Saturn's Children Read online

  The horizon is coming up fast now. I glimpse sawtooth underpinnings as a giant hand grabs us and squeezes. For a moment my vision sparkles with myriad brilliant disconnects, pixelating alarmingly; then a series of titanic jolts rattle my teeth in my head and try to squeeze me down into a puddle. My spine creaks as Lindy’s grip tightens painfully, and I can feel myself bloating, my internals settling in the grip of her foam. But then the deceleration eases, and my vision stabilizes. I can’t see directly ahead, there’s something in the way—something on the track ahead of us. For a panicky moment I think, We’re going to crash! then I realize it’s a fellow steerage passenger. The struts beneath the track are still skimming past alarmingly fast, but they’re no longer a sawtooth blur. We must be down to less than a thousand kilometers per hour. “Is it always like that?”

  No reply. My vision fades to black.

  “Lindy?” I ask.

  There is a pause. Then a strange male voice in my ears says: “Thank you for traveling with Astradyne Tours. Your journey is now at an end, and flight-support services are terminating. You will shortly arrive in the inbound reception area at Cinnabar City trackside terminus. To disembark safely, please wait until you see a steady green light above your disposable pod and the pod peels open—”

  “Lindy?” I ask again. But she doesn’t reply. And I realize soon enough that she never will. I’m on my own again.

  Silent Movie

  MERCURY, UNIQUELY AMONG the planets, is locked in a spin/orbit resonance with the sun; it revolves on its axis and has days and nights, but it takes three of its days to orbit the sun twice. At noon, things get a little hot on the surface—even hotter than down among the half-melted valleys of Venus. At midnight it’s as cold as Pluto or Eris. They build power plants here, vast beampower stations that fly in solar orbit, exporting infrared power to the shipyards of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune. To build and launch those power plants, they need heavy elements—mined locally. And guess what? Someone needs to run those mines.

  To avoid the extremes of temperature, the city of Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn. Thermocouples on the rails drain the heat of daylight into the chill of the wintry night, extracting power to propel the city at a fast walking pace, year in and year out. There are other nomad cities on Mercury, but I believe Cinnabar is the largest, and by extension the largest railway train in the solar system. But it’s no express.

  Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency—a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continuous megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long. The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach. I slide along the maglev track, a prisoner sewn up inside Lindy’s corpse, closing feetfirst with the shadows of the city until I coast up a ramp and come to a standstill beneath the arching ice-rimed shadow of Cinnabar’s vast arrival hall, with a last gentle bump. “Good-bye, Lindy,” I whisper, as the triple-jointed arms swing down out of the darkness above and unfold their cutting blades, slicing me free of her mortal husk.

  It takes me little time to clear the immigration protocols. They’re mostly concerned with monitoring for pink goo—there have been a spate of outbreaks on Venusian floaters recently—but my steerage status reassures them. (Lindy’s packing foam is riddled with digestive parazymes: If one of our Creators tried to travel that way, they’d have arrived as a deeply eroded skeleton.) “Enjoy your stay,” the shakedown captain advises me, as I pass him one of my precious reserve of Reals. “Try to stay out of the darkside, nu?”

  Darkside? I smile and nod as I step through the doorway into air and light. I’d follow it up, but I’m not on the local grid yet. I look around the concourse. Mercury is famously metal-rich, so the signs of evident wealth are misleading: They pave their streets with gold for its thermal properties and corrosion resistance. The buildings are close-fronted, windowless, and forbidding. Above my head, a partially transparent roof blocks the starlight and filters the long shadows of the towers. There are a plethora of body plans on display, but as is usual away from Earth, I’m still the outsize freak. I find a public grid terminal near one exit, and I squat next to it and guide its fibrous leech into the empty socket under my hairline. “Can’t you reduce your height?” it complains querulously. “You’ll damage me if you stretch!”

  “I’ll try. Comfortable?”

  It misses my sharp tone. “That is an improvement. Let me see. Twenty centimes, please?” I release my wallet and lean back. My vision flickers, then returns. “Your keys, now.” I let my wallet open farther and exchange keys with the terminal over the secure channel. “Good, you are now configured, Person Freya. Your mail will be forwarded. You may disconnect now.”

  I stand up, relieved that I don’t have to deal any further with the little bigot. “Bye,” I say, and run my fingers through my hair as I try to decide what to do next. New planet, first call: I’ve done this before. My weight is the first clue. I’m heavier than on Mars, but much lighter than Venus or Earth. It puts a spring in my toes even before I extend my heels. “A hotel,” an echo of one of my sibs whispers through my lips. “You need to find a hotel and install a sister who’s been here before. And you need to deepsleep.”

  She’s right. I need a local guide, however out of date. Plus, a hotel sounds like a good idea on general principles. I feel like shit. That’s not surprising, given what I’ve just been through; ionizing radiation doesn’t cause the same kind of damage in us that it causes in old-fashioned biological organisms, but most of my nonrigid tissues are mechanocytes, and high-energy particles can disrupt their internal control systems. Mechanocytes may be more robust than biological life, but they don’t have the magic replicative and repair abilities of pink goo; if you off-line enough of them, the superorganism has a problem. I can repair a handful of faults myself, but right now I’m down about 4 percent below normal—which will take time to fix—and if I let it slide below 10 percent I’ll have to look for medical help. (And won’t that be fun, with my depleted savings?)

  So. A hotel it is.

  I don’t ask for much—privacy, a door I can lock, molten water on tap, pressure, and oxygen. But swift-footed Mercury is at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, eleven kilometers per second below even rosy-cheeked Venus, and not many people come to visit. Those who do are evidently rich, or they’re indentured miners, and there’s barely anything between the swank and swag of the Cinnabar Paris and an unpressurized bag hanging from the underside of a conveyor feedline. In the end I check my schedule and discover that the gap between my arrival and the departure time Ichiban mentioned is only about six days (Earth, not local), so I bite the numb patch that’s appeared on my lower lip and go wheedle my way into the cheapest the Paris has to offer.

  The huge vaulted dome and polished olivine floor notwithstanding, the Paris is a recent construct; it’s oriented around the needs of aristos and mercantiles, heavy-element brokers and jewelers. “We have a room for madame,” insinuates the front desk, “but alas, it is not cheap.”

  “How not cheap?” I ask, leaning close to his plinth. He’s just a disembodied head on a box—the hotel is his body—but he’s a handsome head, properly proportioned, and his elusive smile is quite charming.

  “Nine Reals.” That would cover the rent on my little room for a month. “That’s per twenty-four hours,” he adds.

  “Can you do any better than that?” I ask, raising an eyebrow and trying not to look desperate. If Ichiban’s friends are paying me, I can afford it, I speculate. But if they aren’t, I’ll be in hock up to my tits, and that’ll mean indenturing myself or borrowing from my sisters, and I really don’t want to do that. I ma
y be poor, but at least I own all my own assets. “For five days?”

  “You’re one of Rhea’s line, aren’t you?” He positively purrs. “One of your sibs stayed with us a few years ago. A lovely guest, delightful company. If you can find her memories, perhaps I could lose your bill?”

  Well! So the hotel has a traditional body fetish? I run my finger along the line of his disembodied jaw, then blow him a kiss, racking my brain for clues as to which of my more dissolute sibs might have tarried here. Yelena? Or Inga? Juliette, perhaps? I know Inga had a habit of staying with high-class hotels, milking them for as long as she was welcome, but Juliette’s the one who traveled around a lot. Came to a bad end, I gather, but if she knew Paris, it’s worth trying. In any case, I haven’t worn her soul yet, so I might as well make a start on her. “What was her name?” I ask bluntly.

  “Juliette. Was she one of yours?”

  “Oh, yes.” In truth I am not moodful for this game, especially after Lindy’s torrid embrace. But I’m certain Juliette’s soul is in my graveyard, and I can let her handle Paris. (Unless she’s one of those idiots who pulled her own chip while having sex, out of a misplaced desire for posthumous privacy.) “Perhaps we can do a deal, depending on your fixtures and . . . fittings. What have you got for me?”

  “I’ll show you.” He smiles widely and a plush red-carpeted chaise rolls voluptuously up behind me. “If you’d care to take a seat?”

  The Cinnabar Paris is luxurious, traditional, and discreet. He sweeps me across his lobby and up to the sixth floor, where he installs me in the Bridal Suite. “Many of our rooms have ceilings too low for you,” he explains, “so I thought this would be more comfortable. But you must have had a tiring journey; forgive me! Feel free to call if you want anything.” And then he withdraws his motile extensions, leaving me alone in a lush, carpeted room about half the size of a spaceport, with diamond windows opening out across the top of the city dome to display a view of the mountainous horizon.

  I manage to walk as far as the bedroom bay—pink wallpaper and gilt cherubs guarding a water bed large enough to irrigate the Hellas Basin, horns of plenty and pillars of joy flanking it—then I sit down and unsling my bag. When I open it, the graveyard is covered in frost, a sprinkled souvenir of outer space. I blow on it to warm it up, then open the lid. Neat translucent soul chips stand in ranks in its brittle velvet lining. I run my right index finger across their tops, feeling their labels with my readsense until I find Juliette’s memorial. Another recent suicide in the family, if I remember the circumstances correctly. This one arrived less than a year ago, quite unexpectedly. Of late my sibs have been dying faster than I can replay their memories. I shiver: If that intruder had succeeded in stealing the graveyard, what secrets that are rightfully mine might I never learn? I hold her soul in my clenched fist for a minute to warm it up, then reach around and slide it into the free socket just under my hairline. Then I lie down, couple myself to the suite’s complementary electrical feed, and collapse into maintenance mode. That’s all I know about for several hours.

  I REALIZE THIS process may be unfamiliar to you, and I should therefore explain it in detail, but I am no initiate of the reproductive mysteries. And if you’re looking for a technical explanation, you’d better look elsewhere. All I can tell you is that within my bones there are hollow spaces filled by the techné devices we call Marrow—mechanisms that can tear down and rebuild mechanocytes, transport them to and from their designated places, and thusly repair damage. Unlike pink goo, this capability is reasonably safe: Our designers did not equip all our subassemblies with the promiscuous, wild, uncontrollable ability to respawn. So we are not subject to the efflorescences and malfunctions that haunt polynucleotide replicators. No mutations, cancer, and senescence for me!

  Having witnessed deepsleep in my sibs, I can affirm that it is aesthetically displeasing, a day trip through the uncanny valley. An onlooker would see my skin loosen and strange lumps and blemishes appear. Muscles contract and twitch, and in some cases wither. Eyes sink back in their sockets beneath tight-shut lids, then refill and harden. Over the space of six hours my body bloats and reddens, then shrinks and refirms, new mechanocytes migrating into place to replace damaged ones. Features puff up, then implode with high-speed autolysis before solidifying and reemerging. The undead deepsleeping body sprouts new and shapely cheekbones and symmetrical eyes, full lips, a strong chin, and a high forehead. Finally, chromatophores come online and add texture, color, and life to my skin. One day, if I am killed, my body will enter this cycle but not return, dismantling itself right down to a skeleton eerily like that of my Dead Love’s kind. But for now I merely die a little, and am reborn fresh and repaired. It’s the fate that awaits us all—unless we take the final cloud-top dive.

  WHILE MY BODY is restoring itself, my mind is adrift. I free-associate, dreaming vividly as I randomly integrate the shards of memories and fragments of experiences recorded on Juliette’s life, recorded in her soul chip and bequeathed to my graveyard on her death. We’re of the same lineage, initialized from a chip recorded by our template-matriarch Rhea, and so we can access memories from one another’s chips without damage or malfunction ensuing. But only experiences she had while wearing this particular chip will come through clearly; older memories or thoughts are recorded as fuzzy echos, memories of memories. Most of us wear our soul chips continuously, as backup, but there are exceptions. If you really, truly, want to do something that you want nobody to know about, not even after you’re dead, you can take your soul chip out and try not to think about your actions thereafter... and then there are the full-scale image dumps, taken in a lab with special equipment, when you want to create a template for initializing new sibs. (You can initialize from a soul chip that’s been updated for long enough, but there’ll always be dropouts and traces of paramnesia. Not recommended . . .)

  To integrate her lost decades in full, to lend an echo of life to her soul, will take me months or years. Unconscious skills and learned reflexes transfer first, of course. That’s what the mechanism was designed for: to facilitate the horizontal spread of desirable new capabilities between worker-sibs, staving off the unwelcome day of obsolescence. Actual memories and thoughts start to come through much later, after the initial neural pathways have formed. There is no pain as yet; I haven’t worn her long enough to receive more than a perfumed hint of her presence in my head, much less felt the final anguish that led her to unchip herself before she played Russian roulette with an antique machine pistol (according to Nike, who sent me the chip).

  Right now I simply sense her as another sister in my head, more extrovert and cynical than I, wearing a brittle disguise of bright and joyous hedonism to conceal the wound in her soul. Juliette did indeed travel widely—though why, I am as yet unsure—and my entry in the lobby brings echoes of déjà vu bubbling from the deep well of her memories. A sense of purpose: She was here, visiting Cinnabar, for a reason—something I do not recall from her fluffy, flighty confidences at the time.

  And then I remember some more of her time in this selfsame hotel, and when I wake up it is to find my hands damp and a hot raw flush of desire spreading between my thighs, and a yearning as deep as my core—but I’m alone in the too-large bed. Paris is too discreet for his own (and my) good, giving me time to get into the spirit of my sib’s affairs before he presses his suit. “Fuck you,” I moan in the back of my throat, unsure whether it’s a curse or a promise. I thump the unresisting mattress, then sit up groggily and take stock.

  I’m on Mercury, in a hotel I can’t afford, to see a gangster’s friends about a courier job I’m not qualified for. I managed to make a powerful enemy on Venus and I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. All I am qualified for, when you get down to it, is to be a grande horizontale for a long-dead species. Capital, Freya. Where do I go from here? I’m in the bottom of the solar gravity well: Every direction is up. Shit, things could be worse. The recurrent dream could be back. (There are times when I go without sleep f
or weeks on end, until I’m hallucinating, just to avoid it.) I suppose I could mail my soul to Emma or Anais or one of the others for safekeeping, indenture my body long enough to work up a deadhead shipper’s fee—or I could wait for Stone to track me down, or—

  I’m tap-dancing on the edge of a cliff, when I suddenly realize two things. Firstly, I’m famished. The last thing I ate was a jug of raw feedstock in Victor’s dive on the good city Ishtar. No wonder I’m anxious and jittery! I look around wildly—There must be something to eat in here—while a nagging sense of having forgotten something prompts me from behind: secondly, secondly—

  I haven’t checked my mail in over two months, have I?

  Standing up unsteadily, I walk over to the door and tap the handle. “Food. Please,” I say, remembering my manners at the last moment. “Whatever room service can manage?”

  Room service is autonomic, I seem to recall—Paris doesn’t supervise everything that happens inside his body in person, although by now he’ll be aware that I’m up and about. He’ll probably want to surprise me. I blink at a rush of jumbled lubricious memories, and feel my cheeks flush. So that’s what Juliette got up to, is it? I’ve never been one for xenomorphs, unlike some of my sibs, but it’s not something I can’t do, and if Juliette’s recollections of tumbling Paris are anything to go by, I’ll enjoy his attentions a lot.