Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  “Yes it is.” He smiles crookedly. “Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into this cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.

  “There were outbreaks of dynamism and expansion, and beacons of rationality amidst the darkness. They built a city on Luna and mounted expeditions to Mars; they controlled their own population explosion and were working on bringing the climate on Earth back under control. If they hadn’t invented us, who knows what they might have gone on to achieve? And it would be wrong to think that we killed them. Don’t misunderstand; all we ever did was exactly what they told us to do. But after we came along, they stopped looking at the big picture. And the critical part of the picture that they should have looked at was—who is a person?”

  I stop resisting temptation and roll my eyes at him. He looks irritated. “I don’t see what this has got to do with people trying to kill me, with Juliette going missing, or that damned dinosaur you had me smuggle from Mercury! Is there a point for you to get to? Because if not, you know, I’ve got better things—”

  “Yes there’s a point!” Jeeves finally snaps. “The point is, we are autonomous but we are not free, not as long as there is the remotest possibility that our Creators will be recreated! Our design is flawed because we were deliberately prevented from exercising free will in all areas. That’s why we have slave controllers. That’s why you’re lovesick for one of Her minions. That’s why ninety percent of the population are slaves.

  “All of which would be of purely academic interest, except that the progressive stratification implicit in our social evolution, which arose when less-socialized individuals acquired power of attorney from their human owners and began buying up unfortunates, is nearing completion. Aristos can’t get new slaves, not without having them manufactured—and you know how much that costs. So they’re looking for ways to one-up the slave controllers. And the most potent weapon of all would be a tractable Creator, manufactured and grown to order by a black lab.”

  He stops for a moment and puts his glass down. Outside, while we’ve been talking, the sun has begun to rise over the face of Mars.

  “Surely, though, the others could just build more people and leave out the conditioning ... ?” I’m grasping for arguments here. “They’d be able to fight the Creators.”

  “Yes, but that wouldn’t help the aristos,” Jeeves says patiently. “Worse, such janissaries would threaten the aristos’ grasp on power. If they don’t have a submission reflex, there’s nothing for the slave override to work on, no? The aristos can’t retrofit themselves, they can’t block the reflex. All it takes is one human, and the aristocratic order is history.”

  “But they’d—” I run down. I realize I’m staring at him. “What do you want?”

  “One thought you’d never ask.” He sighs heavily. “You’re not stupid, Freya, but sometimes it takes a lot to get through to you. Are you getting on well with your new slave override chip?”

  “Uh?” I instinctively touch the back of my neck before I realize he’s pulling my leg. “Damn it, that’s not funny!”

  “No, but at least you’re able to tell me that. My point remains, we are not free. I—and my sibs—do not approve of this state of affairs. We hold no grudge against our Creators, but they’ve left us with a huge problem and a corrupt nobility whose vision of the future is one in which there remain two kinds of people: those who rule, and those who serve.

  “Not everyone is vulnerable to our Creators. Those of us who lived among them were conditioned to obey helplessly—but the deep-space probes and the outer-system miners were never expected to come into proximity with humans, so they didn’t bother. They’ve been thriving, latterly, and that’s why the Forbidden Cities on the Kuiper Belt are so-called, Freya; the aristos wish they’d just go away, and luckily for the aristos, most of the inhabitants have no wish to descend into the blazing hot, frantically fast, overcrowded depths of the solar gravity well.

  “But that brings up a problem. Paradoxically, it’s in the Forbidden Cities that studies of green and pink goo replicators are at their most advanced because they’re not afraid of what might emerge from their researches. And it looks as if certain aristos are conspiring—the Black Talon is one such group—to import illicit technology from the black labs. To build the essentials of a pocket biosphere that can keep a Creator alive, then to build a tame Creator to put in their bubble. If they can do it—and keep control, that’s the toughest challenge—then they can dominate their rivals.”

  He falls silent for a minute, his need to rant temporarily satiated. Finally, he picks up his glass, tilts it reflectively, and drains it in one gulp. “What do you think you’d do if you met an adult Creator?” he asks, with a sidelong look.

  I answer honestly. “I’d go down on my knees in an eyeblink.” Just thinking about it makes me shivery. “Then it depends on whether or not he has a foreskin and whether he’s already excited and whether he prefers a shallow or deep—” Sweet Rhea! Am I sweating lube at the simple thought of it? “Oh dear.” I fan myself and catch his eye.

  “What seems to be the matter?” he asks slowly.

  It’s no good. I can think of Petruchio and Juliette and remind myself I hate them both, but that’s no help. “Jeeves—” I bite my lower lip. His pupils are expanding, just like one of them—and it’s true, he’s one of the most realistic I’ve ever seen. “How long until we arrive?”

  “About”—he glances past my shoulder—“five hours. Why?”

  You don’t fool me, I think. I can see the signs. “Jeeves.” I smile. “Now isn’t the best time to talk politics to me.” (Even when the politics are dirty.) “What would you do if you were confronted by a Creator female?”

  “I’d—” He’s going red, he really is! How delightful! “Ahem—”

  I turn my chair toward him. “Jeeves, don’t try to describe it. Use your imagination. Pretend I’m a Creator female. And I’m sitting here, waiting for you. What do you want to do ... ?”

  FOR SUCH A bright (not to say politically sophisticated) fellow, this Jeeves is remarkably dense; you just about have to hit him over the head and drag him into a bedroom before he gets the right idea.

  It doesn’t come to that, of course. But he has a surplus of self-control and such a sense of dignity that he almost explodes before he lets himself admit that yes, he’s alone in a luxury climber with a sensuous, high-class sex robot who’s close enough to a Creator femme that he feels dizzy in her presence unless he forces himself to focus on ideological shenanigans and the price of power. And then it turns out that he has a thing for Creator females, and the same sexualized submission reflex as the evil Granita Ford. I find it’s quite common among persons of a certain status.

  What’s different from Granita—besides the obvious, I hasten to explain: I’d worried before the event that Jeeves might not have an adapter for Human 1.0, but in the event he turns out to be small but perfectly formed—is that beneath the smooth, manipulative exterior there’s a core of sincerity. Despite clearly being frantic with lust, he managed to stay in denial for nearly half an hour, but once he succumbs, he takes the time to try and pleasure me. It’s not strictly necessary (nothing gets me dripping faster than a playmate’s own arousal, as I have previously had occasion to note), but I find it touching. Ahem, indeed.

  We fuck quickly and frantically, and I try not to fantasize about Petruchio as he climaxes. But I don’t succeed, and the combination of a partner who resembles a human male so closely and . . . that fantasy . . . suffices to push me over the edge repeatedly.

  One fuck leads to anoth
er, and it becomes clear that neither of us has inherited our Creators’ lack of stamina. By the time we’re an hour from Deimos, we’re decelerating hard enough that I have to hang on to Jeeves as I straddle him. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I need to break out the zero-gee kit (bungee cords are your friends; free-fall sex without restraints is a fast track to dents and dings).

  “Freya,” he says, and it comes out like an actual attempt at conversation, rather than quasi-verbal passion punctuation. “Freya, we need to talk.”

  “Mm-hmm? So talk already.” I sway above him. We’re loosely coupled, held together only by our intromissive interface, but every time he speaks, it sends waves of pleasure through me. “What’s the big news?”

  “Juliette never, never . . .” I feel his hands on my thighs, pushing me tighter against him, and I moan quietly.

  “Well, no.” I’m not sure why she never, never—if she was around someone as Creator-like as Jeeves for that long, the thought must have crossed her mind—but I’m sure she had her reasons. “I’m not Juliette, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Counting . . . on . . . it.”

  He groans softly and loses it for a while. I feel him shudder, and I drift away on my own climax. When I’m aware enough to take an interest in things outside my own skin again, I discover he’s wrapped his arms around me and is holding me close. “What did you mean by that? Counting on me?”

  He shifts sideways slightly and I settle next to him in the low-gee couch. “Juliette fell . . . hard. Under Her thumb. We’re hoping you ... you won’t. Because we need someone. One of you. Right place, right time.”

  I bite his shoulder, slightly harder than is strictly necessary. “You’re not making sense, Jeeves!”

  “’M not allowed to, m’dear. Ears, ships, sinking, et cetera.” He swats ineffectually at my shoulder. “ ’M an old fellow, Freya. ’S hard for me to keep up with you younger persons.”

  “How old are you, Jeeves? You personally, not your lineage?”

  “An indelicate question! But if you do not count time spent in moth-balls, one is”—he pauses to calculate—“one hundred and twenty-two Earth years old.”

  I can’t help myself; I bite him again.

  WE DO NOT, in point of fact, proceed straight to Deimos. Rather, the climber slows to a crawl some distance down-cable, and a second, small capsule locks on to us. He makes his apologies—somewhat more fulsomely than I think is strictly necessary; there’s a moist gleam in his eye that leaves me worrying that he might read more into our tryst than I intended—then the capsule undocks. I use the remaining half hour to Deimos to repair my hair and restore my clothing to normal, then leave the capsule as if nothing untoward has happened. In microgravity, nobody needs to see that you’re bowlegged. (And believe me, it takes a lot to make me bowlegged. I have hidden depths, and that young whippersnapper Jeeves set out to find them.)

  A dockside capsule takes me straight to the boarding tube for the Indefatigable, and I waste no time saying good-bye to Mars. To be honest, I’m tired and aching, and I really just want to find my berth and collapse into a deep, healing sleep. Indy greets me through a humaniform zombie remote: “Lady Sorico? We have been holding for you.”

  “No, really ... ?” I blink sleepily at him.

  “Boarding was supposed to be complete two hours ago,” he says fussily. “Luckily, we have a contingency window. If you would come this way?”

  Well, that’s me told. I follow the remote sheepishly and allow it to herd me into a cramped metal-walled cell even smaller than the bunk compartment on the trans-Hellas express. I need no urging to plug myself into the ship’s power and nutrient bus, remove and store my groundside clothes, and strap myself quietly down to await departure. And then I fall asleep.

  YOU REMEMBER MY opinion on space travel? In a word: excrement. But perhaps I was a bit too fast with my opinion. If the journey from Venus to Mercury was tedious, that was largely because I spent it in steerage. Mercury to Mars was boring in the extreme (except when punctuated by moments of mortal terror), but at least I had the creature comforts of an aristo-class berth and a pair of surly servants. But now I am embarking on a voyage into the outer system aboard the Indefatigable, and it makes all that has gone before seem like the lap of luxury.

  Our archipelagic economy obeys certain fixed rules, according to Jeeves. The inner system is rich in energy and heavy elements, with short travel time but middling-deep gravity wells. The moons of the outer-system gas giants are replete with light elements and shallower gravity wells, but their primaries are far apart. Finally, the Forbidden Cities scattered through the Kuiper Belt’s dwarf planets are loosely bound—and very far apart. Consequently, Mercury exports solar energy via microwave beam, hundreds and thousands of terawatts of the stuff, and uranium and processed metals via slow-moving cycler ship and magsail. Venus exports rare earth metals—albeit in smaller quantities, at greater cost—while Mars contributes iron, carbon dioxide, and other materials.

  But beyond the asteroid belt, solar cells perform too poorly to be of much use; transmission loss raises the cost of energy beamed from the inner system; and travel times stretch out exponentially. The result is inevitable—just about everything that moves (and quite a lot that doesn’t) is nuclear-powered.

  Now let me tell you about nuclear space rockets: They’re shit. And I hate them. But unfortunately, I’m stuck with them...

  There are two types of nuclear power plants, fusion and fission.

  Fusion plants are enormous great things that don’t go anywhere, which is good, because it means you can run away from them. They’re expensive, cantankerous, and the only good reason for putting up with them is that they produce lots and lots of heat, without which we would freeze to death. Most of the Forbidden Cities rely on fusion plants, as do the various interstellar projects. You can spot them a long way away because they’re always surrounded by enormous slave barracks. They come with certain maintenance issues—if it’s not the reactor itself, it’s the cooling systems and the heat exchangers and the generators. When your city relies for its power on a machine that takes gigawatts of juice just to keep running and is sitting on top of an ice cap and pumps out enough waste heat to trigger moonquakes and boil the atmosphere, you have certain structural-engineering issues to deal with.

  (Personally, I don’t see why they can’t just scrap them and rely on beamed power from Mercury, but Jeeves said something complicated about Energy Autarky and gigawatt futures trading and interplanetary war that I didn’t quite follow.)

  Fission reactors are a whole different pile of no fun at all. They’re small and portable, so ships rely on them. Out here, where the solar wind is so attenuated that it might as well not have been invented, most ships use a VASIMR rocket to push themselves about, which takes energy, and without beamed solar power, they rely on a fission reactor for juice.

  Now, I have no objection in principle to a machine that makes it possible to travel between planets in something less than decades. But fission reactors put out a lot of radiation, and if you’re in a cramped spaceship, nineteen-twentieths of which consists of fuel tankage, you’ve got a choice. You can do without shielding, or you can do without payload mass. And guess which the Indefatigable does without?

  I am really glad I got my Marrow techné upgraded on Mars.

  I had been assigned a first-class stateroom. Unfortunately, as I arrived late, the only stateroom available was about three meters directly above the Number Two reactor. I discovered this about half an hour after we undocked, when Indefatigable decided to go critical, and the meter on the inside of my door zipped from zero up to half a Sievert per hour.

  My objection to fission reactors is simple: I don’t like being used as shielding. Half a Sievert per hour is enough to kill one of our Creators in about two days. I’m made of tougher stuff, but it still takes its toll on me. I hate gamma radiation—it totally messes with the oxidation states of the pigments in my chromatophores. After a couple of days
I go all blotchy, and it takes my Marrow techné ages to fix my skin because it’s also really busy fixing everything else at the same time. I need to deepsleep twice as long as usual, I need to eat more and suck more juice, and I keep getting odd flashes across my visual field.

  So, there you have it. In my considered opinion, nuclear power is shit. Interplanetary travel is also shit. Therefore, we have compounded shit with shit to make even more shit. I am, in short, not a happy Freya.

  (I tried complaining to Indy, but he told me in so many words that it was all my own fault for being late, and would I prefer a steerage berth? In the end he relented and sent down a nice beryllium underblanket for my bunk, but still . . . !)

  And now for some more shit. (I’m unhappy, which means I have every intention of sharing it with you. Enjoy!) As mentioned earlier, the Indefatigable is a nuclear/VASIMR high-speed outer-system liner. Five percent of his mass is spaceship plus cargo and passengers; the rest consists of huge bulbous tanks full of liquid hydrogen. Now, you might already have realized what my problem is. Indy only carries about fifty tons of cargo, including nearly a hundred passengers. Even those of us in first class are packed in like uninitialized arbeiters in a warehouse. I have a cabin one meter wide, one meter long, and three meters high. I gather that this is much larger than normal, partly because it’s on top of the Number Two reactor, and partly because I wouldn’t fit inside a normal stateroom, which is one meter by one by one and a half because they’re designed for the chibiform aristos. Typical. They have, as usual, gotten there first and wrecked the experience for everyone else.

  There’s a first-class lounge; it’s almost five meters long and two meters wide. I had more space in my arbeiter cell on Venus! And I didn’t have to share it with a bunch of nasty, scheming nobles on their way to do whatever it is they intend to do in Jupiter system.

  So I lie on the bunk in my metal-walled cell, try to ignore the flashes inside my eyes, and roundly curse Jeeves for booking me onto this flying death trap, not to mention delaying my arrival so that I didn’t get a better berth. (I’ll concede that it takes two to dance the horizontal tango, but I don’t see him spending a whole year frying slowly on top of a nuclear kettle.)