Saturn's Children

He tenses. “I’ll try not to make assumptions.” He sounds a little disappointed. Well, well, well. “What’s happening here?”

“It’s a mess.” I knead absentmindedly; it’s relaxing, and not just for Jeeves. “The Domina turns out to be Rhea, my template-matriarch, in disguise. Hunting us and harrying us high and low, just to recruit us as henchbots. The others of my line, you see, we’re the only people she feels she can count on. What she seems to have forgotten is that they prototyped the Block Three treatment on her when she was young and traumatized. Older ones, like Juliette or me, we’re more resilient, less likely to go over the edge. So when she tries to bring us on board, we fail to cooperate, one way or another, so she has us killed. Which is why so few of us have graduated from her, ah, training course.”

I move my point of contact farther down. Jeeves has a small pot-belly, and below that… hmm.

“I’m just back from making contact with your local resident. I’m trying to make up my mind about him… thing is, although Juliette had you under her thumb, strange shit kept happening after you were both out of the picture. Which leads me to ask, did Rhea have a second mole within your organization? I think the answer’s probably ‘yes,’ judging by the way your senior partners are currently ru

“What’s your position on this?” Jeeves asks distractedly. A moment later I feel his hand on top of mine, warm. “Please don’t stop.”

I lean forward and kiss him. “My position is, I’m not any of my elder sibs. All previous history belongs to someone else. You’re sweet. Isn’t that enough for you?”

He emits a small, whimpering moan. “She’ll kill us if she finds us.” He runs a fingertip up my arm and it triggers a gushing rush of reflexes, so sudden that it startles me. I shiver from toe to tail, feeling the power it gives me.

“Hush, Reginald.” I lie down beside him.

“She’ll kill us if she—”

“No, she won’t. She’s out gofering for Rhea.”

He fumbles with my pants and I shiver and arch my back, then lower myself down on top of him.

“I can’t believe this,” he says indistinctly.

“Believe what?” I like Eris’s gravity, I decide; it makes bouncing up and down so easy.

“This.” His own anthropomimetic reflexes are kicking in; sweat (or something like it) beads his upper lip. “Oh, Kate.” His hands grip my hips. “It’s one of our worst failure modes, loving our mistresses. I failed once already. If I do it again—”

“Hush. I don’t think you’re broken.” Although I find it gruesomely, inexplicably exciting to imagine his sibs tearing him apart, just because he let me fuck him. (Because you’re still carrying a chunk of Rhea around in your soul. Juliette rattles the chains of my conscience.) I imagine what his brothers did, forcibly amputating his gender-specific subsystems, just as he gasps and catches his breath, and his orgasm (the first in how many years?) catapults me right over the edge and into my own. “I think you’re just perfect.” (Close enough to pass for one of them, yet not so close that I lose control completely.) I collapse across his chest, pleasantly tingling. “Wow. Want to elope together?”

I’m nose to nose with him, looking into his eyes. “I never dared” — his voice cracks — “to hope one of you would ask. What do you have in mind?”

Time freezes for a split second, as I realize what I’m staring in the face: someone who adores me, someone who isn’t the nightmare daydream of my youth, nor yet the insane perfect superstimulus of Petruchio, but no worse for that; someone whose kind set my soul writhing on first sight, so close to the ideal and yet not quite close enough to threaten my independence—

“I didn’t, actually. Somewhere away from Rhea, somewhere outside the reach of your brothers and my sisters. Got any ideas?”

“We’re on Eris, you said?” Reginald raises his head and kisses me on the cheek. “That makes it difficult; it’ll have to be somewhere where they can’t chase us, which means much farther out.”

“Um, yeah.” I think. “You’re thinking about a colony starship. Would they have us?”

“I don’t see why not.” He looks at me searchingly. “The Sorico identity is certainly wealthy enough to buy a couple of berths. And if we bring along something useful, some new technology…”

I like it when you say “I.” Almost as much as when you say “We.” “Then we’ll just have to get our hands on something.” I sit up and grin at him. “I’ve got an idea. I just need an accomplice. You willing?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he says slowly. “And I think I can guess what you’ve got in mind. You wouldn’t happen to have seen Daks hanging around, would you?”

THERE IS, AS it happens, a starship currently taking shape in orbit around Dysnomia, the tiny moon of Eris. It’s named the Bark (for no reason obvious to me), it’s due to depart in less than a year (far ahead of any possible pursuit from the i

Let me tell you a little bit about starships.

We build them because our Creators told us, “The solar system’s too small to keep all our eggs in one basket.” (Which is perfectly true if you discount eight major planets, thirtysomething dwarf planets, several hundred moons, and the minor point that, as it turned out, just the one planet they started with was more than enough to see them through to extinction.) And so, this huge consortium of government-run space agencies got started several centuries ago with a charge to figure out ways and means, and now, even though our Creators are still dead, and we still don’t know quite how to bootstrap a biosphere they can live in, they’re sending out starships to build cities and install indoor plumbing in preparation for their eventual colonization and conquest of the galaxy.

Talk about misplaced priorities!

The Bark is a hollow cylinder about two kilometers long and four hundred meters in diameter, packed with ice. When it’s time to depart, the beampower stations inside Mercury orbit will point their death rays at it and punch about ten thousand gigawatts of microwaves at the recte