Saturn's Children (6 page)

Right now I simply sense her as another sister in my head, more extrovert and cynical than I, wearing a brittle disguise of bright and joyous hedonism to conceal the wound in her soul. Juliette did indeed travel widely—though why, I am as yet unsure—and my entry in the lobby brings echoes of déjà vu bubbling from the deep well of her memories. A sense of purpose: She was here, visiting Cinnabar, for a
reason
—something I do not recall from her fluffy, flighty confidences at the time.

And then I remember some more of her time in this selfsame hotel, and when I wake up it is to find my hands damp and a hot raw flush of desire spreading between my thighs, and a yearning as deep as my core—but I’m alone in the too-large bed. Paris is too discreet for his own (and my) good, giving me time to get into the spirit of my sib’s affairs before he presses his suit. “Fuck you,” I moan in the back of my throat, unsure whether it’s a curse or a promise. I thump the unresisting mattress, then sit up groggily and take stock.

I’m on Mercury, in a hotel I can’t afford, to see a gangster’s friends about a courier job I’m not qualified for. I managed to make a powerful enemy on Venus and I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. All I
am
qualified for, when you get down to it, is to be a grande horizontale for a long-dead species.
Capital, Freya.
Where do I go from here? I’m in the bottom of the solar gravity well: Every direction is up.
Shit, things could be worse.
The recurrent dream could be back. (There are times when I go without sleep for weeks on end, until I’m hallucinating, just to avoid it.) I suppose I could mail my soul to Emma or Anais or one of the others for safekeeping, indenture my body long enough to work up a deadhead shipper’s fee—or I could wait for Stone to track me down, or—

I’m tap-dancing on the edge of a cliff, when I suddenly realize two things. Firstly, I’m famished. The last thing I ate was a jug of raw feedstock in Victor’s dive on the good city Ishtar. No wonder I’m anxious and jittery! I look around wildly—
There must be something to eat in here
—while a nagging sense of having forgotten something prompts me from behind: secondly,
secondly
—

I haven’t checked my mail in over two months, have I?

Standing up unsteadily, I walk over to the door and tap the handle. “Food. Please,” I say, remembering my manners at the last moment. “Whatever room service can manage?”

Room service is autonomic, I seem to recall—Paris doesn’t supervise everything that happens inside his body in person, although by now he’ll be aware that I’m up and about. He’ll probably want to surprise me. I blink at a rush of jumbled lubricious memories, and feel my cheeks flush.
So that’s what Juliette got up to, is it?
I’ve never been one for xenomorphs, unlike some of my sibs, but it’s not something I can’t do, and if Juliette’s recollections of tumbling Paris are anything to go by, I’ll enjoy his attentions a lot.

Shivering slightly, I tell the printer to make me some items of clothing that are slightly more glamorous than the travel-worn jumpsuit I arrived in. Then I strip and stand before the dressing mirror to compose my face and hair. Lips: slightly fuller, slightly redder. Eyes: slightly darker. Hair: it needs a bit more body. I tweak my appearance gradually into line with Juliette’s sensibilities, then go back over to the printer. It’s rifled through my external memory and come up with a tatterdemalion black gown I last wore to a very special party in Lisbon.
That’ll do!
I extend my heels and try an experimental twirl. I smile at myself in the mirror.
I may be rusty, but I’m not dead yet,
I think, stowing the graveyard in my new evening bag. Then I glance at my pad.

There’s a message from Emma waiting. Her imago unfolds in my mind’s eye, looking uncharacteristically haggard and worried. “Freya, where have you
been
? Please answer me! I need your help urgently. I can’t tell you what’s happening, but a friend will get in touch if you’re still on Venus.” I check the time stamp and message cost and shudder—she sent it forty days ago! And it cost the equivalent of a week’s wages to send.
She’s
really
in trouble.
There are certain signs Rhea gave us, signs of stress unfamiliar to any who don’t share our secret history: Emma’s message is riddled with alarms, puzzled with paranoia. But what does she expect
me
to do about it? Isn’t there another sib who can help her out?

I quickly check the rest of my mail. Nothing from Greta, friendly cheer from Sheena, depressive moaning from Pippa, Charmaine, Elvira, Sirena, and a basket-load more of my sibs—
Stop it,
I tell myself.
You’re in a hotel; you’re making yourself attractive for your host so you can both have a good time. You
can’t
afford to be moody. Think of something else. Like, where’s room service?

Precisely on cue, the door dings for attention. I bounce over to open it, thinking happy thoughts, and that’s when and how the two dead-eyed dwarfs in their black stealthsuits get the drop on me.

ARCHITECTURE AND ECONOMICS are the unacknowledged products of planetography.

My Dead Love’s kind had many eldritch powers, but their vulnerability to variations in temperature and ambient pressure placed tight limitations on their freedom of movement. Consequently, they created environments they could live in and designed buildings to cater to their needs. The city of Cinnabar is of an age and scale that tells me it was built in accordance with the desires of our dead Creators. It’s domed and oxygenated, with an ambient temperature fluctuating around the triple point of dihydrogen monoxide. Also, its buildings are fitted with air locks and riddled with strange waste transportation tubes.

It was through these convoluted cloacae that my assailants gained access, squeezing up through the magnificent but obsolete toilet fittings of the Imperial guest room. As the door opened I caught a brief glimpse of a distressed trolley, lying on its side with wheels spinning—then two humanoid silhouettes darted toward me.

I’m trapped in the frozen present, of course, with no time to think until much later. I take an instinctive step back, but they’re faster than I am. The nearer one stabs at me with a shock stick; I foolishly try to deflect it, and take the full discharge through my hands.

“Freya Nakamichi-47, our brother Stone sends you his regards,” the second intruder recites formally, as I topple slowly backward, chromatophores flaring and motor groups twitching. “We are committing this delightful reunion to memory, so that he may honor you with his personal attention. In fact, he has arranged a festive party for you, and we shall be on our way there just as soon as we have prepared you for a trip through the sewers. Regrettably, he cannot be here in person, but we assure you that he will savor this encounter.” My skin crawls uncontrollably as if a thousand tiny spiderbots are running across it.

"C’mon, Flint, stop poncing around and help me splice the cunt before she gets ’er fuckin’ legs back.” The gravel-voiced shadow with the shock stick has me by the ankles and is wrapping something around them.

Flint sighs. “As you will, Slate.” I try to move my arms, but he’s too fast, and the two of them flip me over on my face and pinion me. Some reflex I don’t remember makes me try to tense my shoulders, but it’s too little, too late: My servos aren’t responding yet. “I think she’s coming round,” Flint observes. “Deal with it.”

I manage to open my mouth, ready to call for help, but Slate stings me in the back of the head with fifty kilovolts, and I stop noticing things for a while.

IT’S DARK.

It’s dark because my eyes are shut down.
Duh.
And I’m lying across something uncomfortable and hard. It’s sticking in my back, and it’s
hot
.

I try to open my eyes, and they respond sluggishly, burning in their sockets. All I get is a faint impression of brightness—I’m temporarily blind, my retinas overloaded. My skin itches, every ’phore burnished to its smoothest shining finish: I must look a sight; I’m positively chromed.
How gauche,
I think vaguely. When I try to move, nothing happens. Then I realize that I’m not breathing. Gas exchange with my environment has ceased.
How odd,
I puzzle.
That must mean
—

Panic!

I try to scream, but there’s no air, and I’m not equipped for vacuum: My electrosense is weak, designed for controlling home appliances rather than shouting across a noisy factory floor. But I am beginning to work out where I am. They’ve tied me across a hard beam—it’s under the small of my back, and my arms are immobilized beneath it. I try to pull my legs up but they’re tied to something else. I turn my face away from the heat and I’m rewarded by a flickering shadow against the burning brightness in one eye. The light level seems to be dropping. For a moment I was afraid they’d taken me out of the city and staked me out on the surface to fry, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan.
A festive party,
they said. I listen, hard, hoping to hear some buzz or chatter of monitoring traffic, but there’s nothing. On the other hand, I can feel a faint, grinding vibration through the small of my back. As if there’s someone else on the beam—
Pole? Rail?
—I’m lying across. And there’s something else to cushion my head, something hard and flat.

The white-hot glare is flickering faster now, as my overloaded eye responds to the slight dimming. I blink, trying to reduce the amount of light entering my pupils, and I’m rewarded by a hazy eyelash-obscured view. I’m lying on a metal rail, one of a group of bars lying parallel to one another. My head casts a long shadow across the nearest one. I must be on the surface, and my head is turned away from the setting sun. The craggy edge of a crater looms to the left of the rails. To the right, there’s a boulder-strewn plain. I tense and strain, testing my bonds. I know what they’ve done to me now, and it’s not funny, not in the slightest. I’m well rested; I’ll still be alive when my nemesis inches into view, rumbling inexorably toward me on a thousand wheels. The plinth my head rests on is part of the switchgear for swapping out undercarriage bogies. I try to sit up, but I only make it a few centimeters before I yank my hair painfully. The little thugs have tied it around one of the track ties.
How long have I got?
I wonder.
Probably not long,
a phantom memory answers;
Cinnabar rolls at nearly thirteen kilometers an hour, and the twilight zone isn’t that wide.
I prod for more details, but the echo is infuriatingly fuzzy and nonspecific. It’s probably a memory of Juliette’s, but she isn’t integrated enough for joined-up thinking yet. And she never will be, I realize: The wheels will crush my head and her soul chip like micrometeoroid debris while Stone’s sibs joke and watch my demise from an observation balcony on the prow of the city.

It’s getting darker. The heat beating on the back of my head is beginning to let up.
What about the track-repair gangs?
I wonder.
Surely they’ll see me . . .
But maybe not: Flint and Slate wouldn’t have positioned me in front of a team of potential rescuers, would they?
How long will it take Paris to realize I’m gone?
I ask.
Too long,
says the icy-cold echo that knows too much about this desolate wasteland.
You don’t want to rely on him, anyway.

Alright, smarty-pants,
I think irritably,
you get me out of this!

Something moves in the knife-edged shadows near the tracks. I roll my eyes in its direction, trying to ignore the whiteout.
Who are you? Stone’s witness, here to watch me die?

I have a sudden intuition.
Let me handle this,
says a certainty bubbling up from the back of my head. I’m not sure whose memory it is, but she feels almost happy. I let go, and everything slides into place.

I concentrate on my chromatophores, tweaking the ones opposite the solar inferno away from their default reflectivity. I can mess with my texture and color, tune my skin from pink goo softness to refraction-grating scales. As a brief experiment I roughen the skin on my wrists and grate at my bonds with denticles of silicon; but there’s not enough freedom of movement to get anywhere—I’ll never cut those ties in time. A shame, but Stone’s vengeful sibs aren’t
that
stupid. So I work on my skin texture some more.
Refraction.
What I’m about to try is fiddly work, and if I slip from the mirror finish too soon, I’ll overheat badly, maybe cook myself.
Diffract, diffract.
Reddening my skin, roughening . . .

The thing in the shadows moves, a curious rippling darkness against the penumbral background. I flex my back and try to turn my head farther, ignoring the tearing pain in my scalp.
“Help,”
I yell as loudly as I can in electrospeak. I can feel the heat licking around the edges of my mirror-finished back, warming my face as the diffractive spines sprouting from my chromatophores bend the solar backlight around me. I must look like a black silhouette of a burning woman, surrounded by a ruby red border. I tense, and force my spines to lie flat. Then I tense the other way, sticking them upright. A
flashing
ruby red border, that’s what I want. The only color in this stark, black-and-white landscape.
Pay attention to me!

The track hums beneath my cheek as I flare and fade, flare and fade. The barely visible thing snuffles around the sleeper ties, then turns toward me, and I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before.
It? Him. “Help!”
I shriek, but all that comes out is a whisper. The track hums again as Cinnabar, a saucer-shaped bowl beneath a crystal dome, rolls ponderously into view from behind the jagged gash in the crater’s rim wall. The pale needles of half a hundred towers creep toward me on a thousand steel wheels, grinding all to dust beneath their juggernaut tread. The track squeals and grates like a living thing. It’s only a few kilometers away—the close horizon is deceptive.
“Help!”
I yell again.

The thing in the shadows stands up and waggles its proboscis in my direction. It begins to walk, very deliberately, away from me. I flash my diffraction silhouette desperately, and it pauses for a moment— then rises on a puff of rocket-disturbed dust and zips away toward the onrolling city.