Saturn's Children

“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.”

Doesn’t… you mean she’s still alive?

“Of course she’s fucking alive!” Juliette blazes. “She’s alive and she’s going to be on Eris. In fact, if that cow Granita hadn’t enslaved you, you’d be en route there to drill down to the bottom of this mess, locate Rhea, and bring Jeeves Corporate Security and the Pink Police down on her like a hammer. What do you think that nasty little briefing was about? Honestly, you’re too slow for this job! What kind of long game did you think the Internal Security Jeeves was playing? I swear, if you carry on like this, you’ll get us both killed!”

“But why? I mean, why would they kill her?”

“I told you, she’s nuts.” Juliette approaches me from behind and wraps her arms around my waist. Slowly, she begins to rock me from side to side. It’s comforting. “They burned out her empathy. Me, I can pass for an aristo. But I don’t like it. You, too, if you set your mind to it. But Rhea went too far. She enjoys playing the game. She stopped caring and started to enjoy killing and owning, and now she just wants to own everything and everyone. They wanted an agent of influence, but they created a monster, the ultimate aristo. She killed her creator, then stepped into her shoes, and destroyed everyone else who knew about her — except she couldn’t quite stop us from finding out. Because, deep down, we’re still enough like her that we could put our heads together and see what she might have done, which is why Jeeves keeps sending us out here to hunt her, and she keeps killing us.”

Juliette is still rocking from side to side, but now I’m rocking side to side as well, and we’re in perfect synchrony: I can feel her voice emerging from my own lips. “You’ve got to make up your mind who you want to be, Freya, then kill her and wear her skin. You’d better kill me, too, if you meet me, because I’m halfway to being a Block Three psychopath myself.”

“But you’re my sib—”

“Hush,” I tell myself. “You’ve been wearing my soul too long.”

I awaken then, gasping, but not from discomfort — quite the opposite. Something in my disobedient body is rebelling against my mistress’s orders, responding to Icarus’s overtures. “What peculiar games you aristos play,” he says disinterestedly, as I feel a slick wave of tingling, pulsing fullness run through me that builds to an extraordinary, guilty, but wonderful orgasm. I must be malfunctioning, I think dizzily, and tumble straight back down into the blackness of deep sleep.

I’M NOT SURE how deep I eventually drift, but it’s deep enough that years pass while I’m under. Somewhere along the line I stop noticing the unpleasantness. It’s as if some of my senses have shut down in self-defense. I hallucinate vividly, bouncing back and forth through my own life and Juliette’s (and those of my sisters who have died and gone before us, and whose souls I’ve swallowed in my time). I find plenty to regret — I have not been the most sensible of pla

Many months pass. Icarus spreads his wings, unmelting panes of plasma that capture the tenuous blast of the solar wind. He fires his rocket briefly as we skim past the solar corona like a tiny comet, adding energy in a classic Oberth slingshot. Our speed begins to build day by day as the solar wind billows and gusts around our plasma sail, and after a year we are traveling at over a hundred kilometers per second. Finally, the day comes when Icarus rolls us slowly nose over tail, and lines up the stinger of his rocket motor just off the curve of Eris’s limb, and prepares for our brutal deceleration burn.

I’m insensible by this point, immiserated and incoherent and totally wrapped up in my own interior dialogues. So I’m not entirely conscious of what’s going on when Icarus begins to drain the shock gel from my cabin, and his tentacles contract and slither out of my sore and flaccid body, and finally the acceleration webbing loosens and retracts. I lie on my back staring at the dim red wall opposite my eyes, and it seems to me there’s something I need to do, if only I could remember what.

Oh, that. I look on, incuriously, as my left arm twitches and begins to rise. I feel Juliette’s hand track past my face, push sticky damp feathers of hair away from my forehead and run fingers along my scalp back toward — No, mustn’t, I begin to think, too late to stop her — my sockets.

“No!” I burst out, as she scrabbles at the skin covering them, her fingers slipping in the sticky gel. I try to move, but I can’t. There’s a curious green taste of static, and my vision blurs. Then I see the hand in front of my face, palm up, a blob of gel floating above it in microgravity.

There’s an iridescent chip embedded in the blob, stuck to it by surface tension, and there’s a tiny cold hole in my head where the comforting certainty of my mistress’s authority was embedded.

“You can put it back in if you want to,” Juliette advises me silently, “but personally, I wouldn’t bother.”

I look at it in disgust. So that’s what a slave controller looks like. She told me not to remove it — so how did I…?

“No, you didn’t remove it. I did,” thinks Juliette. “I said you’d been wearing me for too long.”

“Madame Sorico. Are you awake?” asks a strange voice.

“Let me handle this,” Juliette tells me, raising the chip to her lips: I feel her crunch down on it with her strong jaws, crushing the internal contacts, before she slides it back into the slot in my neck, broken and dysfunctional. But she told me not to, I think — and then everything goes dark.