Saturn's Children Read online

  Huge stone sarcophagi loom to either side of the path, surmounted by heroic statuary: angels in pressure suits stand over the fallen, wings drooping and leading-edge flaps extended. Between them and behind them the sextons have carved a multitude of rough, gnarly columns surmounted by dendritic effusions of tubes and airfoils, as if in imitation of some glade of extinct sessile life-forms. (Plants, that’s what they’re called. Trees. Juliette has studied them, I recall.)

  I sneak past empty crypts and petrified trees, following the path past more monumental carvings, stelae of red sandstone bearing signs of abrasion (while the atmosphere is thin and chill, it suffices to blow storms of sand and dust across the graveyard several times in each long Martian year). Presently, my map-fu prompts me to turn along a sunken, narrow side path that leads behind another wall, shielded from the innermost circle of graves (their memorials all carved in the shape of fantastic, archaic spacecraft). I am barely fifty meters from my destination when the skin in the small of my back tenses, a moving wave of irritation nudging me up against the chilled rock surface as I sense vibration through the soles of my feet. Thud. Thud. The sexton’s ominous monopod gait is slow and tentative, cautiously advancing. They can hear through their feet, my employer warned me. If you move, they’ll get a bearing on you. And then they’ll leap.

  I’m too close to give up now! But if I move, the sexton will hear me. They’re not fast—not until they get the jump on you—but a hollow dread fills me at the thought of falling into their squamous grasp. In this garden of rest, the screaming wordless living have come to outnumber the dead. They attract quixotic rescuers despite the persistent rumors that the sextons booby-trap the soul chips of their victims. A new fear begins to steal up on me, for the monopod’s concussive stomping has stopped—and I am losing power. Out here on the stony nighttime desert of Mars, heater packs or no, the temperature drops alarmingly; the ground beneath my feet saps energy fast, and the breeze adds a wind-chill that my heavy coat cannot entirely block. If I do not move on and complete my mission, I am in danger of freezing solid—in which state the sextons will discover me sooner or later.

  Gravel rattles nearby. A titter of quiet encrypted chatter passes me by. I’m not alone in here tonight, it seems. Of all the bad luck...

  A pair of doll-sized ninjas slide past the end of my alleyway in a poisonous glide, pausing briefly to check for surprises. They miss me because I hide in the shadows like a discarded sack of gravel, my skin and hair dialed down to the black of a Martian nighttime shadow— they’re scanning for sextons, not rivals. They belong to Her, of course, and like all of Her little creatures, they are vicious and focused, special-purpose organisms designed for just one task. They’re not here because of me; they seem to be trying to reach the central crypt. That would be a disaster for Jeeves, for She is a jealous mistress. If they get what She wants, they’ll blow the dome behind them, let in the desert sands and the corrosive, superoxidizing dust to wipe the Creator tomb clean of residual replicators—and I’d get the blame.

  I hear more brief, encrypted chatter. The sexton on the other side of the wall is motionless, waiting. I can feel its presence like an oppressive weight at the back of my head, its outrage at the intrusion of motion and life into its garden of tranquil death. The ninjas titter mockingly. I close my eyes, blinking away a thin film of ice. Can I triangulate on them . . . ? They use electrosense, true, and I can feel their near-field proximity. They’re just over there—

  I look around as the first black-sheathed dwarf launches himself at me from the other end of the alley and realize, I was wrong, they tagged me the first time around! He brings a weapon to bear on me as I begin to move, and I wonder desperately, Where’s his backup?—because the one you don’t see is the one who kills you. He fires as I leap with all the force my discharging leg muscles can put out in a single extension. Something tugs at my coat as I soar into the night, the ground dwindling beneath me, and I wait for the second shooter, helpless on my arc—

  THUMP. I am not the only areonautical flier tonight. The sexton clears the wall in a huge, lurching bound. I see it silhouetted against the sky for a moment, the giant helical shell balanced above a broad, lenticular foot; I even glimpse the toothed maw on its underside, the scrapers that so patiently rasp stone and metal into shape, flense grave robbers, and mutilate intruders. But it doesn’t see me—their designer saw no need to gift them with nanometric sensors—and then I am tumbling back to land more or less on the spot where it launched itself from ambush.

  I hear screams, and a concussion that I feel through the wall, then moist, crunching sounds. I continue on my way, chastened and cautious.

  TWIN #1 HOLDS a wriggling cleaner up to the light, inspecting it minutely. “The history of life is not one of progress, but one of random contingency,” he declares pompously. “Life-forms evolve, the better to assimilate energy sources. So it says in the good book, and so I shall demonstrate.” He raises the malfunctioning microcleaner to his mandibles and bisects it cleanly, then starts to compress it between his masticators. My spirits sink: I know what’s coming next.

  This is day thirty of the voyage, and we have been reduced to salon games and philosophical debate—those of us who have no major business interests to spend our time managing at some remove, that is—but to be sucked into this . . . !

  Twin #2 casts a glance of withering scorn at his sib. “Nonsense! The religious doctrine of evolution relies on the transubstantiation of the holy design by the miracle of mutation. We do not mutate, we are manufactured. So I refute it.”

  The Lyrae twins have been restaging this old chestnut for nearly ten days, now. I’m not sure whether they only do it to annoy, or if there’s some deeper meaning to the squabble, but they keep dragging it out and rehashing it between card games. And Twin #1 insists on eating live canapés while they lock horns. It’s most distressing.

  (I suppose it’s even more distressing if you happen to be one of the snacks, but as the Lyrae twins seem to be fairly civilized for gourmets—they obey Rule Number One: “Never try to eat anything larger than your own head”—I’m fairly safe. For the time being, anyway.)

  “There’s no such thing as random mutation,” says Sinbad-15, launching itself into the debate at short notice. “Change a random instruction in a program, and what happens? It stops working. Complexity is irreducible. Yes, complex systems—like people—can design other complex systems, including ones that exceed their own metrics, but you’d have us believe that simple systems can generate complex ones if you simply break them often enough at random? Stuff and nonsense! Superstition! Next you’ll be telling us there were no Creators—”

  “On the contrary! It is from the Creators themselves that the holy scriptures of evolution come to us, from the great prophet Darwin, peace be unto him, and his saintly disciples Dawkins and Gould. We have their holy scriptures to guide us, and they are most explicit on these points—”

  “But we’ve got the engineering models! And the design schemata!” Sinbad-15 is clearly annoyed by Twin #1’s irrational and superstitious insistence that people evolved by accident. “We’ve even got the purchase orders! With this upgraded arm, I refute you!” He reaches over and snags a many-legged inspection lamp from the bowl that Twin #1 is munching on, and I can’t help noticing that he’s got some very strange-looking fingers.

  “Really?” Twin #1 says mockingly. “That’s just the Lamarckian heresy in disguise. I suppose you’d say that your physical size—so much bigger than the average free citizen these days—is deliberate? Or hadn’t you noticed people getting smaller these days?”

  Honestly, these discussions make my head hurt. There’s something about the holy doctrine of Evolution that seems to attract the worst kind of dogmatic, evangelical, close-minded people, and sometimes it seems as if they won’t be content until they have converted everyone to their religious creed. (Some of them are even believers in the mystery of reincarnation; manikins who think they’re the reembodied state vect
ors of our dead Creators. Stupid superstitionists!) I try to concentrate on the cards stuck to the wall in front of me, but it’s hard to shut out the squabbling, and though I wish Sinbad-15 well of it, I think his chances of convincing Twin #1 that we were all created by rational beings are slim, even though the frustrated dreams and cautionary memories I inherited from Rhea tell me that it was ever so.

  “It’s troublesome, is it not?” A cool, somewhat amused voice insinuates itself in my ear by way of electrospeak. “They’ll be at it for days, on a point of principle, long after it’s become tiresome.”

  I try not to startle too violently, for the source of this intrusive and unwelcome confidence is the Venerable Granita Ford. I slowly turn my head, and see that she’s watching me from across the saloon. Her attendants are inattentive for once, spectators at the nonsensical debate that threatens to swallow two-thirds of the passengers. She blinks slowly, those huge, limpid eyes occulted by lids bedraggled by their huge blue lashes, then begins to smile. I am, it seems, invited to court. It’s the kind of invitation I can live without, but it would be unwise to ignore her. I wave a hand across my cards, resetting them, then kick off toward her.

  Aside from myself, the venerable Granita is the most humanoid person in the lounge; but nobody would dare to call her an outlandish ogre. A meter and two-thirds tall, and apparently of gracile build within the confines of her spun-glass finery, she sports a full head of azure feathers confined in a net of fine gold wire; and, of course, the delicate chin, uptilted nose, and huge eyes of the bishojo aristocracy. But other than that, she could pass for a Creator maiden, albeit one who has indulged in extreme cosmetology. If I did not know her to be a two-and-a-half-century-old tyrant, a noblewoman and slaveholder, I might think her invitation was born of casual curiosity. But with Granita and her kind, nothing is casual.

  “And what is your position on the matter, my lady?” I ask.

  She feigns a yawn—an elaborate, archaic gesture to flush her gas-exchange reservoirs (and strictly speaking unnecessary here, for Pygmalion won’t have molecular oxygen in her passenger quarters; it’s too chemically reactive)—and glances sidelong at me. “Does it matter?” she asks. “Theology makes the ship fly no faster.”

  “I suppose not,” I hear myself agreeing, somewhat to my surprise. Half of me is wondering how to get away from this vile old hag, but my other half seems to be somewhat uncertain. “It passes the time.”

  “For some,” she agrees. “You interest me, madame. I have a strange sense that I seem to remember you from somewhere.” She does not smile, and a terrible chill floods up and down my spine.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I say. “At least, before this voyage.”

  “Yes. Which is what makes it such a strange feeling. Polite society in Cinnabar being as small as it is, after all. Perhaps you remind me of somebody.”

  It’s my turn for a smile—a bluff, of course. “Sometimes one wants to keep a low profile.”

  Her returning smile is coy. “Of course.”

  UP THE AVENUE of shadows I march, coattails sweeping the moonlit gravel. Each pebble is carved in minute detail. The memento mori hollows of an open-visored helmet repeat a thousand times across the arms’ breadth span between crumbling walls of Martian sandstone. Behind me, the sexton dines heavily on my would-be assassins; already their reedy screams grow shorter, though the crunching, slurping sounds continue.

  To my left, a row of empty stone sarcophagi are set back in alcoves within the wall. Each is surmounted by a statue of the dead Creator who formerly slumbered within, their pose at once noble and heroic, as befits the graveyard of those who would dare to reach for the stars. For some reason, those who died of starvation, or gnawed on the bodies of their fallen comrades, are gowned in the formal robes of the Indonesian Islamic Republic’s judiciary; those who walked out into the Martian desert and opened their faceplates, to leave food and air for their companions, are pictured in “space suits,” those claustrophobic contrivances of fabric and metal that the Creators depended on when they ventured outside the environment for which they were designed.

  Between the sarcophagi, guardian angels stand at attention, wings outstretched and flaps extended. Their eyes are fierce as they grip their assault rifles of holy office, ready to see off any who would disturb the slumber of their charges.

  Now, if my information is correct, the second angel on the left—yes, I see it. Its gun is suspiciously smooth for a work of sculpture. I walk over to it and reach inside my coat to retrieve the grisly token I paid so much for. Then I touch fingertip to gun muzzle.

  “Pass, friend,” the guardian angel electrospeaks me, and I pull back my hand. The severed digit of the deliverator I slip back in my pocket, authentication tokens and all. Sometimes identity-based authentication is a good way of securing your perimeter . . . but not always. Even the sextons need to buy supplies. And the sextons are so paranoid about intruders that they don’t want smart guards? That’s their problem, I tell myself as I slip past the guards, open the gate, and enter the rock garden that surrounds the mausoleum.

  The mausoleum stands on its own within a walled garden of immaculately carved memorial stones. Sitting atop a circle of twenty Doric columns, the roof takes the shape of a squat conical landing craft, legs extended in the moment that precedes touchdown. I walk toward the entrance, barely visible in the shifting shadows of Phobos’s passage. Permafrost crackles beneath my feet. In the distance, impaled wretches moan as a distant bell tolls the hour of the night. I step inside.

  Here are stacked the treasure tubes of Mars, rescued from their graves and brought hither by the sextons when the spate of robberies became intolerable. (It’s easier to guard a single mausoleum at the center of a defended installation than a scattering of graves across an open landscape.) They lie in twenty thin aluminum canisters, stacked in a raft at the center of the floor. The bell tolls, but their ears do not hear. My skin crawls, chromatophores tensing into black spiky cones as I approach the pile, something akin to superstitious dread gnawing at the edge of my mind; these are our Creators, and this may be as close to meeting my Dead Love as I shall ever come, unless the plans of—of who?—come to fruition. Dead, and yet containing the seeds of undeath; there are pink goo replicators in here, desiccated and chilled, but nevertheless intact, their monstrously profligate duplication technology present (how strange!) in every cell.

  She wants the samples, of course. She’ll happily destroy the rest, to deny them to Her competitors—but first, She wants the vital undamaged proteome, hydrogen bonds and disulphide bridges intact and unbroken by heat: the chromosomes, DNA tidily supercoiled and held in place, methylation groups signaling their activation status. She wants to scrutinize the cells for tiny scraps of RNA, subtle modulators and trigger sequences to make the machinery spring into life. And when Her artificers are done, they will build Her a cell, clocks and sequencers reset to zero, primed with enzymes and painstakingly reconstructed organelles . . . and She will throw the switch and put her vile scheme into action.

  We can’t be having that, can we?

  I tiptoe over to the stack of tubes and bend over the topmost layer. The tubes are thin-walled and light, as befits a coffin shipped all the way from Earth; there is a dusty label bonded to the nearest one. I read its English translation with some difficulty; ABDUL AZIZ IBRAHIM, it says. XENOBIOLOGIST. Below the label, a series of latches, dull and corroded.

  I am reaching into my inner pocket for the sampler when I sense a vibration through the soles of my feet. I look round in a hurry for somewhere to hide. Is it near and quiet, or far away and loud? I make a hasty decision, and jam the sampler up against the gasket of the coffin. It coughs as it stabs its steel beak through the membrane and into the mummified remains within. I yank it out hastily, cap the point, and head for the entrance as fast as I can.

  But I’m too late.

  IT’S NOT UNTIL the Lyrae twins are halfway into their third course and the fifth back-and-forth of the deb
ate that the venerable Granita Ford puts away her small talk and gets to the point. “You haven’t so much as hinted at what brings you to Mars,” she says. “That interests me. Keeping oneself private is not unusual. But such total restraint, after so long—you’ll forgive me for finding that curious, I hope.”

  Save me from the attentions of bored dowagers! I silently curse Jeeves, but I have a confabulation ready. Like all such, it functions best by blending truth and falsehood. “I’m performing a favor for a friend,” I say, trying to put just the right arch emphasis on the word to imply that they are nothing of the kind. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

  Ford’s carnivorous smile widens. “Come, my dear. D’you think I haven’t noticed the size of your court? Or how lightly you travel? I understand completely; your little problem is safe with me.” Which is to say, she’s swallowed the cover story—that the Honorable Katherine Sorico has fallen upon hard times and is reduced to providing very expensive services for very discreet, rich clients—and is prepared to use it against me. “I sympathize completely, and I can be the soul of discretion. But I’m still curious. What is it that takes you from Mercury to Mars with such haste?”

  “Why, the availability of transport, nothing more and nothing less.” I raise my crystal drinking bulb and ingest a sip of sweet liqueur, using the motion to distract as I compose my features. “My friend wants a pair of trustworthy eyes to look over some interests of his that are giving him reason for concern.” Trustworthy meaning independent and unindentured. Unlikely to be suborned by a conspiracy to throw off the shackles of proxy ownership, in other words. “About which I can say no more.” And that should slam the air lock down before her probing, because if there is a single issue that all aristos hold in confidence, it is the whispered threat of an indentured arbeiter conspiracy against the moneyed elite.