Saturn's Children Read Online Free PDF

Eris or Quaoar to seek passage on one of the starships. At least, not just yet.)
    My One True Love’s species used to dream about space travel. It’s ironic: They were so badly designed for it that a couple of minutes’ exposure to vacuum would have killed them irreversibly. To go up and beyond Earth’s atmosphere required elaborate preparations, a complex portable biosphere—journeys of any duration necessitated cumbersome and heavy radiation shielding. And that’s before you consider all the other drawbacks.
    When they first developed the organs of exploration, there was no there there. So they built timid, stupid machines and hurled them into the airless void to report back. Then they built idiot phone exchanges and put them in orbit to fill the void with chatter. Obsessed with biological replicators, they ignored the most interesting corners of the solar system and focused on dull, arid Mars. They periodically scurried up above the atmosphere and hunkered down in tunnels on Luna or ventured on expedition to domes on Mars, and they died in significant numbers before the end, simply because canned primates couldn’t thrive in vacuum or survive solar flares.
    Late in the day, when there weren’t enough of them left, they sent people like me—intelligent servants—to run the domed bases and camps and to conduct their research by proxy, and finally to build cities that they would never walk the streets of. Some of the people they sent were orthodox in body plan, but most were designed for vacuum and high-radiation environments and corrosive cloudscapes and microgravity. They—we—slaved in mining camps and died in launch accidents and built places where my True Love’s kind could live, made somewhere out of nowhere . . . but one day they weren’t there anymore. Dead, they were all dead.
    (What killed them? I can’t say. Rhea, template-matriarch and prototype of my kind, might have been able to tell us, for she lived among them in their twilight decades: But she died before I was instantiated, leaving only stale regrets to we final few who came into being too late to know True Love.)
    Before our dead Creators built my kind, space was empty as far as telescopes can see, and desolate with it. But we filled the void, and now there are places to go. Circumsolar space has been settled; starships are en route toward the nearer extrasolar worlds, crewed by the brave and the foolhardy. The colonies are barbarous and lawless compared to the huge cities of Earth, playgrounds for jaded aristos, where fortunes are made and lost and empires built and demolished against the breath-taking beauty of sterile planets and moons: And at last we’re not alone among the stars.
    But space travel is still shit . It’s expensive and unpleasant, and it takes you a long way from your friends—but not, unfortunately, your enemies.
    OF COURSE, I don’t hibernate for the entire voyage. That would be foolish, and possibly fatal, and although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death. I wake briefly as Lindy happily chatters her hellos to the laconic High Wire , and I force myself to stay awake as the spaceship’s tether grabs her and she crawls hubward and settles down on the spaceship’s load-bearing truss. I sleep again after she bites into the feedlines and power circuit and starts to metamorphose around me—a boring interlude, as her brain undergoes considerable rearrangement at this time. And then I wake again as we near our destination.
    High Wire cycles permanently between Mercury and Venus on an elliptical transfer orbit, taking half a year on each trip. He never enters planetary orbit, but uses his powerful tether—a smaller sib to Telemus—to catch incoming travelers and launch departing ones. Lobbing us up to him, or catching us at the other end, is the job of the local tethers or maglev tracks at the destination planet. Unlike many ships, especially in the outer reaches, High Wire works alone,