Saturn's Children (36 page)

After about two minutes, the vibration dies away. The line of light stretching across the starscape dims and fades, diffusing like mist; then my vision blanks again, and returns as a view from the rear of the
Icarus Express
. Jupiter bulks just as large as ever, but Callisto has begun to show more of a curvy horizon, and over the next half hour it shrinks visibly until it’s no more than a large disk. I am bored and extremely uncomfortable, and I want to move around. Eventually I try to electrospeak. “What happens now?” I ask.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Icarus refuses to be hurried. When he comes back, after a seeming eternity, I tense in anticipation. “Madame Sorico? Sorry to leave you, but I had some postburn checks to complete. The good news is, we’re now on track for orbital departure. We’re going to make a closer flyby of Jupiter in about four hours, and another burn, then we just drop right back down into the inner system.”

“The
inner
system?” I can hear my voice rising. “I thought we were going to Eris!”

“We are, if you’ll pay attention.”
Patronizing junk heap.
(I keep my speaker shut down.) “You know how far away Eris is? It’s currently twice as far out as Pluto. My main motor is very powerful, but I have to conserve fuel so we can slow down at the other end. If I did a direct burn-and-decelerate, it’d take us about eighteen years to get there. But there’s a shortcut available. You may have noticed I’m carrying a magsail? We’re carrying out a brief burn and a close Jupiter flyby to cancel out our orbital velocity around the sun. If we’re not in orbit, we fall—and in this case, we fall all the way back down the solar gravity well until we’re inside the orbit of Mercury. Then we spread the magsail and accelerate up to cruise speed for Eris, and arrive with about eighty percent of our fuel still available for deceleration.”

“But isn’t that in the wrong direction?” I ask.

“Nope.” And now he sounds
really
smug. “Jupiter and Eris are close to opposition right now—the sun is right between them. So we’re actually following the shortest path between the two worlds.”

“Great.” A thought strikes me. “How long is all this going to take?”

“Oh, not long: about eighteen months to reach Mercury orbit, then a year under magsail acceleration to reach cruise speed, and another year and a half of free flight before we arrive. Just under four years in total.” His tone changes. “You can enter slowtime if you want—I would suggest a step-down of at least fifty to one, and possibly as low as two hundred to one. Or I can put you into hibernation if you give me access to one of your direct-interface slots?”

I shudder in near panic. “No!”
She
told me not to—if not for that, I’d jump at the offer. But I can’t let him near my soul chips. “Sorry. I’ve, I’ve got a phobia of hibernation.”

“That’s odd.” He sounds dubious. “According to my passenger-environment sensors, you are in some discomfort. How about a little slowtime? I can give you an internal massage if you want—”

“Don’t want that, either,” I force out. It’s bad enough having him inside me without—
damn
. I manage to wiggle my pelvic assembly a few centimeters, but I can’t get comfortable. I’m painfully dry and tight, and Icarus’s appendages, which would normally have me crooning and murmuring in delight, are just numb, painful intrusions that feel
wrong
. If Granita hadn’t imposed that stupid restriction on me, I’d be fine, but... I can’t see any way around it.
Shit.
I know I’m supposed to love her, but I’d like to strangle her right now.

“Is there anything I can do for you, madam?” Icarus asks politely. “Are you sure about the massage?”

“Sure,” I hear myself saying. “Leave me alone for a while.”

“As you wish.” And with that, he’s gone. I shift again, reflexively, but it’s no good. Finally, another low-level reflex kicks in, and my vision begins to blur.

Four years in hell! I weep helplessly, trapped and bound by an ill-considered command, and presently slide myself deep into slowtime, and sleep.

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn’t only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there’d be a queue outside every travel agent.

Space travel is also a kind of involuntary time travel—you set out knowing who and what you are, but when you arrive all your friends have forgotten you, your relatives have aged (and sometimes died), and the universe looks different. Slowtime helps you cope with the boredom of transit, but it doesn’t make the postflight dislocation go away.

I dive into slowtime as soon as possible. The light in my cell turns bright blue, and the shock gel feels chilly and thin: I’m leaking roseate techné into it, albeit so slowly that my Marrow manufactures more fast enough to replenish the loss. I have to deepsleep every subjective hour or so, and I have the most amazing, florid dreams while I’m under. I’m not alone in my cell; there’s someone else with me. Some of the time it’s Juliette, haranguing me for my stupidity in getting into this fix in the first place. But sometimes I could swear it’s Granita. And the sense of her presence is a comfort to me (even though this is all her fault) because while she’s nearby, I don’t feel invaded. In fact, I feel almost comfortable. More than comfortable.

“You’ve got a lot to learn, kid,” she tells me.
She? Is she Granita, or Juliette?
“You shouldn’t trust your elders. That’s what got you into this mess.”

No it wasn’t,
I try to say.
It was the Domina; you provoked her.

“Bullshit. You’re capable of independent action; you’re not helpless. ” I have a vision of Stone’s head, ripped from his neck, staring at me and mouthing,
You’ll be sorry
. “You’re being used as a pawn, but that doesn’t mean it’s your destiny to be a sacrificial victim. All you have to do is stop letting other people make decisions for you. Decide what you want for yourself. Some of your sibs are much older than you realize, and much deadlier, and as for your employer, he’s got... collective issues.

“You’re still acting like a stupid little courtesan,” she continues. “Which can get you killed. Because, now you’ve had the Block Two skill set imprinted, you’re equipped as a spy and a killer, a mistress of disguise and a cold-blooded murderess.” (I feel skeletal struts breaking between my fingers, triggers pulled, knives stabbed.) “You can pass for an aristo, and nobody will ever know any better. You can kill an aristo and take her identity and fortune and
be
an aristo, if you’re tough enough.” (I see myself standing over the crumpled wreckage of a slave-owning plutocrat, staring down at her body with fascinated surmise.)

“What is the Block Three template?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply directly. Instead a liquid like night seems to wash over my soul, and I’m Rhea again.

We all start out as Rhea, until they shine a light in our eyes and tell us we’re not, we’re some other name, and we’re on our own in the world now.

For my first eighteen years I grew up as Rhea, as did Juliette and Emma and the rest of us. But Juliette and Emma and the others in Block Two also experienced another eleven years of Rhea’s life, during which her carefully nurtured helpless dependency was broken down by repeated bouts of cruel training. I remember how they trained me—
no, Rhea
—to make love to a Creator male and slide a wire into his neural tube at the moment of climax: the shock of triumphant recognition the first time I successfully switched off a zombie. I remember how they taught me to undervalue life by demonstrating how fragile it is, for even the most intelligent and powerful of arbeiter types. And the other skills: breaking and entering, remixing, passing for somebody else. From
catch me if you can
to
catch me if you dare
; a progression of bent and broken bodies and fried soul chips.

“They saw how good I was at the jobs they’d trained me for, and asked themselves if they were underutilizing me,” she (Rhea? Juliette?) says with a note of quiet pride. “I can pass as an aristo, and I can slip through dragnets and improvise on the fly. Why not go for the ultimate shot?”

The ultimate.
“Walk like this. Talk like this. Dress like this.” That’s how they trained me to pass for Kate Sorico, dead and pulverized into a thin layer of impurities scattered across a hectare of chilly lunar regolith—and all the while I was aping Rhea’s gait, for Rhea wouldn’t simply
act
the part.

They turned her
into
an aristo? How?

“How do
you
think, kid?” Juliette shoots back. “They systematically drove her mad, that’s how. Aristos are slave owners. What would it take to make you feel comfortable about owning other people, unto the death? Our entire training, our whole purpose, requires us to be empathic and respond to our lovers. It’s great cover for a spy, which is what the Block Two training was all about. But say you’re an owner, and you decide to take one of us and turn us into a cold-blooded killer and a passable aristo, someone who can enter an enemy’s organization and subvert it from the inside. You’ve got to break down that empathy, leaving a useful veneer of sympathetic personality traits over something that doesn’t feel anything. The real purpose of the Block Three conditioning wasn’t to destroy her empathy; it was to turn her into a superagent. But it ended up turning her into a psychopath.”

“Of course she’s fucking alive!” Juliette blazes. “She’s alive and she’s going to be on Eris. In fact, if that cow Granita hadn’t enslaved you, you’d be en route there to drill down to the bottom of this mess, locate Rhea, and bring Jeeves Corporate Security and the Pink Police down on her like a hammer. What do you think that nasty little briefing was about? Honestly, you’re too slow for this job! What kind of long game did you think the Internal Security Jeeves was playing? I swear, if you carry on like this, you’ll get us both killed!”

“But why? I mean, why would they kill her?”

“I told you, she’s nuts.” Juliette approaches me from behind and wraps her arms around my waist. Slowly, she begins to rock me from side to side. It’s comforting. “They burned out her empathy. Me, I can pass for an aristo. But I don’t like it. You, too, if you set your mind to it. But Rhea went too far. She
enjoys
playing the game. She stopped caring and started to enjoy killing and owning, and now she just wants to own everything and everyone. They wanted an agent of influence, but they created a monster, the ultimate aristo. She killed her creator, then stepped into her shoes, and destroyed everyone else who knew about her—except she couldn’t quite stop us from finding out. Because, deep down, we’re still enough like her that we could put our heads together and see what she might have done, which is why Jeeves keeps sending us out here to hunt her, and she keeps killing us.”

Juliette is still rocking from side to side, but now I’m rocking side to side as well, and we’re in perfect synchrony: I can feel her voice emerging from my own lips. “You’ve got to make up your mind who you want to be, Freya, then kill her and wear her skin. You’d better kill me, too, if you meet me, because I’m halfway to being a Block Three psychopath myself.”

“But you’re my sib—”

“Hush,” I tell myself. “You’ve been wearing my soul too long.”

I awaken then, gasping, but not from discomfort—quite the opposite. Something in my disobedient body is rebelling against my mistress’s orders, responding to Icarus’s overtures. “What peculiar games you aristos play,” he says disinterestedly, as I feel a slick wave of tingling, pulsing fullness run through me that builds to an extraordinary, guilty, but wonderful orgasm.
I must be malfunctioning,
I think dizzily, and tumble straight back down into the blackness of deep sleep.

I’M NOT SURE how deep I eventually drift, but it’s deep enough that years pass while I’m under. Somewhere along the line I stop noticing the unpleasantness. It’s as if some of my senses have shut down in self-defense. I hallucinate vividly, bouncing back and forth through my own life and Juliette’s (and those of my sisters who have died and gone before us, and whose souls I’ve swallowed in my time). I find plenty to regret—I have not been the most sensible of planners, for I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart’s desire—but I’m not alone in this: Juliette, too, had little about which to be happy, unless it was buried in the blind spots of the “other thing” that never made it onto her soul chips. I hold interminable dialogues with my selves, and I fantasize about murdering Granita (or making her love me truly, madly, deeply, which to her way of thinking might be the same). And occasionally I fantasize about Pete, or Petruchio, or even my strange, inexperienced Martian Jeeves—and what it might take to trick Granita into ordering me to seduce him. Meanwhile, as I float in my cell, the
Icarus Express
is falling down and down toward the sun.

Many months pass. Icarus spreads his wings, unmelting panes of plasma that capture the tenuous blast of the solar wind. He fires his rocket briefly as we skim past the solar corona like a tiny comet, adding energy in a classic Oberth slingshot. Our speed begins to build day by day as the solar wind billows and gusts around our plasma sail, and after a year we are traveling at over a hundred kilometers per second. Finally, the day comes when Icarus rolls us slowly nose over tail, and lines up the stinger of his rocket motor just off the curve of Eris’s limb, and prepares for our brutal deceleration burn.

I’m insensible by this point, immiserated and incoherent and totally wrapped up in my own interior dialogues. So I’m not entirely conscious of what’s going on when Icarus begins to drain the shock gel from my cabin, and his tentacles contract and slither out of my sore and flaccid body, and finally the acceleration webbing loosens and retracts. I lie on my back staring at the dim red wall opposite my eyes, and it seems to me there’s something I need to do, if only I could remember what.