Accelerando

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

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

"No —" A

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

"You can never tell with future shock." A

"You, I – I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. A

"Don't be unhappy," A

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

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

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

A

"She's cornered me!"

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

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

"Yes." A

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

"Oh? How so?"

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

"Yes, of course." A

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

"Here?" A

"Well, then …"

Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers A

"Your – wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but A

"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tu

Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone …

* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small i

* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance – possibly blood – says "I'm checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.