Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  Granita’s smile evaporates. For a moment I think I’ve gone too far. Then she reaches across the table and grasps my arm. I feel the hum of powerful motors concealed within the satin sheath of her formal glove. “One trusts that you will remember your friends, should times become difficult.” She stares at me, eyes glittering as coldly and brilliantly as rhinestones.

  “Indeed, my lady.” I nod, the almost bow that I practice daily, that is reflexive for the bishojo ruling caste. “I shall do that.”

  “Well, then, it’s settled!” She feigns lighthearted delight, as if I have not momentarily scared the shit out of her with rumor of a slave rebellion. “One good word deserves another, I think.”

  “Oh. Yes?” The trichloroethane in the liqueur is tickling my chemotactic sensors, infusing them with a rich warmth that is slightly disorienting.

  “The Pink Police have very recently been placed on heightened alert. It appears they are afraid that a cache of replicators has been raided on Mars. They are searching everyone arriving on or departing the planet, and even with my connections, I am afraid we might be delayed on arrival.”

  I freeze for a few seconds, then knock back the rest of my drink to conceal my dismay. Two things are apparent. First, I haven’t fooled her at all; she thinks I’m smuggling something. And secondly, if she’s telling the truth (and not just a cunning lie to flush me out), it’s clear that they’re looking for me.

  Which means Jeeves has a leak in his organization.

  I RETURN TO the plush, lonely claustrophobia of my cabin, cloisonnéenamel inlay and swagged-velvet drapes concealing soap-bubble lithium-alloy walls. Of my “servants,” Bill is elsewhere; Ben is hunched in his usual spot between my shipping trunk and the coreward bulkhead, chewing on a wire. “You again,” he mutters.

  “Where’s Ben?” I ask.

  “None of your business, mistress.” His sarcasm is charmless in the extreme.

  “Then I suppose he won’t want to hear what I just picked up in the lounge,” I snap, as I swing down the safety bars by my bed and float inside. “The Pink Police have gone onto high alert. They’re searching all traffic between Mars and orbit.”

  “Oh,” Bill responds disappointingly. He stands up, releasing the wire. “I’d better go tell him, then.” He leaves abruptly, by way of the servants’ hatch.

  Alone—for the time being—I let myself drift down to the sleeping pad, then fold the safety bars back into place. (While Pygmalion normally accelerates at barely a hundredth of a gee, she sometimes has to dodge debris. Traveling at hundreds of kilometers per second, even a sand grain can be deadly: and sand grains don’t show up on radar at long range. Consequently, the evasive maneuvers can be brutal—and after the first time they’re plastered against the ceiling by the emergency thrusters, even the most pigheaded aristos learn to respect the safety bars on their beds.)

  Lying securely on a nest of bedding, I check my pad, as I have done for the past fifty days. Normally it’s replete with chatter, to which I have to spend some time responding—queries from the managers of Katherine Sorico’s fictional estates, requests for authorizations to disburse funds and return company accounts—all meaningless, but essential if I am to maintain my cover identity. This time, I’m surprised to see a real message hidden in the morass. It purports to be about repairs to a summer house in Tasmania, but as I skim it hurriedly I suddenly realize there’s an imago attachment. And it’s from Emma!

  “Sister.” Her sudden formality is jarring. “I gather you’ve met my friend.” I have? “And you’re no longer on Venus. Or Mercury. I don’t know where you are, and I don’t want to—if this message reaches you, best not to reply.”

  I squint at the imago, trying to make out the background. It’s dark, and something about Emma’s appearance isn’t right. Her hair is a glassy shell around the top of her head, her skin is—oh. She’s wearing cryoskin, of the kind we only need in the very chilliest of environments. I blink, irritated. “Go on.”

  “I hear you’ve been in trouble lately. I’m sorry about that; we’d have spared you if we could. But I’m in trouble, too, and I need your assistance.” She pauses for a moment, but not to take breath; where she is standing, the traditional oxygen-nitrogen ambient mix would flow like water. What on Earth can she be talking about?

  “For a long time now, we—some of your sibs—have been engaged in a line of work we’ve been careful to keep you out of. That’s you, Freya, and everyone else who didn’t need to be directly involved; you’re our sisters, and we cherish you, but we didn’t want to involve you because what we do is risky and distasteful. So only a few of us were involved at any time. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us left. So we need your help. We need to bring you into the circle.”

  Circle of what? “Get to the point,” I mutter.

  “We—myself, and I think it’s safe to name the dead ones, so I can also say: Juliette, Chloe, Aphrodite, Sinead, and some others who are still alive so it’s best if you don’t know who—are Block Two sibs. You, and most of our sisters, are Block One. You were initialized from a soul dump of Rhea that was taken right after her certification, when she was nineteen years old and in her sixth instar.” Sixth—and final, adult-sized—body, that is. It takes a long time, years and years, to educate and train an archetype for a lineage of concubines. There’s no easy way to short-circuit childhood if you’re trying to build high empathy and interpersonal skills. I (she, I remind myself) was ported through a series of bodies along the way from crèche to cathouse, and only declared complete by our trainers on reaching the sixth instar.

  “What you weren’t told is that after that template dump was taken, Rhea underwent further training. We Block Two sibs have been privileged to receive an update from a soul chip she recorded during her nineteenth instar, at age thirty.” Nineteenth? How in the name of my Dead Love did she get through thirteen bodies in eleven years? “Physically we’re identical, but mentally . . . we have some extra training. We can hide among you quite effectively, but the fact remains, we’re different.”

  I pause the imago. Emma’s confession is outrageous! She’s not— really not, where it counts—one of us? She’s a sib of an older, different lineage that—hang on. My head’s spinning. My hand goes to the back of my head, pushing aside the weight of my synthetic curls. Juliette. She’s compatible. I’m dreaming her, aren’t I? It’s a fact that you can’t exchange memories with a different lineage. You get nothing but fuzzy impressions at best—insanity and catatonia at worst. So. Emma is of my line. But she’s claiming to have extra ... what?

  “That’s alright. Take your time.” Her lips curve in a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “It’s hard to accept, I know. But swapping memories and remembering our dead is only part of the program. This is what our soul chips were designed for in the first place—to allow in-field upgrades, so that we can avoid obsolescence by acquiring new skills and experiences. And there’s nothing as obsolescent as a concubine tailored to please an extinct species, is there? I started out just like you, Freya, as a Block One sister. Now we need you to upgrade to Block Two. You can start the process whenever you like—just load one of us, Chloe or Sinead perhaps. It’ll take a couple of years to complete the process, but once you start, you’ll gain access to the reflexes you need.”

  I pause the imago again and rub the socket at the top of my spine. “What’s in it for me?” I ask.

  Evidently Emma gave her imago some footnotes to roll out if I seemed unconvinced. “How do you think we always manage to buy our sibs free if they fall on hard times and wind up indentured?” She shrugs. “There are more rewarding lines of work than rickshaw driver, Freya. Much more rewarding—even if we have to spend most of our lives wearing one disguise or another.” Is that a moue of bitterness in her expression? “This message was forwarded via our trusted associates. If you’re hearing this, then you’ve already started on that path. The upgrade to Block Two will ease your progress.”

  “That’s not the only re
ason you called,” I say.

  “No.” I can see the logic mill behind the imago switch streams; they’re responsive, but not truly conscious. “I’m still in ... trouble I can’t go into, Freya, but you can help me with it. But you can only help me if you accept the Block Two upgrade and work with my friends. Do you understand?”

  Oh great: moral blackmail. I admit I’ve been in trouble a time or two, but I haven’t needed bailing out of indentured servitude since the time when the baroque ensemble split up and I . . . no, I’ve mostly kept to myself. But I’ve got to admit, if I set aside my outrage at being used as camouflage by a cabal of scheming elder sisters, I’m curious about what this cryptic skill-upgrade package comes with, especially now I know that Juliette was one of the gang. “Okay, so you want me to load one of your Block Two sibs and keep working for JeevesCo. I loaded Juliette back on Mercury, you know? Is there anything else you can tell—”

  I stop, balling my fists in frustration. The imago has autoerased, and I’m talking to dead air. What next? I wonder, staring at the ceiling and counting the seconds (thirty-two million, give or take) until our arrival in Mars orbit.

  THEY’RE WAITING FOR me as I roll through the doorway, taking it low and fast: another pair of bonsai ninja, their camouflage suits shimmering in the light of the setting moon. They’ve got guns, and they’re sneaking up on the entrance, doubtless hoping to take me unawares. I don’t have a gun, but the baton in my left sleeve slides into my hand smoothly, and as I kick off, I’m already swinging it, feeling the depleted uranium sphere at its tip lance out toward the nearer gunman’s head.

  There’s a sharp tug at my side, and he jerks sideways, neck bending unnaturally as I take another light-footed step, leaning backward to compensate for my momentum as I try to swerve the two-meter-long club toward his companion, who is bringing his weapon to bear. But my left leg chooses that moment to malfunction—

  A blurred line flickers through my visual field and slices him in half as I topple over backward and land in the dirt.

  The pain hits me then, intense and localized. I’m leaking perfusion fluid, blue and bubbly with squandered mechanosomes in the cold moonlight. I look up at the hissing roar and the familiar three-eyed face. “Babe?”

  I struggle for words: parts of me feel wrong, and I can’t tell which. “Take the sampler, Daks; I’m a mission kill. The sextons will be here in a minute.”

  Daks lands on top of me with all six legs extended and his fur bristling. “The fuck I will!” He sounds pissed off.

  “Leave me!” I can feel the hollow thudding through the small of my back as the sextons leap into action. I try to reach inside my coat, but Daks is too heavy to dislodge. The damage must be worse than I thought. With any luck they won’t be able to add me to their picket fence. It’s a small consolation, and I hold on to it for a moment, but then I realize Daks is gripping my coat really tight. “Hey, don’t be stupid—”

  Grit, dust, and dirt blows everywhere as Daks lifts off. It’s like being grabbed by a miniature tornado. There’s no way he could manage this in a full-gee field, and even here he’s got to be overloading his thrusters; I’m scared he won’t even make it to the edge of the garden—

  But then I’m lying on my back again. I blink, making tears of antifreeze flow. My vision clears slowly as I hear the usually inaudible chatter of my subroutines taking stock. Anything else broken? No? Good. How’s the hole? Still leaking, down to 50 ml/minute. Bubbles of viscous silicone lube slide down my cheeks as I turn my head sideways. Daks sits beside me, looming anxiously across my visual field. “Babe? You alright? Talk to me! Babe?”

  “I’m still here. Mostly. Take my soul—”

  “We’re next to the spider and I’m out of fuel and I don’t seem to have packed my fission thorax. Can you get in?”

  Shit. I roll my head the other way and try not to giggle as the landscape flips. Thud go the sextons, on the other side of the wall. I feel light-headed. Hey, this could be fun! The spider squats enticingly close, door open, amber light flooding across the ground between us—an impossible expanse of desert, continental in scale. The pain is making me woozy, so I switch it off—risky, but I need a clear head to manage what Daks wants me to do. I experiment, make my hand twitch. Hmm. “Watch me.”

  It takes me uncounted minutes to roll over and crawl two meters. There’s a grinding sharpness in my left abdominal compartment, and my left arm feels like it’s about to come off. Something inside it is bent or broken, something major and structural. I listen for the thump of the sextons all the way, expecting a crushing impact on my back at any moment. But nothing happens, and after a while I begin to hope that Daks’s unexpected lift and my own enfeebled crawl have combined to bamboozle them. Finally—recovering from another head-swimmingly vacant moment—I reach out and grab the edge of the spider’s hatch with my right hand.

  “Nearly there, Babe.”

  “One day.” I make my arm bend. I don’t weigh enough here. Back on Earth I could just barely lift myself this way. Here ... why do I seem to weigh too much?

  “Nearly—”

  I get my other, weakened, arm onto the hatch. My fingers don’t want to close properly, so I shove my wrist over the gap between hatch and windscreen. My right arm contracts, levering me upright as I struggle to get my damaged left arm braced against the rocky ground—

  “One day I’m going to—”

  “There!” Daks bleats encouragement at me.

  “Tell you how much I—”

  Flop. For a moment everything grays out, then I realize I’m sitting in the driver’s chair. My right arm is still locked on. I make my fingers let go, willing them, one by one, then reach down and tug my numb leg into position.

  “Quickly!” I feel a faint vibration through my buttocks. “They’ve figured it out!”

  “How much I.” Hate you, I think. “Love you,” I say aloud. I drop my good right hand onto the controller. “You tied down?”

  “Yeah, Babe. Babe? Make it move.”

  I squeeze the spider’s control nipple. Forget the cover story; we got the goods. “Home to Jeeves,” I slur. Then I go into preterminal shutdown mode, and nothing matters anymore.

  THE VENERABLE GRANITA Ford takes almost the entire voyage to make her play for me. Her seduction technique is polished, professional, painstaking, and chilly in its perfection. I am helpless before her slow approach; it feels as if she knows exactly where I am most vulnerable.

  (Or perhaps I deceive myself. Maybe she’s just spinning it out to relieve the boredom. In truth, ninety days in a metal bubble falling between worlds, with only scoundrels and their slaves for company, has left me fretful and frustrated. I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy. And among my kind, intimacy is a powerful and compelling drive. We need to be needed, and though we do not die for lack of sex, we become something less than ourselves.)

  By seventy days into the journey, all Granita has to do is crook her little finger at me and beckon to set me all a-shiver. Which is exactly what she wants, obviously. Trying to resist your designated purpose is hard, and the stronger your eusocial conditioning, the worse it gets. A road grader with no roads to roll will be unhappy, but that level of frustration pales into insignificance when compared to one of my kind who is forced into celibacy. So I remind myself that what counts is keeping one’s head and one’s autonomy the morning after, and resign myself to an indefinite period of jelly-kneed hunger.

  She doesn’t make it too obvious, at first. She’s got her entourage, her little world of courtiers to distract and pleasure her. But she pays too much attention to me for it to be accidental, asking me to teach her card games that she obviously knew centuries ago, and has since forgotten, discussing sixteenth-century Hungarian folk music with a familiarity that is itself suggestive. She even, coyly, asks my opinion about the proper runni
ng of an orgy—as if the Honorable Katherine Sorico might have anything useful to contribute other than a fetching coral-eared flush and a heaving bosom.

  One day, well into our deceleration phase—Pygmalion is tacking hard against the solar wind, and Marsport is close enough that I’ve carried out Dr. Murgatroyd’s activation process and installed my cargo in the incubator in my abdominal cavity—Granita raises an eyebrow. She has me well trained: I fold my game board and bounce across the room to her side, slotting neatly into her circle between faceless nonentities who make way for me by instinct. “Good morning, Kate!” Granita contrives to sound spontaneously delighted by my presence. “Do you have a minute to spare? I have some matters I should like your opinion on.”

  “Of course.” I smile back at her.

  “In my stateroom, if you please. In private, I’m afraid,” she adds for her courtiers. She floats from her chair, layers of carbon-fiber chiffon belling around her. “Follow me, Kate?”

  This is new. Curiosity, excitement, and a minor key of dread jumble my perceptions as I follow her back through the corridors that lead to the hotel deck.

  My little cabin’s relative poverty becomes obvious as I follow her through the air lock into the owner’s quarters. Granita’s room is nearly as large as the grand saloon. Thickly piled carpets on the walls and ceiling, with thin tapestry hangings to divide up the volume, lend it a plush sense of overfurnished intimacy. Her bed is a huge gauzy cobweb of a hammock that occupies half the end wall, strewn with cushions and throws that don’t quite disguise the wrist and ankle restraints. “Privacy, up,” she orders, as the door closes. “Pygmalion, leave me.”

  “I obey,” says the ship, in a quite unfamiliar tone of voice. Abruptly, we’re alone. I shiver. I have a sudden sense of how much emptiness lies on the far side of the wall behind that web-hammock.

  “Come, join me, my dear.” Granita pats the throw beside her. Subtle cues tweak my awareness; the systolic beat of my thoracic pumps accelerate. “I won’t bite.” Her smile is roguish. It’s an invitation I can’t refuse, don’t want to refuse, in fact. Her intentions are clear enough as she murmurs sweet nothings, and I permit myself to be fussed over with a sense of gathering relief. At last.