Accelerando

'What is the lawsuit, anyway?'

Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying: 'I did not that bit see.'

'It's horrible,' Amber says vehemently.

'Truly evil,' echoes Pierre.

'Fascinating but wrong,' Sadeq muses thoughtfully.

'But it's still horrible!'

'Yes, but what is it?' Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manque asks.

'It's a demand for settlement.' Amber takes a deep breath. 'Dammit, you might as well tell everyone – it won't stay secret for long.' She sighs. 'After we left, it seems my other half – my original incarnation, that is -

got married. To Sadeq, here.' She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. 'And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time – we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home – that is to stop people trying to use the twin's paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels.

'This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the Field Circus several times over. And my accounts are wiped out – I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble.'

* * *

A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old.

The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. 'Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?' she asks. High above them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky.

Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use anything he tells her against him. 'Which childhood would you like to know about?' he asks.

'What do you mean, which?' Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity.

'I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better.' It's his turn to frown.

'She did, did she,' breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. 'Why do you think she did that?'

'It was the only way she knew to raise a child,' Sirhan says defensively. 'She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was reacting against her own character flaws.' When I have children there will be more than one, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side.

Pamela flinches: 'it's not my fault,' she says quietly. 'Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what -

what different childhoods did you have?'

'Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly – she refused to take the veil and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam – at least, his parents thought it was the hidden imam – and -' Sirhan shrugs. 'Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history.'

'Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?' asks his grandmother.

'Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it.' Or rather, decided it was unlawful, he recalls.

'I had a very conservative upbringing in some ways.'

'I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?'

The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. 'The more people you are, the more you know who you are,' says Sirhan. 'You learn what it's like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman.' And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that, he adds for his own stream of consciousness.

'I couldn't agree more.' Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the alarming sharkishness of her expression – or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas. 'So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?'

'Enjoy isn't a word I would use,' he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. As if childhood is something that ever ends, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at least a terasecond – if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span – even into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest him. 'It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?'

Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. 'I made some mistakes in my youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays,' she says lightly.

'It's your revenge, isn't it?' Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees.

'Why, you little -' She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. 'What would you know about revenge?' she asks.

'I'm the family historian.' Sirhan smiles humorlessly. 'I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling everything.'

'That's monstrous.' Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat – grape juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. 'I'd never do something like that to any child of mine.'

'So why won't you tell me about your childhood?' asks her grandson. 'For the family history, of course.'

'I'll -' She puts her glass down. 'You intend to write one,' she states.

'I'm thinking about it.' Sirhan sits up. 'An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times,' he suggests. 'A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that – how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course – if you tell me about your parents, although I am certain they aren't around to answer questions directly – but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the