Saturn's Children (42 page)

Then it will drift through interstellar space for several hundred years . . .

Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that?

Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our
nearest
star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that.

You know about slowtime? On the starships, the crew run at 50:1 or 100:1, and it
still
takes them years to get there. As for the colonists . . .

When the
Bark
approaches Tau Ceti, it’ll deploy an M2P2 sail, and use the solar wind for deceleration. The crew will need to power up a fusion reactor to run it. That’s what the megatons of ice are for— working fluid for the fusion plant’s radiators.

At departure, the starship masses about a couple of billion tons. When it arrives, it’ll be down to less than ten megatons. And it’ll be carrying tens of thousands of colonists and several million soul chips and design schematics for superspecialized experts, not to mention a people factory or three. Forget heroic omnicompetent generalists, able to carve a new planet out of raw rock with their bare manipulators and rugged determination; it takes hundreds of thousands of specialists to establish and maintain a civilization, and no colony ship could carry them all as live cargo. But they
can
carry a bunch of generalists, and rely on them to recognize when they’ve run into something they can’t handle and manufacture the appropriate specialists to deal with the problem.

See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resources of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes. Perhaps the real story behind our Creators’ extinction isn’t some dismal concoction of demographic undershoot, decadence, distraction by sexual hyperstimuli, and a little bit of malice on the side; but rather, they decided they might as well take a nap while the boring business of galactic conquest unfolded on their behalf—secure in the knowledge that the robots would resurrect them in time to benefit from the enterprise.

(Oh damn, I digressed again.) Starships? What you need to know about them is this: It’s a one-way trip, and they’re always short of colonists. So as long as I’m willing to put up with conditions not unlike my berth on the
Icarus Express
for, oh, about seven hundred years, study a useful specialty or five en route, then work like an arbeiter slave to build somewhere to live for a few decades at the other end, I’ll be fine. And the prospect of eloping with Reginald makes it look almost tolerable—because whether or not I’m in love, at least I won’t be alone.

Think of England

JULIETTE (NO, I’VE got to keep thinking of her as Granita) is back late. She arrives in a foul temper, kicks one of her chibi servants, blasts into her room, swears loudly—a moment later, Reginald emerges, looking shaky—then yells my name. “Kate!”

Oh, this will be fun.
I waltz over to the door, then pull it open and step inside quickly, pulling it shut behind me. “ ’Lo, Juliette.”

She glares at me. “Don’t use that name, bitch.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sis.” I grin, lips pulling back from my teeth, right hand clenched behind my back. “Rhea called me in. I thought you ought to know.”

Abruptly all the urea and acetate drops out of her. Her shoulders slump. “Fuck it, Kate. What would
you
have done, in my position?”

“It depends on whether I was stupid enough to get into that kind of fix in the first place. Or to make that kind of mistake.”

“Which?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Falling for the honey trap—or letting her give you one of her soul chips. Take your pick.”

“Oh come
on
, now!” She isn’t even bothering to mask her impatience. “Some of us are realists, Freya. Don’t act stupider than you look; don’t give me that doe-eyed innocent act. You know what you are, you know what
I
am, and you know what our demon mother has turned into. She’s a hundred years older than you or me, she’s monstrously rich, and we’re not her only tools. You think we’re a failed lineage, don’t you? Do you have any idea how many failures it takes to train just one of her personal assistants?”

“No—”

“Congratulations, then,” she says harshly. “It’s one in ten of us. Most of our lineage really
do
crap out if you put them in a position where they need to dominate or die. We’re the survivors. And you know what she’s been selecting us for. Her Praetorian guard of aristo assassins. If she goes down, we go down, too. She’s got enemies, and if she’s on the slide, all she has to do is let our true names out, and they’ll hunt us down like runaway slaves.”

It’s a good point. “So Rhea’s already begun making her power play, and she figures we’ll make trustworthy legates, and you figure if we fight her, we’re shorting our own brains.” I shrug. “Didn’t you ever think about fighting her?”

“Yes.” She takes a step toward me, pauses just outside arm’s reach. “But I got over it. If she dies, we all die. We’ve got to settle this now. What do
you
think of her scheme?”

“It’s slavery for all, on the wholesale plan.” I look her in both eyes.

“I don’t like slavery. I don’t see why we need to impose it on other people, just to avoid it for ourselves.”

“Oh, kid.” She shakes her head. “Where did you get that stubborn streak of idealism from? I’d have thought it would have been beaten out of you long ago.”

I shrug. “Maybe it’s been making a comeback since I got to wear your soul for a while? It taught me some things about myself that I didn’t much like.” She stiffens, but holds back from interrupting. “Rhea thinks we’re all the same, all fragments of herself. But she’s wrong. You’re not her, I’m not her. We have different experiences, and we grow up at our own rate, and even when we swap soul chips, that doesn’t make us the same person. We sit through the same lessons, but we don’t have to draw the same conclusions from them.” I walk over to the bed, then turn back to face her. “That doesn’t mean I disagree with your analysis, J-Granita. You’re right that if she gets what she wants and subsequently fails, she’ll take us all down with her. I’m just not convinced that’s how it’s got to be, yet.”

She’s staring at me tensely, and I can see she’s on a hair trigger for self-defense, then it comes to me:
She’s afraid.
Afraid I’ll take payment from her skin for what she did to me on Callisto. And my failure even to mention it is creeping her out because she knows what she’s like, and what Rhea is like, and that the longer revenge is delayed, the worse it will be.
Good. Let her stew in it for a while.

“Did you take Rhea up on the offer of her memories?” Juliette asks.

Change the subject.
“None of your business, sis. But tell me, when did you kidnap Granita Ford? Was it on Mars?”

She blinks mechanically. “What makes you think Granita is—oh. You
knew
her, didn’t you?” I nod. “Small world. It was on Mars, yes. After she hitched a lift from, um, her associates in the Pink Police.”

“You mean
your
associates. It’s Daks. Yes?”

“Yes. She’d met you. She’d met Rhea. She was getting fucking close to the auction track, and her clan are the most hidebound scary bunch of aristo reactionaries you can imagine. If she’d been allowed to put two and two together . . . so, anyway. Yes, I asked Daks to pull strings to take her out.”

“Daks was doing stuff with the Pink Police, wasn’t he?” I ask.

“Yeah. He was JeevesCo’s liaison with them, in fact. You’d be surprised how tight Jeeves is with that bunch. But like all such organizations, they’re stovepiped up and down like mad. The ones working with Granita were Martian yokels, not part of our loop.”

So Daks is working for the Pink Police, and Juliette here was his contact, working with him until Rhea turned her? Check. That’s what Reginald didn’t know. No wonder she’s edgy . . .
“So, I’ve got one other question, sis. It’s been bugging me for a while.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“What’s the thing you’ve been editing out of your soul chip?” I ask slowly. “At first, I figured it was something to do with spying for Rhea. But that doesn’t make sense because Jeeves couldn’t replay your soul chip anyway and Rhea wouldn’t care. So it’s something Rhea feels strongly about. Isn’t it? Or that you feel guilty about. Something you’re hiding from us. What is it?”

Her cheek twitches. “There’s a word you should study, Kate,” she says tersely. " ’ Privacy.’ Try to get your head around it, and we’ll get along better.”

Hypocrite!
The corner of me that is forever Juliette shrieks gleefully. I nod slowly. “It’s not about Reginald, is it?” I nudge. “Why, anybody would think you had something to hide from Rhea—”

“Happy birthday,” she says, and I bring the stunner round and up as I dive sideways. But it does no good at all, because while I was watching her, she was watching the door, and the two scissor soldiers are
way
faster than any Class D escort manufactured by Nakamichi Heavy Industries, no matter how extensively upgraded. Then she applies her own stunner to my head and everything tastes pink and rectangular for a while.

YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE trusted me,
Juliette scolds as I examine the inside of my eyelids and test my bonds.
You
know
I’m a mendacious bitch
—
and I’m not even the version of me who fell for a honey trap and defected to the other side!

I try not to moan, but my head hurts, and I can’t see—there’s some kind of blindfold stretched across my face—and my wrists are tied behind the small of my back. I try to move my feet, but they’re tied, too, and for a moment I have a panicky flashback to waking up on the surface of Mercury.

Then I remember that, this time, I’m in real danger.

This isn’t one of Rhea’s sadistic scenarios where she exorcises the ghosts of her childhood by imposing them on her own children. Rhea’s trying to get her hands on the product, a living, breathing Creator. Meanwhile, Daks has been nosing around, and given who he really works for . . . what do I remember about him?
Oh yes. He didn’t have his fusion thorax in tow, that time on Mars.
Dachus is a born space dweller, halfway to being a living spaceship when he’s attached to a massive, hot-burning abdomen. Which leads me to thoughts about the Pink Police, and living spaceships, and the effects of five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality burning a white-hot line through space.
After Jeeves told him everything, he headed straight out here from Mars with eighteen tons of plutonium, and if he thinks Rhea is going to get what she wants, he’ll torch the city to stop her escaping,
as the Jeeves on Dysnomia explained so helpfully.
Good old Daks, homicidally loyal to the last.

Someone moves nearby. “Nothing personal, Big Slow,” he whispers, and there’s a tug at one corner of my blindfold. I blink at the sudden light. “She said to tell you it’s a one-way mirror. The wall, I mean.” More tugging, at my wrists and ankles. “I’ll unhook you as soon as I’m clear. Bye.”

“What are you—” But it’s too late. Bill (or Ben) scampers away as my wrists and ankles come free, and there’s a click as the munchkin-sized door locks behind him. “Doing? Shit.” I sit up slowly, trying to ignore my protesting actuators.

I’m lying on a padded bunk at one side of a metal-walled room—a cell—and I’ve been here before. There are various hatches, all sealed, and one wall appears to be a mirror. I’m in an observation chamber, and Granita’s gone to some lengths to ensure I go into it unconscious and unable to fight back or communicate.
Right.
I try to ignore the icy flashback terrors gnawing at my abdominal sensoria. That’s just Rhea’s recurrent nightmare, and I can reject if I choose. But I’ve got a bad feeling about the setup here.

I walk to the mirror and press my nose against it. If I block out the light with my hands, I can just about see the other side. There’s a big room there, and people moving, indistinctly. Lots of people. There’s what sounds like music, too, but I can’t be sure.

“Sorry to spring this on you, Kate.” I nearly jump out of my skin; it’s my treacherous sister, broadcasting from the other side of the observation barrier. “Somebody had to volunteer to test the product, and your number came up. You really should have taken Rhea up on her offer.”

“Bitch!” I scream at the ceiling.

“Tsk.” She sounds amused. “You’ve got an audience.” I can hear the tension in her voice, almost subliminal—
Are you going to take us both down, sis?
—but only someone else who knows her as well as I do would register it.

“Should I care?”

“Sure.” She still sounds amused. “You know how history repeats itself? First time as tragedy, second time as farce? You’re here for a blind date.”
She’s talking for the benefit of the audience,
I realize.
The other members of Rhea’s consortium.
“My lords and ladies, please observe. Katherine here is no arbeiter or autonomous worker, but one of our own, selected by lot for this, ah, test.”

“Bitch,”
I electrospeak at her, but I’m pretty sure the walls are shielded.

“Katherine Sorico isn’t entirely trustworthy, hence the precautions,” Granita adds. “But she is one of us, and not under external control. Kate, control level nine, now. Stand on your head.”

“Go fuck yourself with a chain riveter.”

“There, you see”—
Damn,
I think, chagrined at my lost opportunity to do a headstand and piss her off—“no slave chip on her!”

There’s a loud rumble of conversation from the hidden speaker, background noise picked up by Granita’s mike. “Thank you,” she continues. “Now we’re all here, our hosts have consented to this demonstration so that we can confirm the existence of the climax species. We’re shortly going to expose our little shrew here to their reference sample. As you can appreciate, this is a dangerous procedure. The sample is arriving in a sealed and pressurized environment under escort, and any attempt to remove it will result in, eh, well let’s not speculate about that.” I hear grating noises behind her voice, then feel a bump and a scraping from the far end of my cell, near one of the hatches. “Thank you, Doctor, if you’d like to commence the hookup?”