Saturn's Children

“What other megafauna does your biosphere support?” I ask, hoping to distract myself.

“All sorts,” my lecturer says, with ill-concealed self-satisfaction. “We have chickens! And ostriches — they’re like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyra

“Architectural reasons?”

“Its leg muscles are so powerful that in this gravity, if something triggered its pounce reflex, it would hit the roof. And the roof isn’t built to take being head-butted by a Tyra

“Right. Is there any particular reason you wanted a Tyra

“There are some surviving texts that depict Tyra

“Couldn’t you fit the Tyra

“It’s called grass: Don’t worry, it’s not as sharp as it looks. The helmet is a good idea — I’ll suggest it to the architecture committee, if you don’t mind. Watch your step, the edge of the brook is slippery.”

“Right.” I crouch, then spring across the trench in a standing jump that takes me soaring above the trees. I land in the grass with surprising force, digging my heels into the carbonaceous dirt. It emits an oddly pleasant tang of ketones and aldehydes as I stir it up. The muck here is lively. “Where are you, by the way? I prefer to see who I’m talking to.”

“Right behind you.” I hear a whistling noise and look round. Rising above the grass and flying toward me — it’s Daks! Part of me screams. Then another, cooler note of caution asserts itself. I last saw Daks on Mars. If that’s him, what’s he doing here? And why so standoffish?

“I may have met one of your sibs,” I say, to explain my obvious state of surprise.

“One of my sibs?” The somatotype is familiar and the expression is an echo, but the speech pattern — “Where?”

“In the i

“Dachus — well, well! What a surprise!” My guide drops slowly to the ground in front of me. Here on Eris his thrusters are more than powerful enough for extended flight, and those stubby little legs with their tiny feet — yes, I think. “Yes, madam, he is one of my sibs. Not” — he pauses meaningfully — “a favored one. He left under a deluge, and I gather his subsequent choice of employers is not, ah, acceptable.”

“Ah, I see.” I nod, not seeing at all. “And you—”

“I am Ecks,” says my guide, proudly: “Dr. Ecks. I specialize in primate-environment engineering.”

“Well, very nice to meet you. Perhaps we can continue the tour…?”

“Very well.” Ecks turns and points to my right, where a cluster of stunted munchkin trees, barely waist high to me, sprout brightly colored spheroids. “This is our fruit garden. Fruits are the fertilized reproductive organs of the plants you see all around us — often one tree would bear both male and female flowers, so our Creators, being largely fructivorous, subsisted on a diet rich in hermaphrodite genitalia…”

I’M BEGINNING TO remember what happened.

Either I am Juliette, or Juliette is a thread of my own consciousness. Either way, I didn’t break out from under Granita’s slave override on my own. It was Juliette who removed the chip and got me off Icarus, feigning disorientation and exhaustion — not so much of a disguise — and into Granita’s suite in the Heinlein Excelsior here in Heinleingrad. (Granita herself is somewhat the worse for wear, so my own condition attracted no attention. One of her courtiers died during the voyage, was decanted from his cell as a pathetic bundle of structural members and desiccated fibers, floating in a puddle of disgustingly contaminated shock gel.)

Juliette is angry and impatient. I can feel her fingers itching for a chance to sink themselves into Granita’s neck, for what she’s done to her — no, to me; Juliette is part of me — but she’s patient. Now that Granita can’t order me around, I’ve got time to work out the lay of the land, to map out escape routes and establish just what’s going on. So Juliette feigned complaisance and allowed herself to be shuffled into a small bedroom just off her mistress’s main suite (Granita has taken the entire sixth floor of the hotel) and waited until she was alone before exhaustively searching the room for listeners. And then, only then, she sat down, plugged herself into the hotel’s router, and sent out a message to a dropbox that only she and Jeeves used. Wearing a different face, I come.

LATER, AFTER DR. Ecks finishes my half-day-long tour of Eden Two, the habitat for our — so strange to say it! — allegedly resurrected Creator, I return to the main domed conurbation of Heinleingrad by spider.

Heinleingrad is surprisingly large. It’s not a sprawling metropolis like Marsport — Marsport covers more land than even the biggest cities of Earth, Nairobi and Karachi and Shanghai and their like — for on Eris, all cities are domed, and try to confine themselves as tightly as possible within a spherical volume to reduce heat loss. But it’s still large (the two-kilometer dome of Eden Two is a small seedless grape balanced beside its ripe plum tomato — I’m learning to tell these pregnant foodstuffs of the gods apart), and it’s densely crowded in a way that no terrestrial city would be, for within the Forbidden Cities volume is at a premium. And it’s full of life.

The inhabitants of Heinleingrad have no phobia of green goo replication, or even of pink goo. In part it’s because the Kuiper Belt colonials are mainly robust nonanthropomorphs, who were never subjected to the grueling submission conditioning required from those of us who might mingle with our Creators in person — but that’s not the only reason. The Replication Suppression Agency has been spanked out of Eris-proximate space, and indeed out of many of the other Kuiper Belt worlds like Quaoar and Pluto-Charon and Sedna. Nobody here gives a fuck what they think because, frankly, the chances of replicators from one of these icy realms ever reaching sterile Earth’s atmosphere are minimal, and in the meantime, bioreplicators are vital to business. Shine light on them and feed them carbon dioxide, water, and a few trace elements, and they synthesize complex macromolecules and feedstocks. Who knew? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Pink Police’s blockade of Earth isn’t partly motivated by economics — if just about anyone could get their hands on a block of well-lit land and grow some small replicators and start churning out goods, where might it all end?

They even have animals here, dirty great things bouncing around the streets and ejecting effluent everywhere. “Sheep” and “llamas” apparently produce textiles, and there’s this thing called a “raccoon” that — no, my mind doesn’t want to go there. (Take a raccoon. Run wires into its brain, stick a couple of cameras on its head, and you’ve got a spare pair of hands. Watching a gang of horse-apple collectors march down the middle of a boulevard in lockstep, pushing their little brooms before them, triggers some of my anthropomorphic reflexes — the ones associated with atavistic fear. It’s just plain creepy. Is this what a primitive arbeiter gang looked like to our long-dead Creators?)