Accelerando

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 shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship 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 orbital 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 spaceship 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 appetite 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 shit, 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 shit! 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 space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space 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 attitude: 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 petition 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 God. 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 ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!'

'A mother's love -'

'Fuck 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.'