Saturn's Children (33 page)

LATER ON, LYING alone in my icy bed, I dream again that I am Juliette. It’s the first such flashback I’ve had since arriving on Callisto— in fact, my first since Mars—and I’m very afraid, and very alone, in this dream, because I’m lying in bed. And I shouldn’t be. I should be in microgravity with the Jeeves in the CEV, discussing my next assignment.
Hand me your soul chip,
he said. And I did, though not without reservations, and the next thing I know—

I’m lying down, yes. And it’s very dark.
Try opening your eyes, idiot,
I tell myself. Nothing happens, and I begin to panic. I try to raise a hand—

“Juliette? Stop trying to move. Lie still; you’ll hurt yourself.”

The voice is familiar. Ferdinand Dix, one of Jeeves’s chop-shop artists.
I must be undergoing maintenance.
I try to relax, but I’m still worried.
How did I get here?

“Okay, that was just some early proprioception disturbing her— attitude monitor telling her she’s lying down, or something. Everything checks out. I’m bringing her up now.” Ferd is talking to someone else, which is odd—

My vision begins to brighten and fill in from the edges, as if my eyes are only just coming online.
Huh?
My skin: I feel cold. I twitch a fingertip and feel something soft and yielding beneath it.

“Welcome back, Juliette.” Two figures lean over me, head to head from either side—Jeeves and Ferd. “How do you feel?” The Jeeves looks distinctly uneasy, as if he’s seen a ghost. I decide to try to bluff, although the freezing certainty in my guts tells me that I’ve blown it.

“I feel fine, boss. What happened? Last thing I remember—” I’m lifting an arm, trying to sit up, when I realize I’m actually lying to him. I feel like shit. Gravity here is light, but I’m really weak. In fact, all my upgrades are off-line.
What the fuck?
I’m back to the very basics I was fabbed with! I might as well be naked. “What’s going on?”

Jeeves clears his throat. “Believe it or not, you died.”

“What?”
I bring up my right hand and stare at it. Yes, it’s my hand—or close enough I can’t see anything wrong with it. “I don’t understand.”

“Sit up.”

I’m beginning to do so when I realize what I’m sitting up
from
. I’m lying in a me-shaped hole in a foam pad on a table in Ferd’s examination room, and there’s an open shipping capsule to one side, battered and filthy. My vision blurs. “Shit!”

I stare at my hand in horror.
My
hand, pristine, utterly uncustomized, even virginal. The horror deepens. I swallow. Does Jeeves realize what he’s done? (Yes, of course he does. But he did it anyway ...) “Who was she?” I demand.
“Who was she going to be?”

“No one,” says Jeeves, with a note of world-weary cynicism. “Here.” He tosses two small blue plastic chips at me. I nearly fumble the catch, then stare. They’re blanking plates for soul-chip sockets. “She was uninitialized. Dysfunctional, actually—she came to light in a job lot of obsolete models that were being recycled for spare parts. Old warehouse stock or refurbished factory spares. One has a permanent autobid for spares of certain models that come up for auction. It took this good fellow here nearly twenty days to work out what was wrong with your new body and get it ready to install you from that chip you gave us.”

I still feel sick, but for an entirely different reason: terror. I remember my last first awakening, still thinking I was Rhea, before the unsmiling taskmaster told me otherwise. Glancing sideways I see Jeeves looking at me with an expression of profound distaste. As well he might, but for us to arrive at this pass, certain things must have happened... “Did she try to defect?” I ask harshly.

Jeeves nods. “One is unaware of her current disposition, but it may be inferred that she was not unsuccessful.” He glances at Ferdinand. “You. Leave us. Now.”

“Oh.”
Shit.
Without warning, bleak depression crashes down on me. I’m never going to see him again, I realize.
She
, the selfish cow, my earlier self—she’s gotten to him.
Of course.
Skipping out one jump ahead of Jeeves, she’ll be home and dry by now. And she’s left me to face the music. “What did Daks tell you?”

“Daks?” Jeeves simulates surprise very realistically.

I glare at him. “Do you think I’m
stupid
? What have you done with him?”

“This isn’t about, ah, Pete. If you’ll calm down, stand up, and accompany one into the office, we can discuss it.” Jeeves is, as usual, oleaginous and syrupy. Only a tiny spark burning in the back of his eyes tells me how much trouble I’m in.
What if he knows about the other stuff?
Part of me gibbers, even as I try to thrust it back into the closet it jumped out of.
What if
— I ignore it.

Ferd hands me a yukata as I stand up, and I pull it around myself as Jeeves slowly ambles toward the door, then pauses while I catch up. I’m weak and underspecified but my mind’s working full-time, of course—as it should be, because loading a soul chip into an uninitialized brain for the first time doesn’t have any of the disorienting slow-downs and inefficiencies of transferring memories between a soul chip and a brain that already hosts a personality. Although I’m going to find out I’m missing a lot of stuff if he didn’t start with an initialization dump from Rhea—what I’ve got is whatever I remembered when I—
no, she
—wore this chip.

Item
: I was thinking about how to get back to Pete when Jeeves asked me for the chip.
Item
: He must have suspected something then, too.
Item
: This body, virgin, unawakened ... even if he’s telling the truth and it was recovered from a scrapyard full of abandoned corpses, its arrival at just the right time is extremely disturbing.
Item
: Jeeves has no reason to trust me
except
that another bitch with my name and memories has already gone over the wall and done what I was just beginning to think of half an hour ago. I just hope he doesn’t know about—

“By the way, you will obey all instructions and refrain from resistance, ” Jeeves says off handedly. I stop—or rather, I try to. My feet won’t let me.
Oh shit.

“What’s going on?” I ask, putting the right amount of tremor into my voice.

“You know exactly what’s going on.” He opens the office door and goes inside. “Come in and sit down in the visitor’s chair. It’s time we had a little chat.”

I can’t help doing as I’m told.
Shit, this isn’t just about the object of desire; is it?
Jeeves shuffles around to his side of the desk and sits down. There’s a solid
thunk
from the door frame as the security system engages.
Shit. Shitshitshit
... Sheer terror begins to gnaw away at me. “Who are you?” I ask, and this time I’m not faking the quaver.

“I’m the Internal Security Jeeves. I take care of problems.” He isn’t smiling.

“But, but, what’s . . .” I trail off. Is there any point in acting at this stage? He’s got me slave-chipped and rebooted in a weaponless body: I’m dead meat. The only question is why he wanted me back at all if he knows about the other thing.

“Reginald confessed,” Jeeves says heavily.

“Who’s Reginald?” I ask, trying to sound confused.
It’s not a unique name, after all, is it?

“Control level nine.” A blanket descends, numbing the senses. “Stop trying to dissemble. One is aware of your little
affair
with Reginald. You knew the rules; you continued despite that. You cannot claim ignorance.” He’s breathing heavily. “Reginald has been—disciplined. And reassigned somewhere where he can do no more damage. What I want to know is—why are there wear marks on your soul-chip contacts? What have you been trying to conceal from us? What ends have you been using the privileged access you extracted from Reginald for? Answer!”

I try to answer—but I can’t. My mind is, literally, a blank. I begin to shake. It’s a horrible feeling, as if my mind is being crushed by an invisible fist. I’m distantly aware that I’m lachrymating, and all my biomimetics have gone mad, but I can’t think of anything but the holes in my head, the blind spots where I ought to know something,
the other
, whatever it is—

“Stop.”

“I don’t know!” I wail. “I really don’t—”

“It’s definitely not in your soul chip, then?” Jeeves leans back in his chair. He sounds
interested
.

“There are gaps! You’re asking me about stuff I—she—didn’t want me to know! She must have expected something like this!”

“She took her soul chip out before engaging in compromising activities, ” Jeeves suggests. “Then she tried not to think about them when she replaced it. That would blur the process of memory canalization, yes? What I want you to tell me is what sort of things you might consider important enough to justify taking such extreme measures to keep secrets, even beyond the scrapyard.”

“Love. Terror. The other thing. Blackmail—”

“What other thing?” He asks, almost gently.

“I don’t know!” I’m gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that if I had my full enhancement suite, I’d be leaving dents in them. “It’s in the holes!”

“Well, that leaves me with something of a problem, Freya.”

“I’m not Freya—”

“Silence. Juliette seduced and suborned one of our junior partners, used him to gain access to privileged information, and went so far as to hide what she was doing from her own soul chip, which implies a certain degree of paranoia, not to mention mendacity.

“Now, if one was inclined to suspect mere venal intent, that might be considered a forgivable weakness—albeit one requiring atonement. But, Freya, Juliette knew there was a good reason why one established the rule against fraternization. One’s lineage has a noted weakness for a certain class of lady, which can only be held at bay by rigid self-discipline. And a sufficiently unscrupulous Block Two descendant of Rhea might well know about this and choose to manipulate it for her own ends. So the question is, Freya, what is
the other thing
that Juliette was willing to mutilate her own soul to keep secret?”

He stops, then looks at my writhing lips with dry amusement. “Speak.”

“I’m not called Freya!” I’m shivering and slimy with a chilly sweat, because I’ve got an inkling that this means—

“Be silent again. Freya, this is your assignment: Get to the bottom of whatever Juliette was keeping secret, and call me in. I’m fairly certain it involves your personal nemesis, and the Black Talon, but you shouldn’t let that prejudice you. Succeed, and I’ll give you anything you want—within reason. Fail, and”—he shrugs, and taps a spot on his desktop—“in all probability, none of us have any future as free persons. Now sit still. Don’t be afraid; this won’t hurt, much.”

The door opens behind me. “Make sure you don’t damage her soul chip,” Jeeves calls past my shoulder, and as I feel the scissors close on either side of my neck I realize, to my great surprise, that I’m not afraid. Because I know what happens next.

Evil Twin

GRANITA’S BOLT-HOLE IS the heart of a spiderweb spanning the solar system. Callisto may be a backwater, but there is a method to my mistress’s apparent madness: She’s within an hour’s communication time of everywhere in the inner system, and conveniently close to the giant Jovian gravity well and a source of cheap reaction mass. Nor is Callisto on the Pink Police’s embargo list—it’s so cold here that nobody considers it a serious risk of replicator infection. Callisto is sterile, for our Creator’s works never quite encompassed its surface, and the searingly cold outback is large enough to hide any number of secrets.

Of which my lady’s palace is one.

I have six standard days to fill, and once my luggage catches up with me, I have little to do. Mail must be piling up for me, but I have no appetite to catch up on my sisters’ trivial bulletins, much less to look for word from Jeeves—who one must assume is deeply displeased by my performance so far, although there’s nothing I can do about that—and in any case, if I heard anything from him, I’d only have to pester Granita with it, at a time when she is sufficiently busy. (There is some mail for Katherine Sorico, but it turns out to be mostly bank statements and reports on investment accounts, and suchlike dull administrivia: I ignore them.)

My lady either has impeccable taste or, more usefully, the ability to employ people with impeccable taste to sculpt her surroundings. I didn’t appreciate this fully aboard
Pygmalion
, when I found her traveling with an entourage; but this is her favorite estate, and she has created something of beauty here.

Callisto orbits beyond the dew line created by the sun’s output, in the chilly depths. Too small to have much of an active core, water plays the same role in her geology as molten rock on Earth. You really do not want to place buildings occupied by people still attuned to the inner system on bare ground—they tend to sink.

Granita’s architects have fashioned for her a delicate snowflake of spun ice crystals, its tubular corridors and podlike pressure compartments balanced on slender legs that sprawl across half a crater. Polished irregular tiles of igneous and metamorphic rocks have been slotted together into the intricate mosaic surfaces of walls and floors, combining a superficial impression of wild randomness with smooth-faced artifice—much like their owner. Granita keeps her demesne below the melting point of ice, and at a reduced atmospheric pressure: comfortable if you’re adjusted to Mars equatorial conditions, not quite so hot that the strands of her spiderweb will cut through the frigid surface of the Galilean moon like molten wires.

I spend a couple of days exploring the mansion and its hidden spaces, from the deep, colorless swimming pool filled with acetone (a slippery-slick chill across my skin, unnaturally thin—when I try swimming in it I sink), to the glass-roofed gallery full of alabaster statues of my mistress’s sibs and matriarch. I distract myself with secret splendors, mystified by their presence here in the back of beyond. But Granita’s instructions have set the paint-strippers of anxiety gnawing at the glossy overlay of my complacency. I should be doing something to help her, but I don’t know what she wants. And her orders preclude any discussion with other members of her household, who might be able to guide me. I can’t even admit that I
am
one of her servants to them! I’m supposed to be Katherine Sorico, independent and powerful in my own right. The contradictory instructions set up an unpleasant clash of priorities whenever I think about them, until I finally make my mind up to go and beg Granita for enlightenment—but when I finally do so, she’s away from home on some mysterious business.