Saturn's Children (29 page)

One fuck leads to another, and it becomes clear that neither of us has inherited our Creators’ lack of stamina. By the time we’re an hour from Deimos, we’re decelerating hard enough that I have to hang on to Jeeves as I straddle him. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I need to break out the zero-gee kit (bungee cords are your friends; free-fall sex without restraints is a fast track to dents and dings).

“Freya,” he says, and it comes out like an actual attempt at conversation, rather than quasi-verbal passion punctuation. “Freya, we need to
talk
.”

“Mm-hmm? So talk already.” I sway above him. We’re loosely coupled, held together only by our intromissive interface, but every time he speaks, it sends waves of pleasure through me. “What’s the big news?”

“Juliette never, never . . .” I feel his hands on my thighs, pushing me tighter against him, and I moan quietly.

“Well, no.” I’m not sure
why
she never, never—if she was around someone as Creator-like as Jeeves for that long, the thought must have crossed her mind—but I’m sure she had her reasons. “I’m not Juliette, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Counting . . . on . . . it.”

He groans softly and loses it for a while. I feel him shudder, and I drift away on my own climax. When I’m aware enough to take an interest in things outside my own skin again, I discover he’s wrapped his arms around me and is holding me close. “What did you mean by that? Counting on me?”

He shifts sideways slightly and I settle next to him in the low-gee couch. “Juliette fell . . . hard. Under
Her
thumb. We’re hoping you ... you won’t. Because we need someone. One of you. Right place, right time.”

I bite his shoulder, slightly harder than is strictly necessary. “You’re not making sense, Jeeves!”

“’M not allowed to, m’dear. Ears, ships, sinking, et cetera.” He swats ineffectually at my shoulder. “ ’M an old fellow, Freya. ’S hard for me to keep up with you younger persons.”

“How old
are
you, Jeeves? You personally, not your lineage?”

“An indelicate question! But if you do not count time spent in moth-balls, one is”—he pauses to calculate—“one hundred and twenty-two Earth years old.”

I can’t help myself; I bite him again.

WE DO NOT, in point of fact, proceed straight to Deimos. Rather, the climber slows to a crawl some distance down-cable, and a second, small capsule locks on to us. He makes his apologies—somewhat more fulsomely than I think is strictly necessary; there’s a moist gleam in his eye that leaves me worrying that he might read more into our tryst than I intended—then the capsule undocks. I use the remaining half hour to Deimos to repair my hair and restore my clothing to normal, then leave the capsule as if nothing untoward has happened. In microgravity, nobody needs to see that you’re bowlegged. (And believe me, it takes a
lot
to make me bowlegged. I have hidden depths, and that young whippersnapper Jeeves set out to find them.)

A dockside capsule takes me straight to the boarding tube for the
Indefatigable
, and I waste no time saying good-bye to Mars. To be honest, I’m tired and aching, and I really just want to find my berth and collapse into a deep, healing sleep. Indy greets me through a humaniform zombie remote: “Lady Sorico? We have been holding for you.”

“No, really ... ?” I blink sleepily at him.

“Boarding was supposed to be complete two hours ago,” he says fussily. “Luckily, we have a contingency window. If you would come this way?”

Well, that’s me told. I follow the remote sheepishly and allow it to herd me into a cramped metal-walled cell even smaller than the bunk compartment on the trans-Hellas express. I need no urging to plug myself into the ship’s power and nutrient bus, remove and store my groundside clothes, and strap myself quietly down to await departure. And then I fall asleep.

YOU REMEMBER MY opinion on space travel? In a word: excrement. But perhaps I was a bit too fast with my opinion. If the journey from Venus to Mercury was tedious, that was largely because I spent it in steerage. Mercury to Mars was boring in the extreme (except when punctuated by moments of mortal terror), but at least I had the creature comforts of an aristo-class berth and a pair of surly servants. But now I am embarking on a voyage into the outer system aboard the
Indefatigable
, and it makes all that has gone before seem like the lap of luxury.

Our archipelagic economy obeys certain fixed rules, according to Jeeves. The inner system is rich in energy and heavy elements, with short travel time but middling-deep gravity wells. The moons of the outer-system gas giants are replete with light elements and shallower gravity wells, but their primaries are far apart. Finally, the Forbidden Cities scattered through the Kuiper Belt’s dwarf planets are loosely bound—and very far apart. Consequently, Mercury exports solar energy via microwave beam, hundreds and thousands of terawatts of the stuff, and uranium and processed metals via slow-moving cycler ship and magsail. Venus exports rare earth metals—albeit in smaller quantities, at greater cost—while Mars contributes iron, carbon dioxide, and other materials.

But beyond the asteroid belt, solar cells perform too poorly to be of much use; transmission loss raises the cost of energy beamed from the inner system; and travel times stretch out exponentially. The result is inevitable—just about everything that moves (and quite a lot that doesn’t) is nuclear-powered.

Now let me tell you about nuclear space rockets: They’re
shit
. And I
hate
them. But unfortunately, I’m stuck with them...

There are two types of nuclear power plants, fusion and fission.

Fusion plants are enormous great things that don’t go anywhere, which is good, because it means you can run away from them. They’re expensive, cantankerous, and the only good reason for putting up with them is that they produce lots and lots of heat, without which we would freeze to death. Most of the Forbidden Cities rely on fusion plants, as do the various interstellar projects. You can spot them a long way away because they’re always surrounded by enormous slave barracks. They come with certain maintenance issues—if it’s not the reactor itself, it’s the cooling systems and the heat exchangers and the generators. When your city relies for its power on a machine that takes gigawatts of juice just to keep running and is sitting on top of an ice cap and pumps out enough waste heat to trigger moonquakes and boil the atmosphere, you have certain structural-engineering issues to deal with.

(Personally, I don’t see why they can’t just scrap them and rely on beamed power from Mercury, but Jeeves said something complicated about Energy Autarky and gigawatt futures trading and interplanetary war that I didn’t quite follow.)

Fission reactors are a whole different pile of no fun at all. They’re small and portable, so ships rely on them. Out here, where the solar wind is so attenuated that it might as well not have been invented, most ships use a VASIMR rocket to push themselves about, which takes energy, and without beamed solar power, they rely on a fission reactor for juice.

Now, I have no objection in principle to a machine that makes it possible to travel between planets in something less than decades. But fission reactors put out a lot of radiation, and if you’re in a cramped spaceship, nineteen-twentieths of which consists of fuel tankage, you’ve got a choice. You can do without shielding, or you can do without payload mass. And guess which the
Indefatigable
does without?

I am
really glad
I got my Marrow techné upgraded on Mars.

I had been assigned a first-class stateroom. Unfortunately, as I arrived late, the only stateroom available was about three meters directly above the Number Two reactor. I discovered this about half an hour after we undocked, when
Indefatigable
decided to go critical, and the meter on the inside of my door zipped from zero up to half a Sievert per hour.

My objection to fission reactors is simple: I don’t like being used as shielding. Half a Sievert per hour is enough to kill one of our Creators in about two days. I’m made of tougher stuff, but it still takes its toll on me. I
hate
gamma radiation—it totally messes with the oxidation states of the pigments in my chromatophores. After a couple of days I go all blotchy, and it takes my Marrow techné ages to fix my skin because it’s also really busy fixing everything else at the same time. I need to deepsleep twice as long as usual, I need to eat more and suck more juice, and I keep getting odd flashes across my visual field.

So, there you have it. In my considered opinion, nuclear power is shit. Interplanetary travel is also shit. Therefore, we have compounded shit with shit to make even
more
shit. I am, in short, not a happy Freya.

(I tried complaining to Indy, but he told me in so many words that it was all my own fault for being late, and would I prefer a steerage berth? In the end he relented and sent down a nice beryllium underblanket for my bunk, but still . . . !)

And now for some more shit. (I’m unhappy, which means I have every intention of sharing it with you. Enjoy!) As mentioned earlier, the
Indefatigable
is a nuclear/VASIMR high-speed outer-system liner. Five percent of his mass is spaceship plus cargo and passengers; the rest consists of huge bulbous tanks full of liquid hydrogen. Now, you might already have realized what my problem is. Indy only carries about fifty tons of cargo, including nearly a hundred passengers. Even those of us in first class are packed in like uninitialized arbeiters in a warehouse. I have a cabin one meter wide, one meter long, and three meters high. I gather that this is
much
larger than normal, partly because it’s on top of the Number Two reactor, and partly because I wouldn’t fit inside a normal stateroom, which is one meter by one by one and a half because they’re designed for the chibiform aristos. Typical. They have, as usual, gotten there first and wrecked the experience for everyone else.

There’s a first-class lounge; it’s almost five meters long and two meters wide. I had more space in my arbeiter cell on Venus! And I didn’t have to share it with a bunch of nasty, scheming nobles on their way to do whatever it is they intend to do in Jupiter system.

So I lie on the bunk in my metal-walled cell, try to ignore the flashes inside my eyes, and roundly curse Jeeves for booking me onto this flying death trap, not to mention delaying my arrival so that I didn’t get a better berth. (I’ll concede that it takes two to dance the horizontal tango, but I don’t see
him
spending a whole year frying slowly on top of a nuclear kettle.)

When lying on the bunk gets boring, I reconfigure it as a chaise and practice reclining glamorously—except it’s pretty hard to do that when the ship’s only accelerating at a hundredth of a gee. My wardrobe’s pretty much inaccessible aboard ship, and not much use until we arrive. I could spend hours per day just repairing my chromatophores (have you ever woken up with lips the color of a three-day-old bruise?) but that loses its charm fast. “What can I do?” I moan at Indy, halfway through day two of three hundred and ninety-six.

“You could do what everyone else does, and go into hibernation. Or you could try slowtime,” he says unsympathetically. “I’m told a factor of twenty helps the journey pass quickly.”

I’d go into hibernation, but I don’t dare—not in this line of work. Total suspension of consciousness is too damn dangerous. So that leaves slowtime.

Let me tell you about slowing down time, just in case you haven’t already guessed: Slowing down time is
shit
.

Sure, all of us can adjust our clock speed downward. It’s normal practice for starship passengers and crew, and common enough on long-haul ships in the outer system. Plus, it’s helpful when your owner doesn’t need you right now, or if you get into trouble and need to conserve juice until someone happens by to dig you out of it—that’s why the capability is designed into us. The advantage over hibernation is, of course, that you’re still awake—and able to come back up to real-time speed fast if something happens. But it’s absolutely no fun whatsoever, and I wish I was still as innocent as I was on the Venus/Mercury run, so that I could contemplate hibernation without breaking out in a cold sweat.

First, you have to reconfigure your skin and internals so that your joints stiffen and you don’t sag. Which makes me feel unpleasantly bloated. Lubricant-filled goggles are a must, and if you’ve got self-lubricating orifices or other connectors, plugs are essential for avoiding those embarrassing leaks. (It’s easier for nonhumanoids like Daks or Bilbo, but for me—let’s not go there.) Then you’ve got to pile a whole bunch of extra shielding under your bed, so you’re squeezed up close to the ceiling. Finally, you turn the light down and dip into slowtime.

Slowtime is funny. The first thing you feel is gravity getting stronger. Well, it isn’t—but your reflexes are slowing down, so if you drop something it seems to fall faster. At a speedup of twenty, on a ship pulling a hundredth of a gee, it feels like you’re on Luna—but you don’t dare move around much because you may be running slower, but your muscles aren’t any weaker than they were, and you can damage yourself frighteningly easily.

The light brightens but turns reddish, and everything sounds squeaky and high-pitched. If you’re not wearing all the clothes you can pull on (and a blanket besides), you get cold really fast. The bedding and your clothes wrap themselves around you like a cold, wet funeral shroud, and it feels like you’re lying on a solid slab instead of a mattress. You get sleepy and nod off for catnaps every couple of hours—catnaps of deepsleep—and between them you can’t quite get your skin color or texture to stay right because you keep glitching. If you don’t roll over every few minutes while you’re awake you can damage yourself by overcompressing your mechanocytes. Sex is right out of the question, even if there were anyone remotely attractive and fun aboard. The radiation from the reactor scribbles white lines of graffiti across everything you look at. Your experience of time is wonky: A day may pass in a subjective hour, but it’s an hour of lying on your bunk, being bored. Finally, there’s an omnipresent high-pitched background roar of white noise nagging away at your attention (and don’t mention earplugs!). I gather our Creators used to travel like this all the time, back in the prespace era: They called it economy class.