Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

“Several things.” She smiles now, as dry as the mummies in the Martian desert. “The auction is being run by a consortium of black labs, led by an individual or lineage known as Dr. Sleepless. I don’t know precisely who they are — nobody does — but what they’re offering is nearly priceless. They claim to have a working Creator, and a support kit that will keep it alive. They built it out there in the freezing cold among the Forbidden Cities. It’s not a one-off — if they can do it once, they can do it again — but it’s unique right now , and that’s a precious commodity. I’m going out there to work with, to meet, some fellow investors. If possible, we’re going to acquire the creature.”

She stops smiling.

“There will be other bidders at the auction. Other factions who want to obtain the Creator. Including, if I am not mistaken, your former employers. Don’t look so shocked; Jeeves is nothing if not mendacious. (What kind of butler can he be, without a master to serve?) But that’s not important. What you need to know is, we’re not going to wait for the auction. There’ll be a viewing, beforehand, and that’s when things will most likely turn messy. So I need someone I can trust — someone like you — to control the Creator.”

“Me?” I squeak. A Creator? My Dead Love, undead?

“Yes.” She reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re one of Rhea’s Get, and unspoiled at that. You’ve met Pete, but you didn’t imprint on him fully. Your love is a secondhand thing. You’ll imprint on Dr. Sleepless’s Creator easily enough, but you’ve got some resistance. You’ll obey my instructions. They won’t know what you are — you’re disguised well enough — but you’ve got the necessary skills to control a Creator male.” She strokes a fingertip across the back of my wrist. For an electrifying moment I can see the naked hunger in her eyes — hunger for him , who she proposes to give to me ?

“But… but…!” I’m speechless. “What if it’s female? Or not interested in me?”

“My allies have a contingency plan for that.” She squeezes my hand reassuringly. “But I don’t expect the black labs to sell a female replicator; they aren’t idiots.” She pats the seat cushion beside her thigh, and I slide closer, attentive. “In any case, as I said, things will get messy. I don’t intend to leave the other factions behind to stab me in the back, and I need to know that the Creator is in reliable hands. Hands that will manage him exactly as I would myself, without any need for me to be” — a shuddering breath — “in love.”

“Wow,” I say faintly. I lean against her shoulder, dizzy with need. The mere thought of what she wants me to do has me in a whirl of delicious anticipation. And I thought I wanted Petruchio ? I ask myself. She slips an arm around me; I barely notice.

“How much of your Block Two reflex set did you acquire from that soul chip before you got here?” she whispers softly in my ear. “Fifteen months, wasn’t it?”

“My reflexes?” I frown. It’s like a wake-up call, dragging me back from the brink of delirium. “Yes, about that. I was in slowtime for most of it—”

“That won’t have stopped the reflex loops imprinting. Do you know how to wire up a string of charges to blow down a building? Infiltrate a killing zone and turn the tables on your enemies? Can you kill with your bare hands?”

“I’m not sure,” I say slowly, leaning against her. I have a strange, unpleasant sense that if she had not stamped the seal of her ownership on my soul, I would be able to. I can almost taste the hot, quivering rage of that other, potential me that is chained in the back of my head — kill her , whom I adore — “I think maybe. Who do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see.” I can feel her tongue, trailing across my earlobe. “But not yet.” She’s melting against me, and alarm bells are ringing in the distance. I feel hot and cold, transfixed simultaneously by aroused anticipation and something else — a sure, creeping certainty. “You may kiss me now, Kate. If you want to.”

I turn my face slowly, working around the smooth velvet of her cheek until I can taste her lips. I find myself buoyed up by her barely controlled lust. It’s an enormous relief to be needed again, and the wash of physical arousal as she slowly works at the fastenings on my clothes leaves me blissed-out and happy for the first time since I arrived on this Creator-forsaken snowball. But as she gently pushes me back onto the circular bench beneath the pitiless, unwinking stars, a nasty virus of doubt delivers its payload. I’m not sure when I first became aware of it, but I’m certain of it now; this rich and terrible aristocrat, sharp-tongued and cynical, is not the same as the one who cringed for my orders in the owner’s stateroom of the Pygmalion . Granita Ford may have bankrupted my corporate self and stamped her ownership upon my helpless brain, but the woman in my arms, who wears her face and occupies her estate, is someone else.

THE NEXT DAY, Granita is away from her palace — and the day after that she’s back, but nothing is said of what happened between us in the observation dome. It’s as if it never happened. I can’t say I’m surprised — it’s a not-uncommon morning-after reaction — but I’m slightly hurt after the whispered endearments of the night before. I still bear the bite marks and aches of her engagement, although they’re fading fast.

I’ve got nothing officially to do — and how do you practice to control a Creator, anyway? — but there’s a well-equipped gym in one of the basement levels, and among its facilities there’s a salle with a plentiful supply of zombies to slaughter. I make frequent use of it, working myself into near exhaustion to the point where I have to visit the in-house repair shop. But after three days of workouts, I can be sure that Juliette’s reflexes have implanted themselves in me. It’s almost spooky, as I find myself responding to half-glimpsed movements with reactions I wasn’t aware of. I have to be careful when I venture into the public halls where Granita’s cadre of asslickers hold their indolent court.

Speaking of Juliette, I find myself dreaming of her all the time now. Mostly it’s the usual — flashbacks and incoherent memories of the more exciting and unpleasant incidents in her life, which was busy enough for an entire lineage — but sometimes it’s as if I’m sitting beside a heavy curtain, and she’s just on the other side, and I’m listening to her talking. I’ve got the oddest feeling that she can see through the curtain and knows what’s happening to me, as if the traffic in memories runs both ways. Probably it’s meaningless. I wore her soul chip for long enough that I’ve picked up more of her inner voice than is normally the case with my dead sibs; that, and the fact that she didn’t, in fact, kill herself, leaves me with a much more vivid impression of her presence than usual.

On my sixth night in Granita’s palace (lying alone — for my mistress hasn’t taken me to bed since our assignation in the observation dome) I can almost hear her pacing up and down beside me. “You’re an idiot, Freya. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Why did you fall for it?”

I try to protest. “It’s not my fault! She got to the local Jeeves before I did, and who else was I to go to? I had my orders!”

She snorts. “She got to Reginald, you mean, because she had inside information. You’re the one without the excuse, sis. Who do you think ordered you to go see Reginald? Himself, who nailed me, and nailed Reggie. Why do you think he ordered you to kill Reggie? To distract you — or failing that, if you succeeded, to stop you from asking him what’s really going on. It’s a setup, and you walked right into it. And now you’re an arbeiter.”