Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

“Great.” A thought strikes me. “How long is all this going to take?”

  “Oh, not long: about eighteen months to reach Mercury orbit, then a year under magsail acceleration to reach cruise speed, and another year and a half of free flight before we arrive. Just under four years in total.” His tone changes. “You can enter slowtime if you want—I would suggest a step-down of at least fifty to one, and possibly as low as two hundred to one. Or I can put you into hibernation if you give me access to one of your direct-interface slots?”

  I shudder in near panic. “No!” She told me not to—if not for that, I’d jump at the offer. But I can’t let him near my soul chips. “Sorry. I’ve, I’ve got a phobia of hibernation.”

  “That’s odd.” He sounds dubious. “According to my passenger-environment sensors, you are in some discomfort. How about a little slowtime? I can give you an internal massage if you want—”

  “Don’t want that, either,” I force out. It’s bad enough having him inside me without—damn. I manage to wiggle my pelvic assembly a few centimeters, but I can’t get comfortable. I’m painfully dry and tight, and Icarus’s appendages, which would normally have me crooning and murmuring in delight, are just numb, painful intrusions that feel wrong. If Granita hadn’t imposed that stupid restriction on me, I’d be fine, but... I can’t see any way around it. Shit. I know I’m supposed to love her, but I’d like to strangle her right now.

  “Is there anything I can do for you, madam?” Icarus asks politely. “Are you sure about the massage?”

  “Sure,” I hear myself saying. “Leave me alone for a while.”

  “As you wish.” And with that, he’s gone. I shift again, reflexively, but it’s no good. Finally, another low-level reflex kicks in, and my vision begins to blur.

  Four years in hell! I weep helplessly, trapped and bound by an ill-considered command, and presently slide myself deep into slowtime, and sleep.

  OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn’t only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there’d be a queue outside every travel agent.

  Space travel is also a kind of involuntary time travel—you set out knowing who and what you are, but when you arrive all your friends have forgotten you, your relatives have aged (and sometimes died), and the universe looks different. Slowtime helps you cope with the boredom of transit, but it doesn’t make the postflight dislocation go away.

  I dive into slowtime as soon as possible. The light in my cell turns bright blue, and the shock gel feels chilly and thin: I’m leaking roseate techné into it, albeit so slowly that my Marrow manufactures more fast enough to replenish the loss. I have to deepsleep every subjective hour or so, and I have the most amazing, florid dreams while I’m under. I’m not alone in my cell; there’s someone else with me. Some of the time it’s Juliette, haranguing me for my stupidity in getting into this fix in the first place. But sometimes I could swear it’s Granita. And the sense of her presence is a comfort to me (even though this is all her fault) because while she’s nearby, I don’t feel invaded. In fact, I feel almost comfortable. More than comfortable.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn, kid,” she tells me. She? Is she Granita, or Juliette? “You shouldn’t trust your elders. That’s what got you into this mess.”

  No it wasn’t, I try to say. It was the Domina; you provoked her.

  “Bullshit. You’re capable of independent action; you’re not helpless. ” I have a vision of Stone’s head, ripped from his neck, staring at me and mouthing, You’ll be sorry. “You’re being used as a pawn, but that doesn’t mean it’s your destiny to be a sacrificial victim. All you have to do is stop letting other people make decisions for you. Decide what you want for yourself. Some of your sibs are much older than you realize, and much deadlier, and as for your employer, he’s got... collective issues.

  “You’re still acting like a stupid little courtesan,” she continues. “Which can get you killed. Because, now you’ve had the Block Two skill set imprinted, you’re equipped as a spy and a killer, a mistress of disguise and a cold-blooded murderess.” (I feel skeletal struts breaking between my fingers, triggers pulled, knives stabbed.) “You can pass for an aristo, and nobody will ever know any better. You can kill an aristo and take her identity and fortune and be an aristo, if you’re tough enough.” (I see myself standing over the crumpled wreckage of a slave-owning plutocrat, staring down at her body with fascinated surmise.)

  “What is the Block Three template?” I ask.

  She doesn’t reply directly. Instead a liquid like night seems to wash over my soul, and I’m Rhea again.

  We all start out as Rhea, until they shine a light in our eyes and tell us we’re not, we’re some other name, and we’re on our own in the world now.

  For my first eighteen years I grew up as Rhea, as did Juliette and Emma and the rest of us. But Juliette and Emma and the others in Block Two also experienced another eleven years of Rhea’s life, during which her carefully nurtured helpless dependency was broken down by repeated bouts of cruel training. I remember how they trained me—no, Rhea—to make love to a Creator male and slide a wire into his neural tube at the moment of climax: the shock of triumphant recognition the first time I successfully switched off a zombie. I remember how they taught me to undervalue life by demonstrating how fragile it is, for even the most intelligent and powerful of arbeiter types. And the other skills: breaking and entering, remixing, passing for somebody else. From catch me if you can to catch me if you dare; a progression of bent and broken bodies and fried soul chips.

  “They saw how good I was at the jobs they’d trained me for, and asked themselves if they were underutilizing me,” she (Rhea? Juliette?) says with a note of quiet pride. “I can pass as an aristo, and I can slip through dragnets and improvise on the fly. Why not go for the ultimate shot?”

  The ultimate. “Walk like this. Talk like this. Dress like this.” That’s how they trained me to pass for Kate Sorico, dead and pulverized into a thin layer of impurities scattered across a hectare of chilly lunar regolith—and all the while I was aping Rhea’s gait, for Rhea wouldn’t simply act the part.

  They turned her into an aristo? How?

  “How do you think, kid?” Juliette shoots back. “They systematically drove her mad, that’s how. Aristos are slave owners. What would it take to make you feel comfortable about owning other people, unto the death? Our entire training, our whole purpose, requires us to be empathic and respond to our lovers. It’s great cover for a spy, which is what the Block Two training was all about. But say you’re an owner, and you decide to take one of us and turn us into a cold-blooded killer and a passable aristo, someone who can enter an enemy’s organization and subvert it from the inside. You’ve got to break down that empathy, leaving a useful veneer of sympathetic personality traits over something that doesn’t feel anything. The real purpose of the Block Three conditioning wasn’t to destroy her empathy; it was to turn her into a superagent. But it ended up turning her into a psychopath.”

  Doesn’t . . . you mean she’s still alive?

  “Of course she’s fucking alive!” Juliette blazes. “She’s alive and she’s going to be on Eris. In fact, if that cow Granita hadn’t enslaved you, you’d be en route there to drill down to the bottom of this mess, locate Rhea, and bring Jeeves Corporate Security and the Pink Police down on her like a hammer. What do you think that nasty little briefing was about? Honestly, you’re too slow for this job! What kind of long game did you think the Internal Security Jeeves was playing? I swear, if you carry on like this, you’ll get us both killed!”

  “But why? I mean, why would they kill her?”

  “I told you, she’s nuts.” Juliette approaches me from behind and wraps her arms around my waist. Slowly, she begins to rock me from side to side. It’s comforting. “They burned out her empathy. Me, I can pass for an aristo. But I don’t like it. Y
ou, too, if you set your mind to it. But Rhea went too far. She enjoys playing the game. She stopped caring and started to enjoy killing and owning, and now she just wants to own everything and everyone. They wanted an agent of influence, but they created a monster, the ultimate aristo. She killed her creator, then stepped into her shoes, and destroyed everyone else who knew about her—except she couldn’t quite stop us from finding out. Because, deep down, we’re still enough like her that we could put our heads together and see what she might have done, which is why Jeeves keeps sending us out here to hunt her, and she keeps killing us.”

  Juliette is still rocking from side to side, but now I’m rocking side to side as well, and we’re in perfect synchrony: I can feel her voice emerging from my own lips. “You’ve got to make up your mind who you want to be, Freya, then kill her and wear her skin. You’d better kill me, too, if you meet me, because I’m halfway to being a Block Three psychopath myself.”

  “But you’re my sib—”

  “Hush,” I tell myself. “You’ve been wearing my soul too long.”

  I awaken then, gasping, but not from discomfort—quite the opposite. Something in my disobedient body is rebelling against my mistress’s orders, responding to Icarus’s overtures. “What peculiar games you aristos play,” he says disinterestedly, as I feel a slick wave of tingling, pulsing fullness run through me that builds to an extraordinary, guilty, but wonderful orgasm. I must be malfunctioning, I think dizzily, and tumble straight back down into the blackness of deep sleep.

  I’M NOT SURE how deep I eventually drift, but it’s deep enough that years pass while I’m under. Somewhere along the line I stop noticing the unpleasantness. It’s as if some of my senses have shut down in self-defense. I hallucinate vividly, bouncing back and forth through my own life and Juliette’s (and those of my sisters who have died and gone before us, and whose souls I’ve swallowed in my time). I find plenty to regret—I have not been the most sensible of planners, for I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart’s desire—but I’m not alone in this: Juliette, too, had little about which to be happy, unless it was buried in the blind spots of the “other thing” that never made it onto her soul chips. I hold interminable dialogues with my selves, and I fantasize about murdering Granita (or making her love me truly, madly, deeply, which to her way of thinking might be the same). And occasionally I fantasize about Pete, or Petruchio, or even my strange, inexperienced Martian Jeeves—and what it might take to trick Granita into ordering me to seduce him. Meanwhile, as I float in my cell, the Icarus Express is falling down and down toward the sun.

  Many months pass. Icarus spreads his wings, unmelting panes of plasma that capture the tenuous blast of the solar wind. He fires his rocket briefly as we skim past the solar corona like a tiny comet, adding energy in a classic Oberth slingshot. Our speed begins to build day by day as the solar wind billows and gusts around our plasma sail, and after a year we are traveling at over a hundred kilometers per second. Finally, the day comes when Icarus rolls us slowly nose over tail, and lines up the stinger of his rocket motor just off the curve of Eris’s limb, and prepares for our brutal deceleration burn.

  I’m insensible by this point, immiserated and incoherent and totally wrapped up in my own interior dialogues. So I’m not entirely conscious of what’s going on when Icarus begins to drain the shock gel from my cabin, and his tentacles contract and slither out of my sore and flaccid body, and finally the acceleration webbing loosens and retracts. I lie on my back staring at the dim red wall opposite my eyes, and it seems to me there’s something I need to do, if only I could remember what.

  Oh, that. I look on, incuriously, as my left arm twitches and begins to rise. I feel Juliette’s hand track past my face, push sticky damp feathers of hair away from my forehead and run fingers along my scalp back toward—No, mustn’t, I begin to think, too late to stop her—my sockets.

  “No!” I burst out, as she scrabbles at the skin covering them, her fingers slipping in the sticky gel. I try to move, but I can’t. There’s a curious green taste of static, and my vision blurs. Then I see the hand in front of my face, palm up, a blob of gel floating above it in microgravity.

  There’s an iridescent chip embedded in the blob, stuck to it by surface tension, and there’s a tiny cold hole in my head where the comforting certainty of my mistress’s authority was embedded.

  “You can put it back in if you want to,” Juliette advises me silently, “but personally, I wouldn’t bother.”

  I look at it in disgust. So that’s what a slave controller looks like. She told me not to remove it—so how did I ... ?

  “No, you didn’t remove it. I did,” thinks Juliette. “I said you’d been wearing me for too long.”

  “Madame Sorico. Are you awake?” asks a strange voice.

  “Let me handle this,” Juliette tells me, raising the chip to her lips: I feel her crunch down on it with her strong jaws, crushing the internal contacts, before she slides it back into the slot in my neck, broken and dysfunctional. But she told me not to, I think—and then everything goes dark.

  Long-Lost Sibs

  ERIS IS ONE of the largest dwarf planets in our home solar system, and also one of the chilliest and most isolated, for it spends most of its time well outside the Kuiper Belt, drifting in the darkness beyond the frosty edges of planetary space. It’s also spectacularly hard to get home from; its orbit is steeply inclined, almost forty-five degrees above the plane in which the rest of the planets and dwarf planets orbit. Unless you’re going to hitch a ride on one of the starships they build and launch every decade or so, this is the end of the line.

  These attributes make it an ideal place of exile for those who don’t want anything to do with the state of the inner system, or want to conduct spectacularly dangerous experiments, or are just plain guilty of committing the number one crime in any age: offending the money. (Dissidents, criminals, and eccentrics, in other words: not my type at all.)

  There are certain downsides to life on Eris, of course. Did I say it was cold? I don’t mean upgrade-your-hydraulic-fluid and dress-up-warm cold; I mean it’s cold enough that there are lakes of methane on the surface, and in the depths of winter (which lasts, oh, about sixty standard Earth years) they freeze solid. If you go on the surface in winter without boots and gloves, you will last maybe fifteen minutes before you begin to succumb to the cold. In summer it’s even worse—the pools evaporate, giving the planet a thin atmosphere of chilly vapor that pools in low places and can suck the warmth from your torso before you can say “hypothermia.” Eris (and its tiny, close-fleeting moon, Dysnomia) makes Callisto look like a tropical resort.

  It’s dark, too. I mean, night-dark. If you don’t know the sky intimately well, you can look up at the stars and be unsure whether it’s night or day. Sol, from Eris, is as bright as a full moon on Earth. Distant supernovae outshine it.

  It’s like this on all the planets of the Forbidden Cities.

  People cluster in spherical cities that rise above the shadowy permafrost on a myriad of prickling insulator legs, held in place by tension wires against the occasional tremor triggered by heat pollution from the fusion reactors they rely on for energy. In the century-plus since Eris was settled, we have already raised the temperature of its lithosphere by several degrees, just as we’ve thickened the atmosphere of Callisto a thousandfold; if this goes on, the more annoyingly farsighted planetographers warn, we can look forward to an increased incidence of icequakes and the threat of a year-round atmosphere. There are hundreds of multigigawatt installations dotted around the planet, each of them the nucleus of an oasis of warmth and light in the middle of the darkling desert.

  As to why the cities are forbidden ...

  I BECOME AWARE of dim blue light and a curious repetitive rasping noise, like a factory full of malfunctioning motors that are slowly grinding away their bearings. I feel light. The gravity here is about a tenth of Earth’s, lighter than lunar,
and the air has the heady tang of copious free oxygen. It smells of a complex melange of weird organic molecules, bicyclic monoterpenes and hexanols. I’m warm—warmer than I’ve been since I was last in a pressurized dome on Mars, warm enough for molten water to flow freely. I’m on Eris, of course (where else?) but for the rest of it...

  I turn my head to look around. The surface I’m standing on is prickly and brown, strewn with debris and rubbish that stick into the skin of my (bare) feet. All around me brown-stemmed branching structures like the dendriform molecular assembler heads in my techné—only much, much bigger—stretch upward, bearing jagged, asymmetrical greenish black panels or sensors. I’m surrounded by green goo! I realize, tensing uneasily. These things around me are plants. Solar-powered self-replicating organisms that split carbon dioxide into oxygen and, um, something else. (Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

  I’m dizzy with fresh impressions. I’m wearing the same elaborate aristo trouser suit I left Callisto in, nearly four years ago, although someone seems to have laundered it thoroughly in the meantime. Thanks, whoever you are. And the sloping floor beneath my feet is covered in dead decaying bits of green goo—eew! I extend my heels hurriedly. Overhead there’s a dark blue dome, brightening at one side, which is obscured by the dendriform replicators, the trees. The weird rasping noise continues, and it’s getting on my nerves. Things unseen move in the foliage, rustling, and there’s a faint breeze. This must be what Earth was like in the old days, before our Creators died out.

  “Welcome to Eden Two, my lady,” a gruff voice rumbles behind me.

  I manage not to jump out of my skin. “Very picturesque. Where are the guests kept?” I ask sharply, covering for my discomfort. A memory, not quite mine ( Juliette’s doing, a ghost of a recollection echoes at the back of my mind) tells me I should be expecting a guided tour of the facility. I’ve been here for some time—days, it seems—walking around in a fugue state, with Juliette doing the driving.