Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

Which may account for why I am so foolishly intemperate on my arrival, and the subsequent disastrous turn of events.

WELCOME TO CALLISTO, outermost of Jupiter’s four Galilean (major) moons. Callisto is fractionally smaller than Mercury but rather less massive, and beneath its heavily cratered surface (a chewed-up wilderness of ice and rubble) lies a deep, ammonia-laced ocean surrounding a rocky core. It has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but it’s vanishingly thin, and it’s very cold: Daytime on Callisto is forty degrees colder than a winter’s night on Mars.

Like Mars, Callisto has a space elevator — but it’s nothing as impressive as Bifrost. Four low-speed climber tapes link Callisto Highport to Saga crater on the equator. They wobble slowly in the complex libration of Jupiter’s gravity well. Cargo climbers sluggishly traverse them, driven by power beamed from the laser grid outside Tsiolkovsky, the last city to be decreed by our Creators before their final retreat from space. It’s almost exclusively a cargo-and-freight elevator service — people who can afford to visit Callisto usually take the fast, lightweight rocket shuttles that fly between Highport and Nerrivik. Nerrivik sits on the fringes of a huge opencast mining complex that bites deep into the southern rim of the Valhalla impact basin. Here, more than a billion Earth years ago, a huge impactor smashed right through Callisto’s crust, shattering the mantle wide open and causing ice flows and moonquakes. Deposits of deep-lying minerals were dragged to the surface by the molten ice, and here they lie, waiting to be collected by the miners. The upshot is, Callisto is a major exporter of water-soluble elements.

Blah. I sound like I’ve swallowed a tour guide, don’t I? Let’s be honest, I’m cribbing. But this is all stuff you need to know, by way of context.

By the time I slouch down the boarding tube from the groundside shuttle, I am tired, physically drained, and cold in spite of my many layers of wrap-up-warm clothing. Nearly four hundred days in a radioactive cupboard would dent even the Honorable Katherine Sorico’s pigheaded arrogance, so I let myself slouch a little as I look around the spaceport terminal.

Nerrivik is a backwater and a mining camp, and it shows. There’s no Pink Police presence here — despite the suspicious polymer tapes growing in the deep oceans below — because there’s just about no atmosphere, and the daytime temperature is so low that they don’t even bother insulating liquid-nitrogen tanks. The lighting in the public spaces is dim, to suit eyes set for a daytime illumination only somewhat brighter than a full moonlit night on Earth. Buildings are dark and lack windows; people come in a variety of body plans, and humanoids such as myself are a minority, shivering inside their voluminous coats and robes. The sun is visibly shrunken and hangs in a black sky dominated by a different body — Jupiter. As I walk out of the arrivals hall, I look up briefly at that violent, orange orb. But I have to glance away in a hurry. It’s too big, my instincts squeal. It’s unnervingly bigger than Earth’s full moon, and something about it looks ripe and diseased to my eye, like a pink goo outbreak that’s run its necrotic course. I shake my head and look for a public-information kiosk. “What hotels with repair clinics are there here?” I ask.

“Hotels with repair facilities?” The kiosk giggles for a few seconds as it digests my request. “This is Nerrivik!”

“Listen, you.” I poke it with a triple-gloved finger: “I’m just off the Indefatigable , I’m extremely short-tempered, and I need a Marrow fix now . A hot bath would be good, too. What have you got?”

“There’s the Nerrivik Paris,” it volunteers after a moment. “He doesn’t have an in-house clinic, but he’s next door to the Big Blue Body Shop, and they might be able to fix you up. Will that do?”

“Maybe.” I try to snap my fingers and discover to my annoyance that between the gloves and the lack of an atmosphere, I can’t hear them. Everything here runs on electrospeak, anyway. Luckily, I had my transceiver upgraded back when I was getting fitted for my cold-weather gear. “Directions, please.”

“Humph. If you insist…” The kiosk delivers, grumpily. I flag down a spider — my feet are already beginning to ache, despite my padded boots — and tell it where to go. Five minutes later, I limp into the vestibule of a familiar-looking hotel.

“Hello, madame. Can I be of service?” The talking head on the reception desk is a model of polite formality. I don’t recognize him from any of my sibs’ memories, and he doesn’t appear to recognize me.

“Yes. I need a room. And I gather there’s a body shop somewhere on this street…?” Another ten minutes and my luggage is checked through to my room — even more expensive than the one on Cinnabar, and this one’s in a cheap-ass mining town that doesn’t come with the elaborate maintenance costs of a city on wheels — and the local Paris is bowing and scraping. “I’ll be back once I’ve taken care of some essential maintenance,” I tell him. I’m tempted to mention my real name and suggest he ask his Mercurial sib for an update, but at the last moment I decide not to; I haven’t had any news about the liquidation proceedings, and the last thing I need is to call down a bounty hunter or a lawsuit on my head.

The Big Blue Body Shop turns out to be a small, slick surgical chop ’n’ change outfit operating from the top floor of an office block. I walk up to the front door, waving my credit chip. “Hi! I’ve just come in on the Indefatigable , and I need a Marrow cleanup.”

The friendly-looking surgical gnome beckons me over, jacks his chair up, and unfolds his hunchback to reveal an impressive array of surgical probes. “We can do that, milady.” He looks politely bored. “Anything in particular you’d like us to look at?”

“Yes.” I sit down on the examining chair. “I drew the hot bunk. You might want to wear a lead apron…”

WELL, THAT WAS an expensive mistake, I think ruefully as I leave the body shop and walk briskly back to the hotel, chewing over what just happened to me.

It takes Dr. Meaney almost two days (Earth days, not Callisto diurns, I hasten to add) to fix my techné and repair my Marrow. The bill is eye-watering, and not just because he has to treat my damaged parts as hazardous waste. “Next time they try to put you in that bunk, my advice is not to take the flight,” he chastises me. “If you’d been bound for Saturn and picked up that kind of dose, you’d be dead on arrival.”

“What?” I stare at him.

“Dead, as in, exanimate, beyond repair, an ex-person. Listen.” He leads me over to a triple-glazed slab of window. “Over there, see that tower?” It’s several kilometers away, on the horizon. “Suppose someone set off a quarter-megaton nuclear weapon on top of it. And suppose you were shielded from the heat and blast, but not the radiation. Now try to imagine someone doing that to you once a week for an entire standard year. That’s about what you were exposed to. See? It’s not a good idea, really and truly.”

“Um.” I swallow, reflexively: Fragile slivers of ice break off the back of my throat and slide down my digestive system. “Really?”

“Really!” He looks exasperated. “You could at least have used the saloon — that’s what it’s for! If you refrain from sleeping on top of any more nuclear reactors you’re probably good for another couple of decades before you need another going-over like this. That’s good techné you’ve got there, there are some neat add-ons, and it’s very robust, but you can kill it off if you insist on behaving as if you’re invulnerable.”