Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. "Give it to me right now. I can take it," she says, quietly bitter. "I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible."

"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. "That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ..."

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outwards toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the ulama from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary s.p.a.ces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a mujtahid - the Fermi paradox.

(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. "Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?") Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold s.p.a.ce. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith.

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.

None of this is real, he reminds himself. It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one night. Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene - a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the whole cla.s.sical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appet.i.te - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succ.u.mb to temptation. I'm not dead, he reasons. Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be Paradise because I am a sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile!

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ...

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and pa.s.sageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is pa.s.sing, outside this cybers.p.a.ce pocket), Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: Can I tell if this is the true h.e.l.l? And if it is not, how can I escape?

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.

The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost's description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.

She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's a.s.sertion that she is nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai +4904/[-56] they'd understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she's still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, sp.a.w.ning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be much farther from home by now.

Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's a.s.sertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. "I hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows across her coffee gla.s.s, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever here is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You're going to have to explain why you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn't the only one, you know?"

The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: Have I gone too far? she wonders.

"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone."

"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you mean? What is this place?"

The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. "This s.p.a.ce we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a s.p.a.ce outside our core reality, itself exposed to ent.i.ties that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant ent.i.ties, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures."

"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified - both reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you treat all your visitors?"

The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate."

Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?" she asks. "If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This looks like the start of an abusive relationship."

The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it a.s.serts. "Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired."

"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind? she wonders dismissively. "What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to sp.a.w.n threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?"

"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us ..."

A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly.

Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou s.p.a.ceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate sh.e.l.l game she doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist s.h.i.t and do it right.

Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.

China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole d.a.m.n world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living.

Walking along Jardine's Bazaar - More like Jardine's bizarre, she thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the gla.s.s-and-chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed pa.s.sengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeb.a.l.l.s. The Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that rea.s.sures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab.

For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and s.n.a.t.c.hes at her shoulder bag.

"Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her a.s.sailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn't know how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese.

Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. "Get him, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.

By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in synthetic English.

Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's far too light. It's gone, she thinks, despairingly. He stole it. "Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot's eyes. "Been stolen."

"What item missing?" asks the robot.

"My h.e.l.lo Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. "My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?"

"Certainly," says the cop, resting a rea.s.suring hand on her shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They sp.a.w.n agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the s.p.a.ce and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me get my cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly.

"Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. "To please wax your ident.i.ty stiffly."

"My cat has been stolen," Amber insists.

"Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are asking your name?"

"No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen."

"Aha! Your papers, please?"

"Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!"

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else."

"I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails.

The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses that glow faintly.

"You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll spend the night here."

Amber bursts into tears. "My cat's been stolen," she chokes out.

The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

The implications of her loss - of Aineko's abduction - are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.

But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string.

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is it -" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up the usual suspects - and give them root privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns."

"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons."

Amber sighs. "You guys really are media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my -" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on. There's something I've forgotten." Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that would ... know? ... purr? ... help? "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?"

"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Ent.i.ty is looping in a recursively confined universe."

"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or ill.u.s.trating?"

"Ill.u.s.tration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This ent.i.ty has retreated within a closed s.p.a.ce, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact."

"Well, can you get me into that s.p.a.ce?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give me some leverage -"

"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost.

"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just put me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her up, okay?"

"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself."

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by s.e.xy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by - "s.h.i.t," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, cla.s.sically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a st.i.tch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?"

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. "Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish -" she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here, but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.

"Up or down?" she asks herself. Up - it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this s.p.a.ce? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait till I give him an earful ...

There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this s.e.x-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn't Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.

The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh s.h.i.t! Her eyes widen. Is this what's been inside his head all along?

"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real."

Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?"

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. "That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before."

"For f.u.c.k's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?"

"I -" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?"

"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked.

"Listen, come on." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?" She glances back at him. "What is this place?"

"h.e.l.l is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to see how real you are -" Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.

"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know -"

"Know what?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already sp.a.w.ning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat.

"But I had to - wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. "I'm sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not."

"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?"

Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for -" He shudders convulsively. "Unclean!"

"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she holds out a hand to him. "Come on."

"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats.

"Under the circ.u.mstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

More memories converge on the present moment: The Ring Imperium is a huge cl.u.s.ter of self-replicating robots that Amber has a.s.sembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the ma.s.s and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian s.p.a.ce twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of mult.i.threaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper's intentions.

Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the a.s.s - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the s.p.a.ce station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism.

There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by - "Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica.

"Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes."

"I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here."

"What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

"Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think."