Accelerando Part 9

"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call."

"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn't she?"

"Yes." Amber frowns.

"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?"

Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. "I ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do - legally - but the sh.e.l.l company is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?"

"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don't have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law - and a c.r.a.p human rights record - but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out."

"So."

"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid b.i.t.c.h has gone and converted to s.h.i.+'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the s.e.xes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can a.s.sert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -" She shrugs helplessly.

"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?"

"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it."

"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you can't simply repudiate it."

"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the sh.e.l.l, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me - but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well."

"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day - it's how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?"

"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked him carefully." Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. "How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?"

Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other ways. I've got some friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and there's a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and find out what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him to make a point."

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation s.h.i.+elds are running at full power, shrouding the s.h.i.+p in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly sapping the moon's...o...b..tal momentum).

Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She's taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appet.i.te for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

She sighs again. "Pierre?"

"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming."

"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that until it's reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. "Found anything yet?"

"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole - it's dirty, but there's at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange s.h.i.+t, it's solid with fullerenes."

Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload she's steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney's crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.

The screen blinks at her. "Oh s.h.i.+t! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are you?"

The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking s.p.a.ce capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab s.p.a.ce suit liner. He's floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly. "Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?"

"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah - whatever an ayatollah is - elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. "Who are you?"

"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?"

He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up to this?" They're still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. "You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants."

"Yes, I spoke to - ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?"

Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She's -" She flails around for the right word helplessly. "Look, she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?"

Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. "Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?"

"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his att.i.tude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel - coming from someone more than twenty years old - that she almost lets herself forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up.

"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a pet.i.tion with me. Are you aware of it?"

"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts."

"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of G.o.d. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims -"

"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my owners.h.i.+p. She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a s.h.i.+t about your religion, all she wants is me!"

"A mother's love -"

"f.u.c.k love," Amber snarls, "she wants power."

Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do."

"My mother -" Amber stops dead and sp.a.w.ns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the s.p.a.ce around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network pa.r.s.ers and cla.s.s filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat - "My mother likes control."

"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns gla.s.sy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of - no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?"

"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him - they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed."

"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm."

"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am n.o.body's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any G.o.d, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what does that matter?"

"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for."

"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?"

She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!"

"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..."

Sleep cycles pa.s.s; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are no clunky nanoa.s.semblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles - just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for s.p.a.ce colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter s.p.a.ce, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared ident.i.ty that gives them their messianic drive.

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Ma.r.s.eilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

The Banglades.h.i.+ economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone owners.h.i.+p nearing eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than j.a.pan.

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. s.p.a.ce (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb ma.s.s - like gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five."

"Shut the f.u.c.k up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the t.i.tanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit s.p.a.ce suits - little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It's Chern.o.byl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. "Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty s.p.a.ce for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of gravity -"

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule ma.s.ses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone says over the intercom.

"Of course I -" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there's only the moronic warbling of 'bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?"

There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas cl.u.s.ters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she's on her way.

"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?"

"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here."

"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother s.h.i.+p, watching over her as she falls.

"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way."

"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up - up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the s.h.i.+p's still visible.

"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?"

"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going to come visiting?"

"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?"

"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from Amalthea."

"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?"

"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its...o...b..t up and out toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized."

"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up.

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, pa.s.ses.

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every s.h.i.+ft seems to bring a new crewed s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p into Jupiter system: s.p.a.ce is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply - trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks.

"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I a.s.sume their Kurs guidance is active?"

"Kurs docking target support available to sh.e.l.l level three."

"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the s.h.i.+p to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over."

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over."

"Bravo One One, we have a.s.signed you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control."

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order."

"Bravo One One, stand by."

The next hour pa.s.ses slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-gla.s.s porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose s...o...b..ll of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cl.u.s.ter of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the ma.s.sive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

At last, the battered s.p.a.ce station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the s.h.i.+p, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again - but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the s.h.i.+ny metal docking cone ahead of the s.h.i.+p, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle b.u.mp, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire - and he's down.

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then - * * *

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon ma.s.sing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweats.h.i.+rt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun gla.s.s, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fas.h.i.+on is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial ent.i.ty that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her throne.

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed.

"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay."