"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.

"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren't we?"

He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said, right? That's what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops."

"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they're coming aboard already. And I don't buy it – something about the whole setup stinks."

Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, finally. "Doesn't make sense at all."

Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it."

"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?"

"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later."

He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me as your champion."

"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. "Listen. I had a good reason."

"Reason?"

"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die' time." She grins, impishly. "The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It's crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone."

Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer the guy?"

"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I know you're not some kind of macho psychopath!"

"But your mother's lawyers —"

She shrugs dismissively. "They're lawyers. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works." She leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet around the small of her back. "My hero!"

The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.

Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters – each the size of a small pony – shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation.

Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she mutters.

"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered.

"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!"

"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past." Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.

"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from … and it doesn't give away anything about where we're going."

"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to understand it." She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over.

Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the bishop.

"You tell her," Ang implores him.

"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But we don't want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì – it's a matter of national security."

"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.