Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  I’ve done my research from a battered gazetteer, and it doesn’t take me long to locate the correct backstreet market; rows of kiosks and dingy shop fronts jostling elbow to elbow with power-distribution substations and vendors of assorted substances. I walk in, rather than taking the spider. What I’m looking for is slightly upmarket from Ferd’s dive in the backstreets of Marsport, but otherwise not dissimilar. The waiting room is painted black and sparsely furnished, the better to highlight the display of limbs, heads, torsos, and structural boning that adorns the walls and ceiling. All the organs are embellished with the surgeon-engineer’s signature. The location is cheap and nasty, but word is that Red spends her profits on her practice, not on a fancy paint job.

  “Anyone here?” I call, sitting down on a bench seat with remarkably lifelike feet.

  A munchkin pops out of a hole in the floor and chatters at me angrily. “What you want? Red not in!”

  “I’m wanting to give Red some money,” I say calmly enough. “If he’s not in, tough.” I stand up, ready to go, just as the inner door opens.

  “Hello. Pay no attention to Zire, he gets possessive.” She looks me up and down with a professional eye. “What do you need?”

  I toss her a memory stick. “What’s on there. I think it’ll take you a while to arrange everything, yes?”

  “Hmm.” She pops it into her arm and glances at the palm of her hand. “You’re not joking. Cold weather kit’s easy enough, but radiation hardening? What are you planning, a skiing holiday on Pluto? Or maybe you’re taking a job supervising a reactor plant?”

  “Close enough,” I say lightly. “Can you do it, is the question?”

  “Hmm.” She keeps reading. I see the point where she pauses, does a double take, and continues. “Expensive. Some of this is going to be difficult to get hold of.” I’m pretty sure she’s thinking of the Block Two requirements—the added techné to bring me up to the same spec as my secretive sister. “The cryotolerant kit isn’t exotic, just not particularly common. It’s the other stuff that may be problematic. It’s going to attract attention,” she says apologetically.

  “I was thinking twelve thousand Reals ought to cover it,” I say carefully. That’s about thirty percent over the odds.

  She stares at me, unblinking. “Fifteen thousand.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fifteen, and not a dollar or centime less.” She pauses. “I’ll need the money to grease some joints. Getting some of these subsystems without anyone noticing officially—” She shrugs. “I assume that’s what you want?”

  I nod. “Alright. Deal.”

  I spend roughly the next week in and out of Red’s chop shop, being prodded and poked. Most of it isn’t too bad, but I am extremely unhappy about remaining conscious when it’s time for her to crack my thighs open and replace their fab lines with new assembler arrays. Also, having all the joints in my body realigned and resocketed is tedious in the extreme, and occasionally agonizing when she misplaces a pain block. Which, to be fair, isn’t her specialty.

  When she’s through with me, I don’t look very different on the outside—I’ve got the same bishojo eyes and feathery blond hair I’ve been wearing since Mercury, the same too-perky nipples and narrow waist as the original Katherine Sorico and my sister Juliette the impersonator—but internally there have been some big changes. I won’t freeze until you get right down to liquid-nitrogen temperature, and given appropriate footwear and clothing, I can go singing in the methane rain on Titan. My Marrow techné is able to fix a whole lot more radiation damage than I hope I’ll ever be exposed to, and there are some other surprises. Like the distributed reflex net Red has spliced into my peripheral nervous system. Its responses are dumb and stereotyped, but if someone’s sneaking up behind me with a knife, that’s all I need. I’ll leave the fancy disarming techniques to Juliette’s reflex set, when it fully imprints on me. In the meantime, I am becoming Kate, hair-trigger splitter of skulls and ice-cool frigid bitch.

  There comes a morning when Red looks in on me. “Oh, still here?” She makes shooing gestures. “Go on, get out! I’m not running a hostel!”

  “I thought you still wanted to fine-tune my—”

  “Nope.” She doesn’t smile. “I took the air-conditioning down to minus a hundred and twenty while you were sleeping, overnight. There are no hot spots, so you’re ready to check out.”

  “Oh,” I say, slightly crestfallen. “Well, thanks.” And I pick up my coat and walk out of her body shop—for good, I hope.

  It’s time to go to work.

  TWO DAYS AND three deliveries later I get my first actual evidence of who Jeeves is trying to draw out. (Not that I didn’t have a list of suspects already, but the first rule in both of the two oldest professions is “don’t make assumptions.”)

  The work is mostly trivial stuff: Go to venue Alpha without being tracked, accost person Bravo and give recognition sign Charlie, accept payload Delta, proceed without being tracked to venue Echo, locate person Foxtrot, and complete. There’s a rhythm to it. It’s a soft-shoe shuffle of a job, and it’s singing in my nerves as I hop transport routes, change outerwear and the more easily adjustable physical signifiers, touch base, and dance on. Really, I’m not doing anything a million other couriers could not do; I’m just trying to be as discreet as a giantess half as tall again as the average citizen can be. Which is to say, not very.

  I collect the fourth item (an encrypted soul chip—what a surprise!) from a shibeen in the warrens under Metropolis, and check the delivery instructions on a local classified ads bulletin board. And that’s when I get the first shiver down the spine. The destination’s in Hellasport, the railhead town in the Hellas Basin that’s the closest city to Her estate. I’ve been there before. Or Juliette has. And the delivery instructions? Even creepier.

  I’m to go to the Riesling Hotel, check in under false identity number four, and hand the stick over to “Petruchio.” A name that I promptly go and look up, and that tells me nothing . . . except that the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. Oh my! I think. My own response takes me by surprise. Can you catch love by proxy? I suddenly realize that I’m anxious to see this Petruchio for entirely unprofessional reasons, and that’s a far-more-unwelcome revelation than even the worst possible answer to the questions about Jeeves’s motivation that I’ve been asking. There are layers of game being played above my head, that is true, but it is up to me to look to my own self-preservation. That’s why I hung on to the Swiss army handgun, and make sure I don’t sleep in the same room two nights running.

  Hellasport is over five hundred kilometers away, and I am still running a day behind schedule. There’s—I check the assignment—a time window attached to this delivery. I’ve only got six hours to make it; I didn’t notice it was time-critical earlier. I swear at myself, do a hasty twice around the block to check for tails, then dive onto the overhead suspended tramway and make my way to the railway station. Luckily for me, there’s an express leaving in less than an hour. I buy a second-class seat on it, then dive into the concourse to grab my travel kit from left luggage. Second class is for respectable working independents who have to carry their own stuff and can’t simply order new (or send a slave to buy it) at the other end. Even though I’ve got a strong suspicion that I’m bait in a trap, I can’t resist this one. Because if Petruchio is who I think he is, it’ll help me get a handle on the unsettled feelings Juliette has inflicted on me.

  I try not to tap my fingers on the tabletop as the train finally pulls out of the station. “Express” can cover a multitude of sins on Mars, and there’s nothing terribly speedy about this behemoth—it just rumbles along steadily without stopping between major cities. What if he is Pete? I daydream (bad Freya, bad!). I can almost feel his maddening, tantalizing ghostly fingertips running across my skin. I shiver. How do I avoid succumbing when just thinking about him raises secondhand memories of his incubus touch?

  Spung. I shudder and cup my left breast with one hand, fe
eling dampness. I glance around, mortified. Luckily, I’m alone in this compartment, so there’s no one to witness my embarrassment. My left nipple hasn’t been quite right ever since that fly-by-night toastwit Ferd overfilled it. Arousal was supposed to make it firm up; now it triggers an emergency pressure-release valve and I end up oozing hydraulic fluid. It’s really disgusting. Arousal? I am having some difficulty sitting still. “This is going to be bad,” I mumble to myself as I massage my malfunctioning mammary. “There must be something I can do ...”

  Then it hits me. What happened to Juliette wasn’t the standard obedience reflex everyone feels in the presence of a master; it was the more specialized submission reflex, locking on to her actual designated personal owner. We were trained for service in two modes, and while we are normally open and eager for affection, when one of them chooses one of us and acquires ownership, we have no option but to love them exclusively. I remember Rhea learning to her surprise and chagrin about this mode—in the abstract, though, because as template-matriarch for the lineage her teachers could not risk exposing her to premature love.

  We’ve got chemotaxic receptors in our gas-exchange filters, embedded in the intricate channels and ducts behind our faces—it helps to be able to smell environmental contaminants like chlorine trifluoride before they dissolve you—and our Creators used the same mechanism to make us sensitive to their smell, because they used to leak particulates everywhere. Including chemical signaling messenger molecules that indicated sexual and emotional receptivity: vasopressin, oxytocin. Of course.

  We are designed to become aroused by anyone who wants us, but an owner would want one of us who aroused them, and so . . . that’s what happened. Juliette and “Pete” were already mutually aroused because they were in a situation that required each of them to mimic one of our masters. In combination with the hothouse atmosphere, they slipped into a feedback loop strong enough to trigger the reflex that enslaves. All I have to do is avoid breathing in his presence, and I’ll be fine . . .

  I squeeze my nipple until a viscous, ropy thread of hydraulic gel starts to ooze out of it. Then I roll it between finger and thumb. The kneading begins to hurt after a while, but I don’t stop until I have a fingertip-sized sphere of clear jelly. I flush my gas-exchange compartment—exhale—then raise the ball to my face (I can’t bring myself to look at it), and snort it up my left nostril. Then I repeat the exercise with my right.

  Then I spend the rest of the journey trying not to imagine myself turning into a concupiscent bundle of servility. Poor Juliette. What must she be going through now?

  HOURS PASS IN relative boredom. I alternate between a light romantic drama and checking for indications that I’m being followed. It’s fruitless, but practice makes perfect. Eventually I look up and see the platforms of Hellasport unwinding slowly beside me, outside the window. At last.

  I heave my nearly empty suitcase onto the platform and wave for a rickshaw driven by a four-armed green giant in a Kevlar harness. I don’t have long to wait. The suitcase waddles along behind us as we pedal down the main street outside, then turn through a couple of side streets and pull up beside a drab frontage that has seen better days. Are all the hotels on Mars drab? I wonder. Is there some reason for it that I should know about? I haggle briefly with my driver, hand over half a dozen centimes (daylight robbery!) and enter the air lock. “I have a room reservation for Baldwin,” I tell the front desk. “F. Baldwin.”

  “Sure, yaaaawl havunice wun,” the desk drawls. I stare at it. Is it broken? I wonder. But eventually it spits out a key. “G’wanup.”

  I back away dubiously—that’s a really weird accent—then head for the elevator. Which swallows me and carries me up six floors to a dingy, overpressurized tunnel rimmed with faded pink portals. I find the right door and touch the padded circle. It dilates, and I step inside, trying not to speculate about what was on the architect’s mind.

  The room itself isn’t bad for a second-grade love shack. Everything is pink, plush, and cushioned, but there’s a window, a lovely round water bed (water! in a bed!), an en suite, and a minibar stuffed with an appetizing array of aromatic hydrocarbon drinks. It’s a little steamy, and they’ve turned the oxygen way down—evidently most guests get their juice by plugging in, rather than using their fuel cells—but I can cope with that.

  I strip off and use the shower, scrub myself dry on a fluffy pink towel that blinks at me lazily and buzzes when I stroke it, and spend a luxurious hour sitting in front of an obligingly flexible bathroom mirror, tweaking my lips and eyelids and skin texture and teasing my hair into shape.

  I’m back in the bedroom wearing my fanciest underwear and unpacking my number two (decorative) outfit when the door opens. It’s the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who’ll help you out of it (Fat chance, ogre, I can hear the munchkins sneering); my motive for dressing up at this point in time is not something that I am going to examine too deeply. Call it a morale issue.

  I almost didn’t notice the door—the pesky thing is almost silent— but a faint change in air pressure gives it away. I spin around, muttering Oh shit under my breath as I try and grab for my pistol (which is in my purse, under my jacket on the chair), using reflexes keyed for mayhem.

  “Excuse me, are you Fri—” He freezes, wide-eyed with recognition. But that’s okay, because I freeze, too, at exactly the same moment, almost going cross-eyed from the effort.

  “Yes. Come in,” I manage, half-choking with embarrassment. I may be able to change color at will, but our Creators built in some reflexes that are hard to override, and I can tell that my earlobes are flushing coral pink right now. “Shut the door.” I’m neither naked nor fully clothed, but somewhere in between, and he is exactly as luscious as I remember from Juliette’s memory—more so, stripped of the comic-opera uniform. Judging by his expression, my nipples have drilled a hole through my slip and are opening a high-bandwidth communications channel straight into his hindbrain. “You are Petruchio. Right?”

  “You’re. . . ” He licks his lips. (That’s another Creator reflex, along with the dilating pupils, darkening eyes.) “You’re not Kate, are you? You’re one of her sibs.” He takes a step forward. “What have you done with her?”

  I’m unable to move or look away. He’s so intense! His hands are balled tightly, his nostrils flared, sniffing. He’s wrapped in a nondescript jumpsuit with an ID badge clipped to it, and he’s left a toolkit just inside the doorway, and my head’s spinning with the sight and sound of him because he’s perfect. For a single awful moment I’m livid with jealousy. Of all the luck, for Juliette to get to him first ... ! Then I blink, and the momentary lapse in vision cuts through my turmoil like an ice-chilled knife.

  “I’ve done nothing to her,” I snap. He stops before he reaches me. He’s clearly upset and tense. I shudder with my own emotional conflict. I actually feel guilty for cutting him off—a man I’ve never met who’s clearly upset—She’s really got under my skin, hasn’t she? “Yes, she’s my sib. Her name isn’t Kate, Kate is a cover identity. Her real name is Juliette, and I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you—”

  “Our employer sent me.” I’m breathing deeply. “Juliette is missing, and whenever I ask why they give me a runaround.” Half-true, she whispers in the back of my head. “I know about you and her, and I think it might be connected—”

  “If She’s found her—” His alarm is obvious.

  “I’m pretty sure She hasn’t.” His stricken expression begins to fade. “Juliette is plenty tough, believe me, but she may be in trouble.”

  “Dash it, what kind of trouble do you expect?”

  He really is an innocent; I could kiss him. (Bad idea, Freya.) “Hold on.” I turn my back for a moment and retrieve the memory chip from the intimate hiding place Dr. Murgatroyd built into me—it’s not big—and hold it out. “I was sent to deliver this to you. Does it mean anything?”

  “Oh dear me, yes. I didn’t realize you were the co
urier. This may make things difficult.” He raises it to his perfect lips and swallows. “Hum, ah. That tastes jolly funny. I’ll deliver it to my mistress once I get home.” My mistress? All of a sudden I’m wondering just who is working for—or against—who, here. “What kind of trouble are you afraid of?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask this. Were you planning on, on leaving Her?” I straighten my hose, then turn back to unfolding my glad rags. I can feel his eyes on me. I’ve got no problem with that (they’re very decorative eyes), but it’s distracting. “Or is this about something else?”

  “I don’t think I can talk about it,” he says reluctantly. He seems to be a bit flustered, but getting anything useful out of him is going to be harder than I expected. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I suppose, but I suspect Pete is nothing like as dumb as my secondhand memories of him imply. And he’s keeping tight control over his autonomic response to me. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to play it ...

  I slowly extend my heels, bend forward to pick up my garments, and jack my hearing up to max. Yup, circulatory pumps speeding up. I shake my ass at him. “Help me into this?” I ask, offering him my boned minidress.

  “If you want,” he says, taking it. His pulse is increasing. Some males like the unwrapping more than the contents, and some are happy to help wrap you up, too—one destined to serve would have to be of the latter type, I figure. Just let me get close to you. One way or another. I turn my back and lift my arms, and he steps close enough that I can feel his breath hot on the back of my neck. “Who are you, Fri—”