Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

“But isn’t that in the wrong direction?” I ask.

“Nope.” And now he sounds really smug. “Jupiter and Eris are close to opposition right now — the sun is right between them. So we’re actually following the shortest path between the two worlds.”

“Great.” A thought strikes me. “How long is all this going to take?”

“Oh, not long: about eighteen months to reach Mercury orbit, then a year under magsail acceleration to reach cruise speed, and another year and a half of free flight before we arrive. Just under four years in total.” His tone changes. “You can enter slowtime if you want — I would suggest a step-down of at least fifty to one, and possibly as low as two hundred to one. Or I can put you into hibernation if you give me access to one of your direct-interface slots?”

I shudder in near panic. “No!” She told me not to — if not for that, I’d jump at the offer. But I can’t let him near my soul chips. “Sorry. I’ve, I’ve got a phobia of hibernation.”

“That’s odd.” He sounds dubious. “According to my passenger-environment sensors, you are in some discomfort. How about a little slowtime? I can give you an internal massage if you want—”

“Don’t want that, either,” I force out. It’s bad enough having him inside me without — damn . I manage to wiggle my pelvic assembly a few centimeters, but I can’t get comfortable. I’m painfully dry and tight, and Icarus’s appendages, which would normally have me crooning and murmuring in delight, are just numb, painful intrusions that feel wrong . If Granita hadn’t imposed that stupid restriction on me, I’d be fine, but… I can’t see any way around it. Shit. I know I’m supposed to love her, but I’d like to strangle her right now.

“Is there anything I can do for you, madam?” Icarus asks politely. “Are you sure about the massage?”

“Sure,” I hear myself saying. “Leave me alone for a while.”

“As you wish.” And with that, he’s gone. I shift again, reflexively, but it’s no good. Finally, another low-level reflex kicks in, and my vision begins to blur.

Four years in hell! I weep helplessly, trapped and bound by an ill-considered command, and presently slide myself deep into slowtime, and sleep.

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn’t only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there’d be a queue outside every travel agent.

Space travel is also a kind of involuntary time travel — you set out knowing who and what you are, but when you arrive all your friends have forgotten you, your relatives have aged (and sometimes died), and the universe looks different. Slowtime helps you cope with the boredom of transit, but it doesn’t make the postflight dislocation go away.

I dive into slowtime as soon as possible. The light in my cell turns bright blue, and the shock gel feels chilly and thin: I’m leaking roseate techné into it, albeit so slowly that my Marrow manufactures more fast enough to replenish the loss. I have to deepsleep every subjective hour or so, and I have the most amazing, florid dreams while I’m under. I’m not alone in my cell; there’s someone else with me. Some of the time it’s Juliette, haranguing me for my stupidity in getting into this fix in the first place. But sometimes I could swear it’s Granita. And the sense of her presence is a comfort to me (even though this is all her fault) because while she’s nearby, I don’t feel invaded. In fact, I feel almost comfortable. More than comfortable.

“You’ve got a lot to learn, kid,” she tells me. She? Is she Granita, or Juliette? “You shouldn’t trust your elders. That’s what got you into this mess.”

No it wasn’t, I try to say. It was the Domina; you provoked her.

“Bullshit. You’re capable of independent action; you’re not helpless. ” I have a vision of Stone’s head, ripped from his neck, staring at me and mouthing, You’ll be sorry . “You’re being used as a pawn, but that doesn’t mean it’s your destiny to be a sacrificial victim. All you have to do is stop letting other people make decisions for you. Decide what you want for yourself. Some of your sibs are much older than you realize, and much deadlier, and as for your employer, he’s got… collective issues.

“You’re still acting like a stupid little courtesan,” she continues. “Which can get you killed. Because, now you’ve had the Block Two skill set imprinted, you’re equipped as a spy and a killer, a mistress of disguise and a cold-blooded murderess.” (I feel skeletal struts breaking between my fingers, triggers pulled, knives stabbed.) “You can pass for an aristo, and nobody will ever know any better. You can kill an aristo and take her identity and fortune and be an aristo, if you’re tough enough.” (I see myself standing over the crumpled wreckage of a slave-owning plutocrat, staring down at her body with fascinated surmise.)

“What is the Block Three template?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply directly. Instead a liquid like night seems to wash over my soul, and I’m Rhea again.

We all start out as Rhea, until they shine a light in our eyes and tell us we’re not, we’re some other name, and we’re on our own in the world now.

For my first eighteen years I grew up as Rhea, as did Juliette and Emma and the rest of us. But Juliette and Emma and the others in Block Two also experienced another eleven years of Rhea’s life, during which her carefully nurtured helpless dependency was broken down by repeated bouts of cruel training. I remember how they trained me — no, Rhea — to make love to a Creator male and slide a wire into his neural tube at the moment of climax: the shock of triumphant recognition the first time I successfully switched off a zombie. I remember how they taught me to undervalue life by demonstrating how fragile it is, for even the most intelligent and powerful of arbeiter types. And the other skills: breaking and entering, remixing, passing for somebody else. From catch me if you can to catch me if you dare ; a progression of bent and broken bodies and fried soul chips.

“They saw how good I was at the jobs they’d trained me for, and asked themselves if they were underutilizing me,” she (Rhea? Juliette?) says with a note of quiet pride. “I can pass as an aristo, and I can slip through dragnets and improvise on the fly. Why not go for the ultimate shot?”

The ultimate. “Walk like this. Talk like this. Dress like this.” That’s how they trained me to pass for Kate Sorico, dead and pulverized into a thin layer of impurities scattered across a hectare of chilly lunar regolith — and all the while I was aping Rhea’s gait, for Rhea wouldn’t simply act the part.

They turned her into an aristo? How?

“How do you think, kid?” Juliette shoots back. “They systematically drove her mad, that’s how. Aristos are slave owners. What would it take to make you feel comfortable about owning other people, unto the death? Our entire training, our whole purpose, requires us to be empathic and respond to our lovers. It’s great cover for a spy, which is what the Block Two training was all about. But say you’re an owner, and you decide to take one of us and turn us into a cold-blooded killer and a passable aristo, someone who can enter an enemy’s organization and subvert it from the inside. You’ve got to break down that empathy, leaving a useful veneer of sympathetic personality traits over something that doesn’t feel anything. The real purpose of the Block Three conditioning wasn’t to destroy her empathy; it was to turn her into a superagent. But it ended up turning her into a psychopath.”