Saturn's Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

without a crew of auxiliaries. But he’s not lonely: He gets to talk to a lot of travelers. In fact, it’s almost a rite of passage. So I spend a good three days hanging upside down from a structural truss covered in cargo pods, the sunlight casting acid-sharp shadows in front of me, giving him an abbreviated lifedump.
    “So you left your home because you wanted to segment your self from your sibs,” High Wire rumbles thoughtfully. (He pitches his voice low, adopting the gravitas due his station.) “But you are fond of them. Why did you do that?”
    “They were dying too fast.” I hug the graveyard of memories inside Lindy’s silent chrysalis. “I couldn’t stand to think I’d be just another.”
    “But they were all older than you, subjectively. Your sixty-one-year gap.”
    “What’s six decades?” I’d shrug if I could. “We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?”
    “Many people do not find that a problem,” High Wire muses. “They exist adequately without loving anything, themselves included.”
    “Yes, but that’s not the point. You’re happy, you’re doing exactly what you were designed to do. But imagine ... imagine somebody invented teleportation and made you obsolete overnight. What would you do then?”
    Without missing a beat, High Wire replies; “Without a job, I think I would head for the stars, to see what’s out there.”
    He’s obviously been thinking about that question a lot . . .
    BUT WHY WOULD anyone want to go off-Earth?
    I did. Once.
    I had a lot to run away from. Too many bad memories, too many sibs gone before me into the beyond . . . I’m one of the last, instantiated after we were already obsolete, frozen for over sixty years at one point, running far beyond my design. Over the past century the exigencies of space travel have driven body fashion in a direction I can’t follow. Designed as companion for my One True Love (deceased), my sense of identity is strongly bound to my physical shape. I can’t easily remodel myself as a chibi-san, small, wide-eyed, and big-headed, because it would deny my whole purpose, lovely and obsolete. Without even that tenuous raison d’être, I might as well die. And so, demoted from goddess to ogress with close-set, tiny eyes, I chose to flee.
    We all make mistakes, don’t we?
    ALL GOOD TIMES come to an end, and bad times, too: boring ones just taper out. I sleep after my tête-à-tête with the shipmind, and when I awaken, Mercury is a blazing-hot disk, visible just beyond the rim of Lindy’s sunshade. “Wake up, sleepy bones!” she sings. “It’s time to disembark!”
    I glance around. On every side of me, cargo pods are twitching from their slumbers and changing shape, growing legs and grapples and ion thrusters, and migrating toward High Wire ’s tether. “How do we land ... ?” I start to ask, then feel Lindy shudder.
    “On a rail! It’s fun!”
    “On a—” A memory of Mercury tickles my head, but it belongs to a dead sister I haven’t fully internalized. Juliette, maybe? One of the wild ones. I can but clutch the box of soul chips and swear to myself. Lindy is expanding lengthwise, reconfiguring around me. “How long have we got to go?”
    “Not long! Not long at all!” And she lets go of High Wire ’s tether.
    All around us, pods and cocoons and modules are scattering from the High Wire like fluff from the hub of a bursting flywheel, propelled by spring-loaded ejectors or dropping from the end of the tether. A snowstorm of mechalife swarms in the void as the gangling cycler ship fires up his ion drive and backs away slowly. For a moment my view blacks out as Lindy shields my face from the searing godwheel sun, then we roll around under the impulse of a tiny thruster and I see Mercury ahead of me, a half disk now visible, burnished and shining, larger than my