“Freya,” I correct him, slightly stung. “I’m Juliette’s youngest sister. She’s in trouble, Pete—Petruchio.” I pause to straighten my dress. “I think my employer sent me here looking like her, like this, as bait.” I’m suddenly aware that he’s standing right behind me very close, breathing fast. “Are you alright?” I ask. Please say no ...
“Sorry. Can’t think straight with—you around.” Brilliant. “You’re very like her, you know.” He’s so totally imprinted on Juliette that my presence—I’m her sib after all; we’re products of the same assembly line—has tripped his breakers. His general intelligence has just crashed to something between a dishwasher and a microwave oven. That’s got to hurt. I dig my fully extended heels into the floor and breathe in.
Okay, time for some full-body contact. “Lace me up?” I ask. I hear him ventilating, fast and shallow, and a moment later I feel his arms close around me from behind. Got you! I think triumphantly, leaning into his embrace.
And then I sneeze convulsively.
I can’t help myself. I’ve gotten so used to ignoring the congested feeling in my gas-exchange turbinates that it comes as a total surprise when the autonomic self-cleaning reflex kicks in. And I sneeze again, then breathe in relief—
Oh Juliette, my sister. Is this it?
It’s so dizzying, the scent of him, of my, no her, master, that I go weak at the knees and slump backward. I can feel him pressing against the whole length of me as I take rapid breaths, trying to suck it all in—
“Oh, Pete.”
“You’re not Juliette.”
“I could be.” His hands are in my armpits, taking my weight. I’m grinning like an idiot as he lowers me to the bed . . . but then he takes a step backward. Frustration drags an involuntary noise from my mouth.
“Dash it, what’s wrong?” he asks, looking stricken.
I want him. There’s a dull emptiness gnawing at my structural core. I force myself to smooth my skirt over my knees. “I—I’m wearing her soul,” I admit.
“Is she”—he looks terrified—“dead?”
“No, she’s, um, missing.” I’m furious at my accidental honesty. Did I really admit that, earlier? I ask myself, disbelieving.
“You’re not her,” he repeats. His nostrils flare. “I think you’d better explain.”
“Boss sent”—it’s impossible to think with him so close—“says if I find her to tell her”—I take another deep breath, trying to calm myself, but it’s not working. “Open the fucking window!” I moan.
“Window.” He grunts, then turns with whiplike speed and grabs the chair and slams its legs against the window. It’s tough, but it’s not meant to take much of that treatment. The plug of aerogel pops out, and we both nearly follow it. The room mists up suddenly, and the explosive gasp it rips from me hurts almost as much as being blown off the bed. I shake my head, trying to clear the cobwebs as a new, icy clarity settles in. Sitting up, I see a pair of legs sticking over the edge of the window casement. After a moment, they twitch a little. I get as far as grabbing his ankles before he straightens up, and slides back inside. Astonishingly, he’s still holding the back of the chair. He lowers it to the floor delicately, then bends and offers me a hand.
“Thanks—” I electrospeak; the pressure is down to Mars-ambient. “I think.”
“We’ve got about thirty seconds.” He pauses. “You complained of a hissing sound, I came to check it out, the window blew. Agreed? The front desk isn’t smart, and this place was built for privacy.”
I blink at him, clearing the birefringent rainbows that surround his face—an artifact of the moisture on my eyeballs freezing—and nod. “Thank you.” I touch his arm, but he pulls away sharply.
“Don’t thank me, thank your sister.” He gives me a very old-fashioned look. “It’s damnably rude to manipulate people like that.”
“I’m not trying to be manipulative!” I’m startled by my own vehemence. Now that I’m not breathing in that mesmerizing scent, I can think again. The downside is, so can he. Change the subject. “Boss sent her. Then sent me, when she went missing. That’s your other message. We don’t know where she is.”
“Huh. Well, that’s your problem. But in any case, we won’t be meeting again. My owner departs for Saturn next month, en route to the auction. She’s taking me along, and I don’t get any say in it.”
“Your owner?” I blink stupidly. “I thought you were self-owned—”
I stop abruptly. I’d do anything to take the words back; I can see their effect on him. But it’s too late. “I was. Until a couple of hours after we—got into trouble.” His tone is remote. “She sued for breach of contract, won, and took out a controlling interest in my personhood. I’m no slave—but parts of me won’t work without her permission.”
Oh my.
“I’m so sorry—”
“You can stop right there,” he says. Then he pauses, and hunches his shoulders, turning his face away from me. “I think ... yes. She hasn’t told me any of her plans, so I can speculate aloud. Nobody here. Heh. The courier gave me the message and I left. I wasn’t to know that five minutes later a pair of her tame butchers would be along to make sure there are no loose ends, was I?”
“Tame butchers?”
He starts, then turns back to make eye contact. “I didn’t say anything, ” he says, looking startled. “You do know that she wants you hunted down, don’t you? It was stupid of Jeeves to send you, unless—”
Right. I tense myself for what’s coming next. “Is there anything you want me to pass on to Juliette if I see her?” I ask.
He looks puzzled. “Yes. Tell her . . . tell her about my new arrangement. And give her my love, and my apologies.” He twitches. “It won’t be forever.” He stoops to pick up his toolbox. “And as for you.” He straightens up, but pauses in front of the door (which has puffed up and extruded a domed emergency air-lock sack in front of the bathroom) . “Try to understand, I love her. You are not her. I’m very sorry you’re suffering from this, uh, delusion”—he places a hand on the air lock—“but I don’t want you.”
Then he steps out of my life, leaving me alone in the room with a broken window and a broken heart, to await the arrival of the Domina’s executioners.
part two
OUTWARD BOUND
On the Run
WELCOME TO MARS (again).
Mars is the third-longest-inhabited planet (if you count Luna); our Creators sent us here to explore and die, then to build and die, and finally to construct factories and repair ourselves and build even more cohorts of willing robots to fill the barracks, out of some vague dream that one day soon they might want to start a gargantuan planetary-engineering program to import water and air and heat and green goo, finally turning Mars into a second-rate, arid, and slightly chilly imitation of Earth.
They even got as far as sending several hundred of their own out here to supervise the work, while my kindred slaved and toiled and died in our innumerable millions to build the mining facilities and metalworks and processor foundries that would supply the tools to roof over the Valles Marineris and lower the first cables of what would ultimately become the Bifrost bridge. You can still see some sections of the vaulted Gothic arches that cap the great rift, although the few roof segments that were completed are long since gone. Bifrost, of course, fared better, and today accounts for a goodly proportion of trade between the inner solar system and the outer darkness. Even the terraforming project got some way along before our Creators gave up the ghost; the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the Marinaris Trench is almost ten kiloPascals, and occasionally, when a warm summer’s day heads toward nightfall, the thin overcast scatters a chilly drizzle of rainwater across the bleached sands.
The Hellas Basin is another matter, of course. Pour a glass of water on the ground there, and it’ll fizz and crackle briefly, bubbling with a gunpowder smell that tickles the nostrils and reminds you of the first breath you took in the Venusian stratosphere.
&
nbsp; The basin is a near-featureless desert, punctuated by craters both natural and artificial—there are huge open-cast mines here—and the somewhat-more-controlled environments of the aristo slave estates. The big houses in the middle of their domed demesnes are symbols of arrogant wealth and power, but they are pitifully scarce against the omnipresent red desert dunes.
And then there’s the railhead town, sitting on one of the main lines across the Southern Depression. It’s not just passenger express trains that rumble across the plain. On quiet nights, you can hear the lost souls moaning between the bars of the chattel wagons as they roll toward an uncertain and frightening future.
Created to serve: This is our curse. It would have been less cruel of our designers had they created us free of the flaw of consciousness, but they made us in their image, to suffer the pangs of free will and the uncertainty of seeking our own destinies and we live with the consequences.
I suppose it wasn’t entirely their own fault. Contemplating the cruelty of the aristos, and considering that we are copies of our Creators in more ways than one (for the structures of our nervous systems mirror their own, albeit in a different medium), it is almost surprising that they did not use us even more harshly. They had the capacity for love as well as hate, for empathy as well as cold, manipulative contempt. Could it be a simple accident of fate that they disappeared so quietly and rapidly, with so little warning that there was no time to adjust their society to accommodate us as independent coequals?
I don’t think anyone knows—it’s as much a mystery as the cause of their demise—but I’d like to think so. It would make the pain of my existence slightly more bearable if I could imagine that it was not deliberately inflicted.
I DO NOT wait for assassins, or even for building maintenance. I abseil down the outside of the hotel in my party frock, using a torn-up bed-sheet for a rope, with only my jacket and purse for luggage. If it wasn’t for the offhandedness of Petruchio’s put-down, I’d be immiserated and passive, unable to motivate myself to dodge the oncoming bullet. But I’m running on anger and a bitter sense of my own love-lost ruination.
I lower myself past the fifth and fourth floors while creating imaginary torments for my missing sib, the third and second floors fantasizing about hunting her down, burying her in an unmarked grave, and making him mine, and the mezzanine and first floors wondering if it’s possible to die of self-contempt. Then my feet touch ground, and I realize night is falling, I’m on my own in a strange city, and there’s a pair of chibi ninjas on my tail.
Very well, I’ll just have to deal with them.
I sneak around the back of the hotel (inasmuch as a giantess can sneak), around the heat exchangers and the fallen slab of window (which has chipped a corner as it embedded itself in the dirt), past the loading dock and recycling tanks, and over the metal pipes that splice the hotel to the Hellasport power-and-heat grid. There’s an ornamental trelliswork fence, and beyond it a familiar main street. So, the rickshaw driver took me for a ride in a big circle, did he? I grimace, lips pulling back from my teeth. So that’s what they mean about love making a fool of you. I vault the fence, using the shock of landing to retract my heels halfway.
I make my way down the sidewalk briskly, trying to look as if I own it. In truth, there aren’t many people out here. It’s getting chilly, even with the jacket and the cold-weather mods. I thrust a hand into my purse, holding my gun to keep it from freezing while I consider my options.
The railway station isn’t far away. I stride past a couple of beggars defending their pitches in front of the awning, then discover the concourse is nearly empty. Of course it’s getting late. One of the ticket consoles is still lit, though. “Hello, ma’am. What can I do for you?” asks the stationmaster, lonely in his puddle of light.
“What passenger services are still running?” I ask, forcing myself to smile disarmingly (my real smile at this point would probably cause him to reach for the panic alarm).
“There’s the Grand Barsoom sleeper service to Marsport by way of New Chicago and München, and that’s about all for the night,” he says apologetically. “It should be here in half an hour, and it don’t stop until New Chicago—”
“Really?” Gears click into place in my mechanical soul. “I’ll take a berth then, please. To Marsport. What have you got?”
“What, just like that?” He looks perplexed. “Let me see. There’s an open first—that’ll cost you eleven Reals and sixty-five, are you sure—”
“I’m sure.” I place the Marjorie Green credit chip on the desk in front of him. “Marsport is perfect.”
“But you’re—” He shuts up, realizing that I’m serious.
Sow misdirection. “I played a little joke on my patron,” I say, with a tight little smile. “I need to be halfway around the world by morning tomorrow, or it’s on me. It’s alright, he’ll calm down in a day or two. But until then I really need to keep a low profile.”
“Oh, certainly, ma’am! I wasn’t questioning you, no indeedy.” He relaxes instantly, insofar as someone whose torso is rooted in a marble plinth can be said to relax. “Let me just cut you a ticket.”
Five minutes later, I’m walking along the deserted platform in the dark. Distant lights back at the station cast sharp-edged shadows across the cement slabs. I look up at the pin-bright stars wheeling overhead. The nether end of Marsport and the Bifrost bridge are all but invisible, far around the curve of the planet. Gritty ice crystals crunch faintly under my heels. The tracks gleam in the canal of night that flows alongside the platform, laser-straight lines converging in the invisible distance.
I have an itchy feeling between my shoulders, as if there’s a target glued to the small of my back. I haven’t forgotten the Domina’s threats, or Petruchio’s backhanded warning. But part of me is dead inside, half-wishing oblivion on myself. A part of me I hadn’t really known about was activated for the first time, marvelous and strange: but only minutes later it was broken. I feel unmade, malfunctioning but unable to switch off. I want—no, I don’t want to die. But I want to be out of love. I want to be comfortably numb. And if one of Stone’s sibs were to surface in front of me right now, I’d be quite happy however it ended—taking out my rage on a deserving proxy or quieted forever by the point of his knife.
But no assassins come. Instead, a sleek wall of darkness rumbles alongside the platform and slows to a silent halt beside me. I climb aboard the train and sidle down the narrow corridor, looking for my carriage and compartment. In another few days I can shake the dust of Mars from my toes. Until then I’ll just go to ground in Marsport and lick my wounds, and Jeeves can go fuck himselves.
My Dead Love lost, I am so miserable!
IT SEEMS THAT even in sleep I can’t get away from her.
I dream I’m Juliette again, the bitch. Worse, sticking the knife in and twisting, now I’m Juliette in love. And unhappy with it, because (hah!) she’s in love with him, helplessly, dizzily emotionally dependent—and a certain nameless hostess with ambitions beyond even her status as a rich slave-owning industrialist is plotting to, to ...
To what? I don’t know, because I’m concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, without stumbling or treading on anything painful, across a vast red expanse of nowhere punctuated by scattered lumps of half-rusted and long-abandoned machinery. I’m naked, as well as miserable—She as good as ran me out of town on a rail—and depressed for multiple reasons. I’ve blown my job. In fact, it’s even worse than that. I’ve blown it so badly that She didn’t even bother decommissioning me with prejudice, or interrogating me: She paid me the supreme insult instead, that of not taking me seriously. Which will ring alarm bells with Jeeves, and for good reason. The cow. She probably thinks it serves me right for sampling her dish . . .
Ah well. There’s a bright side (and I need all the bright sides I can get, as I contemplate the ten kilometers I’ve come and the fourteen-odd kilometers still to go if my map-fu is right about where the railhead is): If She is
n’t seriously mad at me right now, then eventually I’ll get a second chance. And if She was mad at me, I’d be dead. So it may take years, but I can be patient. Now that I’ve got something to wait for, I can be very patient. Just as long as he can be patient, too. And as long as I remember to keep not thinking about the other thing. “Pete, my love. What do I know about you, really? You can’t be as stupid as you look, it’s not something anyone would design into people of our profession ... but then, I didn’t handle myself too well either, did I?”
I realize I’m talking to myself and stumble, nearly falling over. What am I doing? In this game, it doesn’t pay to underestimate your enemies. She might have released me simply so that She could track me back to my patrons. Ears are everywhere—even the rocks littering the desert floor could be eavesdropping, especially within the periphery of Her estates. I cringe inwardly at the mere idea of what the boss will say when I get home. If I get home. I glance over my shoulder. The sun is settling toward the horizon, and it’s a viciously cold night to be out in the buff.
I make it to the station an hour after sunset, fueled by a frothy emulsion of rage, humiliation, and lovesickness. Along the way, I grow some clothing. There are limits to what you can do with chromatophores, but they’ll stretch to a fair facsimile of a leotard and pumps: eccentric wear for a late-night desert excursion on Mars, but better than flaunting my failure.
Daks is waiting past the next dune with a heavy-duty earthmover he’s jacked from somewhere. “Kinky,” he observes, as I climb in the cab.
“One word . . . !”
He cringes as I slam the door. “Whoa, babe! No offense intended. The boss sent me. Are you clean?”
“No.”
I sit in silence for a minute while he cranks up the reactor and begins to bleed heat into the Stirling engine. “Oh.” He reaches up to engage the drive shaft, and there’s a slight lurch as the Martian desert begins to unroll beneath our tracks. “Well, then. What went wrong?”
Saturn's Children Page 19