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 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 webcache 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 spacesuit 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 Doctor 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’s actually learned it the hard way. “If so, you want to be careful. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”
“Yes, she did. Ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I have not noticed that. 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?”
Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”
“Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: he’s actually taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel-coming from someone more than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg-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 an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”
“My mother-” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat-“My mother likes control.”
“Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of-no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”
“My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him-they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”
“Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”
“I’m not Moslem.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, mister judge. I don’t believe in any limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me.”
“Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”
“Same to you too,” she mutters darkly as the connection goes dead. “ Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.
“I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”
She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”
“What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody…”
Sleep cycles pass: the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nano-assemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles-just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.
High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal firewalls for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable-since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child
