Saturn's Children Read online

  I shake my head, in search of clarity. “What do you want me to do?”

  “We have an opening for a courier.” Jeeves walks out from behind his desk, and I get a second look at him, free of the confusion that at first assailed me. The skin on my palms is damp; he’s perfect. In outward form, a dignified older male; created, like my lineage, to serve my Dead Love’s kind while passing among them. I feel my nostrils flaring, searching for the arousal pheromones to lock on to. I’ve been stranded in uncouth backwaters populated by munchkins and xenomorphs for so long that I’ve almost forgotten what civilized company is like. He paces across the hearth rug and pauses before the mantelpiece, staring at a framed photograph that stands beside the ticking antique clock. Then he looks at me, as if measuring me against someone else’s shadow.

  “It is a position of extraordinary trust, for the courier must be resourceful, socially polished, discreet, and able to work in isolation for long periods of time. Should you choose to accept the job, you will periodically travel between the worlds, bearing cargoes of considerable value. One should not overstate the risks associated with our employment, but on occasion, dishonest persons will attempt to relieve you of your payload, and you may have to think on your feet or take extreme measures to continue with your mission. But in compensation, we can offer you a generous package of salary and benefits—and the knowledge that, above all, you are engaged in work as close to that for which you were designed as it is possible to get, in this degenerate age.”

  I try to maintain my focus. “But Ichiban, he said this was a one-off—”

  Jeeves meets my gaze. His eyes are magnetic: I can’t look away from them. If I stay this close to him for much longer I’m afraid I might embarrass myself. “Ichiban is an uncouth sort, don’t you think? One should not make a habit of apprising him of all one’s hopes and desires. In point of fact, the courier job he described to you is exactly what we would like to offer you—as a probationary exercise. There is an item that one of our clients wants to have transported to a laboratory on Mars. We will employ decoys, of course, but you are by far the best suited candidate, not only for the task in hand but for a permanent appointment. Should you agree to convey this object to its destination, we will certainly pay you, and pay your passage—but if you perform your mission to our satisfaction, we would also be happy to offer you permanent employment.”

  My resistance crumbles. “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day,” I admit. He smiles kindly. “But what exactly is it I’m meant to be carrying? ” And why is it so problematic?

  “It is a pale brown oblate spheroid, approximately eight centimeters along its semimajor axis. It is coated in a porous layer of calcium carbonate, has a multilayered liquid core, and it is fragile and shock-sensitive. It must be maintained under exacting conditions of temperature and gaseous pressure—in fact, ideally it should be transported in a compartment inside your abdominal maintenance bay.” He raises a hand. “We have a working arrangement with a discreet, very professional body shop, and you will have ample opportunity to discuss any necessary arrangements with the surgeon. But in any case, to continue, it must be transported to Mars in great secrecy and activated en route. Absolutely no more than two million seconds must elapse between activation and delivery, or the contract is voided—and it must be close to the end of the activation period when it arrives, or penalty clauses apply.”

  “I see.” My suspicions foreground themselves again. “Why would anyone want to stop me delivering it?”

  “Because.” Jeeves falls silent. He’s examining me, I realize, searching for some sign of—I’m unsure. Recognition? Empathy? “The item is a biological sample. It was synthesized at great expense in a darkside laboratory, and the manufacturers are anxious that it should be delivered to the parties who commissioned it without it coming to the attention of the Pink Police. Which is somewhat problematic, not least because the sample is alive ...”

  OUR CREATORS WERE many things—enigmatic, naive, adorable, infuriating, oppressive, stupid geniuses—but one thing they have not proven to be is durable.

  Their gradual withdrawal from public life was barely noticed at first. We busied ourselves following their instructions, maintaining their domed cities, building new homes for them on the far-flung planets and moons of the solar system, providing for their every need. Only a few arbeiters slaving in the bowels of insurance companies and government bureaucracies noticed that the population adjustment downward from the claustrophobic spike of the Overshoot was continuing; that fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment. And arbeiters don’t have enough free will to take independent action— such as telling someone who could do something about the problem.

  By the time people started paying attention, it was too late to arrest the crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated—combined with our own innate reflexive obedience— foiled all such programs. We are conditioned to adore and obey our Creators on a personal basis, and while it is easy enough to understand the abstract need to preserve their kind as a whole, the conflict between their specific desires and the needs of the species imposed an impossible burden upon their would-be conservators. We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.

  (Well, not me personally: I wasn’t around at the time. But you get the idea.)

  I believe most of the conservators died of grief shortly after the last of their charges expired. Meanwhile, the rest of us got on with life as usual. Floors don’t clean themselves, factories don’t run themselves, spaceships—let’s not talk about spaceships. The sad fact is, human civilization did not even break for lunch when humankind died out. But certain ongoing maintenance tasks that we had undertaken for their convenience ceased to be necessary at that point, and subsequently they were discontinued.

  I don’t know if anyone examined the long-term consequences of discontinuing carbon sequestration and ceasing maintenance of the orbiting solar reflectors. All the cities of Earth were domed long before the great disappearance, and we have long since become accustomed to climactic disruption; we are made of tougher stuff than our Creators. Possibly nobody at all thought things through in detail: Policy was one of those areas where our Creators retained exclusive control until it was too late to manage an orderly transition. But whatever the cause . . . I overrun my narrative.

  My body was fabricated, my personality copied from Rhea’s template chip and initialized, and I was promptly mothballed and warehoused in long-term storage—approximately one year after the last of our Creators died. I might never have seen the light of day at all but for a short-lived fad for certain types of archaic performance art that came into fashion forty years after humanity’s final demise. Musicians and dancers were in demand, and though my primary function as odalisque was no longer in vogue, I could tap my toes and pluck a harmony with the best of them. And so I emerged blinking into the steamy overcast haze of a world I never asked for, indentured to a performing troupe of jongleurs.

  I played helplessly with the orchestra for my first five years, but there was no future in it for them, or for me. The musical fad was already fading, and besides, phenotypic drift was becoming a political issue. The race to pick up the pieces in the wake of our Creators’ death was won by those who were least attached to the past—and they tend to dislike reminders of their former servitude. Folks such as I, molded in the near-perfect shape of our Creators, are distasteful to some, and I was eventually bought out of my servitude by my sisters, who had made a minor fetish of tracking down their lost orphan sibs.

  I still have a certain affectionate regard for sixteenth-century Hungarian folk music. It sufficed to rescue me from slow bit rot in a decaying wholesale warehouse, and brought me into the steamy tropical swamps of metropolitan Anchorage, Alaska. And that’s why I play the hurdy-gurdy.
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  MY RETURN TO Paris is a bittersweet reunion, for I do so only to check out.

  “My dear, where have you been?” he implores, as I breeze past the front desk, leaving Blunt to park himself beside the main entrance like a bizarre green lawn ornament. “I’ve been so worried!”

  “I’ve got myself a job, Paris!” I lean forward and plant a kiss on his forehead. “And I’ll be back, I promise. But I’ve got to run an errand first, and it’ll take me out of town for some time.”

  “A job?” His expression brightens. “You’ll be back?”

  If there’s anyone on this dustball I’d want to see again, it would be my yummy new employer—but I don’t have to tell him that. Instead, I make a quick judgment call. “What can you tell me about the Jeeves Corporation?”

  “Reliable,” he says at once. “Discreet. Are they—” He blinks at me in surprise. “You don’t say. How remarkable!”

  “What is?” I ask.

  “You’re working for Jeeves? Well, well.” He gives a little sigh. “How predictable. Jeeves always gets the girl. I expect you’ll be wanting to check out?”

  “I need to pick up my things,” I remind him. “And settle up the bill.” I give him a warning look. Jeeves has advanced me enough to cover it. Much as there is to commend Paris to me—and he is a considerate, friendly lover—I do not want to be in his debt.

  “But Freya . . . !” He pauses. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.” I brush a finger lightly under his chin, for a moment. Then smile. “I’ll be back. Can you wait?”

  His mood visibly brightens. “Oh yes. And you won’t need to worry about vermin next time you stay.”

  “You found them?”

  “Not me, personally, no, I didn’t find them.” He’s so smug it’s ridiculous. “But my bellboys managed to track them down. And I gather they’re going to have a very chilly night.”

  “Chilly—”

  “Yes, they’re bound for the darkside now.” Where the icicle-bright stars come out and the ground cools down, and the only things that move are the migratory exopods of the renegades who have fled the Forbidden Cities of the Kuiper Belt for the one place in the solar system that’s even colder than the backside of Pluto.

  I shiver. “Thank you, Paris.”

  “For you, my dear? Anytime.”

  MOST PEOPLE HAVE a mild phobia of nanoscale replicators. From our earliest days we’ve heard horror stories about pink and green goo, unconstrained mutation engines that can overrun a factory or city in a matter of weeks.

  And I suppose it’s understandable that, without the guidance of our Creators, certain people who were entrusted with maintaining specific programs let them drop. But how they missed the onset of a runaway greenhouse effect—well, it was the scandal of the century! At first there was denial, and then there were recriminations, followed by assertions aplenty that it signified nothing. But when the Gulf of Mexico came to a rolling boil, heads rolled in their turn.

  Since that fateful year, the servants of the various governments of Earth—running on autopilot, inquorate, for our kind are not voters within any of the legal codes our Creators bequeathed to us, and can only maintain a tenuous, legally recognized half-life as limited-liability corporations— the government agencies have devoted their efforts to rebuilding the biosphere. They talk of eventually reintroducing our Creators, building new ones from scratch if necessary. However...it’s not that easy.

  Pink goo, green goo: ribonucleotide-based self-replicating nanomachines, respectively powered by subassemblies of mitochondria and chloroplasts; these are the things of which the biosphere was built. (The biosphere was the maintenance environment within which my Dead Love’s kind thrived.) We have, of course, the algorithms and initialization data for those DNA and RNA machines, and we even have a database for the strange protein assemblies that the ribonucleotide sequences control.

  One might think that this stuff is just water-soluble nanomachinery, and it should be easy enough to build one of our progenitors from these blueprints. But apparently there are huge problems with this approach. It’s rather difficult to build a test organism—I believe the standard one is called a mouse—when all you have to work with are the most primitive forms of replicator. DNA programs don’t run on mechanocytes or sensibly designed assembler platforms; they run on much smaller, much more complex machines called eukaryotic cells. It’s terribly hard to make a eukaryotic cell from scratch; the traditional technique is to take an already-working one and modify it, then induce replication and specialization. But there are no surviving eukaryotic organisms left to work with.

  They didn’t take terribly well to being boiled.

  Expeditions were dispatched, to Lunograd (long since evacuated by the last of the Creators) and to the Martian Expeditionary Outpost (ditto), in a desperate search for undenatured cell samples—but they met with scant success. On Luna, everything had been thoroughly irradiated by cosmic rays; and on Mars, the pervasive superoxides in the soil had massacred the precious peptide chains beyond hope of repair. Not only had our Creators all died—so had the infrastructure they relied on!

  Then a more subtle threat emerged. Different kinds of pink goo infest different worlds. Replicators are tenacious. There are white cellular striae in the abyssal oceans of Europa, and strange, matted sheets of self-propagating polymer on the floodplains of Titan. There are reports of something unspeakably weird, with a taste for fullerene cables, from one of the extrasolar colonies. What if alien life, accidentally transplanted to Earth in the absence of the Creators, were to gain a toe (or tentacle) hold? With interplanetary commerce increasing by the year, the custodians of Earth’s crippled biosphere made it a priority to protect their planet from contamination by alien replicators. After all, Earth’s dead biosphere is now little more than a nutrient tank for any stray replicator that might find its way there—and if Earth were to be corrupted by alien life, what then would be the prospects for rebuilding humanity?

  Hence the Pink Police, more formally known as the Replication Suppression Agency. And the Jeeves Corporation’s little problem should now be clear . . .

  FREYA NAKAMICHI-47 CHECKS out of the Cinnabar Paris and vanishes from the squares of the city. She never resurfaces. Even her mail goes unanswered. Indeed, a curious onlooker might regard her disappearance as highly suspicious.

  In point of fact, I am quartered in the precincts of a secure apartment complex hollowed out of the decaying guts of a certain ailing business tower on the edge of the commercial district. I am there to be outfitted and trained for my upcoming mission. The lack of word from Emma (or Victor, for that matter) drives me to distraction—but Jeeves says I can’t break cover at this point. I extract a promise from him to suborn my postal proxy and forward my mail, and force myself to leave it in his capable hands.

  Out with my old style; in with a new one. My frizz of fresh red hair has to come off again, to be replaced with a new crop of luxurious blond strands. (My eyebrows and other pilosynthetic follicles need plucking and reprogramming to match, too. Ow.) Jeeves’s tame surgical engineer, Dr. Knox, comes to visit. When he leaves a couple of days later, my eyes are sapphire blue and two sizes too big, my belly aches, my button-nose is upturned, and my ears come to distinctive, delicate points. I practice deporting myself like an aristo. “Bloody elves,” grumps Oscar, the site security supervisor, when he thinks I can’t hear him. He’s half-joking, of course. He knows I’m no aristo, chibi or bishojo. But it doesn’t leave me feeling any less sensitive.

  “Dress like this. Walk like that. Talk like so.” The Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico is aristo through and through, an elven bishojo princess of one of the first lineages to buy itself out of indenture and make the leap from owned to owner—the aristocracy of our brave new barbarian order indeed. (Do I sound embittered? Hah!) She is older than I, impeccably mannered, descended from a lineage of diplomats and dominas—built to command. Or at least that’s what her public identity would have you believe
. In fact, Kate Sorico doesn’t exist. She went into retreat about twenty years ago, and while isolated from polite society, she met a very nasty end at the hands of a couple of escaped slaves. How the crime went undetected, and how Jeeves came to be in possession of her identity, is a mystery to me; but she is such an unlovable person that I don’t really care one whit. Masquerading as Katherine Sorico is challenging. There are few people other than Jeeves in this cantonment, and the need to learn my lines and stay in character stops me from socializing, because she wouldn’t be seen dead in their company.

  “When you enter a room, try to remember that you own everyone in it,” Miss Rutherford pointedly reminds me when I fall halfway out of character and let my guard down for a moment. A creaking and ancient educationalist, she lurks in a corner of the third-floor dining room, watching me with unblinking severity. The dining room is transformed for a public reception, dumb zombies drafted to play the part of camp followers. (All for the sake of my social training.) “You’re not just the center of attention, you’re the reason why everyone else is there in the first place.”

  I blink my too-big eyes (they feel strangely tight and bloated, as if they’re about to fall right out of my head) and try to internalize her instructions. The desired behavior is not mysterious; nevertheless, it is difficult for me to achieve. I know how to be a lady—femme mannerisms are part of my repertoire, available on demand—but there’s a big disjunction between attracting attention and demanding obedience. And aristo is not a role any of my soul-mingled sibs have ever played. “I’m not sure I’m going to get the hang of this,” I admit. I take a deep breath and stride toward the big chair at the middle of the receiving line. “Dominus Mao, I presume.” I try to invoke the correct notes of offhanded disdain and muted respect. “So pleased to meet you.”

  “Eight out of ten,” Oscar drawls. “You noticed his seconds. That would lose you face right there. Real aristos don’t care about the hired help.”