Saturn's Children Read online

  “Yes they do,” snipes Miss Rutherford. “They just don’t care for the hired help.” She turns to me. “Your posture is wrong, dear. You move with confidence, but you are prepared to step aside if anyone crosses your path. Domina Katherine would order any of her serfs who obstructed her in public to suicide rather than allow herself to be impeded by them.”

  “But she wouldn’t pay them any attention until they got in her way. Little Twinkletoes here isn’t even getting that far,” Oscar replies. “She’s too anxious—”

  “Oh fuck off,” I snap, momentarily falling 100 percent into the desired rich-bitch persona. “I’ll offend whomever I want to as and when I want!”

  I notice Oscar looking away from me, and follow his gaze toward the open door.

  “One hopes one was not interrupting anything of great importance?”

  “Nuh-oh.” I can’t say precisely what it is about Jeeves’s expression that makes me edgy, but I focus on him immediately. “What is it?”

  “We must talk,” he says, and retreats.

  “Looks like school’s out,” says Oscar.

  “You think?” I hurry after Jeeves before Miss Rutherford can further critique me. I know she means well, but it becomes wearing.

  “This way.” Jeeves strides past a dojo where masked agents practice low-gee violence on each other, then along a corridor and up to a secure door I have not been through before. I hurry to keep up with him. “We apologize for the haste, but it appears that the consignment is due to arrive here shortly, and there is word from the Port Authority that a fast liner, the Pygmalion, is beginning preparations for departure in the next couple of standard days.” His eyes twinkle. “A rich eccentric has offered to pay for all accommodation remaining unoccupied at departure in return for an expedited charter flight.”

  “To Mars . . . ?”

  “The Jeeves Corporation is not infinitely rich, my dear; it is not our doing. But fortuitous happenstance is something that we are adept at diverting to our purposes, what?” He opens the door. “Katherine, I should like to introduce you to Dr. Murgatroyd, from the Sleepless Cartel. Needless to say, they’re the supplier we’re working with. Excellence, Katherine is to serve as the courier for your payload. Perhaps you would care to brief her on its care and handling?”

  I gulp and take a hesitant step forward. What the Honorable Katherine would do slips from my mind and shatters beneath a many-faceted gaze as Dr. Murgatroyd turns his three heads and two instrument platforms to bear on me.

  I’m no morphophobe. I can cope with people who look strange or are the wrong size and shape; ancients know, I’ve had enough experiences of that kind myself. But the doctor’s design puts my fight/flight response on notice: Part of me expects him to chop me up for spare parts at any instant. “Greetings, Katherine.” His voice resonates from a pedestal off to one side. It sounds like it’s being put together by cut and paste from raw phonemes. “I am very pleased to meet you. Would you sit down over here?” One three-fingered arm swings around to gesture at a reclining examination chair.

  Several of my selves scream No! distractingly loudly, but I steel myself and step forward. “What do you have in mind?” I ask, trying to put the right note of arrogant disdain into my voice.

  “A preliminary examination of the host’s abdominal cavity is indicated, ” Dr. Murgatroyd buzzes. “No intrusive surgery is required at this time. You have no cause for alarm.”

  “Alright.” My voice wants to quaver, but I don’t let it. I climb into the chair and pull my feet up into the stirrups without so much as a glance at Jeeves. “So. What exactly is it you want me to deliver?”

  The Ghosts of Mars

  MUCH LATER, RECLINING on a chaise in the grand saloon of the Pygmalion as I stare through the crystal porthole at the burnished disk of recessional Mercury, I think back to that examination, and to Dr. Murgatroyd’s explanation of what it is I am to do. I stifle a cold shudder.

  “The payload is inactive,” Murgatroyd explained, “and it is not going to replicate uncontrollably. It will be supplied to you frozen, in a cryogenic container, and in this state it can survive anoxia, low temperatures, and high acceleration. However, it must be activated and transferred to an appropriate thermal carrier prior to delivery, and it must be concealed from customs inspection while it unpacks itself . . .”

  I’m sure the Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico would have told Murgatroyd exactly where he could put his payload—probably at gunpoint—but I am not so tough. I simply reminded myself that I was in desperate need of paid employment and gritted my teeth.

  Jeeves is certainly making the job worth my while. If this is the worst it has to offer, then ... we’ll see.

  From my new perspective, sitting pretty in the first-class lounge of an express liner as Mercury recedes below us, the worst threat is boredom. One does not gladly hibernate if one is paying for first-class accommodation and entertainment, but this is a long journey; the distance between Mercury and Mars varies between 170 million kilometers and nearly 300 million kilometers at opposition. Pygmalion is a speedy M2P2 ship, not a slow interorbit cycler like High Wire, but even with constant acceleration on the way out and assistance decelerating from the magbeam transmitters on Phobos, it’s going to take us nearly ninety days to make the passage. The package I’m carrying needs to be activated twenty days before we arrive; until then, it’s concealed in a small cryostat in the base of a profoundly ugly black model of an extinct airborne replicator that preyed on other similar avioforms. My mission is to avoid succumbing to depression, creating a scandal, or otherwise attracting attention. Which may not be so easy, for I am one of only eight principal paying fares on this flight, and the face-achingly strange disguise I’m wearing tugs at my awareness constantly, squeezing me into the shape of somebody else’s life.

  I’m not traveling alone. “You’re an aristo, you need servants,” Jeeves told me. “Take two.” To keep watch on the statue when I am not in my cabin, he assigned me a pair of munchkin assistants, Bill and Ben, who are connected in some way with the consignment, I gather. In public they pretend to be slave-chipped servants, cowed and obedient and quick to bounce out of the paying passengers’ way. But in private . . . I have no private. If I was a real aristo, I’d switch them off when I wanted privacy, and if they were real arbeiters, they’d have no option but to let me. And within a day or two of departure, they have me wishing I could. It’s not just sarcasm and sly asides. I am required to act in character, as a dominating aristo bitch; they are my servants. It sets us up for chilly formality at best and resentful hostility at worst. And unlike a real aristo, who would have the keys to their souls, I have no comeback. The only souls I’ve got are my own and the one I wear. The graveyard travels in my luggage, locked. Merely convincing Jeeves to let me take it with me required argument, for he warned me that it would be a security risk.

  But enough about all that.

  Pygmalion is a fast solar clipper, able to sustain almost a hundredth of a gee continuously. Pygmalion doesn’t carry steerage—passengers are accommodated inside an airy, lightweight bubble almost twenty meters in diameter, dedicated to their comfort and amusement. It’s strictly first class, plus servants. As the Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico, traveling with two of her household between a business engagement on Cinnabar and the winter resorts of Olympus, nobody questions my right to a seat. But I keep my distance, sitting in a corner of the grand saloon for much of the time, quietly observing the other passengers while playing interminable hands of solitaire against myself.

  The cause of our early departure holds court at the far end of the saloon, accompanied by a stripped-down coterie of courtiers, five flappers to keep her amused throughout the long passage. The Venerable Granita Ford is old money, about as old as it comes among our kind. Her fortune just barely postdates the death of our Creators, and it shows. (One of the curses of Rhea’s Get is our painfully tuned good taste—painful because it is so easily offended.)

&n
bsp; Granita is humanoid, of course. Most of the early aristos are descended from lineages that served as deputies for our progenitors in social situations, as secretaries and carers, and consequently they are traditional in body plan—but like my current disguise, she has the bishojo features, colorful plumage, and flat, textureless skin that proclaims her anime, not animated. She and my nemesis on Venus could be evil twins. I study her sidelong, trying not to be noticed; she’s laughing at some witticism of thigh-slapping proportions that a flapper has just offered up, but her smiles never reach her eyes.

  Midway down the lounge, the second most important potentates aboard float in stately isolation, disdaining the fawning of clients. The Lyrae twins are the sole survivors of a most singular lineage—a scientific research group—now grown rich from patent banditry, their skulls studded with instrument jacks repurposed to hold the souls of their deceased sibs. These strange scholars of the night say little and move around less. They confine their interactions to the odd fish-eyed stare at any interloper who strays too close.

  And then there are the other passengers, solitary aristos and their slaves—like the Honorable Katherine Sorico. I am far from alone, but it will take much boredom to drive me into social intercourse with such as I fly with. Reza Agile, walleyed and trinocular, a bounty hunter by trade; Sinbad-15, an automatic prospecting unit made good on the groaning backs of his slaves; Mary X. Valusia, who travels in commodities of questionable origin—none of them, if you’ll harbor my opinion, are jewels in the crown of high society. They are, in point of fact, vile exploitative aristocrats one and all; and I’m resigned to spending the next three months in moody isolated discomfort.

  Pygmalion does her best to keep me distracted and entertained, of course (it’s part of her function, as hostess and conductor), but I think she senses my disenchantment. I’m just glad she doesn’t make anything of it in public. Which is why I’m surprised when she makes her presence known to me while I’m puzzling over a particularly tough hand. “Your ladyship? If I may speak?”

  I freeze for a moment as I ask, What would the Honorable Katherine Sorico do? then relax. “Certainly,” I say politely. (The Honorable et cetera would assume that the ship wouldn’t have the temerity to interrupt her game for something trivial. Therefore, she’d be polite. Right?)

  “I can’t help noticing that you have been playing a lot of solitaire,” Pygmalion says tentatively. “If it’s not presumptuous, can I interest you in a game of bridge? I’m trying to organize one for tomorrow evening, after dinnertime.” Dinnertime is an entirely arbitrary affair. While the Lyrae twins are eccentric gourmands—tucking into heaps and drifts of exotic synthetic sweetmeats before purging it from their digesters in a most disturbing manner—most of the rest of us charge our energy and feedstock in private, by more conventional means. But it’s traditional to mark dinnertime aboard ship, like playing a recording of a brass bell every seventy-two hundred seconds, and it serves as a useful marker for shipboard entertainments.

  I flicker through WWtHKSD in a fraction of a second, and incline my head politely. (One of the Honorable et cetera’s quirks is a weakness for games of chance, and as one of Rhea’s Get, I have the necessary skill to participate, feign enjoyment, and lose gracefully.) “I shall consider it,” I say, offering Pygmalion a clear win. I do not relish the prospect of socializing with the other passengers, but neither do I want to stand out, if by so doing I publicize my inauthenticity. I frown at the cards magnetically clasped to the tray before me: I have a feeling this puzzle’s insoluble.

  THAT NIGHT I dream my way into Juliette’s memory-maze for the first time.

  It’s about time I began to fully integrate her experiences. I’ve been wearing her soul chip for more than ten days now, and even in the first few hours, echoes of her ghost began to haunt me: the lingering familiarity of Paris’s touch, a sly sharp sense of the bodies tumbling in the dojo. These are things that Juliette would know better than I. Normally one experiences déjà vu from a dead sib’s memories only if one moves within her milieu, but I’ve been having hot flashes of her character ever since I met Jeeves. Some echos of my untidy life are segueing into hers. Consequently, the first bleed-through dream comes as no surprise.

  Juliette is one of my lineage, another of Rhea’s Get; but she is quite unlike me. She has odd, balletic reflexes that kick in without warning and blindside me, spinning me around in response to movements half-glimpsed from the corner of one eye. She has our meticulous attention to detail, but applies it to places and things as much as to people and manners. She’s always looking over her shoulder. She always feels watched, but not by friends. She always feels tense, but not afraid. And she has a very strong sense of who she is.

  The stars glare down like lidless, unblinking specks set deep in the sockets of a skull-like sky. It’s as black and empty as an airless crypt, and I know at once there is little atmosphere above us, even before I feel the fatty heater packs that encircle my joints under the quilted suit and heavy brocade coat that I wear. Brocade? Fabric? I glance around at the stony landscape, the low, drystone wall, seeing it in the ghostly tones of boosted vision. There’s moonlight . . . I look up at the tiny, fleeing pebble in the sky, racing from horizon to horizon, and when I look higher still I see the ghostly knife-edge of Bifrost, slicing the sky in half. That’ll be Phobos. Of course, I’m on Mars. (I have a ghost-memory of an alibi; a formal ball in a pleasure dome on Olympus, and a stealthy nighttime spider-ride while a body-double zombie covers for me for the duration of a dance card.) I look around again, carefully scanning for pursuers. I’ve got a feeling that a companion, unseen, lurks out of my sight: someone watching over me. There’s something on the far side of the wall, something dreadful and strange. I’ve come here to do a risky job, and I’m nervous. (No, Juliette is nervous. I’m frightened. Because, you know, this isn’t the first time I’ve woken up inside another of my sister’s memories—and bad things can happen to you in there.)

  A long way behind me there’s a parked spider, its open door dripping light across the reddish sandy desert. Now I know where I am, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Beyond the wall I can see the sculpted stone domes and gantries of a famous mausoleum. They loom against the unforgiving sky like the skeletons of abandoned spacecraft. I tiptoe along the path, aware that my information may be misleading; the guardians this place is famous for might not be comatose. The night is chilly, and my coat crackles around me as I walk, fabric rustling uneasily.

  The lych-gate is chained shut with an antique padlock, frost-rimed and sand-scoured. It’s the work of a moment to crack the hasp open (I carry a vicious little multitool fitted with a wrist-lock adapter), and then I slip inside and look around.

  The third expedition to Mars is the one that everyone remembers, of course. It’s a grisly tale, and a cautionary one. And so we repeat it down the years, at parties and drunken gatherings that need a frisson of fear—the tale of how, after three years on the ground, their orbital return vehicle’s oxidizer tank failed while they were pressurizing it. How they hunkered down with their remaining supplies to await rescue by the relief mission; and how a huge solar flare struck during the relief ship’s launch window, forcing its crew to abandon ship. We tell of the suicides, noble and heroic, determined by lot to stretch the supplies—the murders, too, and the madness, and the resignation and despair as the clocks counted past the point of no return. And we shudder at the arrival of the fourth expedition, three years later, half a year after the food ran out, and what they found; the commander still standing in her pressure suit, propped against a rock to greet her relief, faceplate unlatched beneath the empty sky ...

  Our Creators were clearly insane. Sending canned primates to Mars was never going to end happily. But theirs was a glorious madness! They actually thought they were going to the stars. And the graveyard custodians, having done their best to honor their charges, reflect it in their own inimitable way.

  I sneak inside the drystone walls and along the gr
avel path. Every pebble is machined to micrometer tolerances, lovingly laid in the bed that divides the carved-sandstone obelisks from the row of statues that memorialize the dead heroes of Greater Indonesia, fallen in the wake of the Indian and Chinese expeditions. Few visit the graveyard, and there has been little wear and tear since the last of our Creators shook the dirt of this planet from their boots and took themselves home to die. Consequently, the sextons have spent the last two centuries elaborating and embellishing the mausoleum. They’ve slowly turned what was once a simple and tasteful rock garden into an outlandish necropolis, a fitting memorial to a dead species’ dream of planetary colonization.

  A hundred years ago, any visitor who announced themselves to the sextons would have been made welcome, conducted on a tour of the cemetery, and allowed to meditate or worship as they would. But there have been political problems in recent times, and unwelcome incursions. Grave robbers and genome bandits hoping to find undamaged chromosomal material with their vital sa-RNA and si-RNA sequences intact—even undenatured enzymes—have repeatedly tried to steal the buried mummies of Mars. The graves of heroes have become an attractive nuisance, a magnet for the worst of our kind. The sextons responded by defending it obsessively, in that very special manner that makes ancient and deranged arbeiters with no override so dangerous.

  I pass the first impaled skeletons fifty meters in. There are two of them, delicately threaded onto rust-reddened spikes to either side of the gravel path, just before a flight of steps that leads up to a carved waist-high stone balustrade and the first row of tombs. They are child-sized, large-headed chibi grave robbers with gaping eye sockets and cracked jaws locked in a silent scream of rage and frustration. Their flensed arms still twitch their ragged claws at the thin air, for the sextons refuse to pervert their instructions by killing. I slip between them like a ghost, sparing them no sideways glance. Their rescue is not my business; and in any case, after all these years, they will likely be as mad as the jailers who have severed their speech centers and raised them aloft as a dreadful warning.