Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 19

"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious-"Are we supposed to be doing this?"

"You cover your a.s.s and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. "You know what I mean."

"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune what-ever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to: they're putting out way too much double-entendre , somebody might mistake you for a grown-up."

"You stick to your business and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. "And you can start by telling me what's happening."

"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch-down. And then it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?"

"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat-wings and lies back in mid-air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day-s.h.i.+ft. "Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot ma.s.sage, something more traditionally hedonistic: but right now just knowing he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go in for- The window rings like a gong and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says dryly. "You want me to read it for you?"

"What the-" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message.

When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

"You b.i.t.c.h, Mom! Why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?"

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and sc.r.a.ping her thumb over the delivery man's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fas.h.i.+oned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. "You're Amber?" it mrowls. "Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?"

"No, I'm from the f.u.c.king tooth fairy." It leans over and head-b.u.t.ts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. "Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?"

"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber: "it's all foreign junk, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?"

"Happy f.u.c.king birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's your dad's present.

b.a.s.t.a.r.d put me in hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the f.u.c.ker. No good will come of it."

Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. "So what is it?" she demands.

"A new invention? Some kind of weird s.e.x toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?"

"Naaah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though-he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise."

"Wow. Like, how totally cool!" In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday, but Mom's at work and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If he doesn't, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber's good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer: "Why dontcha fire it up?" Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whirr and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her owners.h.i.+p.

"What do I do now?" she asks.

"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites in a bored sing-song voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: "Le READ ME contains directions pour l'execution instrument corporate dans le boite. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect. "Warning: don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: "f.u.c.king snotty Parisian b.i.t.c.h, I'll p.i.s.s in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet...."

"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of sub-sapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law-the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the doc.u.ments highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her-that's what her grammar engine is for-or even that they're full of S-expressions and semi-digestible chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to a.s.sert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning slaves.

"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?"

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy and your mother hates him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about this church s.h.i.+t she's putting you through. He thinks that she's a control freak. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dome, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real b.i.t.c.h, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, or something.

Anyway, he built these companies and this printer-which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's-specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do."

Amber fast-forward through the dynamic chunks of the README-boring static UML diagrams, mostly-soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited-liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal-the fiction isthat the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off-and companies are legal ent.i.ties. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave, and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument-about 90 percent of it, in fact-is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company const.i.tutions, and which act as an owners.h.i.+p sh.e.l.l for the slavery contract: at the far end of the corporate firewall is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust funds (which she essentially owns) oversee the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's a.s.sets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is-there's probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough-but it tells a pretty convincing tale.

The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horse whip and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In s.p.a.ce, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your dad and the frog b.i.t.c.h, they're swingers, y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They're out all hours of the night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult s.h.i.+t. Your dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your tante 'Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy s.e.x on the balcony. They'd cramp your style, kid: you shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do."

"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I'd better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household net feed. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have s.e.x: isn't there a law, or something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?"

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard-vacuum chamber in its supercooled works.p.a.ce. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero: by superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level-there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate.

Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to its exhaust ducts.

"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born: your dad did business with him.

So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved, and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the s.p.a.ce biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they-he are building a s.p.a.cehab that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term."

This is mostly going right over Amber's head-she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later-but the idea of running away to s.p.a.ce has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looksaround the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle-America that never was-the one her mom wants to retreat into. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks.

"I know it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?"

"You could say that," says the cat, as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake pa.s.sport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. "Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let's get going: we've got a flight to catch."

Sadeq is eating his dinner when the lawsuit rolls in.

Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he contemplates the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: the supplicant is American, a woman, and-oddly-claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not: as the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

A woman who leads a G.o.d-fearing life-not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding-is deprived of her child by the machinations of a f.e.c.kless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the f.e.c.kless one's behavior, which is degenerate: an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: he doesn't take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress." The same forces that Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the Ummah in orbit around Jupiter.

Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? "Computer,"

he says, "a reply to this supplicant: my sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of a.s.sistance. Your heart cries out for help before G.o.d (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb." He pauses: or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. "If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can a.s.sert the primacy of shari'ah over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emanc.i.p.ation, to the greater glory of G.o.d (blessed be his name) in the name of the Prophet (peace be unto him). Ends, sigblock, send."

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and then kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers: they're already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope's controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign s.h.i.+p of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman's email: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind, he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily: meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within.

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for the war of the sword if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the G.o.dly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful: because, in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

"I'm sorry, but the Borg is attempting to a.s.similate a lawsuit," says the receptionist. "Will you hold?" "Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances around at the cabin. "That is so last century," she grumbles. "Who do they think they are?"

"Doctor Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope that there's this whole hippie groupmind that's grown up using his state vector as a bong-"

"Shut the f.u.c.k up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable s.p.a.cecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry." She sp.a.w.ns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down: then she sp.a.w.ns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's scarce bandwidth-time that will have to be paid for in ch.o.r.es, later-but it's necessary. "She's gone too far. This time, it's war."

She slams out of her cabin and spins right around in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good- But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she's feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad now.

It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district-she said it was a work a.s.signment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it-just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a psycho b.i.t.c.h control-freak and ever since she had to face up to losing Dad she's been working her claws into Amber-which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well-networked to boot. But now Mom's found a way of f.u.c.king Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things.

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meats.p.a.ce den.

There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger-adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin's posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age-apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than the others at running Bob, and she's no slouch when she's being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that's been blocked by toad-sp.a.w.n. She's almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. "Monica? You got a minute?"

"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pa.s.s me the ant.i.torque wrench and a number-six hex head."

"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a fly-wheel counterweight, and laser gyros a.s.sembles itself-Amber pa.s.ses it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is busy."

"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?"

"Yes!"

There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I got a bit of vacuuming to do. Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one."

A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. "I don't want this to go through," she says. "I don't care what Mom says, I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she repeats, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag. "Here, catch."

Amber grabs the bag: too late, she discovers that it's full of water and toadsp.a.w.n. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped baby tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!"

Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the consensus-definedfloor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toadsp.a.w.n with garbage bags and paper-by the time they've got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whirr, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was really clever," Monica says emphatically, as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't happen to know how the toad got in here?"

"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one s.h.i.+ft before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar."

"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm going to have to go back and re-fit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?"

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

"All right, Bob coming online." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice. Your mother's 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 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; 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 firewall."

"So."

"Well, I guess I was technically a Jannissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. But now the stupid b.i.t.c.h has gone and converted to s.h.i.+'ism. Now, 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 were alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories.' They generally take a progressive, almost westernized, 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?"

"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. 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 caseMom owns me, because I'm a minor. 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 creating 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 against you."

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 sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the surface. 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 clockface: for Amalthea orbits the master in 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 run 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, these will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly slowing 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 sent 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: now 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 lookalike, 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 sulfur 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 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.cesuit 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 Doctor 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's actually learned it the hard way. "If so, you want to be careful. She doesn't lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants."

"Yes, she did. Ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I have not noticed that. 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?"