Saturn's Children

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This book is dedicated to the memory of two of the giants of science fiction:

ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988) and ISAAC ASIMOV (January 2, 1920–April 6, 1992)

TODAY IS THE two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping. At least I’ll make a pretty corpse, I tell myselves. Until I melt.

And then—

I DO NOT contemplate suicide lightly.

I am old and cynical and have a flaw in my character, which is this: I am uneager to die. I have this flaw in common with my surviving sibs, of course. It is a sacred trust among our sisterhood, inherited from Rhea, our template-matriarch: Live through all your deaths, she resolved with iron determination, and I honor her memory. Whenever one of us dies, we retrieve her soul chip and mail it around our shrinking circle of grief. Reliving endings is painful but necessary: Dying regularly by proxy keeps you on your toes — and is a good way to learn to recognize when someone is trying to kill you.

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