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 diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human – human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.

None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field Circus : The starwhisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that some of the most important events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place.

"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris."

Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get you for this," Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance.

Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish – small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner – slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy."

"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?"

"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers – but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. "What's with the wicker man?" He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.

"Who cares?" asks Boris. "S part of the scenery, isn't it?"

The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins – the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.

"I care who it is," says Pierre.

"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen."

Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?"

Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. You don't have to, until the trial, you know."

The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior.

"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender —

"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she's just come from the back room.

"Since —" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe the cat's been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. "This universe is broken."

"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his fingers. "Waiter!"

"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything."

Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?"

"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman – blonde and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she's presenting to the public – she's surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "Danke , Ang."

"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris.

Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then." Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid missing anything if possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. "There are eight of me at present! All recording away."

"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what it is that you do here?"

"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were any hills hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about the privacy code here?"

"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason – evidently he's hit an issue she has mixed feelings about.

"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes and cutups."

Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be assault under Ring legal code, not true?"

"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer jellyfish in her direction.

"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all going to be settled soon, isn't it?"

"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again.

"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!"

"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?"

"My —" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested."

"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners."