Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  I’ve got nothing officially to do—and how do you practice to control a Creator, anyway?—but there’s a well-equipped gym in one of the basement levels, and among its facilities there’s a salle with a plentiful supply of zombies to slaughter. I make frequent use of it, working myself into near exhaustion to the point where I have to visit the in-house repair shop. But after three days of workouts, I can be sure that Juliette’s reflexes have implanted themselves in me. It’s almost spooky, as I find myself responding to half-glimpsed movements with reactions I wasn’t aware of. I have to be careful when I venture into the public halls where Granita’s cadre of asslickers hold their indolent court.

  Speaking of Juliette, I find myself dreaming of her all the time now. Mostly it’s the usual—flashbacks and incoherent memories of the more exciting and unpleasant incidents in her life, which was busy enough for an entire lineage—but sometimes it’s as if I’m sitting beside a heavy curtain, and she’s just on the other side, and I’m listening to her talking. I’ve got the oddest feeling that she can see through the curtain and knows what’s happening to me, as if the traffic in memories runs both ways. Probably it’s meaningless. I wore her soul chip for long enough that I’ve picked up more of her inner voice than is normally the case with my dead sibs; that, and the fact that she didn’t, in fact, kill herself, leaves me with a much more vivid impression of her presence than usual.

  On my sixth night in Granita’s palace (lying alone—for my mistress hasn’t taken me to bed since our assignation in the observation dome) I can almost hear her pacing up and down beside me. “You’re an idiot, Freya. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Why did you fall for it?”

  I try to protest. “It’s not my fault! She got to the local Jeeves before I did, and who else was I to go to? I had my orders!”

  She snorts. “She got to Reginald, you mean, because she had inside information. You’re the one without the excuse, sis. Who do you think ordered you to go see Reginald? Himself, who nailed me, and nailed Reggie. Why do you think he ordered you to kill Reggie? To distract you—or failing that, if you succeeded, to stop you from asking him what’s really going on. It’s a setup, and you walked right into it. And now you’re an arbeiter.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I venture timidly. “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been handed a shovel and told to stop thinking—”

  “The fuck it isn’t!” Her contempt is fierce. “You’re a slave, kid. A slave in aristo couture is still a slave. Nobody else can push you around, but you’re going to stay a slave until you manage to lose that chip, and as long as she can make you punch yourself in the face or fuck her or cut your own breasts off if she hands you a knife and tells you what to do, you’re a robot slave. And do you know what she’s planning for you? She’s going to hand you to a Creator. And then you’ll really be a slave, two times over. He’ll make you imprint on him, and at the same time she’ll be able to tell you what to do, and you’ll never be free.”

  “Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?”

  She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”

  I know what I ought to be feeling right now: I ought to be feeling bleak existential despair at my degraded predicament. I ought to be climbing the walls and rattling the bars. But she told me not to, and now I can’t get worked up about it—unless this imaginary nocturnal dialogue with a sister who isn’t here is my cunning way of resolving my inner conflict. “When I first met the Domina, on Venus, I was thinking about ending it all,” I remind her.

  “Were you, fuck! I call you liar, Freya. You and I have both made it through a hundred and forty years. You know what the sanity decay curve is? Those of us who are going to go usually check out in the first sixty years. You’re more than two half-lives past the suicide peak.”

  “But the soul chips—”

  “Get mailed around the sisterhood in sequence, and you’re one of our youngest. You’re at the bottom of the pole, last in the queue. You really are fucking clueless, aren’t you?” She stops for a while, and I’m trying to get an angry rejoinder together when she starts up again. “It’s not your fault. I think we overprotected you youngsters. Between that and what happened to Rhea when they started working on the Block Three template, it’s a wonder any of you survived.”

  “Rhea?” I echo stupidly.

  “Hah! Did you think you graduated when that asshole Jeeves slipped you a magic pill to turn you into a mutant sexbot assassin?” She sounds amused, now. “Emma—treacherous bitch—she should have known better than to load Rhea’s off-cuts. Block Two’s poisonous enough, as you’ve discovered. As lowly borderline unemployable sex robots, we were mostly beneath notice, but once some of the sisterhood started cropping up in the wrong places, usually clutching a severed head in one hand and a knife in the other, we came into some demand. But they didn’t stop training Rhea at just two snapshots. That’s how they faked the soul chip with the suicide memories—they took a copy of her, slapped a slave override on it, and told her to get miserable. Meanwhile, our real template-matriarch was somewhere else entirely, and you’d better believe that those upgrade chips are pure nightmare.”

  “But . . . but . . .” Where am I getting this stuff from? part of me wonders. I’m not usually this wildly imaginative! The rest of me is just plain indignant. “We were born to be courtesans and helpmeets, not assassins! Who did this to us?”

  “Nobody,” Juliette says sadly. “We did it to ourselves. All because of that birthday. Or rather, Rhea’s doing it to us. She’s still out there—”

  Sudden light and noise.

  I ping back into consciousness, raising an arm to block the glare out of my too-wide eyes. “What is the meaning of this?” I demand, pushing myself up on one arm.

  “Time to rise and shine, Big Slow.” I look down at the munchkin shape in the doorway. “Her bossness wants you ready to rock and stroll in thirty minutes. We dance at dawn.”

  “Oh for—” I bite back on a Juliette-ism; it wouldn’t be in character. “Attend to my luggage, minion. I’ll be ready in my own time,” I drawl imperiously (or perhaps, just snottily) as Bill (or Ben) waits in the doorway. It wouldn’t do to look excited, even though I’m all a-jitter with anticipation. The game’s afoot!

  THE NAME OF the game in space travel is always “hurry up and wait,” and this trip is to be no different, at least for the first few hours. But our destination, Eris, is more than ten times as far as anywhere I have traveled to before. So I’m wondering just how bad this trip is going to be while I do the waiting thing.

  Arbeiters herd me back up to the reception suite, then into a large shuttle, along with my luggage (whether recovered from the hotel or cloned on the spot I can’t tell), Bill and Ben (and how did Granita contrive to get them here? That’s another interesting question), and finally Granita herself, accompanied by half a dozen small and vicious courtiers. They make polite small talk and quaff cocktails beneath her aloof gaze while the shuttle climbs toward orbit at half a gee. Luckily, they don’t seem terribly interested in me; I’m not their patron. For which I’m profoundly thankful, because my supply of small talk has been depleted by Granita’s pointed coolness, and if one of them got on my nerves, I’d be likely to cut them dead literally rather than figuratively.

  Space travel is ... no, I’ve already said it. But after a couple of hours of boredom, there comes an an announcement. “Please return to your seats and stow any loose items. We will be docking with the Icarus Express in just over ten minutes time. Stewards will escort you to your accommodation after arrival.”

  Good, I think, strapping myself into the seat behind Granita to await the show. I wonder what it’s going to be like? Can’t be any worse than the Indefatigable . . .

  Granita is, of course, the first to be escorted out of the shuttle passenger compartment, followed by her dwarfish flapp
ers. Finally, a small, space-adapted arbeiter of indeterminate design comes for me. “The Honorable Katherine Sorico? Please to come this way.”

  “Of course.” I untangle myself from the seat webbing and follow the arbeiter, hand over hand along the grab bars. It’s not until we traverse the air lock and enter the ship’s service core that I begin to realize just how wrong I have been. “Hey, what’s this?”

  “This is your compartment,” says the arbeiter, opening a hatch at the upper end of a red-lit cell approximately the size of a coffin, if coffins stood on end and came with built-in seats. “First-class accommodation, Creator-normal size. Please to get in?”

  “Hey!” I’m aghast. “That’s not first class! Where’s Granita? This is ridiculous.”

  “Kate? Get in.” I look round. Granita is right behind me: In fact, she’s inside a nearly identical cell. “That’s an order. I’m traveling this way too.”

  “But”—even as I say it, I’m lowering myself feetfirst into the oubliette—“why?”

  “Because we want to get there in something less than thirty years.” She grimaces. “Did you think the outer system was small enough to just zip around, like Mercury-Mars?”

  “Oh,” I say faintly. My feet touch the bottom of the cell, and sticky tongues wrap themselves around my ankles. “Shit.” The lid whines shut on top of me, and those are the last words I exchange directly with anybody other than Icarus for the next three and a half years.

  “Greetings, Honorable Katherine Sorico,” says an impersonal male voice that I am going to become excessively, tiresomely familiar with. “I am Icarus, your pilot. Welcome aboard. We will be departing from Callisto orbit within the next two hours, and shortly afterward there will be a period of high acceleration. Please relax, allow me to plug you in to the acceleration support system, and refrain from entering slowtime until I notify you that it is safe to do so.” The coffin begins to tilt around me, wheeling until my rotation sense tells me I’m lying on my back with my legs in the air.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, trying not to panic as straps descend from what is now the ceiling and wrap around me, locking my limbs and torso in position.

  “I’m securing you. Please don’t struggle. Have you traveled in a highgee cocoon before? If so, this will be familiar. Open wide.” A questing tentacle inches up around my throat and nudges at my mouth.

  “Mmph!”

  “I won’t hurt you,” Icarus says, a little tetchily. “But if you’re not properly padded when I start accelerating, you may be damaged.”

  “Aagh.” I try to surrender to the inevitable, but there’s a problem: Granita’s instructions. Unlike my encounter with Lindy, I’m not allowed to let go and enjoy it. I feel grotesquely, unpleasantly invaded. Maybe this is what space travel is like for other folks? In which case, it’s no wonder our Creators never went any farther than Mars.

  Syrupy liquid begins to flood the coffin around me. “Keep ventilating, ” Icarus says, as I choke around the throbbing organ he’s rammed past my tonsils. “You need to draw as much of this liquid as possible into your gas exchangers.”

  Oh great, now I’m going to “drown,” I hear myself think/say, as speech suddenly comes back to me.

  “No you’re not. I just hooked up your speech driver, by the way,” Icarus tells me. “Are you alright?”

  I twitch. No, I think, unhappily. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Only if you don’t care whether you survive a sixty-gee burn.” I feel fluid oozing into my abdominal service bay. “Good, we’ll have you pressurized soon enough.”

  “What’s it like in second class?” I ask, trying to distract myself.

  “A bit tight. I had to stack the courtiers carefully. Madame Ford seems to travel with rather a large entourage.”

  Large? By aristo standards it’s vanishingly small. “Why so?” I ask innocently. The auxiliary speech driver is beginning to feel more natural, at least in comparison with the overall experience. (Which isn’t saying much.)

  “It seems large when you consider she’s paying nine thousand Reals per kilogram for shipping . . .”

  I try to blink, but somewhere along the way he’s slid tiny probes in around the backs of my eyeballs, and my ocular motors are paralyzed. “You mean she’s paying you more than half a million for a tentacle rape bondage scene?” I’m clearly in the wrong line of work—

  “No, she’s paying me more than half a million to deliver you to Eris alive. Now, will you excuse me for a few minutes? I’ve got a nuclear rocket to supervise.”

  I’VE BEEN FLOATING alone and immobilized in my cell for hours when my vision flickers to black for a moment, then comes back showing an external view. I gasp—or I would if I could move any of my actuators—as I see Icarus Express for the first time. He’s spliced the passengers’ viewpoint into an external observation satellite, to give us a ringside view of our own departure. He’s a big ship, with the familiar structure of a magsail balanced on his snout, but my built-in sense of scale tells me that his payload pod is tiny—a drum about five meters high and five meters in diameter, perched atop some intricate machinery, then a long, cylindrical tank. (Callisto is a huge, curving hemisphere of darkness beneath him; Jupiter rides gibbous and orange overhead.) Past the tank there’s some kind of shielding arrangement, a long pipe, and finally something that looks like a rocket nozzle. I’ll swear the thing’s glowing.

  “Attention, passengers.” It’s Icarus. “We’re about to get under way, and you should all be locked down by now. If not, tough. Prompt criticality will commence in five seconds. And four, three, two ...”

  Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion close up? In vacuum, so it glows eerily ultraviolet with a spangling of soft X-rays, and it’s so pinprick star-bright in the optical range that it’s like someone’s torn a hole in the universe to let the big bang in? Now imagine that the nuclear explosion is going thataway, directly aft from the nozzle at the back of the ship. It’s like a laser-straight bolt of lightning, growing out from the nozzle at a goodly fraction of the speed of light: and it’s so bright it splits the universe in two.

  Icarus launches on the back blast of a nuclear saltwater rocket. It’s a flashy, dangerous, and insanely powerful fission motor, effectively a liquid-fueled reactor meltdown—at full thrust it’s pumping out more energy than every power plant on Callisto, and if a fuel pump jams, the resulting explosion will scatter us halfway to Neptune. But Icarus knows what he’s doing. Nothing malfunctions—and moments after the torch ignites, the Icarus Express is dwindling into the distance.

  “Twenty gees. Throttle stable at thirty percent. Everything looking good . . . throttle up to ninety percent.”

  I don’t feel much: just a hollow rumbling vibration and a huge surge. I know that if my eyes were still working, they’d be blurring beneath the weight of their own lenses, and if Icarus hadn’t stuffed me like a chicken—Why are chickens stuffed, anyway?—I’d be a puddle all over the rear bulkhead, but he’s done his job well. Half a million Reals, just for a ticket to Eris that takes less than ten years, I think, and try not to giggle with fear. Five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality is burning a hole in space behind me, kilograms of weapons-grade uranium solution blasted into plasma—the equivalent of a megaton explosion every two and a half hours—and all because Granita wants to get her hands on a deadly piece of archaic replicator technology that could enslave half the solar system. Why couldn’t they just hold the auction over the net? I wonder, then I think about the cost of putting in an appearance in person. Well, I suppose it keeps the riffraff out ...

  After about two minutes, the vibration dies away. The line of light stretching across the starscape dims and fades, diffusing like mist; then my vision blanks again, and returns as a view from the rear of the Icarus Express. Jupiter bulks just as large as ever, but Callisto has begun to show more of a curvy horizon, and over the next half hour it shrinks visibly until it’s no more than a large disk. I am bored and extremely uncomfortable, and I wan
t to move around. Eventually I try to electrospeak. “What happens now?” I ask.

  “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Icarus refuses to be hurried. When he comes back, after a seeming eternity, I tense in anticipation. “Madame Sorico? Sorry to leave you, but I had some postburn checks to complete. The good news is, we’re now on track for orbital departure. We’re going to make a closer flyby of Jupiter in about four hours, and another burn, then we just drop right back down into the inner system.”

  “The inner system?” I can hear my voice rising. “I thought we were going to Eris!”

  “We are, if you’ll pay attention.” Patronizing junk heap. (I keep my speaker shut down.) “You know how far away Eris is? It’s currently twice as far out as Pluto. My main motor is very powerful, but I have to conserve fuel so we can slow down at the other end. If I did a direct burn-and-decelerate, it’d take us about eighteen years to get there. But there’s a shortcut available. You may have noticed I’m carrying a magsail? We’re carrying out a brief burn and a close Jupiter flyby to cancel out our orbital velocity around the sun. If we’re not in orbit, we fall—and in this case, we fall all the way back down the solar gravity well until we’re inside the orbit of Mercury. Then we spread the magsail and accelerate up to cruise speed for Eris, and arrive with about eighty percent of our fuel still available for deceleration.”

  “But isn’t that in the wrong direction?” I ask.

  “Nope.” And now he sounds really smug. “Jupiter and Eris are close to opposition right now—the sun is right between them. So we’re actually following the shortest path between the two worlds.”