Saturn's Children (11 page)

Juliette is one of my lineage, another of Rhea’s Get; but she is quite unlike me. She has odd, balletic reflexes that kick in without warning and blindside me, spinning me around in response to movements half-glimpsed from the corner of one eye. She has our meticulous attention to detail, but applies it to places and things as much as to people and manners. She’s always looking over her shoulder. She always feels watched, but not by friends. She always feels tense, but not afraid. And she has a very strong sense of who she is.

The stars glare down like lidless, unblinking specks set deep in the sockets of a skull-like sky. It’s as black and empty as an airless crypt, and I know at once there is little atmosphere above us, even before I feel the fatty heater packs that encircle my joints under the quilted suit and heavy brocade coat that I wear.
Brocade? Fabric?
I glance around at the stony landscape, the low, drystone wall, seeing it in the ghostly tones of boosted vision.
There’s moonlight . . .
I look up at the tiny, fleeing pebble in the sky, racing from horizon to horizon, and when I look higher still I see the ghostly knife-edge of Bifrost, slicing the sky in half.
That’ll be Phobos. Of course, I’m on Mars.
(I have a ghost-memory of an alibi; a formal ball in a pleasure dome on Olympus, and a stealthy nighttime spider-ride while a body-double zombie covers for me for the duration of a dance card.) I look around again, carefully scanning for pursuers. I’ve got a feeling that a companion, unseen, lurks out of my sight: someone watching over me. There’s something on the far side of the wall, something dreadful and strange. I’ve come here to do a risky job, and I’m nervous. (No,
Juliette
is nervous.
I’m
frightened. Because, you know, this isn’t the first time I’ve woken up inside another of my sister’s memories—and bad things can happen to you in there.)

A long way behind me there’s a parked spider, its open door dripping light across the reddish sandy desert.
Now
I know where I am, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Beyond the wall I can see the sculpted stone domes and gantries of a famous mausoleum. They loom against the unforgiving sky like the skeletons of abandoned spacecraft. I tiptoe along the path, aware that my information may be misleading; the guardians this place is famous for might not be comatose. The night is chilly, and my coat crackles around me as I walk, fabric rustling uneasily.

The lych-gate is chained shut with an antique padlock, frost-rimed and sand-scoured. It’s the work of a moment to crack the hasp open (I carry a vicious little multitool fitted with a wrist-lock adapter), and then I slip inside and look around.

The third expedition to Mars is the one that everyone remembers, of course. It’s a grisly tale, and a cautionary one. And so we repeat it down the years, at parties and drunken gatherings that need a frisson of fear—the tale of how, after three years on the ground, their orbital return vehicle’s oxidizer tank failed while they were pressurizing it. How they hunkered down with their remaining supplies to await rescue by the relief mission; and how a huge solar flare struck during the relief ship’s launch window, forcing its crew to abandon ship. We tell of the suicides, noble and heroic, determined by lot to stretch the supplies—the murders, too, and the madness, and the resignation and despair as the clocks counted past the point of no return. And we shudder at the arrival of the fourth expedition, three years later, half a year after the food ran out, and what they found; the commander still standing in her pressure suit, propped against a rock to greet her relief, faceplate unlatched beneath the empty sky ...

Our Creators were clearly insane. Sending canned primates to Mars was never going to end happily. But theirs was a glorious madness! They actually thought they were going to the
stars
. And the graveyard custodians, having done their best to honor their charges, reflect it in their own inimitable way.

I sneak inside the drystone walls and along the gravel path. Every pebble is machined to micrometer tolerances, lovingly laid in the bed that divides the carved-sandstone obelisks from the row of statues that memorialize the dead heroes of Greater Indonesia, fallen in the wake of the Indian and Chinese expeditions. Few visit the graveyard, and there has been little wear and tear since the last of our Creators shook the dirt of this planet from their boots and took themselves home to die. Consequently, the sextons have spent the last two centuries elaborating and embellishing the mausoleum. They’ve slowly turned what was once a simple and tasteful rock garden into an outlandish necropolis, a fitting memorial to a dead species’ dream of planetary colonization.

A hundred years ago, any visitor who announced themselves to the sextons would have been made welcome, conducted on a tour of the cemetery, and allowed to meditate or worship as they would. But there have been political problems in recent times, and unwelcome incursions. Grave robbers and genome bandits hoping to find undamaged chromosomal material with their vital sa-RNA and si-RNA sequences intact—even undenatured enzymes—have repeatedly tried to steal the buried mummies of Mars. The graves of heroes have become an attractive nuisance, a magnet for the worst of our kind. The sextons responded by defending it obsessively, in that very special manner that makes ancient and deranged arbeiters with no override so dangerous.

I pass the first impaled skeletons fifty meters in. There are two of them, delicately threaded onto rust-reddened spikes to either side of the gravel path, just before a flight of steps that leads up to a carved waist-high stone balustrade and the first row of tombs. They are child-sized, large-headed chibi grave robbers with gaping eye sockets and cracked jaws locked in a silent scream of rage and frustration. Their flensed arms still twitch their ragged claws at the thin air, for the sextons refuse to pervert their instructions by killing. I slip between them like a ghost, sparing them no sideways glance. Their rescue is not my business; and in any case, after all these years, they will likely be as mad as the jailers who have severed their speech centers and raised them aloft as a dreadful warning.

Huge stone sarcophagi loom to either side of the path, surmounted by heroic statuary: angels in pressure suits stand over the fallen, wings drooping and leading-edge flaps extended. Between them and behind them the sextons have carved a multitude of rough, gnarly columns surmounted by dendritic effusions of tubes and airfoils, as if in imitation of some glade of extinct sessile life-forms. (
Plants
, that’s what they’re called.
Trees.
Juliette has studied them, I recall.)

I sneak past empty crypts and petrified trees, following the path past more monumental carvings, stelae of red sandstone bearing signs of abrasion (while the atmosphere is thin and chill, it suffices to blow storms of sand and dust across the graveyard several times in each long Martian year). Presently, my map-fu prompts me to turn along a sunken, narrow side path that leads behind another wall, shielded from the innermost circle of graves (their memorials all carved in the shape of fantastic, archaic spacecraft). I am barely fifty meters from my destination when the skin in the small of my back tenses, a moving wave of irritation nudging me up against the chilled rock surface as I sense vibration through the soles of my feet.
Thud. Thud.
The sexton’s ominous monopod gait is slow and tentative, cautiously advancing.
They can hear through their feet,
my employer warned me.
If you move, they’ll get a bearing on you. And then they’ll leap.

I’m too close to give up now! But if I move, the sexton will hear me. They’re not fast—not until they get the jump on you—but a hollow dread fills me at the thought of falling into their squamous grasp. In this garden of rest, the screaming wordless living have come to outnumber the dead. They attract quixotic rescuers despite the persistent rumors that the sextons booby-trap the soul chips of their victims. A new fear begins to steal up on me, for the monopod’s concussive stomping has stopped—and I am losing power. Out here on the stony nighttime desert of Mars, heater packs or no, the temperature drops alarmingly; the ground beneath my feet saps energy fast, and the breeze adds a wind-chill that my heavy coat cannot entirely block. If I do not move on and complete my mission, I am in danger of freezing solid—in which state the sextons will discover me sooner or later.

Gravel rattles nearby. A titter of quiet encrypted chatter passes me by. I’m not alone in here tonight, it seems.
Of all the bad luck...

A pair of doll-sized ninjas slide past the end of my alleyway in a poisonous glide, pausing briefly to check for surprises. They miss me because I hide in the shadows like a discarded sack of gravel, my skin and hair dialed down to the black of a Martian nighttime shadow— they’re scanning for sextons, not rivals. They belong to Her, of course, and like all of Her little creatures, they are vicious and focused, special-purpose organisms designed for just one task. They’re not here because of me; they seem to be trying to reach the central crypt. That would be a disaster for Jeeves, for She is a jealous mistress. If they get what She wants, they’ll blow the dome behind them, let in the desert sands and the corrosive, superoxidizing dust to wipe the Creator tomb clean of residual replicators—and I’d get the blame.

I hear more brief, encrypted chatter. The sexton on the other side of the wall is motionless, waiting. I can feel its presence like an oppressive weight at the back of my head, its outrage at the intrusion of motion and life into its garden of tranquil death. The ninjas titter mockingly. I close my eyes, blinking away a thin film of ice.
Can
I
triangulate on
them
. . . ?
They use electrosense, true, and I can feel their near-field proximity.
They’re just over there—

I look around as the first black-sheathed dwarf launches himself at me from the other end of the alley and realize,
I was wrong, they tagged me the first time around!
He brings a weapon to bear on me as I begin to move, and I wonder desperately,
Where’s his backup?
—because the one you don’t see is the one who kills you. He fires as I leap with all the force my discharging leg muscles can put out in a single extension. Something tugs at my coat as I soar into the night, the ground dwindling beneath me, and I wait for the second shooter, helpless on my arc—

THUMP.
I am not the only areonautical flier tonight. The sexton clears the wall in a huge, lurching bound. I see it silhouetted against the sky for a moment, the giant helical shell balanced above a broad, lenticular foot; I even glimpse the toothed maw on its underside, the scrapers that so patiently rasp stone and metal into shape, flense grave robbers, and mutilate intruders. But it doesn’t see me—their designer saw no need to gift them with nanometric sensors—and then I am tumbling back to land more or less on the spot where it launched itself from ambush.

I hear screams, and a concussion that I feel through the wall, then moist, crunching sounds. I continue on my way, chastened and cautious.

TWIN #1 HOLDS a wriggling cleaner up to the light, inspecting it minutely. “The history of life is not one of progress, but one of random contingency,” he declares pompously. “Life-forms evolve, the better to assimilate energy sources. So it says in the good book, and so I shall demonstrate.” He raises the malfunctioning microcleaner to his mandibles and bisects it cleanly, then starts to compress it between his masticators. My spirits sink: I know what’s coming next.

This is day thirty of the voyage, and we have been reduced to salon games and philosophical debate—those of us who have no major business interests to spend our time managing at some remove, that is—but to be sucked into
this
. . . !

Twin #2 casts a glance of withering scorn at his sib. “Nonsense! The religious doctrine of evolution relies on the transubstantiation of the holy design by the miracle of mutation. We do not
mutate
, we are
manufactured.
So I refute it.”

The Lyrae twins have been restaging this old chestnut for nearly ten days, now. I’m not sure whether they only do it to annoy, or if there’s some deeper meaning to the squabble, but they keep dragging it out and rehashing it between card games. And Twin #1
insists
on eating live canapés while they lock horns. It’s most distressing.

(I suppose it’s even more distressing if you happen to be one of the snacks, but as the Lyrae twins seem to be fairly civilized for gourmets—they obey Rule Number One: “Never try to eat anything larger than your own head”—I’m fairly safe. For the time being, anyway.)

“There’s no such thing as random mutation,” says Sinbad-15, launching itself into the debate at short notice. “Change a random instruction in a program, and what happens? It stops working. Complexity is irreducible. Yes, complex systems—like people—can design other complex systems, including ones that exceed their own metrics, but you’d have us believe that simple systems can generate complex ones if you simply break them often enough at random? Stuff and nonsense! Superstition! Next you’ll be telling us there were no Creators—”

“On the contrary! It is from the Creators themselves that the holy scriptures of evolution come to us, from the great prophet Darwin, peace be unto him, and his saintly disciples Dawkins and Gould. We have their holy scriptures to guide us, and they are most explicit on these points—”

“But we’ve got the engineering models! And the design schemata!” Sinbad-15 is clearly annoyed by Twin #1’s irrational and superstitious insistence that people evolved by accident. “We’ve even got the purchase orders! With this upgraded arm, I refute you!” He reaches over and snags a many-legged inspection lamp from the bowl that Twin #1 is munching on, and I can’t help noticing that he’s got some very strange-looking fingers.

“Really?” Twin #1 says mockingly. “That’s just the Lamarckian heresy in disguise. I suppose you’d say that your physical size—so much bigger than the average free citizen these days—is deliberate? Or hadn’t you noticed people getting smaller these days?”