Saturn's Children (30 page)

The first time I slow down, I leave off the crotch plugs and face mask, and try to make do with just the goggles. I manage to stay awake for two hours before I deepsleep . . . then after waking from my first catnap I have to speed back up to real time so I can clean up the mess. Liquids seem to flow really fast in slowtime; viscous lubricant slime turns into a hideous watery fluid that seems to splash everywhere, and as for salivary mix, the less said the better. I am almost reduced to wishing Lindy was around, with her cheerful no-nonsense approach to packing me inside and out. All I can do is watch reruns of soap operas, play light-romance games, and fantasize/bitch about Petruchio. Then I have to change my bedding again, and I give up on the fantasies.

Did I mention the dreams? I’m dreaming a
lot
. It’s mostly skill-integration stuff. I’m dreaming in gestures and reflexes, strobing through myriad forms of mayhem with each catnap. I keep catching bits of Juliette’s memories, but they’re abbreviated and flickering, as if I’ve got one hand on the FAST-FORWARD button. Which, in a manner of speaking, I have. I’ve been wearing her soul all this time, after all, and while I might be slowing down my perception of the passing of time, I’m not slowing down time itself. It feels as if the bitch is breathing down my neck, so close that sometimes when I wake from deepsleep, I startle and look round, hurting my neck. And her need for Pete . . . I swore off heartbreak, didn’t I? Silly me!

Slowing time is
shit
. Aristo-class travel in the outer solar system is
shit
. Nuclear-powered space liners are
shit
. Two-timing scumbags who’re in love with my elder sister are
shit
.

Anyway, I believe you can now appreciate the true depths of my feelings when, after two subjective weeks of lying in a coffin-sized niche on top of a rock-hard mattress in a freezing-cold room, aching and bruising and leaking fluids from every orifice, Indy pages me to say that we’re on final approach to Callisto.

“Yippee!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warns me. “We’re still seven days out in real time. To you, call it eight hours.”

(Do I need to say it again? Space travel is shit!)

As it happens, I crack before the very end: I speed myself up to real time, peel off my soiled clothes and those disgusting plugs, and scamper naked through the grand saloon. Everyone else is still in slowtime, and as long as I don’t dawdle, they won’t see me as anything but a pale blur. There’s a
head
at the other end of the saloon, and although our individual washing ration is ridiculously stingy, it’s the first shower I’ve had in—a quick check of my real-time clock startles me—
six months?
So I zip myself into a plastic bag, pump almost a quarter of a ton of recycled water into it, and rub myself vigorously.
Luxury!
I’ve lost almost a quarter of my body weight, despite plugging into the shipboard power-and-nutrient grid, and I can feel my ribs: my Marrow is warning that I’m at 86 percent of repair capacity and need urgent clinical attention as soon as possible. I’m also mildly radioactive. (Well,
next time
I travel, I shall be sure not to bunk on top of an undershielded nuclear reactor.)

I inhale repeatedly, flushing clean detergent-laden water through my gas-exchange reservoirs, and wash myself thoroughly. Finally, I drain the bath back into the recycler and turn the fan up to eighty degrees Celsius, basking in hot, steamy warmth for the first time in ages.

By the time
Indefatigable
shuts down his reactors and nudges slowly toward the orbiting junkyard that is Callisto Highport, I have packed my possessions, dressed warmly in a low-temperature-safe outfit (with heater packs on elbows, knees, and feet, and a fetching artificial fur muff for my hands), and am bouncing off the walls and ceiling in my eagerness to be groundside.

Which may account for why I am so foolishly intemperate on my arrival, and the subsequent disastrous turn of events.

A Question of Ownership

WELCOME TO CALLISTO, outermost of Jupiter’s four Galilean (major) moons. Callisto is fractionally smaller than Mercury but rather less massive, and beneath its heavily cratered surface (a chewed-up wilderness of ice and rubble) lies a deep, ammonia-laced ocean surrounding a rocky core. It has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but it’s vanishingly thin, and it’s very cold: Daytime on Callisto is forty degrees colder than a winter’s night on Mars.

Like Mars, Callisto has a space elevator—but it’s nothing as impressive as Bifrost. Four low-speed climber tapes link Callisto Highport to Saga crater on the equator. They wobble slowly in the complex libration of Jupiter’s gravity well. Cargo climbers sluggishly traverse them, driven by power beamed from the laser grid outside Tsiolkovsky, the last city to be decreed by our Creators before their final retreat from space. It’s almost exclusively a cargo-and-freight elevator service— people who can afford to visit Callisto usually take the fast, lightweight rocket shuttles that fly between Highport and Nerrivik. Nerrivik sits on the fringes of a huge opencast mining complex that bites deep into the southern rim of the Valhalla impact basin. Here, more than a billion Earth years ago, a huge impactor smashed right through Callisto’s crust, shattering the mantle wide open and causing ice flows and moonquakes. Deposits of deep-lying minerals were dragged to the surface by the molten ice, and here they lie, waiting to be collected by the miners. The upshot is, Callisto is a major exporter of water-soluble elements.

Blah. I sound like I’ve swallowed a tour guide, don’t I? Let’s be honest, I’m cribbing. But this is all stuff you need to know, by way of context.

By the time I slouch down the boarding tube from the groundside shuttle, I am tired, physically drained, and cold in spite of my many layers of wrap-up-warm clothing. Nearly four hundred days in a radioactive cupboard would dent even the Honorable Katherine Sorico’s pigheaded arrogance, so I let myself slouch a little as I look around the spaceport terminal.

Nerrivik is a backwater and a mining camp, and it shows. There’s no Pink Police presence here—despite the suspicious polymer tapes growing in the deep oceans below—because there’s just about no atmosphere, and the daytime temperature is so low that they don’t even bother insulating liquid-nitrogen tanks. The lighting in the public spaces is dim, to suit eyes set for a daytime illumination only somewhat brighter than a full moonlit night on Earth. Buildings are dark and lack windows; people come in a variety of body plans, and humanoids such as myself are a minority, shivering inside their voluminous coats and robes. The sun is visibly shrunken and hangs in a black sky dominated by a different body—Jupiter. As I walk out of the arrivals hall, I look up briefly at that violent, orange orb. But I have to glance away in a hurry.
It’s too big,
my instincts squeal. It’s unnervingly bigger than Earth’s full moon, and something about it looks ripe and diseased to my eye, like a pink goo outbreak that’s run its necrotic course. I shake my head and look for a public-information kiosk. “What hotels with repair clinics are there here?” I ask.

“Hotels with repair facilities?” The kiosk giggles for a few seconds as it digests my request. “This is Nerrivik!”

“Listen, you.” I poke it with a triple-gloved finger: “I’m just off the
Indefatigable
, I’m extremely short-tempered, and I need a Marrow fix
now
. A hot bath would be good, too. What have you got?”

“There’s the Nerrivik Paris,” it volunteers after a moment. “He doesn’t have an in-house clinic, but he’s next door to the Big Blue Body Shop, and they might be able to fix you up. Will that do?”

“Maybe.” I try to snap my fingers and discover to my annoyance that between the gloves and the lack of an atmosphere, I can’t hear them. Everything here runs on electrospeak, anyway. Luckily, I had my transceiver upgraded back when I was getting fitted for my cold-weather gear. “Directions, please.”

“Humph. If you insist...” The kiosk delivers, grumpily. I flag down a spider—my feet are already beginning to ache, despite my padded boots—and tell it where to go. Five minutes later, I limp into the vestibule of a familiar-looking hotel.

“Hello, madame. Can I be of service?” The talking head on the reception desk is a model of polite formality. I don’t recognize him from any of my sibs’ memories, and he doesn’t appear to recognize me.

“Yes. I need a room. And I gather there’s a body shop somewhere on this street...?” Another ten minutes and my luggage is checked through to my room—even more expensive than the one on Cinnabar, and
this
one’s in a cheap-ass mining town that doesn’t come with the elaborate maintenance costs of a city on wheels—and the local Paris is bowing and scraping. “I’ll be back once I’ve taken care of some essential maintenance,” I tell him. I’m tempted to mention my real name and suggest he ask his Mercurial sib for an update, but at the last moment I decide not to; I haven’t had any news about the liquidation proceedings, and the last thing I need is to call down a bounty hunter or a lawsuit on my head.

The Big Blue Body Shop turns out to be a small, slick surgical chop ’n’ change outfit operating from the top floor of an office block. I walk up to the front door, waving my credit chip. “Hi! I’ve just come in on the
Indefatigable
, and I need a Marrow cleanup.”

The friendly-looking surgical gnome beckons me over, jacks his chair up, and unfolds his hunchback to reveal an impressive array of surgical probes. “We can do that, milady.” He looks politely bored. “Anything in particular you’d like us to look at?”

“Yes.” I sit down on the examining chair. “I drew the hot bunk. You might want to wear a lead apron ...”

WELL,
THAT
WAS an expensive mistake,
I think ruefully as I leave the body shop and walk briskly back to the hotel, chewing over what just happened to me.

It takes Dr. Meaney almost two days (Earth days, not Callisto diurns, I hasten to add) to fix my techné and repair my Marrow. The bill is eye-watering, and not just because he has to treat my damaged parts as hazardous waste. “Next time they try to put you in that bunk, my advice is not to take the flight,” he chastises me. “If you’d been bound for Saturn and picked up that kind of dose, you’d be dead on arrival.”

“What?” I stare at him.

“Dead, as in, exanimate, beyond repair, an ex-person. Listen.” He leads me over to a triple-glazed slab of window. “Over there, see that tower?” It’s several kilometers away, on the horizon. “Suppose someone set off a quarter-megaton nuclear weapon on top of it. And suppose you were shielded from the heat and blast, but not the radiation. Now try to imagine someone doing that to you once a week for an entire standard year. That’s about what you were exposed to. See? It’s
not
a good idea, really and truly.”

“Um.” I swallow, reflexively: Fragile slivers of ice break off the back of my throat and slide down my digestive system. “Really?”

“Really!” He looks exasperated. “You could at least have used the saloon—that’s what it’s for! If you refrain from sleeping on top of any more nuclear reactors you’re probably good for another couple of decades before you need another going-over like this. That’s good techné you’ve got there, there are some neat add-ons, and it’s very robust, but you
can
kill it off if you insist on behaving as if you’re invulnerable.”

“Hmm.” I raise an eyebrow. “Would you mind giving me a signed statement to that effect? Notarized? I’ll pay—I’m just thinking of suing.”

He buzzes. After a moment I realize it’s laughter. “All part of the service!”

And so I rub my face ruefully as I trudge back across the square toward the hotel, reflecting that in almost two days I’ve succeeded in spending a lot of my remaining funds but not in actually doing anything useful.

Back I go to the Nerrivik Paris, which is as gloomy and slightly down-at-heel as I feel. The moment I step through the air lock, I’m drenched in a thick, steaming fog of condensation that sluices off my clothes and forms tiny hailstones that clatter to the floor around me: I hadn’t realized just how cold it was outside. “I’ll take my room key now,” I tell the bored front desk, tapping my fingernails on his polished-granite counter. “Any mail for me?”

“It will be in your queue, madame.” He’s as icily polite as the moment I checked in. “Here is your key. Feel free to let us know if there is any further way we may make your stay enjoyable.”

I take the “up” elevator, feeling slightly miffed, which is silly because I’ve taken no steps to assure a warmer welcome—other than traveling as Kate Sorico, of course, but that’s just a harmless indulgence out here (and a thumb in the eye to those bitches who’re chasing me). The Domina’s on her way to Saturn, and Granita isn’t in the big picture. All that’s left for me here is to meet up with Jeeves and dig out of him whatever it is that Daks was so cagey about—there’s no real hint of my reason for being here in my orders, just some random muttering about Callisto being the gateway to the outer system—and then I can do whatever needs doing. I think.

Being an aristo in a mining town means I get to have the big suite. But it also means that the big suite is small and dingy, with rising permafrost and teensy-tiny porthole windows, quadruple-glazed, looking out at a landscape that makes the marshaling yards on Mars seem like a tourist resort. The carpet crackles under my feet, and I turn the lights up, then the heating (which is set to a less than balmy 230 Kelvins), then contemplate what it will take to thaw out the shower cubicle. Obviously nobody’s stayed here for a long time, and my spirits are not improved when I see that the mixer head gives me a choice of solvents to clean myself with: acetone or carbon tetrachloride. (The thermostat goes up to 260.) In fact, my spirits are about to come crashing down if I don’t find something to occupy myself with, real soon now.

I throw myself backward onto the oversprung mattress and summon up my mail on my pad. There’s a total lack of communication from Freya’s liquidators back on Earth, which I take to be a good sign, but there’s some news for Kate. I pull up the Martian Jeeves’s imago, looking slightly flustered and hot around the collar. “Fr— Katherine, my dear? I’m, ah, I hope this message finds you well.” He swallows.
Dear Creators, just talking to my imago triggers his homomimetic reflexes?
I tense nervously. “I’m afraid I had to disclose our, er, little dalliance, to, ah, my senior partners in the enterprise. They are all very understanding, but suggested in no uncertain terms that I should explain to you, er. Ah. Certain.” He runs a finger around his collar. “Facts.” He clears his throat.