Saturn's Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes and see Telemus in all his glory, dropping back toward the pearlescent cloud tops, tentacle tip retracting into its maintenance shell. “Good-bye!” Lindy calls. “I love you!”
    “Until the next you,” rumbles Telemus, his voice dopplering away as we rise above him.
    I try to get the star-crossed lover’s attention as we drift away. “Lindy, can you see High Wire yet?”
    After a brief pause: “Yes! He’s over there!” A blinking red ring flashes around a barely visible speck of starlight. “Isn’t it exciting?” She gives me a brief squeeze.
    I close my eyes. Patience. “I don’t like travel much,” I say, the most tactful lie that comes rapidly to mind. “Can you put me into full hibernation until we arrive?”
    “Are you sure?” She sounds doubtful, as if the mere idea of anyone not enjoying drifting helplessly between the stars with only a vacuous tart for company is incomprehensible to her.
    “I’m sure, Lindy.” I pause. “Do you have any alternative personality modules?” I add plaintively.
    “Sorry!” She says brightly. “I’m me! We’re all me! With the Mod-42 short-duration environmental-support capsule what you see is exactly what you get! And I want you to know, I really love having you inside me! But if you’re sure you want to sleep ... ?”
    “I am,” I say firmly, and close my eyes, hoping that it’ll be dream-free.
    “Awww! Alright. Sleep tight!”
    The universe goes away.
    THE DIRTY TRUTH— a truth universally acknowledged today, but bizarrely never admitted by any of my True Love’s kind—is that space travel is shit .
    (I use “shit” as a generic placeholder for a vile and unpleasant substance with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Being instantiated as and when I was, I have no direct experience of scat. We had to practice with diatomaceous earth and brown dye. But I digress...)
    If you’re rich, you can rent a stateroom in the supercargo spaces of a big strange person with a magsail or a nuclear-electric drive, depending on what direction you want to go in. And you, and a few sixteens of other folk, get to socialize and intrigue and backstab and be bored together for weeks or months or years on end, in a space not much larger than my rented rack in a cloud-city afloat over Venus. Bandwidth is expensive and metered—someone must keep a relay antenna pointed at your host’s brain, and feed it with kilowatts, just to support your idle chatter—and the stars and planets move so very slowly.
    But it’s much worse if you’re poor.
    If you’re poor, they wrap you in a stupid cocoon and strap you to the outside of the ship. It’s cold, or hot, and the radiation burn keeps your Marrow techné churning with the demands of self-repair, and if you’re unlucky a sand grain with the energy of a guided missile blows you limb from limb. If not for the stimulating company of your cocoon and any other steerage passengers you can talk to, you go insane from sensory deprivation. You can opt for slowtime, but that’s got problems of its own—or you can go into total shutdown hibernation, and possibly die in transit and never wake up again. And that’s it . It lasts for months, or even years.
    You want to know what it’s like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company. Even with slowtime, it’s going to feel like months. You’re wearing a blindfold, which is probably appropriate because every couple of days, just to break the monotony, a not-very-accurate cosmic sniper fires a random shot at the building. And you wonder why my sisters don’t get out much?
    (Of course that’s nothing compared to interstellar travel, where they freeze you and chop off your limbs to save weight—and grow you new ones at the other end if you arrive sufficiently intact after decades and centuries in the vasty deep—but I’m not planning on going to Pluto or