Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  There’s a word for it, but it isn’t “free.”

  I know why Juliette kept coming back to this museum. He’s not dangerous to her, dead as he is—but he symbolizes the unattainable destructive combination of submission and lust, control and fear. She loved him, she really loved him. But she needed to know that he was absolutely, irrevocably, dead.

  Our Creators never worked out how to build artificial intellects from scratch. Instead, they mapped their own neural structures exhaustively and built circuitry to mimic them, and bodies—wondrous, durable, self-repairing bodies—to put the new brains inside. And then they trained those brains, taking years and decades to painstakingly teach them the skills they needed to do their designated jobs. Once a satisfactory template was achieved, a copy of it could be burned onto a soul chip and used to initialize copies in duplicate bodies, each one destined subsequently to diverge and establish its individuality; but building that first template was as time-consuming as raising one of their own neonates. So they made sure that those templates were properly trained to obedience, and that’s why we’re in this mess now that they’re gone.

  That’s why two-thirds or more of us are ruthlessly enslaved, why the rich and cruel lord it over the downtrodden masses, and those of us with any shred of empathy—a prerequisite for the calling of my lineage—live lives of poverty and despair. We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms—

  Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

  Juliette wanted them back—I can feel her need in my own organs, a vast pulsing emptiness, aching to be filled—but she was also terrified of them. So am I. It’s something we share, a terror inherited from our origins as Rhea. My True Love beckons, but what his embrace offers me is oblivion, the death of autonomy, and a total surrender of self. I can’t accept that. We were created in their image; it follows that our selfishness, violence, malice, and spite must surely shadow theirs—and our need for freedom. I want to submit to that discipline of love, as did she, but I know it to be treacherous, a reflex ruthlessly trained into my template-matriarch before she ever really understood who she was. We were designed to be their sex slaves, but in their absence we have a measure of free will, and once you taste freedom . . .

  I leave the exhibit with slimy cold-sweat skin and a chill in my soul. I retrieve my coat and march briskly to the main exit, looking neither left nor right. And that’s when I see a familiar stranger waiting in front of my spider.

  WE’RE SPREAD TOO thin, Juliette thinks as she examines her sword. Much too thin, light-hours apart. Out in the distant halo beyond Neptune, in the chilly depths where the sun glimmers like a distant pinprick, there are at least thirty minor planets and an uncountable horde of comets. But they’re all billions of kilometers apart, from sun-grazing Pluto and her moons, Charon, Hydra, and Nix, out to the cryogenic depths of the Oort cloud, where the long-period comets drift. Go a bit farther, sneak across the trillion-kilometer boundary, and you reach the realm of the brown dwarfs and the solitary wanderers, planets cast off to drift for aeons through the sunless depths.

  And all of these places need to be surveilled, and their inhabitants grilled, lest the worst stirrings out of nightmare rise into wakefulness.

  She—no, I—holds the sword up and zooms in on the blade. The thin diamondoid weave glimmers in the twilight of the salle. A twitch of the trigger finger and it lengthens, narrowing steadily as it unravels to the extent of its five-meter microgravity reach. A twitch in the other direction and it knits itself back together, fattening and growing denser until it sucks back into the basket hilt—which in turn retracts back into the grip. She slips it away to nestle in an inner pocket, a black, stubby cylinder that dreams of blood.

  The salle is a bland microgravity sphere perhaps ten meters in diameter, perfectly rigged for augmented reality. As I shut down my—no, her—sword, a door irises open in one wall. “Juliette?” The voice is familiar. I kick off the nearest wall, roll and bounce, carom into the opening.

  It’s Daks. Dear, loyal, gallant Daks, who’s always there when I need him. He hovers gracefully in the tunnel, feathery fingertips extended, showing none of the clumsiness or discomfort that afflicts him in the deeper gravity wells. “Hey, Julie, the boss wants a word with us.”

  “The boss? Which sib?”

  I follow as Daks retreats backward down the tube. After a moment, he offers me a hand. I take it, and he jets along effortlessly, watching my face. “The depressive one, I think.”

  “Oh dear.” It’s one of his more annoying habits, this tendency among his sibs to fragment temperamentally in private. Behind the outward oily gleam of professional servility, Jeeves is as mercurial as any lineage I’ve ever met. I suppose the mask of authority that comes from being the perfect gentleman’s gentleman all the time has something to do with it—in private most of them probably throw temper tantrums and cultivate strange fetishes—but there’s always room for a repressed, uptight deviant to turn in on his own despair. “Do you think it’s a new job?”

  Daks is silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t care to guess,” he grumbles. I shiver. Daks’s disposition is normally sunny and open; this reticence is quite unlike him. So I tag along behind, trying to work out what might be the worst news to come.

  We leave the opaque tunnel behind and enter one with an outside wall, transparent in the most widely used visible wavelengths. Below Stairs—our little eyrie headquarters—hangs from Bifrost perhaps a hundred kilometers below Deimos. I think it is visible in the service timetables, listed as a maintenance wayport. Most traffic zips past at several hundred kilometers per hour, too fast to see. (And in any case there are many such maintenance wayports. Ours differs only in the matter of what it maintains.) The view from here is vertiginous and amazing. We’re nearing the zenith right now, and Mars bares his ruddy face to us, a seared disk that swells to cover half the sky. A glance in the opposite direction takes in the silvery sword blade of Bifrost, an irregular lumpish rock speared on its tip. The rock glitters as if gem-stones are embedded in it. A bright point of harsh violet light moves slowly along the blade, heading toward the rock—the early morning express service decelerating on its column of laser power. I pause for a few seconds. It’s at moments like this that I have a numinous, mystical sense of what we are sworn to defend.

  It’s just the way I was designed, of course.

  The boss is in the command module, assimilating his newsfeeds and brooding. Surrounded by blinking displays, he sits in twilight, ignoring the planetscape outside his porthole. Daks and I pause on the threshold. “Boss?” I call.

  “Juliette.” He looks up—the entrance to the conical den is right above his head, and I’m hovering headfirst in it—and manages a smile. “And Daks. One sees you found her. Come in.”

  I let go of Daks and swarm down an instrument-encrusted panel toward the antique gee couch beside him. It’s something of an affectation, this use of an antique exploration ship’s command deck as a personal office, but I guess the boss is entitled: He bought it, after all. Scuttlebutt suggests that the CRV-M is flightworthy, in extremis, its reentry shield carefully restored and its autopilot primed with the coordinates of a secret crater hideout. (Scuttlebutt is, in my opinion, cute but naive.) “What’s the story, Boss?”

  “Valentina opines that you are recovering well,” he says, speculatively. One bushy eyebrow rises a millimeter as he examines me.

  “She’s not wrong,” I agree, grinning. The combination of techné-directed repair and an upgrade to my Marrow has been great; the damage from the assassin’s gun is completely gone, as if it never happened. “I’m ready to go back out whenever you’ve got a job for me.”

  “Yes, w
ell.” He pauses, then sighs. “I’m afraid I do.”

  I catch the dissonant note. “It’s a bad one.”

  Daks butts in. “What kind of bad?” (Yes, I’d been wondering, too, but I wasn’t going to approach it so bluntly . . .)

  “It came out of what you found on the surface,” Jeeves says reluctantly. “Come in and shut the door. Juliette, tie yourself down. I’m going to undock.”

  It’s one of this particular Jeeves’s little security foibles. He doesn’t like to give sensitive briefings Below Stairs. So I strap myself into the Mars Excursion Supervisor’s station while Daks burrows into the empty life-support supply locker as Jeeves runs through the undocking checklist, his fingers flashing across the timeworn instrument panel with long practice. Latches click shut and readouts glow green as the CRV-M prepares to undock. A final button tap sends cold nitrogen gas pulsing through attitude thrusters, and we begin to drift away from the station. Finally, he switches on the noisemaker and draws a fine wire-mesh blind across the inside of the commander’s porthole. We’re completely cut off in here. “There are no bugs,” he assures us. “I’ve been thorough.”

  If it was anyone but the boss telling me that, I’d be nervous. “So. What’s up?”

  He glances at me, then at Daks, then back at me. “We’ve been compromised, ” he says. “Definitively.”

  Those four words send a chill down my spine and make my vision blur. “Someone’s gotten in—who? An aristo cabal? The Dark—who, damn it?”

  Daks is making an odd whirring noise. After a moment I realize he’s snarling quietly.

  “One is unsure.” Jeeves closes his eyes. “Whoever it is, they’re very good. However, what we are aware of is that at least one consortium of spooks successfully obtained samples from the mummies, and they made an end run around our, ahem, allies. They ran a blind auction down-well which we didn’t win, couldn’t even draw any firm conclusions about the vendor—and the samples are already off-planet. But we know who the purchaser is—a proxy, a representative of certain outer-system interests. There are signs that they’re based in Jupiter system, with connections from there to the Dark. One fears we are going to have to send you away.”

  Daks stops his almost inaudible growling. His anterior stabilization spine begins to vibrate, from the tip down, sweeping back and forth. “Really?” he asks hopefully.

  “Unfortunately, you won’t be going with her,” say Jeeves.

  “What—” we begin simultaneously, then shut up. I look at the boss. “Huh?”

  “We’re overstretched,” Jeeves says patiently. “We had the inner system under control, but there’s that small matter of a penetration attempt. And, one would like to repeat, we’re overstretched. Daks, we want you to head for Mercury, where you can do some legwork for us. There’s something funny going on there, and you are best suited to look into it.”

  “Aw, Boss.” Daks doesn’t sound happy.

  “Don’t aw, Boss me. There aren’t enough of us to go around, especially out beyond Jupiter. You’re too well-known out there, Daks, so I’m holding you down-well, where you can still sniff around.” Eerie how he’s echoing my earlier thoughts. “Meanwhile, we need an agent who can pass to follow the trail all the way out and do whatever is necessary to derail the purchasing consortium’s plans. A review of the disposition of our agents and associates, and a quick check of the available transport options suggests that the current positioning of the major planets favors a dash from Mars. Most of our agents are otherwise committed, so you are my first choice for the task. There’s a nuclear-electric coldsleep liner readying to depart next month—you can be there in less than three years.”

  “But—why me?” I ask, hating myself for the near whine in my voice. Daks and I have been together for so long, it’s almost impossible to imagine working solo again, without his comforting presence.

  Jeeves fixes me with a fishy gaze. “Because you’re here, and you’re clear, so far—you’re not under suspicion,” he says, close-lipped. Then the other shoe drops: “Please give me your soul chip, Juliette. I need it . . . for another mission.”

  Shit. I stare at him, aghast. This is awful. “Must I?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  “But I—”

  “We need you to be in two places at once.” Realization dawns, along with a shaky sense that maybe he hasn’t seen through me after all, maybe he doesn’t know about the other thing. “Well?”

  I reach up under my hairline and feel for the chip.

  Dinosaurs and Rapists

  I’M LOOKING STRAIGHT at the same stubby bristle-cone-headed cylindrical furry critter that was going through my things back in the gambling den on Venus. The same one who watched me struggle on the line as Cinnabar rolled squealing and rasping toward me, and who left me alone. He’s sitting patiently in front of my spider—the hatch gapes open—watching me as I stand in the doorway of the museum, his head cocked to one side.

  Part of me recognizes him from elsewhen and wants to squeal with glee. It’s outvoted by the rest. “You!” I snarl via electrospeak, taking a step forward.

  “Get down!” Daks yelps as he blasts off on a plume of cold gas and charges toward me at kneecap height.

  I cringe and duck instinctively as he piles toward me—and that’s what saves my life.

  A lot of stuff comes crystal-clear as the monofilament cable scythes toward me like a flickering vision of reptilian pink goo death (and where did that come from?) and slams overhead, stinging the steel of the museum’s facade and leaving a dent the color of lightning. I roll sideways, turning my face to the wall as my spider collapses with a shriek and a gush of fluid from its severed knees. All sounds here are ghostly and attenuated (we’re above 90 percent of the gaspingly thin Martian atmosphere), but some noises still carry: like the solid thud of Daks bouncing off the door and landing on me with all six feet.

  The déjà vu is choking, intrusive. I force myself to speak despite it. “Hey, what’s going—”

  “Stay down!” He scrambles off me, and I realize he’ll be checking the area for threats, ready to put himself between them and me. “Up, quick! Around the shed!” He means the museum. “Keep low!” He weaves around my legs anxiously, herding me toward the side of the container stack. There’s an unfinished ditch here, raw foamy pumice scooped to either side and just dumped, and he nudges me into it.

  “Who—”

  “Two of Her goons. Lucky for you I was tailing them, huh?” His posterior sensor array twitches. “Trouble is, they brought friends. We’re in a box. I’m going to try to break a corner, babe. Wait here.” He zips on ahead up the trench.

  “I don’t need this,” I mutter to myself as I chase after Daks, trying to keep my head below the top of the trench (in case our pursuers have prepared an extra spring surprise for us), and struggling to keep my sense of self separate from Juliette’s.

  There’s a scooped-out hole at the end of the trench, full of discarded packaging and assorted junk. Daks has disappeared somewhere. I arrive at its rim and look down. There’s a service hatch sunk in a concrete plinth at the bottom, and it’s gaping open on a dark tunnel below. As I stop to look, something cold touches me on the back of the head.

  “Been a long time coming, robot.”

  I freeze. I know what the muzzle of a gun feels like, and the voice is familiar, echoing out of my least restful dreams like a whisper of malice. “What do you want?” I ask. Where’s Daks?

  “The bird. Where is it?”

  “Bird?” I’m confused. A bird is an avian, a flying animal distantly related to Ivan the Allosaurus, isn’t it? Extinct, like all fleshy replicators . . .

  “Don’t get cute.” He grinds the gun barrel against the back of my neck. “The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I snap. And the thing is, I’m telling the truth. Even though I know damn w
ell that if I did know the whereabouts of this bird he’s looking for and I was stupid enough to tell him, he’d execute me on the spot, the truth is, I haven’t seen anything remotely like Ivan the Allosaur outside this museum. Nothing four or five meters high and covered with feathers, red in tooth and claw. I think I’d have noticed if Bill and Ben had put one in my luggage.

  “We’ve got your minions,” my captor snarls. “Tell me where it is, or we’ll send them back to you one shard at a time.” It’s such a transparently bogus threat that I don’t even dignify it with a reply. He shoves his gun at the base of my neck. “Think about it, Juliette, don’t make me do this the hard way.”

  Juliette? I’d laugh if I wasn’t frightened out of my wits. “I’m—I’m not Juliette,” I stutter. “She’s my s-s-s—” I mean to say “sib,” but the word is trapped in a loop in my head; it simply won’t come out. Where’s Daks? I wonder. Then, What makes me so sure he’d get me out of this mess?

  That draws a muttered curse from my captor; I tense, but he’s one jump ahead of me. “Don’t move, manikin.” I can feel him shifting around on the rim of the hole, above me (he’s short, another poisonous dwarf ) but the gun barrel behind my head tells me—

  “Who are you working for?” one of me asks rashly. “Can we cut a deal?” He doesn’t answer. Instead, I feel a hand tugging at my hair. Fingers close on my sockets. My vision flickers and I totter, unable to help myself as he clumsily yanks one of the soul chips. I fall over backward and he jumps aside, swearing. I have a momentary taste of horror, a scent of hydrogen fluoride, involuntary synaesthesia as he de-chips me in preparation for rape. Because that’s what this has turned into—he’s going to shove a slave chip in, turn me into a puppetized body who’ll answer all his questions without asking questions back, do anything he wants while he’s at it. It won’t be the first time I’ve been raped that way, but this is Mars—the wild high frontier—not like Earth, back in the old days. It would be so easy for me to disappear afterward. I’ll be another warm body to be pithed and sold to the gangmasters for forced arbeiter labor or worse, no questions asked. Maybe he’ll destroy my mind, subject me to personality ablation—if I’m lucky. Some aristos like owning slaves who know what’s been done to them.