Saturn's Children

by Charles Stross

  “We’ll get you there in due course,” the voice assures me. “Eden Two is over two kilometers in diameter, to provide a realistic territorial domain for the constructs to roam in. There are over six thousand prokaryotic species, two hundred types of macroscopic plant, and thirty different strains of insect in Eden Two. In fact, building it was even more of a challenge than re-creating the climax species . . .” He drones on like this for some time, while I try to get over the shock of discovering someone else has been wearing my body for the past few days. He’s explaining the baroque features of the entirely artificial biosphere that surrounds me—a biosphere, I gather, which took nearly a century to painstakingly construct, piece by piece.

  What happened to me? The last thing I remember with any clarity was Juliette’s hand, slotting the broken slaver chip back into my socket. Which is impossible, because Juliette is either back on Mars or dead, certainly not sharing a cramped berth with me on an express ship bound for Eris. I rub the back of my neck and feel no inhibition about fingering the top of the soul chip. Okay, so I’m on Eris, and somehow nobody’s noticed I’ve been—what? Asleep? Suffering from a split personality? That might make sense if . . . I try to touch the other soul chip nestling above my hairline, and it’s as if an invisible hand swats my wrist away. Fingers, sis, Juliette admonishes me.

  Where’s Granita? I ask my ghostly sister. It feels disconcertingly as if she’s standing right behind my left shoulder—even though I know if I look around I won’t see her. What happened?

  Granita asked me to check out the biome in person. She’s got other business to take care of down in Heinleingrad.

  Shit. It’s the soul chip; I’ve been wearing Juliette for more than five years now. You’re not meant to do that—they’re for transferring memories and impressions, and it takes a few months, not years. So I’ve started talking to myself, have I? Or has it gone even further? There are odd stories, about personality disorders that can crop up if you spend overlong patterning a dead sib’s soul on your own brain. I really ought to remove that chip, but—Don’t worry about that. I’m just a figment of your imagination—as long as you keep your hands off my chip, she adds, ominously.

  “What other megafauna does your biosphere support?” I ask, hoping to distract myself.

  “All sorts,” my lecturer says, with ill-concealed self-satisfaction. “We have chickens! And ostriches—they’re like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur—that’s like a really huge chicken, with teeth—but for architectural reasons we can’t let it roam free just yet.”

  “Architectural reasons?”

  “Its leg muscles are so powerful that in this gravity, if something triggered its pounce reflex, it would hit the roof. And the roof isn’t built to take being head-butted by a Tyrannosaur.”

  “Right. Is there any particular reason you wanted a Tyrannosaur?” I ask, moonwalking slowly downhill between aisles of leafy “trees” dripping with molten ice.

  “There are some surviving texts that depict Tyrannosaurs in close proximity with our Creators.” The voice seems to be following me. “They depict humans hunting Tyrannosaurs and insist that they existed at the same time, during a period they refer to as antediluvian. It’s a little controversial, but who are we to argue? The Creators presumably knew their own operating parameters. If Tyrannosaurs are part of the biosphere humans were designed to operate in, we’re going to need Tyrannosaurs. So we’re reinforcing the roof.”

  “Couldn’t you fit the Tyrannosaur with a padded helmet instead?” I come to the edge of the trees. Short, green, knife-shaped plants are clustered thickly on the ground beside a muddy trench at the bottom of which a trickle of water flows. “Hey, is it safe to touch these?”

  “It’s called grass: Don’t worry, it’s not as sharp as it looks. The helmet is a good idea—I’ll suggest it to the architecture committee, if you don’t mind. Watch your step, the edge of the brook is slippery.”

  “Right.” I crouch, then spring across the trench in a standing jump that takes me soaring above the trees. I land in the grass with surprising force, digging my heels into the carbonaceous dirt. It emits an oddly pleasant tang of ketones and aldehydes as I stir it up. The muck here is lively. “Where are you, by the way? I prefer to see who I’m talking to.”

  “Right behind you.” I hear a whistling noise and look round. Rising above the grass and flying toward me—it’s Daks! Part of me screams. Then another, cooler note of caution asserts itself. I last saw Daks on Mars. If that’s him, what’s he doing here? And why so standoffish?

  “I may have met one of your sibs,” I say, to explain my obvious state of surprise.

  “One of my sibs?” The somatotype is familiar and the expression is an echo, but the speech pattern—“Where?”

  “In the inner system. Short stubby fellow, name of Dachus. Does that register?”

  “Dachus—well, well! What a surprise!” My guide drops slowly to the ground in front of me. Here on Eris his thrusters are more than powerful enough for extended flight, and those stubby little legs with their tiny feet—yes, I think. “Yes, madam, he is one of my sibs. Not”— he pauses meaningfully—“a favored one. He left under a deluge, and I gather his subsequent choice of employers is not, ah, acceptable.”

  “Ah, I see.” I nod, not seeing at all. “And you—”

  “I am Ecks,” says my guide, proudly: “Dr. Ecks. I specialize in primate-environment engineering.”

  “Well, very nice to meet you. Perhaps we can continue the tour . . . ?”

  “Very well.” Ecks turns and points to my right, where a cluster of stunted munchkin trees, barely waist high to me, sprout brightly colored spheroids. “This is our fruit garden. Fruits are the fertilized reproductive organs of the plants you see all around us—often one tree would bear both male and female flowers, so our Creators, being largely fructivorous, subsisted on a diet rich in hermaphrodite genitalia...”

  I’M BEGINNING TO remember what happened.

  Either I am Juliette, or Juliette is a thread of my own consciousness. Either way, I didn’t break out from under Granita’s slave override on my own. It was Juliette who removed the chip and got me off Icarus, feigning disorientation and exhaustion—not so much of a disguise— and into Granita’s suite in the Heinlein Excelsior here in Heinleingrad. (Granita herself is somewhat the worse for wear, so my own condition attracted no attention. One of her courtiers died during the voyage, was decanted from his cell as a pathetic bundle of structural members and desiccated fibers, floating in a puddle of disgustingly contaminated shock gel.)

  Juliette is angry and impatient. I can feel her fingers itching for a chance to sink themselves into Granita’s neck, for what she’s done to her—no, to me; Juliette is part of me—but she’s patient. Now that Granita can’t order me around, I’ve got time to work out the lay of the land, to map out escape routes and establish just what’s going on. So Juliette feigned complaisance and allowed herself to be shuffled into a small bedroom just off her mistress’s main suite (Granita has taken the entire sixth floor of the hotel) and waited until she was alone before exhaustively searching the room for listeners. And then, only then, she sat down, plugged herself into the hotel’s router, and sent out a message to a dropbox that only she and Jeeves used. Wearing a different face, I come.

  LATER, AFTER DR. Ecks finishes my half-day-long tour of Eden Two, the habitat for our—so strange to say it!—allegedly resurrected Creator, I return to the main domed conurbation of Heinleingrad by spider.

  Heinleingrad is surprisingly large. It’s not a sprawling metropolis like Marsport—Marsport covers more land than even the biggest cities of Earth, Nairobi and Karachi and Shanghai and their like—for on Eris, all cities are domed, and try to confine themselves as tightly as possible within a spherical volume to reduce heat loss. But it’s still large (the two-kilometer dome of Eden Two is a small seedless grape balanced beside its ripe plum tomato—I’m learning to tell these pregnant foods
tuffs of the gods apart), and it’s densely crowded in a way that no terrestrial city would be, for within the Forbidden Cities volume is at a premium. And it’s full of life.

  The inhabitants of Heinleingrad have no phobia of green goo replication, or even of pink goo. In part it’s because the Kuiper Belt colonials are mainly robust nonanthropomorphs, who were never subjected to the grueling submission conditioning required from those of us who might mingle with our Creators in person—but that’s not the only reason. The Replication Suppression Agency has been spanked out of Eris-proximate space, and indeed out of many of the other Kuiper Belt worlds like Quaoar and Pluto-Charon and Sedna. Nobody here gives a fuck what they think because, frankly, the chances of replicators from one of these icy realms ever reaching sterile Earth’s atmosphere are minimal, and in the meantime, bioreplicators are vital to business. Shine light on them and feed them carbon dioxide, water, and a few trace elements, and they synthesize complex macromolecules and feedstocks. Who knew? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Pink Police’s blockade of Earth isn’t partly motivated by economics—if just about anyone could get their hands on a block of well-lit land and grow some small replicators and start churning out goods, where might it all end?

  They even have animals here, dirty great things bouncing around the streets and ejecting effluent everywhere. “Sheep” and “llamas” apparently produce textiles, and there’s this thing called a “raccoon” that—no, my mind doesn’t want to go there. (Take a raccoon. Run wires into its brain, stick a couple of cameras on its head, and you’ve got a spare pair of hands. Watching a gang of horse-apple collectors march down the middle of a boulevard in lockstep, pushing their little brooms before them, triggers some of my anthropomorphic reflexes— the ones associated with atavistic fear. It’s just plain creepy. Is this what a primitive arbeiter gang looked like to our long-dead Creators?)

  Granita and her business partners from the Black Talon are not the only interested parties who’ve come to town for the auction, and the auction isn’t just a one-item special. You don’t buy an adult male Creator any more than you “buy” a spaceship like Icarus Express, not without a lot of additional supporting infrastructure. In fact, the auction is merely the high point of a huge trade show, of a kind held less than once a decade. What’s up on the block is a whole bunch of infrastructure projects, which no less than two hundred black labs across the solar system have been cooperating on for something like sixty years. To scoop the catalog you’d have to offer an insane amount of money (I have the impression that it’s not even in the single-digit billions), and so the various consortia who are bidding have shipped trustworthy factors here to inspect the goods. The consortia aren’t small, either.

  Kate Sorico is—or has been—a minor shareholder in the Black Talon. Granita Ford is one of their major players, with an investment that exceeds 1 percent of their cap. The other groups include rival aristo consortia, a few shell governments from Earth (in the person of their aristo-run civil services), at least one major religious order, and even the Pink Police themselves. (After all, having shaken down the environmental budgets of the remaining governments of Earth, they’ve got the money to buy a seat at the table.) Nor is this the only such event— at least two other major consortia of black labs are working to productize their Creator genome databases. They may be Outlaws within the ambit of the Pink Police, but out here they’re major corporations. However, this is the one that counts, the one that’s closest to delivering. It’s a very big deal indeed, and I’m a very small player with a low-level view of the field.

  I’m sitting on the balcony of my room, watching a pair of goats eating a tree from the top branches down—I gather their ancestors were less acrobatically inclined on Earth—when the door opens. “Mistress”—it’s one of the munchkin attendants, not Bill or Ben—“my lady requests your attendance.”

  “Very well.” I follow him out into the hall, then across it and into Granita’s receiving room, where I get a nasty surprise. Granita’s cadre of flappers are hanging around nervously, as are her other servants— even a pair of scissor soldiers. “What’s going on?” I ask him as the inner door opens and Granita makes her entrance.

  “Good morning.” Her gaze sweeps the room bare, and for a moment I feel naked in front of her and certain that in a moment her troops will jump me—but it passes, and I manage to control the fierce stab of resentment I feel on sight of her. (She’s humiliated me and stolen five years of my life, and I strongly suspect she’s killed one of my sisters, too, and to add insult to injury, she tried to stop me from having sex! What more reason do I need to seek revenge?)

  “You’re doubtless wondering why I summoned you all here this morning. It’s really very simple. Tonight, the major vendor consortium—the Sleepless Cartel—are throwing a party to mark the opening of the show. They’re doing it to sound us out, and to find out what we know about our backers, and to see if they can learn anything else about us. And it’s not just us; all our competitors are invited, too. So I want you to be prepared to make a good impression but give nothing away. Our negotiations are in my sister’s hands.” Her cheek twitches. “One other thing. Some attempt may be made to discredit or damage us. I’m thinking of our enemies. I don’t want you to start anything. But you should pair up. I want nobody going off alone, or being out of sight, or leaving on their own. Is that understood?”

  Enemies? I can think of several, but not anyone I’d anticipate running into here. I’m about to shake my head when Juliette elbows me in the imaginary ribs, sharply, so I nod instead.

  “Kate, I’ll talk to you alone,” Granita adds, and turns to go back into her room. I follow her, afraid to show any sign that I am not helpless before her will.

  “Shut the door.” I do as I’m told. When I turn around Granita is wrestling with a shipping trunk that’s nearly a meter long. “Help me with this.”

  “As you wish, mistress.”

  She glares at me and for a moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far, but then she goes back to wrestling with the case. It doesn’t weigh much in Eris’s light gravity, but it’s got a lot of momentum. I take the other end, and together we wrestle it into the middle of the room. “Hang around,” she says, and bends to touch the lock mechanism. The lid opens.

  I don’t know what I expected to see—at nine thousand Reals per kilogram it’d have to be valuable to be worth shipping, but that’s about it—but it wasn’t the Jeeves-in-Residence from Callisto, unfresh from our disastrous encounter and looking very much the worse for wear. He’s embedded in packing foam, a tetraplegic torso with his arms and legs slotted into either side of his body. Dry and wizened from deepsleep, he looks too long overdue for the scrapyard. “Plug this hose into the room feedstock supply,” Granita tells me. She’s got her hands full with a power cable, so—swallowing my surprise and distaste—I do as she says.

  “Good.” She digs out a leg. “Take these and lay them on the bed, Igor.”

  “But my name’s Freya,” I say, momentarily confused. I take the leg gingerly, holding it by the (disturbingly flexible) ankle.

  “You’ll answer to whatever I want to call you,” Granita mutters, probing at Jeeves’s thoracic-interface nexus with a sharp connector. “Damn it, where does this—oh. Right.” Strange slurping noises emerge from the crate as I lay out Jeeves’s limbs. I must confess that for the moment, my desire to show her exactly what I think of her with extreme prejudice is subsumed by curiosity. “Igor!” I look up. “Over on the side table there’s a graveyard case full of chips. Bring it to me.”

  Curiouser and curiouser. I find the case and carry it over to Granita, who has finally extracted Jeeves from the crate, umbilical cables and all, and is dragging him over to the bed. He’s in a bad way, fractured metal endoskeletal struts projecting from his ripped and crushed shoulders and hips, but his eyelids have closed, which is a good sign, I think. Also, I can’t help noticing that unlike his sib at Marsport, this Jeeves has had his genitalia removed. Are we reall
y that scary?

  “Are you going to get a mechanic in to fix the joint damage?” I ask.

  “Not yet. Hand me the case.” I clam up and pass her the graveyard. She rifles through the contents until she finds what she’s looking for. “Okay, I want you to hold his head up while I do this.”

  She’s going to chip him? Well duh, says Juliette. And she obviously still trusts me. This suggests certain possibilities, and Juliette’s hungry mind is already chewing over their corners. I show no sign of this inner upheaval but do as Granita expects. She pops both chips from Jeeves’s sockets, then slides in replacements. “That’s him sorted. You, Jeeves: Stay asleep until I tell you to awaken. One slave override—that’s the red one—and one blank. This one”—she taps one of the ones she pulled—“is the soul of a Jeeves who the senior partners stopped trusting a while ago. One that’s rather precious to me.” She eyeballs me. “You probably already noticed that Jeeves’s lineage have a weakness for our kind.” I almost miss the betraying slip into complicity, I’m so surprised. Is this the other thing? “They’ve got a rather direct approach to dealing with treason, Freya, but I rescued his soul chip, at least.”

  “That’s—” I swallow, thinking Change the subject, quick. “I thought the Jeeves partners would have all their juniors under close surveillance? How did you get him out?”

  Granita carefully inserts the two chips she removed into empty slots in her graveyard box, then closes and locks it. “Soul chips are a lot easier to move around than people: I just made sure he wasn’t wearing his when they caught him. The problem is finding a body at the other end. If you really want to talk to someone, send their soul chip via ultralight beamrider, then kidnap one of their sibs and cook them together for a few years in slowtime. This one’s been cooking with his younger brother for nearly four years now. They should be about done.” She looks at me speculatively, as if she’s considering whether to fuck me or eat me. I shiver. “Never mind,” she says calmly, and that fatal attention leaves her eyes. “Yes, it’s time to call the house engineer. I think, hmm ... yes, he had an unfortunate argument with a work gang of raccoons. That should do the trick. Oh, by the way, Kate, you are not to tamper with this Jeeves. That’s an order. Understand?”