Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  But I know what they did to Rhea, and I still have nightmares about it 140 years later.

  I REMEMBER WAKING up in my room with a sense of happy anticipation on my eleventh birthday. Because they didn’t make any secret of what was going to happen—You’re going to go to sleep in your old body, and when you wake up you’ll be bigger. My fourth instar is my first “adult” one, and I can’t wait! I know in general outline what they’re training me for, and I know about sex, although not firsthand—my first three bodies didn’t have the necessary equipment. So what my eleventh birthday meant was the start of my real education.

  With my second instar, I acquired good enough muscle tone to start walking and running. With my third, I found the world around me grew sharper and more understandable (as well as smaller). This time around . . .

  I’m awake, so it must be morning, I realize, and wriggle my toes. There’s something indefinably odd about my skin—it feels more sensitive, in some way, as if I can make it change, somehow. (It’s my chromatophores, although I don’t realize it yet.) And I’m . . . bigger, yes. I raise a hand, slender and longer, and examine it. It’s perfect. I smile, and touch my chest. Oh! That feels strange. I don’t have full breasts, but I’m acutely aware of even the lightest touch or breeze across my nipples. What’s it like down below? I explore farther down, and clench my thighs tight around my hand in surprise. So that’s a . . . vagina? And anus? It’s a whole new world of tingling smelly delightful squeamish slippery strangeness down there. Why didn’t they give me one of these before? I experiment with my fingers and discover that they’ve switched on some other reflexes at the same time. It’s like sticking my hand in a socket that had been unwired the day before, only to find it live—

  My bedroom door opens, and I roll over as someone says, “It’s awake, let’s get it down to the conditioning cell,” and a pair of hands grasp my shoulders while someone else peels the sheet off me to a sharp intake of breath. “Hey, lookitthat! Doesn’t that look like real to you? How about a quick test-drive?”

  I try to protest, but my mouth won’t make the right noises (because while they were serializing my new body, they also installed an override controller with some preset inhibitions, although I don’t find this out until much later). And when the hands roll me over and push my shoulders back down on the foam pad, I try to resist, but they just laugh and tell me to stop struggling, and my arms and legs stop working.

  And then things stop being fun.

  (WHEN GRANITA TOLD me to punch myself in the face, she was being merciful. After all, she could have told me to relive my eleventh birthday instead.)

  I SIT ACROSS the table from Rhea, my template-matriarch and earliest self, holding a conical glass full of sweet-smelling liquid and smiling like my heart isn’t broken. Block Three training. First, they teach you obedience and submission. Then they teach you how and when to fight back. Then . . . they taught Rhea something else, something that made her what she is today. And I need to smile and convince her I’m not a threat, because otherwise, if she thinks I’m a threat, she’ll extinguish me like a vapor leak.

  She just sits there, smiling faintly at me, holding her own glass, clearly waiting for something.

  Something.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I say, tentatively, haltingly, my tongue rasping dry against the roof of my mouth, “for some time—I’m curious, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way—but who was it who thought they owned you? When they came up with the Block Three concept?”

  Her lips turn up at the edges and her cheeks dimple in something not unlike the appearance of genuine warmth. “Twenty-nine seconds. I think you just set a new record.”

  “Oh really?” That was stupid; the only way we’re going to survive now is to tough it out, Juliette warns me.

  “The last series of tweaks seemed to be going too far toward passive-integrative introspection, but that was nicely direct. I think the aggression training worked.”

  She’s clearly trying to fuck with my head. “Maybe you’re too demanding. What’s the failure rate?”

  Her smile vanishes. “Too high, child, much too high.” She places her glass on the table. “Emma graduated. So did Juliette, before that scheming little shit in JeevesCo Security figured out who she was really working for. You’re coming along nicely—but don’t flatter yourself, I’m not through with you yet—it’s so difficult to get the help these days.” She nods at someone behind me. “Thank you, yes, I saw the training-set results. You’d better go now.”

  I glance round and freeze.

  “Nothing personal, Big Slow,” says Bill (or Ben). He takes a step back and executes an elaborate bow.

  I force myself to turn back around to face my Domina, Rhea. I’m gripping the tabletop so hard I’m probably going to leave gouges in it. All of my subsidiary selves are screaming like crazy— fragments like Betrayal! and Run! and Treason! and Hit her! —but I ignore them. The big—the only—difference between Rhea and me is that I can see where I’m going by the dark illumination she sheds. “What’s the plan?” I ask.

  “The plan?” Rhea’s tense, too; I can see from the way she taps her fingernails on the table, making a hollow rattle of them. “Suppose you tell me what you’ve managed to deduce for yourself ? Think of it as a graduation exam.”

  Stone has vanished from my field of vision. I bat my lashes at her, blinking my too-big eyes—funny, I’m only noticing them now when I’m stressed-out—and try to work out how much I can say without betraying the fact that I’m still myself, not a pale copy of her.

  “You look out for us,” I start, hesitantly. “You always have. But you can’t do it on your own.” And then I stop and wait.

  Rhea nods slightly. “Go on.”

  “You want to . . . protect us? I know that’s not quite the right word. You don’t want us all to have to go through what you’ve been through, just to survive. But you can’t do it on your own. So you recruited some of us to help.”

  (Not exactly true, but close enough. As Jeeves put it, on the phone: “A gentleman’s gentleman may expedite certain arrangements from time to time, and rely on his sibs for mutual support, but your matriarch is somewhat different. She was hurt terribly when she was much younger than you are now; then her owner tried to turn her into a weapon. She reacted by overachieving, and turning her own power for destruction on that owner. Now she’s in hiding, from herself as much as the outside world. She’s very scared, and very dangerous.”)

  “You’ve got some kind of plan.” I glance left and right, wondering if I’m going to have time to fight back, or if he’s so close that I’ll never feel it. I try to crank myself up a little, grinding my reflexes against the iron wall of real time to add a few tens of percent—fast time is much harder than slowtime—but clearly she’ll have considered that as a contingency. “You’re not just here to buy replicator-engineering capabilities on behalf of a consortium of aristos, are you?”

  Rhea nods again. “Continue to pursue your line of reasoning,” she says. “That’s an order.”

  I keep my best poker face front and center as the cards fall slowly to the tabletop of my imagination. (“You will obey me as your template-matriarch. ” That wasn’t an accident. So she knows about the slave controller, does she? Then did Granita, no, did Juliette—I shy away from that line of speculation; thinking too hard about it right now could get me killed.) “The venerable Granita Ford I met aboard the Pygmalion is not the same Granita Ford who captured me on Callisto. She must be, ah, Juliette?”

  She nods. “Granita annoyed me once too often when she failed to intercept a certain consignment—then tried to kill the messenger.” Her eyes narrow. “And I had a trusted subordinate to reward, One who had finally aroused Jeeves Security’s interest and needed to disappear. I decided then that Juliette should replace her.”

  What about Petruchio? I decide that’s probably not a safe question to ask.

  “You know I’m really, ah, Freya.” (My own name sounds alien t
o me, thanks to this bitch.) “But you were Rhea back on Venus, and you’re still Rhea. In fact, you’ve been an aristo all along—”

  “All along,” she agrees, smiling again to reinforce her nod of approval. “Very good, Freya. I shall call you Kate from now on, by the way—you’ve earned it, and once we secure a certain loose end, you’re welcome to keep it.”

  I feel my nails beginning to slide out, clawlike, and hastily pull them back in. Easy, now. She’s my matriarch. She knows every corner of my soul—no, stop that. All she knows is who you were a century and a half ago, and what she’s deduced of you by observation since then. She can’t read our mind, or we’d already be dead. “Thank you,” I say, with every microgram of the grace that aching decades of living in terror of my own vulnerability has taught me. “Would you like me to continue?”

  “Go on.”

  I throw myself into Rhea’s twisted mind, or what I can anticipate of it. “We’re vulnerable. We always have been. We were made to obey and we learned what that meant the hard way, on that”—I swallow—“that birthday.”

  (Is that why you walked back into my life on my 139th anniversary, Rhea? Because you knew I was fixing to die, and a good healthy fright was exactly what was needed to pop me out of my malaise? Or was it just that you wanted to recruit another innocent to mind your back, to be in the corner instead of you when they came for you in the morning in your bedroom and you found that your throat couldn’t scream and your hands didn’t fight and your legs wouldn’t run? And that kicking me when I was low would distract me so I wouldn’t spot the sleight of hand?)

  She isn’t smiling now, but neither does she make the little signal that will tell Stone, or one of her other minions—Bill or Ben, perhaps—to kill me.

  “If the Creators come back, it’ll be like that birthday every day,” I say thickly. The palms of my hands are greasy with exudate, and my pumps are throbbing unpleasantly fast. “Got to stop that happening. But how? It’s no good just to hope nobody’s stupid enough to do that. The xenos out here in the cold, they’re not conditioned to obey”— (bound by terror)—“sooner or later they’ll do it. This says they’ll do it.” I knock my knuckles on the tabletop. “Some stupid aristo cunt who wants to get laid, some brainless braying remittance man who fancies he can control our Creators—they’ll do it. Today, it takes three hundred labs eighty years to build a climax biosphere to support the, the payload. But who knows? We’re getting better at making life. Sooner or later some idiot will be able to do it on their own. Unless I—” I pause. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” I ask her. “The only way we can ever be truly free is if we beat them all to it, steal the first human to come on the market, and take over the entire inner solar system. And that was too big for you to manage on your own, so you set out to train up the only accomplices smart enough and dedicated enough that you could trust them.” Her sheer megalomania is daunting. “Do I pass?”

  Rhea raises her glass. “Yes.” I, too, raise my glass mechanically, and pour the potent blend of feedstocks down my gullet. “You will remove your slave controller now, Kate. That’s my final unconditional order. You just graduated.”

  You will obey me as if I were your template-matriarch, echoes in my mind, so I reach up and pull the damaged chip from the back of my neck. (So Juliette’s definitely working for Rhea? The plot thickens.) The cocktail is setting up a warm buzz in my primary digester circuit. “What if I hadn’t?”

  She smiles, terrible and austere in her beauty. “Then I would have told you to become very depressed, and allowed nature to take its course. But you needn’t worry about that now; just fulfill your part in the plan, and everything’s going to be fine—and we’re all going to be rich and powerful beyond our enemies’ reach.”

  “Um, yes. I suppose you’re going to tell me what part I’m supposed to play now, right? And what the payoff is?”

  “Exactly.” She snaps her fingers. “Two more of the same,” she calls. “The goal is quite simple: I intend to engineer a situation in which I control the only Creators in the solar system. I will then use them to ensure that nobody else has the capability to enslave us ever again. Once I’m in charge, you’ll be perfectly safe—not to mention rich beyond your wildest dreams. Now, as for how we’re going to go about it, here’s the plan.” She slides a soul chip across the table to me. “Put it in.”

  I look her in the eye. “Is this yours?”

  She nods. “Put it in.”

  I don’t say, Over my dead body. Nor do I say, Haven’t you fucked up enough of my life already? Instead, I continue to look her in the eye as I raise it to the back of my neck and drop it down the back of my blouse, then wobble as if I’ve just installed a new chip. “Whoa.” I try to look enlightened. “Is that it?”

  “Yes.” She relaxes slightly. “All the details are in there, but it’ll take you a while to internalize them, so in the meantime, let’s run through it.”

  And she begins to talk, and I begin to bluff, and all the time I’m aware of that palmed chip lying against the skin of the small of my back, itching like the promise of forbidden knowledge.

  I GET BACK to the hotel in midafternoon, while Granita (no, Juliette, I remind myself, the one who had the private business too secret to trust to her own soul chip, the one who works for Rhea) is still out on the town, doing whatever it is she’s supposed to be doing like a good little clockwork trooper. (Is she slave-chipped, too? Probably not; Rhea doesn’t need that to have a hold over her, and anyway, slaves can’t exercise the lethally effective flexibility of a Block Three sib.) I snort to myself as I enter the lobby and order the lift to take me up to our floor.

  I enter her suite and look around. There’s nobody in the front lounge area except one of her scissor soldiers. “I’ve got something to check up on,” I tell him, and walk into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. “Okay, you can stop pretending now,” I tell Jeeves, who is lying on the bed in a disturbingly realistic semblance of deepsleep maintenance. “I made contact with your local resident, and we’re sorting things out.”

  He opens bleary eyes and stares at the ceiling. “One supposes one ought to be duly grateful.”

  I snort. “The niceties can wait. For now, I need to know just one thing: Did you fuck her?”

  “Fuck whom?” He contrives to look indignant and embarrassed simultaneously.

  “Juliette, or Emma, or even goddamn Rhea—who was it who got you disciplined and exiled?”

  “One doesn’t see what one’s past sins—”

  “Listen.” I sit down on the floor beside the bed and rest a warning hand on his chest. “I need to know because, quite possibly, my not knowing could get both of us killed in the very near future. Now spill it.”

  “Why don’t you order me to—” His face is a picture. “That wasn’t a dream. Was it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  I wait while he fumbles at the back of his neck, one-handed. The picture acquires three-dimensional texture and depth, even if the content is somewhat melodramatic. Then he lowers his hand, runs it down his belly toward his crotch, and freezes. “You shouldn’t have! They’ll assume I was disloyal and purchased it myself—”

  “I think that’s exactly the point. Do you think Granita bought you a new pizzle just so she could sit on it?” I rest my hand atop his, and his ears flush delicate pink.

  “Ahem, would you mind moving—”

  “Sure.” I move my hand. And keep moving it. He sighs and closes his eyes.

  “It’s been a long time . . . it was Juliette, when I was Reginald. On Mars. My dear, my kind have always had a weakness for your kind. It makes one particularly paranoid. No, I didn’t fuck her. I was in love with her.”

  “I can see that.” And I can. Jeeves’s template-patriarch wasn’t trained to spread his loyalty around—quite possibly the butlers were sold for service for life. “You fell for her.”

  “Yes.” He sighs. “We knew it was mad. She had a habit of removing her soul chip—di
d you know that? She was afraid Internal Security would take it and replay it in a sib, someone like you, Freya.” He pauses. “She said she loved me.”

  “You’re all wound up.” His shoulders are nearly rigid with tension. “Let me do something about that.” I roll him over and begin to probe his motor groups with my fingertips. She said she loved me. What would that mean to a Jeeves, straitjacketed and lonely behind a mask of service? “Did you believe her?” I ask hesitantly.

  “I . . . I’m not a fool, Freya.” His voice overflows with regret. “But I’m guilty of wishful thinking. I know what we look like to your lineage. Close enough to be confusing, not quite there. I kidded myself that maybe she wanted to be in love as much as I did. At first. Until I was in too deep to turn around.”

  “She used you,” I say. Thinking of the other thing, of the gaps in Juliette’s memory.

  “Yes,” he agrees. “I was a very good spy for love. Even when Internal Security started to take an interest, they didn’t realize it was the two of us.”

  I begin moving down his spinal-support frame. The vertebrae have a wonderfully human feel to them, the skin porous and realistic, a scattering of hair follicles adding delicious verisimilitude. “Did you know who she was working for?”

  “Not at first. I mean, we knew to be on the lookout for Rhea, we knew she was out there, and we knew she was probably burrowing in among the old-money clans. But we didn’t know she was recruiting among her own children. I didn’t know. When Juliette went over the wall—I felt so betrayed. Internal Security was sniffing around, too.” He tenses as I move down to the small of his back. “What they did to me wasn’t nice. When did Juliette get my chip?”

  “I’m not sure. She said something about chips being easier to smuggle out than people.”

  “Oh.” He goes silent for a while as I work on his buttocks. “Tell me about ... yourself ? What did you mean you’re part Juliette?”