Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

I’m sitting on the balcony of my room, watching a pair of goats eating a tree from the top branches down — I gather their ancestors were less acrobatically inclined on Earth — when the door opens. “Mistress” — it’s one of the munchkin attendants, not Bill or Ben — “my lady requests your attendance.”

“Very well.” I follow him out into the hall, then across it and into Granita’s receiving room, where I get a nasty surprise. Granita’s cadre of flappers are hanging around nervously, as are her other servants — even a pair of scissor soldiers. “What’s going on?” I ask him as the inner door opens and Granita makes her entrance.

“Good morning.” Her gaze sweeps the room bare, and for a moment I feel naked in front of her and certain that in a moment her troops will jump me — but it passes, and I manage to control the fierce stab of resentment I feel on sight of her. (She’s humiliated me and stolen five years of my life, and I strongly suspect she’s killed one of my sisters, too, and to add insult to injury, she tried to stop me from having sex! What more reason do I need to seek revenge?)

“You’re doubtless wondering why I summoned you all here this morning. It’s really very simple. Tonight, the major vendor consortium — the Sleepless Cartel — are throwing a party to mark the opening of the show. They’re doing it to sound us out, and to find out what we know about our backers, and to see if they can learn anything else about us. And it’s not just us; all our competitors are invited, too. So I want you to be prepared to make a good impression but give nothing away. Our negotiations are in my sister’s hands.” Her cheek twitches. “One other thing. Some attempt may be made to discredit or damage us. I’m thinking of our enemies. I don’t want you to start anything. But you should pair up. I want nobody going off alone, or being out of sight, or leaving on their own. Is that understood?”

Enemies? I can think of several, but not anyone I’d anticipate running into here. I’m about to shake my head when Juliette elbows me in the imaginary ribs, sharply, so I nod instead.

“Kate, I’ll talk to you alone,” Granita adds, and turns to go back into her room. I follow her, afraid to show any sign that I am not helpless before her will.

“Shut the door.” I do as I’m told. When I turn around Granita is wrestling with a shipping trunk that’s nearly a meter long. “Help me with this.”

“As you wish, mistress.”

She glares at me and for a moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far, but then she goes back to wrestling with the case. It doesn’t weigh much in Eris’s light gravity, but it’s got a lot of momentum. I take the other end, and together we wrestle it into the middle of the room. “Hang around,” she says, and bends to touch the lock mechanism. The lid opens.

I don’t know what I expected to see — at nine thousand Reals per kilogram it’d have to be valuable to be worth shipping, but that’s about it — but it wasn’t the Jeeves-in-Residence from Callisto, unfresh from our disastrous encounter and looking very much the worse for wear. He’s embedded in packing foam, a tetraplegic torso with his arms and legs slotted into either side of his body. Dry and wizened from deepsleep, he looks too long overdue for the scrapyard. “Plug this hose into the room feedstock supply,” Granita tells me. She’s got her hands full with a power cable, so — swallowing my surprise and distaste — I do as she says.

“Good.” She digs out a leg. “Take these and lay them on the bed, Igor.”

“But my name’s Freya,” I say, momentarily confused. I take the leg gingerly, holding it by the (disturbingly flexible) ankle.

“You’ll answer to whatever I want to call you,” Granita mutters, probing at Jeeves’s thoracic-interface nexus with a sharp connector. “Damn it, where does this — oh. Right.” Strange slurping noises emerge from the crate as I lay out Jeeves’s limbs. I must confess that for the moment, my desire to show her exactly what I think of her with extreme prejudice is subsumed by curiosity. “Igor!” I look up. “Over on the side table there’s a graveyard case full of chips. Bring it to me.”

Curiouser and curiouser. I find the case and carry it over to Granita, who has finally extracted Jeeves from the crate, umbilical cables and all, and is dragging him over to the bed. He’s in a bad way, fractured metal endoskeletal struts projecting from his ripped and crushed shoulders and hips, but his eyelids have closed, which is a good sign, I think. Also, I can’t help noticing that unlike his sib at Marsport, this Jeeves has had his genitalia removed. Are we really that scary?

“Are you going to get a mechanic in to fix the joint damage?” I ask.

“Not yet. Hand me the case.” I clam up and pass her the graveyard. She rifles through the contents until she finds what she’s looking for. “Okay, I want you to hold his head up while I do this.”

She’s going to chip him? Well duh, says Juliette. And she obviously still trusts me. This suggests certain possibilities, and Juliette’s hungry mind is already chewing over their corners. I show no sign of this inner upheaval but do as Granita expects. She pops both chips from Jeeves’s sockets, then slides in replacements. “That’s him sorted. You, Jeeves: Stay asleep until I tell you to awaken. One slave override — that’s the red one — and one blank. This one” — she taps one of the ones she pulled — “is the soul of a Jeeves who the senior partners stopped trusting a while ago. One that’s rather precious to me.” She eyeballs me. “You probably already noticed that Jeeves’s lineage have a weakness for our kind.” I almost miss the betraying slip into complicity, I’m so surprised. Is this the other thing? “They’ve got a rather direct approach to dealing with treason, Freya, but I rescued his soul chip, at least.”

“That’s—” I swallow, thinking Change the subject, quick . “I thought the Jeeves partners would have all their juniors under close surveillance? How did you get him out?”

Granita carefully inserts the two chips she removed into empty slots in her graveyard box, then closes and locks it. “Soul chips are a lot easier to move around than people: I just made sure he wasn’t wearing his when they caught him. The problem is finding a body at the other end. If you really want to talk to someone, send their soul chip via ultralight beamrider, then kidnap one of their sibs and cook them together for a few years in slowtime. This one’s been cooking with his younger brother for nearly four years now. They should be about done.” She looks at me speculatively, as if she’s considering whether to fuck me or eat me. I shiver. “Never mind,” she says calmly, and that fatal attention leaves her eyes. “Yes, it’s time to call the house engineer. I think, hmm… yes, he had an unfortunate argument with a work gang of raccoons. That should do the trick. Oh, by the way, Kate, you are not to tamper with this Jeeves. That’s an order. Understand?”

SO OF COURSE, at absolutely the first opportunity — after the engineer has reattached Jeeves’s arms and legs, tutted over the other damage, ordered up a new crotch, and left, and after Granita has swept out and about on a wave of business, leaving me to babysit the stricken foe — I pull the slave chip. “Psst! Jeeves! Can you hear me?” I electrospeak him through skin conduction, afraid we might be overheard.

“Oh, one feels strange…” His fingertips twitch.

“Don’t try to move. It’s Freya. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Marsp — no, Nerrivik, and the soldiers—” He begins to tense.