Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  “Any moment now!” Lindy says brightly, then squeezes my nipples affectionately. “Relax and let me help you enjoy the ride?!?”

  I shudder as the balloon lifts free of the deck. My cocoon is paying rather more attention to certain bits of my anatomy than is strictly businesslike: It’s been a long time since anyone took that kind of interest in me. “Lindy, do you make love to all your passengers?” I ask.

  “Only the ones who’re equipped for it!” she chirps, throbbing inside me. “It helps them pass the time. Ooh, I see we’re in for a ride on Telemus! That’ll be fun! I like him! He’s cute!” I groan, silently—my mouth is agape, constrained by the soft spacer that holds my lips and throat open—and feel the unscratched itch building up inside me. I can’t help myself; some reflexes are built into my lineage too deeply to control consciously, and it has been a very long time—too long—since anyone made love to me. Even a not-very-bright surface-to-orbit sleeping bag. I writhe, or try to—Lindy has me thoroughly immobilized—and just as I’m about to ask her to back off on the customer-care front, she squirms again. “Ooh! Ooh! Yes! Yes! Oh!”

  One of the peculiarities of my lineage is that although we superficially resemble a female of our Creators’ kind, we differ profoundly in some ways—especially our sexual reflexes. In our default state (unless we’re unconditionally imprinted on our One True Love), when someone becomes aroused over one of us, we become aroused over them. This is conditioned into us at a very low level, with the aid of some low-level modification to our basic neural architecture, and the addition of something called an “enhanced vomeronasal loop reflex.” Without that reflexive arousal, I’d be useless for my design purpose—but it sometimes has annoying side effects. And so I lose most of three minutes to a very overdue orgasm, and the afterglow keeps me preoccupied for another hour.

  (This is probably a good thing, because if I were left alone to contemplate my predicament—helpless and hog-tied inside a launch cocoon, floating through the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus with only a soap-bubble-thin gasbag between me and the red-hot foothills below, waiting to be yanked violently into low orbit by a thousand-kilometer-long cable—I might be close to panic. Especially as a malign aristo wishes me ill, and strangers have turned over my pad, all in the past six hours. And then there’s the upcoming lift ride. But Lindy knows exactly how to distract nervous passengers, and I suspect assigning one of her kind to keep me quiet was part of Ichiban’s plan all along.)

  I’ve ridden in lift pods before; it’s the easiest way off Earth. But leaving Earth was different. That time I was already in hibernation, packed in a commercial widebody load and hiked up to speed on a hypersonic sled before docking. This is a solo ride on a big dipper with an arm a thousand kilometers long, the tip counterrotating along its orbital path, dipping down until it’s just fifty kilometers above mean ground level in order to yank me up to orbital velocity in half a rotation: I’m going to be pulling tens of gees. (Which is partly why Lindy has been so enthusiastically stuffing me: I need the padding.) “What happens once we reach orbit?” I ask her, trying not to dwell on the process.

  “Who cares?” she says dreamily. “Telemus is wild! I haven’t ridden him in ages!” I’d grind my teeth if she hadn’t carefully gagged me. “Well, my template has, but this is all new to me! This is my first flight! Ooh! I’m so excited!”

  She shivers slightly, and I feel the tremors running through her skin.

  “My flight itinerary,” I say carefully. “It matters to me.”

  “We’ll get you there!” She giggles briefly. “Telemus will drop us just in time to catch the High Wire, and he’ll take us the rest of the way! It’ll be fun!”

  “You’re going the whole way?” I ask, trying to conceal my dismay.

  “Yes! Once High Wire has us, I’ll morph into my second instar, to keep you snug and safe from all the nasty radiation and micrometeoroids! ” she simpers as she flashes up a schematic of her type’s second instar—a form with stubby solar wings, a heat exchanger, and a mirrored parasol. They form a fetching ensemble for a cocoon hanging off a bough of the great ship High Wire, or one of his sibs. “We’ll have lots of time to get to know each other! Squee!”

  I’m still searching for a suitably withering retort when I glimpse the arm of Telemus tracing a white scar down through the beaten-bronze dome of the sky toward us. And then I do have second thoughts—but by then it’s too late.

  LINDY HAS OBVIOUSLY been looking forward to sex with Telemus for ages, if not her entire life, and he reciprocates. They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter. I find the comm setting to screen out their groans and shuddering endearments before I get caught up in it. I lie alone and slimy in Lindy’s abdomen, squished down by the centripetal acceleration as Telemus yanks us into orbit. I have a lot of time to think black thoughts. It’s not that I mind that my steerage cocoon is a slut, but if I don’t get some decent conversation en route, I’ll go mad before we arrive. I should have plugged in the graveyard before we left, I realize. At least the ghosts of my sisters would keep me well-grounded. But it’s too late now, and I’m not going to ask Lindy to hook me up—some things are too private.

  The thundering pressure of the ride falls away from me, and I cut back into the open chat channel in time to hear Lindy whisper tearful good-byes to her beau. I open my eyes and see Telemus in all his glory, dropping back toward the pearlescent cloud tops, tentacle tip retracting into its maintenance shell. “Good-bye!” Lindy calls. “I love you!”

  “Until the next you,” rumbles Telemus, his voice dopplering away as we rise above him.

  I try to get the star-crossed lover’s attention as we drift away. “Lindy, can you see High Wire yet?”

  After a brief pause: “Yes! He’s over there!” A blinking red ring flashes around a barely visible speck of starlight. “Isn’t it exciting?” She gives me a brief squeeze.

  I close my eyes. Patience. “I don’t like travel much,” I say, the most tactful lie that comes rapidly to mind. “Can you put me into full hibernation until we arrive?”

  “Are you sure?” She sounds doubtful, as if the mere idea of anyone not enjoying drifting helplessly between the stars with only a vacuous tart for company is incomprehensible to her.

  “I’m sure, Lindy.” I pause. “Do you have any alternative personality modules?” I add plaintively.

  “Sorry!” She says brightly. “I’m me! We’re all me! With the Mod-42 short-duration environmental-support capsule what you see is exactly what you get! And I want you to know, I really love having you inside me! But if you’re sure you want to sleep ... ?”

  “I am,” I say firmly, and close my eyes, hoping that it’ll be dream-free.

  “Awww! Alright. Sleep tight!”

  The universe goes away.

  THE DIRTY TRUTH— a truth universally acknowledged today, but bizarrely never admitted by any of my True Love’s kind—is that space travel is shit.

  (I use “shit” as a generic placeholder for a vile and unpleasant substance with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Being instantiated as and when I was, I have no direct experience of scat. We had to practice with diatomaceous earth and brown dye. But I digress...)

  If you’re rich, you can rent a stateroom in the supercargo spaces of a big strange person with a magsail or a nuclear-electric drive, depending on what direction you want to go in. And you, and a few sixteens of other folk, get to socialize and intrigue and backstab and be bored together for weeks or months or years on end, in a space not much larger than my rented rack in a cloud-city afloat over Venus. Bandwidth is expensive and metered—someone must keep a relay antenna pointed at your host’s brain, and feed it with kilowatts, just to support your idle chatter—and the stars and planets move so very slowly.

  But it’s much worse if you’re poor.

  If you’re poor, they wrap you in a stupid cocoon and strap you to the outside of the ship. It’s cold, or hot, and the radia
tion burn keeps your Marrow techné churning with the demands of self-repair, and if you’re unlucky a sand grain with the energy of a guided missile blows you limb from limb. If not for the stimulating company of your cocoon and any other steerage passengers you can talk to, you go insane from sensory deprivation. You can opt for slowtime, but that’s got problems of its own—or you can go into total shutdown hibernation, and possibly die in transit and never wake up again. And that’s it. It lasts for months, or even years.

  You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company. Even with slowtime, it’s going to feel like months. You’re wearing a blindfold, which is probably appropriate because every couple of days, just to break the monotony, a not-very-accurate cosmic sniper fires a random shot at the building. And you wonder why my sisters don’t get out much?

  (Of course that’s nothing compared to interstellar travel, where they freeze you and chop off your limbs to save weight—and grow you new ones at the other end if you arrive sufficiently intact after decades and centuries in the vasty deep—but I’m not planning on going to Pluto or Eris or Quaoar to seek passage on one of the starships. At least, not just yet.)

  My One True Love’s species used to dream about space travel. It’s ironic: They were so badly designed for it that a couple of minutes’ exposure to vacuum would have killed them irreversibly. To go up and beyond Earth’s atmosphere required elaborate preparations, a complex portable biosphere—journeys of any duration necessitated cumbersome and heavy radiation shielding. And that’s before you consider all the other drawbacks.

  When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.

  Late in the day, when there weren’t enough of them left, they sent people like me—intelligent servants—to run the domed bases and camps and to conduct their research by proxy, and finally to build cities that they would never walk the streets of. Some of the people they sent were orthodox in body plan, but most were designed for vacuum and high-radiation environments and corrosive cloudscapes and microgravity. They—we—slaved in mining camps and died in launch accidents and built places where my True Love’s kind could live, made somewhere out of nowhere . . . but one day they weren’t there anymore. Dead, they were all dead.

  (What killed them? I can’t say. Rhea, template-matriarch and prototype of my kind, might have been able to tell us, for she lived among them in their twilight decades: But she died before I was instantiated, leaving only stale regrets to we final few who came into being too late to know True Love.)

  Before our dead Creators built my kind, space was empty as far as telescopes can see, and desolate with it. But we filled the void, and now there are places to go. Circumsolar space has been settled; starships are en route toward the nearer extrasolar worlds, crewed by the brave and the foolhardy. The colonies are barbarous and lawless compared to the huge cities of Earth, playgrounds for jaded aristos, where fortunes are made and lost and empires built and demolished against the breath-taking beauty of sterile planets and moons: And at last we’re not alone among the stars.

  But space travel is still shit. It’s expensive and unpleasant, and it takes you a long way from your friends—but not, unfortunately, your enemies.

  OF COURSE, I don’t hibernate for the entire voyage. That would be foolish, and possibly fatal, and although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death. I wake briefly as Lindy happily chatters her hellos to the laconic High Wire, and I force myself to stay awake as the spaceship’s tether grabs her and she crawls hubward and settles down on the spaceship’s load-bearing truss. I sleep again after she bites into the feedlines and power circuit and starts to metamorphose around me—a boring interlude, as her brain undergoes considerable rearrangement at this time. And then I wake again as we near our destination.

  High Wire cycles permanently between Mercury and Venus on an elliptical transfer orbit, taking half a year on each trip. He never enters planetary orbit, but uses his powerful tether—a smaller sib to Telemus—to catch incoming travelers and launch departing ones. Lobbing us up to him, or catching us at the other end, is the job of the local tethers or maglev tracks at the destination planet. Unlike many ships, especially in the outer reaches, High Wire works alone, without a crew of auxiliaries. But he’s not lonely: He gets to talk to a lot of travelers. In fact, it’s almost a rite of passage. So I spend a good three days hanging upside down from a structural truss covered in cargo pods, the sunlight casting acid-sharp shadows in front of me, giving him an abbreviated lifedump.

  “So you left your home because you wanted to segment your self from your sibs,” High Wire rumbles thoughtfully. (He pitches his voice low, adopting the gravitas due his station.) “But you are fond of them. Why did you do that?”

  “They were dying too fast.” I hug the graveyard of memories inside Lindy’s silent chrysalis. “I couldn’t stand to think I’d be just another.”

  “But they were all older than you, subjectively. Your sixty-one-year gap.”

  “What’s six decades?” I’d shrug if I could. “We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?”

  “Many people do not find that a problem,” High Wire muses. “They exist adequately without loving anything, themselves included.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the point. You’re happy, you’re doing exactly what you were designed to do. But imagine ... imagine somebody invented teleportation and made you obsolete overnight. What would you do then?”

  Without missing a beat, High Wire replies; “Without a job, I think I would head for the stars, to see what’s out there.”

  He’s obviously been thinking about that question a lot . . .

  BUT WHY WOULD anyone want to go off-Earth?

  I did. Once.

  I had a lot to run away from. Too many bad memories, too many sibs gone before me into the beyond . . . I’m one of the last, instantiated after we were already obsolete, frozen for over sixty years at one point, running far beyond my design. Over the past century the exigencies of space travel have driven body fashion in a direction I can’t follow. Designed as companion for my One True Love (deceased), my sense of identity is strongly bound to my physical shape. I can’t easily remodel myself as a chibi-san, small, wide-eyed, and big-headed, because it would deny my whole purpose, lovely and obsolete. Without even that tenuous raison d’être, I might as well die. And so, demoted from goddess to ogress with close-set, tiny eyes, I chose to flee.

  We all make mistakes, don’t we?

  ALL GOOD TIMES come to an end, and bad times, too: boring ones just taper out. I sleep after my tête-à-tête with the shipmind, and when I awaken, Mercury is a blazing-hot disk, visible just beyond the rim of Lindy’s sunshade. “Wake up, sleepy bones!” she sings. “It’s time to disembark!”

  I glance around. On every side of me, cargo pods are twitching from their slumbers and changing shape, growing legs and grapples and ion thrusters, and migrating toward High Wire’s tether. “How do we land ... ?” I start to ask, then feel Lindy shudder.

  “On a rail! It’s fun!”

  “On a—” A memory of Mercury tickles my head, but it belongs to a dead sister I haven’t fully internalized. Juliette, maybe? One of the wild ones.
I can but clutch the box of soul chips and swear to myself. Lindy is expanding lengthwise, reconfiguring around me. “How long have we got to go?”

  “Not long! Not long at all!” And she lets go of High Wire’s tether.

  All around us, pods and cocoons and modules are scattering from the High Wire like fluff from the hub of a bursting flywheel, propelled by spring-loaded ejectors or dropping from the end of the tether. A snowstorm of mechalife swarms in the void as the gangling cycler ship fires up his ion drive and backs away slowly. For a moment my view blacks out as Lindy shields my face from the searing godwheel sun, then we roll around under the impulse of a tiny thruster and I see Mercury ahead of me, a half disk now visible, burnished and shining, larger than my fists held at arm’s length. “Two hours, and we’ll be down! Whee!” Lindy squeezes. “Are you worried? Be happy! I can relax you!”

  On a rail. I have an archaic emulation mode in my fight/flight module. It makes me swallow, my throat dry. “Massage. Please.” Resolved: If I’m to die at a time not of my choosing, I will die happy. But Lindy’s theory of mind is too weak to model me, and so she takes me at my word. I arrive on Mercury butt first, scared witless, with my spine totally relaxed. Just as well, really.

  Mercury’s escape velocity is over four kilometers per second, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of. We are coming in at just over orbital velocity, without a thruster pack, and there can’t possibly be enough orbital tethers for this crowd. But the Mercurials have come up with a solution: the equatorial maglev track. Come down just so, and its magnets will catch you in a grip of steel and drag you to a standstill at the gates of Cinnabar. (Miss it even by centimeters, and you learn exactly what it’s like to be a meteorite.)

  The maglev track is a blinding-bright line slashed across the cratered lunar landscape of Mercury. We’re landing in daylight but driving into the twilight zone, with the searing solar glare blasting our shadow across the gray-brown landscape that blurs beneath us. I can’t look back—even if I could, Lindy’s solar parasol would block the view—but there’s a string of glittering pods lined up behind our approach path, like those arrayed in front, all with blinking emerald beacons like an expensive and fragile necklace. The horizon pancakes up and flattens beneath me as the landscape unwinds. It seems to speed up as we fall toward the track. Mountains frame the distant horizon. Is that Cinnabar’s huge dome I see at the vanishing point? I’m not sure—even with vision boosted to the max, I can’t quite make it out. “This is the fun part!” Lindy enthuses. “Try not to flinch! Whee! ”