'Oh.' She shakes her head. 'I assumed you were avoiding me because -'
'No.' He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. 'I owe you an apology.'
About time, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. 'What for?' she asks.
'For not giving you the benefit of the doubt,' he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. 'I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me.'
The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. 'You're not an easy man to get close to,' she says quietly. 'Maybe that's part of your problem.'
'Part of it?' He chuckles bitterly. 'My mother -' He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. 'Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me…'
'They run both ways.' Rita reaches out and takes his hand – and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. 'Listen, it looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?'
He shrugs. 'I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan – Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet's energy budget – but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt.'
She shrugs. 'Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats.' But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. 'And think of all the people we'll be leaving behind.'
'Well.' He smiles tightly. 'If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us…'
'A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated.' Rita stares at him. 'Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive.'
Sirhan looks uncomfortable. 'If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it,' he says, self- deprecatingly. 'Sometimes I wonder about that cat.'
'Maybe I will.' She pauses. 'And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?'
'I -' He looks sideways at her. 'I can see myself sending an eigenbrother,' he says quietly. 'But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring – and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?'
'You'll go all three ways?' she asks.
'Yes, I think so. What about you?'
'Where you go, I go.' She leans against him. 'Isn't that what matters in the end?' she murmurs.
Chapter 9: Survivor
This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.
Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.
Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies.
I wonder who we'll find here?
* * *
There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles – there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them.
A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously.
The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) 'City, what's that?' he asks without moving his lips.
'What are you looking at?' replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should.
The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise – and those paws – 'You're sharp,' he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval.
'Yeah, whatever.' The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys.
'Who are you?' he demands.
The beast looks at him insolently. 'I know your parents,' it says, still using innerspeech. 'You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father.'
'No!' Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. 'I don't like you! Go away!' He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose.
'I'll go away when you take me to your father,' says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. 'If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?'
'Don't care!' Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old – seven old Earth-years – but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent.
'Kids.' The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. 'Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know.' A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat – but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a
'Get away!' Manni is worried. 'Mom!' he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. 'There's this
'Mom will do.' The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him.
'There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you.'
Manni stops hollering. 'Who're you?' he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.
'I'm Aineko.' The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. 'And you're Manni, right?'
