"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. "He might be in one of these tanks, playing a sh.e.l.l game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for."

"Not -" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired: "What's with the body? You used to be human. And what's going on?"

"I still am human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meats.p.a.ce is no longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open door. "You will find big changes. Your son has organized -"

"My son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of minds.p.a.ce that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh s.h.i.t! Tell me she isn't here already!"

"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his grandmere. Who he, of course, invited to his party."

"His party?"

"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special inst.i.tution. The family archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here - even me." The ape-body smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress."

"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father I've never f.u.c.ked."

"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette.

"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?"

"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks, first."

While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a service pa.s.sage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The gra.s.s is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a gra.s.sy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight.

"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?"

"No -" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. "And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and gla.s.s. "That's it." The ape grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?"

"But I -" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?"

"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. "We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed a.s.semblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time." Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time.

"You, I - I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-G.o.d, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.

"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks the courage of her convictions."

"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.

"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a pa.s.sive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. He thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before."

"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn't that a bit slow?"

Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her ident.i.ty is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought t.i.tle to your other self's business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys."

"She's cornered me!"

"Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we -"

"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad.

"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she'll still talk to me. You will do better. But his a.s.sets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father."

"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me."

"Oh? How so?"

"You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien transmission?"

"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads."

Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?"

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

"Well, then ..."

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

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

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

Snapshots from the family alb.u.m: While you were gone ... * Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian const.i.tutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's deep-s.p.a.ce program." * A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance - possibly blood - says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her emba.s.sy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique. * Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to sp.a.w.n external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meats.p.a.ce, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man. * A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah - of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers. * A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost into the infrared, it's the return signal from the Field Circus's light sail as the starwhisp pa.s.ses the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwhisp when it ma.s.ses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!) * Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to sp.a.w.n and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more ent.i.ties join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they're poor. * A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and sp.a.w.n in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib. * Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber's mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father absent-minded and p.r.o.ne to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the s.p.a.ce of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding ident.i.ties like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals around t.i.tan, his parents give their reluctant a.s.sent. * Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a s.p.a.celike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam. * For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father - but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her ident.i.ty. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past. * Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact. * Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.

"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the serious-faced young man.

"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: "What history is this?"

"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't you?"

"Remember it -" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?"

"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain."

The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty.

"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if that was what interested me."

Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it's downtown Baghdad.

"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility."

"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?"

"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. "Why do you ask?"

"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time."

"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse," Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily sp.a.w.ns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.

"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not about you, or your father either," he adds quietly. "Or my other ... life." Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.

"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, "but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives."

He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin there" - a point three quarters of the way up the tree - "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil samples per megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the micrometer level has become practical. What a waste."

"That's" - Pierre does a quick sum - "fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?"

"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of multicellular organisms - it's hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse."

"Aha! So you're after memoriesy yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the free-fall core of the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?"

"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight. "I'm after history. All of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help - and you're here to help me get it."

Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth, they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the gra.s.sy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.

Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien sh.o.r.e when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber's flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spider-silk cable a kilometer beneath the s.p.a.ce-frame underpinnings of the city.

But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage. Not that he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies.

Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely s.p.a.celike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions - it's no picnic out there!"

"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms -"

"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve."

"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. "Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, darling."

Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: "Bring my carriage, now."

A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades. Most of them are pa.s.sengers or crew recently decanted from the starwhisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circ.u.mstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next."

He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there's no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can't be - "Father?" he asks.

Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?"

"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there's something wrong - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy's hair stand on end. "I won't hold it against you, I promise," he blurts.

Sadeq raises an eyebrow but pa.s.ses no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he says hastily. "If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." Sirhan doesn't believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for confusion are embarra.s.sing - but he's going to be busy working the party.

He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top made by deconstructing a s.p.a.ce suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does that mean?) There's an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They're - Amber Macx? That's his mother? She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, approaching the couple.

"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under the circ.u.mstances, although I should thank you for the spread."

"I -" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that."

"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: "You know d.a.m.n well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know d.a.m.n well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?"

Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side isn't his father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. "They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory - "

"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and self-directed."

"How did you know?" he asks, worried.

She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very familiar grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. "Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here."

"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't - no need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I need your help," he babbles. "It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -"

"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: "h.e.l.lo, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too."

"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance to say no."

"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy f.u.c.k?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected better of you."

"Why, you -" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not." Pamela jabs her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your son's idea. Why don't you eat something?"

"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly.

"For f.u.c.k's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He shoves the plate at Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours."

The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.

"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around."

"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. "What was that about the family investment project?" she asks.

"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. "Not that I expect you to care."

Boris b.u.t.ts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -"

"Don't remember you being there," Pierre says grumpily.

"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time - we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth - but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0."

"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it." Amber casts her a cool stare.

"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a gla.s.s of fizzy grape juice appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the ma.s.s of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word."

"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router."

Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -" He shudders.