Accelerando

*

Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals – Amber's mother

offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user

interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber

despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes.

Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents – the father absentminded and

prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the

mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing

kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding

identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring

Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions annoy him, and

when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent

education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their

reluctant assent.

*

Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies

abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is

into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis,

encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to

await a better epoch. His instrument of will – the legal mechanism of his

resurrection – specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden,

twelfth imam.

*

For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her

father – but there's nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing

debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those

aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is

tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past.

*

Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium – now unmanned,

leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control – slowly deorbits

into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches

a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of

which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.

*

Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to

make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not

necessarily in a manner of their liking.

* * *

'You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project,' says the serious-faced young man.

'History project.' Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: 'What history is this?'

'The history of the twenty-first century,' says Sirhan. 'You remember it, don't you?'

'Remember it -' Pierre pauses. 'You're serious?'

'Yes.' Sirhan opens a side door. 'This way, please. I'll explain.'

The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete – tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping- pong with spin and polarization – and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low- power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty.

'Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth – if that was what interested me.'

Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona – or maybe it's downtown Baghdad.

'Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,' Sirhan continues. 'And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility.'

'Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense.' Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of iron – that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. 'Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?'

'Hiding, probably,' Sirhan says, without rancor. 'Her mother's about,' he adds. 'Why do you ask?'

'I don't know what you know about us.' Pierre looks at him askance: 'We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.'

'Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's collapse,' Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.

'We didn't know about any of that!' Pierre crosses his arms defensively. 'Not about you, or your father either,' he adds quietly. 'Or my other… life.' Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.

'I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you,' Sirhan says condescendingly, 'but it's all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead – and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself.

The fittest version of you survives.'

He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines.

'Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us,' he says pompously.