Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (2-Jul-2009) Paperback by Stross Charles

Author:Stross, Charles [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, thriller
Amazon: B011T7BGNW
Goodreads: 168737414
Publisher: Orbit; paperback / softback edition (2 July 2009)
Published: 2008-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

part two

OUTWARD BOUND

On the Run

WELCOME TO MARS (again).

Mars is the third-longest-inhabited planet (if you count Luna); our Creators sent us here to explore and die, then to build and die, and finally to construct factories and repair ourselves and build even more cohorts of willing robots to fill the barracks, out of some vague dream that one day soon they might want to start a gargantuan planetary-engineering program to import water and air and heat and green goo, finally turning Mars into a second-rate, arid, and slightly chilly imitation of Earth.

They even got as far as sending several hundred of their own out here to supervise the work, while my kindred slaved and toiled and died in our innumerable millions to build the mining facilities and metalworks and processor foundries that would supply the tools to roof over the Valles Marineris and lower the first cables of what would ultimately become the Bifrost bridge. You can still see some sections of the vaulted Gothic arches that cap the great rift, although the few roof segments that were completed are long since gone. Bifrost, of course, fared better, and today accounts for a goodly proportion of trade between the inner solar system and the outer darkness. Even the terraforming project got some way along before our Creators gave up the ghost; the atmospheric pressure at the bottom of the Marinaris Trench is almost ten kiloPascals, and occasionally, when a warm summer’s day heads toward nightfall, the thin overcast scatters a chilly drizzle of rainwater across the bleached sands.

The Hellas Basin is another matter, of course. Pour a glass of water on the ground there, and it’ll fizz and crackle briefly, bubbling with a gunpowder smell that tickles the nostrils and reminds you of the first breath you took in the Venusian stratosphere.

The basin is a near-featureless desert, punctuated by craters both natural and artificial—there are huge open-cast mines here—and the somewhat-more-controlled environments of the aristo slave estates. The big houses in the middle of their domed demesnes are symbols of arrogant wealth and power, but they are pitifully scarce against the omnipresent red desert dunes.

And then there’s the railhead town, sitting on one of the main lines across the Southern Depression. It’s not just passenger express trains that rumble across the plain. On quiet nights, you can hear the lost souls moaning between the bars of the chattel wagons as they roll toward an uncertain and frightening future.

Created to serve: This is our curse. It would have been less cruel of our designers had they created us free of the flaw of consciousness, but they made us in their image, to suffer the pangs of free will and the uncertainty of seeking our own destinies and we live with the consequences.

I suppose it wasn’t entirely their own fault. Contemplating the cruelty of the aristos, and considering that we are copies of our Creators in more ways than one (for the structures of our nervous systems mirror their own, albeit in a different medium), it is almost surprising that they did not use us even more harshly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.