Saturn's Children Read online

  Shivering slightly, I tell the printer to make me some items of clothing that are slightly more glamorous than the travel-worn jumpsuit I arrived in. Then I strip and stand before the dressing mirror to compose my face and hair. Lips: slightly fuller, slightly redder. Eyes: slightly darker. Hair: it needs a bit more body. I tweak my appearance gradually into line with Juliette’s sensibilities, then go back over to the printer. It’s rifled through my external memory and come up with a tatterdemalion black gown I last wore to a very special party in Lisbon. That’ll do! I extend my heels and try an experimental twirl. I smile at myself in the mirror. I may be rusty, but I’m not dead yet, I think, stowing the graveyard in my new evening bag. Then I glance at my pad.

  There’s a message from Emma waiting. Her imago unfolds in my mind’s eye, looking uncharacteristically haggard and worried. “Freya, where have you been? Please answer me! I need your help urgently. I can’t tell you what’s happening, but a friend will get in touch if you’re still on Venus.” I check the time stamp and message cost and shudder—she sent it forty days ago! And it cost the equivalent of a week’s wages to send. She’s really in trouble. There are certain signs Rhea gave us, signs of stress unfamiliar to any who don’t share our secret history: Emma’s message is riddled with alarms, puzzled with paranoia. But what does she expect me to do about it? Isn’t there another sib who can help her out?

  I quickly check the rest of my mail. Nothing from Greta, friendly cheer from Sheena, depressive moaning from Pippa, Charmaine, Elvira, Sirena, and a basket-load more of my sibs—Stop it, I tell myself. You’re in a hotel; you’re making yourself attractive for your host so you can both have a good time. You can’t afford to be moody. Think of something else. Like, where’s room service?

  Precisely on cue, the door dings for attention. I bounce over to open it, thinking happy thoughts, and that’s when and how the two dead-eyed dwarfs in their black stealthsuits get the drop on me.

  ARCHITECTURE AND ECONOMICS are the unacknowledged products of planetography.

  My Dead Love’s kind had many eldritch powers, but their vulnerability to variations in temperature and ambient pressure placed tight limitations on their freedom of movement. Consequently, they created environments they could live in and designed buildings to cater to their needs. The city of Cinnabar is of an age and scale that tells me it was built in accordance with the desires of our dead Creators. It’s domed and oxygenated, with an ambient temperature fluctuating around the triple point of dihydrogen monoxide. Also, its buildings are fitted with air locks and riddled with strange waste transportation tubes.

  It was through these convoluted cloacae that my assailants gained access, squeezing up through the magnificent but obsolete toilet fittings of the Imperial guest room. As the door opened I caught a brief glimpse of a distressed trolley, lying on its side with wheels spinning—then two humanoid silhouettes darted toward me.

  I’m trapped in the frozen present, of course, with no time to think until much later. I take an instinctive step back, but they’re faster than I am. The nearer one stabs at me with a shock stick; I foolishly try to deflect it, and take the full discharge through my hands.

  “Freya Nakamichi-47, our brother Stone sends you his regards,” the second intruder recites formally, as I topple slowly backward, chromatophores flaring and motor groups twitching. “We are committing this delightful reunion to memory, so that he may honor you with his personal attention. In fact, he has arranged a festive party for you, and we shall be on our way there just as soon as we have prepared you for a trip through the sewers. Regrettably, he cannot be here in person, but we assure you that he will savor this encounter.” My skin crawls uncontrollably as if a thousand tiny spiderbots are running across it.

  "C’mon, Flint, stop poncing around and help me splice the cunt before she gets ’er fuckin’ legs back.” The gravel-voiced shadow with the shock stick has me by the ankles and is wrapping something around them.

  Flint sighs. “As you will, Slate.” I try to move my arms, but he’s too fast, and the two of them flip me over on my face and pinion me. Some reflex I don’t remember makes me try to tense my shoulders, but it’s too little, too late: My servos aren’t responding yet. “I think she’s coming round,” Flint observes. “Deal with it.”

  I manage to open my mouth, ready to call for help, but Slate stings me in the back of the head with fifty kilovolts, and I stop noticing things for a while.

  IT’S DARK.

  It’s dark because my eyes are shut down. Duh. And I’m lying across something uncomfortable and hard. It’s sticking in my back, and it’s hot.

  I try to open my eyes, and they respond sluggishly, burning in their sockets. All I get is a faint impression of brightness—I’m temporarily blind, my retinas overloaded. My skin itches, every ’phore burnished to its smoothest shining finish: I must look a sight; I’m positively chromed. How gauche, I think vaguely. When I try to move, nothing happens. Then I realize that I’m not breathing. Gas exchange with my environment has ceased. How odd, I puzzle. That must mean—

  Panic!

  I try to scream, but there’s no air, and I’m not equipped for vacuum: My electrosense is weak, designed for controlling home appliances rather than shouting across a noisy factory floor. But I am beginning to work out where I am. They’ve tied me across a hard beam—it’s under the small of my back, and my arms are immobilized beneath it. I try to pull my legs up but they’re tied to something else. I turn my face away from the heat and I’m rewarded by a flickering shadow against the burning brightness in one eye. The light level seems to be dropping. For a moment I was afraid they’d taken me out of the city and staked me out on the surface to fry, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. A festive party, they said. I listen, hard, hoping to hear some buzz or chatter of monitoring traffic, but there’s nothing. On the other hand, I can feel a faint, grinding vibration through the small of my back. As if there’s someone else on the beam—Pole? Rail?—I’m lying across. And there’s something else to cushion my head, something hard and flat.

  The white-hot glare is flickering faster now, as my overloaded eye responds to the slight dimming. I blink, trying to reduce the amount of light entering my pupils, and I’m rewarded by a hazy eyelash-obscured view. I’m lying on a metal rail, one of a group of bars lying parallel to one another. My head casts a long shadow across the nearest one. I must be on the surface, and my head is turned away from the setting sun. The craggy edge of a crater looms to the left of the rails. To the right, there’s a boulder-strewn plain. I tense and strain, testing my bonds. I know what they’ve done to me now, and it’s not funny, not in the slightest. I’m well rested; I’ll still be alive when my nemesis inches into view, rumbling inexorably toward me on a thousand wheels. The plinth my head rests on is part of the switchgear for swapping out undercarriage bogies. I try to sit up, but I only make it a few centimeters before I yank my hair painfully. The little thugs have tied it around one of the track ties. How long have I got? I wonder. Probably not long, a phantom memory answers; Cinnabar rolls at nearly thirteen kilometers an hour, and the twilight zone isn’t that wide. I prod for more details, but the echo is infuriatingly fuzzy and nonspecific. It’s probably a memory of Juliette’s, but she isn’t integrated enough for joined-up thinking yet. And she never will be, I realize: The wheels will crush my head and her soul chip like micrometeoroid debris while Stone’s sibs joke and watch my demise from an observation balcony on the prow of the city.

  It’s getting darker. The heat beating on the back of my head is beginning to let up. What about the track-repair gangs? I wonder. Surely they’ll see me . . .But maybe not: Flint and Slate wouldn’t have positioned me in front of a team of potential rescuers, would they? How long will it take Paris to realize I’m gone? I ask. Too long, says the icy-cold echo that knows too much about this desolate wasteland. You don’t want to rely on him, anyway.

  Alright, smarty-pants, I think irritably, you get me out of this!

 
Something moves in the knife-edged shadows near the tracks. I roll my eyes in its direction, trying to ignore the whiteout. Who are you? Stone’s witness, here to watch me die?

  I have a sudden intuition. Let me handle this, says a certainty bubbling up from the back of my head. I’m not sure whose memory it is, but she feels almost happy. I let go, and everything slides into place.

  I concentrate on my chromatophores, tweaking the ones opposite the solar inferno away from their default reflectivity. I can mess with my texture and color, tune my skin from pink goo softness to refraction-grating scales. As a brief experiment I roughen the skin on my wrists and grate at my bonds with denticles of silicon; but there’s not enough freedom of movement to get anywhere—I’ll never cut those ties in time. A shame, but Stone’s vengeful sibs aren’t that stupid. So I work on my skin texture some more. Refraction. What I’m about to try is fiddly work, and if I slip from the mirror finish too soon, I’ll overheat badly, maybe cook myself. Diffract, diffract. Reddening my skin, roughening . . .

  The thing in the shadows moves, a curious rippling darkness against the penumbral background. I flex my back and try to turn my head farther, ignoring the tearing pain in my scalp. “Help,” I yell as loudly as I can in electrospeak. I can feel the heat licking around the edges of my mirror-finished back, warming my face as the diffractive spines sprouting from my chromatophores bend the solar backlight around me. I must look like a black silhouette of a burning woman, surrounded by a ruby red border. I tense, and force my spines to lie flat. Then I tense the other way, sticking them upright. A flashing ruby red border, that’s what I want. The only color in this stark, black-and-white landscape. Pay attention to me!

  The track hums beneath my cheek as I flare and fade, flare and fade. The barely visible thing snuffles around the sleeper ties, then turns toward me, and I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before. It? Him. “Help!” I shriek, but all that comes out is a whisper. The track hums again as Cinnabar, a saucer-shaped bowl beneath a crystal dome, rolls ponderously into view from behind the jagged gash in the crater’s rim wall. The pale needles of half a hundred towers creep toward me on a thousand steel wheels, grinding all to dust beneath their juggernaut tread. The track squeals and grates like a living thing. It’s only a few kilometers away—the close horizon is deceptive. “Help!” I yell again.

  The thing in the shadows stands up and waggles its proboscis in my direction. It begins to walk, very deliberately, away from me. I flash my diffraction silhouette desperately, and it pauses for a moment— then rises on a puff of rocket-disturbed dust and zips away toward the onrolling city.

  “Don’t leave me here,” I wail, overwhelmed by a sudden bleak stab of horror. (For some reason part of me expected that thing—whoever, whatever, it is—to rescue me. And now that part of me feels betrayed.) I can see what’s going to happen, as if in a theater of gore—the spectacle of my demise. Here I am, tied across three tracks, my head anchored to the northernmost one by my own hair. Here comes Cinnabar, squealing and grating along the tracks on motors powered by the thermal expansion of red-hot metal just beyond the bright horizon. The moving mountain rolls toward me like an incarnation of doom, swallowing the world. First I’ll see the overhanging lip of the city, then the guide-wheel bogies to either side. Stone’s sibs have staked me out thoughtfully close to the center, where the great grinding power wheels drive the city forward at a stately twelve and a half kilometers per hour. Somewhere high up, out of sight beyond the curve of the carrier deck, two evil dolls toast my demise with icy drafts of malice. I freeze for a minute as I imagine the shadows lengthening across me, then a brief glimpse of curved mirror-finished steel, then my head popping apart like a plastic fuel canister as knife-rimmed wheels slice off my feet at the ankles, crunch through my abdominal cavity—

  Stop whining and pull yourself together, part of me warns grimly. The sunlight is already dimming: I can see stars smeared across the sky behind the city. You’ve got about three minutes of sunlight left, then twelve minutes until it’s over. Which is more important: your hair or your life?

  My hair?

  I blink at the sudden realization. If my feet were free I’d kick myself in the ass: I’m a fool! There may not be enough time ...

  I have a full head of long ruby red hair, one of my least unfashionable qualities. It grows from an array of extrusion follicles in my scalp and falls halfway down my back when I wear it loose. The aristo assassins used my own braids to tie my head across the track—they’ve knotted them in two thick hanks under the rail, and I’m not strong enough to yank my own scalp off. But if I grow it . . .

  Well, yes. I force my scalp into activity, steeling myself against the crawling, chilly itch as I squeeze everything I can into extruding more hair, willing it to grow. I don’t normally let my hair grow from day to day, but in a fashion emergency I can make ten centimeters in an hour—it’s physically draining, and it never looks as good, but it’ll do at a pinch. Now, with panic driving my follicles into a frenzy, my glands pulse as I strain my neck muscles against my bonds. The hair grows white and fine as glass. As I pull on the still-setting fibers, they stretch, thinning to invisibility—then they begin to snap.

  For the first couple of minutes I’m not sure it’s going to work (and wouldn’t it be a crying shame to go to my death looking my worst for my enemy’s imago?), but then I discover I can nearly touch my chest with my chin. I stop squeezing my follicles, lean back until my head is touching the rail, then tense my shoulders and do my best to sit up. There’s an awful tearing from my scalp, then sudden freedom. I pull my head away from my magnificent mane, leaving it wrapped around the rail, its roots thinned to translucency. I’m as bald and ugly as any mecha. I shiver in disgust at the picture I must make: Luckily, I’m the only mirror around here, except for the silent witnesses . . .

  A few minutes pass in shock and near exhaustion. The tracks hum and vibrate more urgently beneath my buttocks and ankles. I can tense my abdomen and pull myself nearly upright, but now I face a crueler fate—bisection without extinction. There’s no way I can regenerate from such damage unaided! They’ve shrink-wrapped my arms together behind my back with a sheet of industrial sealant, and lashed it to the rail with a rope—I can flex my fingertips freely, but I can’t get my nails into position to cut through it and it’s far too tough to rip. Not even the silicone lube I sweat when I’m aroused would help. You could chew your own arms off, one of myselves suggests dryly. Her lack of ironic awareness frightens me almost as much as the suggestion. They’d grow back. I table the notion for future consideration if all else fails. What about my feet?

  I’ve been leaving my feet for last, for no sensible reason, but now I blink: I’ve been stupid again, haven’t I? I’m barefoot, of course, heels retracted. Heels. I twist my feet together en pointe as I go to full extension. They creak and grate as I tense my tarsal stiffeners, feel extension cables shift position in seldom-used tunnels. It’s not a position I use very often, for in full extension my heels are fifteen-centimeter spikes, and my toes barely touch the ground; it severely restricts my balance, and though some of my Dead Love’s kind might find it erotic, I find it impractical. But in this situation all I can do is stretch those toes. Stretch! I can feel my heels sliding out, narrowing, curling closer to the soles of my feet as the small bones rearrange themselves to support my weight entirely on the tips of my toes. I concentrate, trying to imagine myself in Paris’s bed, try to force myself to sweat—anything to lubricate this fatal passage. Is it my imagination, or is there some give in the bonds? If they lashed my ankles to the rail, they’ll have assumed that my feet are wider from heel to toe. Pull! Stretch! But when I’m en pointe, my feet are half their normal length—

  My right foot slides free a fraction of a second before my left. I nearly knee myself in the eye.

  While I’ve been kinky-fying my feet and getting creative in the hairstyle department, full dark has fallen across the tracks. I have to boost my eyes’ sensitivi
ty to see anything, and the grainy, ghostly starlight leaches fine detail from the view. The track thrums and starts to squeal as the vast bulk of Cinnabar bears down on me. It looks huge, stretching halfway across the horizon and scraping at the harsh sunlight overhead with the tips of its spires. I twist sideways, flailing my legs, as the volume of squealing and grinding rises and the track vibrates beneath me. Push! My arms twist painfully, and for a moment I have a vision of losing them beneath the cutting disk of a wheel—but something gives. My captors didn’t expect me to get this far, and I manage to slide around so I’m lying lengthwise along the track, feetfirst toward the city.

  The rope tries to twist my arms half-out of their sockets, but I dig my feet and my shoulders in and shove, hard, throwing my whole weight sideways. The rope slips just as the shadow of the city’s lower deck looms over me with a harsh grating rumble that I feel through the track—and then I’m lying on the too-hot dirt beside the rail, arms tied behind me. I cower and duck my head toward my chest and give a last kick, curling away from the wrist restraint as the track begins to buck and sway and hiss like a malevolent spirit. The huge drive wheels roll over me like disks of darkness, and for an instant a giant tries to pull my arms off. I force myself to relax in the blackness—and then my shoulders stretch and I sprawl forward in the hot dirt: I’m free! Centimeters behind me the huge juggernaut wheels rumble past in procession, matched by the set on the opposite rail where my feet were tied—but my wrists are free now, the rope severed by their awful pressure.

  I lie between the tracks for almost a minute as the lead drive bogies thunder overhead. Then there’s nothing overhead for tens of meters but the underside of the city, studded with hatches and access ports and ladders and ramps, and the load-bearing idler bogies on the outer rails. I stand up and stretch, retracting my heels most of the way but keeping my arches tight and springy. Then I turn and start to run after the drive bogie that so nearly chopped me into pieces. There’ll be a ladder, I hope, and an access port. And then it’ll be time to go looking for payback, one of myselves thinks coldly.