Accelerando

The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention. He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth – then stop. "What do you want?" he demands.

"A word, if you please?" A

"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. "What do you want?"

"I'm not sure." A

"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: A

"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's wearing – a major departure from her normal style – and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?"

Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "Why ?" he snaps.

"Yes. Why?" A

"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life —"

"What interference?"

He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night —"

A

"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so very wrong that —"

A

"I —" Sirhan swallows. "She's what ?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought …" He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?

"I think you need to apologize to someone," A

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons – literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.

But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on A

"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem."

"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?"

"It was meant to be a surprise." A

"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff."

"That stuff." A

"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. Now I do, but I think I pissed her off —"

"Which brings us back to point one."

"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" – Manfred takes a mouthful of beer – "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely."

"So? Don't brood." A