Meanwhile, outside the light cone - * * *

Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, "Where am I - oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?" Mumble. "Oh, I see." Her eyes widen in horror. "It's not a dream ..."

"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: "I see you are awake. Would you like anything?"

Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pa.s.s for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, and what am I doing in your head?"

Her eyes narrow. a.n.a.lytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. "The router," she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?" Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no gla.s.s in it - just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny.

"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard.

"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?"

"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature comforts." Which isn't entirely true - it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?"

"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?"