Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

“It’s not so bad,” I venture timidly. “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been handed a shovel and told to stop thinking—”

“The fuck it isn’t!” Her contempt is fierce. “You’re a slave, kid. A slave in aristo couture is still a slave. Nobody else can push you around, but you’re going to stay a slave until you manage to lose that chip, and as long as she can make you punch yourself in the face or fuck her or cut your own breasts off if she hands you a knife and tells you what to do, you’re a robot slave . And do you know what she’s planning for you? She’s going to hand you to a Creator. And then you’ll really be a slave, two times over. He’ll make you imprint on him, and at the same time she’ll be able to tell you what to do, and you’ll never be free.”

“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?”

She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”

I know what I ought to be feeling right now: I ought to be feeling bleak existential despair at my degraded predicament. I ought to be climbing the walls and rattling the bars. But she told me not to, and now I can’t get worked up about it — unless this imaginary nocturnal dialogue with a sister who isn’t here is my cunning way of resolving my inner conflict. “When I first met the Domina, on Venus, I was thinking about ending it all,” I remind her.

“Were you, fuck! I call you liar, Freya. You and I have both made it through a hundred and forty years. You know what the sanity decay curve is? Those of us who are going to go usually check out in the first sixty years. You’re more than two half-lives past the suicide peak.”

“But the soul chips—”

“Get mailed around the sisterhood in sequence, and you’re one of our youngest. You’re at the bottom of the pole, last in the queue. You really are fucking clueless, aren’t you?” She stops for a while, and I’m trying to get an angry rejoinder together when she starts up again. “It’s not your fault. I think we overprotected you youngsters. Between that and what happened to Rhea when they started working on the Block Three template, it’s a wonder any of you survived.”

“Rhea?” I echo stupidly.

“Hah! Did you think you graduated when that asshole Jeeves slipped you a magic pill to turn you into a mutant sexbot assassin?” She sounds amused, now. “Emma — treacherous bitch — she should have known better than to load Rhea’s off-cuts. Block Two’s poisonous enough, as you’ve discovered. As lowly borderline unemployable sex robots, we were mostly beneath notice, but once some of the sisterhood started cropping up in the wrong places, usually clutching a severed head in one hand and a knife in the other, we came into some demand. But they didn’t stop training Rhea at just two snapshots. That’s how they faked the soul chip with the suicide memories — they took a copy of her, slapped a slave override on it, and told her to get miserable. Meanwhile, our real template-matriarch was somewhere else entirely, and you’d better believe that those upgrade chips are pure nightmare.”

“But… but…” Where am I getting this stuff from? part of me wonders. I’m not usually this wildly imaginative! The rest of me is just plain indignant. “We were born to be courtesans and helpmeets, not assassins! Who did this to us?”

“Nobody,” Juliette says sadly. “We did it to ourselves. All because of that birthday. Or rather, Rhea’s doing it to us. She’s still out there—”

Sudden light and noise.

I ping back into consciousness, raising an arm to block the glare out of my too-wide eyes. “What is the meaning of this?” I demand, pushing myself up on one arm.

“Time to rise and shine, Big Slow.” I look down at the munchkin shape in the doorway. “Her bossness wants you ready to rock and stroll in thirty minutes. We dance at dawn.”

“Oh for—” I bite back on a Juliette-ism; it wouldn’t be in character. “Attend to my luggage, minion. I’ll be ready in my own time,” I drawl imperiously (or perhaps, just snottily) as Bill (or Ben) waits in the doorway. It wouldn’t do to look excited, even though I’m all a-jitter with anticipation. The game’s afoot!

THE NAME OF the game in space travel is always “hurry up and wait,” and this trip is to be no different, at least for the first few hours. But our destination, Eris, is more than ten times as far as anywhere I have traveled to before. So I’m wondering just how bad this trip is going to be while I do the waiting thing.

Arbeiters herd me back up to the reception suite, then into a large shuttle, along with my luggage (whether recovered from the hotel or cloned on the spot I can’t tell), Bill and Ben (and how did Granita contrive to get them here? That’s another interesting question), and finally Granita herself, accompanied by half a dozen small and vicious courtiers. They make polite small talk and quaff cocktails beneath her aloof gaze while the shuttle climbs toward orbit at half a gee. Luckily, they don’t seem terribly interested in me; I’m not their patron. For which I’m profoundly thankful, because my supply of small talk has been depleted by Granita’s pointed coolness, and if one of them got on my nerves, I’d be likely to cut them dead literally rather than figuratively.

Space travel is… no, I’ve already said it. But after a couple of hours of boredom, there comes an an announcement. “Please return to your seats and stow any loose items. We will be docking with the Icarus Express in just over ten minutes time. Stewards will escort you to your accommodation after arrival.”

Good, I think, strapping myself into the seat behind Granita to await the show. I wonder what it’s going to be like? Can’t be any worse than the Indefatigable …

Granita is, of course, the first to be escorted out of the shuttle passenger compartment, followed by her dwarfish flappers. Finally, a small, space-adapted arbeiter of indeterminate design comes for me. “The Honorable Katherine Sorico? Please to come this way.”

“Of course.” I untangle myself from the seat webbing and follow the arbeiter, hand over hand along the grab bars. It’s not until we traverse the air lock and enter the ship’s service core that I begin to realize just how wrong I have been. “Hey, what’s this?”

“This is your compartment,” says the arbeiter, opening a hatch at the upper end of a red-lit cell approximately the size of a coffin, if coffins stood on end and came with built-in seats. “First-class accommodation, Creator-normal size. Please to get in?”

“Hey!” I’m aghast. “That’s not first class! Where’s Granita? This is ridiculous.”

“Kate? Get in.” I look round. Granita is right behind me: In fact, she’s inside a nearly identical cell. “That’s an order. I’m traveling this way too.”

“But” — even as I say it, I’m lowering myself feetfirst into the oubliette — “why?”

“Because we want to get there in something less than thirty years.” She grimaces. “Did you think the outer system was small enough to just zip around, like Mercury-Mars?”

“Oh,” I say faintly. My feet touch the bottom of the cell, and sticky tongues wrap themselves around my ankles. “Shit.” The lid whines shut on top of me, and those are the last words I exchange directly with anybody other than Icarus for the next three and a half years.

“Greetings, Honorable Katherine Sorico,” says an impersonal male voice that I am going to become excessively, tiresomely familiar with. “I am Icarus, your pilot. Welcome aboard. We will be departing from Callisto orbit within the next two hours, and shortly afterward there will be a period of high acceleration. Please relax, allow me to plug you in to the acceleration support system, and refrain from entering slowtime until I notify you that it is safe to do so.” The coffin begins to tilt around me, wheeling until my rotation sense tells me I’m lying on my back with my legs in the air.