Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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found the casting a trifle disturbing.”
“I’m no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role … let’s just say,
the cap fits.” Amber leans back in her chair. “Mind you, Marguerite
had an interesting life,” she muses.
“Don’t you mean depraved and debauched?” her neighbor counters.
“Sadeq.” She closes her eyes. “Let’s not pick a fight over absolute
morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry
out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I’m
feeling very tired. Drained.”
“Ah - I apologize.” He inclines his head carefully. “Is it your young
man’s fault? Has he slighted you?”
“Not exactly -” Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along
as ship’s theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her
pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly
oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the
quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium,
he’s outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an
unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah
by the time they get home. He’s circumspect in dealing with cultural
differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids
antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral
development. “It’s a personal misunderstanding,” she says. “I’d rather
not talk about it until we’ve sorted it out.”
“Very well.” He looks unsatisfied, but that’s normal. Sadeq still has
the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to
his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don’t mirror
in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. “But back to the here and now. Do you know
where this router is?”
“I will, in a few minutes or hours.” Amber raises her voice,
simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. “Boris! You got any
idea where we’re going?”
Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he’s wearing a
velociraptor, and they don’t turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls
irritably: “Give me some space!” He coughs, a threatening noise from
the back of his wattled throat, “Searching the sail’s memory now.” The
back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny
nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors
and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array
detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is
feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the
unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as
visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an
aborted sun.
“But where is it going to be?” asks Sadeq. “Do you know what you are
looking for?”
“Yes. We should have no trouble finding it,” says Amber. “It looks
like this.” She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows
that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and
something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the
seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and
whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in
space above a darkling planet. “Looks like a William Latham sculpture
made out of strange matter, doesn’t it?”
“Very abstract,” Sadeq says approvingly.
“It’s alive,” she adds. “And when it gets close enough to see us,
it’ll try to eat us.”
“What?” Sadeq sits up uneasily.
“You mean nobody told you?” asks Amber: “I thought we’d briefed
everybody.” She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he
catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits
in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. “Damn,” she
adds mildly.
Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with
ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he’s busy in
another private universe.
“Hrrrr! Boss! Found something,” calls Boris, drooling on the bridge
floor.
Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router, she thinks. “Put it on
the main screen.”
“Are you sure this is safe?” Su Ang asks nervously.
“Nothing is safe,” Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck.
“Here. Look.”
The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish
horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white
methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by
Hyundai +4904/[-56]‘s residual rotation. The image-intensification
level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness.
Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk:
Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost
planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms
in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and
dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far
horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of
frigid darkness.
“That’s it,” Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the
terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around
her; “That’s it!” Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment
with everybody she values. “Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned
cat in here! Where’s Pierre? He’s got to see this!”
*
Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and
rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Fireworks
burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of
cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a
tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a
prarranged rendezvous. He’s been drinking, and his best linen shirt
shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to
breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of
hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I doing this? he
wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around -
He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a
vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside
into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the
threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement.
Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an
unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness
lower down that makes him cry out, “where are you?”
“Over here.” He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She’s
partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested
corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes.
Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He’s full
of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight,
the taste in her mouth. She’s the magnet for his reality, impossibly
alluring, so tense she could burst. “Is it working for you?” she asks.
“Yes.” he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and
desire as he walks toward her. They’ve experimented with gender play,
trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is
the first time they’ve done it this way. She opens her mouth: He
kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips,
the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.
She leans against him, feeling his erection. “So this is how it feels
to be you,” she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but
she doesn’t have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new
sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive
sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing
deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she
feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly
faints with the rich sensations of her body - it’s as if he’s
dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning
to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist -
so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She’s
whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: “Do it to
me!” she demands, “Do it now!”
Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts
bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against
him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and
there’s a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts,
so inside out it takes his breath away. It’s hot and as hard as rock,
and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it’s an
intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of
his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and
terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he
begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his
own head, I didn’t know it felt like this -
Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, “How was it
for you?” Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have,
too.
But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting
into him, and of how good it felt. All he can hear is his father
yelling (“What are you, some kind of queer?”) - and he feels dirty.
*
Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.
The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33 MIPS - thoughts
bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented
human minds. Saturn’s rings glow with waste heat. The remaining
faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space
of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to
resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in
equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves
of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small,
crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black
slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass
drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around
the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of
copious solar power and determined mining robots.
The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high
orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter
trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner
Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are
shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and
crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below,
skimming the edges of Jupiter’s turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic
glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of
superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas
giant’s magnetosphere. It’s trading momentum for electrical
current, diverting it into a fly’s eye grid of lasers that beam it
toward Hyundai +4904/[-56]. As long as the original Amber and her
incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue
its mission of discovery, but they’re part of the posthuman
civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system,
part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control
engine of history.
Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in
the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto,
supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming
structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.
There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s
getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the
twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic
malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic
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