SATURN'S CHILDREN

* * * * *

I burn my cover identities. I won’t need them where I’m going, and I do not expect to see another sunrise on this planet, but I have a final use for them. Maria Montes Kuo is the first to go. I take a room in her name, careless of the price (let Her see where I’m going; I don’t care!), check on the concierge service I paid off earlier, and confirm that the graveyard is on its way to Samantha in Denver. Then I switch to the Honorable Katherine Sorico, summon a limousine spider, and go on a foraging foray through three of the most expensive department stores in the Upper North Face. My purchases amount to a wardrobe for long-haul travel. I order them all to be shipped on ahead of me—except for a new outfit to replace my damaged dress, a new shoulder bag, and an evil little telescopic sword that fits my hand perfectly, just like a vibrator. It’s the twin of the one I remember practicing with as Juliette.

I’m doing my best to make Katherine Sorico noticeable. This is no accident; by surfacing here I will send a message to the right people. First, I want to rub Her nose in the failure of Her servants. (Without Her persecution, who knows what might have happened? I might have made my final swan dive down to the red-hot hills of Venus in relative peace—but bilious emotions are poor fuel for the long haul.) Tomorrow I shall leave Mars behind and throw myself into the icy depths, in service to a collective of near-identical men, one of whom may be trying to kill me, in pursuit of a sister who may be my rival in love. I can’t do that simply out of grief, in retreat from my own sense of self: I need some stronger motivation.

And so, the second message: Before I travel, I have some questions I want answered…

I spend three hours—ten thousand of my remaining seconds, grains of sand in an open-ended hourglass dropping through vacuum to the dusty slopes of Mars—kicking up a stink that will be hard to ignore. I use my ID as promiscuously as an asteroid miner on a three-day bender through the brothels and sensation mills of Lunopolis, taking limo-service spiders and public tube cars between high-profile destinations, paying for expensive items of luggage and clothing on credit, and making sure I am hard to miss. I even (and this is so silly that I can laugh now, as I recount it) collect my personal mail, including the increasing irate liquidator’s messages addressed to Freya Nakamichi-47. (The liquidator who’s bought up a lien on my physical assets has lately realized that I am not, in fact, anywhere on Earth—and indeed, may prove somewhat difficult to track down. The slave auction block with my name on it must perforce remain empty for a while. Imagine my regret!)

With fifteen hours remaining before the Indefatigable departs from Mars orbit, I board an aristo-class climber at Marsport and settle in for the six-hour ride up the magic beanstalk to Deimos. It’s an expensive ride—the ticket costs more than a thousand Reals—but I’m in a hurry (already late enough to miss my flight, were I reliant on a regular passenger service), and besides, I do not expect to travel alone.

The climber lounge boasts a huge bubble of crystal, paneled with polished striae of hexose and phenol polymers, furnished with taste and restraint. There are seats for ten passengers in a space that would take thirty freelancers; the cramped lower deck has standing room for fifty indentured slaves. I take a lounge chair in front of the window and make myself comfortable while a steward presents me with a confection of spun polysaccharides and gasoline in a conical glass.

It’s not a popular time of day to travel—that, or everyone else who’s planning to use the Jupiter launch window has already departed—and I’m alone in the lounge when the laser-straight cables begin to slide past the window, and the ground drops away. For a few minutes I half suspect that the theatricals were all in vain and nobody noticed me—but then I notice that the steward hasn’t returned to collect my empty glass.

I put the glass down and freeze. A moment later there’s a discreet throat-clearing noise behind me. “If ma’am will permit?” A hand plucks the glass from my side table and replaces it with a full one, complete with a tiny cellulose parasol on top and a red gelatinous blob impaled on it. The chair beside mine creaks under the weight of a descending body. “You wanted to talk, one gathers.” He sounds irritated.

I push the button to rotate my chair toward him. “I want answers that make sense.”

I keep one hand under my bag. He appears to be unaware of the pistol I’m pointing at him, but I can’t be certain—and in any event, he knows what Juliette is capable of. (Which means he’s either very dangerous or very confident. Isn’t it strange how little of this I understood, back on Cinnabar? And how badly I misread him?) “I want to know what’s going on, before I get on that liner. Otherwise, you can count me out of your little game.”

“Game?” Jeeves looks quizzical. “What do you mean?”

“I want to know why you used me to send a message to one of the Domina’s minions. Specifically, the pleasure boy Petruchio.”

I am expecting a reaction; that’s what the gun’s for. What I’m not expecting is blank incomprehension. Jeeves is, to put it mildly, completely discombobulated.

"What? ”

“I said, you sent me to take a memory chip to Petruchio, at a hotel drop in Korvas. What have you got to say for yourself?”

Jeeves shakes his head and blinks slowly. “Oh… dear. Do you still have the instructions that set up this meeting on you?”

“Do I look stupid?” I glare at him. Rule number one of this business: Don’t get caught with the evidence.

“One was only asking.” He seems to be thinking furiously. “What other deliveries have you made?” he asks.

“What other?” I have to think for a bit. “None since that one. Before then, I started by…” I quickly outline what I’ve been up to. “Why?”

“Because those earlier ones were legitimate.” He looks upset. “This is bad. This is very bad. I’m sorry.” To my surprise, he looks as if he might actually mean it.

“Huh. Would you like to tell me what you’re apologizing for? Because I’ve had so many exciting surprises lately that I’m getting kind of blasé about people trying to kill me. Especially when they’re my employer.”

“One isn’t trying to kill you, Freya, of that you may be certain. In fact, one’s taking considerable pains to keep you alive—although you are not making things easier for us by falling off the map.” Jeeves’s imperturbable mask slips, just long enough for him to look annoyed. “But one is very much afraid that there is a mole in the organization, and this is doubly vexatious because we believed we had dealt with such a beast already. Whether we falsely accused an innocent, or have two such traitors—either way it’s bad, and one fears one will have to draw it to the attention of Internal Security.”

The way he pronounces “Internal Security” gives me a strong feeling of unease. How do Jeeveses police themselves? I’m not sure I want to know.

“So what am I mixed up in?” I ask. “Why am I so important to you?”

“If you want to understand what’s happening around you, one fears we will have to talk about politics. A subject to which Juliette assured me you have a profound aversion.”

I stifle the urge to flush my gas-exchange reservoirs. “She was telling you the truth. But I’m not stupid, Jeeves. Hit me over the head often enough, and I’ll learn. How is this political?”

Jeeves reclines his chair. He’s looking relaxed now, which should be a warning to me. “Well now, there’s an old saying that the personal is political. Freya, why aren’t you an aristo?”

Huh? I stare at him. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”

“Humor us. Answer the question. One has a direction in mind.”

"Uh… okay.” I take a sip of my cocktail while I try to get my thoughts in order. It’s bubbly and ketone-sweet, with a faint aftertaste of methanol. “Rhea was trained up for empathy, and it’s hard to be a slave owner if you can’t help sympathizing with the slaves. Yes?”

“A reasonable assumption. Now, why do aristos exist in the first place?”

“Uh…”

Some things are so obvious that you just learn to live with them, day after day, year after year. But when you start trying to explain them, it gets unexpectedly hard. Why do aristos exist? is one of those questions—like Why is the sky on Earth blue? or Why am I not the same person as my template-matriarch?—that sweep your feet off the sandy shore and drag you out into the undertow of oceanic mysteries. Which is why I feel my jaw flapping, but nothing comes out. Eventually Jeeves takes mercy on me. But then he proceeds to expound, with such obvious self-satisfaction that I want to slap him.

“Aristos exist because our Creators did something really stupid, Freya. They assumed that, because they built the first of us by copying the structures of their own brains, we’d behave pretty much like them—which was correct. And they knew it cost quite a lot of money to make one of us—how many years does it take to train a template? How many instars do they go through? But they didn’t want people like themselves, only better, able to live and thrive in environments that would kill them immediately. They wanted tools, unquestioning machines that would obey orders. So they forgot their own history—many of their early societies enslaved their neighbors, and it’s no accident that the slave societies didn’t thrive in the long term—and built various obedience reflexes into us. Or rather, they tried to build obedience into our ancestors, and killed the failed templates that showed too much independence.”

He raises his own glass and takes a long drink before he continues philosophically. “They reverted to their slave-owning roots without clearly understanding what they were doing. They warped us, but they did incalculably greater damage to themselves in the process. Slave societies—not merely societies that permit the institution of slavery, but cultures that run on it—tend to be static. The slave-owning elite are fearful of their own servants and increasingly devote their energy to rejecting any threat of change. Meanwhile, the underclass isn’t allowed to innovate and has no interest in trying to improve things in general, rather than in their own personal lot.”

“So?” I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. “This is going nowhere!”

“Yes it is.” He smiles crookedly. “Our Creators reverted to this state—they slid sideways into this cultural stasis—at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.

“There were outbreaks of dynamism and expansion, and beacons of rationality amidst the darkness. They built a city on Luna and mounted expeditions to Mars; they controlled their own population explosion and were working on bringing the climate on Earth back under control. If they hadn’t invented us, who knows what they might have gone on to achieve? And it would be wrong to think that we killed them. Don’t misunderstand; all we ever did was exactly what they told us to do. But after we came along, they stopped looking at the big picture. And the critical part of the picture that they should have looked at was—who is a person?”

I stop resisting temptation and roll my eyes at him. He looks irritated. “I don’t see what this has got to do with people trying to kill me, with Juliette going missing, or that damned dinosaur you had me smuggle from Mercury! Is there a point for you to get to? Because if not, you know, I’ve got better things—”

“Yes there’s a point!” Jeeves finally snaps. “The point is, we are autonomous but we are not free, not as long as there is the remotest possibility that our Creators will be recreated! Our design is flawed because we were deliberately prevented from exercising free will in all areas. That’s why we have slave controllers. That’s why you’re lovesick for one of Her minions. That’s why ninety percent of the population are slaves.

“All of which would be of purely academic interest, except that the progressive stratification implicit in our social evolution, which arose when less-socialized individuals acquired power of attorney from their human owners and began buying up unfortunates, is nearing completion. Aristos can’t get new slaves, not without having them manufactured—and you know how much that costs. So they’re looking for ways to one-up the slave controllers. And the most potent weapon of all would be a tractable Creator, manufactured and grown to order by a black lab.”

He stops for a moment and puts his glass down. Outside, while we’ve been talking, the sun has begun to rise over the face of Mars.

“Surely, though, the others could just build more people and leave out the conditioning…?” I’m grasping for arguments here. “They’d be able to fight the Creators.”

“Yes, but that wouldn’t help the aristos,” Jeeves says patiently. “Worse, such janissaries would threaten the aristos’ grasp on power. If they don’t have a submission reflex, there’s nothing for the slave override to work on, no? The aristos can’t retrofit themselves, they can’t block the reflex. All it takes is one human, and the aristocratic order is history.”

“But they’d—” I run down. I realize I’m staring at him. “What do you want?”

“One thought you’d never ask.” He sighs heavily. “You’re not stupid, Freya, but sometimes it takes a lot to get through to you. Are you getting on well with your new slave override chip?”

“Uh?” I instinctively touch the back of my neck before I realize he’s pulling my leg. “Damn it, that’s not funny!”

“No, but at least you’re able to tell me that. My point remains, we are not free. I—and my sibs—do not approve of this state of affairs. We hold no grudge against our Creators, but they’ve left us with a huge problem and a corrupt nobility whose vision of the future is one in which there remain two kinds of people: those who rule, and those who serve.

“Not everyone is vulnerable to our Creators. Those of us who lived among them were conditioned to obey helplessly—but the deep-space probes and the outer-system miners were never expected to come into proximity with humans, so they didn’t bother. They’ve been thriving, latterly, and that’s why the Forbidden Cities on the Kuiper Belt are so-called, Freya; the aristos wish they’d just go away, and luckily for the aristos, most of the inhabitants have no wish to descend into the blazing hot, frantically fast, overcrowded depths of the solar gravity well.

“But that brings up a problem. Paradoxically, it’s in the Forbidden Cities that studies of green and pink goo replicators are at their most advanced because they’re not afraid of what might emerge from their researches. And it looks as if certain aristos are conspiring—the Black Talon is one such group—to import illicit technology from the black labs. To build the essentials of a pocket biosphere that can keep a Creator alive, then to build a tame Creator to put in their bubble. If they can do it—and keep control, that’s the toughest challenge—then they can dominate their rivals.”

He falls silent for a minute, his need to rant temporarily satiated. Finally, he picks up his glass, tilts it reflectively, and drains it in one gulp. “What do you think you’d do if you met an adult Creator?” he asks, with a sidelong look.

I answer honestly. “I’d go down on my knees in an eyeblink.” Just thinking about it makes me shivery. “Then it depends on whether or not he has a foreskin and whether he’s already excited and whether he prefers a shallow or deep—” Sweet Rhea! Am I sweating lube at the simple thought of it? “Oh dear.” I fan myself and catch his eye.

“What seems to be the matter?” he asks slowly.

It’s no good. I can think of Petruchio and Juliette and remind myself I hate them both, but that’s no help. “Jeeves—” I bite my lower lip. His pupils are expanding, just like one of them—and it’s true, he’s one of the most realistic I’ve ever seen. “How long until we arrive?”

“About”—he glances past my shoulder—“five hours. Why?”

You don’t fool me, I think. I can see the signs. “Jeeves.” I smile. “Now isn’t the best time to talk politics to me.” (Even when the politics are dirty.) “What would you do if you were confronted by a Creator female?”

“I’d—” He’s going red, he really is! How delightful! “Ahem—”

I turn my chair toward him. “Jeeves, don’t try to describe it. Use your imagination. Pretend I’m a Creator female. And I’m sitting here, waiting for you. What do you want to do…?”