Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

For the first couple of minutes I’m not sure it’s going to work (and wouldn’t it be a crying shame to go to my death looking my worst for my enemy’s imago?), but then I discover I can nearly touch my chest with my chin. I stop squeezing my follicles, lean back until my head is touching the rail, then tense my shoulders and do my best to sit up. There’s an awful tearing from my scalp, then sudden freedom. I pull my head away from my magnificent mane, leaving it wrapped around the rail, its roots thinned to translucency. I’m as bald and ugly as any mecha. I shiver in disgust at the picture I must make: Luckily, I’m the only mirror around here, except for the silent witnesses…

A few minutes pass in shock and near exhaustion. The tracks hum and vibrate more urgently beneath my buttocks and ankles. I can tense my abdomen and pull myself nearly upright, but now I face a crueler fate — bisection without extinction. There’s no way I can regenerate from such damage unaided! They’ve shrink-wrapped my arms together behind my back with a sheet of industrial sealant, and lashed it to the rail with a rope — I can flex my fingertips freely, but I can’t get my nails into position to cut through it and it’s far too tough to rip. Not even the silicone lube I sweat when I’m aroused would help. You could chew your own arms off, one of myselves suggests dryly. Her lack of ironic awareness frightens me almost as much as the suggestion. They’d grow back. I table the notion for future consideration if all else fails. What about my feet?

I’ve been leaving my feet for last, for no sensible reason, but now I blink: I’ve been stupid again, haven’t I? I’m barefoot, of course, heels retracted. Heels. I twist my feet together en pointe as I go to full extension. They creak and grate as I tense my tarsal stiffeners, feel extension cables shift position in seldom-used tunnels. It’s not a position I use very often, for in full extension my heels are fifteen-centimeter spikes, and my toes barely touch the ground; it severely restricts my balance, and though some of my Dead Love’s kind might find it erotic, I find it impractical. But in this situation all I can do is stretch those toes. Stretch! I can feel my heels sliding out, narrowing, curling closer to the soles of my feet as the small bones rearrange themselves to support my weight entirely on the tips of my toes. I concentrate, trying to imagine myself in Paris’s bed, try to force myself to sweat — anything to lubricate this fatal passage. Is it my imagination, or is there some give in the bonds? If they lashed my ankles to the rail, they’ll have assumed that my feet are wider from heel to toe. Pull! Stretch! But when I’m en pointe , my feet are half their normal length—

My right foot slides free a fraction of a second before my left. I nearly knee myself in the eye.

While I’ve been kinky-fying my feet and getting creative in the hairstyle department, full dark has fallen across the tracks. I have to boost my eyes’ sensitivity to see anything, and the grainy, ghostly starlight leaches fine detail from the view. The track thrums and starts to squeal as the vast bulk of Cinnabar bears down on me. It looks huge, stretching halfway across the horizon and scraping at the harsh sunlight overhead with the tips of its spires. I twist sideways, flailing my legs, as the volume of squealing and grinding rises and the track vibrates beneath me. Push! My arms twist painfully, and for a moment I have a vision of losing them beneath the cutting disk of a wheel — but something gives. My captors didn’t expect me to get this far, and I manage to slide around so I’m lying lengthwise along the track, feetfirst toward the city.

The rope tries to twist my arms half-out of their sockets, but I dig my feet and my shoulders in and shove, hard, throwing my whole weight sideways. The rope slips just as the shadow of the city’s lower deck looms over me with a harsh grating rumble that I feel through the track — and then I’m lying on the too-hot dirt beside the rail, arms tied behind me. I cower and duck my head toward my chest and give a last kick, curling away from the wrist restraint as the track begins to buck and sway and hiss like a malevolent spirit. The huge drive wheels roll over me like disks of darkness, and for an instant a giant tries to pull my arms off. I force myself to relax in the blackness — and then my shoulders stretch and I sprawl forward in the hot dirt: I’m free! Centimeters behind me the huge juggernaut wheels rumble past in procession, matched by the set on the opposite rail where my feet were tied — but my wrists are free now, the rope severed by their awful pressure.

I lie between the tracks for almost a minute as the lead drive bogies thunder overhead. Then there’s nothing overhead for tens of meters but the underside of the city, studded with hatches and access ports and ladders and ramps, and the load-bearing idler bogies on the outer rails. I stand up and stretch, retracting my heels most of the way but keeping my arches tight and springy. Then I turn and start to run after the drive bogie that so nearly chopped me into pieces. There’ll be a ladder, I hope, and an access port. And then it’ll be time to go looking for payback, one of myselves thinks coldly.

I shudder. She seems to know what she’s talking about.

THERE CAN BE few sights more out of place in a luxury hotel than an angry bald ogress in a ripped black gown who storms in through the service entrance and demands to talk to the management — unless it is the front desk itself in a full-dress panic, sending remotes and drones rushing back and forth, locking down all its pipes and tubes and orifices, and going into an orgy of self-recrimination and hand-wringing apology.

“Don’t want an apology!” I say breathlessly. “I want you to find where they came in and block it! And if you can hunt them down and crucify them as well—”

“My dear, I assure you that I will leave no crevice unexamined, no cranny unprobed! But what happened to your hair? Have you any idea who is behind this outrage? You poor thing—” I allow myself to be cosseted and fussed over and whisked up to the Bridal Suite (once I am assured it has been made safe, the entire floor sanitized and sealed), then Paris hugs me tight and holds me, and effusively reassures me that I am safe in his heart. I almost permit myself to believe it, but as he undresses me with his remotes, and I lie down on his chaise, he confesses that he’s afraid. “I know where they got in, but I have no idea why I didn’t notice them. I’ve paid for external security to seal the opening, but it’s absolutely horrible. Vermin!” He shivers beneath me.

I stroke his intromissive adapter. “It’s alright,” I tell him, and this time he shivers for a different reason. “Let’s not worry about that now.” The last thing I need is a host who associates my presence with stress. “Hug me, dearest. I want you to touch me.” It’s manipulative, but by no means the worst thing I’ve done. I very deliberately make love to Paris, afloat in his bed of delirium, aware that with every passing second my shadowy enemies have more time to realize that their fiendish plan has failed.

I SURFACE REINVIGORATED and slippery with sweat, my batteries recharged and my scalp covered with a frizz of thick red bristles just beginning to curl at the tips. The room has cooled around me, and the furnishings are detumescent and dulled after their hot, fleshy urgency: it smells faintly of salt and regrets. Paris has withdrawn his presence to afford me solitude. Or perhaps he feels guilty about taking advantage of me. You can never tell with men, they have such a strange attitude to sex: almost as strange as Creator females, but that’s another story.