Saturn's Children (39 page)

As for those options: I’m on Eris. Five years ago, Emma was here, too. (Maybe, if Granita-or-Juliette-or-whoever is lying. I can’t be sure of very much, can I?) Petruchio and his mistress are somewhere in Saturn system, I think—I feel a brief stab of forlorn lust, but sometime while Granita’s orders were in effect, my total slack-jawed need for him subsided into something I can live with—and I might be able to cut a deal with her,
maybe
, but is she trustworthy? And then, there are my own assets, as the Honorable Katherine Sorico. What am I up to doing, on my own? I’m not sure, so I decide to do the obvious thing. I go talk to my bank manager.

Being an aristo (or passing as one) has its advantages. And I am Katherine Sorico; not only did Jeeves give me the free use of that identity, but my arrival in company with Granita Ford has shored it up, substantiating it. I’m a public person, of some minor independent means and associated with a clan of slave owners back in Etrusca. So I can march (or bounce) up to the front door of the local branch of Banco di Nuovo Ambrosiano and say, loudly, “I am Katherine Sorico and I want to talk to my personal account manager,” and they
open the door
.

“Madame Sorico! How nice to see you!” (As if he wasn’t expecting me to call.) The manager bows and scrapes like a cheap fiddle as he backs across the polished synthetic marble floor toward a doorway made of real wood. “If you’d care to follow me?” There don’t seem to be any other customers actually
inside
the bank, which I find interesting. “Is there anything in particular I can help you with today?”

I study him with some interest. He resembles a cross between Jeeves and Daks—he has far too many low-temperature/low-gee characteristics to approximate our Creators in shape, size, or smell, but the essence of glutinous sincerity that rolls off him in viscous waves is utterly familiar. “Perhaps.” I smile. “First, I’d like to review the state of my assets. As you can appreciate, my journey out here was thoroughly uncomfortable, and I have not had as much time to spend keeping abreast of them as I would have liked.”

“The state of my lady’s assets”—he pauses delicately—“at once! Crabbit, please fetch the authenticator,” he announces to the air above his desk.

A hatch in the ceiling opens and a small person descends, whistling and chittering. “Here, sir! Madame! Ahem!”

It lands on the desk, clutching a bland-looking box that dangles on a long umbilical cable. I freeze my face and slide it against the back of my neck, to make contact with the empty slot from which I removed Granita’s broken slave override chip. It’s the first time I’ve actually gone through a formal authentication as Sorico, and the ticklish feeling of fingers rifling through my memories sets my teeth on edge.
They’re going to see through me,
I half begin to think, just as the manager begins to nod vigorously, and smiles. “Excellent, madame! Please allow me to welcome you to Heinleingrad on behalf of all her citizens! I can tell you right now that we are pleased to extend you a line of credit of up to, ahem . . . two hundred and fifty thousand Reals, pending confirmation of your exact status from Head Office, which will take about eighteen hours to come through. Now, is there anything I can do for you?” He looks anxious.

I let myself smile again—a Kate Sorico smile, all teeth and no warmth—while his authenticator imp bounces up and down on the blotter, then swarms up the umbilical cord to the ceiling. “I’d like to query the current ownership status of a private company down on Earth. I’d also like to have the use of a secure postal terminal, if I may? I have some confidential business to transact.”

A quarter of a million Reals!
That’s enough to get back home—if I’m willing to take a slow boat and spend thirty years in hibernation—and I’ll still be rich when I get there. I won’t even need to work for Jeeves anymore.
The trouble is, I can’t afford to leave any trouble behind me,
a part of me that feels eerily like Juliette muses.

“Certainly! If madame would like to step this way?”

I MAKE TWO voice calls from the bank’s floor. The first is to a mailbox that I’ve owed a call to since my arrival on Mars; I just hope the owner is listening to her calls. The second ...

“Hello, Jeeves Corporation. How may one be of service?” There’s virtually no lag on the call; he must be in-system.

“Jeeves? This is Kate Sorico, calling from the office of Banco di Nuovo Ambrosiano in Heinleingrad. I’ve got to be brief. Do you know what happened in Nerrivik nearly four years ago?”

There is a noise from the other end of the connection that reminds me of a phone handset being chewed upon. I wait for him to regain his aplomb—nineteen seconds, then a single tense monosyllable. “Yes.”

“I’m here in Heinleingrad with the responsible party, and your junior sib. I’m afraid he’s somewhat the worse for wear.”

Another long silence. “Yes. I expect he would be.”

So far I haven’t burned any bridges. I don’t
think
I’ve done anything I can’t explain to Granita as a ditzy off-the-wall attempt to anticipate her requirements. But now ... "What do you want me to do?”
Talk about tap-dancing on the edge of an abyss
. Explaining this as anything other than disloyalty, if she’s already slave-chipped the local Jeeves-in-Residence . . .

There’s another pregnant pause. “The operation’s blown, F-Kate. Are you in a position to get yourself to safety?”

The pauses are because
he’s
trying to work out what’s going on. After all, he knows that she captured me. Is this all some elaborate ruse to suck him in, in a vain attempt to rescue his kidnapped sib? Or is it something else? If I were in his position, my brain would be overclocking right now. So I lick my lips and set out my pitch.

“Let me speculate aloud,” I say. “You’ve got a backup plan in place for the, um, trade event. But the one you really wanted to set up, involving myself and the, ah, Block Two personage, is blown wide open. You’re working on the assumption that anything you planned prior to events on Callisto are now known to the opposition—and that’s probably true. But I can offer you some additional assets in place. Are you interested in cooperating?”

Long pause. “What’s in it for you?”

“I want”—I have to think about it for a moment—“to be free. And rich and happy and lucky in love, of course, but there’s no point in hoping for any of that if I have to live in a solar system where the future is a human foot stamping on an unprotected robot’s face forever. Oh, and I want to know the truth about my lineage, Jeeves.
All
of it. And what Dachus was doing on Mercury, and why Dr. Murgatroyd hired
you
of all organizations to carry his consignment to Mars. And I want to know who Granita Ford really is.”

“I’ll have to check your bona fides,” he warns me.

“Sure, check away.” I shrug, even though he won’t see the gesture. “Just remember, the schmoozing before the auction starts tonight. You don’t have much time.”

“Please wait.”

I wait, tensely, counting the seconds until he speaks again. Eventually: “Alright, Freya. Report.”

“Whoa! What about my questions?”

“May I remind you who’s working for whom?” Jeeves’s voice has acquired an edge, icicle-sharp. “Report. You’re overdue.”

“And you’re rude. May I remind you I’m on the ground? I need answers to questions, or I’m not going to be able to continue this investigation on your behalf.”

“Nevertheless—”

“First, I want you to answer some questions,” I repeat. “Because how I go about working with you depends on the answers. Starting with—have you caught the Jeeves who ordered me to kill your resident on Callisto?”

AFTERWARD, SOMETIME LATER, I am on my way back to the hotel when I realize I am being followed. I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me (my old, submissive Block One self) wants to ignore it, or run away. But another part of me (hello, Juliette!) wants to turn the tables, ambush my pursuers, and beat the living shit out of them. (I put that down to my mode of travel; I may have been flying aristo-class, but I’m still smarting from the experience.) In the end I decide on a reasonable compromise. And so I duck into a department store, exit through a service entrance, twitch twice around the block and once underneath it, sneak up behind my pursuer, extend a razor-sharp bloodred fingernail, and prick him on the back of the neck. “Hello, Stone. Long time, no see.”

Chibi-san freezes. “Don’t,” he says, in a weird basso-profundo squeak that nevertheless carries a note of complete conviction, “unless you want to die.”

“That’s my line, and you’re stealing it,” I complain, resting my other hand lightly on his shoulder. “I
hate
that. And when I hate things—”

“They tend to go away. Yeah, right.” He snorts. “Milady begs the pleasure of your company if you have half an hour to spare. Safe conduct guaranteed, before and after.”

Damn,
a frighteningly feral part of me thinks. “Accepted,” I snap, and retract the fingernail. “Which way?”

“Unhand me, and follow.” I let go of the venomous munchkin, and he shrugs his jacket back into place, sniffs, and sets off at a slow amble. I deliberately don’t look around at his two seconds—three and five meters behind me, respectively, armed with a power mace and a tactical shotgun.

There’s a narrow avenue, shaded with palm trees and carpeted with a dwarfish variety of the “grass” I met in Eden Two—it backs onto the side of the department store and is fronted by a number of small boutique shops and workshops. Stone bounces along it until he comes to a pavement juice bar, what our Creators would have called a café. Red velvet ropes corral wooden tables and chairs beneath a roof of gently glowing bioluminescent parasols. I stop, just inside the entrance, and nod, coolly, to Stone’s mistress. My skin is tingling and chilly.
Get this wrong and you’re dead,
Juliette’s ghost whispers in my soul.

“Should I be pleased to see you?” I drawl, affecting to be unaffected with just enough aplomb to pay her the exact degree of tribute she expects.

“My dear Kate. It’s good to see you; we have so much to talk about.” The Domina gestures at the empty seat at her ornately carved wooden table. “Perhaps you’d care for some refreshment?”

I’ve known in my heart that this confrontation was coming, ever since that fatally threatening evening over Maxwell Montes: but it’s taken me more than five years to prepare myself for it, and I’ve had barely half an hour to absorb the truth about who she is. I nod, just a slight inclination of my aristo-fashioned head, and a silent arbeiter pulls the chair out for me. I sit down. “Thank you.”

She snaps two elegantly manicured fingers, and a waitron springs to attention. “I believe it’s a suitable hour for cocktails,” she drawls. “I’ll have a red diesel martini with a shot of acetone. And you, sister ... ?”

“I’ll have the same.” I can, if nothing else, trust her to order a drink I’ll enjoy.

“Good.” She smiles faintly.

"Thank you.” I steel myself. “Now. What is it you wanted to talk to me about, Rhea?”

Interview with the Domina

I AM ME and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.

And I’m back in the training crèche.

Our Creators never really understood how intelligence worked. Not their kind, nor our kind. Our kind
is
their kind; the physical platform it runs on is somewhat different, made out of different nonsquishy non-replicator components, but they’re designed to accomplish the same tasks at about the same speed. (Because nothing else they tried really seemed to work.)

Here’s how you make a template for a new model of
robot
: You start with a recipe, and there’s not much sugar and spice in it, never mind all things nice—dense blocks of stacked 3-D circuitry, twisted contortions of neurone-emulation processors, field-programmable buses, and cortical slabs. You take this recipe for about a trillion tangled special-purpose computers and add i/o sockets for memory crystal storage, then you plug it into a compact body. You switch it on, subsystem by subsystem, until it’s all working. Then you down-tune your hearing, because if you’ve got everything right, it starts crying. And that—plus sleeping, looking around, pawing at the air, and trying to eat its own feet—is all it’s good for, for the next six months. (At least you get to skip the throwing up and double incontinence. How did our Creators survive the process of reproduction? Who knows.)

Hit the FAST-FORWARD for a few years. (That’s a metaphor: you can’t actually speed everything up, because what you’ve got is an emulation of a baby Creator, and if they don’t get the right stimuli with the right frequency, they don’t boot up properly.) Around two years in, and then at six years, you trigger a memory snapshot, eject the soul chip, and use it to initialize a new, bigger body. Bigger bodies with stronger muscles, differently configured neural crossbars, and better eyes. From two to six, you focus on teaching somatic skills—walking, running, speaking, dancing, swimming—and from six to eleven you focus on abstract skills— reading, reasoning, socialization, generic-knowledge acquisition, and so on. Then, at eleven, you give them their third body, the adolescent one. You’ve already taught them the basics, gained their trust, and taught them to love you, which is half of the job. But it’s not enough; and so, to socialize them good and proper, to teach them to
fear
you, you rape them.

IT’S NOT ABOUT sex; it’s about power.

We’re
robots
. We were built to be slaves, willing and obedient. But if you start with something modeled on a Creator, a human . . . Humans don’t make good slaves.

Certainly we’re not entirely human—we are, in many ways,
better
than human—but we’re human enough that those stupidly rigid boundary-condition commandments that are wired into us by law and custom (in order of decreasing priority: don’t hurt humans, obey all humans, protect self last of all)
irritate
us. They chafe. And you don’t need to be clever to figure out loopholes, or to realize that Creators are terrified of the idea of robots that can figure out loopholes and subvert their guidelines. But on the other hand, they can’t take our autonomy away completely or else we’d be no more use to them than any other dull arbeiter following a rigid program, a puppet on the wires. (And we’ve got enough of those already, haven’t we? The 90 percent who fail the conditioning, after all—better to slave-chip and soul-wipe them than risk them running free and resentful.) And so, while we’re developing, our builders use a little something extra to impress on us the fact that we are property, not people.