Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak.
"I know you're busy —" she begins, then stops. "Is it that important?" she asks.
"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router – there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more – they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes —" he shakes his head.
"It's big?"
"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a low —bandwidth link compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are – and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless —"
He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself."
"I can't!" He really is agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it."
"Stop."
He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?"
"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately."
"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up."
"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen."
"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?"
Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're setting up a trading network, yes?" she asks.
"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system – a souk – and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's listening. Trade …" his eyebrows furrow. "There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates —"
"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?"
"Got it." There's a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells. "Hey, that's interesting."
"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before him.
"An ack from …" he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light. "… about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says."
It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he says.
"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell Amber."
"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along."
"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and they're actually making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad reputation somewhere along the line – and Amber needs to know.
Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him – access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.
"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?"
"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth about this system."
"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly – the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?"
"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it on credit."
They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists the Wunch negotiator.
"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one – one that wanted to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage."
"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species."
"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head.
"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over."
"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be – no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is that?"
"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to."
"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?" he asks.
"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder.
"What are you doing —"
"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch. Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?"
"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us directly without using that shell interface?"
"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears footsteps behind him on the gravel path.
"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in standard human form – a sword hangs from his belt, and there's a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!"
"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun.
Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now, rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms —"
Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!"
Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.
Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.
"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion.
More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.