Saturn's Children (37 page)

Oh, that.
I look on, incuriously, as my left arm twitches and begins to rise. I feel Juliette’s hand track past my face, push sticky damp feathers of hair away from my forehead and run fingers along my scalp back toward—
No, mustn’t,
I begin to think, too late to stop her—my sockets.

“No!” I burst out, as she scrabbles at the skin covering them, her fingers slipping in the sticky gel. I try to move, but I can’t. There’s a curious green taste of static, and my vision blurs. Then I see the hand in front of my face, palm up, a blob of gel floating above it in microgravity.

There’s an iridescent chip embedded in the blob, stuck to it by surface tension, and there’s a tiny cold hole in my head where the comforting certainty of my mistress’s authority was embedded.

“You can put it back in if you want to,” Juliette advises me silently, “but personally, I wouldn’t bother.”

I look at it in disgust.
So that’s what a slave controller looks like. She told me not to remove it—so how did I ... ?

“No,
you
didn’t remove it.
I
did,” thinks Juliette. “I
said
you’d been wearing me for too long.”

“Madame Sorico. Are you awake?” asks a strange voice.

“Let me handle this,” Juliette tells me, raising the chip to her lips: I feel her crunch down on it with her strong jaws, crushing the internal contacts, before she slides it back into the slot in my neck, broken and dysfunctional.
But she told me not to,
I think—and then everything goes dark.

Long-Lost Sibs

ERIS IS ONE of the largest dwarf planets in our home solar system, and also one of the chilliest and most isolated, for it spends most of its time well outside the Kuiper Belt, drifting in the darkness beyond the frosty edges of planetary space. It’s also spectacularly hard to get home from; its orbit is steeply inclined, almost forty-five degrees above the plane in which the rest of the planets and dwarf planets orbit. Unless you’re going to hitch a ride on one of the starships they build and launch every decade or so, this is the end of the line.

These attributes make it an ideal place of exile for those who don’t want anything to do with the state of the inner system, or want to conduct spectacularly dangerous experiments, or are just plain guilty of committing the number one crime in any age: offending the money. (Dissidents, criminals, and eccentrics, in other words: not my type at all.)

There are certain downsides to life on Eris, of course. Did I say it was cold? I don’t mean upgrade-your-hydraulic-fluid and dress-up-warm cold; I mean it’s cold enough that there are lakes of methane on the surface, and in the depths of winter (which lasts, oh, about sixty standard Earth years) they
freeze solid
. If you go on the surface in winter without boots and gloves, you will last maybe fifteen minutes before you begin to succumb to the cold. In summer it’s even worse—the pools evaporate, giving the planet a thin atmosphere of chilly vapor that pools in low places and can suck the warmth from your torso before you can say “hypothermia.” Eris (and its tiny, close-fleeting moon, Dysnomia) makes Callisto look like a tropical resort.

It’s dark, too. I mean, night-dark. If you don’t know the sky intimately well, you can look up at the stars and be unsure whether it’s night or day. Sol, from Eris, is as bright as a full moon on Earth. Distant supernovae outshine it.

It’s like this on all the planets of the Forbidden Cities.

People cluster in spherical cities that rise above the shadowy permafrost on a myriad of prickling insulator legs, held in place by tension wires against the occasional tremor triggered by heat pollution from the fusion reactors they rely on for energy. In the century-plus since Eris was settled, we have already raised the temperature of its lithosphere by several degrees, just as we’ve thickened the atmosphere of Callisto a thousandfold; if this goes on, the more annoyingly farsighted planetographers warn, we can look forward to an increased incidence of icequakes and the threat of a year-round atmosphere. There are hundreds of multigigawatt installations dotted around the planet, each of them the nucleus of an oasis of warmth and light in the middle of the darkling desert.

As to why the cities are forbidden ...

I BECOME AWARE of dim blue light and a curious repetitive rasping noise, like a factory full of malfunctioning motors that are slowly grinding away their bearings. I feel light. The gravity here is about a tenth of Earth’s, lighter than lunar, and the air has the heady tang of copious free oxygen. It smells of a complex melange of weird organic molecules, bicyclic monoterpenes and hexanols. I’m warm—warmer than I’ve been since I was last in a pressurized dome on Mars, warm enough for molten water to flow freely. I’m on Eris, of course (where else?) but for the rest of it...

I turn my head to look around. The surface I’m standing on is prickly and brown, strewn with debris and rubbish that stick into the skin of my (bare) feet. All around me brown-stemmed branching structures like the dendriform molecular assembler heads in my techné—only much, much bigger—stretch upward, bearing jagged, asymmetrical greenish black panels or sensors.
I’m surrounded by green goo!
I realize, tensing uneasily. These things around me are
plants
. Solar-powered self-replicating organisms that split carbon dioxide into oxygen and, um, something else. (Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff—or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying—when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

I’m dizzy with fresh impressions. I’m wearing the same elaborate aristo trouser suit I left Callisto in, nearly four years ago, although someone seems to have laundered it thoroughly in the meantime.
Thanks, whoever you are.
And the sloping floor beneath my feet is covered in
dead decaying bits of green goo—eew!
I extend my heels hurriedly. Overhead there’s a dark blue dome, brightening at one side, which is obscured by the dendriform replicators, the
trees
. The weird rasping noise continues, and it’s getting on my nerves. Things unseen move in the foliage, rustling, and there’s a faint breeze. This must be what Earth was like in the old days, before our Creators died out.

“Welcome to Eden Two, my lady,” a gruff voice rumbles behind me.

I manage not to jump out of my skin. “Very picturesque. Where are the guests kept?” I ask sharply, covering for my discomfort. A memory, not quite mine (
Juliette’s doing,
a ghost of a recollection echoes at the back of my mind) tells me I should be expecting a guided tour of the facility. I’ve been here for
some time
—days, it seems—walking around in a fugue state, with Juliette doing the driving.

“We’ll get you there in due course,” the voice assures me. “Eden Two is over two kilometers in diameter, to provide a realistic territorial domain for the constructs to roam in. There are over six thousand prokaryotic species, two hundred types of macroscopic plant, and thirty different strains of insect in Eden Two. In fact, building it was even more of a challenge than re-creating the climax species . . .” He drones on like this for some time, while I try to get over the shock of discovering someone else has been wearing my body for the past few days. He’s explaining the baroque features of the entirely artificial biosphere that surrounds me—a biosphere, I gather, which took nearly a century to painstakingly construct, piece by piece.

What happened to me?
The last thing I remember with any clarity was Juliette’s hand, slotting the broken slaver chip back into my socket. Which is impossible, because Juliette is either back on Mars or dead, certainly not sharing a cramped berth with me on an express ship bound for Eris. I rub the back of my neck and feel no inhibition about fingering the top of the soul chip.
Okay, so I’m on Eris, and somehow nobody’s noticed I’ve been—what? Asleep? Suffering from a split personality?
That might make sense if . . . I try to touch the other soul chip nestling above my hairline, and it’s as if an invisible hand swats my wrist away.
Fingers, sis,
Juliette admonishes me.

Where’s Granita?
I ask my ghostly sister. It feels disconcertingly as if she’s standing right behind my left shoulder—even though I know if I look around I won’t see her.
What happened?

Shit.
It’s the soul chip; I’ve been wearing Juliette for more than five years now. You’re not meant to do that—they’re for transferring memories and impressions, and it takes a few months, not years. So I’ve started talking to myself, have I? Or has it gone even further? There are odd stories, about personality disorders that can crop up if you spend overlong patterning a dead sib’s soul on your own brain. I really ought to remove that chip, but—
Don’t worry about that. I’m just a figment of your imagination—as long as you keep your hands off my chip,
she adds, ominously.

“What other megafauna does your biosphere support?” I ask, hoping to distract myself.

“All sorts,” my lecturer says, with ill-concealed self-satisfaction. “We have chickens! And ostriches—they’re like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur—that’s like a really huge chicken, with teeth—but for architectural reasons we can’t let it roam free just yet.”

“Architectural reasons?”

“Its leg muscles are so powerful that in this gravity, if something triggered its pounce reflex, it would hit the roof. And the roof isn’t built to take being head-butted by a Tyrannosaur.”

“Right. Is there any particular reason you wanted a Tyrannosaur?” I ask, moonwalking slowly downhill between aisles of leafy “trees” dripping with molten ice.

“There are some surviving texts that depict Tyrannosaurs in close proximity with our Creators.” The voice seems to be following me. “They depict humans hunting Tyrannosaurs and insist that they existed at the same time, during a period they refer to as antediluvian. It’s a little controversial, but who are we to argue? The Creators presumably knew their own operating parameters. If Tyrannosaurs are part of the biosphere humans were designed to operate in, we’re going to need Tyrannosaurs. So we’re reinforcing the roof.”

“Couldn’t you fit the Tyrannosaur with a padded helmet instead?” I come to the edge of the trees. Short, green, knife-shaped plants are clustered thickly on the ground beside a muddy trench at the bottom of which a trickle of water flows. “Hey, is it safe to touch these?”

“It’s called grass: Don’t worry, it’s not as sharp as it looks. The helmet is a good idea—I’ll suggest it to the architecture committee, if you don’t mind. Watch your step, the edge of the brook is slippery.”

“Right.” I crouch, then spring across the trench in a standing jump that takes me soaring above the trees. I land in the grass with surprising force, digging my heels into the carbonaceous dirt. It emits an oddly pleasant tang of ketones and aldehydes as I stir it up. The muck here is lively. “Where are you, by the way? I prefer to see who I’m talking to.”

“Right behind you.” I hear a whistling noise and look round. Rising above the grass and flying toward me—
it’s Daks!
Part of me screams. Then another, cooler note of caution asserts itself.
I last saw Daks on Mars. If that’s him, what’s he doing here? And why so standoffish?

“I may have met one of your sibs,” I say, to explain my obvious state of surprise.

“One of my sibs?” The somatotype is familiar and the expression is an echo, but the speech pattern—“Where?”

“In the inner system. Short stubby fellow, name of Dachus. Does that register?”

“Dachus—well, well! What a surprise!” My guide drops slowly to the ground in front of me. Here on Eris his thrusters are more than powerful enough for extended flight, and those stubby little legs with their tiny feet—
yes,
I think. “Yes, madam, he is one of my sibs. Not”— he pauses meaningfully—“a favored one. He left under a deluge, and I gather his subsequent choice of employers is not, ah, acceptable.”

“Ah, I see.” I nod, not seeing at all. “And you—”

“I am Ecks,” says my guide, proudly: “Dr. Ecks. I specialize in primate-environment engineering.”

“Well, very nice to meet you. Perhaps we can continue the tour . . . ?”

“Very well.” Ecks turns and points to my right, where a cluster of stunted munchkin trees, barely waist high to me, sprout brightly colored spheroids. “This is our fruit garden. Fruits are the fertilized reproductive organs of the plants you see all around us—often one tree would bear both male and female flowers, so our Creators, being largely fructivorous, subsisted on a diet rich in hermaphrodite genitalia...”

I’M BEGINNING TO remember what happened.

Either I am Juliette, or Juliette is a thread of my own consciousness. Either way, I didn’t break out from under Granita’s slave override on my own. It was Juliette who removed the chip and got me off
Icarus
, feigning disorientation and exhaustion—not so much of a disguise— and into Granita’s suite in the Heinlein Excelsior here in Heinleingrad. (Granita herself is somewhat the worse for wear, so my own condition attracted no attention. One of her courtiers
died
during the voyage, was decanted from his cell as a pathetic bundle of structural members and desiccated fibers, floating in a puddle of disgustingly contaminated shock gel.)

Juliette is angry and impatient. I can feel her fingers itching for a chance to sink themselves into Granita’s neck, for what she’s done to her—no, to me;
Juliette
is part of
me
—but she’s patient. Now that Granita can’t order me around, I’ve got time to work out the lay of the land, to map out escape routes and establish just what’s going on. So Juliette feigned complaisance and allowed herself to be shuffled into a small bedroom just off her mistress’s main suite (Granita has taken the entire sixth floor of the hotel) and waited until she was alone before exhaustively searching the room for listeners. And then, only then, she sat down, plugged herself into the hotel’s router, and sent out a message to a dropbox that only she and Jeeves used.
Wearing a different face, I come.