Saturn's Children (4 page)

The thundering pressure of the ride falls away from me, and I cut back into the open chat channel in time to hear Lindy whisper tearful good-byes to her beau. I open my eyes and see Telemus in all his glory, dropping back toward the pearlescent cloud tops, tentacle tip retracting into its maintenance shell. “Good-bye!” Lindy calls. “I love you!”

“Until the next you,” rumbles Telemus, his voice dopplering away as we rise above him.

I try to get the star-crossed lover’s attention as we drift away. “Lindy, can you see
High Wire
yet?”

After a brief pause: “Yes! He’s over there!” A blinking red ring flashes around a barely visible speck of starlight. “Isn’t it exciting?” She gives me a brief squeeze.

I close my eyes.
Patience.
“I don’t like travel much,” I say, the most tactful lie that comes rapidly to mind. “Can you put me into full hibernation until we arrive?”

“Are you sure?” She sounds doubtful, as if the mere idea of anyone not enjoying drifting helplessly between the stars with only a vacuous tart for company is incomprehensible to her.

“I’m sure, Lindy.” I pause. “Do you have any alternative personality modules?” I add plaintively.

“Sorry!” She says brightly. “I’m me! We’re all me! With the Mod-42 short-duration environmental-support capsule what you see is exactly what you get! And I want you to know, I really
love
having you inside me! But if you’re
sure
you want to sleep ... ?”

“I am,” I say firmly, and close my eyes, hoping that it’ll be dream-free.

“Awww! Alright. Sleep tight!”

The universe goes away.

THE DIRTY TRUTH— a truth universally acknowledged today, but bizarrely never admitted by any of my True Love’s kind—is that space travel is
shit
.

(I use “shit” as a generic placeholder for a vile and unpleasant substance with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Being instantiated as and when I was, I have no direct experience of scat. We had to practice with diatomaceous earth and brown dye. But I digress...)

If you’re rich, you can rent a stateroom in the supercargo spaces of a big strange person with a magsail or a nuclear-electric drive, depending on what direction you want to go in. And you, and a few sixteens of other folk, get to socialize and intrigue and backstab and be bored together for weeks or months or years on end, in a space not much larger than my rented rack in a cloud-city afloat over Venus. Bandwidth is expensive and metered—someone must keep a relay antenna pointed at your host’s brain, and feed it with kilowatts, just to support your idle chatter—and the stars and planets move so very slowly.

But it’s much worse if you’re poor.

If you’re poor, they wrap you in a stupid cocoon and strap you to the outside of the ship. It’s cold, or hot, and the radiation burn keeps your Marrow techné churning with the demands of self-repair, and if you’re unlucky a sand grain with the energy of a guided missile blows you limb from limb. If not for the stimulating company of your cocoon and any other steerage passengers you can talk to, you go insane from sensory deprivation. You can opt for slowtime, but that’s got problems of its own—or you can go into total shutdown hibernation, and possibly die in transit and never wake up again. And that’s
it
. It lasts for months, or even years.

You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company. Even with slowtime, it’s going to feel like months. You’re wearing a blindfold, which is probably appropriate because every couple of days, just to break the monotony, a not-very-accurate cosmic sniper fires a random shot at the building. And you wonder why my sisters don’t get out much?

(Of course that’s nothing compared to interstellar travel, where they freeze you and chop off your limbs to save weight—and grow you new ones at the other end
if
you arrive sufficiently intact after decades and centuries in the vasty deep—but I’m not planning on going to Pluto or Eris or Quaoar to seek passage on one of the starships. At least, not just yet.)

My One True Love’s species used to dream about space travel. It’s ironic: They were so badly designed for it that a couple of minutes’ exposure to vacuum would have killed them irreversibly. To go up and beyond Earth’s atmosphere required elaborate preparations, a complex portable biosphere—journeys of any duration necessitated cumbersome and heavy radiation shielding. And that’s before you consider all the other drawbacks.

When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no
there
there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.

Late in the day, when there weren’t enough of them left, they sent people like me—intelligent servants—to run the domed bases and camps and to conduct their research by proxy, and finally to build cities that they would never walk the streets of. Some of the people they sent were orthodox in body plan, but most were designed for vacuum and high-radiation environments and corrosive cloudscapes and microgravity. They—we—slaved in mining camps and died in launch accidents and built places where my True Love’s kind could live, made
somewhere
out of
nowhere
. . . but one day they weren’t there anymore. Dead, they were all dead.

(What killed them? I can’t say. Rhea, template-matriarch and prototype of my kind, might have been able to tell us, for she lived among them in their twilight decades: But she died before I was instantiated, leaving only stale regrets to we final few who came into being too late to know True Love.)

Before our dead Creators built my kind, space was empty as far as telescopes can see, and desolate with it. But we filled the void, and now there are places to go. Circumsolar space has been settled; starships are en route toward the nearer extrasolar worlds, crewed by the brave and the foolhardy. The colonies are barbarous and lawless compared to the huge cities of Earth, playgrounds for jaded aristos, where fortunes are made and lost and empires built and demolished against the breath-taking beauty of sterile planets and moons: And at last we’re not alone among the stars.

But space travel is still
shit
. It’s expensive and unpleasant, and it takes you a long way from your friends—but not, unfortunately, your enemies.

OF COURSE, I don’t hibernate for the entire voyage. That would be foolish, and possibly fatal, and although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death. I wake briefly as Lindy happily chatters her hellos to the laconic
High Wire
, and I force myself to stay awake as the spaceship’s tether grabs her and she crawls hubward and settles down on the spaceship’s load-bearing truss. I sleep again after she bites into the feedlines and power circuit and starts to metamorphose around me—a boring interlude, as her brain undergoes considerable rearrangement at this time. And then I wake again as we near our destination.

High Wire
cycles permanently between Mercury and Venus on an elliptical transfer orbit, taking half a year on each trip. He never enters planetary orbit, but uses his powerful tether—a smaller sib to Telemus—to catch incoming travelers and launch departing ones. Lobbing us up to him, or catching us at the other end, is the job of the local tethers or maglev tracks at the destination planet. Unlike many ships, especially in the outer reaches,
High Wire
works alone, without a crew of auxiliaries. But he’s not lonely: He gets to talk to a lot of travelers. In fact, it’s almost a rite of passage. So I spend a good three days hanging upside down from a structural truss covered in cargo pods, the sunlight casting acid-sharp shadows in front of me, giving him an abbreviated lifedump.

“So you left your home because you wanted to segment your self from your sibs,”
High Wire
rumbles thoughtfully. (He pitches his voice low, adopting the gravitas due his station.) “But you are fond of them. Why did you do that?”

“They were dying too fast.” I hug the graveyard of memories inside Lindy’s silent chrysalis. “I couldn’t stand to think I’d be just another.”

“But they were all older than you, subjectively. Your sixty-one-year gap.”

“What’s six decades?” I’d shrug if I could. “We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?”

“Many people do not find that a problem,”
High Wire
muses. “They exist adequately without loving anything, themselves included.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point. You’re happy, you’re doing exactly what you were designed to do. But imagine ... imagine somebody invented teleportation and made you obsolete overnight. What would you do then?”

Without missing a beat,
High Wire
replies; “Without a job, I think I would head for the stars, to see what’s out there.”

He’s obviously been thinking about that question a lot . . .

BUT WHY WOULD anyone want to go off-Earth?

I did. Once.

I had a lot to run away from. Too many bad memories, too many sibs gone before me into the beyond . . . I’m one of the last, instantiated after we were already obsolete, frozen for over sixty years at one point, running far beyond my design. Over the past century the exigencies of space travel have driven body fashion in a direction I can’t follow. Designed as companion for my One True Love (deceased), my sense of identity is strongly bound to my physical shape. I can’t easily remodel myself as a chibi-san, small, wide-eyed, and big-headed, because it would deny my whole purpose, lovely and obsolete. Without even that tenuous raison d’être, I might as well die. And so, demoted from goddess to ogress with close-set, tiny eyes, I chose to flee.

We all make mistakes, don’t we?

ALL GOOD TIMES come to an end, and bad times, too: boring ones just taper out. I sleep after my tête-à-tête with the shipmind, and when I awaken, Mercury is a blazing-hot disk, visible just beyond the rim of Lindy’s sunshade. “Wake up, sleepy bones!” she sings. “It’s time to disembark!”

I glance around. On every side of me, cargo pods are twitching from their slumbers and changing shape, growing legs and grapples and ion thrusters, and migrating toward
High Wire
’s tether. “How do we land ... ?” I start to ask, then feel Lindy shudder.

“On a rail! It’s fun!”

“On a—” A memory of Mercury tickles my head, but it belongs to a dead sister I haven’t fully internalized.
Juliette, maybe?
One of the wild ones. I can but clutch the box of soul chips and swear to myself. Lindy is expanding lengthwise, reconfiguring around me. “How long have we got to go?”

“Not long! Not long at all!” And she lets go of
High Wire
’s tether.

All around us, pods and cocoons and modules are scattering from the
High Wire
like fluff from the hub of a bursting flywheel, propelled by spring-loaded ejectors or dropping from the end of the tether. A snowstorm of mechalife swarms in the void as the gangling cycler ship fires up his ion drive and backs away slowly. For a moment my view blacks out as Lindy shields my face from the searing godwheel sun, then we roll around under the impulse of a tiny thruster and I see Mercury ahead of me, a half disk now visible, burnished and shining, larger than my fists held at arm’s length. “Two hours, and we’ll be down! Whee!” Lindy squeezes. “Are you worried? Be happy! I can relax you!”

On a rail.
I have an archaic emulation mode in my fight/flight module. It makes me swallow, my throat dry. “Massage. Please.”
Resolved
: If I’m to die at a time not of my choosing, I will die happy. But Lindy’s theory of mind is too weak to model me, and so she takes me at my word. I arrive on Mercury butt first, scared witless, with my spine totally relaxed. Just as well, really.

Mercury’s escape velocity is over four kilometers per second, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of. We are coming in at just over orbital velocity, without a thruster pack, and there can’t possibly be enough orbital tethers for this crowd. But the Mercurials have come up with a solution: the equatorial maglev track. Come down just
so
, and its magnets will catch you in a grip of steel and drag you to a standstill at the gates of Cinnabar. (Miss it even by centimeters, and you learn exactly what it’s like to be a meteorite.)

The maglev track is a blinding-bright line slashed across the cratered lunar landscape of Mercury. We’re landing in daylight but driving into the twilight zone, with the searing solar glare blasting our shadow across the gray-brown landscape that blurs beneath us. I can’t look back—even if I could, Lindy’s solar parasol would block the view—but there’s a string of glittering pods lined up behind our approach path, like those arrayed in front, all with blinking emerald beacons like an expensive and fragile necklace. The horizon pancakes up and flattens beneath me as the landscape unwinds. It seems to speed up as we fall toward the track. Mountains frame the distant horizon. Is that Cinnabar’s huge dome I see at the vanishing point? I’m not sure—even with vision boosted to the max, I can’t quite make it out. “This is the fun part!” Lindy enthuses. “Try not to flinch!
Whee!
”

The horizon is coming up fast now. I glimpse sawtooth underpinnings as a giant hand grabs us and squeezes. For a moment my vision sparkles with myriad brilliant disconnects, pixelating alarmingly; then a series of titanic jolts rattle my teeth in my head and try to squeeze me down into a puddle. My spine creaks as Lindy’s grip tightens painfully, and I can feel myself bloating, my internals settling in the grip of her foam. But then the deceleration eases, and my vision stabilizes. I can’t see directly ahead, there’s something in the way—something on the track ahead of us. For a panicky moment I think,
We’re going to crash!
then I realize it’s a fellow steerage passenger. The struts beneath the track are still skimming past alarmingly fast, but they’re no longer a sawtooth blur. We must be down to less than a thousand kilometers per hour. “Is it always like that?”