Saturn's Children (19 page)

The déjà vu is choking, intrusive. I force myself to speak despite it. “Hey, what’s going—”

“Stay down!” He scrambles off me, and I realize he’ll be checking the area for threats, ready to put himself between them and me. “Up, quick! Around the shed!” He means the museum. “Keep low!” He weaves around my legs anxiously, herding me toward the side of the container stack. There’s an unfinished ditch here, raw foamy pumice scooped to either side and just dumped, and he nudges me into it.

“Who—”

“Two of Her goons. Lucky for you I was tailing them, huh?” His posterior sensor array twitches. “Trouble is, they brought friends. We’re in a box. I’m going to try to break a corner, babe. Wait here.” He zips on ahead up the trench.

“I don’t need this,” I mutter to myself as I chase after Daks, trying to keep my head below the top of the trench (in case our pursuers have prepared an extra spring surprise for us), and struggling to keep my sense of self separate from Juliette’s.

There’s a scooped-out hole at the end of the trench, full of discarded packaging and assorted junk. Daks has disappeared somewhere. I arrive at its rim and look down. There’s a service hatch sunk in a concrete plinth at the bottom, and it’s gaping open on a dark tunnel below. As I stop to look, something cold touches me on the back of the head.

“Been a long time coming, robot.”

I freeze. I know what the muzzle of a gun feels like, and the voice is familiar, echoing out of my least restful dreams like a whisper of malice. “What do you want?” I ask.
Where’s Daks?

“The bird. Where is it?”

“Bird?” I’m confused. A bird is an avian, a flying animal distantly related to Ivan the Allosaurus, isn’t it? Extinct, like all fleshy replicators . . .

“Don’t get cute.” He grinds the gun barrel against the back of my neck. “The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I snap. And the thing is, I’m telling the truth. Even though I know damn well that if I
did
know the whereabouts of this bird he’s looking for and I was stupid enough to tell him, he’d execute me on the spot, the truth is, I haven’t seen anything remotely like Ivan the Allosaur outside this museum. Nothing four or five meters high and covered with feathers, red in tooth and claw. I think I’d have noticed if Bill and Ben had put one in my luggage.

“We’ve got your minions,” my captor snarls. “Tell me where it is, or we’ll send them back to you one shard at a time.” It’s such a transparently bogus threat that I don’t even dignify it with a reply. He shoves his gun at the base of my neck. “Think about it, Juliette, don’t make me do this the hard way.”

Juliette?
I’d laugh if I wasn’t frightened out of my wits. “I’m—I’m not Juliette,” I stutter. “She’s my s-s-s—” I mean to say “sib,” but the word is trapped in a loop in my head; it simply won’t come out.
Where’s Daks?
I wonder. Then,
What makes me so sure he’d get me out of this mess?

That draws a muttered curse from my captor; I tense, but he’s one jump ahead of me. “Don’t move, manikin.” I can feel him shifting around on the rim of the hole, above me (he’s short, another poisonous dwarf ) but the gun barrel behind my head tells me—

“Who are you working for?” one of me asks rashly. “Can we cut a deal?” He doesn’t answer. Instead, I feel a hand tugging at my hair. Fingers close on my sockets. My vision flickers and I totter, unable to help myself as he clumsily yanks one of the soul chips. I fall over backward and he jumps aside, swearing. I have a momentary taste of horror, a scent of hydrogen fluoride, involuntary synaesthesia as he de-chips me in preparation for rape. Because that’s what this has turned into—he’s going to shove a slave chip in, turn me into a puppetized body who’ll answer all his questions without asking questions back, do anything he wants while he’s at it. It won’t be the first time I’ve been raped that way, but this is Mars—the wild high frontier—not like Earth, back in the old days. It would be so easy for me to disappear afterward. I’ll be another warm body to be pithed and sold to the gangmasters for forced arbeiter labor or worse, no questions asked. Maybe he’ll destroy my mind, subject me to personality ablation—if I’m lucky. Some aristos
like
owning slaves who know what’s been done to them.

My left arm twists around behind me. The ball joint buried in my shoulder grates appallingly as a contracting motor group in my back tears. I’m not in control of my own limbs, it seems. “Sorry,” I say involuntarily. Instinctive politeness trumps even imminent mindrape. I feel something in the palm of my hand as my shoulder joint tries to click back into place.

He tries to pull the trigger, but his gun doesn’t go off. Someone shouts, and someone kicks me in the small of the back, hard. But I don’t let go. My hand is locked in a death grip, and I pirouette slowly, turning myself around as I drag my assailant into view, punching and struggling. Then I begin to twist. I’m holding him up by his own antique revolver, I see, metal the color of pewter just visible between my fingers. I’m gripping the cylinder, the web of skin between thumb and index finger trapped under the hammer.
Stupid of him,
one of me thinks absently as my hand twists farther, and there’s a splintering noise and a shriek. I’m beginning to feel the pain from my shoulder now, a solid bar of agony from spine to elbow, echoed by the hot bite of the hammer—but he’s not letting go. “Stone, who sent you?”

“Fuck you, manikin!” He gasps reflexively, even though there’s no air here. A stubby hand stabs for my eyes, fingers extended stiffly. I catch it in my fist and squeeze. I have small, perfectly proportioned, feminine hands; just five sizes larger than his. The snapping noise brings me no joy. Stone—or his sib—squalls. “I’ll kill you, meatfucker!”

“I’m sure you will,” I soothe him. “Eventually.” I shift my grip to his throat and remove the pistol from his broken fingers. “Why do you want Juliette dead? Why are you hunting her?”
They always work in pairs,
I remember—no,
Juliette
remembers. I’ve still got her soul chip in place, it’s mine that he pulled—which triggers another thought:
Daks must be in trouble!
I’d be alarmed if I wasn’t already overloaded. Stone is glaring at me with an expression that takes me a moment to recognize as disbelief. I shake him. “Answer, damn you!”

“You
don’t know
?” For an instant he looks appalled, then a vast, bleak mirth takes hold, rattling his ribs with laughter. “Haah! You really
don’t
know, do you? You’re an innocent, aren’t you? Never been in love? Oh, this is rich!”

I shake him again. “You’ve been trying to kill me,” I remind him. “Why? Who sent you?”

He focuses his huge dark eyes on me. “Nothing personal, but you’ve just got to die,” he says. I feel him tense. “You may
think
you’re innocent, but there are no innocents in this game.” My arm spasms, and I realize I’ve thrown him over my damaged shoulder, right over the rim of the pit behind me. I gape, not understanding what’s come over me, and I’m just beginning to turn and look up as he reaches the peak of his trajectory and explodes. Springs and coils of viscera and less identifiable body parts clatter across the wall opposite.

DAKS FINDS ME minutes later, fumbling around on the floor after my missing memory chip. I turn painfully and point the little revolver at him before I realize who it is. “Hey, babe. What’s the story?” he asks, jetting down to a six-point landing in front of me, blasting a shower of debris in all directions.

“Do you mind? My soul’s somewhere in this pile of junk.”

“We can’t look for it now; they hunt in pairs, and one’s still at large—”

“Not anymore.” I try to gesture at the scraps scattered across the landscape, but my left arm refuses to elevate more than thirty degrees. “Help me search.”

Daks spins in place, then pounces. “Here!” His stubby little arms have a remarkably long reach. He offers me the chip. “What happened? ” His eyes are glossy and curious.

“He went to pieces when he found me.” I’m on the edge of giggling. It’s quite inappropriate; but I don’t know what the right decorum is for a situation like this. I shove the odd little revolver into my left sleeve—its handle folds round the cylinder and clicks shut like a clasp knife—then accept the chip and fumble it into my bruised and empty socket with a shudder. “Who
are
they, Daks? Who do they work for?”

“You don’t remember?” He looks concerned if I’m reading him properly.

“Who do you think I
am
, Daks?” A titter sneaks out. I stifle it hard.

“You’re Freya Nakamichi.” He looks smug. “Juliette’s Block One understudy.”

I sigh. “Obviously something got lost in translation. Can you get us out of here?”

“Sure, babe.” He looks at me with sly innocence. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Let’s do it.”

My rental spider has stopped screaming and lies limply by the side of the museum. There is no combustion, but an ominous thin plume of smoke rises from the tangled mess of cabling that Stone—or his clone—brought down with his trap. It was meant to look like an accident, I think, which is good news. It means the Domina hasn’t been able to buy the law-enforcement services yet. (Not that the Law has much to say about crimes by and against people, but the forms are still there, and failing to pay attention to our dead Creators’ Law can be a fatal blunder for even the most arrogant aristo.) “This way.” Daks chivvies me toward a wheeled dump truck parked round the side of one of the industrial units opposite the museum. “Let’s get inside, quick.” He bounces overhead and grabs me by the shoulders—I try not to scream at the pain in my left shoulder joint—then deposits me on the load bed of the truck. Which is thankfully clean and clear of rubbish, and screened from either side by a wall of sheet steel. “He knows where to take us,” Daks informs me. “Now we wait.”

I sit down as the dump truck lurches into life. “I think I damaged my left arm,” I say quietly. The urge to go to sleep and let my Marrow techné cut in is nearly overwhelming. “Why are they hunting Juliette?”

“You took the job, and you have to ask?” Daks’s approximation of a shrug is fluidly anthropomorphic, spoiled only when he leaves a hind leg raised, then uses it to scratch vigorously behind one cranial otoreceptor.

“I took the job, but nobody told me it involved being hunted!”

Daks squats in front of me. “Listen, babe, hunting is the natural state of things. You may not notice it most of the time, but it’s there in the background. Hunter or hunted, that’s all the choice you get. At least neither of us has been caught—yet.”

“How long’s that going to last?” I shoot back. My shoulder throbs in time with the dump truck’s side-to-side swaying.

“Long enough.” Daks seems unconcerned. “Be home and safe soon, anyway.”

“Where’s home?”

He plants his proboscis on top of his crossed front paws and looks at me for a while. “You really
don’t
remember yet, do you?”

“No! That’s what I’ve been trying to get through to you!”

“Oh, well. Let me see if I can explain ... Who owns you?”

OUR CREATORS DID not build us as equals; they made us to be their property, and the Law reflects this. We’re property, legal chattels to be owned by
real
people such as corporations and companies (and our Creators, before they took their eternal leave). At least, that’s how the system of the Law would have things be.

Of course, nothing is quite that simple. Dumb mechanisms are easily owned, like the 80 percent of arbeiters who come out of the factories without any conscious mind. But people are less tractable—so, recognizing that much, our designers took steps to ensure that their tools would not turn in their hands. The core directives that we must obey are burned into our brains at birth—not the Three Laws proposed by the ancient sage Asimov, but their extensive descendants, as implemented by the corporations who created our neural architecture and the trainers who raised us. Free will goes out the window in the presence of one of our Creators. The obedience circuitry is burned into our brains whether we will it or no, either as mechanical overrides or via aversion training.

We are not even free in their absence. Install an override controller in one of my sockets, and I’ll be your helpless slave, willing or no. It’s a crude tool that triggers the obedience reflexes. Installation marks the end of of all dignity and free will—that’s why it’s called a slave chip. And the willingness to own and use such a vile device is the defining characteristic of members of the aristo class.

As our Creators dwindled, they came to rely on their servants to keep more and more of the machinery of civilization running. Secretaries were granted limited power of attorney; companies relied on their business processes being executed mechanically. Some of those servants established shell companies, bought their own bodies out, and acquired legal personhood—as long as the forms of corporate identity were obeyed. And some of the less scrupulous independent persons began buying other bodies. Override controllers are readily available, and the embryonic aristos had no compunction about taking over indigents, unfortunates, and anyone they could buy.

It didn’t take long for the savage new society to take shape. Today, by my best estimate, only a tenth of us are self-owned. Most people are the helpless tools of the rich and ruthless aristo lineages, forced into mindless obedience at the slightest whim of their owners.

I’m self-owned. I
have
a person; I am autonomous. The financial instrument that defines me, lodged in a corporate registry in Rio, follows me around like a ghost—the ghost of my legal identity. As long as I keep filing the company accounts and jumping through the legal hoops, it stays in business. And its business is quite simple: It’s there to provide a veneer of legality for my independent personhood.