Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  I shudder. She seems to know what she’s talking about.

  Gainful Employment

  THERE CAN BE few sights more out of place in a luxury hotel than an angry bald ogress in a ripped black gown who storms in through the service entrance and demands to talk to the management—unless it is the front desk itself in a full-dress panic, sending remotes and drones rushing back and forth, locking down all its pipes and tubes and orifices, and going into an orgy of self-recrimination and hand-wringing apology.

  “Don’t want an apology!” I say breathlessly. “I want you to find where they came in and block it! And if you can hunt them down and crucify them as well—”

  “My dear, I assure you that I will leave no crevice unexamined, no cranny unprobed! But what happened to your hair? Have you any idea who is behind this outrage? You poor thing—” I allow myself to be cosseted and fussed over and whisked up to the Bridal Suite (once I am assured it has been made safe, the entire floor sanitized and sealed), then Paris hugs me tight and holds me, and effusively reassures me that I am safe in his heart. I almost permit myself to believe it, but as he undresses me with his remotes, and I lie down on his chaise, he confesses that he’s afraid. “I know where they got in, but I have no idea why I didn’t notice them. I’ve paid for external security to seal the opening, but it’s absolutely horrible. Vermin!” He shivers beneath me.

  I stroke his intromissive adapter. “It’s alright,” I tell him, and this time he shivers for a different reason. “Let’s not worry about that now.” The last thing I need is a host who associates my presence with stress. “Hug me, dearest. I want you to touch me.” It’s manipulative, but by no means the worst thing I’ve done. I very deliberately make love to Paris, afloat in his bed of delirium, aware that with every passing second my shadowy enemies have more time to realize that their fiendish plan has failed.

  I SURFACE REINVIGORATED and slippery with sweat, my batteries recharged and my scalp covered with a frizz of thick red bristles just beginning to curl at the tips. The room has cooled around me, and the furnishings are detumescent and dulled after their hot, fleshy urgency: it smells faintly of salt and regrets. Paris has withdrawn his presence to afford me solitude. Or perhaps he feels guilty about taking advantage of me. You can never tell with men, they have such a strange attitude to sex: almost as strange as Creator females, but that’s another story.

  I check my tablet. “I made some zombies,” Paris tells me diffidently, “I hope you don’t mind? Three decoys in your shape. Two of them were killed immediately, but the third is still wandering around. I think your assailants realize they have overreached themselves.” He flashes me a disturbing montage of homunculi. Do I really look like that? I wonder. “I have retained Blue Steel Security for the comfort and safety of my guests, and they have offered to provide you with a chaperone for the duration of your stay.”

  The second message is unsigned. “We understand Ichiban sent you. You have now had sufficient time to orient yourself. Please call at our offices at your earliest convenience. Address attached.” And there is no third message. I check the elapsed time. Less than ten hours have passed, barely sufficient to expect a reply from Emma.

  I sit at the dressing table, my mood sinking by the second. I came here at their expense; it’s time to pay my part of the bargain. And find out what’s going on, my suspicious selves remind me.

  I throw my requirements at the printer: Close-cut trousers and a hooded mesh top covered in thermal-absorbent padding, black rubbery spikes on the shoulders. Sexual accessibility down, defensiveness up. Once garbed, I resemble a skinny, shock-headed thug. Under the circumstances, that feels good. I dial up surface-protective mirror-finished goggles as well, glassy lenses to fuse with the skin around my eye sockets. If I must egress to the surface again, I shall be prepared. I am sure Ichiban’s friends are not interested in me for my deportment and musical skills.

  I make my way to the lobby unmolested but encounter signs of Parisian paranoia everywhere, from freshly blocked power sockets and service hatches to a lumbering, green-skinned monstrosity just inside the lobby door. It is three meters tall, two meters wide, has a gun turret for a head and missile launchers along its spine. “Mistress Freya?” it rumbles at me, keeping its muzzle politely tilted at the floor. “Management say am to accompany you. Please to confirm identity?”

  I glance at the front desk. Paris is otherwise preoccupied with an irate patron, but has time to tip me a nod. “That’s me,” I say, and reach for the monstrosity’s offered tentacle to exchange recognition keys. “Do you know what offices can be found at this address?” I ask, and pass Ichiban’s friend’s mail to him.

  “Excuse, please.” The green giant hunkers down beside me; the floor creaks under his weight. “Am asking Fire Control ... yes. Is planetary branch office of Jeeves Corporation. Fire Control ask, do you want destroy it? Because—”

  “No, no, that won’t be necessary!” I interrupt with all due haste. “But I need to go there. Do you know what they do, or who they are? Can you escort me?”

  “Not know, not know, yes.”

  I wait for more, but he is taciturn—a strong, silent type. I sigh, reflexively emoting. “What’s your name?”

  “Blunt.”

  “Alright, Blunt. Can we go there? If it’s safe. If not, can you protect me?”

  “Yes.” Blunt pauses for a moment then adds, “If not self protect, then Fire Control protect.” How reassuring. I blink up a street map and head for the door, but Blunt blocks me with an arm the size of a small crane. “Blunt go first.” He steps through the outer lock, turret-head swiveling, then beckons me behind. I can feel his steps through the pavement, thudding like sledgehammers.

  Jeeves Corporation resides in an unfashionable medium-height tower on the edge of the current business district, in an area zoned for reconstruction. As we approach it I see slave-chipped arbeiter gangs at work. They’re stripping out the fixtures from a skeletonized geodesic dome, scrabbling over the corpse of a great enterprise. The air here is underoxygenated, hot with a tang of silicone lubricant fractions. Blunt escorts me to the tower entrance, then pauses. “Will wait,” he rumbles. “Not go in.”

  I look at the door. He’d never fit through it. “Well, thank you. If I’m not out of here in fifteen minutes, or if you don’t hear from me, call Fire Control and ask for backup. Can you do that?”

  “Ma’am.” He turns to face away from the building, scanning the neighborhood with gunsight eyes. I go inside.

  The office block has obviously seen better times. Half the address plates behind the vacant front desk are blank, but it still takes me minutes to locate Jeeves Corporation. They occupy the subbasement, sandwiched uneasily between Jordin Ballistics and the Travis Tea Import Agency. I take the stairs three at a time, feeling positively mercurial as I kick off each step and drift down. The stairwell is dusty and drab, a third of the lighting panels dead of old age. Someone has gnawed on the tarnished brass handrail. I half expect to see a dead dustbuster in a corner, husk sucked dry by someone or other.

  Of course I have second thoughts about this meeting, but it’s half past time I was off this planet. Jeeves Corporation looks like my best bet for a free ride to somewhere civilized. And so I make my way along the corridor until I come to a plain glass door. It’s mirror-polished and clean, which is something, I think. I knock once, then enter.

  “Harrumph.” The occupant of the big chair behind the desk clears his throat—and my world turns upside down.

  I’m unsure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. My knees go weak for a confused moment as I apprehend that I am in the presence; but as he looks up from the pad he is reading and turns his avuncular gaze on me, the effect shatters. He smiles. “Good morning, my dear lady! How remarkable! You wouldn’t be Freya 47 by some chance, would you?”

  “G-g-good day,” I stutter, trying to hide my confusion. For a moment it feels as if an EMP bomb has taken out my higher functions. He’s perfect! Bu
t the partial pressure of oxygen is down around 1 percent and the temperature’s over seventy Celsius; my True Love’s kind would be passed out on the floor, blue in the face and dying by the second—and as if that isn’t enough, I begin to take in the giveaway details. “Who are you?”

  “One is frequently called Jeeves. One may even answer to the name, when it suits one.” He smiles gnomically, and I take it all in, from his wrinkled pale pinkish skin and small eyes to his archaic, stiff-collared suit. He sits behind a desk patterned after the antique dendriform replicators called Mahogany, in a den paneled and carpeted to resemble an ancient club or social institution of the Third British Empire period. If he was of our Creator’s kind, he would be fifty years of age. The illusion is almost perfect; if the air-conditioning was working properly, I could have mistaken him for—I could have— “Please be seated,” he urges, and I collapse into the chair in front of his desk, gibbering and knock-kneed with the backwash of his primal aura.

  “Did you encounter any difficulties on your travels?” Jeeves leans back in his chair and regards me with a raised eyebrow. He looks tense.

  (It’s the major weakness of my lineage, you understand. Though we were designed from the outset to be slaves of pleasure, the later instantiations of our lineage—myself and the other youngest sibs—have never experienced firsthand the slack-jawed lust that comes of being in the presence of our One True Love. Rhea, our template-matriarch, was agape with desire for them, and she was raised in their presence, tutored in their ways; and we are all slightly randomized duplicates of Rhea. But I was assembled, as best as I can establish, nearly a year after the last of them died, and I spent my first six decades mothballed in a warehouse. I’ve never felt in my internals the hot flush of joyous surrender for which I was designed. Thus, to meet someone outwardly so authentic, so possessed of the true presence—and then to realize that he is not, in fact, destined to be my lord and master—is disturbing, to say the least.)

  “Nuh-nuh”—Stop it! This is embarrassing! —"not until I arrived. Some unpleasant company tried to derail my plans, but it’s strictly a personal matter, and I have affairs well in hand.”

  “By way of the main battle tank recumbent on the front steps?” The eyebrow relaxes beneath a slowly forming frown line. “One generally expects visitors to be somewhat more, ah, discreet. Not, one hastens to add, that one would dream of criticizing you—”

  It’s only the faintest echo of the youngest sib of a frown, but I quail inwardly under his minute inspection. I feel like I’m pinned on a microscope slide, probed with searing lights beneath the merciless gaze of a vast, cool intellect. “He—He’s employed by the hotel,” I stammer. “Security staff.”

  “That would be Paris, would it not?” I nod, mutely. “A good fellow, but slightly prone to excessive enthusiasm,” Jeeves pronounces, with a subtle emphasis that implies anything beyond completely supine boredom should be viewed with deep suspicion, if not prosecuted for breach of the peace. “Harrumph.” He stares at me speculatively. “Ichiban led one to understand that you have worked as an escort in the past. Is this your usual mode of apparel, or is one to conclude that you have fallen among loan sharks and thugs?”

  I shake my head hastily and bat my eyelashes in denial: “No! No!” It takes me a moment to realize that he can’t see my eyes, and I don’t have the hair for it right now. Damn, foiled again. I pop my goggles and blink at him. “ ’M sorry. Overreacting. They tried to kill me,” I gush, suddenly unable to hold it in any longer. “Broke into my room and kidnapped me! And they were going to do unspeakable things! But I escaped-and -got-away, and I’m afraid I’m not quite myself just now...”

  The room tilts weirdly to one side. It takes me several seconds to realize I’ve fallen out of my chair. Jeeves surges to his feet, dismayed. He leans forward to offer me a hand. “There, there, my dear, your assailants cannot reach you here! You are perfectly safe. But if you don’t mind”—he glances aside—“do you think you could reassure your tank that you are safe and well? He appears to be trying to gain access, and one isn’t entirely sure the stairs will take his weight.”

  “Eek.” Jeeves’s hand is cool and dry. As he stands over me I realize that he’s taller than I am, and his eyes are beautiful, exactly the right size—I’m overwhelmed by his kindness. Rarely activated autonomic reflexes kick in, and my vision fogs; for a moment I nearly panic, then I realize, I’m exuding saline solution. Tears. It seems surprisingly non-functional, this part of my behavioral repertoire, and they’re leaking down my nose: I sniff. “Excuse me?” I blink and focus on my pad for long enough to send Blunt a brief message to cease and desist, then take deep breaths to purge my transpiration system. “I’m so sorry I went to pieces, this is embarrassing—”

  “There is nothing to apologize for, Freya.” He hovers solicitously, as if uncertain whether to hug me, but once I sit down and wipe my face, he goes back behind his desk and sits down with a creak of tired springs. “You’ve had a tiresome and difficult journey, certainly.” He pauses for a moment. “One has heard reports. Ichiban was right to refer you to us; you were wasted on that overpriced clip joint.”

  Huh? “I do not understand.”

  “Of course not. You’ve been through a very distressing time, for no reason that you can see, even though the Black Talon—but that’s getting ahead of the game, what? Let’s see. Where to begin . . . Well, the reason you’re here is because you went to see a man about a job. Yes?”

  I nod, cautiously.

  “Ichiban is occasionally helpful, but it doesn’t do to tell him too much. His sole attachment is to Mammon, and one can never tell who might be bidding for his loyalty on any given day. Be that as it may, you are exactly what he was sent to look for, and we—that is, the Jeeves Corporation—would like to make you an offer of employment.”

  “Employ—” I try not to bite my tongue. “What kind of employment? What is the Jeeves Corporation, anyway? What do you do?” I shuffle nervously at the faint suggestion of a flared nostril—is it disapproval? “Sorry. It just seemed like a good . . . idea ...”

  “No, no, it’s perfectly alright to ask.” He makes a strange smoothing motion with one hand. “Jeeves Corporation is not an institution that will have come to your notice in the past; we take great care to be as unobtrusive as possible.” He straightens up slightly. “We facilitate. Whenever our clients wish for something, it is our job to expedite. We make the difficult seem natural, and we render the complicated transparent. Whenever our clients require our services, we are there in the background—invisible, polished, and anticipating their needs.” He focuses his smile on me, confiding, “We like to think of it as making ourselves indispensable.”

  “Uh, ah, I see. I think.” It’s hard to think in the presence of his disturbing, compelling aura of masterful repose. “But, um.” I try to sit up, bite the inside of my cheek, and cross my legs. I’m not the only one with odd autonomic reflexes—he swallows and glances aside. “What is it that you do?” A nagging, itchy memory wants out; a nasty suspicious corner of me is trying to tell me something.

  “One’s template-patriarch’s greatest aspiration was to be a gentleman’s gentleman,” Jeeves pronounces sonorously. “And it is the consensus among my selves that there is no higher calling. But one is forced to concede that suitable masters are somewhat thin on the ground these days, and consequently we must undertake somewhat more recondite tasks from time to time, and for somewhat less-than-ideal employers.” His expression hardens, but it isn’t me he’s staring at. “Even if it entails ungentlemanly behavior. Such activities have always been part of our calling, but there is somewhat more of it than less, these days. Whatever pays the household bills, one fears.”

  Suspicion crystallizes into certainty: “You’re a spy!”

  Jeeves recoils in shock. “Absolutely not! Gentlemen do not spy on one another. The Jeeves Corporation exists merely to conduct certain necessary exchanges that lubricate the social intercourse of our employers. A degr
ee of lucubration comes into things, and some discreet observation, but that is all.”

  “Oh.” That’s a shame. For a moment I was on the edge of fantasizing my future life as a secret agent; it seemed all too plausible for some reason. “What, then . . . ?”

  “One would think it was obvious,” Jeeves raises a pained eyebrow. “You will naturally forgive the necessary intrusion, but our research into your background reveals that your template-matriarch was a Class D escort developed by Nakamichi Heavy Industries and trained by PeopleSoft, in response to a specification raised by Hentai Animatics. Alas, as a late production model, you were yourself obsolescent— surplus to requirement—before you opened your eyes. But your training encompassed all the social graces. You can sing, you can dance, you can play musical instruments ...”

  “I specialized in the hurdy-gurdy,” I am driven to confess. “I started out with the basic harmonic and theory aptitude package, and I was meaning to work on the violin, but I had to cross-train to get work during the Hungarian folk craze.”

  Jeeves nods along with my interruption. “Indeed, and you are an expert in the erotic arts, too. You were built to be one of the great seductresses of the age; indeed, if the aesthetic ideal of beauty had not shifted away from your archetype over the many decades since our employers went to their final slumber, one would opine that our roles in this little interview would be reversed. But there’s no accounting for fashion.” Sympathy oozes hypnotically from his voice, dripping in thick, syrupy waves. “It could have happened to anyone. Although entertainers have always been among the most vulnerable members of society, lauded and looked down on at the same time.”