"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from the museum. It's not flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog."

"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the dinosaur's skull. "Stop f.u.c.king with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad."

Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of pa.s.senger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the gra.s.s, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory.

"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. "And isn't it a bit cramped in there?"

"You get used to it," says the primary - and thoroughly distributed - copy of her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning, but I can show you what she's doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out t.u.r.d packets all over your sleek new machine."

Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly.

"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her before it's too late -"

The ancient woman in the s.p.a.ce suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. "h.e.l.lo, darling. I know you're spying on me."

There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It's certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background - probably an air recirculator. There's no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be long now," she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a minute or so."

"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly.

"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it - he's going to grow old gracelessly, succ.u.mbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang. Aren't I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap.

"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know you'd audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack - she's been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your pa.s.senger from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!"

The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen.

"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so."

"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what else I'm planning?"

"But my aunt is -" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber's awareness almost before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?"

Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat f.u.c.king blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if I have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures before."

"It's -" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn't have been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time -"

"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old woman." She grins wickedly. "Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was stupid. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you now, I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for you."

"Oh, Ma."

"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I f.u.c.ked up my life, don't try to talk me into f.u.c.king up my death. And don't feel guilty about me. This isn't about you, this is about me. That's an order."

Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. "But -"

"h.e.l.lo?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela's cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.

"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye - in fact, that's a complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing. They're both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a total non-sequitur, a reb.u.t.tal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete s.h.i.t even though Pamela's absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan, this p.r.i.c.kly and insecure son she's never met by a man she wouldn't dream of f.u.c.king (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a k.n.o.bbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily.

"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?"

The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If you're going to be like that, I don't see why I should talk to you."

"Then you must be -" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns you -"

The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One that I've bootstrapped myself, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from there."

"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?"

"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn't work half as well on an orang-utan as a feline - and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father."

"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't want you eating any of me!"

"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes."

"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long -"

The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It's already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my b.i.t.c.h; always has been, always will -"

The feed goes dead.

Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks.

"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your pa.s.senger -"

"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they're getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they've been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -"

A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads toward the stars.

"- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I'd say ..." she looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear."

"What?"

The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash within twelve hours."

"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of gra.s.s. She squints at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks quietly. Louder: "She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire ma.s.s of their star system into a free-flying sh.e.l.l of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, sh.e.l.ls within sh.e.l.ls, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. But. Some of them survive. Some of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth."

She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?"

Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in back-ups. Or uploading. Or interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?"

Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't quite believe it." She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?"

But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving.

Chapter 8.

: Elector.

Half a year pa.s.ses on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes - before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.

There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces - what is it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled groundsc.r.a.pers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-sh.e.l.led shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for s.p.a.ce with pedestrians and animals.

Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my b.u.m look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully.

"Ma cherie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her posture and expression.

"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. 'S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, experimenting. "You get out of the habit of foraging. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She trails off.

"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But -" Annette looks thoughtful.

"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election s.h.i.t, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canva.s.s them that look as if I'm trying to push b.u.t.tons -"

"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma cherie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?"

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, that" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - "is just too much."

She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a breast-and-a.s.s fetishist's fantasy - isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers."

"Like your coronation robe?"

Amber winces. "Touche." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then."

"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't feel older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here."

"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -"

"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core ident.i.ty." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's - ah, bonjour!"

"h.e.l.lo. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop a.s.sistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a cla.s.sical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead a.s.sistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important."

"We would be delighted to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?"

"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. It's your head, she sends. "I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?"

The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her cla.s.sic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?"

"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers a.s.sociations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it."

"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoa.r.s.e and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe ..."

"I'm running for the a.s.sembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to a.s.semble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful."

"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?"

"Macx. Amber Macx."

"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has pa.s.sed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements -"

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big s.p.a.ces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone.

Except that he isn't, really.

"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English.

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind - Is nowhere private? - but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.

"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This isn't a sim."

Sirhan sighs - another exile - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undoc.u.mented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I suppose that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?"

"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented."

Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks.

"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center ..?"

"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental ma.s.s of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly.

"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy s.h.i.t." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you -"

Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming sh.e.l.ls of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly.

"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!"

"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous.

The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?"

Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel."

A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "d.a.m.n, that hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants."

"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the bas.e.m.e.nt in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously.