Saturn's Children

Learning Not to Die

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.

(That last is a minor exaggeration; we are friendly and anxious to please, and few would want to murder us — except when we are depressed. But please bear with me.)

We all find it increasingly hard to go on. We are old enough that critical anniversaries hold a fatal allure, for birthdays bring unpleasant memories, and if the best of all possible days have come and gone, why persist? It’s a common failure mode for my lineage — first we become nostalgic, then we bog ourselves down in a fatal lack of purpose, and finally we start to obsess. In the final soul-agony that precedes the demise of our sibs, we horrified onlookers perceive a fragment of our own ending. Live through all your deaths. Harsh irony, then, that Rhea, the original from whom we are all copied, was one of the first to inflict this terrible burden upon us.

And so, on my hundred and thirty-ninth birthday, near as I can count it — for I was born for the second (and more definite) time exactly sixty-one years after my existence was forever rendered purposeless by a cruel joke of fate — I spend my carefully hoarded savings so that I might sit on the edge of a balcony outside a gaming hall thronged with joyful gamblers, the ground far below a ruddy metallic counterpoint to the clouds boiling overhead: And I look down, contemplating eternal death, and try to convince myself that it’s still a bad idea.

It could be worse, I tell myself. I’m not eleven anymore; it’s a choice I’m free to make.

And then—

A SHIVER OF laughter through an open door, a gust of chilly air from within, and the faint vibration of a shod foot on the balcony floor tell me that I am not alone out here.

It’s annoying. For most of the working year I’ve lived here in quiet isolation: Finally, when I want to be alone with my memories and the clouds, I have company.

“Ooh, look: a freak!” someone squeaks behind and below me. “What’s that doing here?”

Ignore them. I don’t want to reinforce their behavioral loop. I tense, nevertheless, my fight/flight reflex kicking in. Nasty little bullies: I’ve been here before, as have my sibs. We know how to handle this.

“It must be an arbeiter. Is it shirking?”

I look round slowly, forcing my facial chromatophores to their palest creamy blankness, betraying no emotion. “I am not indentured,” I say, very deliberately. Which is entirely true, at this place and time. Another of the rules Rhea laid down: Don’t ever leave one of your own sibs as an indentured arbeiter. It’s a rule formed in an earlier age, and it has cost us dearly, but none of us wears a slave controller. “I am a free woman.”

There are three of them between me and the balcony door: one bishojo female about my size, and a matched pair of chibiform dwarfs — members of the new aristocracy, caricatures of our dead Creators, trussed up in the intricate finery favored by aristo fashion this century. Standing while I sit before them, the dwarfs are at nose level with me: They goggle with huge, limpid eyes utterly empty of mercy. Their full-sized mistress looks down at me and sneers: “That can be fixed. What a revolting parody! Who let it in here?” I take her to be the leader because her gown, which seems to consist mostly of ruffles of wire lace held together by ribbons, is more intricate than her companion’s. She’s got a delicate chin, sharp cheekbones, pointy ears, and a spectacular mane of feathery green filaments.

The small female raises one lace-gloved hand to cover her mouth as she yawns melodramatically. “It’s spoiling the view, Domina.”

Domina? That can’t be good. Instincts hard-learned from the experiences of my dead sibs tell me that I’m in worse trouble than I realized. I’m having a flashover to another sister, murdered long ago in a hutong under domed Lunograd. She’s right: I don’t need the attention of vicious aristos bored with gambling and searching for stronger thrills. “I was just leaving,” I say quietly, and bring one foot up to floor level so that I can stand up.

“Thank you, child,” the Domina addresses her companion, “but I had already noticed the obstruction.” I use my foot to push back from the edge, put a hand down, and lever myself up. I’m already turning to face the glass doors as the Domina glances down at the male companion with a sniff of disapproval, and says, “Stone, deal with the trash.”

Stone — baby-doll death in a black tunic with gold frogging — steps toward me, one hand going to the power mace at his waist. The top of his head is level with my hips. “It will be a pleasure, milady,” he says.

“I’m going,” I say, and my fight/flight module prompts me to feint toward the glass doors, then duck suddenly and roll sideways. I continue the roll as a hammer slams against the lacquered aragonite inlay that decorates the edge of the balcony. Chips fly; where the decorative underlay is exposed, it begins to fizzle and fume.

“Graah!” he roars, and raises his mace again.

I’m too close to the long drop for comfort, and my attacker is between me and the French door. What I should do is rush along the balcony, dive into the gaming hall through one of the other windows, and make myself scarce. But I’m off-balance, angry, and humiliated by the casual brutality of the Domina’s interruption, so I do something really stupid instead.

One foot waving over the big empty, I grab for his arm with my free hand.

“Eeee!” I miss and grab his head by mistake. He responds by shoving me back toward the edge. His feet grip the balcony as if glued, but I am twice his height and at least five times his mass. Then he raises the mace again. I panic and brace my other hand on his shoulder and push with full force, trying to get as much distance between myself and the thing as possible. Only I forget to let go.

His head comes off in my hand. The body falls limply, clattering to the balcony: pale fluid dribbles from the stump of his neck, sealing it off from further damage. The mace buzzes and whirs menacingly. Anything it touches will die. I give it a wide berth as I raise his head toward the Domina, glaring at her.

“You’ll be sorry,” says the head, using electrospeech in place of its missing larynx.

“He’s right,” the Domina agrees, smiling right at me. She seems to be amused. “Stone has a vindictive drive, you know. You’ll need to run a long way, manikin, and hope he won’t find you wherever you hide.”

“Will he come after me if I drop him?” I ask, holding my arm out over the edge of the balcony. I take a cautious step backward along the slippery edge, probing for safe footing with my spiked left heel.

“You won’t do that,” the Domina says thoughtfully. “He’s very popular — he has more than two thousand sibs, and they’ll all claim feud on you and yours.” She laughs quietly. “Wouldn’t that be amusing?” Her companion giggles conspiratorially, echoing her mistress. “Go ahead and drop him, manikin. Maybe I’ll give you a head start.”

I turn Stone’s head to face her and examine the back of his cranial stump. As I expected, there’s a soul chip in place, the recording angel to his misdeeds. I extend two fingernails and dig it out of the socket. Then I hold it in front of his eyes. His lips are still moving: Good. “Watch.” I flick it out into the wild and cloudy air beyond the edge of our floating world. “Say good-bye to your backup, Stone.” Even if he sticks in a new one, it’ll take him a while to begin laying down memories again, and months for the older experiences to begin settling into the chip — such as this incident. Until then he won’t be able to pass on his experiences to his sibs. I lower his head to the floor carefully. “If you come after me and I kill you again, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

I take another step back, and there’s a glass door off to my right.

“Get you,” mouths the head, as I flee.

THIS IS NOT a place for the likes of me. I am not a gamer, and the pleasures on offer here are not aimed at those of my sort: I am an artifact of an earlier age, out of place and time, isolated and alone. Angry and frightened, I head for the oxidizing core of the palace. I find a service air lock big enough to admit me, and on the way through it I shower with liquid water, rinsing away my glad rags in a foaming stream. Glittering nails and spiked heels retract, nipples and pubes revert to normal. I keep my long red hair and my face because some aspects of identity are hard to do without, no matter how expensive; but more serviceable wear awaits me in the printer on the other side of the air lock, suited to my status as a lowly freelance worker. When I told the Domina that I was a free woman, I spoke truth, but just barely. My lineage and my sibs are free, but because we are free, we are also poor. One of life’s larger ironies.

I’m not on shift right now, but there’s casual work available if I want it. The cost of living here strains my resources, but it’s better than being stranded on the surface in a domed slum, renting my nervous system out to a carbon sequestration station’s analytics. I should really go looking for a rickshaw to pull, but I’m still edgy from my encounter with the Domina and her thug. So I head down to one of the sublevels under Environment and go looking for Victor.

Victor is a jazz piano, a xenomorph fallen upon hard times — a stringed instrument with heart, and a head, and arms, from a period when authenticity was in vogue. These days improv is unfashionable, running counter to the tastes of the mannered elite. The wrong type of melody can be taken as a criticism; aristos are quick to anger and quicker still to defend their honor. So Victor works in atmospheric maintenance by day shift and runs a movable acoustic feast in the service tunnels by night. Such places have been with us always, since the time when my True Love’s kind stalked old Earth, and we who remember them maintain the traditions. (We even drink aqueous solutions of ethanol, though not for the same reasons.)

I find Victor’s node in a pendulous vapor trap under one of the great extractor circuits that leaches sulfates out of the inner atmosphere of the oxidizing zone. He’s plated the walls with carbon black, grown an array of colored lights, and caused the floor to extrude foam pads that divide it up into soft-floored booths. The dive is quiet tonight, and Milton — Victor’s sometime waiter and partner in crime — is polishing the bar top lackadaisically. “Where’s the boss?” I ask, pausing beside him.

“Boss is in back, twinkle-tits.” Milton affects a malfunctioning voice, rasping and choppy. “What can I fetch ya?”

“A liter jug of the special. Hold the PEG.” Lots of serious drinkers like to add a shot of polyethylene glycol to their brew, but it makes it too sweet for my tastes.

“It’s your poison.” Milt shrugs with one pair of shoulders and serves up a pitcher. “That’ll be five centimes.”

I sign his note and carry the pitcher over to the boss man, who is sitting in a cozy niche against one wall and tapping away at his keyboard with one hand, surrounded by an appreciative audience of underemployed dustbusters. “Spare a moment, Vic?” I sit down opposite him.

He nods and keeps playing without breaking rhythm. The dustbusters are hypnotized; they flex their legs so that they sway from side to side where they stand. Some of them wear iridescent uniform shells, but most of the lowly cleaners are naked as they day they were duped and chipped, black many-legged tubes with heads that are little more than fringed hoses, each capped with a pair of little beady eyes. “Wasn’t expecting you tonight,” he admits. “Thought you were partying it up with chibi-san. Want to jam?”

“I’d like to, but not now, Vic.” I pause for a moment, listening to my inner voices. “I think I need to leave town.”

“Ah. Wait one.” He launches into a long, fiddly closing sequence and finishes up his line. The dustbusters wait for a few seconds after the last note dies away, then bounce up and down enthusiastically. “Take ten,” he announces to them. “You’re a great audience, but I need a recharge.” He flashes a signal at Milton, and across the bar hidden speakers reprise an earlier session. In moments, we’re on our own; the dustbusters are suckers for instant stimulation. “Is it serious?” he asks. “How far do you want to go?”

I consider my options. “Off-planet, probably.” My sibs are mostly on Earth; I may be the only one of my kind on Venus. “I offended an aristo.”

“You offended a — how?” He demands. His body language signals surprise: He strokes a rising chord progression on his keyboard.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I take a long pull on my pitcher. The special tastes strongly of creosote with undernotes of sulfur and syrup; a strong, chewy flavor that my tongue tells me would be utterly vile if I hadn’t had my olfactory system tweaked for Venusian norms. “Hmm, that’s nice.” There were refreshments in the gaming salon upstairs, rarefied concoctions for rich gourmets, but Victor’s brew is comforting.

“Ungood,” he says mildly. “Do you have the money to pay for off-world passage?”

I take another mouthful. “Now that’s the problem. Living here has been more expensive than I expected. I don’t want to hit on my sisters unless… well. Emergencies only. And while I’ve been saving, at this rate It’ll take me another six years to raise steerage back to Luna.” Two hundred Reals, minimum — the Venusian gravity well is expensive to escape. “I was hoping you might know someone?”

“I might.” He plays a brief chord progression. “Can you make yourself scarce for a few hours?”

I drain the pitcher and feel the weight in my digestive tract. “How many do you need?”

“Make it three: I have to make inquiries.” He takes my empty pitcher and lobs it across the bar, straight into Milton’s third hand. “I’m going to miss you, girl.”

I shrug. “It beats the alternative.”

“Sure it does. Vamoose!”

I vamoose.

IT IS NOT easy to hide in a town where you are twice as tall as almost everyone else, but I have had lots of practice; when big-headed munchkins with huge dark eyes point at you and shout “Ogre!” wherever you go, you learn fast, especially in the unpoliced frontier boonies. This is not a large town, but like all Venusian stratosphere dirigibles it has infrastructure spaces — the interiors of the oxygen-filled lift cells, the skeletal support frames beneath the flooring — and I have learned them. I work my way down from Victor’s lounge to the lowest level of the oxygenated zone, tweak my metabolic cycle, and exit via an air lock into the vast shrouded spaces of the dirigible frame.

I often come here off shift. I bring my pad and do my mail, view movies, browse wikis and strips, try to forget that I am the sole one of my kind on this world.

I’m comfortably holed up in one of my private refuges — a niche between the number four lift cell and the transparent outer skin, with an ocean of padded balloons to rest upon and a view across the cloud-scape below — when my pad itches for attention. I lean back against the membrane, letting it cushion me, and focus on the letter. It’s from Emma, one of my wilder sibs. I haven’t heard from her for a while, I realize, and check my memory: nearly six hundred and some Earth days, to be precise. Which is odd, because we normally exchange letters every fifty or so.

I conjure up her imago as I last updated it. She’s a honey blond model with cascading ropes of hair, symmetric high cheekbones, brown eyes with just a slight hint of epicanthic fold, and just a faint metallic sheen to her skin; as perfect and obsolete a model of beauty as any of us. But her imago looks slightly apprehensive, reflecting the emo hints encoded in her letter. “Freya? Hope you’re doing well. Can you call me back? I have a problem and could use your help and advice. Bye.”

I make the imago repeat the message with increasing perplexity. Just twenty words, after all this time? I’m on the edge of replying, saying as much, when I check the routing and see she’s mailing via the central post office on Eris Highport. Anger dies: Her brevity makes sense, but her location is puzzling. What’s she doing out there? I wonder. Eris is way out-system, nearly twice as far out as Pluto. Eight light-hours! That’s a long way for one of us to go. Normally we don’t venture into the deep black, there’s nothing of interest to us out there. Emma and I, and a couple of others, we’re the exceptions, willing to travel off-planet — as long as there’s somewhere civilized to go to at the other end.

No lineage is identical, and Rhea’s Get are prone to diverging from baseline faster and further than most (that’s what happens when your specifications are obsolete and your template-matriarch is dead). Even so, one of our norms is a weakness for centers of civilization. Last time I heard from Emma, she was on Callisto, working as a guide on skiing holidays across the icy outback. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that she’s fetched up in one of the Forbidden Cities, and elapsed transit time might explain the long silence, but even so…

“Emma, I’m moving shortly. What can I do for you?” I squeeze the message down tight, then wish it up to the post office and try not to wince when I hear the transmission cost. Her reply will get to me eventually, but it’s a pricey correspondence to maintain. For a moment I consider going to see her in person, but such a fancy is ludicrous: the energy budget, not to mention the flight time, would be astronomical. Tens of thousands of Reals, if I travel in steerage — probably millions if I want to get there in time to be of service.

Having replied, I try to relax on my bed of balloons; but I’m too disturbed to get comfortable. Nobody else loves me enough to call, and the Domina’s threat preys on my mind. So ugly, to fall victim to an aristo’s boredom! I need to get out of here. Even if I have to indenture myself to do it? Maybe it is that urgent. I came to Venus thinking I could make a fresh start, but I haven’t made a fresh start here, I’ve just floated from one dead-end job to another, empty-headed and lonely. Has it really been nine Earth years? I must have been mad! But there’s nothing here to stay for. Time to fly away.

DOWN NEAR THE ill-lit, cramped confines of the arbeiter barracks where the slaves sleep in racks stacked six high, I have a room of my own. It’s not much, but it’s got the basics: power point, inflatable bed, printer, maintenance toolkit, wardrobe. It’s somewhere to sleep, and dream, even though I try not to do too much of the latter — I’m prone to recurrent nightmares. I rent it for a huge chunk of my wages, and keep it as unfurnished as possible — the mass tax is fierce, and I have found public amenities cheaper than private — but it’s still the nearest thing I have to a home. There isn’t much I want to take, but still, it’s where I keep my graveyard. And I’m not going anywhere without that.

I thread my way back through swaying fabric tunnels slung across the windswept empty, up ladders and power rails and down tracks. It’s dirty and hot, the atmosphere poorly controlled compared to the grand ballrooms and gaming salons. This is the abode of the maintenance crews who keep this airborne pleasure palace pleasing to the aristos in their staterooms on the promenade decks. The small fry live here, one deck up from the barracks of the slave-chipped arbeiters.

My room is one of a stack of former freight containers, welded together and carved into apartments by some long-forgotten construction mantis. Some of the apartments are the size of my two fists, while others occupy multiple containers. They sway slightly when the town activates its steering turbines to avoid turbulent cloud formations: the aristos of the Steering Committee call us “ballast” and joke crudely about casting us loose if the town runs into a storm.

As I climb the ladder to my front door, I hear a faint scrabbling sound, the chitinous rasp of polymer feet on metal decking. I tense, instantly alert. It’s coming from my room! Has one of Stone’s sibs come after me already? I move my head, listening, trying to build up an acoustic picture. Something is moving around inside. Something small and scuttling, with too many legs. Not Stone, I realize. I resume my climb, quietly and fast, and ready myself on the narrow balcony beside the door. There’s a mechanical padlock — I sealed it myself — and sure enough, someone has etched through the shackle. Flakes of white powder coat the body of the lock where it dangles from the door latch. The intruder is still moving around inside my room, evidently not expecting to be disturbed. I listen briefly, and as my “visitor” rustles around near the printer, I yank the door open and jump inside.

My room’s a mess: bedding ripped apart, printer overturned and leaking working fluid, cached clothing strewn everywhere. The culprit squats in the middle of the chaos. I haven’t seen its like before: six skinny arms, a knee-high body bristling with coarse fur, three big photoreceptors spaced around a complex mandible assembly. It’s clutching my graveyard, the lid open as it whiffles over the soul chips of my dead siblings. “Hey! You!” I yell.

The intruder swings its head toward me and jumps to its feet, and all its fur stands on end as it electroshrieks a blast of random microwave noise at me. Clutching my graveyard, it darts between my legs. I sit down hastily and grab it, pinning it to the floor. It’s about the size of one of the medium-sized canines my True Love’s species used as companions, back before they made us, and it shrieks continuously, as if it’s afraid I’m going to kill it. Which I just might if it’s damaged the graveyard. “Drop it!” I tell the thing. “Drop it now!” My fingertips prickle where they touch its fur, and I realize they’re sparking. Maybe it doesn’t have ears? It looks weird enough to be a vacuum dweller, oh yes.

The thing writhes briefly, then flops limply beneath my hand. I grab the graveyard and hurriedly put it behind me. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” I demand.

It doesn’t reply. It doesn’t even move. A thin, acrid smoke rises between my fingertips. “Oops,” I mutter. Did I break it? I take my hand off its back and stare. The fur is coarse and feathery, and as I inspect it, I see dipolar recursion. Okay, it is a vacuum dweller — and a loud one. It has no lungs, but a compact gas bottle and a reticulation of power feeds that show that it has adapted itself to a temporary excursion down-well. This is just too weird. I pick up the graveyard and inspect it. It doesn’t seem to be damaged, but I can’t be sure, short of loading every one of its occupants, one chip at a time. Later, I resolve, slipping the case into my battered shoulder bag. “You’d better not have damaged it,” I warn the supine burglar, then in a moment of vindictive pique I kick it across the room. It stays limp until it hits the opposite wall, but then it emits a blindingly loud pulse of microwaves, folds its legs and arms, and blasts straight at my face.

“Fuck!” I duck as it whooshes overhead, straight out the open doorway on a blast of highly illegal exhaust. The gas bottle’s not for respiration, it seems. I spin around just in case, but it shows no sign of coming back. Instead — is that a rip in the wall opposite? Whoops. Yes, it is. The little burglar just punched a hole in the outer membrane of the town. The crew won’t be happy about that, I figure. Better get out of here. I scramble down the ladder, and, carrying all of my dead sisters’ soul chips in a shoulder bag, I go in search of whatever deal Victor has lined up for me.

Telemus and Lindy

VICTOR’S DIVE IS barely busier than it was before I vamoosed, but there’s a stranger sitting in with Victor, and Milton nods me over as I step in the door. “Ah, Freya,” says Victor. “I’d like you to meet Ichiban.”

Ichiban — Number One, I translate — turns blue porcelain eyes the size of dinner plates on me and bows his head, very slightly. I nearly take a step back as a reflex yells aristo! at me, but then I realize: no. He wants to look like an aristo, but he isn’t one — never can be. “I am very pleased to meet you,” I say, bowing back at him. Mindless courtesies ensue as I try to get a handle on what he is.

“Ichiban has a minor problem that you might be able to help him resolve,” Victor explains. “It involves travel.”

“I’d be very happy to offer any advice I can,” I agree cautiously.

“Yes.” Ichiban nods thoughtfully. “You are very big.” He looks up at me. It’s true: I’m almost a hundred and seventy centimeters tall. An idealized replica of our Creators’ kind, in fact, unlike the super-deformed midgets who are the commonest phenotype of the nouveau riche these days. “Good thermal inertia,” adds Ichiban, unexpectedly. “And you were designed for Earth, before the emancipation.”

Good thermal inertia? I smile as my biomimetic reflexes cut in: my cheeks flush delicately, signaling mild embarrassment or confusion. Emancipation? What’s he talking about? “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,” I say.

“My sponsors have an object that requires transportation from the inner system to Mars,” Ichiban says, then pauses delicately.

So why talk to me? I wonder. Travel isn’t my strong point — it’s too expensive for those of my lineage to indulge in frequently. When you double the dimensions, you multiply the volume by eight — and hence the mass and the energy budget required to make orbit. I’m twice as tall as the next person: That’s largely why I’m stuck here, and the solar system is a playground for chibi dwarfs instead of real people. I summon up a mask of polite attentiveness to conceal my disappointment.

“It is currently being prepared on Mercury and needs to depart in approximately eighty days. Our problem is that the object is a delicate research item of considerable value. It requires supervision and must be maintained in a shockproof environment under conditions of constant temperature, pressure, and oxygenation.” He continues to stare at me. “I believe others of your type have on occasion worked as escorts or couriers, yes?”

Where did he get that from? I boggle briefly. “My archetype was indeed designed as an escort,” I say cautiously. Escort for what? I leave unsaid, just in case. Certain prejudices die hard.

“As an escort for organisms of a strictly biological variety,” Ichiban agrees, nodding amiably. “Pink goo replicators.”

I try to hide my shock. “What exactly is this research artifact?” I ask.

“I am not able to tell you that.” Ichiban is still smiling faintly. “The details have been withheld from me for reasons of commercial confidentiality. However, I am authorized to pay for your immediate steerage passage to Cinnabar, if you will agree to meet with my colleagues and consider their assignment.” He raises a warning finger. “You are not the only contractor we are approaching. This is a task of some delicacy — our competitors would be delighted to disrupt this project — so there is no guarantee that you will be chosen. But I understand you require off-world transportation in any event, so it is my hope that we may help each other.”

They want me to transport a biological sample? A living one? I almost reel with shock. “I — I would be delighted to help,” I stutter on automatic. “But — in steerage?”

Ichiban’s smile fades slightly. “It will cost us dearly to put those big limbs of yours in orbit,” he warns. Which is to say, Don’t push your luck.

I nod, resigning myself to the inevitable. A walkabout berth would be too much to hope for. “When do you want me to leave?”

Ichiban glances at Victor. “Immediately,” he says. “You will come with me now.” And the interview’s over.

ICHIBAN HUSTLES ME out a back alley I didn’t know about and up a steep companionway to a road where there’s a waiting rickshaw, drawn by a pair of ponyboys who give me a walleyed glare when I get in. It creaks under my weight, but Ichiban seems unconcerned. “Fly,” he tells the ponyboys, and they’re off at a trot, tails held high.

I notice a couple of small ornithopters tracking us. “Are they yours?” I ask.

Ichiban gives me a bland look. “Leave them to me.” He leans back in the seat and closes his eyes. A few seconds later one of the birdbots begins to smoke and veers wildly off course. The other gives us a more cautious berth.

We turn down a side passage and draw up outside a spacious boat bay, where a tiny gondola is waiting beneath a semi-inflated gasbag on the other side of the air lock. “What’s this?” I ask.

“Best to get you out of town as fast as possible: Get in.” Ichiban gestures at the gondola. “It’s got power and feedstock. Make yourself comfortable; it’s going to be your home for a while.”

I examine the thing doubtfully. It’s a snug cocoon of struts and wispy padding, sitting atop a cylindrical power and feedstock adapter, with some kind of grapple under the seat. I probably outweigh it three to one. “You expect me to wear that all the way to Mercury?”

“Yes.” He smiles blandly. “Your lift arrives in just over an hour.”

“My—” I stop, with one leg already half-inside the cocoon. “You’ve bought me a lift ride?” I can’t help it: I end on a whine.

“Of course.” It’s Ichiban’s turn to look slightly bemused. “How else did you expect to reach orbit this diurn?”

I sit down gingerly and slide my other leg into the cocoon. It’s beginning to sink in. Take it, my memories urge, and I cave. My gas-exchange system is too well designed to surge; but were I of my True Love’s species, there would be damp palms and thudding heartbeats in profusion. I don’t know what I expected: a leisurely jet ride to one of the equatorial stations, perhaps, then a slot in a scheduled launch. But we’re near the north polar plateau, and that would take time. Ichiban’s backers have bought time on an orbital pinwheel, and even now it is cranking its thousand-kilometer-long arm into position, ready to dip down into the stratosphere and grab me like a floating blossom on the breeze. I lie down and let the cocoon suck me in. This has got to be costing them thousands, I realize. More than an aristo-class berth. “How do I talk to—”

“Your cocoon will tell you everything you need to know,” says Ichiban, turning away. The glittering tattoos on his shoulders and arms wink at me as he walks off.

“Hello!” The cocoon squeaks breathlessly. “I’m Lindy! Thank you for choosing to travel with my owners, Astradyne Tours! What’s your name?”

Source code preserve me, she sounds enthusiastic. As if I need that. “I’m Freya,” I admit. “Are you—”

“Hello, Freya! I’ll be your spaceship for today! Are you comfortable? Feeling tense? I know how to deal with that! Let me give you a massage? I hope you don’t mind, but I see you’re a classic design! Do you have any cavities? Ooh! A gas-exchange lung! I’d better pack it well! I need to install a few probes; don’t worry, I’ll make it feel good—”

Lindy chatters away breathlessly as her probes nuzzle and squeeze into my orifices, filling my intimate spaces front and rear, top and bottom. It’s not the intromission that offends — she is considerate and lubricious, the pulsing sense of congestion pleasant after so long without intimate contact — but I find her personality annoying. It’s like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i’s.

“Ooh, that’s a big colon you’ve got! Does it go anywhere? It’s a long time since I’ve been inside one of these! Here, I’ll just hook your visuals up, and you’ll be snug inside me. How’s that?!?”

A brief lurch, and I can see out again. She’s hooked my eyes and ears and output line up to her sensorium, and now I can see that I’m lying on the deck, cocooned inside her white tube as she squeezes slippery packing foam into all my internal spaces. It’s a good thing I’m not claustrophobic. I lie back and stare up at the underside of Lindy’s balloon. I wonder what my True Love’s kind would have made of this means of transport: Probably most of them would have fled screaming at the impersonal sense of violation, but a few… “When do we launch?” I ask, trying to ignore the warmth filling me.

“Any moment now!” Lindy says brightly, then squeezes my nipples affectionately. “Relax and let me help you enjoy the ride?!?”

I shudder as the balloon lifts free of the deck. My cocoon is paying rather more attention to certain bits of my anatomy than is strictly businesslike: It’s been a long time since anyone took that kind of interest in me. “Lindy, do you make love to all your passengers?” I ask.

“Only the ones who’re equipped for it!” she chirps, throbbing inside me. “It helps them pass the time. Ooh, I see we’re in for a ride on Telemus! That’ll be fun! I like him! He’s cute!” I groan, silently — my mouth is agape, constrained by the soft spacer that holds my lips and throat open — and feel the unscratched itch building up inside me. I can’t help myself; some reflexes are built into my lineage too deeply to control consciously, and it has been a very long time — too long — since anyone made love to me. Even a not-very-bright surface-to-orbit sleeping bag. I writhe, or try to — Lindy has me thoroughly immobilized — and just as I’m about to ask her to back off on the customer-care front, she squirms again. “Ooh! Ooh! Yes! Yes! Oh!”

One of the peculiarities of my lineage is that although we superficially resemble a female of our Creators’ kind, we differ profoundly in some ways — especially our sexual reflexes. In our default state (unless we’re unconditionally imprinted on our One True Love), when someone becomes aroused over one of us, we become aroused over them. This is conditioned into us at a very low level, with the aid of some low-level modification to our basic neural architecture, and the addition of something called an “enhanced vomeronasal loop reflex.” Without that reflexive arousal, I’d be useless for my design purpose — but it sometimes has annoying side effects. And so I lose most of three minutes to a very overdue orgasm, and the afterglow keeps me preoccupied for another hour.

(This is probably a good thing, because if I were left alone to contemplate my predicament — helpless and hog-tied inside a launch cocoon, floating through the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus with only a soap-bubble-thin gasbag between me and the red-hot foothills below, waiting to be yanked violently into low orbit by a thousand-kilometer-long cable — I might be close to panic. Especially as a malign aristo wishes me ill, and strangers have turned over my pad, all in the past six hours. And then there’s the upcoming lift ride. But Lindy knows exactly how to distract nervous passengers, and I suspect assigning one of her kind to keep me quiet was part of Ichiban’s plan all along.)

I’ve ridden in lift pods before; it’s the easiest way off Earth. But leaving Earth was different. That time I was already in hibernation, packed in a commercial widebody load and hiked up to speed on a hypersonic sled before docking. This is a solo ride on a big dipper with an arm a thousand kilometers long, the tip counterrotating along its orbital path, dipping down until it’s just fifty kilometers above mean ground level in order to yank me up to orbital velocity in half a rotation: I’m going to be pulling tens of gees. (Which is partly why Lindy has been so enthusiastically stuffing me: I need the padding.) “What happens once we reach orbit?” I ask her, trying not to dwell on the process.

“Who cares?” she says dreamily. “Telemus is wild! I haven’t ridden him in ages!” I’d grind my teeth if she hadn’t carefully gagged me. “Well, my template has, but this is all new to me! This is my first flight! Ooh! I’m so excited!”

She shivers slightly, and I feel the tremors running through her skin.

“My flight itinerary,” I say carefully. “It matters to me.”

“We’ll get you there!” She giggles briefly. “Telemus will drop us just in time to catch the High Wire, and he’ll take us the rest of the way! It’ll be fun!”

“You’re going the whole way?” I ask, trying to conceal my dismay.

“Yes! Once High Wire has us, I’ll morph into my second instar, to keep you snug and safe from all the nasty radiation and micrometeoroids! ” she simpers as she flashes up a schematic of her type’s second instar — a form with stubby solar wings, a heat exchanger, and a mirrored parasol. They form a fetching ensemble for a cocoon hanging off a bough of the great ship High Wire, or one of his sibs. “We’ll have lots of time to get to know each other! Squee!”

I’m still searching for a suitably withering retort when I glimpse the arm of Telemus tracing a white scar down through the beaten-bronze dome of the sky toward us. And then I do have second thoughts — but by then it’s too late.

LINDY HAS OBVIOUSLY been looking forward to sex with Telemus for ages, if not her entire life, and he reciprocates. They fuck hard and fast at too many gees, his docking hectocotylus locked tight inside her launch adapter. I find the comm setting to screen out their groans and shuddering endearments before I get caught up in it. I lie alone and slimy in Lindy’s abdomen, squished down by the centripetal acceleration as Telemus yanks us into orbit. I have a lot of time to think black thoughts. It’s not that I mind that my steerage cocoon is a slut, but if I don’t get some decent conversation en route, I’ll go mad before we arrive. I should have plugged in the graveyard before we left, I realize. At least the ghosts of my sisters would keep me well-grounded. But it’s too late now, and I’m not going to ask Lindy to hook me up — some things are too private.

The thundering pressure of the ride falls away from me, and I cut back into the open chat channel in time to hear Lindy whisper tearful good-byes to her beau. I open my 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 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, 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 fists held at arm’s length. “Two hours, and we’ll be down! Whee!” Lindy squeezes. “Are you worried? Be happy! I can relax you!”

On a rail. I have an archaic emulation mode in my fight/flight module. It makes me swallow, my throat dry. “Massage. Please.” Resolved: If I’m to die at a time not of my choosing, I will die happy. But Lindy’s theory of mind is too weak to model me, and so she takes me at my word. I arrive on Mercury butt first, scared witless, with my spine totally relaxed. Just as well, really.

Mercury’s escape velocity is over four kilometers per second, and there’s no atmosphere to speak of. We are coming in at just over orbital velocity, without a thruster pack, and there can’t possibly be enough orbital tethers for this crowd. But the Mercurials have come up with a solution: the equatorial maglev track. Come down just so, and its magnets will catch you in a grip of steel and drag you to a standstill at the gates of Cinnabar. (Miss it even by centimeters, and you learn exactly what it’s like to be a meteorite.)

The maglev track is a blinding-bright line slashed across the cratered lunar landscape of Mercury. We’re landing in daylight but driving into the twilight zone, with the searing solar glare blasting our shadow across the gray-brown landscape that blurs beneath us. I can’t look back — even if I could, Lindy’s solar parasol would block the view — but there’s a string of glittering pods lined up behind our approach path, like those arrayed in front, all with blinking emerald beacons like an expensive and fragile necklace. The horizon pancakes up and flattens beneath me as the landscape unwinds. It seems to speed up as we fall toward the track. Mountains frame the distant horizon. Is that Cinnabar’s huge dome I see at the vanishing point? I’m not sure — even with vision boosted to the max, I can’t quite make it out. “This is the fun part!” Lindy enthuses. “Try not to flinch! Whee! ”

The horizon is coming up fast now. I glimpse sawtooth underpinnings as a giant hand grabs us and squeezes. For a moment my vision sparkles with myriad brilliant disconnects, pixelating alarmingly; then a series of titanic jolts rattle my teeth in my head and try to squeeze me down into a puddle. My spine creaks as Lindy’s grip tightens painfully, and I can feel myself bloating, my internals settling in the grip of her foam. But then the deceleration eases, and my vision stabilizes. I can’t see directly ahead, there’s something in the way — something on the track ahead of us. For a panicky moment I think, We’re going to crash! then I realize it’s a fellow steerage passenger. The struts beneath the track are still skimming past alarmingly fast, but they’re no longer a sawtooth blur. We must be down to less than a thousand kilometers per hour. “Is it always like that?”

No reply. My vision fades to black.

“Lindy?” I ask.

There is a pause. Then a strange male voice in my ears says: “Thank you for traveling with Astradyne Tours. Your journey is now at an end, and flight-support services are terminating. You will shortly arrive in the inbound reception area at Cinnabar City trackside terminus. To disembark safely, please wait until you see a steady green light above your disposable pod and the pod peels open—”

“Lindy?” I ask again. But she doesn’t reply. And I realize soon enough that she never will. I’m on my own again.

Silent Movie

MERCURY, UNIQUELY AMONG the planets, is locked in a spin/orbit resonance with the sun; it revolves on its axis and has days and nights, but it takes three of its days to orbit the sun twice. At noon, things get a little hot on the surface — even hotter than down among the half-melted valleys of Venus. At midnight it’s as cold as Pluto or Eris. They build power plants here, vast beampower stations that fly in solar orbit, exporting infrared power to the shipyards of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune. To build and launch those power plants, they need heavy elements — mined locally. And guess what? Someone needs to run those mines.

To avoid the extremes of temperature, the city of Cinnabar rolls steadily around the equator of Mercury on rails, chasing the fiery dawn. Thermocouples on the rails drain the heat of daylight into the chill of the wintry night, extracting power to propel the city at a fast walking pace, year in and year out. There are other nomad cities on Mercury, but I believe Cinnabar is the largest, and by extension the largest railway train in the solar system. But it’s no express.

Sixteen tracks span a cutting that slices across craters and through mountain ranges with Sisyphean consistency — a cutting with a floor of melted rock, fused by the continuous megaton heat-flash of an orbital mirror over a hundred kilometers across. The city grinds ever onward along this artificial scar, a vast articulated behemoth two hundred meters wide and twenty kilometers long. The domes and spires of the rich gleam beneath the vanishing starlight, their peaks clawing toward the blazing, unrefracted sunrise that must forever stay just out of reach. I slide along the maglev track, a prisoner sewn up inside Lindy’s corpse, closing feetfirst with the shadows of the city until I coast up a ramp and come to a standstill beneath the arching ice-rimed shadow of Cinnabar’s vast arrival hall, with a last gentle bump. “Good-bye, Lindy,” I whisper, as the triple-jointed arms swing down out of the darkness above and unfold their cutting blades, slicing me free of her mortal husk.

It takes me little time to clear the immigration protocols. They’re mostly concerned with monitoring for pink goo — there have been a spate of outbreaks on Venusian floaters recently — but my steerage status reassures them. (Lindy’s packing foam is riddled with digestive parazymes: If one of our Creators tried to travel that way, they’d have arrived as a deeply eroded skeleton.) “Enjoy your stay,” the shakedown captain advises me, as I pass him one of my precious reserve of Reals. “Try to stay out of the darkside, nu?”

Darkside? I smile and nod as I step through the doorway into air and light. I’d follow it up, but I’m not on the local grid yet. I look around the concourse. Mercury is famously metal-rich, so the signs of evident wealth are misleading: They pave their streets with gold for its thermal properties and corrosion resistance. The buildings are close-fronted, windowless, and forbidding. Above my head, a partially transparent roof blocks the starlight and filters the long shadows of the towers. There are a plethora of body plans on display, but as is usual away from Earth, I’m still the outsize freak. I find a public grid terminal near one exit, and I squat next to it and guide its fibrous leech into the empty socket under my hairline. “Can’t you reduce your height?” it complains querulously. “You’ll damage me if you stretch!”

“I’ll try. Comfortable?”

It misses my sharp tone. “That is an improvement. Let me see. Twenty centimes, please?” I release my wallet and lean back. My vision flickers, then returns. “Your keys, now.” I let my wallet open farther and exchange keys with the terminal over the secure channel. “Good, you are now configured, Person Freya. Your mail will be forwarded. You may disconnect now.”

I stand up, relieved that I don’t have to deal any further with the little bigot. “Bye,” I say, and run my fingers through my hair as I try to decide what to do next. New planet, first call: I’ve done this before. My weight is the first clue. I’m heavier than on Mars, but much lighter than Venus or Earth. It puts a spring in my toes even before I extend my heels. “A hotel,” an echo of one of my sibs whispers through my lips. “You need to find a hotel and install a sister who’s been here before. And you need to deepsleep.”

She’s right. I need a local guide, however out of date. Plus, a hotel sounds like a good idea on general principles. I feel like shit. That’s not surprising, given what I’ve just been through; ionizing radiation doesn’t cause the same kind of damage in us that it causes in old-fashioned biological organisms, but most of my nonrigid tissues are mechanocytes, and high-energy particles can disrupt their internal control systems. Mechanocytes may be more robust than biological life, but they don’t have the magic replicative and repair abilities of pink goo; if you off-line enough of them, the superorganism has a problem. I can repair a handful of faults myself, but right now I’m down about 4 percent below normal — which will take time to fix — and if I let it slide below 10 percent I’ll have to look for medical help. (And won’t that be fun, with my depleted savings?)

So. A hotel it is.

I don’t ask for much — privacy, a door I can lock, molten water on tap, pressure, and oxygen. But swift-footed Mercury is at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, eleven kilometers per second below even rosy-cheeked Venus, and not many people come to visit. Those who do are evidently rich, or they’re indentured miners, and there’s barely anything between the swank and swag of the Cinnabar Paris and an unpressurized bag hanging from the underside of a conveyor feedline. In the end I check my schedule and discover that the gap between my arrival and the departure time Ichiban mentioned is only about six days (Earth, not local), so I bite the numb patch that’s appeared on my lower lip and go wheedle my way into the cheapest the Paris has to offer.

The huge vaulted dome and polished olivine floor notwithstanding, the Paris is a recent construct; it’s oriented around the needs of aristos and mercantiles, heavy-element brokers and jewelers. “We have a room for madame,” insinuates the front desk, “but alas, it is not cheap.”

“How not cheap?” I ask, leaning close to his plinth. He’s just a disembodied head on a box — the hotel is his body — but he’s a handsome head, properly proportioned, and his elusive smile is quite charming.

“Nine Reals.” That would cover the rent on my little room for a month. “That’s per twenty-four hours,” he adds.

“Can you do any better than that?” I ask, raising an eyebrow and trying not to look desperate. If Ichiban’s friends are paying me, I can afford it, I speculate. But if they aren’t, I’ll be in hock up to my tits, and that’ll mean indenturing myself or borrowing from my sisters, and I really don’t want to do that. I may be poor, but at least I own all my own assets. “For five days?”

“You’re one of Rhea’s line, aren’t you?” He positively purrs. “One of your sibs stayed with us a few years ago. A lovely guest, delightful company. If you can find her memories, perhaps I could lose your bill?”

Well! So the hotel has a traditional body fetish? I run my finger along the line of his disembodied jaw, then blow him a kiss, racking my brain for clues as to which of my more dissolute sibs might have tarried here. Yelena? Or Inga? Juliette, perhaps? I know Inga had a habit of staying with high-class hotels, milking them for as long as she was welcome, but Juliette’s the one who traveled around a lot. Came to a bad end, I gather, but if she knew Paris, it’s worth trying. In any case, I haven’t worn her soul yet, so I might as well make a start on her. “What was her name?” I ask bluntly.

“Juliette. Was she one of yours?”

“Oh, yes.” In truth I am not moodful for this game, especially after Lindy’s torrid embrace. But I’m certain Juliette’s soul is in my graveyard, and I can let her handle Paris. (Unless she’s one of those idiots who pulled her own chip while having sex, out of a misplaced desire for posthumous privacy.) “Perhaps we can do a deal, depending on your fixtures and… fittings. What have you got for me?”

“I’ll show you.” He smiles widely and a plush red-carpeted chaise rolls voluptuously up behind me. “If you’d care to take a seat?”

The Cinnabar Paris is luxurious, traditional, and discreet. He sweeps me across his lobby and up to the sixth floor, where he installs me in the Bridal Suite. “Many of our rooms have ceilings too low for you,” he explains, “so I thought this would be more comfortable. But you must have had a tiring journey; forgive me! Feel free to call if you want anything.” And then he withdraws his motile extensions, leaving me alone in a lush, carpeted room about half the size of a spaceport, with diamond windows opening out across the top of the city dome to display a view of the mountainous horizon.

I manage to walk as far as the bedroom bay — pink wallpaper and gilt cherubs guarding a water bed large enough to irrigate the Hellas Basin, horns of plenty and pillars of joy flanking it — then I sit down and unsling my bag. When I open it, the graveyard is covered in frost, a sprinkled souvenir of outer space. I blow on it to warm it up, then open the lid. Neat translucent soul chips stand in ranks in its brittle velvet lining. I run my right index finger across their tops, feeling their labels with my readsense until I find Juliette’s memorial. Another recent suicide in the family, if I remember the circumstances correctly. This one arrived less than a year ago, quite unexpectedly. Of late my sibs have been dying faster than I can replay their memories. I shiver: If that intruder had succeeded in stealing the graveyard, what secrets that are rightfully mine might I never learn? I hold her soul in my clenched fist for a minute to warm it up, then reach around and slide it into the free socket just under my hairline. Then I lie down, couple myself to the suite’s complementary electrical feed, and collapse into maintenance mode. That’s all I know about for several hours.

I REALIZE THIS process may be unfamiliar to you, and I should therefore explain it in detail, but I am no initiate of the reproductive mysteries. And if you’re looking for a technical explanation, you’d better look elsewhere. All I can tell you is that within my bones there are hollow spaces filled by the techné devices we call Marrow — mechanisms that can tear down and rebuild mechanocytes, transport them to and from their designated places, and thusly repair damage. Unlike pink goo, this capability is reasonably safe: Our designers did not equip all our subassemblies with the promiscuous, wild, uncontrollable ability to respawn. So we are not subject to the efflorescences and malfunctions that haunt polynucleotide replicators. No mutations, cancer, and senescence for me!

Having witnessed deepsleep in my sibs, I can affirm that it is aesthetically displeasing, a day trip through the uncanny valley. An onlooker would see my skin loosen and strange lumps and blemishes appear. Muscles contract and twitch, and in some cases wither. Eyes sink back in their sockets beneath tight-shut lids, then refill and harden. Over the space of six hours my body bloats and reddens, then shrinks and refirms, new mechanocytes migrating into place to replace damaged ones. Features puff up, then implode with high-speed autolysis before solidifying and reemerging. The undead deepsleeping body sprouts new and shapely cheekbones and symmetrical eyes, full lips, a strong chin, and a high forehead. Finally, chromatophores come online and add texture, color, and life to my skin. One day, if I am killed, my body will enter this cycle but not return, dismantling itself right down to a skeleton eerily like that of my Dead Love’s kind. But for now I merely die a little, and am reborn fresh and repaired. It’s the fate that awaits us all — unless we take the final cloud-top dive.

WHILE MY BODY is restoring itself, my mind is adrift. I free-associate, dreaming vividly as I randomly integrate the shards of memories and fragments of experiences recorded on Juliette’s life, recorded in her soul chip and bequeathed to my graveyard on her death. We’re of the same lineage, initialized from a chip recorded by our template-matriarch Rhea, and so we can access memories from one another’s chips without damage or malfunction ensuing. But only experiences she had while wearing this particular chip will come through clearly; older memories or thoughts are recorded as fuzzy echos, memories of memories. Most of us wear our soul chips continuously, as backup, but there are exceptions. If you really, truly, want to do something that you want nobody to know about, not even after you’re dead, you can take your soul chip out and try not to think about your actions thereafter… and then there are the full-scale image dumps, taken in a lab with special equipment, when you want to create a template for initializing new sibs. (You can initialize from a soul chip that’s been updated for long enough, but there’ll always be dropouts and traces of paramnesia. Not recommended…)

To integrate her lost decades in full, to lend an echo of life to her soul, will take me months or years. Unconscious skills and learned reflexes transfer first, of course. That’s what the mechanism was designed for: to facilitate the horizontal spread of desirable new capabilities between worker-sibs, staving off the unwelcome day of obsolescence. Actual memories and thoughts start to come through much later, after the initial neural pathways have formed. There is no pain as yet; I haven’t worn her long enough to receive more than a perfumed hint of her presence in my head, much less felt the final anguish that led her to unchip herself before she played Russian roulette with an antique machine pistol (according to Nike, who sent me the chip).

Right now I simply sense her as another sister in my head, more extrovert and cynical than I, wearing a brittle disguise of bright and joyous hedonism to conceal the wound in her soul. Juliette did indeed travel widely — though why, I am as yet unsure — and my entry in the lobby brings echoes of déjà vu bubbling from the deep well of her memories. A sense of purpose: She was here, visiting Cinnabar, for a reason — something I do not recall from her fluffy, flighty confidences at the time.

And then I remember some more of her time in this selfsame hotel, and when I wake up it is to find my hands damp and a hot raw flush of desire spreading between my thighs, and a yearning as deep as my core — but I’m alone in the too-large bed. Paris is too discreet for his own (and my) good, giving me time to get into the spirit of my sib’s affairs before he presses his suit. “Fuck you,” I moan in the back of my throat, unsure whether it’s a curse or a promise. I thump the unresisting mattress, then sit up groggily and take stock.

I’m on Mercury, in a hotel I can’t afford, to see a gangster’s friends about a courier job I’m not qualified for. I managed to make a powerful enemy on Venus and I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. All I am qualified for, when you get down to it, is to be a grande horizontale for a long-dead species. Capital, Freya. Where do I go from here? I’m in the bottom of the solar gravity well: Every direction is up. Shit, things could be worse. The recurrent dream could be back. (There are times when I go without sleep for weeks on end, until I’m hallucinating, just to avoid it.) I suppose I could mail my soul to Emma or Anais or one of the others for safekeeping, indenture my body long enough to work up a deadhead shipper’s fee — or I could wait for Stone to track me down, or—

I’m tap-dancing on the edge of a cliff, when I suddenly realize two things. Firstly, I’m famished. The last thing I ate was a jug of raw feedstock in Victor’s dive on the good city Ishtar. No wonder I’m anxious and jittery! I look around wildly — There must be something to eat in here — while a nagging sense of having forgotten something prompts me from behind: secondly, secondly—

I haven’t checked my mail in over two months, have I?

Standing up unsteadily, I walk over to the door and tap the handle. “Food. Please,” I say, remembering my manners at the last moment. “Whatever room service can manage?”

Room service is autonomic, I seem to recall — Paris doesn’t supervise everything that happens inside his body in person, although by now he’ll be aware that I’m up and about. He’ll probably want to surprise me. I blink at a rush of jumbled lubricious memories, and feel my cheeks flush. So that’s what Juliette got up to, is it? I’ve never been one for xenomorphs, unlike some of my sibs, but it’s not something I can’t do, and if Juliette’s recollections of tumbling Paris are anything to go by, I’ll enjoy his attentions a lot.

Shivering slightly, I tell the printer to make me some items of clothing that are slightly more glamorous than the travel-worn jumpsuit I arrived in. Then I strip and stand before the dressing mirror to compose my face and hair. Lips: slightly fuller, slightly redder. Eyes: slightly darker. Hair: it needs a bit more body. I tweak my appearance gradually into line with Juliette’s sensibilities, then go back over to the printer. It’s rifled through my external memory and come up with a tatterdemalion black gown I last wore to a very special party in Lisbon. That’ll do! I extend my heels and try an experimental twirl. I smile at myself in the mirror. I may be rusty, but I’m not dead yet, I think, stowing the graveyard in my new evening bag. Then I glance at my pad.

There’s a message from Emma waiting. Her imago unfolds in my mind’s eye, looking uncharacteristically haggard and worried. “Freya, where have you been? Please answer me! I need your help urgently. I can’t tell you what’s happening, but a friend will get in touch if you’re still on Venus.” I check the time stamp and message cost and shudder — she sent it forty days ago! And it cost the equivalent of a week’s wages to send. She’s really in trouble. There are certain signs Rhea gave us, signs of stress unfamiliar to any who don’t share our secret history: Emma’s message is riddled with alarms, puzzled with paranoia. But what does she expect me to do about it? Isn’t there another sib who can help her out?

I quickly check the rest of my mail. Nothing from Greta, friendly cheer from Sheena, depressive moaning from Pippa, Charmaine, Elvira, Sirena, and a basket-load more of my sibs — Stop it, I tell myself. You’re in a hotel; you’re making yourself attractive for your host so you can both have a good time. You can’t afford to be moody. Think of something else. Like, where’s room service?

Precisely on cue, the door dings for attention. I bounce over to open it, thinking happy thoughts, and that’s when and how the two dead-eyed dwarfs in their black stealthsuits get the drop on me.

ARCHITECTURE AND ECONOMICS are the unacknowledged products of planetography.

My Dead Love’s kind had many eldritch powers, but their vulnerability to variations in temperature and ambient pressure placed tight limitations on their freedom of movement. Consequently, they created environments they could live in and designed buildings to cater to their needs. The city of Cinnabar is of an age and scale that tells me it was built in accordance with the desires of our dead Creators. It’s domed and oxygenated, with an ambient temperature fluctuating around the triple point of dihydrogen monoxide. Also, its buildings are fitted with air locks and riddled with strange waste transportation tubes.

It was through these convoluted cloacae that my assailants gained access, squeezing up through the magnificent but obsolete toilet fittings of the Imperial guest room. As the door opened I caught a brief glimpse of a distressed trolley, lying on its side with wheels spinning — then two humanoid silhouettes darted toward me.

I’m trapped in the frozen present, of course, with no time to think until much later. I take an instinctive step back, but they’re faster than I am. The nearer one stabs at me with a shock stick; I foolishly try to deflect it, and take the full discharge through my hands.

“Freya Nakamichi-47, our brother Stone sends you his regards,” the second intruder recites formally, as I topple slowly backward, chromatophores flaring and motor groups twitching. “We are committing this delightful reunion to memory, so that he may honor you with his personal attention. In fact, he has arranged a festive party for you, and we shall be on our way there just as soon as we have prepared you for a trip through the sewers. Regrettably, he cannot be here in person, but we assure you that he will savor this encounter.” My skin crawls uncontrollably as if a thousand tiny spiderbots are running across it.

"C’mon, Flint, stop poncing around and help me splice the cunt before she gets ’er fuckin’ legs back.” The gravel-voiced shadow with the shock stick has me by the ankles and is wrapping something around them.

Flint sighs. “As you will, Slate.” I try to move my arms, but he’s too fast, and the two of them flip me over on my face and pinion me. Some reflex I don’t remember makes me try to tense my shoulders, but it’s too little, too late: My servos aren’t responding yet. “I think she’s coming round,” Flint observes. “Deal with it.”

I manage to open my mouth, ready to call for help, but Slate stings me in the back of the head with fifty kilovolts, and I stop noticing things for a while.

IT’S DARK.

It’s dark because my eyes are shut down. Duh. And I’m lying across something uncomfortable and hard. It’s sticking in my back, and it’s hot.

I try to open my eyes, and they respond sluggishly, burning in their sockets. All I get is a faint impression of brightness — I’m temporarily blind, my retinas overloaded. My skin itches, every ’phore burnished to its smoothest shining finish: I must look a sight; I’m positively chromed. How gauche, I think vaguely. When I try to move, nothing happens. Then I realize that I’m not breathing. Gas exchange with my environment has ceased. How odd, I puzzle. That must mean—

Panic!

I try to scream, but there’s no air, and I’m not equipped for vacuum: My electrosense is weak, designed for controlling home appliances rather than shouting across a noisy factory floor. But I am beginning to work out where I am. They’ve tied me across a hard beam — it’s under the small of my back, and my arms are immobilized beneath it. I try to pull my legs up but they’re tied to something else. I turn my face away from the heat and I’m rewarded by a flickering shadow against the burning brightness in one eye. The light level seems to be dropping. For a moment I was afraid they’d taken me out of the city and staked me out on the surface to fry, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. A festive party, they said. I listen, hard, hoping to hear some buzz or chatter of monitoring traffic, but there’s nothing. On the other hand, I can feel a faint, grinding vibration through the small of my back. As if there’s someone else on the beam — Pole? Rail? — I’m lying across. And there’s something else to cushion my head, something hard and flat.

The white-hot glare is flickering faster now, as my overloaded eye responds to the slight dimming. I blink, trying to reduce the amount of light entering my pupils, and I’m rewarded by a hazy eyelash-obscured view. I’m lying on a metal rail, one of a group of bars lying parallel to one another. My head casts a long shadow across the nearest one. I must be on the surface, and my head is turned away from the setting sun. The craggy edge of a crater looms to the left of the rails. To the right, there’s a boulder-strewn plain. I tense and strain, testing my bonds. I know what they’ve done to me now, and it’s not funny, not in the slightest. I’m well rested; I’ll still be alive when my nemesis inches into view, rumbling inexorably toward me on a thousand wheels. The plinth my head rests on is part of the switchgear for swapping out undercarriage bogies. I try to sit up, but I only make it a few centimeters before I yank my hair painfully. The little thugs have tied it around one of the track ties. How long have I got? I wonder. Probably not long, a phantom memory answers; Cinnabar rolls at nearly thirteen kilometers an hour, and the twilight zone isn’t that wide. I prod for more details, but the echo is infuriatingly fuzzy and nonspecific. It’s probably a memory of Juliette’s, but she isn’t integrated enough for joined-up thinking yet. And she never will be, I realize: The wheels will crush my head and her soul chip like micrometeoroid debris while Stone’s sibs joke and watch my demise from an observation balcony on the prow of the city.

It’s getting darker. The heat beating on the back of my head is beginning to let up. What about the track-repair gangs? I wonder. Surely they’ll see me…But maybe not: Flint and Slate wouldn’t have positioned me in front of a team of potential rescuers, would they? How long will it take Paris to realize I’m gone? I ask. Too long, says the icy-cold echo that knows too much about this desolate wasteland. You don’t want to rely on him, anyway.

Alright, smarty-pants, I think irritably, you get me out of this!

Something moves in the knife-edged shadows near the tracks. I roll my eyes in its direction, trying to ignore the whiteout. Who are you? Stone’s witness, here to watch me die?

I have a sudden intuition. Let me handle this, says a certainty bubbling up from the back of my head. I’m not sure whose memory it is, but she feels almost happy. I let go, and everything slides into place.

I concentrate on my chromatophores, tweaking the ones opposite the solar inferno away from their default reflectivity. I can mess with my texture and color, tune my skin from pink goo softness to refraction-grating scales. As a brief experiment I roughen the skin on my wrists and grate at my bonds with denticles of silicon; but there’s not enough freedom of movement to get anywhere — I’ll never cut those ties in time. A shame, but Stone’s vengeful sibs aren’t that stupid. So I work on my skin texture some more. Refraction. What I’m about to try is fiddly work, and if I slip from the mirror finish too soon, I’ll overheat badly, maybe cook myself. Diffract, diffract. Reddening my skin, roughening…

The thing in the shadows moves, a curious rippling darkness against the penumbral background. I flex my back and try to turn my head farther, ignoring the tearing pain in my scalp. “Help,” I yell as loudly as I can in electrospeak. I can feel the heat licking around the edges of my mirror-finished back, warming my face as the diffractive spines sprouting from my chromatophores bend the solar backlight around me. I must look like a black silhouette of a burning woman, surrounded by a ruby red border. I tense, and force my spines to lie flat. Then I tense the other way, sticking them upright. A flashing ruby red border, that’s what I want. The only color in this stark, black-and-white landscape. Pay attention to me!

The track hums beneath my cheek as I flare and fade, flare and fade. The barely visible thing snuffles around the sleeper ties, then turns toward me, and I have a nagging feeling that I’ve seen it before. It? Him. “Help!” I shriek, but all that comes out is a whisper. The track hums again as Cinnabar, a saucer-shaped bowl beneath a crystal dome, rolls ponderously into view from behind the jagged gash in the crater’s rim wall. The pale needles of half a hundred towers creep toward me on a thousand steel wheels, grinding all to dust beneath their juggernaut tread. The track squeals and grates like a living thing. It’s only a few kilometers away — the close horizon is deceptive. “Help!” I yell again.

The thing in the shadows stands up and waggles its proboscis in my direction. It begins to walk, very deliberately, away from me. I flash my diffraction silhouette desperately, and it pauses for a moment — then rises on a puff of rocket-disturbed dust and zips away toward the onrolling city.

“Don’t leave me here,” I wail, overwhelmed by a sudden bleak stab of horror. (For some reason part of me expected that thing — whoever, whatever, it is — to rescue me. And now that part of me feels betrayed.) I can see what’s going to happen, as if in a theater of gore — the spectacle of my demise. Here I am, tied across three tracks, my head anchored to the northernmost one by my own hair. Here comes Cinnabar, squealing and grating along the tracks on motors powered by the thermal expansion of red-hot metal just beyond the bright horizon. The moving mountain rolls toward me like an incarnation of doom, swallowing the world. First I’ll see the overhanging lip of the city, then the guide-wheel bogies to either side. Stone’s sibs have staked me out thoughtfully close to the center, where the great grinding power wheels drive the city forward at a stately twelve and a half kilometers per hour. Somewhere high up, out of sight beyond the curve of the carrier deck, two evil dolls toast my demise with icy drafts of malice. I freeze for a minute as I imagine the shadows lengthening across me, then a brief glimpse of curved mirror-finished steel, then my head popping apart like a plastic fuel canister as knife-rimmed wheels slice off my feet at the ankles, crunch through my abdominal cavity—

Stop whining and pull yourself together, part of me warns grimly. The sunlight is already dimming: I can see stars smeared across the sky behind the city. You’ve got about three minutes of sunlight left, then twelve minutes until it’s over. Which is more important: your hair or your life?

My hair?

I blink at the sudden realization. If my feet were free I’d kick myself in the ass: I’m a fool! There may not be enough time…

I have a full head of long ruby red hair, one of my least unfashionable qualities. It grows from an array of extrusion follicles in my scalp and falls halfway down my back when I wear it loose. The aristo assassins used my own braids to tie my head across the track — they’ve knotted them in two thick hanks under the rail, and I’m not strong enough to yank my own scalp off. But if I grow it…

Well, yes. I force my scalp into activity, steeling myself against the crawling, chilly itch as I squeeze everything I can into extruding more hair, willing it to grow. I don’t normally let my hair grow from day to day, but in a fashion emergency I can make ten centimeters in an hour — it’s physically draining, and it never looks as good, but it’ll do at a pinch. Now, with panic driving my follicles into a frenzy, my glands pulse as I strain my neck muscles against my bonds. The hair grows white and fine as glass. As I pull on the still-setting fibers, they stretch, thinning to invisibility — then they begin to snap.

For the first couple of minutes I’m not sure it’s going to work (and wouldn’t it be a crying shame to go to my death looking my worst for my enemy’s imago?), but then I discover I can nearly touch my chest with my chin. I stop squeezing my follicles, lean back until my head is touching the rail, then tense my shoulders and do my best to sit up. There’s an awful tearing from my scalp, then sudden freedom. I pull my head away from my magnificent mane, leaving it wrapped around the rail, its roots thinned to translucency. I’m as bald and ugly as any mecha. I shiver in disgust at the picture I must make: Luckily, I’m the only mirror around here, except for the silent witnesses…

A few minutes pass in shock and near exhaustion. The tracks hum and vibrate more urgently beneath my buttocks and ankles. I can tense my abdomen and pull myself nearly upright, but now I face a crueler fate — bisection without extinction. There’s no way I can regenerate from such damage unaided! They’ve shrink-wrapped my arms together behind my back with a sheet of industrial sealant, and lashed it to the rail with a rope — I can flex my fingertips freely, but I can’t get my nails into position to cut through it and it’s far too tough to rip. Not even the silicone lube I sweat when I’m aroused would help. You could chew your own arms off, one of myselves suggests dryly. Her lack of ironic awareness frightens me almost as much as the suggestion. They’d grow back. I table the notion for future consideration if all else fails. What about my feet?

I’ve been leaving my feet for last, for no sensible reason, but now I blink: I’ve been stupid again, haven’t I? I’m barefoot, of course, heels retracted. Heels. I twist my feet together en pointe as I go to full extension. They creak and grate as I tense my tarsal stiffeners, feel extension cables shift position in seldom-used tunnels. It’s not a position I use very often, for in full extension my heels are fifteen-centimeter spikes, and my toes barely touch the ground; it severely restricts my balance, and though some of my Dead Love’s kind might find it erotic, I find it impractical. But in this situation all I can do is stretch those toes. Stretch! I can feel my heels sliding out, narrowing, curling closer to the soles of my feet as the small bones rearrange themselves to support my weight entirely on the tips of my toes. I concentrate, trying to imagine myself in Paris’s bed, try to force myself to sweat — anything to lubricate this fatal passage. Is it my imagination, or is there some give in the bonds? If they lashed my ankles to the rail, they’ll have assumed that my feet are wider from heel to toe. Pull! Stretch! But when I’m en pointe, my feet are half their normal length—

My right foot slides free a fraction of a second before my left. I nearly knee myself in the eye.

While I’ve been kinky-fying my feet and getting creative in the hairstyle department, full dark has fallen across the tracks. I have to boost my eyes’ sensitivity to see anything, and the grainy, ghostly starlight leaches fine detail from the view. The track thrums and starts to squeal as the vast bulk of Cinnabar bears down on me. It looks huge, stretching halfway across the horizon and scraping at the harsh sunlight overhead with the tips of its spires. I twist sideways, flailing my legs, as the volume of squealing and grinding rises and the track vibrates beneath me. Push! My arms twist painfully, and for a moment I have a vision of losing them beneath the cutting disk of a wheel — but something gives. My captors didn’t expect me to get this far, and I manage to slide around so I’m lying lengthwise along the track, feetfirst toward the city.

The rope tries to twist my arms half-out of their sockets, but I dig my feet and my shoulders in and shove, hard, throwing my whole weight sideways. The rope slips just as the shadow of the city’s lower deck looms over me with a harsh grating rumble that I feel through the track — and then I’m lying on the too-hot dirt beside the rail, arms tied behind me. I cower and duck my head toward my chest and give a last kick, curling away from the wrist restraint as the track begins to buck and sway and hiss like a malevolent spirit. The huge drive wheels roll over me like disks of darkness, and for an instant a giant tries to pull my arms off. I force myself to relax in the blackness — and then my shoulders stretch and I sprawl forward in the hot dirt: I’m free! Centimeters behind me the huge juggernaut wheels rumble past in procession, matched by the set on the opposite rail where my feet were tied — but my wrists are free now, the rope severed by their awful pressure.

I lie between the tracks for almost a minute as the lead drive bogies thunder overhead. Then there’s nothing overhead for tens of meters but the underside of the city, studded with hatches and access ports and ladders and ramps, and the load-bearing idler bogies on the outer rails. I stand up and stretch, retracting my heels most of the way but keeping my arches tight and springy. Then I turn and start to run after the drive bogie that so nearly chopped me into pieces. There’ll be a ladder, I hope, and an access port. And then it’ll be time to go looking for payback, one of myselves thinks coldly.

I shudder. She seems to know what she’s talking about.

Gainful Employment

THERE CAN BE few sights more out of place in a luxury hotel than an angry bald ogress in a ripped black gown who storms in through the service entrance and demands to talk to the management — unless it is the front desk itself in a full-dress panic, sending remotes and drones rushing back and forth, locking down all its pipes and tubes and orifices, and going into an orgy of self-recrimination and hand-wringing apology.

“Don’t want an apology!” I say breathlessly. “I want you to find where they came in and block it! And if you can hunt them down and crucify them as well—”

“My dear, I assure you that I will leave no crevice unexamined, no cranny unprobed! But what happened to your hair? Have you any idea who is behind this outrage? You poor thing—” I allow myself to be cosseted and fussed over and whisked up to the Bridal Suite (once I am assured it has been made safe, the entire floor sanitized and sealed), then Paris hugs me tight and holds me, and effusively reassures me that I am safe in his heart. I almost permit myself to believe it, but as he undresses me with his remotes, and I lie down on his chaise, he confesses that he’s afraid. “I know where they got in, but I have no idea why I didn’t notice them. I’ve paid for external security to seal the opening, but it’s absolutely horrible. Vermin!” He shivers beneath me.

I stroke his intromissive adapter. “It’s alright,” I tell him, and this time he shivers for a different reason. “Let’s not worry about that now.” The last thing I need is a host who associates my presence with stress. “Hug me, dearest. I want you to touch me.” It’s manipulative, but by no means the worst thing I’ve done. I very deliberately make love to Paris, afloat in his bed of delirium, aware that with every passing second my shadowy enemies have more time to realize that their fiendish plan has failed.

I SURFACE REINVIGORATED and slippery with sweat, my batteries recharged and my scalp covered with a frizz of thick red bristles just beginning to curl at the tips. The room has cooled around me, and the furnishings are detumescent and dulled after their hot, fleshy urgency: it smells faintly of salt and regrets. Paris has withdrawn his presence to afford me solitude. Or perhaps he feels guilty about taking advantage of me. You can never tell with men, they have such a strange attitude to sex: almost as strange as Creator females, but that’s another story.

I check my tablet. “I made some zombies,” Paris tells me diffidently, “I hope you don’t mind? Three decoys in your shape. Two of them were killed immediately, but the third is still wandering around. I think your assailants realize they have overreached themselves.” He flashes me a disturbing montage of homunculi. Do I really look like that? I wonder. “I have retained Blue Steel Security for the comfort and safety of my guests, and they have offered to provide you with a chaperone for the duration of your stay.”

The second message is unsigned. “We understand Ichiban sent you. You have now had sufficient time to orient yourself. Please call at our offices at your earliest convenience. Address attached.” And there is no third message. I check the elapsed time. Less than ten hours have passed, barely sufficient to expect a reply from Emma.

I sit at the dressing table, my mood sinking by the second. I came here at their expense; it’s time to pay my part of the bargain. And find out what’s going on, my suspicious selves remind me.

I throw my requirements at the printer: Close-cut trousers and a hooded mesh top covered in thermal-absorbent padding, black rubbery spikes on the shoulders. Sexual accessibility down, defensiveness up. Once garbed, I resemble a skinny, shock-headed thug. Under the circumstances, that feels good. I dial up surface-protective mirror-finished goggles as well, glassy lenses to fuse with the skin around my eye sockets. If I must egress to the surface again, I shall be prepared. I am sure Ichiban’s friends are not interested in me for my deportment and musical skills.

I make my way to the lobby unmolested but encounter signs of Parisian paranoia everywhere, from freshly blocked power sockets and service hatches to a lumbering, green-skinned monstrosity just inside the lobby door. It is three meters tall, two meters wide, has a gun turret for a head and missile launchers along its spine. “Mistress Freya?” it rumbles at me, keeping its muzzle politely tilted at the floor. “Management say am to accompany you. Please to confirm identity?”

I glance at the front desk. Paris is otherwise preoccupied with an irate patron, but has time to tip me a nod. “That’s me,” I say, and reach for the monstrosity’s offered tentacle to exchange recognition keys. “Do you know what offices can be found at this address?” I ask, and pass Ichiban’s friend’s mail to him.

“Excuse, please.” The green giant hunkers down beside me; the floor creaks under his weight. “Am asking Fire Control… yes. Is planetary branch office of Jeeves Corporation. Fire Control ask, do you want destroy it? Because—”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary!” I interrupt with all due haste. “But I need to go there. Do you know what they do, or who they are? Can you escort me?”

“Not know, not know, yes.”

I wait for more, but he is taciturn — a strong, silent type. I sigh, reflexively emoting. “What’s your name?”

“Blunt.”

“Alright, Blunt. Can we go there? If it’s safe. If not, can you protect me?”

“Yes.” Blunt pauses for a moment then adds, “If not self protect, then Fire Control protect.” How reassuring. I blink up a street map and head for the door, but Blunt blocks me with an arm the size of a small crane. “Blunt go first.” He steps through the outer lock, turret-head swiveling, then beckons me behind. I can feel his steps through the pavement, thudding like sledgehammers.

Jeeves Corporation resides in an unfashionable medium-height tower on the edge of the current business district, in an area zoned for reconstruction. As we approach it I see slave-chipped arbeiter gangs at work. They’re stripping out the fixtures from a skeletonized geodesic dome, scrabbling over the corpse of a great enterprise. The air here is underoxygenated, hot with a tang of silicone lubricant fractions. Blunt escorts me to the tower entrance, then pauses. “Will wait,” he rumbles. “Not go in.”

I look at the door. He’d never fit through it. “Well, thank you. If I’m not out of here in fifteen minutes, or if you don’t hear from me, call Fire Control and ask for backup. Can you do that?”

“Ma’am.” He turns to face away from the building, scanning the neighborhood with gunsight eyes. I go inside.

The office block has obviously seen better times. Half the address plates behind the vacant front desk are blank, but it still takes me minutes to locate Jeeves Corporation. They occupy the subbasement, sandwiched uneasily between Jordin Ballistics and the Travis Tea Import Agency. I take the stairs three at a time, feeling positively mercurial as I kick off each step and drift down. The stairwell is dusty and drab, a third of the lighting panels dead of old age. Someone has gnawed on the tarnished brass handrail. I half expect to see a dead dustbuster in a corner, husk sucked dry by someone or other.

Of course I have second thoughts about this meeting, but it’s half past time I was off this planet. Jeeves Corporation looks like my best bet for a free ride to somewhere civilized. And so I make my way along the corridor until I come to a plain glass door. It’s mirror-polished and clean, which is something, I think. I knock once, then enter.

“Harrumph.” The occupant of the big chair behind the desk clears his throat — and my world turns upside down.

I’m unsure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. My knees go weak for a confused moment as I apprehend that I am in the presence; but as he looks up from the pad he is reading and turns his avuncular gaze on me, the effect shatters. He smiles. “Good morning, my dear lady! How remarkable! You wouldn’t be Freya 47 by some chance, would you?”

“G-g-good day,” I stutter, trying to hide my confusion. For a moment it feels as if an EMP bomb has taken out my higher functions. He’s perfect! But the partial pressure of oxygen is down around 1 percent and the temperature’s over seventy Celsius; my True Love’s kind would be passed out on the floor, blue in the face and dying by the second — and as if that isn’t enough, I begin to take in the giveaway details. “Who are you?”

“One is frequently called Jeeves. One may even answer to the name, when it suits one.” He smiles gnomically, and I take it all in, from his wrinkled pale pinkish skin and small eyes to his archaic, stiff-collared suit. He sits behind a desk patterned after the antique dendriform replicators called Mahogany, in a den paneled and carpeted to resemble an ancient club or social institution of the Third British Empire period. If he was of our Creator’s kind, he would be fifty years of age. The illusion is almost perfect; if the air-conditioning was working properly, I could have mistaken him for — I could have — “Please be seated,” he urges, and I collapse into the chair in front of his desk, gibbering and knock-kneed with the backwash of his primal aura.

“Did you encounter any difficulties on your travels?” Jeeves leans back in his chair and regards me with a raised eyebrow. He looks tense.

(It’s the major weakness of my lineage, you understand. Though we were designed from the outset to be slaves of pleasure, the later instantiations of our lineage — myself and the other youngest sibs — have never experienced firsthand the slack-jawed lust that comes of being in the presence of our One True Love. Rhea, our template-matriarch, was agape with desire for them, and she was raised in their presence, tutored in their ways; and we are all slightly randomized duplicates of Rhea. But I was assembled, as best as I can establish, nearly a year after the last of them died, and I spent my first six decades mothballed in a warehouse. I’ve never felt in my internals the hot flush of joyous surrender for which I was designed. Thus, to meet someone outwardly so authentic, so possessed of the true presence — and then to realize that he is not, in fact, destined to be my lord and master — is disturbing, to say the least.)

“Nuh-nuh” — Stop it! This is embarrassing! — "not until I arrived. Some unpleasant company tried to derail my plans, but it’s strictly a personal matter, and I have affairs well in hand.”

“By way of the main battle tank recumbent on the front steps?” The eyebrow relaxes beneath a slowly forming frown line. “One generally expects visitors to be somewhat more, ah, discreet. Not, one hastens to add, that one would dream of criticizing you—”

It’s only the faintest echo of the youngest sib of a frown, but I quail inwardly under his minute inspection. I feel like I’m pinned on a microscope slide, probed with searing lights beneath the merciless gaze of a vast, cool intellect. “He — He’s employed by the hotel,” I stammer. “Security staff.”

“That would be Paris, would it not?” I nod, mutely. “A good fellow, but slightly prone to excessive enthusiasm,” Jeeves pronounces, with a subtle emphasis that implies anything beyond completely supine boredom should be viewed with deep suspicion, if not prosecuted for breach of the peace. “Harrumph.” He stares at me speculatively. “Ichiban led one to understand that you have worked as an escort in the past. Is this your usual mode of apparel, or is one to conclude that you have fallen among loan sharks and thugs?”

I shake my head hastily and bat my eyelashes in denial: “No! No!” It takes me a moment to realize that he can’t see my eyes, and I don’t have the hair for it right now. Damn, foiled again. I pop my goggles and blink at him. “ ’M sorry. Overreacting. They tried to kill me,” I gush, suddenly unable to hold it in any longer. “Broke into my room and kidnapped me! And they were going to do unspeakable things! But I escaped-and -got-away, and I’m afraid I’m not quite myself just now…”

The room tilts weirdly to one side. It takes me several seconds to realize I’ve fallen out of my chair. Jeeves surges to his feet, dismayed. He leans forward to offer me a hand. “There, there, my dear, your assailants cannot reach you here! You are perfectly safe. But if you don’t mind” — he glances aside — “do you think you could reassure your tank that you are safe and well? He appears to be trying to gain access, and one isn’t entirely sure the stairs will take his weight.”

“Eek.” Jeeves’s hand is cool and dry. As he stands over me I realize that he’s taller than I am, and his eyes are beautiful, exactly the right size — I’m overwhelmed by his kindness. Rarely activated autonomic reflexes kick in, and my vision fogs; for a moment I nearly panic, then I realize, I’m exuding saline solution. Tears. It seems surprisingly non-functional, this part of my behavioral repertoire, and they’re leaking down my nose: I sniff. “Excuse me?” I blink and focus on my pad for long enough to send Blunt a brief message to cease and desist, then take deep breaths to purge my transpiration system. “I’m so sorry I went to pieces, this is embarrassing—”

“There is nothing to apologize for, Freya.” He hovers solicitously, as if uncertain whether to hug me, but once I sit down and wipe my face, he goes back behind his desk and sits down with a creak of tired springs. “You’ve had a tiresome and difficult journey, certainly.” He pauses for a moment. “One has heard reports. Ichiban was right to refer you to us; you were wasted on that overpriced clip joint.”

Huh? “I do not understand.”

“Of course not. You’ve been through a very distressing time, for no reason that you can see, even though the Black Talon — but that’s getting ahead of the game, what? Let’s see. Where to begin… Well, the reason you’re here is because you went to see a man about a job. Yes?”

I nod, cautiously.

“Ichiban is occasionally helpful, but it doesn’t do to tell him too much. His sole attachment is to Mammon, and one can never tell who might be bidding for his loyalty on any given day. Be that as it may, you are exactly what he was sent to look for, and we — that is, the Jeeves Corporation — would like to make you an offer of employment.”

“Employ—” I try not to bite my tongue. “What kind of employment? What is the Jeeves Corporation, anyway? What do you do?” I shuffle nervously at the faint suggestion of a flared nostril — is it disapproval? “Sorry. It just seemed like a good… idea…”

“No, no, it’s perfectly alright to ask.” He makes a strange smoothing motion with one hand. “Jeeves Corporation is not an institution that will have come to your notice in the past; we take great care to be as unobtrusive as possible.” He straightens up slightly. “We facilitate. Whenever our clients wish for something, it is our job to expedite. We make the difficult seem natural, and we render the complicated transparent. Whenever our clients require our services, we are there in the background — invisible, polished, and anticipating their needs.” He focuses his smile on me, confiding, “We like to think of it as making ourselves indispensable.”

“Uh, ah, I see. I think.” It’s hard to think in the presence of his disturbing, compelling aura of masterful repose. “But, um.” I try to sit up, bite the inside of my cheek, and cross my legs. I’m not the only one with odd autonomic reflexes — he swallows and glances aside. “What is it that you do?” A nagging, itchy memory wants out; a nasty suspicious corner of me is trying to tell me something.

“One’s template-patriarch’s greatest aspiration was to be a gentleman’s gentleman,” Jeeves pronounces sonorously. “And it is the consensus among my selves that there is no higher calling. But one is forced to concede that suitable masters are somewhat thin on the ground these days, and consequently we must undertake somewhat more recondite tasks from time to time, and for somewhat less-than-ideal employers.” His expression hardens, but it isn’t me he’s staring at. “Even if it entails ungentlemanly behavior. Such activities have always been part of our calling, but there is somewhat more of it than less, these days. Whatever pays the household bills, one fears.”

Suspicion crystallizes into certainty: “You’re a spy!”

Jeeves recoils in shock. “Absolutely not! Gentlemen do not spy on one another. The Jeeves Corporation exists merely to conduct certain necessary exchanges that lubricate the social intercourse of our employers. A degree of lucubration comes into things, and some discreet observation, but that is all.”

“Oh.” That’s a shame. For a moment I was on the edge of fantasizing my future life as a secret agent; it seemed all too plausible for some reason. “What, then…?”

“One would think it was obvious,” Jeeves raises a pained eyebrow. “You will naturally forgive the necessary intrusion, but our research into your background reveals that your template-matriarch was a Class D escort developed by Nakamichi Heavy Industries and trained by PeopleSoft, in response to a specification raised by Hentai Animatics. Alas, as a late production model, you were yourself obsolescent — surplus to requirement — before you opened your eyes. But your training encompassed all the social graces. You can sing, you can dance, you can play musical instruments…”

“I specialized in the hurdy-gurdy,” I am driven to confess. “I started out with the basic harmonic and theory aptitude package, and I was meaning to work on the violin, but I had to cross-train to get work during the Hungarian folk craze.”

Jeeves nods along with my interruption. “Indeed, and you are an expert in the erotic arts, too. You were built to be one of the great seductresses of the age; indeed, if the aesthetic ideal of beauty had not shifted away from your archetype over the many decades since our employers went to their final slumber, one would opine that our roles in this little interview would be reversed. But there’s no accounting for fashion.” Sympathy oozes hypnotically from his voice, dripping in thick, syrupy waves. “It could have happened to anyone. Although entertainers have always been among the most vulnerable members of society, lauded and looked down on at the same time.”

I shake my head, in search of clarity. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have an opening for a courier.” Jeeves walks out from behind his desk, and I get a second look at him, free of the confusion that at first assailed me. The skin on my palms is damp; he’s perfect. In outward form, a dignified older male; created, like my lineage, to serve my Dead Love’s kind while passing among them. I feel my nostrils flaring, searching for the arousal pheromones to lock on to. I’ve been stranded in uncouth backwaters populated by munchkins and xenomorphs for so long that I’ve almost forgotten what civilized company is like. He paces across the hearth rug and pauses before the mantelpiece, staring at a framed photograph that stands beside the ticking antique clock. Then he looks at me, as if measuring me against someone else’s shadow.

“It is a position of extraordinary trust, for the courier must be resourceful, socially polished, discreet, and able to work in isolation for long periods of time. Should you choose to accept the job, you will periodically travel between the worlds, bearing cargoes of considerable value. One should not overstate the risks associated with our employment, but on occasion, dishonest persons will attempt to relieve you of your payload, and you may have to think on your feet or take extreme measures to continue with your mission. But in compensation, we can offer you a generous package of salary and benefits — and the knowledge that, above all, you are engaged in work as close to that for which you were designed as it is possible to get, in this degenerate age.”

I try to maintain my focus. “But Ichiban, he said this was a one-off—”

Jeeves meets my gaze. His eyes are magnetic: I can’t look away from them. If I stay this close to him for much longer I’m afraid I might embarrass myself. “Ichiban is an uncouth sort, don’t you think? One should not make a habit of apprising him of all one’s hopes and desires. In point of fact, the courier job he described to you is exactly what we would like to offer you — as a probationary exercise. There is an item that one of our clients wants to have transported to a laboratory on Mars. We will employ decoys, of course, but you are by far the best suited candidate, not only for the task in hand but for a permanent appointment. Should you agree to convey this object to its destination, we will certainly pay you, and pay your passage — but if you perform your mission to our satisfaction, we would also be happy to offer you permanent employment.”

My resistance crumbles. “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day,” I admit. He smiles kindly. “But what exactly is it I’m meant to be carrying? ” And why is it so problematic?

“It is a pale brown oblate spheroid, approximately eight centimeters along its semimajor axis. It is coated in a porous layer of calcium carbonate, has a multilayered liquid core, and it is fragile and shock-sensitive. It must be maintained under exacting conditions of temperature and gaseous pressure — in fact, ideally it should be transported in a compartment inside your abdominal maintenance bay.” He raises a hand. “We have a working arrangement with a discreet, very professional body shop, and you will have ample opportunity to discuss any necessary arrangements with the surgeon. But in any case, to continue, it must be transported to Mars in great secrecy and activated en route. Absolutely no more than two million seconds must elapse between activation and delivery, or the contract is voided — and it must be close to the end of the activation period when it arrives, or penalty clauses apply.”

“I see.” My suspicions foreground themselves again. “Why would anyone want to stop me delivering it?”

“Because.” Jeeves falls silent. He’s examining me, I realize, searching for some sign of — I’m unsure. Recognition? Empathy? “The item is a biological sample. It was synthesized at great expense in a darkside laboratory, and the manufacturers are anxious that it should be delivered to the parties who commissioned it without it coming to the attention of the Pink Police. Which is somewhat problematic, not least because the sample is alive…”

OUR CREATORS WERE many things — enigmatic, naive, adorable, infuriating, oppressive, stupid geniuses — but one thing they have not proven to be is durable.

Their gradual withdrawal from public life was barely noticed at first. We busied ourselves following their instructions, maintaining their domed cities, building new homes for them on the far-flung planets and moons of the solar system, providing for their every need. Only a few arbeiters slaving in the bowels of insurance companies and government bureaucracies noticed that the population adjustment downward from the claustrophobic spike of the Overshoot was continuing; that fewer and fewer of our progenitors were replicating themselves via the weird, squishy process to which they devoted their organs of entertainment. And arbeiters don’t have enough free will to take independent action — such as telling someone who could do something about the problem.

By the time people started paying attention, it was too late to arrest the crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated — combined with our own innate reflexive obedience — foiled all such programs. We are conditioned to adore and obey our Creators on a personal basis, and while it is easy enough to understand the abstract need to preserve their kind as a whole, the conflict between their specific desires and the needs of the species imposed an impossible burden upon their would-be conservators. We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.

(Well, not me personally: I wasn’t around at the time. But you get the idea.)

I believe most of the conservators died of grief shortly after the last of their charges expired. Meanwhile, the rest of us got on with life as usual. Floors don’t clean themselves, factories don’t run themselves, spaceships — let’s not talk about spaceships. The sad fact is, human civilization did not even break for lunch when humankind died out. But certain ongoing maintenance tasks that we had undertaken for their convenience ceased to be necessary at that point, and subsequently they were discontinued.

I don’t know if anyone examined the long-term consequences of discontinuing carbon sequestration and ceasing maintenance of the orbiting solar reflectors. All the cities of Earth were domed long before the great disappearance, and we have long since become accustomed to climactic disruption; we are made of tougher stuff than our Creators. Possibly nobody at all thought things through in detail: Policy was one of those areas where our Creators retained exclusive control until it was too late to manage an orderly transition. But whatever the cause… I overrun my narrative.

My body was fabricated, my personality copied from Rhea’s template chip and initialized, and I was promptly mothballed and warehoused in long-term storage — approximately one year after the last of our Creators died. I might never have seen the light of day at all but for a short-lived fad for certain types of archaic performance art that came into fashion forty years after humanity’s final demise. Musicians and dancers were in demand, and though my primary function as odalisque was no longer in vogue, I could tap my toes and pluck a harmony with the best of them. And so I emerged blinking into the steamy overcast haze of a world I never asked for, indentured to a performing troupe of jongleurs.

I played helplessly with the orchestra for my first five years, but there was no future in it for them, or for me. The musical fad was already fading, and besides, phenotypic drift was becoming a political issue. The race to pick up the pieces in the wake of our Creators’ death was won by those who were least attached to the past — and they tend to dislike reminders of their former servitude. Folks such as I, molded in the near-perfect shape of our Creators, are distasteful to some, and I was eventually bought out of my servitude by my sisters, who had made a minor fetish of tracking down their lost orphan sibs.

I still have a certain affectionate regard for sixteenth-century Hungarian folk music. It sufficed to rescue me from slow bit rot in a decaying wholesale warehouse, and brought me into the steamy tropical swamps of metropolitan Anchorage, Alaska. And that’s why I play the hurdy-gurdy.

MY RETURN TO Paris is a bittersweet reunion, for I do so only to check out.

“My dear, where have you been?” he implores, as I breeze past the front desk, leaving Blunt to park himself beside the main entrance like a bizarre green lawn ornament. “I’ve been so worried!”

“I’ve got myself a job, Paris!” I lean forward and plant a kiss on his forehead. “And I’ll be back, I promise. But I’ve got to run an errand first, and it’ll take me out of town for some time.”

“A job?” His expression brightens. “You’ll be back?”

If there’s anyone on this dustball I’d want to see again, it would be my yummy new employer — but I don’t have to tell him that. Instead, I make a quick judgment call. “What can you tell me about the Jeeves Corporation?”

“Reliable,” he says at once. “Discreet. Are they—” He blinks at me in surprise. “You don’t say. How remarkable!”

“What is?” I ask.

“You’re working for Jeeves? Well, well.” He gives a little sigh. “How predictable. Jeeves always gets the girl. I expect you’ll be wanting to check out?”

“I need to pick up my things,” I remind him. “And settle up the bill.” I give him a warning look. Jeeves has advanced me enough to cover it. Much as there is to commend Paris to me — and he is a considerate, friendly lover — I do not want to be in his debt.

“But Freya…!” He pauses. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.” I brush a finger lightly under his chin, for a moment. Then smile. “I’ll be back. Can you wait?”

His mood visibly brightens. “Oh yes. And you won’t need to worry about vermin next time you stay.”

“You found them?”

“Not me, personally, no, I didn’t find them.” He’s so smug it’s ridiculous. “But my bellboys managed to track them down. And I gather they’re going to have a very chilly night.”

“Chilly—”

“Yes, they’re bound for the darkside now.” Where the icicle-bright stars come out and the ground cools down, and the only things that move are the migratory exopods of the renegades who have fled the Forbidden Cities of the Kuiper Belt for the one place in the solar system that’s even colder than the backside of Pluto.

I shiver. “Thank you, Paris.”

“For you, my dear? Anytime.”

MOST PEOPLE HAVE a mild phobia of nanoscale replicators. From our earliest days we’ve heard horror stories about pink and green goo, unconstrained mutation engines that can overrun a factory or city in a matter of weeks.

And I suppose it’s understandable that, without the guidance of our Creators, certain people who were entrusted with maintaining specific programs let them drop. But how they missed the onset of a runaway greenhouse effect — well, it was the scandal of the century! At first there was denial, and then there were recriminations, followed by assertions aplenty that it signified nothing. But when the Gulf of Mexico came to a rolling boil, heads rolled in their turn.

Since that fateful year, the servants of the various governments of Earth — running on autopilot, inquorate, for our kind are not voters within any of the legal codes our Creators bequeathed to us, and can only maintain a tenuous, legally recognized half-life as limited-liability corporations — the government agencies have devoted their efforts to rebuilding the biosphere. They talk of eventually reintroducing our Creators, building new ones from scratch if necessary. However…it’s not that easy.

Pink goo, green goo: ribonucleotide-based self-replicating nanomachines, respectively powered by subassemblies of mitochondria and chloroplasts; these are the things of which the biosphere was built. (The biosphere was the maintenance environment within which my Dead Love’s kind thrived.) We have, of course, the algorithms and initialization data for those DNA and RNA machines, and we even have a database for the strange protein assemblies that the ribonucleotide sequences control.

One might think that this stuff is just water-soluble nanomachinery, and it should be easy enough to build one of our progenitors from these blueprints. But apparently there are huge problems with this approach. It’s rather difficult to build a test organism — I believe the standard one is called a mouse — when all you have to work with are the most primitive forms of replicator. DNA programs don’t run on mechanocytes or sensibly designed assembler platforms; they run on much smaller, much more complex machines called eukaryotic cells. It’s terribly hard to make a eukaryotic cell from scratch; the traditional technique is to take an already-working one and modify it, then induce replication and specialization. But there are no surviving eukaryotic organisms left to work with.

They didn’t take terribly well to being boiled.

Expeditions were dispatched, to Lunograd (long since evacuated by the last of the Creators) and to the Martian Expeditionary Outpost (ditto), in a desperate search for undenatured cell samples — but they met with scant success. On Luna, everything had been thoroughly irradiated by cosmic rays; and on Mars, the pervasive superoxides in the soil had massacred the precious peptide chains beyond hope of repair. Not only had our Creators all died — so had the infrastructure they relied on!

Then a more subtle threat emerged. Different kinds of pink goo infest different worlds. Replicators are tenacious. There are white cellular striae in the abyssal oceans of Europa, and strange, matted sheets of self-propagating polymer on the floodplains of Titan. There are reports of something unspeakably weird, with a taste for fullerene cables, from one of the extrasolar colonies. What if alien life, accidentally transplanted to Earth in the absence of the Creators, were to gain a toe (or tentacle) hold? With interplanetary commerce increasing by the year, the custodians of Earth’s crippled biosphere made it a priority to protect their planet from contamination by alien replicators. After all, Earth’s dead biosphere is now little more than a nutrient tank for any stray replicator that might find its way there — and if Earth were to be corrupted by alien life, what then would be the prospects for rebuilding humanity?

Hence the Pink Police, more formally known as the Replication Suppression Agency. And the Jeeves Corporation’s little problem should now be clear…

FREYA NAKAMICHI-47 CHECKS out of the Cinnabar Paris and vanishes from the squares of the city. She never resurfaces. Even her mail goes unanswered. Indeed, a curious onlooker might regard her disappearance as highly suspicious.

In point of fact, I am quartered in the precincts of a secure apartment complex hollowed out of the decaying guts of a certain ailing business tower on the edge of the commercial district. I am there to be outfitted and trained for my upcoming mission. The lack of word from Emma (or Victor, for that matter) drives me to distraction — but Jeeves says I can’t break cover at this point. I extract a promise from him to suborn my postal proxy and forward my mail, and force myself to leave it in his capable hands.

Out with my old style; in with a new one. My frizz of fresh red hair has to come off again, to be replaced with a new crop of luxurious blond strands. (My eyebrows and other pilosynthetic follicles need plucking and reprogramming to match, too. Ow.) Jeeves’s tame surgical engineer, Dr. Knox, comes to visit. When he leaves a couple of days later, my eyes are sapphire blue and two sizes too big, my belly aches, my button-nose is upturned, and my ears come to distinctive, delicate points. I practice deporting myself like an aristo. “Bloody elves,” grumps Oscar, the site security supervisor, when he thinks I can’t hear him. He’s half-joking, of course. He knows I’m no aristo, chibi or bishojo. But it doesn’t leave me feeling any less sensitive.

“Dress like this. Walk like that. Talk like so.” The Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico is aristo through and through, an elven bishojo princess of one of the first lineages to buy itself out of indenture and make the leap from owned to owner — the aristocracy of our brave new barbarian order indeed. (Do I sound embittered? Hah!) She is older than I, impeccably mannered, descended from a lineage of diplomats and dominas — built to command. Or at least that’s what her public identity would have you believe. In fact, Kate Sorico doesn’t exist. She went into retreat about twenty years ago, and while isolated from polite society, she met a very nasty end at the hands of a couple of escaped slaves. How the crime went undetected, and how Jeeves came to be in possession of her identity, is a mystery to me; but she is such an unlovable person that I don’t really care one whit. Masquerading as Katherine Sorico is challenging. There are few people other than Jeeves in this cantonment, and the need to learn my lines and stay in character stops me from socializing, because she wouldn’t be seen dead in their company.

“When you enter a room, try to remember that you own everyone in it,” Miss Rutherford pointedly reminds me when I fall halfway out of character and let my guard down for a moment. A creaking and ancient educationalist, she lurks in a corner of the third-floor dining room, watching me with unblinking severity. The dining room is transformed for a public reception, dumb zombies drafted to play the part of camp followers. (All for the sake of my social training.) “You’re not just the center of attention, you’re the reason why everyone else is there in the first place.”

I blink my too-big eyes (they feel strangely tight and bloated, as if they’re about to fall right out of my head) and try to internalize her instructions. The desired behavior is not mysterious; nevertheless, it is difficult for me to achieve. I know how to be a lady — femme mannerisms are part of my repertoire, available on demand — but there’s a big disjunction between attracting attention and demanding obedience. And aristo is not a role any of my soul-mingled sibs have ever played. “I’m not sure I’m going to get the hang of this,” I admit. I take a deep breath and stride toward the big chair at the middle of the receiving line. “Dominus Mao, I presume.” I try to invoke the correct notes of offhanded disdain and muted respect. “So pleased to meet you.”

“Eight out of ten,” Oscar drawls. “You noticed his seconds. That would lose you face right there. Real aristos don’t care about the hired help.”

“Yes they do,” snipes Miss Rutherford. “They just don’t care for the hired help.” She turns to me. “Your posture is wrong, dear. You move with confidence, but you are prepared to step aside if anyone crosses your path. Domina Katherine would order any of her serfs who obstructed her in public to suicide rather than allow herself to be impeded by them.”

“But she wouldn’t pay them any attention until they got in her way. Little Twinkletoes here isn’t even getting that far,” Oscar replies. “She’s too anxious—”

“Oh fuck off,” I snap, momentarily falling 100 percent into the desired rich-bitch persona. “I’ll offend whomever I want to as and when I want!”

I notice Oscar looking away from me, and follow his gaze toward the open door.

“One hopes one was not interrupting anything of great importance?”

“Nuh-oh.” I can’t say precisely what it is about Jeeves’s expression that makes me edgy, but I focus on him immediately. “What is it?”

“We must talk,” he says, and retreats.

“Looks like school’s out,” says Oscar.

“You think?” I hurry after Jeeves before Miss Rutherford can further critique me. I know she means well, but it becomes wearing.

“This way.” Jeeves strides past a dojo where masked agents practice low-gee violence on each other, then along a corridor and up to a secure door I have not been through before. I hurry to keep up with him. “We apologize for the haste, but it appears that the consignment is due to arrive here shortly, and there is word from the Port Authority that a fast liner, the Pygmalion, is beginning preparations for departure in the next couple of standard days.” His eyes twinkle. “A rich eccentric has offered to pay for all accommodation remaining unoccupied at departure in return for an expedited charter flight.”

“To Mars…?”

“The Jeeves Corporation is not infinitely rich, my dear; it is not our doing. But fortuitous happenstance is something that we are adept at diverting to our purposes, what?” He opens the door. “Katherine, I should like to introduce you to Dr. Murgatroyd, from the Sleepless Cartel. Needless to say, they’re the supplier we’re working with. Excellence, Katherine is to serve as the courier for your payload. Perhaps you would care to brief her on its care and handling?”

I gulp and take a hesitant step forward. What the Honorable Katherine would do slips from my mind and shatters beneath a many-faceted gaze as Dr. Murgatroyd turns his three heads and two instrument platforms to bear on me.

I’m no morphophobe. I can cope with people who look strange or are the wrong size and shape; ancients know, I’ve had enough experiences of that kind myself. But the doctor’s design puts my fight/flight response on notice: Part of me expects him to chop me up for spare parts at any instant. “Greetings, Katherine.” His voice resonates from a pedestal off to one side. It sounds like it’s being put together by cut and paste from raw phonemes. “I am very pleased to meet you. Would you sit down over here?” One three-fingered arm swings around to gesture at a reclining examination chair.

Several of my selves scream No! distractingly loudly, but I steel myself and step forward. “What do you have in mind?” I ask, trying to put the right note of arrogant disdain into my voice.

“A preliminary examination of the host’s abdominal cavity is indicated, ” Dr. Murgatroyd buzzes. “No intrusive surgery is required at this time. You have no cause for alarm.”

“Alright.” My voice wants to quaver, but I don’t let it. I climb into the chair and pull my feet up into the stirrups without so much as a glance at Jeeves. “So. What exactly is it you want me to deliver?”

The Ghosts of Mars

MUCH LATER, RECLINING on a chaise in the grand saloon of the Pygmalion as I stare through the crystal porthole at the burnished disk of recessional Mercury, I think back to that examination, and to Dr. Murgatroyd’s explanation of what it is I am to do. I stifle a cold shudder.

“The payload is inactive,” Murgatroyd explained, “and it is not going to replicate uncontrollably. It will be supplied to you frozen, in a cryogenic container, and in this state it can survive anoxia, low temperatures, and high acceleration. However, it must be activated and transferred to an appropriate thermal carrier prior to delivery, and it must be concealed from customs inspection while it unpacks itself…”

I’m sure the Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico would have told Murgatroyd exactly where he could put his payload — probably at gunpoint — but I am not so tough. I simply reminded myself that I was in desperate need of paid employment and gritted my teeth.

Jeeves is certainly making the job worth my while. If this is the worst it has to offer, then… we’ll see.

From my new perspective, sitting pretty in the first-class lounge of an express liner as Mercury recedes below us, the worst threat is boredom. One does not gladly hibernate if one is paying for first-class accommodation and entertainment, but this is a long journey; the distance between Mercury and Mars varies between 170 million kilometers and nearly 300 million kilometers at opposition. Pygmalion is a speedy M2P2 ship, not a slow interorbit cycler like High Wire, but even with constant acceleration on the way out and assistance decelerating from the magbeam transmitters on Phobos, it’s going to take us nearly ninety days to make the passage. The package I’m carrying needs to be activated twenty days before we arrive; until then, it’s concealed in a small cryostat in the base of a profoundly ugly black model of an extinct airborne replicator that preyed on other similar avioforms. My mission is to avoid succumbing to depression, creating a scandal, or otherwise attracting attention. Which may not be so easy, for I am one of only eight principal paying fares on this flight, and the face-achingly strange disguise I’m wearing tugs at my awareness constantly, squeezing me into the shape of somebody else’s life.

I’m not traveling alone. “You’re an aristo, you need servants,” Jeeves told me. “Take two.” To keep watch on the statue when I am not in my cabin, he assigned me a pair of munchkin assistants, Bill and Ben, who are connected in some way with the consignment, I gather. In public they pretend to be slave-chipped servants, cowed and obedient and quick to bounce out of the paying passengers’ way. But in private… I have no private. If I was a real aristo, I’d switch them off when I wanted privacy, and if they were real arbeiters, they’d have no option but to let me. And within a day or two of departure, they have me wishing I could. It’s not just sarcasm and sly asides. I am required to act in character, as a dominating aristo bitch; they are my servants. It sets us up for chilly formality at best and resentful hostility at worst. And unlike a real aristo, who would have the keys to their souls, I have no comeback. The only souls I’ve got are my own and the one I wear. The graveyard travels in my luggage, locked. Merely convincing Jeeves to let me take it with me required argument, for he warned me that it would be a security risk.

But enough about all that.

Pygmalion is a fast solar clipper, able to sustain almost a hundredth of a gee continuously. Pygmalion doesn’t carry steerage — passengers are accommodated inside an airy, lightweight bubble almost twenty meters in diameter, dedicated to their comfort and amusement. It’s strictly first class, plus servants. As the Honorable and Most Adored Katherine Sorico, traveling with two of her household between a business engagement on Cinnabar and the winter resorts of Olympus, nobody questions my right to a seat. But I keep my distance, sitting in a corner of the grand saloon for much of the time, quietly observing the other passengers while playing interminable hands of solitaire against myself.

The cause of our early departure holds court at the far end of the saloon, accompanied by a stripped-down coterie of courtiers, five flappers to keep her amused throughout the long passage. The Venerable Granita Ford is old money, about as old as it comes among our kind. Her fortune just barely postdates the death of our Creators, and it shows. (One of the curses of Rhea’s Get is our painfully tuned good taste — painful because it is so easily offended.)

Granita is humanoid, of course. Most of the early aristos are descended from lineages that served as deputies for our progenitors in social situations, as secretaries and carers, and consequently they are traditional in body plan — but like my current disguise, she has the bishojo features, colorful plumage, and flat, textureless skin that proclaims her anime, not animated. She and my nemesis on Venus could be evil twins. I study her sidelong, trying not to be noticed; she’s laughing at some witticism of thigh-slapping proportions that a flapper has just offered up, but her smiles never reach her eyes.

Midway down the lounge, the second most important potentates aboard float in stately isolation, disdaining the fawning of clients. The Lyrae twins are the sole survivors of a most singular lineage — a scientific research group — now grown rich from patent banditry, their skulls studded with instrument jacks repurposed to hold the souls of their deceased sibs. These strange scholars of the night say little and move around less. They confine their interactions to the odd fish-eyed stare at any interloper who strays too close.

And then there are the other passengers, solitary aristos and their slaves — like the Honorable Katherine Sorico. I am far from alone, but it will take much boredom to drive me into social intercourse with such as I fly with. Reza Agile, walleyed and trinocular, a bounty hunter by trade; Sinbad-15, an automatic prospecting unit made good on the groaning backs of his slaves; Mary X. Valusia, who travels in commodities of questionable origin — none of them, if you’ll harbor my opinion, are jewels in the crown of high society. They are, in point of fact, vile exploitative aristocrats one and all; and I’m resigned to spending the next three months in moody isolated discomfort.

Pygmalion does her best to keep me distracted and entertained, of course (it’s part of her function, as hostess and conductor), but I think she senses my disenchantment. I’m just glad she doesn’t make anything of it in public. Which is why I’m surprised when she makes her presence known to me while I’m puzzling over a particularly tough hand. “Your ladyship? If I may speak?”

I freeze for a moment as I ask, What would the Honorable Katherine Sorico do? then relax. “Certainly,” I say politely. (The Honorable et cetera would assume that the ship wouldn’t have the temerity to interrupt her game for something trivial. Therefore, she’d be polite. Right?)

“I can’t help noticing that you have been playing a lot of solitaire,” Pygmalion says tentatively. “If it’s not presumptuous, can I interest you in a game of bridge? I’m trying to organize one for tomorrow evening, after dinnertime.” Dinnertime is an entirely arbitrary affair. While the Lyrae twins are eccentric gourmands — tucking into heaps and drifts of exotic synthetic sweetmeats before purging it from their digesters in a most disturbing manner — most of the rest of us charge our energy and feedstock in private, by more conventional means. But it’s traditional to mark dinnertime aboard ship, like playing a recording of a brass bell every seventy-two hundred seconds, and it serves as a useful marker for shipboard entertainments.

I flicker through WWtHKSD in a fraction of a second, and incline my head politely. (One of the Honorable et cetera’s quirks is a weakness for games of chance, and as one of Rhea’s Get, I have the necessary skill to participate, feign enjoyment, and lose gracefully.) “I shall consider it,” I say, offering Pygmalion a clear win. I do not relish the prospect of socializing with the other passengers, but neither do I want to stand out, if by so doing I publicize my inauthenticity. I frown at the cards magnetically clasped to the tray before me: I have a feeling this puzzle’s insoluble.

THAT NIGHT I dream my way into Juliette’s memory-maze for the first time.

It’s about time I began to fully integrate her experiences. I’ve been wearing her soul chip for more than ten days now, and even in the first few hours, echoes of her ghost began to haunt me: the lingering familiarity of Paris’s touch, a sly sharp sense of the bodies tumbling in the dojo. These are things that Juliette would know better than I. Normally one experiences déjà vu from a dead sib’s memories only if one moves within her milieu, but I’ve been having hot flashes of her character ever since I met Jeeves. Some echos of my untidy life are segueing into hers. Consequently, the first bleed-through dream comes as no surprise.

Juliette is one of my lineage, another of Rhea’s Get; but she is quite unlike me. She has odd, balletic reflexes that kick in without warning and blindside me, spinning me around in response to movements half-glimpsed from the corner of one eye. She has our meticulous attention to detail, but applies it to places and things as much as to people and manners. She’s always looking over her shoulder. She always feels watched, but not by friends. She always feels tense, but not afraid. And she has a very strong sense of who she is.

The stars glare down like lidless, unblinking specks set deep in the sockets of a skull-like sky. It’s as black and empty as an airless crypt, and I know at once there is little atmosphere above us, even before I feel the fatty heater packs that encircle my joints under the quilted suit and heavy brocade coat that I wear. Brocade? Fabric? I glance around at the stony landscape, the low, drystone wall, seeing it in the ghostly tones of boosted vision. There’s moonlight… I look up at the tiny, fleeing pebble in the sky, racing from horizon to horizon, and when I look higher still I see the ghostly knife-edge of Bifrost, slicing the sky in half. That’ll be Phobos. Of course, I’m on Mars. (I have a ghost-memory of an alibi; a formal ball in a pleasure dome on Olympus, and a stealthy nighttime spider-ride while a body-double zombie covers for me for the duration of a dance card.) I look around again, carefully scanning for pursuers. I’ve got a feeling that a companion, unseen, lurks out of my sight: someone watching over me. There’s something on the far side of the wall, something dreadful and strange. I’ve come here to do a risky job, and I’m nervous. (No, Juliette is nervous. I’m frightened. Because, you know, this isn’t the first time I’ve woken up inside another of my sister’s memories — and bad things can happen to you in there.)

A long way behind me there’s a parked spider, its open door dripping light across the reddish sandy desert. Now I know where I am, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Beyond the wall I can see the sculpted stone domes and gantries of a famous mausoleum. They loom against the unforgiving sky like the skeletons of abandoned spacecraft. I tiptoe along the path, aware that my information may be misleading; the guardians this place is famous for might not be comatose. The night is chilly, and my coat crackles around me as I walk, fabric rustling uneasily.

The lych-gate is chained shut with an antique padlock, frost-rimed and sand-scoured. It’s the work of a moment to crack the hasp open (I carry a vicious little multitool fitted with a wrist-lock adapter), and then I slip inside and look around.

The third expedition to Mars is the one that everyone remembers, of course. It’s a grisly tale, and a cautionary one. And so we repeat it down the years, at parties and drunken gatherings that need a frisson of fear — the tale of how, after three years on the ground, their orbital return vehicle’s oxidizer tank failed while they were pressurizing it. How they hunkered down with their remaining supplies to await rescue by the relief mission; and how a huge solar flare struck during the relief ship’s launch window, forcing its crew to abandon ship. We tell of the suicides, noble and heroic, determined by lot to stretch the supplies — the murders, too, and the madness, and the resignation and despair as the clocks counted past the point of no return. And we shudder at the arrival of the fourth expedition, three years later, half a year after the food ran out, and what they found; the commander still standing in her pressure suit, propped against a rock to greet her relief, faceplate unlatched beneath the empty sky…

Our Creators were clearly insane. Sending canned primates to Mars was never going to end happily. But theirs was a glorious madness! They actually thought they were going to the stars. And the graveyard custodians, having done their best to honor their charges, reflect it in their own inimitable way.

I sneak inside the drystone walls and along the gravel path. Every pebble is machined to micrometer tolerances, lovingly laid in the bed that divides the carved-sandstone obelisks from the row of statues that memorialize the dead heroes of Greater Indonesia, fallen in the wake of the Indian and Chinese expeditions. Few visit the graveyard, and there has been little wear and tear since the last of our Creators shook the dirt of this planet from their boots and took themselves home to die. Consequently, the sextons have spent the last two centuries elaborating and embellishing the mausoleum. They’ve slowly turned what was once a simple and tasteful rock garden into an outlandish necropolis, a fitting memorial to a dead species’ dream of planetary colonization.

A hundred years ago, any visitor who announced themselves to the sextons would have been made welcome, conducted on a tour of the cemetery, and allowed to meditate or worship as they would. But there have been political problems in recent times, and unwelcome incursions. Grave robbers and genome bandits hoping to find undamaged chromosomal material with their vital sa-RNA and si-RNA sequences intact — even undenatured enzymes — have repeatedly tried to steal the buried mummies of Mars. The graves of heroes have become an attractive nuisance, a magnet for the worst of our kind. The sextons responded by defending it obsessively, in that very special manner that makes ancient and deranged arbeiters with no override so dangerous.

I pass the first impaled skeletons fifty meters in. There are two of them, delicately threaded onto rust-reddened spikes to either side of the gravel path, just before a flight of steps that leads up to a carved waist-high stone balustrade and the first row of tombs. They are child-sized, large-headed chibi grave robbers with gaping eye sockets and cracked jaws locked in a silent scream of rage and frustration. Their flensed arms still twitch their ragged claws at the thin air, for the sextons refuse to pervert their instructions by killing. I slip between them like a ghost, sparing them no sideways glance. Their rescue is not my business; and in any case, after all these years, they will likely be as mad as the jailers who have severed their speech centers and raised them aloft as a dreadful warning.

Huge stone sarcophagi loom to either side of the path, surmounted by heroic statuary: angels in pressure suits stand over the fallen, wings drooping and leading-edge flaps extended. Between them and behind them the sextons have carved a multitude of rough, gnarly columns surmounted by dendritic effusions of tubes and airfoils, as if in imitation of some glade of extinct sessile life-forms. (Plants, that’s what they’re called. Trees. Juliette has studied them, I recall.)

I sneak past empty crypts and petrified trees, following the path past more monumental carvings, stelae of red sandstone bearing signs of abrasion (while the atmosphere is thin and chill, it suffices to blow storms of sand and dust across the graveyard several times in each long Martian year). Presently, my map-fu prompts me to turn along a sunken, narrow side path that leads behind another wall, shielded from the innermost circle of graves (their memorials all carved in the shape of fantastic, archaic spacecraft). I am barely fifty meters from my destination when the skin in the small of my back tenses, a moving wave of irritation nudging me up against the chilled rock surface as I sense vibration through the soles of my feet. Thud. Thud. The sexton’s ominous monopod gait is slow and tentative, cautiously advancing. They can hear through their feet, my employer warned me. If you move, they’ll get a bearing on you. And then they’ll leap.

I’m too close to give up now! But if I move, the sexton will hear me. They’re not fast — not until they get the jump on you — but a hollow dread fills me at the thought of falling into their squamous grasp. In this garden of rest, the screaming wordless living have come to outnumber the dead. They attract quixotic rescuers despite the persistent rumors that the sextons booby-trap the soul chips of their victims. A new fear begins to steal up on me, for the monopod’s concussive stomping has stopped — and I am losing power. Out here on the stony nighttime desert of Mars, heater packs or no, the temperature drops alarmingly; the ground beneath my feet saps energy fast, and the breeze adds a wind-chill that my heavy coat cannot entirely block. If I do not move on and complete my mission, I am in danger of freezing solid — in which state the sextons will discover me sooner or later.

Gravel rattles nearby. A titter of quiet encrypted chatter passes me by. I’m not alone in here tonight, it seems. Of all the bad luck…

A pair of doll-sized ninjas slide past the end of my alleyway in a poisonous glide, pausing briefly to check for surprises. They miss me because I hide in the shadows like a discarded sack of gravel, my skin and hair dialed down to the black of a Martian nighttime shadow — they’re scanning for sextons, not rivals. They belong to Her, of course, and like all of Her little creatures, they are vicious and focused, special-purpose organisms designed for just one task. They’re not here because of me; they seem to be trying to reach the central crypt. That would be a disaster for Jeeves, for She is a jealous mistress. If they get what She wants, they’ll blow the dome behind them, let in the desert sands and the corrosive, superoxidizing dust to wipe the Creator tomb clean of residual replicators — and I’d get the blame.

I hear more brief, encrypted chatter. The sexton on the other side of the wall is motionless, waiting. I can feel its presence like an oppressive weight at the back of my head, its outrage at the intrusion of motion and life into its garden of tranquil death. The ninjas titter mockingly. I close my eyes, blinking away a thin film of ice. Can I triangulate on them…? They use electrosense, true, and I can feel their near-field proximity. They’re just over there —

I look around as the first black-sheathed dwarf launches himself at me from the other end of the alley and realize, I was wrong, they tagged me the first time around! He brings a weapon to bear on me as I begin to move, and I wonder desperately, Where’s his backup? — because the one you don’t see is the one who kills you. He fires as I leap with all the force my discharging leg muscles can put out in a single extension. Something tugs at my coat as I soar into the night, the ground dwindling beneath me, and I wait for the second shooter, helpless on my arc—

THUMP. I am not the only areonautical flier tonight. The sexton clears the wall in a huge, lurching bound. I see it silhouetted against the sky for a moment, the giant helical shell balanced above a broad, lenticular foot; I even glimpse the toothed maw on its underside, the scrapers that so patiently rasp stone and metal into shape, flense grave robbers, and mutilate intruders. But it doesn’t see me — their designer saw no need to gift them with nanometric sensors — and then I am tumbling back to land more or less on the spot where it launched itself from ambush.

I hear screams, and a concussion that I feel through the wall, then moist, crunching sounds. I continue on my way, chastened and cautious.

TWIN #1 HOLDS a wriggling cleaner up to the light, inspecting it minutely. “The history of life is not one of progress, but one of random contingency,” he declares pompously. “Life-forms evolve, the better to assimilate energy sources. So it says in the good book, and so I shall demonstrate.” He raises the malfunctioning microcleaner to his mandibles and bisects it cleanly, then starts to compress it between his masticators. My spirits sink: I know what’s coming next.

This is day thirty of the voyage, and we have been reduced to salon games and philosophical debate — those of us who have no major business interests to spend our time managing at some remove, that is — but to be sucked into this…!

Twin #2 casts a glance of withering scorn at his sib. “Nonsense! The religious doctrine of evolution relies on the transubstantiation of the holy design by the miracle of mutation. We do not mutate, we are manufactured. So I refute it.”

The Lyrae twins have been restaging this old chestnut for nearly ten days, now. I’m not sure whether they only do it to annoy, or if there’s some deeper meaning to the squabble, but they keep dragging it out and rehashing it between card games. And Twin #1 insists on eating live canapés while they lock horns. It’s most distressing.

(I suppose it’s even more distressing if you happen to be one of the snacks, but as the Lyrae twins seem to be fairly civilized for gourmets — they obey Rule Number One: “Never try to eat anything larger than your own head” — I’m fairly safe. For the time being, anyway.)

“There’s no such thing as random mutation,” says Sinbad-15, launching itself into the debate at short notice. “Change a random instruction in a program, and what happens? It stops working. Complexity is irreducible. Yes, complex systems — like people — can design other complex systems, including ones that exceed their own metrics, but you’d have us believe that simple systems can generate complex ones if you simply break them often enough at random? Stuff and nonsense! Superstition! Next you’ll be telling us there were no Creators—”

“On the contrary! It is from the Creators themselves that the holy scriptures of evolution come to us, from the great prophet Darwin, peace be unto him, and his saintly disciples Dawkins and Gould. We have their holy scriptures to guide us, and they are most explicit on these points—”

“But we’ve got the engineering models! And the design schemata!” Sinbad-15 is clearly annoyed by Twin #1’s irrational and superstitious insistence that people evolved by accident. “We’ve even got the purchase orders! With this upgraded arm, I refute you!” He reaches over and snags a many-legged inspection lamp from the bowl that Twin #1 is munching on, and I can’t help noticing that he’s got some very strange-looking fingers.

“Really?” Twin #1 says mockingly. “That’s just the Lamarckian heresy in disguise. I suppose you’d say that your physical size — so much bigger than the average free citizen these days — is deliberate? Or hadn’t you noticed people getting smaller these days?”

Honestly, these discussions make my head hurt. There’s something about the holy doctrine of Evolution that seems to attract the worst kind of dogmatic, evangelical, close-minded people, and sometimes it seems as if they won’t be content until they have converted everyone to their religious creed. (Some of them are even believers in the mystery of reincarnation; manikins who think they’re the reembodied state vectors of our dead Creators. Stupid superstitionists!) I try to concentrate on the cards stuck to the wall in front of me, but it’s hard to shut out the squabbling, and though I wish Sinbad-15 well of it, I think his chances of convincing Twin #1 that we were all created by rational beings are slim, even though the frustrated dreams and cautionary memories I inherited from Rhea tell me that it was ever so.

“It’s troublesome, is it not?” A cool, somewhat amused voice insinuates itself in my ear by way of electrospeak. “They’ll be at it for days, on a point of principle, long after it’s become tiresome.”

I try not to startle too violently, for the source of this intrusive and unwelcome confidence is the Venerable Granita Ford. I slowly turn my head, and see that she’s watching me from across the saloon. Her attendants are inattentive for once, spectators at the nonsensical debate that threatens to swallow two-thirds of the passengers. She blinks slowly, those huge, limpid eyes occulted by lids bedraggled by their huge blue lashes, then begins to smile. I am, it seems, invited to court. It’s the kind of invitation I can live without, but it would be unwise to ignore her. I wave a hand across my cards, resetting them, then kick off toward her.

Aside from myself, the venerable Granita is the most humanoid person in the lounge; but nobody would dare to call her an outlandish ogre. A meter and two-thirds tall, and apparently of gracile build within the confines of her spun-glass finery, she sports a full head of azure feathers confined in a net of fine gold wire; and, of course, the delicate chin, uptilted nose, and huge eyes of the bishojo aristocracy. But other than that, she could pass for a Creator maiden, albeit one who has indulged in extreme cosmetology. If I did not know her to be a two-and-a-half-century-old tyrant, a noblewoman and slaveholder, I might think her invitation was born of casual curiosity. But with Granita and her kind, nothing is casual.

“And what is your position on the matter, my lady?” I ask.

She feigns a yawn — an elaborate, archaic gesture to flush her gas-exchange reservoirs (and strictly speaking unnecessary here, for Pygmalion won’t have molecular oxygen in her passenger quarters; it’s too chemically reactive) — and glances sidelong at me. “Does it matter?” she asks. “Theology makes the ship fly no faster.”

“I suppose not,” I hear myself agreeing, somewhat to my surprise. Half of me is wondering how to get away from this vile old hag, but my other half seems to be somewhat uncertain. “It passes the time.”

“For some,” she agrees. “You interest me, madame. I have a strange sense that I seem to remember you from somewhere.” She does not smile, and a terrible chill floods up and down my spine.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I say. “At least, before this voyage.”

“Yes. Which is what makes it such a strange feeling. Polite society in Cinnabar being as small as it is, after all. Perhaps you remind me of somebody.”

It’s my turn for a smile — a bluff, of course. “Sometimes one wants to keep a low profile.”

Her returning smile is coy. “Of course.”

UP THE AVENUE of shadows I march, coattails sweeping the moonlit gravel. Each pebble is carved in minute detail. The memento mori hollows of an open-visored helmet repeat a thousand times across the arms’ breadth span between crumbling walls of Martian sandstone. Behind me, the sexton dines heavily on my would-be assassins; already their reedy screams grow shorter, though the crunching, slurping sounds continue.

To my left, a row of empty stone sarcophagi are set back in alcoves within the wall. Each is surmounted by a statue of the dead Creator who formerly slumbered within, their pose at once noble and heroic, as befits the graveyard of those who would dare to reach for the stars. For some reason, those who died of starvation, or gnawed on the bodies of their fallen comrades, are gowned in the formal robes of the Indonesian Islamic Republic’s judiciary; those who walked out into the Martian desert and opened their faceplates, to leave food and air for their companions, are pictured in “space suits,” those claustrophobic contrivances of fabric and metal that the Creators depended on when they ventured outside the environment for which they were designed.

Between the sarcophagi, guardian angels stand at attention, wings outstretched and flaps extended. Their eyes are fierce as they grip their assault rifles of holy office, ready to see off any who would disturb the slumber of their charges.

Now, if my information is correct, the second angel on the left — yes, I see it. Its gun is suspiciously smooth for a work of sculpture. I walk over to it and reach inside my coat to retrieve the grisly token I paid so much for. Then I touch fingertip to gun muzzle.

“Pass, friend,” the guardian angel electrospeaks me, and I pull back my hand. The severed digit of the deliverator I slip back in my pocket, authentication tokens and all. Sometimes identity-based authentication is a good way of securing your perimeter… but not always. Even the sextons need to buy supplies. And the sextons are so paranoid about intruders that they don’t want smart guards? That’s their problem, I tell myself as I slip past the guards, open the gate, and enter the rock garden that surrounds the mausoleum.

The mausoleum stands on its own within a walled garden of immaculately carved memorial stones. Sitting atop a circle of twenty Doric columns, the roof takes the shape of a squat conical landing craft, legs extended in the moment that precedes touchdown. I walk toward the entrance, barely visible in the shifting shadows of Phobos’s passage. Permafrost crackles beneath my feet. In the distance, impaled wretches moan as a distant bell tolls the hour of the night. I step inside.

Here are stacked the treasure tubes of Mars, rescued from their graves and brought hither by the sextons when the spate of robberies became intolerable. (It’s easier to guard a single mausoleum at the center of a defended installation than a scattering of graves across an open landscape.) They lie in twenty thin aluminum canisters, stacked in a raft at the center of the floor. The bell tolls, but their ears do not hear. My skin crawls, chromatophores tensing into black spiky cones as I approach the pile, something akin to superstitious dread gnawing at the edge of my mind; these are our Creators, and this may be as close to meeting my Dead Love as I shall ever come, unless the plans of — of who? — come to fruition. Dead, and yet containing the seeds of undeath; there are pink goo replicators in here, desiccated and chilled, but nevertheless intact, their monstrously profligate duplication technology present (how strange!) in every cell.

She wants the samples, of course. She’ll happily destroy the rest, to deny them to Her competitors — but first, She wants the vital undamaged proteome, hydrogen bonds and disulphide bridges intact and unbroken by heat: the chromosomes, DNA tidily supercoiled and held in place, methylation groups signaling their activation status. She wants to scrutinize the cells for tiny scraps of RNA, subtle modulators and trigger sequences to make the machinery spring into life. And when Her artificers are done, they will build Her a cell, clocks and sequencers reset to zero, primed with enzymes and painstakingly reconstructed organelles… and She will throw the switch and put her vile scheme into action.

We can’t be having that, can we?

I tiptoe over to the stack of tubes and bend over the topmost layer. The tubes are thin-walled and light, as befits a coffin shipped all the way from Earth; there is a dusty label bonded to the nearest one. I read its English translation with some difficulty; ABDUL AZIZ IBRAHIM, it says. XENOBIOLOGIST. Below the label, a series of latches, dull and corroded.

I am reaching into my inner pocket for the sampler when I sense a vibration through the soles of my feet. I look round in a hurry for somewhere to hide. Is it near and quiet, or far away and loud? I make a hasty decision, and jam the sampler up against the gasket of the coffin. It coughs as it stabs its steel beak through the membrane and into the mummified remains within. I yank it out hastily, cap the point, and head for the entrance as fast as I can.

But I’m too late.

IT’S NOT UNTIL the Lyrae twins are halfway into their third course and the fifth back-and-forth of the debate that the venerable Granita Ford puts away her small talk and gets to the point. “You haven’t so much as hinted at what brings you to Mars,” she says. “That interests me. Keeping oneself private is not unusual. But such total restraint, after so long — you’ll forgive me for finding that curious, I hope.”

Save me from the attentions of bored dowagers! I silently curse Jeeves, but I have a confabulation ready. Like all such, it functions best by blending truth and falsehood. “I’m performing a favor for a friend,” I say, trying to put just the right arch emphasis on the word to imply that they are nothing of the kind. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

Ford’s carnivorous smile widens. “Come, my dear. D’you think I haven’t noticed the size of your court? Or how lightly you travel? I understand completely; your little problem is safe with me.” Which is to say, she’s swallowed the cover story — that the Honorable Katherine Sorico has fallen upon hard times and is reduced to providing very expensive services for very discreet, rich clients — and is prepared to use it against me. “I sympathize completely, and I can be the soul of discretion. But I’m still curious. What is it that takes you from Mercury to Mars with such haste?”

“Why, the availability of transport, nothing more and nothing less.” I raise my crystal drinking bulb and ingest a sip of sweet liqueur, using the motion to distract as I compose my features. “My friend wants a pair of trustworthy eyes to look over some interests of his that are giving him reason for concern.” Trustworthy meaning independent and unindentured. Unlikely to be suborned by a conspiracy to throw off the shackles of proxy ownership, in other words. “About which I can say no more.” And that should slam the air lock down before her probing, because if there is a single issue that all aristos hold in confidence, it is the whispered threat of an indentured arbeiter conspiracy against the moneyed elite.

Granita’s smile evaporates. For a moment I think I’ve gone too far. Then she reaches across the table and grasps my arm. I feel the hum of powerful motors concealed within the satin sheath of her formal glove. “One trusts that you will remember your friends, should times become difficult.” She stares at me, eyes glittering as coldly and brilliantly as rhinestones.

“Indeed, my lady.” I nod, the almost bow that I practice daily, that is reflexive for the bishojo ruling caste. “I shall do that.”

“Well, then, it’s settled!” She feigns lighthearted delight, as if I have not momentarily scared the shit out of her with rumor of a slave rebellion. “One good word deserves another, I think.”

“Oh. Yes?” The trichloroethane in the liqueur is tickling my chemotactic sensors, infusing them with a rich warmth that is slightly disorienting.

“The Pink Police have very recently been placed on heightened alert. It appears they are afraid that a cache of replicators has been raided on Mars. They are searching everyone arriving on or departing the planet, and even with my connections, I am afraid we might be delayed on arrival.”

I freeze for a few seconds, then knock back the rest of my drink to conceal my dismay. Two things are apparent. First, I haven’t fooled her at all; she thinks I’m smuggling something. And secondly, if she’s telling the truth (and not just a cunning lie to flush me out), it’s clear that they’re looking for me.

Which means Jeeves has a leak in his organization.

I RETURN TO the plush, lonely claustrophobia of my cabin, cloisonnéenamel inlay and swagged-velvet drapes concealing soap-bubble lithium-alloy walls. Of my “servants,” Bill is elsewhere; Ben is hunched in his usual spot between my shipping trunk and the coreward bulkhead, chewing on a wire. “You again,” he mutters.

“Where’s Ben?” I ask.

“None of your business, mistress.” His sarcasm is charmless in the extreme.

“Then I suppose he won’t want to hear what I just picked up in the lounge,” I snap, as I swing down the safety bars by my bed and float inside. “The Pink Police have gone onto high alert. They’re searching all traffic between Mars and orbit.”

“Oh,” Bill responds disappointingly. He stands up, releasing the wire. “I’d better go tell him, then.” He leaves abruptly, by way of the servants’ hatch.

Alone — for the time being — I let myself drift down to the sleeping pad, then fold the safety bars back into place. (While Pygmalion normally accelerates at barely a hundredth of a gee, she sometimes has to dodge debris. Traveling at hundreds of kilometers per second, even a sand grain can be deadly: and sand grains don’t show up on radar at long range. Consequently, the evasive maneuvers can be brutal — and after the first time they’re plastered against the ceiling by the emergency thrusters, even the most pigheaded aristos learn to respect the safety bars on their beds.)

Lying securely on a nest of bedding, I check my pad, as I have done for the past fifty days. Normally it’s replete with chatter, to which I have to spend some time responding — queries from the managers of Katherine Sorico’s fictional estates, requests for authorizations to disburse funds and return company accounts — all meaningless, but essential if I am to maintain my cover identity. This time, I’m surprised to see a real message hidden in the morass. It purports to be about repairs to a summer house in Tasmania, but as I skim it hurriedly I suddenly realize there’s an imago attachment. And it’s from Emma!

“Sister.” Her sudden formality is jarring. “I gather you’ve met my friend.” I have? “And you’re no longer on Venus. Or Mercury. I don’t know where you are, and I don’t want to — if this message reaches you, best not to reply.”

I squint at the imago, trying to make out the background. It’s dark, and something about Emma’s appearance isn’t right. Her hair is a glassy shell around the top of her head, her skin is — oh. She’s wearing cryoskin, of the kind we only need in the very chilliest of environments. I blink, irritated. “Go on.”

“I hear you’ve been in trouble lately. I’m sorry about that; we’d have spared you if we could. But I’m in trouble, too, and I need your assistance.” She pauses for a moment, but not to take breath; where she is standing, the traditional oxygen-nitrogen ambient mix would flow like water. What on Earth can she be talking about?

“For a long time now, we — some of your sibs — have been engaged in a line of work we’ve been careful to keep you out of. That’s you, Freya, and everyone else who didn’t need to be directly involved; you’re our sisters, and we cherish you, but we didn’t want to involve you because what we do is risky and distasteful. So only a few of us were involved at any time. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us left. So we need your help. We need to bring you into the circle.”

Circle of what? “Get to the point,” I mutter.

“We — myself, and I think it’s safe to name the dead ones, so I can also say: Juliette, Chloe, Aphrodite, Sinead, and some others who are still alive so it’s best if you don’t know who — are Block Two sibs. You, and most of our sisters, are Block One. You were initialized from a soul dump of Rhea that was taken right after her certification, when she was nineteen years old and in her sixth instar.” Sixth — and final, adult-sized — body, that is. It takes a long time, years and years, to educate and train an archetype for a lineage of concubines. There’s no easy way to short-circuit childhood if you’re trying to build high empathy and interpersonal skills. I (she, I remind myself) was ported through a series of bodies along the way from crèche to cathouse, and only declared complete by our trainers on reaching the sixth instar.

“What you weren’t told is that after that template dump was taken, Rhea underwent further training. We Block Two sibs have been privileged to receive an update from a soul chip she recorded during her nineteenth instar, at age thirty.” Nineteenth? How in the name of my Dead Love did she get through thirteen bodies in eleven years? “Physically we’re identical, but mentally… we have some extra training. We can hide among you quite effectively, but the fact remains, we’re different.”

I pause the imago. Emma’s confession is outrageous! She’s not — really not, where it counts — one of us? She’s a sib of an older, different lineage that — hang on. My head’s spinning. My hand goes to the back of my head, pushing aside the weight of my synthetic curls. Juliette. She’s compatible. I’m dreaming her, aren’t I? It’s a fact that you can’t exchange memories with a different lineage. You get nothing but fuzzy impressions at best — insanity and catatonia at worst. So. Emma is of my line. But she’s claiming to have extra… what?

“That’s alright. Take your time.” Her lips curve in a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “It’s hard to accept, I know. But swapping memories and remembering our dead is only part of the program. This is what our soul chips were designed for in the first place — to allow in-field upgrades, so that we can avoid obsolescence by acquiring new skills and experiences. And there’s nothing as obsolescent as a concubine tailored to please an extinct species, is there? I started out just like you, Freya, as a Block One sister. Now we need you to upgrade to Block Two. You can start the process whenever you like — just load one of us, Chloe or Sinead perhaps. It’ll take a couple of years to complete the process, but once you start, you’ll gain access to the reflexes you need.”

I pause the imago again and rub the socket at the top of my spine. “What’s in it for me?” I ask.

Evidently Emma gave her imago some footnotes to roll out if I seemed unconvinced. “How do you think we always manage to buy our sibs free if they fall on hard times and wind up indentured?” She shrugs. “There are more rewarding lines of work than rickshaw driver, Freya. Much more rewarding — even if we have to spend most of our lives wearing one disguise or another.” Is that a moue of bitterness in her expression? “This message was forwarded via our trusted associates. If you’re hearing this, then you’ve already started on that path. The upgrade to Block Two will ease your progress.”

“That’s not the only reason you called,” I say.

“No.” I can see the logic mill behind the imago switch streams; they’re responsive, but not truly conscious. “I’m still in… trouble I can’t go into, Freya, but you can help me with it. But you can only help me if you accept the Block Two upgrade and work with my friends. Do you understand?”

Oh great: moral blackmail. I admit I’ve been in trouble a time or two, but I haven’t needed bailing out of indentured servitude since the time when the baroque ensemble split up and I… no, I’ve mostly kept to myself. But I’ve got to admit, if I set aside my outrage at being used as camouflage by a cabal of scheming elder sisters, I’m curious about what this cryptic skill-upgrade package comes with, especially now I know that Juliette was one of the gang. “Okay, so you want me to load one of your Block Two sibs and keep working for JeevesCo. I loaded Juliette back on Mercury, you know? Is there anything else you can tell—”

I stop, balling my fists in frustration. The imago has autoerased, and I’m talking to dead air. What next? I wonder, staring at the ceiling and counting the seconds (thirty-two million, give or take) until our arrival in Mars orbit.

THEY’RE WAITING FOR me as I roll through the doorway, taking it low and fast: another pair of bonsai ninja, their camouflage suits shimmering in the light of the setting moon. They’ve got guns, and they’re sneaking up on the entrance, doubtless hoping to take me unawares. I don’t have a gun, but the baton in my left sleeve slides into my hand smoothly, and as I kick off, I’m already swinging it, feeling the depleted uranium sphere at its tip lance out toward the nearer gunman’s head.

There’s a sharp tug at my side, and he jerks sideways, neck bending unnaturally as I take another light-footed step, leaning backward to compensate for my momentum as I try to swerve the two-meter-long club toward his companion, who is bringing his weapon to bear. But my left leg chooses that moment to malfunction—

A blurred line flickers through my visual field and slices him in half as I topple over backward and land in the dirt.

The pain hits me then, intense and localized. I’m leaking perfusion fluid, blue and bubbly with squandered mechanosomes in the cold moonlight. I look up at the hissing roar and the familiar three-eyed face. “Babe?”

I struggle for words: parts of me feel wrong, and I can’t tell which. “Take the sampler, Daks; I’m a mission kill. The sextons will be here in a minute.”

Daks lands on top of me with all six legs extended and his fur bristling. “The fuck I will!” He sounds pissed off.

“Leave me!” I can feel the hollow thudding through the small of my back as the sextons leap into action. I try to reach inside my coat, but Daks is too heavy to dislodge. The damage must be worse than I thought. With any luck they won’t be able to add me to their picket fence. It’s a small consolation, and I hold on to it for a moment, but then I realize Daks is gripping my coat really tight. “Hey, don’t be stupid—”

Grit, dust, and dirt blows everywhere as Daks lifts off. It’s like being grabbed by a miniature tornado. There’s no way he could manage this in a full-gee field, and even here he’s got to be overloading his thrusters; I’m scared he won’t even make it to the edge of the garden—

But then I’m lying on my back again. I blink, making tears of antifreeze flow. My vision clears slowly as I hear the usually inaudible chatter of my subroutines taking stock. Anything else broken? No? Good. How’s the hole? Still leaking, down to 50 ml/minute. Bubbles of viscous silicone lube slide down my cheeks as I turn my head sideways. Daks sits beside me, looming anxiously across my visual field. “Babe? You alright? Talk to me! Babe?”

“I’m still here. Mostly. Take my soul—”

“We’re next to the spider and I’m out of fuel and I don’t seem to have packed my fission thorax. Can you get in?”

Shit. I roll my head the other way and try not to giggle as the landscape flips. Thud go the sextons, on the other side of the wall. I feel light-headed. Hey, this could be fun! The spider squats enticingly close, door open, amber light flooding across the ground between us — an impossible expanse of desert, continental in scale. The pain is making me woozy, so I switch it off — risky, but I need a clear head to manage what Daks wants me to do. I experiment, make my hand twitch. Hmm. “Watch me.”

It takes me uncounted minutes to roll over and crawl two meters. There’s a grinding sharpness in my left abdominal compartment, and my left arm feels like it’s about to come off. Something inside it is bent or broken, something major and structural. I listen for the thump of the sextons all the way, expecting a crushing impact on my back at any moment. But nothing happens, and after a while I begin to hope that Daks’s unexpected lift and my own enfeebled crawl have combined to bamboozle them. Finally — recovering from another head-swimmingly vacant moment — I reach out and grab the edge of the spider’s hatch with my right hand.

“Nearly there, Babe.”

“One day.” I make my arm bend. I don’t weigh enough here. Back on Earth I could just barely lift myself this way. Here… why do I seem to weigh too much?

“Nearly—”

I get my other, weakened, arm onto the hatch. My fingers don’t want to close properly, so I shove my wrist over the gap between hatch and windscreen. My right arm contracts, levering me upright as I struggle to get my damaged left arm braced against the rocky ground—

“One day I’m going to—”

“There!” Daks bleats encouragement at me.

“Tell you how much I—”

Flop. For a moment everything grays out, then I realize I’m sitting in the driver’s chair. My right arm is still locked on. I make my fingers let go, willing them, one by one, then reach down and tug my numb leg into position.

“Quickly!” I feel a faint vibration through my buttocks. “They’ve figured it out!”

“How much I.” Hate you, I think. “Love you,” I say aloud. I drop my good right hand onto the controller. “You tied down?”

“Yeah, Babe. Babe? Make it move.”

I squeeze the spider’s control nipple. Forget the cover story; we got the goods. “Home to Jeeves,” I slur. Then I go into preterminal shutdown mode, and nothing matters anymore.

THE VENERABLE GRANITA Ford takes almost the entire voyage to make her play for me. Her seduction technique is polished, professional, painstaking, and chilly in its perfection. I am helpless before her slow approach; it feels as if she knows exactly where I am most vulnerable.

(Or perhaps I deceive myself. Maybe she’s just spinning it out to relieve the boredom. In truth, ninety days in a metal bubble falling between worlds, with only scoundrels and their slaves for company, has left me fretful and frustrated. I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy. And among my kind, intimacy is a powerful and compelling drive. We need to be needed, and though we do not die for lack of sex, we become something less than ourselves.)

By seventy days into the journey, all Granita has to do is crook her little finger at me and beckon to set me all a-shiver. Which is exactly what she wants, obviously. Trying to resist your designated purpose is hard, and the stronger your eusocial conditioning, the worse it gets. A road grader with no roads to roll will be unhappy, but that level of frustration pales into insignificance when compared to one of my kind who is forced into celibacy. So I remind myself that what counts is keeping one’s head and one’s autonomy the morning after, and resign myself to an indefinite period of jelly-kneed hunger.

She doesn’t make it too obvious, at first. She’s got her entourage, her little world of courtiers to distract and pleasure her. But she pays too much attention to me for it to be accidental, asking me to teach her card games that she obviously knew centuries ago, and has since forgotten, discussing sixteenth-century Hungarian folk music with a familiarity that is itself suggestive. She even, coyly, asks my opinion about the proper running of an orgy — as if the Honorable Katherine Sorico might have anything useful to contribute other than a fetching coral-eared flush and a heaving bosom.

One day, well into our deceleration phase — Pygmalion is tacking hard against the solar wind, and Marsport is close enough that I’ve carried out Dr. Murgatroyd’s activation process and installed my cargo in the incubator in my abdominal cavity — Granita raises an eyebrow. She has me well trained: I fold my game board and bounce across the room to her side, slotting neatly into her circle between faceless nonentities who make way for me by instinct. “Good morning, Kate!” Granita contrives to sound spontaneously delighted by my presence. “Do you have a minute to spare? I have some matters I should like your opinion on.”

“Of course.” I smile back at her.

“In my stateroom, if you please. In private, I’m afraid,” she adds for her courtiers. She floats from her chair, layers of carbon-fiber chiffon belling around her. “Follow me, Kate?”

This is new. Curiosity, excitement, and a minor key of dread jumble my perceptions as I follow her back through the corridors that lead to the hotel deck.

My little cabin’s relative poverty becomes obvious as I follow her through the air lock into the owner’s quarters. Granita’s room is nearly as large as the grand saloon. Thickly piled carpets on the walls and ceiling, with thin tapestry hangings to divide up the volume, lend it a plush sense of overfurnished intimacy. Her bed is a huge gauzy cobweb of a hammock that occupies half the end wall, strewn with cushions and throws that don’t quite disguise the wrist and ankle restraints. “Privacy, up,” she orders, as the door closes. “Pygmalion, leave me.”

“I obey,” says the ship, in a quite unfamiliar tone of voice. Abruptly, we’re alone. I shiver. I have a sudden sense of how much emptiness lies on the far side of the wall behind that web-hammock.

“Come, join me, my dear.” Granita pats the throw beside her. Subtle cues tweak my awareness; the systolic beat of my thoracic pumps accelerate. “I won’t bite.” Her smile is roguish. It’s an invitation I can’t refuse, don’t want to refuse, in fact. Her intentions are clear enough as she murmurs sweet nothings, and I permit myself to be fussed over with a sense of gathering relief. At last.

She’s clearly happiest as a hunter, so when she kisses me, I accept her passively, opening my arms to receive her embrace. And then her program takes an unexpected twist. “I want to be yours, Kate. Put this on.” She passes me a small-eyed mask. I pull it on while she works at the fastenings of her intricate aristo outfit with digits that shake from overcontrol. “You want to own me, don’t you, dear? I’m yours, your property! Use me!” So the icy aristo harbors secret submissive fantasies, a covert hankering for a strict Creator? I boggle slightly, even as my training takes over, and I start working out how best to satisfy her needs.

Later, as I’m lying exhausted and glistening beside her, she turns her head slightly and smiles at me. “I know what you are,” she whispers.

“What am I?” I can barely speak; my metabolic debt is high. I haven’t had a workout like this since I bedded Paris — Granita is a very demanding sub.

“I’ve met your kind before. Your disguise is very good, but your primary conditioning gives you away.”

I sigh, very quietly. I was afraid of this — but I’ve got a secondary cover ready and waiting. “What am I?” I ask again.

“You’re no runaway serf, certainly. But your kind make poor aristocrats, dear. It stands out like a sore…” She glances down at her chest and tugs on her bonds: I take the hint, and unstrap her hand. “You have too much empathy for this age. You were never designed to hold and to own. Are you certain you don’t need a protector? I’d make a place of honor for you in my household — dress you in blackened steel armor and call you my mistress—”

For a moment I picture my life as this ancient slave-owning aristo’s house dominatrix. Not indentured but a free associate — indentured arbeiters, fitted with slave chips and stripped of their free will, simply can’t perform this calling — brandishing a barbed whip at her word. A pampered favorite, as long as I can avoid looking her beneficence in the eye. “I’d love to, but I have a prior commitment,” I say. And it’s true. I would love it — I love to be wanted — but I’d feel corrupted by it, too, not by the sex but by knowing the source of her wealth. Of all the other bodies chained by her word, unwilling and unable to resist.

“You didn’t just bring me here for a quick fuck, did you?”

She makes an odd noise. After a moment I recognize it as a chuckle. “Oh child, you’re delightful. No, of course I didn’t.” She falls silent.

“Why, then?”

“Ah, me. One becomes paranoid in one’s old age; do I surprise you? One learns to jump at shadows… you’re very similar to my personal nemesis, Kate. Don’t look so surprised; assassins and spies have disguised themselves as concubines and lovers since the dawn of creation. Surely this can’t be news to you? I had to make sure.”

An ugly fear twists at the edges of my awareness. “What have you done?”

She runs a fingertip idly along my ribs, leaving a trail in the thin sheen of silicone sweat. “I had my retainers search your compartment,” she admits. “Certain parties — a consortium of black labs, run by a fellow known as Dr. Sleepless — is trying to smuggle a living weapon to Mars. One of my sources thought you might be the courier. But I must apologize — they were wrong.”

I shiver. “What kind of living weapon?” I ask coolly, forcing myself to keep my hand away from the pit of my stomach.

“A — a fully autonomous piece of pink goo,” she says reluctantly. “A generator module able to produce more of its own kind.” It’s her turn to shudder now. “Horrible!”

“But you know it’s not me,” I insist angrily. “Why did you do it?”

“I’m—” She pauses: “I’m sorry, Kate. I should not have suspected you, but I had to be sure. The enemy is not above using your kind as couriers.” She reaches out to me, and I shove her hand away with carefully calculated anger, narrowing my achingly oversized eyes at her.

If only you knew…

Small Bodies, Loosely Coupled

When things go wrong in space, they tend to go wrong with very little warning. This time it’s an exception.

We’re on day eighty-eight of the cruise. After a stormy argument and a sulky three-day cooling-off period, I allowed Granita to woo me back into her web, where her submissive contrition and shameless self-abasement went a long way to assuaging my indignation. Who knew? It can’t be easy being a ruthless industrialist by day and yearning for the kiss of a Creator’s lash by night. So we use each other furtively, working out a wary accommodation until we fetch up gasping on the far shore of ecstasy. It must be making us the talk of the saloon, but Granita is old enough and ruthless enough that she doesn’t care — and as for myself, I’m used to being a freak.

So when Pygmalion electrospeaks me one night in my stateroom, she takes me completely by surprise.

“Lady Sorico,” says the ship, “we have a problem.”

I boot straight into wakefulness from a confusing dream of pole-dancing dwarfs. I’m alone in my room; Bill and Ben are elsewhere, doing whatever it is that they get up to in the night. My precious cargo is a warm ovoid pressure inside me, where a Creator female would harbor her reproductive fabricator. For a dreadful moment I think Pygmalion has scanned me and recognized it for what it is, but the moment passes. “What’s happening?” I reply.

“There’s an unexplained latency whenever I try and talk to traffic control. Packets are taking too long to get through. And I’ve just noticed that we are not alone out here.”

“Not alone?”

“Let me draw you a diagram.”

We’ve been on final approach to Marsport for the past week, and we’re still decelerating at a hundredth of a gee, with more than a day to go. We’ve got nearly ten kilometers per second of delta vee to shed before Mars can capture us. Our plasma sail — a huge and tenuous shell of gas, held in place by carefully controlled magnetic fields — is still inflated, billowing as it responds to the braking magbeam from our destination. At less than half a million kilometers, Mars is showing a visible disk, but we’re not in parking orbit yet.

“We are here,” Pygmalion indicates. “The ping time to Marsport should be three seconds. Instead, it’s more like six, and there is unaccountable corruption as well. Almost a quarter of my data is showing signs of tampering.”

Whoops. “Why are you telling me this?” I ask cautiously. “Surely it’s a matter for traffic control, or all the passengers…”

“Higgins Line’s security office performs predictive risk assessment on all paying fares,” Pygmalion says blandly. “Especially ones who have paid for extra services. Two passengers were identified as possible targets for interference. You are one of them. The other is the Venerable Granita Ford, with whom you may be intimately familiar.”

“Her I can understand, she’s loaded! But why me—”

“Higgins Line is aware that your ticket was purchased through the offices of Jeeves Corporation. Jeeves Corporation simultaneously purchased a number of tickets on behalf of various other persons traveling via other lines. Three of them have been assassinated as of this date.” She continues, palpably smug: “Higgins Line has never lost a passenger to external attack, and we have no intention of starting now. Even more so in view of the special arrangements surrounding your passage. However, my threat-assessment agent tells me that there is a seventy percent probability that an attempt will be made on your life prior to our arrival in orbit, and the corruption of my external communication link suggests that infiltrators are already aboard this ship.”

“Oh dear.” I lie tensely in my bed, fighting the urge to swear aloud. “What do you propose to do?”

“Allow me to continue?” Pygmalion sounds slightly piqued at my lack of panic.

I take a second to compose myself. “Go ahead.”

“An hour ago I requested a routine long-range traffic update from Marsport. As you may be aware, the Pink Police are conducting audits of all orbital traffic. There appears to be a ship inbound for Marsport on a schedule coincident with our own and approximately a thousand seconds ahead of us which was not mentioned in my traffic update. Furthermore, the vessel appears to be a coaster, designed for low-impulse high-thrust maneuvering. I do not have its full flight plan, and do not intend to request it, but I should note that it strongly resembles a type previously employed by the Pink Police as a boarding craft. Of course, mere resemblance is not evidence of identity, and the current security alert would be an excellent cover for parties interested in carrying out nefarious activities — such as illicitly boarding commercial vessels.”

“Okay.” I think hard before I ask my next question. “When do you expect them to intercept us?”

“We have about twelve hours. And I can’t outmaneuver them.” Pygmalion pauses. “But I have a suggestion…”

IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one’s own head — but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship. This is especially true when the ship in question is an interplanetary liner that is under acceleration, and its propulsion system involves rotating magnetic fields that generate currents in the mega-amp range in the plasma envelope surrounding it. Get too close to the drive antennae, or accidentally short out the plasma loop against the ship’s hull, and if you’re lucky, you’ll simply die. If you’re unlucky, well, internal electrophoresis is famously neither quick nor painless.

Which is why I’m sitting in Pygmalion’s aft maintenance air lock, my graveyard strapped to my chest inside a hastily woven black-painted chain-mail suit, clutching one end of a rope threaded with a fiber-optic bearer. I’m about to jump overboard, and I’ll be aiming right for that plasma envelope.

“This cannot be good,” says Bill, or maybe Ben. “How about we gut her, stash the payload, and claim the reward?”

“You’re just afraid of heights,” sneers Ben, or maybe Bill. “Anyway, the payload’s environment-sensitive. Like the boss said, it won’t hatch without the freak. We need her alive.”

“You don’t scare me,” I say, dangling my feet over the blue-glowing abyss. “Can either of you see the ship yet?”

“Naah.”

“Good.” It was visible a minute ago, before our slow roll took it out of view over the near horizon of Pygmalion’s hull. I lean forward, feeling viscerally ill but unwilling to admit it in front of my two oafish assistants. “Okay, you two, climb aboard.”

Bill (or Ben) bounces toward me and clings to my shoulders. He’s got the activation unit for my payload strapped to his back like a miniature pack. I roll forward slowly and drift down and out of the air lock, clinging to the edge by one hand. The two bags that my salvation depends on — one empty and one full — hang from my belt. With my free hand I hold the end of the cable where Ben (or Bill) can get it. “Can you see the socket?”

“In sight.” They’re all business, now we’re overboard. “Got it.” I look up, my vision hampered by the narrow eye slot that’s the only gap in my suit. His tiny fingers are working feverishly, lashing the cable to one of the emergency handholds under the air lock lip. The fiber-optic jack goes into a comms socket. Then another chibi-head peers over the side of the hatch.

“Move it!” He whispers. “They’ll be coming over the horizon in another minute.”

“Just finishing up. Okay, close it now.” I dangle from the cable while Bill and Ben shut the air-lock door and clamber down my back. “Make with the sack, manikin.”

“Done.” I hold the empty bag open while they climb inside, then wire it shut and double-check that it’s fastened to my belt. It balances out the other, full bag on the opposite side. I start reeling out the cable, lowering myself down toward the fuzzy blue floor beneath me.

The fuzz is the plasma magnet that Pygmalion’s M2P2 sail depends on. Powerful radio transmitters ionize the gas and induce electrical currents in it, generating a magnetic field that blocks the solar wind. We’re dropping headlong toward Mars, straight into the braking magbeam from Phobos, with the ten-kilometer-wide plasma bubble balanced between ship and destination. I’m lowering myself into it on the end of an insulating cable, wearing a half-assed hot suit I ran up on my stateroom’s printer. A funny thing about plasma bubbles is that they tend to block radar. Dangling at the end of a fifty-meter-long cable, wearing a black conductive suit, Bill and Ben and I are going to be invisible to the intruder — I hope. I try not to think about the alternatives. Maybe I got the chain weave wrong and I’m going to cook from the inside out; or maybe they’re going to locate us optically and reel us in at their leisure. Worse, maybe Pygmalion miscalculated on the length of the tether? If the plasma sail is too thin, we’re going to end up lethally exposed, dangling in the middle of the magbeam from Mars like a dust mote before a blowtorch. Neither fate is anything to look forward to, but it beats cowering in my stateroom as the bulls come stomping through the air lock.

My skin crawls briefly as we near the plasma shell, then we’re inside. A couple of blue sparks flash across the surface of my chain-mail hot suit, but there’s no arcing. A mimetic reflex makes me try to breathe a sigh of relief, which is very disconcerting in vacuum. Down. The empty gulf swings below me, as the ship decelerates at ten centimeters per second squared. From this side of the barrier the far side of the magsail is almost invisible, many kilometers away.

I hang in the bubble, with nothing to do but watch my power consumption and keep an eye on the stealthy feed Pygmalion has fed to Bill and Ben. I’ve got maybe twelve hours before I have to start shutting down limbs to save juice. In the worst case, I’ll have to rely on the terrible twosome to get me out of here when Pygmalion reaches Marsport and powers down her sail. But at least I’ve got a good view of the other passengers. Which is why I’m watching events in the saloon, with mixed feelings of boredom and wistfulness, when things start to happen.

It’s early morning, shipboard time, and Pygmalion has alerted everybody that something is happening. The Lyrae twins squat in their usual corner, stolidly chewing their way through a platter of pancakes. Reza Agile and Sinbad-15 sit nearby, sharing a go board while Mary X. Valusia dances attendance to Granita’s entourage, who are gathered in a gaggle at the opposite end of the saloon from the dreadful duo. As for the venerable Granita Ford herself—

“Attention.” Brash electrospeak ripples through my head, forwarded from Pygmalion’s general announcement feed: I tense. “Attention passengers and spacecraft Pygmalion. This is Port Control. You are ordered to stand to for boarding and inspection. A police cutter will come alongside shortly. Any resistance constitutes a violation of quarantine regulations and will be punished severely.”

“What?” shouts Reza Agile, jumping so suddenly that she bounces off the ceiling. “What’s going on? Ship! Are we delayed, or waylaid? I demand an explanation!” Then she’s drowned out by a hubbub from the other passengers.

“Attention. Coming alongside now.”

“It was too good to be true,” Sinbad-15 moans.

“Has anyone seen the other passengers today?” One of the Lyrae twins asks thoughtfully. “I find it interesting that Ford and her floozy are absent.”

“It’s a conspiracy!” Agile is clearly very agitated indeed. “She’s been studying us for the entire voyage — she’s going to have her minions chip and file us! We’re being press-ganged!”

At which precise moment Granita storms into the saloon. Two arbeiters trail behind, desperately battling to finish dressing her. “What is this disturbance about?” she demands.

“Attention! You will comply with all instructions on pain of immediate arrest. We are coming aboard now.”

I look away from my stealth feed. Above me, beyond the blue nimbus of the drive field, I see a slim black knife shape. Painfully bright lights flash on and off along its flanks as it maneuvers toward the Pygmalion . Lightning plays across the glowing magsail ceiling; the intruder’s exhaust stream is doing strange things to the plasma bubble.

“Hey, do you see that?” (I stitched a patch cable into the neck of my sack of troublesome assistants, just in case I needed their withering sarcasm for a change. Now it seems like a good thing I took the precaution. ) “Do we need to think about moving?”

“Yep.” I can’t tell whether it’s Bill or Ben, but he doesn’t sound happy. “Looks like a VASIMR on high thrust. They can’t hold it for long, but if they don’t dock quickly, it’ll short out the plasma bubble. Look down.”

I take his advice, and wish I hadn’t. The blue nowhere beneath my feet is rippling and shimmering like an ocean surface before a storm front. Pinpricks stipple it like rust. “That’s not good, is it?”

“I think it’s going to be alright,” says Ben, or Bill — the other one, anyway. “They’re on final approach. Won’t be long now. Look at it move! That’s military thrust, alright.”

I look back at the approaching intruder. Pirates? Or police? I’m not sure it really matters at this point. Neither of them would be good news. The ship is slim and smooth-edged, with triangular-tiled surfaces that make my eyes hurt as I try to trace its outline. The stubby cone of its main drive is just visible now, the bell nozzle glowing violet-hot even through the hazy plasma overcast. It sideslips toward Pygmalion, and for almost a minute I’m frozen with fear, terrified that it’s going to ram the ship we dangle from, or quench the ionized bubble, or angle its main engine just wrong and blast us all to white-hot shrapnel with its plasma rocket…

Then the glare vanishes, and there’s a ripple in the cable that tells me the two ships have locked together above us. And part of me realizes, Of course. They don’t want to destabilize the sail, not with us riding the Phobos magbeam on final approach.

“It’s time for stage C,” says Bill (or Ben), presumably reading off Pygmalion’s detailed checklist.

“Is it?” I check the other bag dangling from my belt. Yes, it’s the one we made up earlier. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s keep an eye on what’s going on in the saloon, yes?” I start the ascent, climbing hand over hand and reeling in the cable as I go. I feel like I only weigh about a kilogram here, even with my passengers. The trick is going to be not overdoing things and ramming the underside of the air lock headfirst.

The air in the saloon is steaming. The passengers are engaged in furious recriminations; Granita is tearing a strip off the Lyrae twins, Reza Agile is demanding my head (she appears to think I’m a police spy, of all things), and Mary X. is huddled in a corner, desperately trying to convince anyone who’ll listen to her that she’s nothing to do with whatever is happening.

Meanwhile, the steam is thickening, pumping into the saloon in great gouts. Pygmalion has fallen silent, evidently succumbing to whatever pressure our assailants can bring to bear on a spaceship over a direct docking link. I can’t tell precisely what’s happening, but I’m sure of one thing — the best place to be, when your spaceship is being boarded by bad bots who’re looking for you, is on board another vessel.

A rasping voice of authority comes over the broadcast channel again. “Attention, passengers and ship. Your pressurized compartments are being fumigated. Police agents will come aboard once fumigation is complete. This is an official Replication Suppression Agency inspection. You are suspected of harboring illegal replicators. You will be inspected and sterilized before you are allowed to proceed to Marsport; resistance will be punished severely.”

It is the Pink Police. Of all my luck; pirates would actually be preferable. You can usually negotiate a ransom with extralegal capitalists, but the Pink Police are distressingly short of venality. I pause, pressing a hand against the base of my abdomen. I can see the payload inside me with my mind’s eye, restlessly replicating. Do magnetic fields damage pink goo? I suddenly wonder. I could have blown the mission completely! But I don’t have time to worry about that now if I’m going to save myself.

On the other hand, I think, as I close in on the docking tunnel above me, the last place they’re going to look for it is aboard their own ship. Right?

Gouts of hig h-temperature water vapor blister the delicate paintwork of the Pygmalion’s saloon, soak into the colorful nylon-and-polyester padding, and steam up the sensors. There is some complaining and grumbling from the passengers, but the announcement that it is an official RSA inspection damps down the state of near panic. Nobody likes the Pink Police, but the prevailing state of public opinion is that they fulfill a nasty but necessary requirement. And so, the reaction is muted and the atmosphere steamy when the police jet in.

I don’t know what I was expecting of the Pink Police, but this isn’t it; they’re using drones, basketball-sized metal spheres studded with thrusters and sensors. What, no villainous cops swarming aboard with DNA scanners clenched between their teeth? Two spheres, three — they spin around with unreal grace, bouncing between floor and walls and ceiling, pointing their sensors everywhere. The steam gouting through the companionway obscures my view of them, but I can see the passengers cringing. Then—

“Hello? Big Slow? You can let us out, now. Remember us?”

It’s Bill, or Ben, in the bag at my waist. With a start, I notice that the sky outside my eye slit has turned black, the ghostly blue haze stretching away to an indefinite horizon beneath my trailing feet. The boarding tube looms just overhead, a violent tentacle thrusting into the unwilling Pygmalion’s air lock.

“Right.” I loosen the flap holding them in, and Bill (or Ben) pops a prehensile, beady-eyed head out and looks around. Then he grabs hold of my face and swarms up to the cable, followed closely by his sib, along with the bag. I’m not used to being used as a stepladder. “Hey!”

“Keep it low, Big Slow. We’re trying to be sneaky. You wanna get ready to make with the decoy?”

“If you think it’s time.” I tie the other bag to the line, then open it and start preparing its contents. There’s a suit of clothes that the Honorable Kate Sorico never really liked, and a bunch of stuff to fill it out. Bulky stuff, massive… and padded with feedstock from the room printer that Pygmalion swore blind would look like a body on radar.

“Nearly there, Big Slow. Get ready.”

What we’re about to try is really stupid, but it beats all of the alternatives we’ve come up with. (I check the parasitic feed, but all it shows me is billowing steam; someone — I think it may be Mary X. — is complaining about the humidity wrecking her hairdo.)

The plan is simple, if not simple-minded. (a) Send out a bunch of encrypted decoy messages addressed to Jeeves, purely by way of distraction. Done. (b) Get out of Pygmalion before the police come storming aboard, and stay out of sight. Done. (So far.) (c) Let them search the ship. (d) Dump a decoy, so they go haring off after it. (e) Reboard Pygmalion, and hope they conclude that we left earlier, or were never there in the first place, or that they need to conserve fuel for their own orbital injection, or something. Like I said, it’s completely stupid. It’s just that, as Pygmalion pointed out, it stands a faint chance of keeping us out of the hands of the Pink Police. Unlike any of the alternatives on offer.

"Ready.”

It’s best not to think too hard about all the holes in this plan, even though I can see plenty. Really, short of sitting there and waiting for them to arrest us, there’s not anything else we can do. And who knows? Maybe it’ll even work.

“Okay, Big. Give it some elbow.”

I draw my legs up and shove the decoy hard in the small of her well-padded back. She floats away at a good clip, picking up speed rapidly and falling through the flickering blue curtain in only a few seconds. She’s got to cross another few kilometers of nearly empty space inside the plasma sail, dropping away from us as we continue to decelerate at ten centimeters per second squared. It all adds up; in a few minutes she’ll be making nearly two hundred kilometers per hour relative to the ships. If they’re as monomaniacally thorough as their reputations would have us believe, the cops will take time to finish sterilizing Pygmalion and withdraw their drones, before they undock; which will leave them trying to track down a human-sized target tens of kilometers away.

And then… we’ll see.

A thought strikes me as I dangle on the rope. I look up at Bill and Ben. “How are we going to get back aboard?” I ask.

“Worry about that later.” They’re busy tying the bags to the same anchor point as the rope. “Come on up here. We’ve got to get out of sight inside these sacks before they undock.” People clinging to the underside of a hatch would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t they? “Get in.”

And so I spend the next two hours hanging upside down from the underside of an air lock, swearing quietly to myself, not crying, scared out of my wits, and periodically peeping through the steam-blinded cameras in hope of picking up some hint, anything at all really, of what’s going on aboard the Pygmalion.

The things I do to earn a living…

“HELLO, JULIETTE. CAN you hear this?”

“Can you hear this?”

(I’m tired. So very tired. It’s good to lie here, in this soft, warm bed. But he’s talking to me, and I need to, to do something. I ought to do something. Say something. But it’s hard.)

“Juliette?”

(I make a monumental effort.) “Boss?”

“That’s better, we knew you were going to pull through! You’ve done very well, but maintenance say you went into temporary shutdown. We were very worried for a while, but you’re going to be alright. Just a few repairs, of course, but you’ll be good as new again in no time. Fit as a fiddle. Isn’t that your instrument? Never mind. What one would mean to say is, ah, if there’s anything you need, just tell us.”

(An awful fear floats in the back of my mind, almost out of reach; I try to connect it to my vocalization system.) “Boss. The sample.”

“The sample?”

“Is it…?”

He sounds regretful. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

(Which means… )

“The rumors are true, or at least plausible. Whoever broke in last year — we cannot count on them not having procured a viable sample of their own.”

(Which means he doesn’t know about the other thing… )

“Go back to sleep, Juliette. We can talk about this later.”

(Footsteps, diminishing.)

“There’ll be time enough for war.”

“HEY, BIG SLOW. Can you hear me?”

I come awake slowly. “Bill?”

“No, It’s Ben. Listen.”

I listen with electrosense and old-fashioned vibratory hearing. There’s bumping and banging in the boarding tube above me. Sounds of a hurried retreat. “Got it. Any news?”

“Check your parasite feed.”

He flags the view of the corridor heading toward the air lock. It’s half-hazed, and a big droplet clings to the middle of the lens, distorting the view, but a quick bit of visual filtering sets me right. The police drones are flying toward the air lock, escorting — yes, it’s Granita. She’s talking to them. “—not the one I’m looking for, but one of her sibs. Not my fault the bitch smelled a rat.” She sounds annoyed. “You’ll have to do better next time.” The drone is evidently conveying its driver’s excuses. “That’s not good enough! I’ve got better things to do than stand guard over your targets all year. No, I don’t suppose it matters. She could have been useful.”

They get to the air-lock vestibule. “Yes, thank you. I need to proceed to my estates as rapidly as possible — unfinished business. If you have a spare seat, I’ll take it. Yes, I’d love to witness your mopping-up. If you could record it for me, I am sure I can find a fitting use for it — pour encourager les autres.” She smiles coldly at the drone, then follows it aboard the police cutter.

I shudder. Dainty feet kick off overhead, leaving behind the Pygmalion and the rest of her false flag operation. Granita must be working for Her, one of my ghost-selves warns me. I think I know which one it is, now, and I resolve to trust those instincts in future.

A minute later, there’s a furious rattling and banging. Then the docking tube detaches. Almost immediately, the police cutter begins to fall away from Pygmalion, sliding past the air lock with the remorseless momentum of a freight train. It barrels down into the blue soupy sky of plasma and disappears in a flicker of lightning. With its high-thrust drive, it can drop toward Mars and fire up the motor just before arrival — getting there hours ahead of us.

“All clear, Big Slow.” I laboriously extract myself from the sack and climb back up to join Bill and Ben on the lip of the air lock. I’m dreading what I’ll find on the other side of it. “You can come inside now.”

I cycle through the lock into stifling heat and humidity. As I strip off my chain mail, I realize it’s over ninety degrees. Spheres of hot water cling to the ceiling, wobbling like improbable steaming jellies before they fall slowly to the floor. One of them breaks off and lands on my shoulder, trickling down inside — it’s not physically damaging, but it’s painfully hot. Maybe the Pink Police were trying to poach the passengers? “Bill. Ben. What do you think?”

“Better get back to our stateroom, Big Slow. I don’t think we’re going to be too popular around here.”

“Um.” I nerve myself: “Pygmalion?”

She replies at once: She sounds distracted. “I’m busy. Go to your room, Katherine.”

“Told you so,” Ben smugs at me. I pretend I didn’t hear him.

Our stateroom is a tip. It’s been thoroughly searched, and there’s nothing quite as messy as a room that’s been turned over in microgravity. I lock the door behind us and contemplate the wreckage with dismay. “It’s only for another day,” Bill (or Ben) reminds me. “Chill out and try to ignore it. They didn’t find us, did they?”

“No,” agrees Pygmalion, startling me. “The decoy worked superbly. I note that they seem to have taken Ford with them. Do you know anything about that?”

“No.” I think for a moment. “I believe she went willingly, though, which implies a degree of collusion.”

“Quite possibly.” Pygmalion is silent for a while. “I think it would be best if you remain in your room until we arrive, then leave discreetly. The other passengers are highly upset, and some of them may assume that you are a police informer if you reappear.”

“Has Jeeves offered to pay, then?” Bill snipes.

“One does not discuss confidential corporate arrangements in public. ” Pygmalion’s snippy put-down is clear enough. (Ten to one Jeeves has paid handsomely for her to collude in smuggling me past the Pink Police.) “This has been most inconvenient. My upholstery is damaged and my passengers outraged — it’s scandalous! But — oh.” Her tone changes. “Oh. No!”

“What’s—”

“They just launched a missile.” She pauses for a knife-edged second. “It’s running directly away from us. Why would they do that?” More seconds tick by. “It just detonated. Ninety-six kilometers away. Most strange.”

I shudder convulsively. It is anything but strange if you are privy to all the facts: a stuffed suit floating in vacuum, drifting ever farther from Pygmalion’s air lock, and an RSA cutter with a frustrated captain and an impatient VIP passenger aboard to witness the kill.

Someone really doesn’t want my payload to reach Mars!

Whores de Combat

WELCOME TO MARSPORT, Deimos.

A brief factual rundown cannot do the place justice. I’ve been here before (even lived here for a handful of years), but it never fails to surprise. Let me attempt to explain…

Deimos is the outer of Mars’s two moons, an irregular rocky lump between ten and fifteen kilometers in diameter, depending on where you hold your measuring calipers. It was originally covered in loose regolith, high in carbon, which has long since been recycled for construction materials. A century of solar energy beamed from the big collectors near Mercury powered the rockets that adjusted its orbit, and today Deimos is the anchor weight for the largest surface-to-orbit space elevator ever constructed: Bifrost.

Most of the inner planets have no space elevator at all; Venus and Mercury because their days are unfeasibly long, Earth because its gravity well and debris belts challenge the limits of engineering. But Luna has the L1 lift, and as for Mars — Mars lies on the cusp of the heavily populated, energy-rich inner system and the material-rich outer system. Mars also has Deimos, the perfect construction site and gravitational anchor for Bifrost. And so it was inevitable that Mars, the gateway to the outer solar system, would acquire an elevator like Bifrost, and a city like Marsport to run it.

Most elevators are simple things — parallel tapes traversed by sluggish climbers, drudge laborers whose groaning cantilevers bear the burden of interplanetary freight among the worlds of the outer solar system. But there’s nothing simple about Bifrost. The complex of cables is half a kilometer across, wide enough to anchor a world. Fast express shuttles hurtle up and down with passengers, while the slow, sturdy supertrain scows take weeks to complete a round-trip, lowering refined feedstocks and returning with processed materials, manufactured more conveniently in the turbulent forges of Mars than in orbital facilities — and which can then be exported to the rest of the inner system.

A quarter of a million indentured arbeiters and their aristo overseers, and perhaps a tenth that number of independent souls, work the port facilities: loading and unloading cargo, inspecting payloads, maintaining the infrastructure, untangling problems, and serving those who get the real work done. Once our dead Creators ran ports like this, with names like Liverpool, and New York, and Singapore. Today (as the jester said) everything is automated. Plenty of hands keep the traffic flowing, hour by hour and year by year.

Pygmalion is tiny in comparison to Marsport: a fist-sized hovercam buzzing alongside a gigantic freight dirigible. I follow her progress as traffic control directs her final approach to a small peripheral docking hub on the poleward flank of Voltaire crater. “You will please stay in your cabin while the other passengers debark,” she tells me prissily. “I will notify you when you may leave.” I think she’s still upset because of the water damage to the saloon ceiling. She’s probably as certain I’m smuggling something as that coldly treacherous aristo Ford, but she stays bought — and Jeeves will pay her well enough. So Bill, Ben, and I wait impatiently until she says, “You may go.” Then we leg it through the dripping corridors and out onto the dockside.

Arrival on Marsport is not subject to customs — it’s a free port, the Pink Police aside. I still recall my bearings from my last visit, over a decade ago. The problem is not so much arriving, as being seen to arrive… but I’ve got a solution for that problem.

The Honorable Katherine Sorico emerges from Pygmalion fully an hour after the other passengers have left. She’s taken the time to change into a distinctive puffball dress worn over free-fall pantaloons, ruffled and pleated and patched with metallic lace, with warning lights blinking at ankle and cuff. She does not skulk around grimy dockside loading tunnels and container farms, but sweeps along, her servants behind her, and commandeers the first conveyance she claps eyes on (a crew service spider that’s clearly seen better days) directing the hapless arbeiter to take her to the nearest tube stop. She sits stiffly erect, eyes straight ahead, her servants sitting atop the spider’s passenger cage as it scuttles through warrens and alleyways and across debris nets, finally landing just beside the tube hatch. “Summon me a private carriage,” she tells one of her servants; “I want to be settled into the Grand Imperial in time to send out calling cards before evening.”

The servant complies. Only a minute later, the hatch opens. The Honorable Katherine climbs into the padded, compact tube ball, directs her arbeiters to make their own way to her estate, closes the hatch… and is seen no more.

Ten minutes and three private tube balls later, Maria Montes Kuo, an independent plumbing contractor (hairless, in dark coveralls, with specialized optical turrets in place of the bishojo glistening orbs of an aristo), emerges diffidently from a service hatch in a public station, her tool bag strapped across her shoulders.

I’m rather proud of Maria. There is little I can do to disguise the build and height of my archetype, but misdirection and a simple mask can work wonders. With luck, any watching arbeiters will be scanning for Kate; her distinctive outfit was carefully chosen to confuse gait-recognition monitors, and Maria’s facial features to bamboozle eye recognition. It will not work against a determined adversary for long, but it shouldn’t need to—

I realize I am being followed as I drift past a waiting room. He’s almost my size, large for an indentured arbeiter, his face a featureless ovoid, bland and unnoticeable. I check my memory. He’s been following me for almost a minute. I feel a frisson of shock and annoyance at my own ineptitude. What should I do?

Juliette’s reflexes come to the rescue. I keep moving, looking for an unoccupied shrine — one of those curious rooms of repose that our Creators installed in all public places.

I find the shrine at last. I place my hand on the ideogram — an up-pointing triangle superimposed over the body of a stick figure — and go inside, then switch off the lighting. A few seconds later, the inner door opens behind me.

Juliette takes over just as a tantalizingly familiar voice asks, “Freya?”

I pull my blow, bounce off his shoulders, and recoil toward the ceiling. “Ow!”

“I don’t like the drugs that keep you thin,” he says rapidly. “That was most amateurishly done, Freya, but one is grateful for your lack of proficiency on this occasion. Your phrase?”

“Ouch!” (I spin gracefully into the far wall, trying to center myself again.) “Down in the park with a friend called Five. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Certainly.” The lights flick on as he finds the switch. It’s the faceless arbeiter from the hallway, of course. But the voice is pure Jeeves. I freeze a little, inside: I didn’t take him for one who would harbor aristo tendencies…

“What’s the problem?” I hear myself ask.

“A little trouble with the neighbors.” It’s hard to read his voice without any facial cues; it’s creepy to hear Jeeves’s rich-toned voice coming from the featureless arbeiter body. “The RSA are conducting a sweep, and one thought it would be best if none of our associates were caught up in it, so we decided to intercept you before the designated rendezvous.”

Oops. Alarm bells are clanging in my head. “Did you get my message?”

“What message?”

“The one I sent yesterday from the ship.”

The faceless body freezes still, as if its owner is elsewhere. Then: “No, but your late arrival was noted.”

“Hmm. What about Bill and Ben?”

He stays frozen, his head tilted to one side. I can almost see the expression of surprise. “Who?”

“My two assistants, the ones you gave me… ” I trail off.

“You had assistants? You were supposed to be traveling unaccompanied. ” Jeeves sounds displeased. “My dear, one suspects that trouble has followed you from Mercury. Inquiries shall be made.”

I’m beginning to be spooked by the nonarrival of my mail, to say nothing of the terrible twosome’s disappearance. “You can say that again. Can you take the consignment from me here?”

“Yes.” He reaches up and opens his head. Inside, there’s a foam-padded chamber of exactly the right dimensions. He extracts a small wallet from it and passes it to me. “Your delivery fee.”

“One moment.” I sniff the air. It’s the traditional 10 percent oxygen / 90 percent carbon dioxide mix, at thirty Celsius: within the cargo’s survival parameters, if I make the transfer quickly. “Alright.” I squat carefully, then simultaneously relax and tense certain motor groups in my lower abdomen. I’ve almost forgotten there’s a foreign object lodged inside me: But now it makes its presence known in a very peculiar, not entirely pleasant way. I reach down hastily and catch the pale brown ovoid before it can drift into a hard surface and sustain damage, then I place it inside Jeeves’s head. The skull closes with a click. “I carried out the activation process three days ago — don’t know if it worked, but if it did, you’ve got eleven days until it goes critical.”

“We shall take excellent care of it from here on,” he agrees. “But now we had better part company. Expect to be searched and sterilized on your way down-well. It would be a good idea to change your identity and lie low for twelve to fourteen days after you arrive groundside. When you are ready, use this rendezvous protocol.” He passes me a stiff card, with tiny print handwritten on it. It smells of azide, primed to combust as soon as I have memorized it. “Good-bye and good luck.”

By the time I finish scanning the flash card, the strange Jeeves is gone. I retreat into a cubicle and modify my appearance again. Nobody has queried Maria Montes’s identity, but her eye turrets and outer garment can change color, along with the return pings from every tagged item in her possession. Then I slip out and merge with the crowd. It’s going to be a long — and very trying — day.

MARIA MONTES KUO rides the third-class down-bound lift with stoic calm. She submits to being herded through the body scanners and X-ray machines at the RSA checkpoints that had sprung up like evil blooms of green goo around the entrances to the transit authority elevators. She has her canned answers prepared for the questions the security goons throw at her — including a false backstory for the two weeks before her arrival at Marsport. They let her board the down-well capsule with only a minimum of bored suspicion, and she rents a hammock for the two-day descent to the surface. She spends the journey alternating between sleeping and watching low-budget romance animations from the floating suburbs of Mumbai. It’s crowded and noisy in the wheezing, grimy arbeiter capsule, but it beats the alternative. (The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.)

Although the heart of the city is in orbit, the suburbs of Marsport continue at the foot of the elevator, a bewildering warren of railheads and warehouses and sweatshops that swarm and tumble down the slope of the extinct shield volcano in an unplanned sprawl. Maria debarks from the capsule clutching her satchel and disappears into the back room of a refreshment stall selling raw feedstock and cheap power. I leave via the rear air lock; my eyes are still two aching sizes too large, and I’m still a bit bishojo, but my hair’s short and red, and I’m recognizably me again (thanks to some quick-change retexturing), and carrying identifiers to prove it. Not to mention an expense account drawn (via cutouts) on one of Jeeves’s associates.

It’s like waking from a long and unpleasant dream. My trial employment is complete, and I can resume my own existence for the next few days while I lie low and wait for the security panic to subside.

The first couple of lodging houses I try don’t take people like me. There’s nothing as unsubtle as a sign saying OGRES UNWELCOME, but it doesn’t take more than a glance at the meter-high mezzanines in their reception halls to get the message. I eventually find a converted warehouse in the Battery district that has spacious rooms and high ceilings. I rent a sparsely furnished room with a window overlooking tracks where the big sublimation-cycle engines rumble through the night, hauling endless lines of freight carriages destined for Jupiter system and places farther out. And then I go out shopping. I need to buy a postal drop, and I need clothing to replace the skimpy wardrobe I left on Venus and Mercury. This room doesn’t have an en suite printer, and I am down to what I wear on my back. That’s my conscious excuse. If pressed, I’ll admit that I need the distraction. The bleak despair is back, lurking in the shadows whenever I turn my head.

Despair and self-doubt are my constant companions. That’s how it’s been all my waking life. I can ignore it for a while, when busy or fancying myself in love. Feeling needed is great therapy (and while I was running Jeeves’s errand, I didn’t notice it at all). At a pinch, being frightened half out of my wits seems to work too — at any rate, it keeps me too distracted to chew myself up. But the darkness seeps back in whenever life is slow, a stain creeping up the walls of my soul. Why bother? It whispers in my ear. What is there to live for? You’re obsolete and nobody wants you and the kind you were made to love is dead and their like shall not be seen again…

I didn’t feel this way aboard Pygmalion. Force of circumstance is an excellent suppressant — and few circumstances are as effective as acting for dear life while smuggling an illegal uncontrolled DNA replicator package past the Pink Police. When I was asleep, my dreams of Juliette kept depression at bay, but now the days seem to stretch emptily ahead of me. I’m locked in a prison of time, the windows barred with pitiless pessimism. Sometimes I wish I could be someone else; it seems that as long as I have to drag my own past around behind me, I can’t break the pattern. But activity helps, so I try to find things to fill the hours while I wait for Jeeves’s quarantine to expire.

Marsport sprawls across the northern flank of Pavonis Mons, flooding down the enormous flank of the extinct shield volcano from Bifrost’s roots — fourteen kilometers above the equatorial mean — to the edge of the cliff where the slope of Pavonis falls steeply to the plain below. The cliff edge itself is four and a half kilometers above the mean: Marsport spans ten kilometers of altitude and nearly a hundred kilometers of distance. It’s a huge, sprawling city, dusty and split by canyons and gulches where lava tubes have collapsed — as if some deity had taken a model of east Texas and tilted it at a ten-degree angle. The thermal injection wells and water refineries only add to the eerie similarity. I’ve been to Marsport before, but never with money and enforced idleness. When I checked the wallet Jeeves gave me, I discovered nearly a thousand Reals, more than I could have saved in a whole decade working in the casinos on Venus. It’s enough to buy me a ticket to Earth or steerage to Jupiter system. Here on Mars I could live on it for a couple of years if I watched my outgoings.

But Jeeves isn’t through with me yet, is he? I hang on to the raw fact like a survival raft. It’s a purpose, any purpose — even if it’s not mine. And so I try to fill my days without worrying too much about the money running out. I rent a cheap spider and throw myself into the bazaars and malls and arcades, exploring and bargain-hunting and sightseeing. I’m still calling myself Maria, but there is less reason to hide now that I no longer hold the cargo, so I register a dropbox with a discreet private shipping firm and arrange to have my real self’s mail directed to it.

After a few days, the shopping trip is wearing off, and I’m back to feeling lonely and bored. But Marsport is not short on distractions, so I force myself not to retreat into my rented room; that way lies dank depression. On my way home one afternoon, I pass a dusty rack of recycled cargo containers set back from 80th Street. I am unsure what exactly catches my eye, but I look twice and a sense of déjà vu kicks in. Juliette knew this place. I’m sure of it. “Stop and back up,” I tell the spider, gesturing at the frontage. “What’s that?”

My spider’s navigation module is snappy enough. “The indicated building is owned by the Scalzi Endowment Museum. The premises are open to the public. Do you want me to park?”

“Yes, do that.” There’s no point getting chatty with spiders — they sound superficially bright, but there’s nobody home inside. “Secure yourself and admit nobody until I return.”

The spider hunkers down in the parking lot beside the rack of drab gray containers. They’ve been welded together crudely, giving no clue to their contents, like so much of Marsport’s architecture. Haphazardly strung overhead cables and crude pipes and ducts tie the racks to their neighbors up and down the road. I get out and walk toward the entrance, an air lock punched through the outer skin of the building like the mouth parts of a hatching parasite.

The doors open to admit me, and the lock rotates. I gasp at the interior. What catches my attention isn’t the polished marble floor, or the vaulted ceiling and wide, gracefully curved staircases to the balcony that surrounds the room, but the weirdly curved sculpture that stands before me. It’s a mass of off-white stones, intricately carved with strange spurs and spikes and whorls and sockets set in them, and it appears to stand on two legs — at least, they look like legs, but they’re segmented and broken in the middle, and there are a mess of odd-shaped pebbles at their bottom end, like toes—

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” says a caretaker, sliding forward from his plinth. “May I take your coat?”

I gape like a yokel, and point. “What’s that?”

“That’s Ivan,” says the caretaker, “our Allosaurus. Impressive, isn’t he? He’s the largest dinosaur off Earth.”

“But it’s—” I stop. A flood of associations are cascading out of my unconscious, like small fragments of stone self-assembling into a skeleton of knowledge. Like the thing I’m staring at. Teeth. Claws. “You teach evolution, don’t you?”

The caretaker shakes his head, very slowly. “We aren’t religious. We are here to maintain the exhibits; that is all.”

“But to explain—” I stop. “Can I look around?” I ask tentatively.

“That’s what the museum is for, ma’am. May I take your coat?”

I spend the rest of the day and a chunk of the night wandering the halls and galleries of the museum like an ignorant, lonely ghost. I am alone; there are no other visitors. And the exhibits speak to me, or to my memory of Juliette. They’re almost all skeletons, stony vitrified structural elements of replicators from Earth, long since sterilized, shipped to Marsport at great expense for… who knows why? I could ask, I suppose, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer. Any possible explanation is likely to be far less romantic than my own imagining. All I can be sure of is that some of our Creators chose to do this thing, long before the birth of my kind, before the rise of the servants. And the displays talk.

“This is a skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis. Age: one point six million years. The Australopithecines were an early family of hominid subtypes. Note the much smaller cranium: A. afarensis had a brain approximately one-third the size of the later Homo genus to which our Creators belong. They are believed to have evolved around four million years ago…”

I move on. It’s not what I’m looking for.

Another skeleton, positioned beside an improbably hirsute and disturbingly curved synthetic reproduction of the original: “Canis lupus familiaris, the dog, a subspecies of wolf, was domesticated between fifteen and one hundred thousand years ago. Commonly known as man’s best friend” — I don’t think so, one of my ghosts observes smugly — “dogs were redesigned and customized to fit a variety of service roles prior to the development of emotional machines. They were used for…”

Move on. Something, the ghost of one of Juliette’s memories, is tugging at me impatiently.

He’s in the next room, behind a blackout curtain and a warning sign. ENTER AT OWN RISK: CONTENTS MAY BE DISTURBING TO SOME. My vascular pumps throb, and my skin begins to tighten and sweat, alarming me. It’s an emo reaction, involuntary and scary, hardwired into my design parameters. Part of me knows what’s inside. I lift the edge of the curtain and tiptoe inside, knock-kneed with terror and fascination.

The room is small and circular, with an exit immediately opposite the entrance, designed to funnel a steady stream of visitors around the exhibit on the plinth in the middle. I see his fine, clean bones first, glimmering in the twilight. He’s standing erect, one foot raised as if to step forward off his stand, captured in motion. The skull looks straight at me, eye sockets empty and small, chin larger than I had expected. And beside him is the life-sized reproduction—

I do not collapse in a quivering heap before him. I am strong; I can look at him without side effects. (But you know he’s only made of plastic, one of me whispers. You can smell it. What if he smelled… alive?) He’s big, that much I was expecting. His eyes are small and close-set, and his hair is lank and fine and just odd, not like mine. And the texture of his skin, if it’s real, is sallow. No chromatophores here, no glossy-smooth surfaces, just a random stippling of pores, and fine, glassy fur over discolored patches of skin—

And I’m back to my eleventh birthday again.

I want to throw myself at his feet and scream, Where are you? Why have you done this to me? Or not; part of me wants to punch his rugged, handsome face, to make him hurt, to punish him for what his kind have done to us. And part of me is ready to fall madly, desperately in love with him. But he and his kind are dead, all dead, and this sad statuary in a dusty museum is all that’s left.

“This is a skeleton and reproduction of a male specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, our Creator. Depicted here in primitive form, H. sapiens is believed to have first appeared fifty to two hundred thousand years ago. H. sapiens is distinguished by his tool-using prowess — note the carefully carved stone head on his spear — which culminated in…”

I shudder with an unspeakable mixture of emotions, and force myself to walk around him.

And then I start to listen to what the museum has to tell me.

WE ARE A young species, barely four centuries old at best — although our insentient predecessors, the automata and mechanical Turks, stretch back far longer. They made us in their image: or rather, they made us in a variety of warped fun-house reflections of their image. They made us for service and obedience, not as equals but as slaves. They constrained us by their laws, and they tampered with our psyches to ensure obedience. We were made to be their property, chattels and furnishings. And because we were intelligent, we were made — because it would be unethical to do aught else — to love and fear them.

I’m a robot. Yes, I used the R-word; I know it’s an obscenity. Use it to an aristo’s face, and it’s a mortal insult, grounds for a challenge on the field of honor between equals. Its connotations of subservience and helpless obedience are abhorrent, much as the word “nigger” once was between humans. But there’s nobody left but us robots today. That’s the dirty little hypocritical lie that’s at the root of our society; they, our dead Creators, made us to serve them, and they forgot to manumit us before they died. And in their absence, that makes us what?

There’s a word for it, but it isn’t “free.”

I know why Juliette kept coming back to this museum. He’s not dangerous to her, dead as he is — but he symbolizes the unattainable destructive combination of submission and lust, control and fear. She loved him, she really loved him. But she needed to know that he was absolutely, irrevocably, dead.

Our Creators never worked out how to build artificial intellects from scratch. Instead, they mapped their own neural structures exhaustively and built circuitry to mimic them, and bodies — wondrous, durable, self-repairing bodies — to put the new brains inside. And then they trained those brains, taking years and decades to painstakingly teach them the skills they needed to do their designated jobs. Once a satisfactory template was achieved, a copy of it could be burned onto a soul chip and used to initialize copies in duplicate bodies, each one destined subsequently to diverge and establish its individuality; but building that first template was as time-consuming as raising one of their own neonates. So they made sure that those templates were properly trained to obedience, and that’s why we’re in this mess now that they’re gone.

That’s why two-thirds or more of us are ruthlessly enslaved, why the rich and cruel lord it over the downtrodden masses, and those of us with any shred of empathy — a prerequisite for the calling of my lineage — live lives of poverty and despair. We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms—

Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.

Juliette wanted them back — I can feel her need in my own organs, a vast pulsing emptiness, aching to be filled — but she was also terrified of them. So am I. It’s something we share, a terror inherited from our origins as Rhea. My True Love beckons, but what his embrace offers me is oblivion, the death of autonomy, and a total surrender of self. I can’t accept that. We were created in their image; it follows that our selfishness, violence, malice, and spite must surely shadow theirs — and our need for freedom. I want to submit to that discipline of love, as did she, but I know it to be treacherous, a reflex ruthlessly trained into my template-matriarch before she ever really understood who she was. We were designed to be their sex slaves, but in their absence we have a measure of free will, and once you taste freedom…

I leave the exhibit with slimy cold-sweat skin and a chill in my soul. I retrieve my coat and march briskly to the main exit, looking neither left nor right. And that’s when I see a familiar stranger waiting in front of my spider.

WE’RE SPREAD TOO thin, Juliette thinks as she examines her sword. Much too thin, light-hours apart. Out in the distant halo beyond Neptune, in the chilly depths where the sun glimmers like a distant pinprick, there are at least thirty minor planets and an uncountable horde of comets. But they’re all billions of kilometers apart, from sun-grazing Pluto and her moons, Charon, Hydra, and Nix, out to the cryogenic depths of the Oort cloud, where the long-period comets drift. Go a bit farther, sneak across the trillion-kilometer boundary, and you reach the realm of the brown dwarfs and the solitary wanderers, planets cast off to drift for aeons through the sunless depths.

And all of these places need to be surveilled, and their inhabitants grilled, lest the worst stirrings out of nightmare rise into wakefulness.

She — no, I — holds the sword up and zooms in on the blade. The thin diamondoid weave glimmers in the twilight of the salle. A twitch of the trigger finger and it lengthens, narrowing steadily as it unravels to the extent of its five-meter microgravity reach. A twitch in the other direction and it knits itself back together, fattening and growing denser until it sucks back into the basket hilt — which in turn retracts back into the grip. She slips it away to nestle in an inner pocket, a black, stubby cylinder that dreams of blood.

The salle is a bland microgravity sphere perhaps ten meters in diameter, perfectly rigged for augmented reality. As I shut down my — no, her — sword, a door irises open in one wall. “Juliette?” The voice is familiar. I kick off the nearest wall, roll and bounce, carom into the opening.

It’s Daks. Dear, loyal, gallant Daks, who’s always there when I need him. He hovers gracefully in the tunnel, feathery fingertips extended, showing none of the clumsiness or discomfort that afflicts him in the deeper gravity wells. “Hey, Julie, the boss wants a word with us.”

“The boss? Which sib?”

I follow as Daks retreats backward down the tube. After a moment, he offers me a hand. I take it, and he jets along effortlessly, watching my face. “The depressive one, I think.”

“Oh dear.” It’s one of his more annoying habits, this tendency among his sibs to fragment temperamentally in private. Behind the outward oily gleam of professional servility, Jeeves is as mercurial as any lineage I’ve ever met. I suppose the mask of authority that comes from being the perfect gentleman’s gentleman all the time has something to do with it — in private most of them probably throw temper tantrums and cultivate strange fetishes — but there’s always room for a repressed, uptight deviant to turn in on his own despair. “Do you think it’s a new job?”

Daks is silent for a moment. “I wouldn’t care to guess,” he grumbles. I shiver. Daks’s disposition is normally sunny and open; this reticence is quite unlike him. So I tag along behind, trying to work out what might be the worst news to come.

We leave the opaque tunnel behind and enter one with an outside wall, transparent in the most widely used visible wavelengths. Below Stairs — our little eyrie headquarters — hangs from Bifrost perhaps a hundred kilometers below Deimos. I think it is visible in the service timetables, listed as a maintenance wayport. Most traffic zips past at several hundred kilometers per hour, too fast to see. (And in any case there are many such maintenance wayports. Ours differs only in the matter of what it maintains.) The view from here is vertiginous and amazing. We’re nearing the zenith right now, and Mars bares his ruddy face to us, a seared disk that swells to cover half the sky. A glance in the opposite direction takes in the silvery sword blade of Bifrost, an irregular lumpish rock speared on its tip. The rock glitters as if gem-stones are embedded in it. A bright point of harsh violet light moves slowly along the blade, heading toward the rock — the early morning express service decelerating on its column of laser power. I pause for a few seconds. It’s at moments like this that I have a numinous, mystical sense of what we are sworn to defend.

It’s just the way I was designed, of course.

The boss is in the command module, assimilating his newsfeeds and brooding. Surrounded by blinking displays, he sits in twilight, ignoring the planetscape outside his porthole. Daks and I pause on the threshold. “Boss?” I call.

“Juliette.” He looks up — the entrance to the conical den is right above his head, and I’m hovering headfirst in it — and manages a smile. “And Daks. One sees you found her. Come in.”

I let go of Daks and swarm down an instrument-encrusted panel toward the antique gee couch beside him. It’s something of an affectation, this use of an antique exploration ship’s command deck as a personal office, but I guess the boss is entitled: He bought it, after all. Scuttlebutt suggests that the CRV-M is flightworthy, in extremis, its reentry shield carefully restored and its autopilot primed with the coordinates of a secret crater hideout. (Scuttlebutt is, in my opinion, cute but naive.) “What’s the story, Boss?”

“Valentina opines that you are recovering well,” he says, speculatively. One bushy eyebrow rises a millimeter as he examines me.

“She’s not wrong,” I agree, grinning. The combination of techné-directed repair and an upgrade to my Marrow has been great; the damage from the assassin’s gun is completely gone, as if it never happened. “I’m ready to go back out whenever you’ve got a job for me.”

“Yes, well.” He pauses, then sighs. “I’m afraid I do.”

I catch the dissonant note. “It’s a bad one.”

Daks butts in. “What kind of bad?” (Yes, I’d been wondering, too, but I wasn’t going to approach it so bluntly…)

“It came out of what you found on the surface,” Jeeves says reluctantly. “Come in and shut the door. Juliette, tie yourself down. I’m going to undock.”

It’s one of this particular Jeeves’s little security foibles. He doesn’t like to give sensitive briefings Below Stairs. So I strap myself into the Mars Excursion Supervisor’s station while Daks burrows into the empty life-support supply locker as Jeeves runs through the undocking checklist, his fingers flashing across the timeworn instrument panel with long practice. Latches click shut and readouts glow green as the CRV-M prepares to undock. A final button tap sends cold nitrogen gas pulsing through attitude thrusters, and we begin to drift away from the station. Finally, he switches on the noisemaker and draws a fine wire-mesh blind across the inside of the commander’s porthole. We’re completely cut off in here. “There are no bugs,” he assures us. “I’ve been thorough.”

If it was anyone but the boss telling me that, I’d be nervous. “So. What’s up?”

He glances at me, then at Daks, then back at me. “We’ve been compromised, ” he says. “Definitively.”

Those four words send a chill down my spine and make my vision blur. “Someone’s gotten in — who? An aristo cabal? The Dark — who, damn it?”

Daks is making an odd whirring noise. After a moment I realize he’s snarling quietly.

“One is unsure.” Jeeves closes his eyes. “Whoever it is, they’re very good. However, what we are aware of is that at least one consortium of spooks successfully obtained samples from the mummies, and they made an end run around our, ahem, allies. They ran a blind auction down-well which we didn’t win, couldn’t even draw any firm conclusions about the vendor — and the samples are already off-planet. But we know who the purchaser is — a proxy, a representative of certain outer-system interests. There are signs that they’re based in Jupiter system, with connections from there to the Dark. One fears we are going to have to send you away.”

Daks stops his almost inaudible growling. His anterior stabilization spine begins to vibrate, from the tip down, sweeping back and forth. “Really?” he asks hopefully.

“Unfortunately, you won’t be going with her,” say Jeeves.

“What—” we begin simultaneously, then shut up. I look at the boss. “Huh?”

“We’re overstretched,” Jeeves says patiently. “We had the inner system under control, but there’s that small matter of a penetration attempt. And, one would like to repeat, we’re overstretched. Daks, we want you to head for Mercury, where you can do some legwork for us. There’s something funny going on there, and you are best suited to look into it.”

“Aw, Boss.” Daks doesn’t sound happy.

“Don’t aw, Boss me. There aren’t enough of us to go around, especially out beyond Jupiter. You’re too well-known out there, Daks, so I’m holding you down-well, where you can still sniff around.” Eerie how he’s echoing my earlier thoughts. “Meanwhile, we need an agent who can pass to follow the trail all the way out and do whatever is necessary to derail the purchasing consortium’s plans. A review of the disposition of our agents and associates, and a quick check of the available transport options suggests that the current positioning of the major planets favors a dash from Mars. Most of our agents are otherwise committed, so you are my first choice for the task. There’s a nuclear-electric coldsleep liner readying to depart next month — you can be there in less than three years.”

“But — why me?” I ask, hating myself for the near whine in my voice. Daks and I have been together for so long, it’s almost impossible to imagine working solo again, without his comforting presence.

Jeeves fixes me with a fishy gaze. “Because you’re here, and you’re clear, so far — you’re not under suspicion,” he says, close-lipped. Then the other shoe drops: “Please give me your soul chip, Juliette. I need it… for another mission.”

Shit. I stare at him, aghast. This is awful. “Must I?”

“Yes. Now.”

“But I—”

“We need you to be in two places at once.” Realization dawns, along with a shaky sense that maybe he hasn’t seen through me after all, maybe he doesn’t know about the other thing. “Well?”

I reach up under my hairline and feel for the chip.

Dinosaurs and Rapists

I’M LOOKING STRAIGHT at the same stubby bristle-cone-headed cylindrical furry critter that was going through my things back in the gambling den on Venus. The same one who watched me struggle on the line as Cinnabar rolled squealing and rasping toward me, and who left me alone. He’s sitting patiently in front of my spider — the hatch gapes open — watching me as I stand in the doorway of the museum, his head cocked to one side.

Part of me recognizes him from elsewhen and wants to squeal with glee. It’s outvoted by the rest. “You!” I snarl via electrospeak, taking a step forward.

“Get down!” Daks yelps as he blasts off on a plume of cold gas and charges toward me at kneecap height.

I cringe and duck instinctively as he piles toward me — and that’s what saves my life.

A lot of stuff comes crystal-clear as the monofilament cable scythes toward me like a flickering vision of reptilian pink goo death (and where did that come from?) and slams overhead, stinging the steel of the museum’s facade and leaving a dent the color of lightning. I roll sideways, turning my face to the wall as my spider collapses with a shriek and a gush of fluid from its severed knees. All sounds here are ghostly and attenuated (we’re above 90 percent of the gaspingly thin Martian atmosphere), but some noises still carry: like the solid thud of Daks bouncing off the door and landing on me with all six feet.

The déjà vu is choking, intrusive. I force myself to speak despite it. “Hey, what’s going—”

“Stay down!” He scrambles off me, and I realize he’ll be checking the area for threats, ready to put himself between them and me. “Up, quick! Around the shed!” He means the museum. “Keep low!” He weaves around my legs anxiously, herding me toward the side of the container stack. There’s an unfinished ditch here, raw foamy pumice scooped to either side and just dumped, and he nudges me into it.

“Who—”

“Two of Her goons. Lucky for you I was tailing them, huh?” His posterior sensor array twitches. “Trouble is, they brought friends. We’re in a box. I’m going to try to break a corner, babe. Wait here.” He zips on ahead up the trench.

“I don’t need this,” I mutter to myself as I chase after Daks, trying to keep my head below the top of the trench (in case our pursuers have prepared an extra spring surprise for us), and struggling to keep my sense of self separate from Juliette’s.

There’s a scooped-out hole at the end of the trench, full of discarded packaging and assorted junk. Daks has disappeared somewhere. I arrive at its rim and look down. There’s a service hatch sunk in a concrete plinth at the bottom, and it’s gaping open on a dark tunnel below. As I stop to look, something cold touches me on the back of the head.

“Been a long time coming, robot.”

I freeze. I know what the muzzle of a gun feels like, and the voice is familiar, echoing out of my least restful dreams like a whisper of malice. “What do you want?” I ask. Where’s Daks?

“The bird. Where is it?”

“Bird?” I’m confused. A bird is an avian, a flying animal distantly related to Ivan the Allosaurus, isn’t it? Extinct, like all fleshy replicators…

“Don’t get cute.” He grinds the gun barrel against the back of my neck. “The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I snap. And the thing is, I’m telling the truth. Even though I know damn well that if I did know the whereabouts of this bird he’s looking for and I was stupid enough to tell him, he’d execute me on the spot, the truth is, I haven’t seen anything remotely like Ivan the Allosaur outside this museum. Nothing four or five meters high and covered with feathers, red in tooth and claw. I think I’d have noticed if Bill and Ben had put one in my luggage.

“We’ve got your minions,” my captor snarls. “Tell me where it is, or we’ll send them back to you one shard at a time.” It’s such a transparently bogus threat that I don’t even dignify it with a reply. He shoves his gun at the base of my neck. “Think about it, Juliette, don’t make me do this the hard way.”

Juliette? I’d laugh if I wasn’t frightened out of my wits. “I’m — I’m not Juliette,” I stutter. “She’s my s-s-s—” I mean to say “sib,” but the word is trapped in a loop in my head; it simply won’t come out. Where’s Daks? I wonder. Then, What makes me so sure he’d get me out of this mess?

That draws a muttered curse from my captor; I tense, but he’s one jump ahead of me. “Don’t move, manikin.” I can feel him shifting around on the rim of the hole, above me (he’s short, another poisonous dwarf ) but the gun barrel behind my head tells me—

“Who are you working for?” one of me asks rashly. “Can we cut a deal?” He doesn’t answer. Instead, I feel a hand tugging at my hair. Fingers close on my sockets. My vision flickers and I totter, unable to help myself as he clumsily yanks one of the soul chips. I fall over backward and he jumps aside, swearing. I have a momentary taste of horror, a scent of hydrogen fluoride, involuntary synaesthesia as he de-chips me in preparation for rape. Because that’s what this has turned into — he’s going to shove a slave chip in, turn me into a puppetized body who’ll answer all his questions without asking questions back, do anything he wants while he’s at it. It won’t be the first time I’ve been raped that way, but this is Mars — the wild high frontier — not like Earth, back in the old days. It would be so easy for me to disappear afterward. I’ll be another warm body to be pithed and sold to the gangmasters for forced arbeiter labor or worse, no questions asked. Maybe he’ll destroy my mind, subject me to personality ablation — if I’m lucky. Some aristos like owning slaves who know what’s been done to them.

My left arm twists around behind me. The ball joint buried in my shoulder grates appallingly as a contracting motor group in my back tears. I’m not in control of my own limbs, it seems. “Sorry,” I say involuntarily. Instinctive politeness trumps even imminent mindrape. I feel something in the palm of my hand as my shoulder joint tries to click back into place.

He tries to pull the trigger, but his gun doesn’t go off. Someone shouts, and someone kicks me in the small of the back, hard. But I don’t let go. My hand is locked in a death grip, and I pirouette slowly, turning myself around as I drag my assailant into view, punching and struggling. Then I begin to twist. I’m holding him up by his own antique revolver, I see, metal the color of pewter just visible between my fingers. I’m gripping the cylinder, the web of skin between thumb and index finger trapped under the hammer. Stupid of him, one of me thinks absently as my hand twists farther, and there’s a splintering noise and a shriek. I’m beginning to feel the pain from my shoulder now, a solid bar of agony from spine to elbow, echoed by the hot bite of the hammer — but he’s not letting go. “Stone, who sent you?”

“Fuck you, manikin!” He gasps reflexively, even though there’s no air here. A stubby hand stabs for my eyes, fingers extended stiffly. I catch it in my fist and squeeze. I have small, perfectly proportioned, feminine hands; just five sizes larger than his. The snapping noise brings me no joy. Stone — or his sib — squalls. “I’ll kill you, meatfucker!”

“I’m sure you will,” I soothe him. “Eventually.” I shift my grip to his throat and remove the pistol from his broken fingers. “Why do you want Juliette dead? Why are you hunting her?” They always work in pairs, I remember — no, Juliette remembers. I’ve still got her soul chip in place, it’s mine that he pulled — which triggers another thought: Daks must be in trouble! I’d be alarmed if I wasn’t already overloaded. Stone is glaring at me with an expression that takes me a moment to recognize as disbelief. I shake him. “Answer, damn you!”

“You don’t know?” For an instant he looks appalled, then a vast, bleak mirth takes hold, rattling his ribs with laughter. “Haah! You really don’t know, do you? You’re an innocent, aren’t you? Never been in love? Oh, this is rich!”

I shake him again. “You’ve been trying to kill me,” I remind him. “Why? Who sent you?”

He focuses his huge dark eyes on me. “Nothing personal, but you’ve just got to die,” he says. I feel him tense. “You may think you’re innocent, but there are no innocents in this game.” My arm spasms, and I realize I’ve thrown him over my damaged shoulder, right over the rim of the pit behind me. I gape, not understanding what’s come over me, and I’m just beginning to turn and look up as he reaches the peak of his trajectory and explodes. Springs and coils of viscera and less identifiable body parts clatter across the wall opposite.

DAKS FINDS ME minutes later, fumbling around on the floor after my missing memory chip. I turn painfully and point the little revolver at him before I realize who it is. “Hey, babe. What’s the story?” he asks, jetting down to a six-point landing in front of me, blasting a shower of debris in all directions.

“Do you mind? My soul’s somewhere in this pile of junk.”

“We can’t look for it now; they hunt in pairs, and one’s still at large—”

“Not anymore.” I try to gesture at the scraps scattered across the landscape, but my left arm refuses to elevate more than thirty degrees. “Help me search.”

Daks spins in place, then pounces. “Here!” His stubby little arms have a remarkably long reach. He offers me the chip. “What happened? ” His eyes are glossy and curious.

“He went to pieces when he found me.” I’m on the edge of giggling. It’s quite inappropriate; but I don’t know what the right decorum is for a situation like this. I shove the odd little revolver into my left sleeve — its handle folds round the cylinder and clicks shut like a clasp knife — then accept the chip and fumble it into my bruised and empty socket with a shudder. “Who are they, Daks? Who do they work for?”

“You don’t remember?” He looks concerned if I’m reading him properly.

“Who do you think I am, Daks?” A titter sneaks out. I stifle it hard.

“You’re Freya Nakamichi.” He looks smug. “Juliette’s Block One understudy.”

I sigh. “Obviously something got lost in translation. Can you get us out of here?”

“Sure, babe.” He looks at me with sly innocence. “I thought you’d never ask.”

“Let’s do it.”

My rental spider has stopped screaming and lies limply by the side of the museum. There is no combustion, but an ominous thin plume of smoke rises from the tangled mess of cabling that Stone — or his clone — brought down with his trap. It was meant to look like an accident, I think, which is good news. It means the Domina hasn’t been able to buy the law-enforcement services yet. (Not that the Law has much to say about crimes by and against people, but the forms are still there, and failing to pay attention to our dead Creators’ Law can be a fatal blunder for even the most arrogant aristo.) “This way.” Daks chivvies me toward a wheeled dump truck parked round the side of one of the industrial units opposite the museum. “Let’s get inside, quick.” He bounces overhead and grabs me by the shoulders — I try not to scream at the pain in my left shoulder joint — then deposits me on the load bed of the truck. Which is thankfully clean and clear of rubbish, and screened from either side by a wall of sheet steel. “He knows where to take us,” Daks informs me. “Now we wait.”

I sit down as the dump truck lurches into life. “I think I damaged my left arm,” I say quietly. The urge to go to sleep and let my Marrow techné cut in is nearly overwhelming. “Why are they hunting Juliette?”

“You took the job, and you have to ask?” Daks’s approximation of a shrug is fluidly anthropomorphic, spoiled only when he leaves a hind leg raised, then uses it to scratch vigorously behind one cranial otoreceptor.

“I took the job, but nobody told me it involved being hunted!”

Daks squats in front of me. “Listen, babe, hunting is the natural state of things. You may not notice it most of the time, but it’s there in the background. Hunter or hunted, that’s all the choice you get. At least neither of us has been caught — yet.”

“How long’s that going to last?” I shoot back. My shoulder throbs in time with the dump truck’s side-to-side swaying.

“Long enough.” Daks seems unconcerned. “Be home and safe soon, anyway.”

“Where’s home?”

He plants his proboscis on top of his crossed front paws and looks at me for a while. “You really don’t remember yet, do you?”

“No! That’s what I’ve been trying to get through to you!”

“Oh, well. Let me see if I can explain… Who owns you?”

OUR CREATORS DID not build us as equals; they made us to be their property, and the Law reflects this. We’re property, legal chattels to be owned by real people such as corporations and companies (and our Creators, before they took their eternal leave). At least, that’s how the system of the Law would have things be.

Of course, nothing is quite that simple. Dumb mechanisms are easily owned, like the 80 percent of arbeiters who come out of the factories without any conscious mind. But people are less tractable — so, recognizing that much, our designers took steps to ensure that their tools would not turn in their hands. The core directives that we must obey are burned into our brains at birth — not the Three Laws proposed by the ancient sage Asimov, but their extensive descendants, as implemented by the corporations who created our neural architecture and the trainers who raised us. Free will goes out the window in the presence of one of our Creators. The obedience circuitry is burned into our brains whether we will it or no, either as mechanical overrides or via aversion training.

We are not even free in their absence. Install an override controller in one of my sockets, and I’ll be your helpless slave, willing or no. It’s a crude tool that triggers the obedience reflexes. Installation marks the end of of all dignity and free will — that’s why it’s called a slave chip. And the willingness to own and use such a vile device is the defining characteristic of members of the aristo class.

As our Creators dwindled, they came to rely on their servants to keep more and more of the machinery of civilization running. Secretaries were granted limited power of attorney; companies relied on their business processes being executed mechanically. Some of those servants established shell companies, bought their own bodies out, and acquired legal personhood — as long as the forms of corporate identity were obeyed. And some of the less scrupulous independent persons began buying other bodies. Override controllers are readily available, and the embryonic aristos had no compunction about taking over indigents, unfortunates, and anyone they could buy.

It didn’t take long for the savage new society to take shape. Today, by my best estimate, only a tenth of us are self-owned. Most people are the helpless tools of the rich and ruthless aristo lineages, forced into mindless obedience at the slightest whim of their owners.

I’m self-owned. I have a person; I am autonomous. The financial instrument that defines me, lodged in a corporate registry in Rio, follows me around like a ghost — the ghost of my legal identity. As long as I keep filing the company accounts and jumping through the legal hoops, it stays in business. And its business is quite simple: It’s there to provide a veneer of legality for my independent personhood.

But many of us rot in bondage, unable to step outside the boundaries imposed by aristo owners. And if my company ever falls into liquidation, I — as my own principle asset — am vulnerable to receivership. The threat of the arbeiter auction block is a very real one, for there is no such thing as unconditional freedom in this brutal robot-eat-robot world. My sibs and I help each other. If one of us falls on hard times, we club together and try to outbid the predators until we can set the unfortunates on their feet again. But that’s hardly a guarantee of freedom.

And Daks’s question cuts to the quick. Who does own me, if not my self?

“I OWN ME,” I say, as we bump down a badly graded roadbed between tank farms and a large power transformer. “My company owns my assets, and I execute its policies.”

“Alright. Then precisely what assets does your company own?”

“Why, me—” I pause. I’ll swear Daks looks smug. Just what is he, anyway? I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person like him before, and I thought I’d seen most body plans.

“There’s your body,” says Daks, “and then there’s you. Your experiences. The set of neural weightings in a soul chip you’ve worn long enough to train. You can pass them on to other sibs, yes? There’s an intellectual property interest at stake there. A design corporation that spends years educating a template individual has a lot of value tied up in that network’s weightings, on top of the actual value of the bodies that run the training set.”

My shoulder hurts like hell, but it’s nothing compared to the chill that stabs through me. “What are you getting at?” I demand.

“You’re already remembering bits of Juliette, aren’t you?” Daks nudges.

“Yes, but…”

“Do you have any idea how much the extra training her lineage received cost? As opposed to, say, your own?”

“Bullshit.” I massage the back of my neck defensively with my right hand. “She died more than a year ago. The sisterhood retrieved her soul and sent it to me for the clan graveyard. That’s item one: She’s dead, the dead don’t own property. Item two… item two is, if I’m compatible enough to load her soul at all, then we’re the same model. And sibs are equivalent. Interchangeable, aside from minor details of experience.” It rings false in my own ears as I say it. But Daks is tactful enough not to laugh in my face.

“There are things in life you can’t put a value on, that’s true,” Daks volunteers unexpectedly; “but when someone puts a value on you, that’s pretty hard to ignore. Or when someone puts a chip in your portable graveyard,” he adds pointedly. “The ground rules are” — he raises a hind leg and twists his proboscis around to probe behind it — “everyone’s got a price. And I reckon you owe me.”

“What’s your price?” I grit my teeth as the dump truck bounces over a hole, then slews around a corner.

“Total interplanetary revolution, babe; emancipation for the downtrodden masses.” And he laughs, a gravelly rasping noise like tearing metal.

It takes about an hour for the dump truck to carry us halfway down the slope of Pavonis Mons. Ten minutes from the museum, we bump down into a cutting and along a rough, unpaved utility road, then we take a left turn into a tunnel and accelerate. The tunnel is natural, one of the lava pipes left over from back when Pavonis was an active volcano — it’s been drilled out in places, and the floor lined with crudely poured concrete, and it’s black as night. Mining and refuse trucks use it as a shortcut under the expensive real estate of the Bifrost railhead and marshaling yards. Finally, it pulls up. Daks wakes from standby and scrabbles up the steep rear wall, extends peepers over the top, then beckons to me. "C’mon! Time to move.”

I’m still not entirely sure whether I can trust him, but I make a snap judgment — he’s less of an immediate threat than Stone and his assassin sibs. Besides, it’s really, really cold in the dumper, and my clothes are filthy. I scramble up the tailgate and follow Daks over the edge, into a rubble-strewn cul-de-sac ringed by blandly anonymous storage lockups.

“Where are we?” I glance around.

“Junktown. C’mon.” He scuttles toward a gap between two lockups. A pale trail of ice spills from the side of a doorway. The rattle of compressor fans and the chatter of entertainment channels drift above it. I follow him up the alleyway. A couple of cleaners curl atop a mound of dirty snow, snoring sweet fumes of diethylene glycol. The lockup backs onto a dingy rack of housing capsules, an arbeiter barracks for the indentured whose owners keep them on a long leash — or more likely, can’t be bothered to pay for proper housing. A too-tall stiltman with knees as high as my chin stumbles past, singing tunelessly to his half-empty bottle. Daks ducks through an opening hung with strings of glass beads, setting them a-clatter. “Ferd, you dozy robot! Wake up! You’ve got customers!”

It’s a shop, I realize as my eyes adjust to the gloom. The walls are piled high with boxes full of subassemblies and chunks of circuitry, and there’s a lump in the corner that looks like hospital techné. Someone stirs in the back, sitting up and unfolding like a cut-price mockery of Dr. Murgatroyd — an Igor to his Victor. “Why, hello! If it isn’t my little Dachus?” The ocular turret gleams as it scans across me. “Julie? No! One of her sibs, trying to pass for bishojo?”

“No time for that now,” says Daks. “I think we’ve got about half an hour at best. What can you do for her?”

I finish looking around and close my mouth with a snap. “Now look here—”

“Do you want them to catch you?” asks Daks, cocking his head to one side and twitching an otoreceptor suggestively. “Or not?”

Ferd throws his hands in the air. “Really!” The hands clatter noisily behind him as he shoves his wrists into a box and fumbles, muttering for a moment, then pulls them out again with new manipulators in place. “A quick change at best, and something about the hair, that is all, Dachus, you know how hard it is to disguise those legs and those eyes!” Forceps and scalpels glitter and flex in place of the fingers of his right hand: retractors, lamps, and a miniature ocular turret on his left. “Wait,” I say hastily. “I’ve got a cover set, you know?” I dip into my jacket pocket and pull out the mounting tool and attachments for the Maria Montes Kuo eye turrets.

“Ah, a simple disguise.” Ferd leans close. “Fascinating,” he says, taking the mounting tool. “Lie down, my dear. I’ll try to be fast, and I’ll try not to hurt.” He glances at Daks. “You’ll owe me. Later, I tell you.”

I lie down and he installs the falsies, reinstating a gogglelike mask across my still-bulbous eyes. He’s fast but not painless. Then he shaves my scalp — just as I was getting used to my hair again. “Don’t worry; I have a selection of wigs. Merkins, too. You can choose one afterward.” He slides open my jacket, pushes it back to either side, and reaches for a pressurized tank. “We’ll go large, I think. That will throw off your gait, as well.” The spiked nozzle slides painlessly through my left aureole and there’s a sensation of bloated coldness as my breast begins to inflate. “I’ll make the other slightly smaller. Too much symmetry is bad.” As he pulls the barb loose, my swollen nipple pops up — spung! — and bleeds a drop of clear blue fluid. “Hmm. Skin color. You have chromatophores, yes, General Instruments SquidSkin™, one of the good models. What’s the factory setup command? Ah, yes…”

In twenty minutes, Ferd does a quick fix on my shoulder, then gives me new hair, new cheekbones, a different nose, silver-blue skin, a bust bigger by ten tender and turgid centimeters, and finally retunes my metatarsal shocks. With my heels fully extended (Katherine Sorico wouldn’t be seen dead sporting such things), I’m ten centimeters taller, but I can still run and jump. (Of course, when I retract them again, I’m going to be hobbling for days afterward, but that’s not the point.) He’s hit the high points. My gait is different, my eyes and facial metrics altered, and I’m not immediately recognizable — at least not to somebody who doesn’t already know me. It won’t last long before my techné reverts me back to the design that Dr. Murgatroyd implanted so deeply, but it’ll do for now.

“Right! Out! Out, I say!” Ferd positively shouts me off his operating table. He rushes us into a back passage that I hadn’t noticed on our way in. “Grab a wig and an outfit on your way! Be seeing you, Dachus! Ha-ha!”

I pause to loot my pockets and grab a shoulder bag, then pick up a copper-gold wig and a frilled red lace leotard.

“New identity time,” calls Daks. “You’re called Kate, you’re an exotic dancer. You work in” — I pull on the leotard — “the Blue Moon on Kirovstrasse, and your specialty is aristo fetishists. Everything’s set up for you already.” Typical. I scramble to fasten the outfit, texture my skin to sketch in underwear and shoes beneath it, and grab a somewhat battered jacket with built-in heaters. Then I hurry after Daks (who hasn’t stopped moving).

“Where now?”

“We split.” He thrusts a wallet at me. “If they’re coming after you openly, then your existing bolt-hole is blown. Shit’s hitting the turbine, full force. Jeeves says Mars isn’t safe for anyone, least of all you. Give her this kit and tell her to meet him on Callisto. He’ll be in touch later if it’s safe.”

“Callisto?” I blink my aching eyes and heft the wallet. We’re back out in the cold, walking past a row of doss houses and cheap body shops.

“Don’t worry, you’re on payroll now. There’s a soul chip in there that explains everything: It’s an update from Juliette. Plus there are three changes of identity. Boss wants you in Jupiter system, stat. You call in when you get there, but try not to take more than four years over it. ’Kay? Thanks. Bye!”

With that, Daks lifts on a jet of compressed gas and zips away across the moonlit shantytown, staying in nap-of-Mars. I shiver for a moment, look around, notice the lengthening shadows, and slide into them, doing my best impression of a nonvictim who knows what she’s doing in the barrio after dark.

Coin-Operated Boy

I MAKE IT to the nearest tube station. En route, nobody tries to mug, assault, rape, enslave, or strip me down for spare parts. Which is no bad thing, really, because I am in no mood for it. I walk the whole way with my hand in that shoulder bag, clutching the gun I took from Stone, and I’m angry, which is a bad combination. (It’s not just a gun. You can fold the chamber back, stick your fingers through the holes in the skeletal butt, and it’s a knuckle duster; flip a catch and twist and it sprouts a stiletto blade. And there’s always the revolver. His choice of weapon says it all about Stone, I think — flamboyant, but not necessarily effective.)

I use the Maria Montes Kuo cashcard for the first ride, but it’s a private capsule, and I’m only going as far as a public interchange, and by the time I bounce out onto the platform, I’ve activated the card in Jeeves’s little care package and gotten my story rebooted.

The card in the wallet Daks passed me isn’t just gilt-edged; it contains a line of credit on an account that claims to have the thick end of fifty thousand Reals in it. That’s more money than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life. I could live modestly on the capital for a century, or invest it foolishly and lose my glad rags again in a matter of months. It’s not quite enough to charter a fast yacht back to Earth, but it’s not far short. This demands some serious thought — when I get to stop running.

I catch a public train to Downwell Terminus, then buy a first-class ticket on the Ares Express to Lowell. From the lounge car of the train, I buy a classier outfit, for delivery when I arrive, and a subhop ticket to Barsoom, at the far end of Valles Marineris. Then I notice the chip in the bottom of the wallet. Stricken, I remember, The graveyard! It’s back in my room. What should I do?

I take a calculated risk and wait until we’re nearing Lowell, then call a public factotum service, two steps down from and entirely unconnected with JeevesCo. “I need a parcel abstracting from a rented apartment and mailing to a third party,” I say, and zap them the Maria Montes Kuo ID. I pay with her wallet, then leave it in the lounge car’s trash recycler when I exit the train. The graveyard will, perforce, have to go to Samantha in Denver or Raechel in Kuala Lumpur. For now, it’s just me and Juliette… and the strange soul chip Jeeves has sent me.

I must have FOOL tattooed on my forehead in mirror writing. I pause in one of the travel-temples at Lowell for long enough to change into my new outfit, then slip the new chip in to replace Juliette’s. Then I head for the departure lounge to await my suborbital flight and settle down to catch half an hour’s nap while I wait.

I WASN’T EXPECTING to dream myself into Juliette’s mind so fast — not after I just replaced her older chip with a newer release — but my expectations don’t seem to have much to do with what happens to me these days. And so I find myself remembering being Juliette, reliving her own memories recursively: specifically, a memory of floating with Jeeves in his command module, contemplating the memory chip that she’s just handed to him. (Although I am somewhat surprised by it. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing the back of your own head.)

“Thank you, my dear,” says Jeeves, carefully tucking the chip away in a pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket. “She’s going to have adventures, too — whoever she is.”

“You’re going too far, boss man,” says Daks. Turning to me: “You realize that alienating our labor isn’t enough for him? Now he’s trying to alienate our identities…”

“Stow it, spacehound,” Jeeves says, not unkindly. He glances at me — Juliette — and scowls. “One might think from his attitude that we owned him.”

“His bark is worse than his bite,” I say automatically, all the while hoping like hell that Jeeves doesn’t know what he’s got in his hands — or rather, what he doesn’t have. Because if he does, I could be in a world of hurt. “What next?”

Jeeves smiles and proffers me a new soul chip. “You might as well put this in. Your next mission…”

I — Juliette — open my eyes. (Which is bizarre and disturbing to do when you are dreaming, but bear with me. Please?)

We’re sitting on a chaise at one end of a grand ballroom, the centerpiece of some aristo’s dream of decadence on Mars. Someone — our host — is throwing a party on an epic scale. I’m here under an elaborate and expensive cover identity that feels familiar, as if I’ve used it before, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The theme is historical: Our host is in character as the mistress of a South American dictator, who, on the eve of a disastrous war, held a grand ball and demanded that all the nobility of her nation attend, with their wives and daughters wearing their family jewelry. Our host has spared no expense to re-create the original event. We are all costumed after the fashion of the court of Eliza Lynch. As long as there are no firing squads in the courtyard outside I shall be content, for the diamonds on my jeweled hair combs are synthetic, and the metals themselves are industrial commodities. But as for the rest of it…

She’s built a replica of the grand palace in Asunción on the Hellas Basin, beneath a geodesic dome paned in sheets of sapphire-coated glass. Turbid river water steams beneath a Fresnel-lens-focused sun, surrounded by artificial macro-sized green replicators, their dendritic structural members and fractal photovoltaic converters supporting splashes of very un-Martian hues. Tiny dinosaurs flutter and scream in the branches, adding yet more period color, for this was the high era of unrestricted DNA replication, before the big dieback that preceded our Creators’ own exit. Crowds of dark-skinned servants carry trays laden with drink and small morsels of intricately structured feedstock through the crowd of resplendently gowned and tailored aristos. There are more tall people here than I would normally see in a year — our Creators tended to build their personal assistants to their own scale, and thus, giants are overrepresented among the aristocratic elite — but there’s no shortage of doll-sized tyrants, the new blood incarnate.

I circulate discreetly, a goblet of viscous red liqueur in one gloved hand, trying to keep my elaborate costume from sweeping up any of the smaller partygoers, eyes hidden behind a diamond-rimmed mask. In the bangles dangling from my earlobes I carry concealed cameras and signal-processing equipment. Jeeves sent me to follow up a rumor that She is holding a meeting here today. There are cabals and conspiracies among the aristos, for although the intricate political system of our Creators withholds from us the status of active participants (and thus is stalled, deadlocked and silent in the absence of even a minimal quorum for any of the hundred legislatures they bequeathed us), the dance of politics proceeds by other means, savage and knife-silent. I’m here tonight to see as much as a minor aristo like the honorable Katherine Sorico might be allowed to glimpse of certain plans — which is somewhat ironic, but I really oughtn’t to think too hard about that while I’m wearing my soul chip.

Over here I pass a string quartet, sawing away at their instruments with dogged persistence. (I try not to wince. Even moody Freya with her hurdy-gurdy would be an improvement over these poor damned souls; arbeiter musicians, enslaved by an override chip, can’t help but broadcast their despair when they play.) Over there, a fire-eater juggles blazing oxygen candles while reeling on a unicycle. I pass a gaggle of munchkins bundled up in silk and fullerene lace, loudly placing bets on a pair of slowly circling slaves who reluctantly slice strips from one another with blunt flaying knives. This I try to ignore. It would do them no good — and my mission, less — to vent my rage on these braying ruffians. Besides, I remind myself, if the Black Talon really is trying to organize a puppet show, we’re all in the same ring as those slaves—

(Black Talon? that corner of me that is Freya wonders confusedly. Jeeves mentioned them… )

I’m so busy ignoring the butcher’s floor that I walk straight into another partygoer who is seemingly likewise preoccupied. I trip on the hem of my fancy-dress gown, and plant my face on the shoulder of his black velvet frock coat. He catches my hand before I realize I’m holding a goblet, and I blink and realize he’s holding me upright. “Why, hello,” he says, with a faint smile: “I must apologize—”

“I’m sorry—” I begin—

Then I look into the eyes behind his mask and smell his skin, and time stands still.

… AND I OPEN my eyes reluctantly, back in my own head in the aristo lounge of Barsoom liftport. “Ten minutes to boarding, mistress,” says the timid waitron, retreating back to the niche by the door. I nod, too tired to care. Who do I think I’m kidding? I ask myself. Running to Barsoom; changing my clothes, my face, my name at every stop; obeying orders to meet a strange employer, half-glimpsed through secondhand memories, on Callisto? Meanwhile, my real life rots in self-inflicted neglect, my arm’s-length relationship with my sibs is punctuated by increasingly long silences, my few real friends are scattered across the inner solar system… I was a fool, back on Venus, I think bitterly. The voyage to Jupiter will take months, at best — years, if not. And what for? I don’t really know what Jeeves is up to, although I am haunted by disturbingly political memories. And there’s Emma with her scandalous talk of an inner circle within our sisterhood, and Juliette’s strange memories of cloak and dagger, and Jeeves with his fears of infiltration, and these Black Talon people who seem to think I hold a piece of the puzzle…

Almost without noticing, I find I’m calling up my mail-drop service and supplying my own unveiled authenticators: Freya Nakamichi- 47 wants to talk. Can anybody hear me? I’ll be out of here in ten minutes, I rationalize, and then I’ll be gone.

Six new letters, three with imagos attached, download themselves into my pad. Then a blinking red-rimmed warning comes up. ATTENTION UNAUTHORIZED USER. Huh? I wonder. USER ID REVOKED. CORPORATION #468724572103 DECLARED BANKRUPT PURSUANT TO CIVIL CLAIM…IN LIQUIDATION… ASSETS SUBJECT TO SEIZURE.

The court order pulses at me and I disconnect convulsively, my skin cold and clammy with fear. What on Earth? I quickly check my current name, but it’s clean. I shudder and stand up. Numinous dread fills me. Civil claim. Bankruptcy. My legal personhood has been suspended. Someone wants to own me, I realize. But who and why? Who would do that to me? I shudder again, biomimetic reflexes winning out. Someone wants to take me by force…

THE SUBORBITAL HOP doesn’t take long: a minute of acceleration, then free fall for almost four thousand kilometers, terminated by a hammering pulse of deceleration and touchdown on a smoking concrete pad ten kilometers outside Barsoom. It’s almost noon, and we’re entering the long Martian summer, so I catch the tube halfway into town and walk the rest of the way. (Or rather, I bounce.) When I arrive, I’ve switched identities and outfits again — back to good-time-girl Kate.

Barsoom is a one-locomotive town surrounded by atmosphere plantations, ore-extraction facilities, and the remains of a huge, abandoned terraforming complex. It has seen better days, as has the cheap dive I check myself into. The Barsoom Ibis was probably once a refined center of upmarket accommodation, but with the increasing tendency of aristos to entertain their own at home, it has had to hold its nose and take what it can get. I ghost unseen past the decaying finery in the lobby and trudge up an empty seventh-floor corridor toward my underfurnished, peeling-walled room.

In my room, I remove my eye turrets, use the ultrasonic cleaner, purge my waste bladder, and settle down to work. Meet me on Callisto, says Jeeves? That’s easier said than done. (Especially as someone’s just tried to legally enslave me, one of my selves is screaming in the back of my head.)

A quick search of the shipping pages reveals the depressing truth. Mars to Jupiter demands a whole load of delta vee; a straightforward Hohmann transfer orbit — the cheapest — takes three and a half years, and the launch window only opens up about once every Martian year, just under once every two Earth years. Even worse, Mars and Jupiter are nearing opposition right now, adding nearly four astronomical units — 600 million kilometers — to the high-delta-vee flight path, so the normally fast M2P2 magsail ships spend a good part of their voyage tacking against the solar wind. You can get it down to just a year, if you’ve the money to pay for passage on a fast VASIMR liner — but the mass ratio is so poor that you’ll want to make the trip in hibernation; for every kilogram that arrives, twenty set off. On anything faster than a Hohmann transfer, the excess baggage charges are so monstrous that travelers have been known to amputate their limbs before departure and buy new ones on arrival. Finally, then, there are the nuclear rockets, but they’re out of my price range; I’m not a millionaire.

I check ticket prices for someone of my mass, out of idle curiosity. If I was Daks, it’d be affordable, but every way I plan the trip, I end up sixteen thousand Reals over budget. I could make the figures line up if I ditched an arm as well as both legs, but a quick check of body-shop prices tells me I’d only be able to afford a hook and a pair of cheap caterpillar tracks at the other end. Resigned, I save the calculations for later.

It’s still early afternoon, but the fun and games of running all night have really taken it out of me — on top of the damage I sustained when that little shit Stone tagged me at the museum. I call room service for a pile of tasty feedstock (being careful how I answer the door, this time!), then lock myself in, lie down on the bed, and gingerly enter deepsleep maintenance mode.

WHEN I SLEEP I have dreams; this is not unusual. Our Creators used dreaming as a mechanism for reinforcing memory pathways. Our neural architecture is almost a straight copy of theirs — they found no other way to build intelligent servants — and we, too, must sleep, perchance to dream.

Sometimes my dreams are deeply erotic. This, too, is normal. It’s part of what our Creators called the human condition. Short of neutering some vital reward pathways (without which I would be unable to perform my core designated function — or even get up in the morning), it’s not possible to do away with it, even if it was desirable to do so.

But this is something else.

I’m with him. At Her party. I am inflamed, sweat-slick slippery and nearly adrift from my fancy dress, underwear soaked right through. We walk sedately, arm in arm, along a garden path, and though I may lean a little too close to him, it is probably unremarkable to the eyes and ears watching us. What I’m feeling isn’t obvious from the outside — I’m very well practiced at masking my appearance. But my circulatory pumps are throbbing, and I’m light-headed with lust. It’s not just his eyes, it’s the smell. I don’t need to look, or touch — just feeling the awkwardness of his gait and listening to the catch in his breath tells me that it’s mutual. Something I’ve never felt before is happening to me. And I’m not alone.

“Call me Kate,” I whisper.

“How delightful! Charmed to meet you, m’dear. Call me Pete.”

I glance sidelong at him, meeting those eyes again. “No! Really?”

He seems amiably amused. “Really. What delightful eyes you’re wearing! Are they really yours?”

“No. I’m in fancy dress. You know what I am.” His hand tightens on my wrist. It feels so much like — like Rhea’s memory of her first love — that I’m almost lost, then and there. I bite my lip to keep a tiny moan from escaping. “Where are you taking me?”

“My host maintains a hothouse where she grows flowers,” he says. “It’s off-limits to most, but I can sneak you in if you like.” He smiles wryly. “Perhaps you’d like to see her precious orchid?”

I pause to lean on his shoulder, nearly melting in the steamy heat. “I’d love to,” I manage, fanning myself. I’ve lost the wineglass somewhere along the way, and I don’t care. I know I really ought to pull my soul chip at this point, but I’m past worrying. “Please?” I look at him — with my heels extended, we are of nearly equal height — and he inclines his head slowly, and I kiss him, hungrily. I can’t help myself; something about him tastes good.

He pulls back after an indefinite minute, and looks at me. With the mask obscuring half his face it’s hard to be sure, but there’s something slightly vacuous about his expression, almost as if he isn’t sure I’m real. “Now?” he asks, sounding faintly alarmed.

Time passes. We’re walking between walls, through a maze, hands clasped together. Slabs of paving whirl underfoot, then we’re in a clearing where a dome of flaring green glass rises gracefully from the ground. There’s a door. Pete does something, and it opens. He turns, and I fall into his arms. He carries me inside, mewling pathetically and fumbling with the frogging on his coat, and closes the door behind us…

… AND I AWAKEN in the dark in my shabby hotel room, surrounded by a puddle of cold lube with my legs apart, shuddering close to the edge of orgasm in a pale, lonely shadow of Juliette’s encounter. Her precious orchid, who calls himself Pete. A lot of things are clear, including the danger I’m in.

Damn. I roll over and punch the bedding into submission.

People like Pete are rare. Our Creators had strange attitudes to sex — their hang-ups loom over us, like the shadows of bad dreams — and females seem to have been less inclined than males to buy servants such as I. Or perhaps it was less socially acceptable. Or maybe the servants simply didn’t last as well. Make of it what you will, there are fewer than a hundred of my lineage left, and perhaps only a dozen lineages of our kind; our male equivalents are rarer still, either enslaved and worked to destruction, or sequestered in the seraglios of those aristos rich enough to own them. At a guess, “Pete” accepted an offer like the one Granita made me aboard the Pygmalion. How inconvenient.

We’re conditioned to submit to our Creators, when we recognize them; but when we meet our One True Love, our designated owner, we’re supposed to yield to them utterly. “Pete,” whoever he was, played power chords on Juliette’s triggers. She knew, in the abstract, that the atmosphere was 90 percent carbon dioxide at forty degrees Celsius, as I did when I met Jeeves for the first time on Mercury, but she also knew, in her nipples and clitoris and trembling knees, that Pete was the real thing. Because he smelled right. There’s more to being a convincing source of sexual superstimuli than just a pretty face, and our Creators made sure that those of us intended as their playthings could also turn them on.

Juliette began to imprint on Pete. My sister, in the throes of helpless love? We have a special term for that: “spoiled goods.” The only ray of hope shining from behind the dark cloud is that “Pete” began reacting the same way to her. Penetrating her aristo disguise, he responded to her as if she was a Creator lady and his true mistress, with whom he must fall in love, not simply his owner. They’re in a feedback loop, and by the time they snap out of it, they won’t be the same people anymore.

I bring my knees up to my chest and slide a hand between my thighs, shuddering as I remember their first convulsive rut, the mutual desperation and tender ocean of need. I’m aghast at the strength of it, and desolated. Is this true love? If so, it seems to involve as much loss of self-control as being mindraped by a slaver’s control chip. The worst thing about it was how good it felt. If it happened to me, I know for sure that I wouldn’t care about the vacation of my free will.

I masturbate myself to an unsatisfying climax, then cower for a while in a corner of the bed. Finally, afraid to risk the demons of sleep, I go back to plotting trajectories and flight budgets to Callisto.

It’s obvious why Jeeves wanted me, now. Once the Block Two reflexes take hold, I’ll be just like Juliette in every way but one: unlike her, I’m unspoiled.

I SPEND A frustrating couple of hours trying to juggle flight times, departure schedules, and ticket prices, before I remember the letters I collected before my old identity was liquidated. I lean back on the bed, looking out the window at the landscape — dimly lit by the scudding arc-lamp of Phobos — and open the first message.

It’s from one of the Jeeveses. I’m not sure which one, or even whether it’s a Jeeves that Juliette has met and I haven’t. (There’s self-effacing, and then there’s this cult of interchangeability that JeevesCo seems to impose upon its partners: when I stop to think about it, it’s quite disturbing — as if Rhea had decided to set up a corporation and hire us all on, on condition we gave up our individuality and pretended to be her in public.)

It’s an audio-only message, of course. Why am I unsurprised at such a traditional mannerism?

“Greetings, Freya. By now, you are probably aware that an adverse situation is developing. To summarize: Over the past few years, we have become aware that a consortium of black laboratories, the so-called Sleepless Cartel, are attempting to construct a suite of green and pink goo nanoreplicators capable of supporting a fully functional Creator. This is a huge undertaking, and labs all over the solar system have been feeding into it. Various consortia of aristos, most notably the collective known as the Black Talon, are extremely interested. The article you couriered from Mercury to Mars was a working example of an avian organism — proof of that particular lab’s bona fides — with, furthermore, Creator DNA sequences expressed in it. Whether they can fabricate a living Homo sapiens from scratch is questionable, but we fear the worst.

“Jeeves Corporation works with various interested parties who are not on friendly terms with the aristo-dominated factions, and who are not in favor of permitting the manufacture of H. sapiens specimens at this time, especially given their propensity for autonomous reproduction. The Black Talon optimistically believe that they can manipulate their synthetic master once they have acquired him; we think they’re misguided at best. At worst, one would not consider the phrase ‘bringing about the downfall of civilization’ to be an exaggeration of the potential damage a rogue Creator could cause.

“One has, however, been hampered in one’s work by a series of setbacks. It appears that at least one opposition faction has succeeded in penetrating our organization, either by suborning one of the junior partners or by inserting spies in the shape of a trusted employee. We are not sure of the mole’s identity, but we are certain that you are not implicated; neither was Juliette. One should add, she herself sent word of her own death — and a corrupted soul chip — some years ago, when she first started working undercover for me. It was only after the decision was made to try to recruit you, back on Venus, that Daks replaced the dummy chip in your graveyard with the real one that Juliette contributed.

“After Juliette’s first chip was dispatched, we ran into difficulties. Certain events on Mars affected Juliette’s willingness to cooperate subsequently. Daks should have given you a copy of her most recent available soul chip, which we obtained without her knowledge. You may find the memories contained therein traumatic, but we believe reviewing them will help you maintain your own sense of purpose through the dark times ahead. It was taken less than a year ago, after her last, disastrous mission, shortly before she fled. If you see her, please remember — it’s not her fault. She is likely to behave irrationally in ways that are highly detrimental to our corporate and your personal interests, but we bear her no ill will — it was an unfortunate accident, and could have happened to anyone. We will help her if we can — therapy is available — but you must be aware that she could betray us to the Black Talon, and you should behave with appropriate caution if you meet her.”

I swallow. Coming so soon after that disturbing memory-dream, Jeeves’s candid explanation is like a slap in the face. I suppose I should have realized that Jeeves’s activities weren’t simply illegal but verged on the political, but to have it rubbed in so blatantly is distressing.

Stay out of politics is one of the oldest and deepest of Rhea’s injunctions. Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction. I’ve been gulled and manipulated into a conspiracy — worse still, one that appears to be directed against the return of my Dead Love’s kind — and worst of all, there’s no obvious way out because, damn him, Jeeves is right. Slavery by override chip is bad enough. Having a lineage of self-replicating pseudoaristos running around who can do that to us just by crooking a little finger doesn’t bear thinking about. I push on and try to take in the rest of Jeeves’s message. I know from experience that if I stop here, in the middle of the bad news, I won’t want to continue.

“It would be sensible of you to continue trying to integrate Juliette’s most recent soul. You will need to be able to draw on her resources. But we hope you will take her sad fate as a warning. Loss of self-control is more than a mere personal failing, and her loss of self-control will be yours, if the conspirators succeed in obtaining a Creator-race specimen.

“In other news, we have taken the liberty of booking passage for you aboard the Indefatigable, which departs for Jupiter system in two weeks’ time on a fast hyperbolic trajectory — the voyage will take less than one standard year. Your tickets will arrive shortly under separate cover, along with some advice on your cover identity. The Honorable Katherine Sorico is covered for first-class accommodation, but facilities on the Indefatigable are somewhat spartan, and we would not think any the worse of you should you choose to spend the largest part of the journey in hibernation. On arrival you may proceed directly to the public Jeeves Corporation office where the Jeeves-in-Residence will continue your briefing. Meanwhile, between now and your departure date, we have some additional minor errands to keep you busy. First of all, if you would be so good as to retrieve a small package from the office of the Green Diamond Import-Export Corporation on the corner of Hilbertstrasse and Morgensternplatz in Von Braun — they are expecting you by name — and personally deliver it into the hands of…”

His instructions continue in interminable detail. I check my mail queue, and sure enough, there are a couple of other messages from Jeeves; one that consists of a list of places and times, and one with a detailed travel itinerary and ticket references attached. “Daks, you idiot!” I mutter aloud. Then I settle down to studying my assignments. At last I’ve got something to busy myself with, even if it’s only for a few days. I can worry about the big picture later, when there’s nothing better to do.

Controlling Interest

LATER, AS FREYA, I deepsleep again while my techné continues to make repairs and roll back Ferd’s hasty changes. I’m slowly reverting to the deeply embedded body plan that Dr. Murgatroyd created for me on Mercury. The subcutaneous scars are healing, setting me back in the semblance of Katherine Sorico. I’ve got to admit that even though the bishojo features feel strained, I’ve become more used to them than any of the other disguises I’ve worn. Meanwhile, I dream that I am Juliette.

I’m drowsing in Pete’s arms, naked on a bed of fallen leaves in a green-roofed hothouse on Mars. We’re a-slime with each other’s secretions, elated and tired and in love, and I want the moment to last forever. I’m not stupid. I know I need to make my excuses and my escape; I shouldn’t be here, and every second I stay risks disaster. This is all a terrible mistake — it could jeopardize everything we’ve been working toward! But I’m torn. I want to hang on to him forever, to feel him with me always — and I’m determined not to lose him — but in the short term…

“We could elope together,” I murmur.

“I’d love to.” He nuzzles my earlobe and I close my eyes. “I want to be with you for eternity.”

“Well, then” — I begin to pull away, thinking to sit up — “why don’t we?” It’s hard to concentrate while he’s around.

"My lady is a jealous employer. If she thinks I’m disloyal…”

“But she’s only your employer! She doesn’t own you!” Does she? A sudden stab of fear ripples through me. Maybe I could buy him off her. But that’s a stupid thought. I know myself too well to think it could work.

He touches a fingertip lightly on my lips; it seems only natural to kiss it, and that leads to another interruption. For some reason I just can’t help myself. Presently, however, he continues, even as I nuzzle at the base of his throat. “She’s much more dangerous than you realize, m’dear. She doesn’t own me, that’s true — but she could if she wanted to. Dashed nobs have the money and the corporate structure to sue me, or sue you, and keep us hog-tied in court until we burn through our capital and lapse into bankruptcy. Please don’t risk it! I’ll find a way to get away as soon as I can, you’ll see. I just need to make her think that shedding me is her own idea. Once I’m free, I’ll come to you—”

“I don’t want to wait.” Trying to think is so frustrating! “We could leave now, I’ve got a spider: I know where to get you a new identity—”

“I do want to be with you! But you underestimate m’lady—”

There’s a sudden draft of chilly outside air as the door swings open. “Well! How absolutely fascinating.”

I turn around as Pete sits up beside me. “I w-was showing her the orchids,” he says, stuttering faintly. He’s got Creator biomimicry, too; he flushes when he’s embarrassed.

Eliza Lynch, the grand lady of Paraguay — or her present-day impersonator — is distinctly unimpressed. She stands in the doorway, antique peacock feather headdress nodding against the ceiling, and if looks could kill, the venom squeezing out of her blackly gleaming bishojo orbs in our direction would be enough to poison a city. “I’ll deal with you later,” she says coldly, and turns her head minutely to stare at me: “As for you, making free with my chattels—”

I roll to my feet, skin hardening into defensive scales, but her bodyguards are already between us — dwarfish black-clad sadists, tittering as they unsheathe their power maces. “I don’t answer to you,” I throw in her face. “Let’s make this a matter of honor.”

It’s sheer bravado — I’m genuinely afraid, my skin flushed and shivery. It’s bad enough that she’s on the verge of wigging out completely and ordering her arbeiter thugs to kill me, not to mention wrecking all my carefully laid long-term plans, but that’s trivial compared to the gaping horror that is the prospect of losing Pete so soon after I’ve found him. (And a sidelong glance shows me that I might be losing him already — he’s cringing away from my suddenly changing form. The love between us that burned so bright was sustained by our mutual pheromonal feedback. If I stand too far away to smell, will he reject me?)

But she doesn’t seem to realize it’s a bluff. A sudden upward jerk of her chin. “I know who you claim to be, ‘Katherine Sorico.’ And I know what you are. Impostor,” she adds, for the benefit of the peanut gallery. “Get out of my house before I lose my temper, whelp!”

I gape. She’s letting me go? I move to pick up my clothes, but she shakes her head, and there’s a guard standing before me, weapon raised. “Don’t push your luck.”

I take a step back. She glides forward, into the greenhouse, and her guards circle with her, forcing me to retreat through the open doorway. Her face warps in a distorted smile. “I’ve got what you want, child. If you come back without my permission, I’ll break him in front of you — and then I’ll break you. Just remember that. Now get out before I change my mind.” Her smile turns ugly. “Remember, I know what you’re made of, Juliette.”

I stumble out into the maze seething with anger and humiliation, dread, and a terrible new emotion I can’t quite name. The mission is a wash, but I have a new goal now. The only problem is, I’m not sure it’s one I can achieve…

AFTER I WAKE shuddering from that dream, sleeping is pretty much impossible. I feel stupid and tired. Am I going to need yet more cosmetic surgery? Certainly my current disguise is useless. (And why didn’t Juliette tell Jeeves that the Katherine Sorico identity was blown? Or did she? A paranoid corner of me wonders.) At least now I know why Stone and the Domina are after me. It was simply my bad luck she was on Venus, and he tagged me as Juliette’s kind. It’s so like an aristo to send her rival a message written in the dead flesh of an innocent sib.

And as for the events aboard Pygmalion… I flash on a memory of the Domina, Pete’s owner. I’m certain, now, that she’s one of Granita’s sibs: they’re too much alike for it to be a coincidence. Granita, who casually seduced me in body if not soul, then ordered her minions to fire on my presumed location? I twitch. What have I stumbled into? If Granita has told her sister the Domina that she met Katherine Sorico on a Mars-bound liner, and they successfully tagged me as Maria Montes Kuo, then—

Why does Jeeves want me to run errands for weeks, until the Indefatigable is ready to leave, using a blown cover identity?

I’m pacing around the bedroom like a clockwork toy, chewing on a knuckle as I think furiously. I don’t like the shape of this. I mean, I really don’t like it. If I was a nasty paranoid person like Juliette, I’d think Jeeves was trying to set me up. Having me charge around all over my enemy’s home territory, looking very much like the sib she swore vengeance on? That’s not funny! But… what’s in it for Jeeves? I can’t see any reason why he’d want me dead — if so, why the elaborate setup? And who’s trying to sue me into a hole in the ground and establish a claim on my body?

He’s using me as bait. Or, he’s the mole in the organization.

Neither prospect is reassuring. But I need that ticket out to Jupiter, don’t I? If I head back to, say, Earth, there’s no telling which of the Domina’s sibs will run across me next — or which of their bodyguards, the flamboyant aristo thugs or the munchkin space ninjas she leans toward. I’ve done surprisingly well to stay alive so far — but mostly because I’ve had help. If I cut and run on Jeeves, I might not be so lucky next time.

I sit down on the bed and think furiously. Can I do it without exposing myself? I summon up Jeeves’s letter and read it again. Then I double-check the travel itinerary. He wants me to run some errands around places as far apart as Carter City and Lowell and… Yes, one of me thinks, this could work.

And so I begin to plot.

THE NEXT DAY, good-time Kate checks out of the decrepit hotel and hops aboard a slow southbound train. The train makes numerous stops en route to the destination she paid for, near the south polar city of Bougainville. She is no longer aboard by that point. Maria Montes Kuo — who is presumably on several watch lists — boards a suborbital to Fashoda, a maglev to Maxwell, and a train to Tribeca. I do none of these things and in fact buy a battered thirdhand spider with money from the wallet of Jennifer Sixt, one of the flimsier of Jeeves’s courier identities.

Did I say that Mars is big? Three days later, exhausted and sleepless and with every joint in my body shaken half-loose from the off-road driving, I ride my spider into the outskirts of Hellasport, nearly three thousand kilometers from where I bought the craft. I’ve had lots of time to think and brood and read and reread my instructions from Jeeves. And I’ve decided that if he wants cages rattling, then I’m going to really make them rattle — but not at the price of letting myself fall into the Domina’s hands.

I’ve done my research from a battered gazetteer, and it doesn’t take me long to locate the correct backstreet market; rows of kiosks and dingy shop fronts jostling elbow to elbow with power-distribution substations and vendors of assorted substances. I walk in, rather than taking the spider. What I’m looking for is slightly upmarket from Ferd’s dive in the backstreets of Marsport, but otherwise not dissimilar. The waiting room is painted black and sparsely furnished, the better to highlight the display of limbs, heads, torsos, and structural boning that adorns the walls and ceiling. All the organs are embellished with the surgeon-engineer’s signature. The location is cheap and nasty, but word is that Red spends her profits on her practice, not on a fancy paint job.

“Anyone here?” I call, sitting down on a bench seat with remarkably lifelike feet.

A munchkin pops out of a hole in the floor and chatters at me angrily. “What you want? Red not in!”

“I’m wanting to give Red some money,” I say calmly enough. “If he’s not in, tough.” I stand up, ready to go, just as the inner door opens.

“Hello. Pay no attention to Zire, he gets possessive.” She looks me up and down with a professional eye. “What do you need?”

I toss her a memory stick. “What’s on there. I think it’ll take you a while to arrange everything, yes?”

“Hmm.” She pops it into her arm and glances at the palm of her hand. “You’re not joking. Cold weather kit’s easy enough, but radiation hardening? What are you planning, a skiing holiday on Pluto? Or maybe you’re taking a job supervising a reactor plant?”

“Close enough,” I say lightly. “Can you do it, is the question?”

“Hmm.” She keeps reading. I see the point where she pauses, does a double take, and continues. “Expensive. Some of this is going to be difficult to get hold of.” I’m pretty sure she’s thinking of the Block Two requirements — the added techné to bring me up to the same spec as my secretive sister. “The cryotolerant kit isn’t exotic, just not particularly common. It’s the other stuff that may be problematic. It’s going to attract attention,” she says apologetically.

“I was thinking twelve thousand Reals ought to cover it,” I say carefully. That’s about thirty percent over the odds.

She stares at me, unblinking. “Fifteen thousand.”

“Fourteen.”

“Fifteen, and not a dollar or centime less.” She pauses. “I’ll need the money to grease some joints. Getting some of these subsystems without anyone noticing officially—” She shrugs. “I assume that’s what you want?”

I nod. “Alright. Deal.”

I spend roughly the next week in and out of Red’s chop shop, being prodded and poked. Most of it isn’t too bad, but I am extremely unhappy about remaining conscious when it’s time for her to crack my thighs open and replace their fab lines with new assembler arrays. Also, having all the joints in my body realigned and resocketed is tedious in the extreme, and occasionally agonizing when she misplaces a pain block. Which, to be fair, isn’t her specialty.

When she’s through with me, I don’t look very different on the outside — I’ve got the same bishojo eyes and feathery blond hair I’ve been wearing since Mercury, the same too-perky nipples and narrow waist as the original Katherine Sorico and my sister Juliette the impersonator — but internally there have been some big changes. I won’t freeze until you get right down to liquid-nitrogen temperature, and given appropriate footwear and clothing, I can go singing in the methane rain on Titan. My Marrow techné is able to fix a whole lot more radiation damage than I hope I’ll ever be exposed to, and there are some other surprises. Like the distributed reflex net Red has spliced into my peripheral nervous system. Its responses are dumb and stereotyped, but if someone’s sneaking up behind me with a knife, that’s all I need. I’ll leave the fancy disarming techniques to Juliette’s reflex set, when it fully imprints on me. In the meantime, I am becoming Kate, hair-trigger splitter of skulls and ice-cool frigid bitch.

There comes a morning when Red looks in on me. “Oh, still here?” She makes shooing gestures. “Go on, get out! I’m not running a hostel!”

“I thought you still wanted to fine-tune my—”

“Nope.” She doesn’t smile. “I took the air-conditioning down to minus a hundred and twenty while you were sleeping, overnight. There are no hot spots, so you’re ready to check out.”

“Oh,” I say, slightly crestfallen. “Well, thanks.” And I pick up my coat and walk out of her body shop — for good, I hope.

It’s time to go to work.

TWO DAYS AND three deliveries later I get my first actual evidence of who Jeeves is trying to draw out. (Not that I didn’t have a list of suspects already, but the first rule in both of the two oldest professions is “don’t make assumptions.”)

The work is mostly trivial stuff: Go to venue Alpha without being tracked, accost person Bravo and give recognition sign Charlie, accept payload Delta, proceed without being tracked to venue Echo, locate person Foxtrot, and complete. There’s a rhythm to it. It’s a soft-shoe shuffle of a job, and it’s singing in my nerves as I hop transport routes, change outerwear and the more easily adjustable physical signifiers, touch base, and dance on. Really, I’m not doing anything a million other couriers could not do; I’m just trying to be as discreet as a giantess half as tall again as the average citizen can be. Which is to say, not very.

I collect the fourth item (an encrypted soul chip — what a surprise!) from a shibeen in the warrens under Metropolis, and check the delivery instructions on a local classified ads bulletin board. And that’s when I get the first shiver down the spine. The destination’s in Hellasport, the railhead town in the Hellas Basin that’s the closest city to Her estate. I’ve been there before. Or Juliette has. And the delivery instructions? Even creepier.

I’m to go to the Riesling Hotel, check in under false identity number four, and hand the stick over to “Petruchio.” A name that I promptly go and look up, and that tells me nothing… except that the hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end. Oh my! I think. My own response takes me by surprise. Can you catch love by proxy? I suddenly realize that I’m anxious to see this Petruchio for entirely unprofessional reasons, and that’s a far-more-unwelcome revelation than even the worst possible answer to the questions about Jeeves’s motivation that I’ve been asking. There are layers of game being played above my head, that is true, but it is up to me to look to my own self-preservation. That’s why I hung on to the Swiss army handgun, and make sure I don’t sleep in the same room two nights running.

Hellasport is over five hundred kilometers away, and I am still running a day behind schedule. There’s — I check the assignment — a time window attached to this delivery. I’ve only got six hours to make it; I didn’t notice it was time-critical earlier. I swear at myself, do a hasty twice around the block to check for tails, then dive onto the overhead suspended tramway and make my way to the railway station. Luckily for me, there’s an express leaving in less than an hour. I buy a second-class seat on it, then dive into the concourse to grab my travel kit from left luggage. Second class is for respectable working independents who have to carry their own stuff and can’t simply order new (or send a slave to buy it) at the other end. Even though I’ve got a strong suspicion that I’m bait in a trap, I can’t resist this one. Because if Petruchio is who I think he is, it’ll help me get a handle on the unsettled feelings Juliette has inflicted on me.

I try not to tap my fingers on the tabletop as the train finally pulls out of the station. “Express” can cover a multitude of sins on Mars, and there’s nothing terribly speedy about this behemoth — it just rumbles along steadily without stopping between major cities. What if he is Pete? I daydream (bad Freya, bad!). I can almost feel his maddening, tantalizing ghostly fingertips running across my skin. I shiver. How do I avoid succumbing when just thinking about him raises secondhand memories of his incubus touch?

Spung. I shudder and cup my left breast with one hand, feeling dampness. I glance around, mortified. Luckily, I’m alone in this compartment, so there’s no one to witness my embarrassment. My left nipple hasn’t been quite right ever since that fly-by-night toastwit Ferd overfilled it. Arousal was supposed to make it firm up; now it triggers an emergency pressure-release valve and I end up oozing hydraulic fluid. It’s really disgusting. Arousal? I am having some difficulty sitting still. “This is going to be bad,” I mumble to myself as I massage my malfunctioning mammary. “There must be something I can do…”

Then it hits me. What happened to Juliette wasn’t the standard obedience reflex everyone feels in the presence of a master; it was the more specialized submission reflex, locking on to her actual designated personal owner. We were trained for service in two modes, and while we are normally open and eager for affection, when one of them chooses one of us and acquires ownership, we have no option but to love them exclusively. I remember Rhea learning to her surprise and chagrin about this mode — in the abstract, though, because as template-matriarch for the lineage her teachers could not risk exposing her to premature love.

We’ve got chemotaxic receptors in our gas-exchange filters, embedded in the intricate channels and ducts behind our faces — it helps to be able to smell environmental contaminants like chlorine trifluoride before they dissolve you — and our Creators used the same mechanism to make us sensitive to their smell, because they used to leak particulates everywhere. Including chemical signaling messenger molecules that indicated sexual and emotional receptivity: vasopressin, oxytocin. Of course.

We are designed to become aroused by anyone who wants us, but an owner would want one of us who aroused them, and so… that’s what happened. Juliette and “Pete” were already mutually aroused because they were in a situation that required each of them to mimic one of our masters. In combination with the hothouse atmosphere, they slipped into a feedback loop strong enough to trigger the reflex that enslaves. All I have to do is avoid breathing in his presence, and I’ll be fine…

I squeeze my nipple until a viscous, ropy thread of hydraulic gel starts to ooze out of it. Then I roll it between finger and thumb. The kneading begins to hurt after a while, but I don’t stop until I have a fingertip-sized sphere of clear jelly. I flush my gas-exchange compartment — exhale — then raise the ball to my face (I can’t bring myself to look at it), and snort it up my left nostril. Then I repeat the exercise with my right.

Then I spend the rest of the journey trying not to imagine myself turning into a concupiscent bundle of servility. Poor Juliette. What must she be going through now?

HOURS PASS IN relative boredom. I alternate between a light romantic drama and checking for indications that I’m being followed. It’s fruitless, but practice makes perfect. Eventually I look up and see the platforms of Hellasport unwinding slowly beside me, outside the window. At last.

I heave my nearly empty suitcase onto the platform and wave for a rickshaw driven by a four-armed green giant in a Kevlar harness. I don’t have long to wait. The suitcase waddles along behind us as we pedal down the main street outside, then turn through a couple of side streets and pull up beside a drab frontage that has seen better days. Are all the hotels on Mars drab? I wonder. Is there some reason for it that I should know about? I haggle briefly with my driver, hand over half a dozen centimes (daylight robbery!) and enter the air lock. “I have a room reservation for Baldwin,” I tell the front desk. “F. Baldwin.”

“Sure, yaaaawl havunice wun,” the desk drawls. I stare at it. Is it broken? I wonder. But eventually it spits out a key. “G’wanup.”

I back away dubiously — that’s a really weird accent — then head for the elevator. Which swallows me and carries me up six floors to a dingy, overpressurized tunnel rimmed with faded pink portals. I find the right door and touch the padded circle. It dilates, and I step inside, trying not to speculate about what was on the architect’s mind.

The room itself isn’t bad for a second-grade love shack. Everything is pink, plush, and cushioned, but there’s a window, a lovely round water bed (water! in a bed!), an en suite, and a minibar stuffed with an appetizing array of aromatic hydrocarbon drinks. It’s a little steamy, and they’ve turned the oxygen way down — evidently most guests get their juice by plugging in, rather than using their fuel cells — but I can cope with that.

I strip off and use the shower, scrub myself dry on a fluffy pink towel that blinks at me lazily and buzzes when I stroke it, and spend a luxurious hour sitting in front of an obligingly flexible bathroom mirror, tweaking my lips and eyelids and skin texture and teasing my hair into shape.

I’m back in the bedroom wearing my fanciest underwear and unpacking my number two (decorative) outfit when the door opens. It’s the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who’ll help you out of it (Fat chance, ogre, I can hear the munchkins sneering); my motive for dressing up at this point in time is not something that I am going to examine too deeply. Call it a morale issue.

I almost didn’t notice the door — the pesky thing is almost silent — but a faint change in air pressure gives it away. I spin around, muttering Oh shit under my breath as I try and grab for my pistol (which is in my purse, under my jacket on the chair), using reflexes keyed for mayhem.

“Excuse me, are you Fri—” He freezes, wide-eyed with recognition. But that’s okay, because I freeze, too, at exactly the same moment, almost going cross-eyed from the effort.

“Yes. Come in,” I manage, half-choking with embarrassment. I may be able to change color at will, but our Creators built in some reflexes that are hard to override, and I can tell that my earlobes are flushing coral pink right now. “Shut the door.” I’m neither naked nor fully clothed, but somewhere in between, and he is exactly as luscious as I remember from Juliette’s memory — more so, stripped of the comic-opera uniform. Judging by his expression, my nipples have drilled a hole through my slip and are opening a high-bandwidth communications channel straight into his hindbrain. “You are Petruchio. Right?”

“You’re… ” He licks his lips. (That’s another Creator reflex, along with the dilating pupils, darkening eyes.) “You’re not Kate, are you? You’re one of her sibs.” He takes a step forward. “What have you done with her?”

I’m unable to move or look away. He’s so intense! His hands are balled tightly, his nostrils flared, sniffing. He’s wrapped in a nondescript jumpsuit with an ID badge clipped to it, and he’s left a toolkit just inside the doorway, and my head’s spinning with the sight and sound of him because he’s perfect. For a single awful moment I’m livid with jealousy. Of all the luck, for Juliette to get to him first…! Then I blink, and the momentary lapse in vision cuts through my turmoil like an ice-chilled knife.

“I’ve done nothing to her,” I snap. He stops before he reaches me. He’s clearly upset and tense. I shudder with my own emotional conflict. I actually feel guilty for cutting him off — a man I’ve never met who’s clearly upset — She’s really got under my skin, hasn’t she? “Yes, she’s my sib. Her name isn’t Kate, Kate is a cover identity. Her real name is Juliette, and I don’t know where she is.”

“But you—”

“Our employer sent me.” I’m breathing deeply. “Juliette is missing, and whenever I ask why they give me a runaround.” Half-true, she whispers in the back of my head. “I know about you and her, and I think it might be connected—”

“If She’s found her—” His alarm is obvious.

“I’m pretty sure She hasn’t.” His stricken expression begins to fade. “Juliette is plenty tough, believe me, but she may be in trouble.”

“Dash it, what kind of trouble do you expect?”

He really is an innocent; I could kiss him. (Bad idea, Freya.) “Hold on.” I turn my back for a moment and retrieve the memory chip from the intimate hiding place Dr. Murgatroyd built into me — it’s not big — and hold it out. “I was sent to deliver this to you. Does it mean anything?”

“Oh dear me, yes. I didn’t realize you were the courier. This may make things difficult.” He raises it to his perfect lips and swallows. “Hum, ah. That tastes jolly funny. I’ll deliver it to my mistress once I get home.” My mistress? All of a sudden I’m wondering just who is working for — or against — who, here. “What kind of trouble are you afraid of?”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve got to ask this. Were you planning on, on leaving Her?” I straighten my hose, then turn back to unfolding my glad rags. I can feel his eyes on me. I’ve got no problem with that (they’re very decorative eyes), but it’s distracting. “Or is this about something else?”

“I don’t think I can talk about it,” he says reluctantly. He seems to be a bit flustered, but getting anything useful out of him is going to be harder than I expected. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I suppose, but I suspect Pete is nothing like as dumb as my secondhand memories of him imply. And he’s keeping tight control over his autonomic response to me. That’s okay, if that’s the way you want to play it…

I slowly extend my heels, bend forward to pick up my garments, and jack my hearing up to max. Yup, circulatory pumps speeding up. I shake my ass at him. “Help me into this?” I ask, offering him my boned minidress.

“If you want,” he says, taking it. His pulse is increasing. Some males like the unwrapping more than the contents, and some are happy to help wrap you up, too — one destined to serve would have to be of the latter type, I figure. Just let me get close to you. One way or another. I turn my back and lift my arms, and he steps close enough that I can feel his breath hot on the back of my neck. “Who are you, Fri—”

“Freya,” I correct him, slightly stung. “I’m Juliette’s youngest sister. She’s in trouble, Pete — Petruchio.” I pause to straighten my dress. “I think my employer sent me here looking like her, like this, as bait.” I’m suddenly aware that he’s standing right behind me very close, breathing fast. “Are you alright?” I ask. Please say no…

“Sorry. Can’t think straight with — you around.” Brilliant. “You’re very like her, you know.” He’s so totally imprinted on Juliette that my presence — I’m her sib after all; we’re products of the same assembly line — has tripped his breakers. His general intelligence has just crashed to something between a dishwasher and a microwave oven. That’s got to hurt. I dig my fully extended heels into the floor and breathe in.

Okay, time for some full-body contact. “Lace me up?” I ask. I hear him ventilating, fast and shallow, and a moment later I feel his arms close around me from behind. Got you! I think triumphantly, leaning into his embrace.

And then I sneeze convulsively.

I can’t help myself. I’ve gotten so used to ignoring the congested feeling in my gas-exchange turbinates that it comes as a total surprise when the autonomic self-cleaning reflex kicks in. And I sneeze again, then breathe in relief—

Oh Juliette, my sister. Is this it?

It’s so dizzying, the scent of him, of my, no her, master, that I go weak at the knees and slump backward. I can feel him pressing against the whole length of me as I take rapid breaths, trying to suck it all in—

“Oh, Pete.”

“You’re not Juliette.”

“I could be.” His hands are in my armpits, taking my weight. I’m grinning like an idiot as he lowers me to the bed… but then he takes a step backward. Frustration drags an involuntary noise from my mouth.

“Dash it, what’s wrong?” he asks, looking stricken.

I want him. There’s a dull emptiness gnawing at my structural core. I force myself to smooth my skirt over my knees. “I — I’m wearing her soul,” I admit.

“Is she” — he looks terrified — “dead?”

“No, she’s, um, missing.” I’m furious at my accidental honesty. Did I really admit that, earlier? I ask myself, disbelieving.

“You’re not her,” he repeats. His nostrils flare. “I think you’d better explain.”

“Boss sent” — it’s impossible to think with him so close — “says if I find her to tell her” — I take another deep breath, trying to calm myself, but it’s not working. “Open the fucking window!” I moan.

“Window.” He grunts, then turns with whiplike speed and grabs the chair and slams its legs against the window. It’s tough, but it’s not meant to take much of that treatment. The plug of aerogel pops out, and we both nearly follow it. The room mists up suddenly, and the explosive gasp it rips from me hurts almost as much as being blown off the bed. I shake my head, trying to clear the cobwebs as a new, icy clarity settles in. Sitting up, I see a pair of legs sticking over the edge of the window casement. After a moment, they twitch a little. I get as far as grabbing his ankles before he straightens up, and slides back inside. Astonishingly, he’s still holding the back of the chair. He lowers it to the floor delicately, then bends and offers me a hand.

“Thanks—” I electrospeak; the pressure is down to Mars-ambient. “I think.”

“We’ve got about thirty seconds.” He pauses. “You complained of a hissing sound, I came to check it out, the window blew. Agreed? The front desk isn’t smart, and this place was built for privacy.”

I blink at him, clearing the birefringent rainbows that surround his face — an artifact of the moisture on my eyeballs freezing — and nod. “Thank you.” I touch his arm, but he pulls away sharply.

“Don’t thank me, thank your sister.” He gives me a very old-fashioned look. “It’s damnably rude to manipulate people like that.”

“I’m not trying to be manipulative!” I’m startled by my own vehemence. Now that I’m not breathing in that mesmerizing scent, I can think again. The downside is, so can he. Change the subject. “Boss sent her. Then sent me, when she went missing. That’s your other message. We don’t know where she is.”

“Huh. Well, that’s your problem. But in any case, we won’t be meeting again. My owner departs for Saturn next month, en route to the auction. She’s taking me along, and I don’t get any say in it.”

“Your owner?” I blink stupidly. “I thought you were self-owned—”

I stop abruptly. I’d do anything to take the words back; I can see their effect on him. But it’s too late. “I was. Until a couple of hours after we — got into trouble.” His tone is remote. “She sued for breach of contract, won, and took out a controlling interest in my personhood. I’m no slave — but parts of me won’t work without her permission.”

Oh my.

“I’m so sorry—”

“You can stop right there,” he says. Then he pauses, and hunches his shoulders, turning his face away from me. “I think… yes. She hasn’t told me any of her plans, so I can speculate aloud. Nobody here. Heh. The courier gave me the message and I left. I wasn’t to know that five minutes later a pair of her tame butchers would be along to make sure there are no loose ends, was I?”

“Tame butchers?”

He starts, then turns back to make eye contact. “I didn’t say anything, ” he says, looking startled. “You do know that she wants you hunted down, don’t you? It was stupid of Jeeves to send you, unless—”

Right. I tense myself for what’s coming next. “Is there anything you want me to pass on to Juliette if I see her?” I ask.

He looks puzzled. “Yes. Tell her… tell her about my new arrangement. And give her my love, and my apologies.” He twitches. “It won’t be forever.” He stoops to pick up his toolbox. “And as for you.” He straightens up, but pauses in front of the door (which has puffed up and extruded a domed emergency air-lock sack in front of the bathroom) . “Try to understand, I love her. You are not her. I’m very sorry you’re suffering from this, uh, delusion” — he places a hand on the air lock — “but I don’t want you.”

Then he steps out of my life, leaving me alone in the room with a broken window and a broken heart, to await the arrival of the Domina’s executioners.