"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted – part of their contract – that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system since then, who can blame them?"
Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says.
"The cat —" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of this public space. "What about the cat?"
"The family cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later … when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit." She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away – they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about to open."
"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit – " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.
"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically.
"No," says Pierre. "I have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault."
"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?"
"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And compurgation , but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." In the most traditional way imaginable , he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but – "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance."
He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.
"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are very persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean everything."
Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai +4904 /–56 looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the Field Circus like a rind of darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.
Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router.
"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit."
Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back."
"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you want, I can ping it now …?"
"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's – ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?"
"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge.
"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber.
"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. "Opening port now."
A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The Field Circus is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought.
The Field Circus is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data.
"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. "Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains.
"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!"
"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair.
"What does it say?" she asks, quietly.
"What do they say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want."
"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?"
The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself —"
"I don't want anybody on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got that?"
"Clear," Aineko grumbles.
"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?"
One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's abruptly precipitated into a very different space.
Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges is —
"Pierre?"
She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you know it's rude to —"
"Pierre."
He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and wrong in her presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly.
"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, then stops and bites her lip. Don't do this to me! he thinks. "You know it hurts?"
"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent, elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. The shame. "I didn't – I have some issues."
"It was the other night?"
He nods. Now she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want," she says. And she leans toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?
"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself out."
"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have said. We don't have to do it that way if you don't want to."
How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says, implicitly changing the subject.
Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks.
"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?"
"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That's the problem."
"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject.