Saturn's Children (20 page)

But many of us rot in bondage, unable to step outside the boundaries imposed by aristo owners. And if my company ever falls into liquidation, I—as my own principle asset—am vulnerable to receivership. The threat of the arbeiter auction block is a very real one, for there is no such thing as unconditional freedom in this brutal robot-eat-robot world. My sibs and I help each other. If one of us falls on hard times, we club together and try to outbid the predators until we can set the unfortunates on their feet again. But that’s hardly a guarantee of freedom.

And Daks’s question cuts to the quick. Who
does
own me, if not my self?

“
I
OWN ME,” I say, as we bump down a badly graded roadbed between tank farms and a large power transformer. “My company owns my assets, and I execute its policies.”

“Alright. Then precisely
what
assets does your company own?”

“Why, me—” I pause. I’ll swear Daks looks smug. Just what
is
he, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person like him before, and I thought I’d seen most body plans.

“There’s your body,” says Daks, “and then there’s
you
. Your experiences. The set of neural weightings in a soul chip you’ve worn long enough to train. You can pass them on to other sibs, yes? There’s an intellectual property interest at stake there. A design corporation that spends years educating a template individual has a lot of value tied up in that network’s weightings, on top of the actual value of the bodies that run the training set.”

My shoulder hurts like hell, but it’s nothing compared to the chill that stabs through me. “What are you getting at?” I demand.

“You’re already remembering bits of Juliette, aren’t you?” Daks nudges.

“Yes, but . . .”

“Do you have any idea how much the extra training her lineage received cost? As opposed to, say, your own?”

“Bullshit.” I massage the back of my neck defensively with my right hand. “She died more than a year ago. The sisterhood retrieved her soul and sent it to me for the clan graveyard. That’s item one: She’s dead, the dead don’t own property. Item two ... item two is, if I’m compatible enough to load her soul
at all
, then we’re the same model. And sibs are equivalent. Interchangeable, aside from minor details of experience.” It rings false in my own ears as I say it. But Daks is tactful enough not to laugh in my face.

“There are things in life you can’t put a value on, that’s true,” Daks volunteers unexpectedly; “but when someone puts a value on
you
, that’s pretty hard to ignore. Or when someone puts a chip in your portable graveyard,” he adds pointedly. “The ground rules are”—he raises a hind leg and twists his proboscis around to probe behind it—“everyone’s got a price. And I reckon you owe me.”

“What’s
your
price?” I grit my teeth as the dump truck bounces over a hole, then slews around a corner.

“Total interplanetary revolution, babe; emancipation for the downtrodden masses.” And he laughs, a gravelly rasping noise like tearing metal.

It takes about an hour for the dump truck to carry us halfway down the slope of Pavonis Mons. Ten minutes from the museum, we bump down into a cutting and along a rough, unpaved utility road, then we take a left turn into a tunnel and accelerate. The tunnel is natural, one of the lava pipes left over from back when Pavonis was an active volcano—it’s been drilled out in places, and the floor lined with crudely poured concrete, and it’s black as night. Mining and refuse trucks use it as a shortcut under the expensive real estate of the Bifrost railhead and marshaling yards. Finally, it pulls up. Daks wakes from standby and scrabbles up the steep rear wall, extends peepers over the top, then beckons to me. "C’mon! Time to move.”

I’m still not entirely sure whether I can trust him, but I make a snap judgment—he’s less of an immediate threat than Stone and his assassin sibs. Besides, it’s really, really cold in the dumper, and my clothes are filthy. I scramble up the tailgate and follow Daks over the edge, into a rubble-strewn cul-de-sac ringed by blandly anonymous storage lockups.

“Where are we?” I glance around.

“Junktown. C’mon.” He scuttles toward a gap between two lockups. A pale trail of ice spills from the side of a doorway. The rattle of compressor fans and the chatter of entertainment channels drift above it. I follow him up the alleyway. A couple of cleaners curl atop a mound of dirty snow, snoring sweet fumes of diethylene glycol. The lockup backs onto a dingy rack of housing capsules, an arbeiter barracks for the indentured whose owners keep them on a long leash—or more likely, can’t be bothered to pay for proper housing. A too-tall stiltman with knees as high as my chin stumbles past, singing tunelessly to his half-empty bottle. Daks ducks through an opening hung with strings of glass beads, setting them a-clatter. “Ferd, you dozy robot! Wake up! You’ve got customers!”

It’s a shop, I realize as my eyes adjust to the gloom. The walls are piled high with boxes full of subassemblies and chunks of circuitry, and there’s a lump in the corner that looks like hospital techné. Someone stirs in the back, sitting up and unfolding like a cut-price mockery of Dr. Murgatroyd—an Igor to his Victor. “Why,
hello
! If it isn’t my little Dachus?” The ocular turret gleams as it scans across me. “Julie? No! One of her sibs, trying to pass for bishojo?”

“No time for that now,” says Daks. “I think we’ve got about half an hour at best. What can you do for her?”

I finish looking around and close my mouth with a snap. “Now look here—”

“Do you want them to catch you?” asks Daks, cocking his head to one side and twitching an otoreceptor suggestively. “Or not?”

Ferd throws his hands in the air. “Really!” The hands clatter noisily behind him as he shoves his wrists into a box and fumbles, muttering for a moment, then pulls them out again with new manipulators in place. “A quick change at best, and something about the hair, that is
all
, Dachus, you know how hard it is to disguise those legs and those eyes!” Forceps and scalpels glitter and flex in place of the fingers of his right hand: retractors, lamps, and a miniature ocular turret on his left. “Wait,” I say hastily. “I’ve got a cover set, you know?” I dip into my jacket pocket and pull out the mounting tool and attachments for the Maria Montes Kuo eye turrets.

“Ah, a simple disguise.” Ferd leans close. “Fascinating,” he says, taking the mounting tool. “Lie down, my dear. I’ll try to be fast, and I’ll try not to hurt.” He glances at Daks. “You’ll owe me. Later, I tell you.”

I lie down and he installs the falsies, reinstating a gogglelike mask across my still-bulbous eyes. He’s fast but not painless. Then he shaves my scalp—just as I was getting used to my hair again. “Don’t worry; I have a selection of wigs. Merkins, too. You can choose one afterward.” He slides open my jacket, pushes it back to either side, and reaches for a pressurized tank. “We’ll go large, I think. That will throw off your gait, as well.” The spiked nozzle slides painlessly through my left aureole and there’s a sensation of bloated coldness as my breast begins to inflate. “I’ll make the other slightly smaller. Too much symmetry is bad.” As he pulls the barb loose, my swollen nipple pops up—
spung!
— and bleeds a drop of clear blue fluid. “Hmm. Skin color. You have chromatophores, yes, General Instruments SquidSkin™, one of the good models. What’s the factory setup command? Ah, yes ...”

In twenty minutes, Ferd does a quick fix on my shoulder, then gives me new hair, new cheekbones, a different nose, silver-blue skin, a bust bigger by ten tender and turgid centimeters, and finally retunes my metatarsal shocks. With my heels fully extended (Katherine Sorico wouldn’t be seen dead sporting such things), I’m ten centimeters taller, but I can still run and jump. (Of course, when I retract them again, I’m going to be hobbling for days afterward, but that’s not the point.) He’s hit the high points. My gait is different, my eyes and facial metrics altered, and I’m not immediately recognizable—at least not to somebody who doesn’t already know me. It won’t last long before my techné reverts me back to the design that Dr. Murgatroyd implanted so deeply, but it’ll do for now.

“Right! Out! Out, I say!” Ferd positively shouts me off his operating table. He rushes us into a back passage that I hadn’t noticed on our way in. “Grab a wig and an outfit on your way! Be seeing you, Dachus! Ha-ha!”

I pause to loot my pockets and grab a shoulder bag, then pick up a copper-gold wig and a frilled red lace leotard.

“New identity time,” calls Daks. “You’re called Kate, you’re an exotic dancer. You work in”—I pull on the leotard—“the Blue Moon on Kirovstrasse, and your specialty is aristo fetishists. Everything’s set up for you already.”
Typical.
I scramble to fasten the outfit, texture my skin to sketch in underwear and shoes beneath it, and grab a somewhat battered jacket with built-in heaters. Then I hurry after Daks (who hasn’t stopped moving).

“Where now?”

“We split.” He thrusts a wallet at me. “If they’re coming after you openly, then your existing bolt-hole is blown. Shit’s hitting the turbine, full force. Jeeves says Mars isn’t safe for anyone, least of all you. Give her this kit and tell her to meet him on Callisto. He’ll be in touch later if it’s safe.”

“Callisto?”
I blink my aching eyes and heft the wallet. We’re back out in the cold, walking past a row of doss houses and cheap body shops.

“Don’t worry, you’re on payroll now. There’s a soul chip in there that explains everything: It’s an update from Juliette. Plus there are three changes of identity. Boss wants you in Jupiter system, stat. You call in when you get there, but try not to take more than four years over it. ’Kay? Thanks. Bye!”

With that, Daks lifts on a jet of compressed gas and zips away across the moonlit shantytown, staying in nap-of-Mars. I shiver for a moment, look around, notice the lengthening shadows, and slide into them, doing my best impression of a nonvictim who knows what she’s doing in the barrio after dark.

Coin-Operated Boy

I MAKE IT to the nearest tube station. En route, nobody tries to mug, assault, rape, enslave, or strip me down for spare parts. Which is no bad thing, really, because I am in no mood for it. I walk the whole way with my hand in that shoulder bag, clutching the gun I took from Stone, and I’m angry, which is a bad combination. (It’s not just a gun. You can fold the chamber back, stick your fingers through the holes in the skeletal butt, and it’s a knuckle duster; flip a catch and twist and it sprouts a stiletto blade. And there’s always the revolver. His choice of weapon says it all about Stone, I think—flamboyant, but not necessarily effective.)

I use the Maria Montes Kuo cashcard for the first ride, but it’s a private capsule, and I’m only going as far as a public interchange, and by the time I bounce out onto the platform, I’ve activated the card in Jeeves’s little care package and gotten my story rebooted.

The card in the wallet Daks passed me isn’t just gilt-edged; it contains a line of credit on an account that claims to have the thick end of fifty thousand Reals in it. That’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life. I could live modestly on the capital for a century, or invest it foolishly and lose my glad rags again in a matter of months. It’s not quite enough to charter a fast yacht back to Earth, but it’s not far short. This demands some serious thought—when I get to stop running.

I catch a public train to Downwell Terminus, then buy a first-class ticket on the Ares Express to Lowell. From the lounge car of the train, I buy a classier outfit, for delivery when I arrive, and a subhop ticket to Barsoom, at the far end of Valles Marineris. Then I notice the chip in the bottom of the wallet. Stricken, I remember,
The graveyard!
It’s back in my room. What should I do?

I take a calculated risk and wait until we’re nearing Lowell, then call a public factotum service, two steps down from and entirely unconnected with JeevesCo. “I need a parcel abstracting from a rented apartment and mailing to a third party,” I say, and zap them the Maria Montes Kuo ID. I pay with her wallet, then leave it in the lounge car’s trash recycler when I exit the train. The graveyard will, perforce, have to go to Samantha in Denver or Raechel in Kuala Lumpur. For now, it’s just me and Juliette ... and the strange soul chip Jeeves has sent me.

I must have FOOL tattooed on my forehead in mirror writing. I pause in one of the travel-temples at Lowell for long enough to change into my new outfit, then slip the new chip in to replace Juliette’s. Then I head for the departure lounge to await my suborbital flight and settle down to catch half an hour’s nap while I wait.

I WASN’T EXPECTING to dream myself into Juliette’s mind so fast— not after I just replaced her older chip with a newer release—but my expectations don’t seem to have much to do with what happens to me these days. And so I find myself remembering being Juliette, reliving her own memories recursively: specifically, a memory of floating with Jeeves in his command module, contemplating the memory chip that she’s just handed to him. (Although I
am
somewhat surprised by it. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing the back of your own head.)

“Thank you, my dear,” says Jeeves, carefully tucking the chip away in a pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket. “She’s going to have adventures, too—whoever she is.”

“You’re going too far, boss man,” says Daks. Turning to me: “You realize that alienating our labor isn’t enough for him? Now he’s trying to alienate our identities . . .”

“Stow it, spacehound,” Jeeves says, not unkindly. He glances at me—Juliette—and scowls. “One might think from his attitude that we
owned
him.”

“His bark is worse than his bite,” I say automatically, all the while hoping like hell that Jeeves doesn’t know what he’s got in his hands—or rather, what he
doesn’t
have. Because if he does, I could be in a world of hurt. “What next?”

Jeeves smiles and proffers me a new soul chip. “You might as well put this in. Your next mission ...”