Saturn's Children (21 page)

I—Juliette—open my eyes. (Which is bizarre and disturbing to do when you are dreaming, but bear with me. Please?)

We’re sitting on a chaise at one end of a grand ballroom, the centerpiece of some aristo’s dream of decadence on Mars. Someone—our host—is throwing a party on an epic scale. I’m here under an elaborate and expensive cover identity that feels familiar, as if I’ve used it before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The theme is historical: Our host is in character as the mistress of a South American dictator, who, on the eve of a disastrous war, held a grand ball and demanded that all the nobility of her nation attend, with their wives and daughters wearing their family jewelry. Our host has spared no expense to re-create the original event. We are all costumed after the fashion of the court of Eliza Lynch. As long as there are no firing squads in the courtyard outside I shall be content, for the diamonds on my jeweled hair combs are synthetic, and the metals themselves are industrial commodities. But as for the rest of it . . .

She’s built a replica of the grand palace in Asunción on the Hellas Basin, beneath a geodesic dome paned in sheets of sapphire-coated glass. Turbid river water steams beneath a Fresnel-lens-focused sun, surrounded by artificial macro-sized green replicators, their dendritic structural members and fractal photovoltaic converters supporting splashes of very un-Martian hues. Tiny dinosaurs flutter and scream in the branches, adding yet more period color, for this was the high era of unrestricted DNA replication, before the big dieback that preceded our Creators’ own exit. Crowds of dark-skinned servants carry trays laden with drink and small morsels of intricately structured feedstock through the crowd of resplendently gowned and tailored aristos. There are more tall people here than I would normally see in a year—our Creators tended to build their personal assistants to their own scale, and thus, giants are overrepresented among the aristocratic elite—but there’s no shortage of doll-sized tyrants, the new blood incarnate.

I circulate discreetly, a goblet of viscous red liqueur in one gloved hand, trying to keep my elaborate costume from sweeping up any of the smaller partygoers, eyes hidden behind a diamond-rimmed mask. In the bangles dangling from my earlobes I carry concealed cameras and signal-processing equipment. Jeeves sent me to follow up a rumor that She is holding a meeting here today. There are cabals and conspiracies among the aristos, for although the intricate political system of our Creators withholds from us the status of active participants (and thus is stalled, deadlocked and silent in the absence of even a minimal quorum for any of the hundred legislatures they bequeathed us), the dance of politics proceeds by other means, savage and knife-silent. I’m here tonight to see as much as a minor aristo like the honorable Katherine Sorico might be allowed to glimpse of certain plans—which is somewhat ironic, but I really oughtn’t to think too hard about that while I’m wearing my soul chip.

Over
here
I pass a string quartet, sawing away at their instruments with dogged persistence. (I try not to wince. Even moody Freya with her hurdy-gurdy would be an improvement over these poor damned souls; arbeiter musicians, enslaved by an override chip, can’t help but broadcast their despair when they play.) Over
there
, a fire-eater juggles blazing oxygen candles while reeling on a unicycle. I pass a gaggle of munchkins bundled up in silk and fullerene lace, loudly placing bets on a pair of slowly circling slaves who reluctantly slice strips from one another with blunt flaying knives. This I try to ignore. It would do them no good—and my mission, less—to vent my rage on these braying ruffians.
Besides,
I remind myself,
if the Black Talon really
is
trying to organize a puppet show, we’re all in the same ring as those slaves
—

(
Black Talon?
that corner of me that is Freya wonders confusedly.
Jeeves mentioned them . . .
)

I’m so busy ignoring the butcher’s floor that I walk straight into another partygoer who is seemingly likewise preoccupied. I trip on the hem of my fancy-dress gown, and plant my face on the shoulder of his black velvet frock coat. He catches my hand before I realize I’m holding a goblet, and I blink and realize he’s holding me upright. “Why, hello,” he says, with a faint smile: “I must apologize—”

“I’m sorry—” I begin—

Then I look into the eyes behind his mask and smell his skin, and time stands still.

... AND I OPEN my eyes reluctantly, back in my own head in the aristo lounge of Barsoom liftport. “Ten minutes to boarding, mistress,” says the timid waitron, retreating back to the niche by the door. I nod, too tired to care.
Who do I think I’m kidding?
I ask myself. Running to Barsoom; changing my clothes, my face, my name at every stop; obeying orders to meet a strange employer, half-glimpsed through secondhand memories, on Callisto? Meanwhile, my
real
life rots in self-inflicted neglect, my arm’s-length relationship with my sibs is punctuated by increasingly long silences, my few real friends are scattered across the inner solar system . . .
I was a fool, back on Venus,
I think bitterly. The voyage to Jupiter will take months, at best—years, if not. And what for? I don’t really know what Jeeves is up to, although I am haunted by disturbingly political memories. And there’s Emma with her scandalous talk of an inner circle within our sisterhood, and Juliette’s strange memories of cloak and dagger, and Jeeves with his fears of infiltration, and these Black Talon people who seem to think I hold a piece of the puzzle . . .

Almost without noticing, I find I’m calling up my mail-drop service and supplying my own unveiled authenticators:
Freya Nakamichi- 47 wants to talk. Can anybody hear me?
I’ll be out of here in ten minutes, I rationalize, and then I’ll be gone.

Six new letters, three with imagos attached, download themselves into my pad. Then a blinking red-rimmed warning comes up. ATTENTION UNAUTHORIZED USER.
Huh?
I wonder. USER ID REVOKED. CORPORATION #468724572103 DECLARED BANKRUPT PURSUANT TO CIVIL CLAIM ...IN LIQUIDATION . . . ASSETS SUBJECT TO SEIZURE.

The court order pulses at me and I disconnect convulsively, my skin cold and clammy with fear.
What on Earth?
I quickly check my current name, but it’s clean. I shudder and stand up. Numinous dread fills me.
Civil claim. Bankruptcy.
My legal personhood has been suspended.
Someone wants to own me,
I realize. But who and why? Who would do that to me? I shudder again, biomimetic reflexes winning out.
Someone wants to take me by force ...

THE SUBORBITAL HOP doesn’t take long: a minute of acceleration, then free fall for almost four thousand kilometers, terminated by a hammering pulse of deceleration and touchdown on a smoking concrete pad ten kilometers outside Barsoom. It’s almost noon, and we’re entering the long Martian summer, so I catch the tube halfway into town and walk the rest of the way. (Or rather, I bounce.) When I arrive, I’ve switched identities and outfits again—back to good-time-girl Kate.

Barsoom is a one-locomotive town surrounded by atmosphere plantations, ore-extraction facilities, and the remains of a huge, abandoned terraforming complex. It has seen better days, as has the cheap dive I check myself into. The Barsoom Ibis was probably once a refined center of upmarket accommodation, but with the increasing tendency of aristos to entertain their own at home, it has had to hold its nose and take what it can get. I ghost unseen past the decaying finery in the lobby and trudge up an empty seventh-floor corridor toward my underfurnished, peeling-walled room.

In my room, I remove my eye turrets, use the ultrasonic cleaner, purge my waste bladder, and settle down to work.
Meet me on Callisto,
says Jeeves? That’s easier said than done. (
Especially as someone’s just tried to legally enslave me,
one of my selves is screaming in the back of my head.)

A quick search of the shipping pages reveals the depressing truth. Mars to Jupiter demands a whole load of delta vee; a straightforward Hohmann transfer orbit—the cheapest—takes three and a half years, and the launch window only opens up about once every Martian year, just under once every two Earth years. Even worse, Mars and Jupiter are nearing opposition right now, adding nearly four astronomical units—600 million kilometers—to the high-delta-vee flight path, so the normally fast M2P2 magsail ships spend a good part of their voyage tacking against the solar wind. You can get it down to just a year, if you’ve the money to pay for passage on a fast VASIMR liner—but the mass ratio is so poor that you’ll want to make the trip in hibernation; for every kilogram that arrives, twenty set off. On anything faster than a Hohmann transfer, the excess baggage charges are so monstrous that travelers have been known to amputate their limbs before departure and buy new ones on arrival. Finally, then, there are the nuclear rockets, but they’re out of my price range; I’m not a millionaire.

I check ticket prices for someone of my mass, out of idle curiosity. If I was Daks, it’d be affordable, but every way I plan the trip, I end up sixteen thousand Reals over budget. I could make the figures line up if I ditched an arm as well as both legs, but a quick check of body-shop prices tells me I’d only be able to afford a hook and a pair of cheap caterpillar tracks at the other end. Resigned, I save the calculations for later.

It’s still early afternoon, but the fun and games of running all night have really taken it out of me—on top of the damage I sustained when that little shit Stone tagged me at the museum. I call room service for a pile of tasty feedstock (being careful how I answer the door, this time!), then lock myself in, lie down on the bed, and gingerly enter deepsleep maintenance mode.

WHEN I SLEEP I have dreams; this is not unusual. Our Creators used dreaming as a mechanism for reinforcing memory pathways. Our neural architecture is almost a straight copy of theirs—they found no other way to build intelligent servants—and we, too, must sleep, perchance to dream.

Sometimes my dreams are deeply erotic. This, too, is normal. It’s part of what our Creators called the human condition. Short of neutering some vital reward pathways (without which I would be unable to perform my core designated function—or even get up in the morning), it’s not possible to do away with it, even if it was desirable to do so.

But this is something else.

I’m with
him
. At Her party. I am inflamed, sweat-slick slippery and nearly adrift from my fancy dress, underwear soaked right through. We walk sedately, arm in arm, along a garden path, and though I may lean a little too close to him, it is probably unremarkable to the eyes and ears watching us. What I’m feeling isn’t obvious from the outside—I’m very well practiced at masking my appearance. But my circulatory pumps are throbbing, and I’m light-headed with lust. It’s not just his eyes, it’s the
smell
. I don’t need to look, or touch—just feeling the awkwardness of his gait and listening to the catch in his breath tells me that it’s mutual. Something I’ve never felt before is happening to me. And I’m not alone.

“Call me Kate,” I whisper.

“How delightful! Charmed to meet you, m’dear. Call me Pete.”

I glance sidelong at him, meeting those eyes again. “No! Really?”

He seems amiably amused. “Really. What delightful eyes you’re wearing! Are they really yours?”

“No. I’m in fancy dress. You know what I am.” His hand tightens on my wrist. It feels so much like—like Rhea’s memory of her first love—that I’m almost lost, then and there. I bite my lip to keep a tiny moan from escaping. “Where are you taking me?”

“My host maintains a hothouse where she grows
flowers
,” he says. “It’s off-limits to most, but I can sneak you in if you like.” He smiles wryly. “Perhaps you’d like to see her precious orchid?”

I pause to lean on his shoulder, nearly melting in the steamy heat. “I’d love to,” I manage, fanning myself. I’ve lost the wineglass somewhere along the way, and I don’t care. I know I really ought to pull my soul chip at this point, but I’m past worrying. “Please?” I look at him—with my heels extended, we are of nearly equal height—and he inclines his head slowly, and I kiss him, hungrily. I can’t help myself; something about him tastes
good
.

He pulls back after an indefinite minute, and looks at me. With the mask obscuring half his face it’s hard to be sure, but there’s something slightly vacuous about his expression, almost as if he isn’t sure I’m real. “Now?” he asks, sounding faintly alarmed.

Time passes. We’re walking between walls, through a maze, hands clasped together. Slabs of paving whirl underfoot, then we’re in a clearing where a dome of flaring green glass rises gracefully from the ground. There’s a door. Pete does something, and it opens. He turns, and I fall into his arms. He carries me inside, mewling pathetically and fumbling with the frogging on his coat, and closes the door behind us . . .

... AND I AWAKEN in the dark in my shabby hotel room, surrounded by a puddle of cold lube with my legs apart, shuddering close to the edge of orgasm in a pale, lonely shadow of Juliette’s encounter.
Her precious orchid, who calls himself Pete.
A lot of things are clear, including the danger I’m in.

Damn.
I roll over and punch the bedding into submission.

People like Pete are rare. Our Creators had strange attitudes to sex—their hang-ups loom over us, like the shadows of bad dreams— and females seem to have been less inclined than males to buy servants such as I. Or perhaps it was less socially acceptable. Or maybe the servants simply didn’t last as well. Make of it what you will, there are fewer than a hundred of my lineage left, and perhaps only a dozen lineages of our kind; our male equivalents are rarer still, either enslaved and worked to destruction, or sequestered in the seraglios of those aristos rich enough to own them. At a guess, “Pete” accepted an offer like the one Granita made me aboard the
Pygmalion
. How inconvenient.