Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

When lying on the bunk gets boring, I reconfigure it as a chaise and practice reclining glamorously — except it’s pretty hard to do that when the ship’s only accelerating at a hundredth of a gee. My wardrobe’s pretty much inaccessible aboard ship, and not much use until we arrive. I could spend hours per day just repairing my chromatophores (have you ever woken up with lips the color of a three-day-old bruise?) but that loses its charm fast. “What can I do?” I moan at Indy, halfway through day two of three hundred and ninety-six.

“You could do what everyone else does, and go into hibernation. Or you could try slowtime,” he says unsympathetically. “I’m told a factor of twenty helps the journey pass quickly.”

I’d go into hibernation, but I don’t dare — not in this line of work. Total suspension of consciousness is too damn dangerous. So that leaves slowtime.

Let me tell you about slowing down time, just in case you haven’t already guessed: Slowing down time is shit .

Sure, all of us can adjust our clock speed downward. It’s normal practice for starship passengers and crew, and common enough on long-haul ships in the outer system. Plus, it’s helpful when your owner doesn’t need you right now, or if you get into trouble and need to conserve juice until someone happens by to dig you out of it — that’s why the capability is designed into us. The advantage over hibernation is, of course, that you’re still awake — and able to come back up to real-time speed fast if something happens. But it’s absolutely no fun whatsoever, and I wish I was still as innocent as I was on the Venus/Mercury run, so that I could contemplate hibernation without breaking out in a cold sweat.

First, you have to reconfigure your skin and internals so that your joints stiffen and you don’t sag. Which makes me feel unpleasantly bloated. Lubricant-filled goggles are a must, and if you’ve got self-lubricating orifices or other connectors, plugs are essential for avoiding those embarrassing leaks. (It’s easier for nonhumanoids like Daks or Bilbo, but for me — let’s not go there.) Then you’ve got to pile a whole bunch of extra shielding under your bed, so you’re squeezed up close to the ceiling. Finally, you turn the light down and dip into slowtime.

Slowtime is funny. The first thing you feel is gravity getting stronger. Well, it isn’t — but your reflexes are slowing down, so if you drop something it seems to fall faster. At a speedup of twenty, on a ship pulling a hundredth of a gee, it feels like you’re on Luna — but you don’t dare move around much because you may be running slower, but your muscles aren’t any weaker than they were, and you can damage yourself frighteningly easily.

The light brightens but turns reddish, and everything sounds squeaky and high-pitched. If you’re not wearing all the clothes you can pull on (and a blanket besides), you get cold really fast. The bedding and your clothes wrap themselves around you like a cold, wet funeral shroud, and it feels like you’re lying on a solid slab instead of a mattress. You get sleepy and nod off for catnaps every couple of hours — catnaps of deepsleep — and between them you can’t quite get your skin color or texture to stay right because you keep glitching. If you don’t roll over every few minutes while you’re awake you can damage yourself by overcompressing your mechanocytes. Sex is right out of the question, even if there were anyone remotely attractive and fun aboard. The radiation from the reactor scribbles white lines of graffiti across everything you look at. Your experience of time is wonky: A day may pass in a subjective hour, but it’s an hour of lying on your bunk, being bored. Finally, there’s an omnipresent high-pitched background roar of white noise nagging away at your attention (and don’t mention earplugs!). I gather our Creators used to travel like this all the time, back in the prespace era: They called it economy class.

The first time I slow down, I leave off the crotch plugs and face mask, and try to make do with just the goggles. I manage to stay awake for two hours before I deepsleep… then after waking from my first catnap I have to speed back up to real time so I can clean up the mess. Liquids seem to flow really fast in slowtime; viscous lubricant slime turns into a hideous watery fluid that seems to splash everywhere, and as for salivary mix, the less said the better. I am almost reduced to wishing Lindy was around, with her cheerful no-nonsense approach to packing me inside and out. All I can do is watch reruns of soap operas, play light-romance games, and fantasize/bitch about Petruchio. Then I have to change my bedding again, and I give up on the fantasies.

Did I mention the dreams? I’m dreaming a lot . It’s mostly skill-integration stuff. I’m dreaming in gestures and reflexes, strobing through myriad forms of mayhem with each catnap. I keep catching bits of Juliette’s memories, but they’re abbreviated and flickering, as if I’ve got one hand on the FAST-FORWARD button. Which, in a manner of speaking, I have. I’ve been wearing her soul all this time, after all, and while I might be slowing down my perception of the passing of time, I’m not slowing down time itself. It feels as if the bitch is breathing down my neck, so close that sometimes when I wake from deepsleep, I startle and look round, hurting my neck. And her need for Pete… I swore off heartbreak, didn’t I? Silly me!

Slowing time is shit . Aristo-class travel in the outer solar system is shit . Nuclear-powered space liners are shit . Two-timing scumbags who’re in love with my elder sister are shit .

Anyway, I believe you can now appreciate the true depths of my feelings when, after two subjective weeks of lying in a coffin-sized niche on top of a rock-hard mattress in a freezing-cold room, aching and bruising and leaking fluids from every orifice, Indy pages me to say that we’re on final approach to Callisto.

“Yippee!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warns me. “We’re still seven days out in real time. To you, call it eight hours.”

(Do I need to say it again? Space travel is shit!)

As it happens, I crack before the very end: I speed myself up to real time, peel off my soiled clothes and those disgusting plugs, and scamper naked through the grand saloon. Everyone else is still in slowtime, and as long as I don’t dawdle, they won’t see me as anything but a pale blur. There’s a head at the other end of the saloon, and although our individual washing ration is ridiculously stingy, it’s the first shower I’ve had in — a quick check of my real-time clock startles me — six months? So I zip myself into a plastic bag, pump almost a quarter of a ton of recycled water into it, and rub myself vigorously. Luxury! I’ve lost almost a quarter of my body weight, despite plugging into the shipboard power-and-nutrient grid, and I can feel my ribs: my Marrow is warning that I’m at 86 percent of repair capacity and need urgent clinical attention as soon as possible. I’m also mildly radioactive. (Well, next time I travel, I shall be sure not to bunk on top of an undershielded nuclear reactor.)

I inhale repeatedly, flushing clean detergent-laden water through my gas-exchange reservoirs, and wash myself thoroughly. Finally, I drain the bath back into the recycler and turn the fan up to eighty degrees Celsius, basking in hot, steamy warmth for the first time in ages.

By the time Indefatigable shuts down his reactors and nudges slowly toward the orbiting junkyard that is Callisto Highport, I have packed my possessions, dressed warmly in a low-temperature-safe outfit (with heater packs on elbows, knees, and feet, and a fetching artificial fur muff for my hands), and am bouncing off the walls and ceiling in my eagerness to be groundside.