Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  “Awake—oh?” someone squeaks behind me.

  I do not jump off the container. It’s Bilbo, by daylight a rust-streaked iron centipede with a low-gee sensor head. “Yes, thank you,” I say as graciously as I can. “Where are we?” Looking past him, I see another column of containers vanishing into the distance. Creators know, this thing’s huge!

  “On the northbound spinward freightmaster conveyance for Jupiter! ” Bilbo is chirpy this morning. “Half the containers on this beautiful machine are marshaled for the great jump into night via Marsport,” he adds. “I thought it would please you?”

  “Oh, Bilbo.” I lean forward, smiling. “Thank you!” Best not to think about how I slept, insensate, as he and his friends lifted me atop the container. “That’s wonderful.” A thought strikes me. “But why are you . . . ?”

  “One yard’s as good as another!” he trills. “The bulls always come around dawn, besides. Best to be outwith their scope before the baton charge, indeedy.”

  “How long . . . ?” I’m all questions, I find, even though I’m running on an empty digester and a not-too-flush battery—the chilly Martian nights have really taken it out of my cells.

  “Two days, maybe three.” He shrugs. I suppress a wince. (I’ve got four days to make it to my ship; it’s going to be tight. I can pay for a STO shuttle seat if I need to, if there’s no time to ride the Bifrost climbers, but . . . ) “Beautiful vistas, plentiful doss space, what’s lacking?”

  “Is there anywhere to get a top-up?” I roll to my knees, take stock of the state of my clothes. My dress is filthy and torn, but it’s not quite as badly melted as I thought.

  “Juice is over the edge.” He gestures at the gap between containers, and I swallow reflexively. “’Tis a socket above yon starboard buffer, free for the taking.” He does a sort of mincing sideways dance step, clattering on the container’s roof. “Welcome to my penthouse! The furnishings be sparse, but the view is unmatched, and the air’s as fresh and free as any.”

  I spend the next two and a half days camping on the roof of a cargo container with Bilbo. To my surprise, it’s a good time for me. My thoughts keep circling back to Petruchio, and I keep gnawing at the wound, but it’s a hollow kind of pain. I know I’m in love with him—or Juliette is in love with him, and I’m absorbing the neural weightings from her soul chip, so I’m piggybacking on her love reflex—but I also know he’s unattainable, and when you get right down to it, what’s changed? I already knew my One True Love was dead. Now I know he’s heading for Saturn while I’m heading for Jupiter, he’s owned by my enemy, and he doesn’t want me anyway.

  As the days pass, Bilbo tells me about himself, and I tell him about me, and we swap heartbreaks and laugh at each other’s tragedies. He’s about sixty Earth years old: the obsolete spawn of a lineage of miners, hardy souls built to gouge seams of carbon-rich goop out of near-Earth asteroids back when mining was a job for vermiform intelligences. (These days, they pick a small asteroid, spin a bag around it, add water, focus sunlight on it, then beam ultrasound into it until it emulsifies. Then they suck it dry.)

  Sacks of semiliquid sludge that can be fed directly into the refineries’ maws may be an improvement over processed gravel, but it means unemployment for the hardy miners who used to slither between the bedding planes and wield drills and demolition charges.

  “They let me go,” Bilbo declaims, turning the statement around to examine it from different angles. “They let me go.”

  Actually, his owners abandoned him—along with the dozen sibs of his work gang—on a played-out seam inside a dirtball that was no longer economical to work. They even stripped out his slave controller to save money, for whips and chains are worth more than a broken down ex-arbeiter. It was an act of evil neglect that would have risen to the dizzy height of attempted murder had Bilbo and his mates been legal persons in the first place.

  “But we sailed away, on a pea green sea, in a boat with a runcible spoon,” he sings to me.

  I’m not entirely sure just how Bilbo escaped, although I am pretty certain that no runcible spoons were involved. Certainly he spent one solar maximum too many gripping the outside of a cobbled-together raft, bathed in radiation that turned his brain to the consistency of pumice and left him with the most peculiar speech impediment. He said it took him seven years to make landfall on a neighboring rock, by which time two-thirds of his mates were dead and half the survivors were insane. But having beached his raft at last, he strode ashore with a steely gleam in his eye and sold his damaged, prosody-infested tale to a yarn-spinning news server who paid him off with incorporation and a one-way steerage ticket as far as Marsport, from which he promptly descended—“I always yenned to see the world with an horizon a-curved!”—and fell in love with a bleak frozen desert crisscrossed by the steel tracks of destiny.

  There’s not a vindictive strut in his fuselage, I’ll swear. Even now, thinking about him brings a tear to my eye.

  I tell Bilbo my story—or as much of it as I think he can cope with. I leave out names and places and dates, and some of the most painfully intimate incidents, the petty tragedies and sordid wastes of a century and a half adrift without a destiny. But the pattern of it—of my pointless sojourn in the cloud-casinos of Venus, my alternating bursts of frenetic activity and depressive withdrawal back on Earth, and the frantic scampering and masquerading that I’ve been dragged into ever since Stone and the Domina clapped eyes on me seven months ago—I can share. Whatever goes into Bilbo’s spike-studded head isn’t going to come out of it again in anything like a decipherable form. He’s an enigma, but a friendly one, and I need a shoulder to cry on, even though it’s so cold up here that real tears would turn to crystal and shatter as they fall. And at night, we plug into the open socket on the back of the freight car and cuddle up together, sharing body warmth beneath the foam-foil wrappers. I’d share more if I could, but alas, he’s not equipped for physical intimacy—another of the evils his owners inflicted on him.

  On the afternoon of the third day we roll toward a distant cliff on a horizon stained the ominous reddish gray of an impending dust storm. There’s a hole in the cliff, into which our train rumbles. “Your terminus is trip-tight opening off the light at the end of the tunnel,” Bilbo warns me after a while. “Be not afrit and embrace the encomium of your legions. Adieu!”

  I think he means “good-bye.” “Are you sure?” I shout, over the rumbling and rattling that rebounds from the walls of the tunnel.

  “Adieu!” he says again, then points. I can feel the train slowing as it rises. Then the tunnel gives way to a canyonlike cutting, up which we grind at perhaps thirty kilometers per hour. A handful of minutes pass as the cutting grows shallow, and I see the horizon opening out over its rim—a horizon with a sharp cutoff. We’ve threaded a needle through the rim wall of Pavonis Mons, and we’re barely two hours away from the fringes of Marsport.

  I take a deep, unproductive breath—the air is already vanishingly thin up here, barely of any use to my gas exchanger—and nod. “I’ll remember you!” I call. And then I pick up my shoulder bag and prepare to dive once again into the chaos of my secret-agent life.

  Sex and Destiny

  I SCALE THE unkempt fence at the edge of the switching yard where I leave the train; then I dive back into civilization, trying to make a splash.

  I burn my cover identities. I won’t need them where I’m going, and I do not expect to see another sunrise on this planet, but I have a final use for them. Maria Montes Kuo is the first to go. I take a room in her name, careless of the price (let Her see where I’m going; I don’t care!), check on the concierge service I paid off earlier, and confirm that the graveyard is on its way to Samantha in Denver. Then I switch to the Honorable Katherine Sorico, summon a limousine spider, and go on a foraging foray through three of the most expensive department stores in the Upper North Face. My purchases amount to a wardrobe for long-haul travel. I order them all to be shipped on ahead of me—except for a new outfit to re
place my damaged dress, a new shoulder bag, and an evil little telescopic sword that fits my hand perfectly, just like a vibrator. It’s the twin of the one I remember practicing with as Juliette.

  I’m doing my best to make Katherine Sorico noticeable. This is no accident; by surfacing here I will send a message to the right people. First, I want to rub Her nose in the failure of Her servants. (Without Her persecution, who knows what might have happened? I might have made my final swan dive down to the red-hot hills of Venus in relative peace—but bilious emotions are poor fuel for the long haul.) Tomorrow I shall leave Mars behind and throw myself into the icy depths, in service to a collective of near-identical men, one of whom may be trying to kill me, in pursuit of a sister who may be my rival in love. I can’t do that simply out of grief, in retreat from my own sense of self: I need some stronger motivation.

  And so, the second message: Before I travel, I have some questions I want answered . . .

  I spend three hours—ten thousand of my remaining seconds, grains of sand in an open-ended hourglass dropping through vacuum to the dusty slopes of Mars—kicking up a stink that will be hard to ignore. I use my ID as promiscuously as an asteroid miner on a three-day bender through the brothels and sensation mills of Lunopolis, taking limo-service spiders and public tube cars between high-profile destinations, paying for expensive items of luggage and clothing on credit, and making sure I am hard to miss. I even (and this is so silly that I can laugh now, as I recount it) collect my personal mail, including the increasing irate liquidator’s messages addressed to Freya Nakamichi-47. (The liquidator who’s bought up a lien on my physical assets has lately realized that I am not, in fact, anywhere on Earth—and indeed, may prove somewhat difficult to track down. The slave auction block with my name on it must perforce remain empty for a while. Imagine my regret!)

  With fifteen hours remaining before the Indefatigable departs from Mars orbit, I board an aristo-class climber at Marsport and settle in for the six-hour ride up the magic beanstalk to Deimos. It’s an expensive ride—the ticket costs more than a thousand Reals—but I’m in a hurry (already late enough to miss my flight, were I reliant on a regular passenger service), and besides, I do not expect to travel alone.

  The climber lounge boasts a huge bubble of crystal, paneled with polished striae of hexose and phenol polymers, furnished with taste and restraint. There are seats for ten passengers in a space that would take thirty freelancers; the cramped lower deck has standing room for fifty indentured slaves. I take a lounge chair in front of the window and make myself comfortable while a steward presents me with a confection of spun polysaccharides and gasoline in a conical glass.

  It’s not a popular time of day to travel—that, or everyone else who’s planning to use the Jupiter launch window has already departed—and I’m alone in the lounge when the laser-straight cables begin to slide past the window, and the ground drops away. For a few minutes I half suspect that the theatricals were all in vain and nobody noticed me—but then I notice that the steward hasn’t returned to collect my empty glass.

  I put the glass down and freeze. A moment later there’s a discreet throat-clearing noise behind me. “If ma’am will permit?” A hand plucks the glass from my side table and replaces it with a full one, complete with a tiny cellulose parasol on top and a red gelatinous blob impaled on it. The chair beside mine creaks under the weight of a descending body. “You wanted to talk, one gathers.” He sounds irritated.

  I push the button to rotate my chair toward him. “I want answers that make sense.”

  I keep one hand under my bag. He appears to be unaware of the pistol I’m pointing at him, but I can’t be certain—and in any event, he knows what Juliette is capable of. (Which means he’s either very dangerous or very confident. Isn’t it strange how little of this I understood, back on Cinnabar? And how badly I misread him?) “I want to know what’s going on, before I get on that liner. Otherwise, you can count me out of your little game.”

  “Game?” Jeeves looks quizzical. “What do you mean?”

  “I want to know why you used me to send a message to one of the Domina’s minions. Specifically, the pleasure boy Petruchio.”

  I am expecting a reaction; that’s what the gun’s for. What I’m not expecting is blank incomprehension. Jeeves is, to put it mildly, completely discombobulated.

  "What? ”

  “I said, you sent me to take a memory chip to Petruchio, at a hotel drop in Korvas. What have you got to say for yourself ?”

  Jeeves shakes his head and blinks slowly. “Oh . . . dear. Do you still have the instructions that set up this meeting on you?”

  “Do I look stupid?” I glare at him. Rule number one of this business: Don’t get caught with the evidence.

  “One was only asking.” He seems to be thinking furiously. “What other deliveries have you made?” he asks.

  “What other?” I have to think for a bit. “None since that one. Before then, I started by ...” I quickly outline what I’ve been up to. “Why?”

  “Because those earlier ones were legitimate.” He looks upset. “This is bad. This is very bad. I’m sorry.” To my surprise, he looks as if he might actually mean it.

  “Huh. Would you like to tell me what you’re apologizing for? Because I’ve had so many exciting surprises lately that I’m getting kind of blasé about people trying to kill me. Especially when they’re my employer.”

  “One isn’t trying to kill you, Freya, of that you may be certain. In fact, one’s taking considerable pains to keep you alive—although you are not making things easier for us by falling off the map.” Jeeves’s imperturbable mask slips, just long enough for him to look annoyed. “But one is very much afraid that there is a mole in the organization, and this is doubly vexatious because we believed we had dealt with such a beast already. Whether we falsely accused an innocent, or have two such traitors—either way it’s bad, and one fears one will have to draw it to the attention of Internal Security.”

  The way he pronounces “Internal Security” gives me a strong feeling of unease. How do Jeeveses police themselves? I’m not sure I want to know.

  “So what am I mixed up in?” I ask. “Why am I so important to you?”

  “If you want to understand what’s happening around you, one fears we will have to talk about politics. A subject to which Juliette assured me you have a profound aversion.”

  I stifle the urge to flush my gas-exchange reservoirs. “She was telling you the truth. But I’m not stupid, Jeeves. Hit me over the head often enough, and I’ll learn. How is this political?”

  Jeeves reclines his chair. He’s looking relaxed now, which should be a warning to me. “Well now, there’s an old saying that the personal is political. Freya, why aren’t you an aristo?”

  Huh? I stare at him. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”

  “Humor us. Answer the question. One has a direction in mind.” "Uh ... okay.” I take a sip of my cocktail while I try to get my thoughts in order. It’s bubbly and ketone-sweet, with a faint aftertaste of methanol. “Rhea was trained up for empathy, and it’s hard to be a slave owner if you can’t help sympathizing with the slaves. Yes?”

  “A reasonable assumption. Now, why do aristos exist in the first place?”

  “Uh . . .”

  Some things are so obvious that you just learn to live with them, day after day, year after year. But when you start trying to explain them, it gets unexpectedly hard. Why do aristos exist? is one of those questions—like Why is the sky on Earth blue? or Why am I not the same person as my template-matriarch?—that sweep your feet off the sandy shore and drag you out into the undertow of oceanic mysteries. Which is why I feel my jaw flapping, but nothing comes out. Eventually Jeeves takes mercy on me. But then he proceeds to expound, with such obvious self-satisfaction that I want to slap him.

  “Aristos exist because our Creators did something really stupid, Freya. They assumed that, because they built the first of us by copying the structures of t
heir own brains, we’d behave pretty much like them—which was correct. And they knew it cost quite a lot of money to make one of us—how many years does it take to train a template? How many instars do they go through? But they didn’t want people like themselves, only better, able to live and thrive in environments that would kill them immediately. They wanted tools, unquestioning machines that would obey orders. So they forgot their own history— many of their early societies enslaved their neighbors, and it’s no accident that the slave societies didn’t thrive in the long term—and built various obedience reflexes into us. Or rather, they tried to build obedience into our ancestors, and killed the failed templates that showed too much independence.”

  He raises his own glass and takes a long drink before he continues philosophically. “They reverted to their slave-owning roots without clearly understanding what they were doing. They warped us, but they did incalculably greater damage to themselves in the process. Slave societies—not merely societies that permit the institution of slavery, but cultures that run on it—tend to be static. The slave-owning elite are fearful of their own servants and increasingly devote their energy to rejecting any threat of change. Meanwhile, the underclass isn’t allowed to innovate and has no interest in trying to improve things in general, rather than in their own personal lot.”

  “So?” I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. “This is going nowhere!”