of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. 'My, what a tall boy you are.'
'Person,' he corrects, instinctively. 'I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume.'
'Person, thing, boy, whatever – you're engendered, aren't you?' she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. 'Never trust anyone who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman,' she says gloomily.
'You can't rely on them.' Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue.
'That damn cat,' his grandmother complains. '
'Is it on the ship?' Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.
'It might be.' She stares at him through narrowed eyes. 'You want to interview it, too, huh?'
Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. 'I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but…' He shrugs. 'Business is business, and
'Hah!' She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. 'You'll get yours, kid.' The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. 'And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's hit her.'
* * *
'Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her,' says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair – carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms – her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. 'It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it.'
'Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke,' Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. 'Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?'
'If you will excuse me?' asks Sadeq. 'We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions – and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very much like to know – concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?'
'Do bears shit in woods?' asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. 'Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish!
If you -'
'Boris, can it!' Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died – incurred child support payments? 'I don't hold you responsible for this,' she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.
'This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon.' Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber – and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer – as he laces his fingers.
'Drop it. I said I don't blame you.' Amber forces a smile. 'We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out.'
'We could keep going.' This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth without a good reason. 'The Field Circus is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years…'
'We've lost too much sail mass,' says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. 'We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904/-56, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target.' Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail.
'There's nowhere to run.'
'Nowhere to -' Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. 'Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?'
'I know you do.' And Pierre really does know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore – it's not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) 'I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?'
'My mother.' Amber nods thoughtfully. 'Where's Donna?'
'I don't -'
There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. 'Hiding in corners again?' Amber says disdainfully.
'I am a camera!' protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. 'I am
– '
Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: 'You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once. Merde!'
The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. 'Go fuck yourself!'
'I don't like being spied on,' Amber says sharply. 'Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?'
'I'm the archivist.' Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. ' You said I should -'
'Yes, well.' Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber.
'You heard what we were discussing. What do you know about my mother's state of mind?'
'Absolutely nothing,' Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. 'I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?'
'I -' For once, Amber's speechless.
'I'll schedule you for facial surgery,' offers the cat. Sotto voce: 'It's the only way to be sure.'
Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the Field Circus. It's a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide.
