Accelerando (20 page)

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's tiny screen. Mom calls her “your father's fancy bitch” with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her—not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blond, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) “
Oui
. Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to 'im?”

It comes out in a rush. “I want to
see
him.” Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette—”

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”

Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go “right now.” “I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell.
It can't get Dad into trouble if he doesn't know, can it
?

“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for you.”

Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: He must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi—Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I
made you call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?”

“Um.” For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. “Go ahead. There's something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?”

She's going to have to be brief. The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week—she's dragging me round all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I
can't
do what she wants—I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt—I can't even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her
tante
Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

Amber sniffs. “Can
you
help?” she asks.

“I'll see what I can do,” her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

An instrument package peels away from the
Sanger
's claim jumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist. Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and
wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience. Life aboard the
Sanger
is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth). They're unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor—they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults—working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toehold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count.

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly, “how you doing?”

Pierre sniffs. “It's going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices.
He's twelve. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age?
She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics, and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it.”

“I'll shove if I want,
slave
.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious—“Are we supposed to be doing this?”

“You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console. “Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to—they're putting out way too much double entendre. Somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

“You stick to
your
business, and
I'll
stick to
mine,
” she says, emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what's happening.”

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. “It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's
the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touchdown. And
then
it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in midair, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. “Wake me when there's something interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic, but right now, just
knowing
he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he
really fancies you
stuff the older girls go in for—

The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. “You've got mail,” he says drily. “You want me to read it for you?”

“What the—” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

“You
bitch,
Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?”

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber. It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. “You're Amber?” it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear—it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence interface.

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from
tante
'Nette?”

“No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

“Mom doesn't believe in seafood,” says Amber. “It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?”

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. “Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”

Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

“Naah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though—he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works.”

“Wow. Like, how totally cool.” In truth, Amber is delighted because it
is
her birthday, but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world
tante
Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her—it's always hard to tell with Mom—things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. “Why doncha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

“What do I do now?” she asks.

“Pick up the page labeled
READ ME
and follow the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le
READ ME
, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect. “Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions. It is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married.
Ends
.” It mumbles on for a while. “Fucking snotty Parisian bitch. I'll piss in her knicker drawer. I'll molt in her bidet . . .”