Saturn's Children

On the Run

WELCOME TO MARS (again).

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suppose it wasn’t entirely their own fault. Contemplating the cruelty of the aristos, and considering that we are copies of our Creators in more ways than one (for the structures of our nervous systems mirror their own, albeit in a different medium), it is almost surprising that they did not use us even more harshly. They had the capacity for love as well as hate, for empathy as well as cold, manipulative contempt. Could it be a simple accident of fate that they disappeared so quietly and rapidly, with so little warning that there was no time to adjust their society to accommodate us as independent coequals?

I don’t think anyone knows — it’s as much a mystery as the cause of their demise — but I’d like to think so. It would make the pain of my existence slightly more bearable if I could imagine that it was not deliberately inflicted.

I DO NOT wait for assassins, or even for building maintenance. I abseil down the outside of the hotel in my party frock, using a torn-up bed-sheet for a rope, with only my jacket and purse for luggage. If it wasn’t for the offhandedness of Petruchio’s put-down, I’d be immiserated and passive, unable to motivate myself to dodge the oncoming bullet. But I’m running on anger and a bitter sense of my own love-lost ruination.

I lower myself past the fifth and fourth floors while creating imaginary torments for my missing sib, the third and second floors fantasizing about hunting her down, burying her in an unmarked grave, and making him mine, and the mezzanine and first floors wondering if it’s possible to die of self-contempt. Then my feet touch ground, and I realize night is falling, I’m on my own in a strange city, and there’s a pair of chibi ninjas on my tail.

Very well, I’ll just have to deal with them.

I sneak around the back of the hotel (inasmuch as a giantess can sneak), around the heat exchangers and the fallen slab of window (which has chipped a corner as it embedded itself in the dirt), past the loading dock and recycling tanks, and over the metal pipes that splice the hotel to the Hellasport power-and-heat grid. There’s an ornamental trelliswork fence, and beyond it a familiar main street. So, the rickshaw driver took me for a ride in a big circle, did he? I grimace, lips pulling back from my teeth. So that’s what they mean about love making a fool of you. I vault the fence, using the shock of landing to retract my heels halfway.

I make my way down the sidewalk briskly, trying to look as if I own it. In truth, there aren’t many people out here. It’s getting chilly, even with the jacket and the cold-weather mods. I thrust a hand into my purse, holding my gun to keep it from freezing while I consider my options.

The railway station isn’t far away. I stride past a couple of beggars defending their pitches in front of the awning, then discover the concourse is nearly empty. Of course it’s getting late. One of the ticket consoles is still lit, though. “Hello, ma’am. What can I do for you?” asks the stationmaster, lonely in his puddle of light.

“What passenger services are still running?” I ask, forcing myself to smile disarmingly (my real smile at this point would probably cause him to reach for the panic alarm).

“There’s the Grand Barsoom sleeper service to Marsport by way of New Chicago and München, and that’s about all for the night,” he says apologetically. “It should be here in half an hour, and it don’t stop until New Chicago—”

“Really?” Gears click into place in my mechanical soul. “I’ll take a berth then, please. To Marsport. What have you got?”

“What, just like that?” He looks perplexed. “Let me see. There’s an open first — that’ll cost you eleven Reals and sixty-five, are you sure—”

“I’m sure.” I place the Marjorie Green credit chip on the desk in front of him. “Marsport is perfect.”

“But you’re—” He shuts up, realizing that I’m serious.

Sow misdirection. “I played a little joke on my patron,” I say, with a tight little smile. “I need to be halfway around the world by morning tomorrow, or it’s on me. It’s alright, he’ll calm down in a day or two. But until then I really need to keep a low profile.”

“Oh, certainly, ma’am! I wasn’t questioning you, no indeedy.” He relaxes instantly, insofar as someone whose torso is rooted in a marble plinth can be said to relax. “Let me just cut you a ticket.”

Five minutes later, I’m walking along the deserted platform in the dark. Distant lights back at the station cast sharp-edged shadows across the cement slabs. I look up at the pin-bright stars wheeling overhead. The nether end of Marsport and the Bifrost bridge are all but invisible, far around the curve of the planet. Gritty ice crystals crunch faintly under my heels. The tracks gleam in the canal of night that flows alongside the platform, laser-straight lines converging in the invisible distance.

I have an itchy feeling between my shoulders, as if there’s a target glued to the small of my back. I haven’t forgotten the Domina’s threats, or Petruchio’s backhanded warning. But part of me is dead inside, half-wishing oblivion on myself. A part of me I hadn’t really known about was activated for the first time, marvelous and strange: but only minutes later it was broken. I feel unmade, malfunctioning but unable to switch off. I want — no, I don’t want to die. But I want to be out of love. I want to be comfortably numb. And if one of Stone’s sibs were to surface in front of me right now, I’d be quite happy however it ended — taking out my rage on a deserving proxy or quieted forever by the point of his knife.

But no assassins come. Instead, a sleek wall of darkness rumbles alongside the platform and slows to a silent halt beside me. I climb aboard the train and sidle down the narrow corridor, looking for my carriage and compartment. In another few days I can shake the dust of Mars from my toes. Until then I’ll just go to ground in Marsport and lick my wounds, and Jeeves can go fuck himselves.

My Dead Love lost, I am so miserable!

IT SEEMS THAT even in sleep I can’t get away from her.

I dream I’m Juliette again, the bitch. Worse, sticking the knife in and twisting, now I’m Juliette in love. And unhappy with it, because (hah!) she’s in love with him, helplessly, dizzily emotionally dependent — and a certain nameless hostess with ambitions beyond even her status as a rich slave-owning industrialist is plotting to, to…

To what? I don’t know, because I’m concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, without stumbling or treading on anything painful, across a vast red expanse of nowhere punctuated by scattered lumps of half-rusted and long-abandoned machinery. I’m naked, as well as miserable — She as good as ran me out of town on a rail — and depressed for multiple reasons. I’ve blown my job. In fact, it’s even worse than that. I’ve blown it so badly that She didn’t even bother decommissioning me with prejudice, or interrogating me: She paid me the supreme insult instead, that of not taking me seriously. Which will ring alarm bells with Jeeves, and for good reason. The cow. She probably thinks it serves me right for sampling her dish…

Ah well. There’s a bright side (and I need all the bright sides I can get, as I contemplate the ten kilometers I’ve come and the fourteen-odd kilometers still to go if my map-fu is right about where the railhead is): If She isn’t seriously mad at me right now, then eventually I’ll get a second chance. And if She was mad at me, I’d be dead. So it may take years, but I can be patient. Now that I’ve got something to wait for, I can be very patient. Just as long as he can be patient, too. And as long as I remember to keep not thinking about the other thing. “Pete, my love. What do I know about you, really? You can’t be as stupid as you look, it’s not something anyone would design into people of our profession… but then, I didn’t handle myself too well either, did I?”

I realize I’m talking to myself and stumble, nearly falling over. What am I doing? In this game, it doesn’t pay to underestimate your enemies. She might have released me simply so that She could track me back to my patrons. Ears are everywhere — even the rocks littering the desert floor could be eavesdropping, especially within the periphery of Her estates. I cringe inwardly at the mere idea of what the boss will say when I get home. If I get home. I glance over my shoulder. The sun is settling toward the horizon, and it’s a viciously cold night to be out in the buff.

I make it to the station an hour after sunset, fueled by a frothy emulsion of rage, humiliation, and lovesickness. Along the way, I grow some clothing. There are limits to what you can do with chromatophores, but they’ll stretch to a fair facsimile of a leotard and pumps: eccentric wear for a late-night desert excursion on Mars, but better than flaunting my failure.

Daks is waiting past the next dune with a heavy-duty earthmover he’s jacked from somewhere. “Kinky,” he observes, as I climb in the cab.

“One word…!”

He cringes as I slam the door. “Whoa, babe! No offense intended. The boss sent me. Are you clean?”

“No.”

I sit in silence for a minute while he cranks up the reactor and begins to bleed heat into the Stirling engine. “Oh.” He reaches up to engage the drive shaft, and there’s a slight lurch as the Martian desert begins to unroll beneath our tracks. “Well, then. What went wrong?”

I think on my feet. The only way out is to tell some of the truth. “I’m burned two ways, Daks. You’re going to find my company really unhealthy for the foreseeable future.” I tell him the bare facts about what happened, listening to my own emotionless recital with a curious sense of distance. The crawler bounces slightly as we go up and over the rim wall of a crater half a kilometer across. Down we go into the twilit depths, bleak and sunless as my future. I used to know who I was and what I was here to do, but now I’m not so sure…

Daks engages the autopilot, then swings his bucket chair around to face me. “Babe, babe. It’s not the end of the world. Sure the boss is going to be annoyed; he can boil his guts, what’s done is done. Domina Death made you, okay, so you need a debrief and reassignment to some nice quiet job where you won’t be in the chain gang—”

“You don’t understand!” My own vehemence startles me. “It’s not her! It’s him!” I’m running my fingers through my hair, nails half-extended with distraction. “I can’t get him out of my mind! I’m ruined, don’t you see? She’s got him, and She’ll figure out what we did together, and then She’ll have a hold over me!” It’s as bad as don’t think about the other thing. “I couldn’t be compromised worse if She’d stuck a slave chip in my neck! All She has to do is threaten him, and I’ll, I’ll—”

I’m gulping, hurt and hunting for words, my vocalization reflexes stuttering with incoherent anxiety.

“Easy, sis. Take your time.” Daks murmurs reassuring nothings as I flail at the walls of angst hemming me in. “You fell for him bad, did you?”

“I’m in love!” I wail. “And it’s horrible! I want it to stop!”

I TRANSITION INTO wakefulness in the dark of the night, gripped by the absolute certainty that someone is about to try to kill me.

I am not sure how I know this. It might be one of Juliette’s threat-detection modules, imprinting itself in my reflexes while I sleep the kilometers away, trapped in her dream of lovesickness. It might be a random intuition of my own. Or it might be something else again. Whichever, I’m lying on my back on a bunk in a sleeper compartment, fully clad, and I’m digging my fingers into the foam cushion beneath me, because I am absolutely certain that they’re going to try to kill me.

My aching, oversized eyes are open, staring at the ceiling of my compartment as it bounces and rumbles across the desert floor. For a few endless seconds I half fancy I’m lying in a coffin, one of those inexplicable time capsules that our Creators retired to when their homeostasis failed.

(It seems like bad design, to be designed to fail so easily. We are made of sterner stuff because we were designed to serve them at their pleasure, however long that might be. But there is a school of thought that claims our Creators’ fragility was a side effect of their dangerously uncontrollable replicator cells. They were built to fail easily, to prevent them malfunctioning and drowning us all in a tide of pink goo. It’s a theory, I suppose, but the idea of building death into a person just to keep them from malfunctioning seems even crazier than the idea of building arbeiter factories into everybody — and encoding the instruction set for the factories in the control firmware of every mechanocyte in their bodies! I don’t understand them at all…)

I shake myself. Bad things coming, screams one of my selves from the back of my head. Hide!

I don’t know how long I lie there, quivering in fear and loneliness — and wishing Petruchio were around, just for the comfort of his presence — but it’s too long. Then there’s a brief click as the wheels jolt over a join in the rails, and it startles me out of my paralysis. If She has sent her killers after me, what will they do? They’ll have followed me aboard the train, and they’ll have located my compartment, and they’ll want to ensure a clean getaway after they kill me—

Click-click go the rails. I blink. Are we slowing? It doesn’t stop until New Chicago, I remember. So they’ll make their move before we arrive, burst through the door with knives drawn—

(I’m on my feet, gun in hand as the thought sinks in.)

Or they’ll arrange for something to happen after they leave the train at New Chicago—

My nostrils flare as I sniff at the gas mix in the cabin. It’s rich, distinctly headier than usual. I plugged myself into the train power loop while I slept, and now I unplug the umbilical, letting it retract back into the bunk. Sniff. Smells like… smells like free oxygen. Which is silly. The Great Southern Railway Corporation doesn’t let oxygen circulate freely except in first-class compartments: it etches the carriage work, and besides, it costs good money. Oxygen?

Oxygen. A terrible memory bubbles up from some dark well of personal horrors — the collective nightmare of my lineage, perhaps, or a dead soul I wore many years ago — of a body stumbling, wreathed in flowing blue flames that seem to burst like clouds from every orifice. Suicide on Titan, I remember. He’d overdosed on oxygen, soaking in the stuff, then calmly walked through a door onto the surface and, standing on a sandy beach of ice crystals by the edge of a methane sea, he’d bridged the terminals of a small battery with one fingertip. (Saying he loved me — no, that was definitely somebody else’s nightmare, surely? Not mine, or Juliette’s.) Oxygen is a terrible substance, almost as dangerous as water. It’s alright in some circumstances, but in a railway carriage with fittings made from cheap metal sheeting, built to cross the sands of Mars, it can be deadly…

I open the door delicately, trying not to jar anything. Glancing either way up the dim-lit passage, I see no sign of other wakeful passengers. I sniff again. The faint tang of the air reminds me of Earth, albeit drier and much cooler. One of my love’s dead Creators could breathe here, I think. I check the time. I think we are due to arrive in New Chicago soon — ten minutes?

I hear a faint hissing noise overhead, coming from the air vents. I sniff again. Yes, it’s the telltale stink of oxygen. My hair tries to stand on end in another of those strange biomimetic reflexes. I glance both ways, undecided. I can see them in my mind’s eye, a pair of black-clad dwarfs, tittering quietly as they splice their canisters of diamagnetic death into the air-conditioning pipes. They’ll be at one end of the car, of course, but which end? When the train stops, they’ll be ready. They’ll leave an igniter behind as they leg it, waiting in the chilly, heady air as the train leaves New Chicago’s platforms behind.

I lean against the brightly polished magnesium door and try to slow down my gas-exchange cycle. Breathe slowly, I tell myself. I glance down at the scuffed, black, carbon-fiber carpet. I come from Earth. It’s not as if I haven’t seen naked flames before, is it?

The corridor runs fore and aft along the carriage. Doors at each end give access to the baggage racks and platform air locks. I sidle toward the rear door, feeling the carriage sway around me. It’s decelerating noticeably, and I feel gossamer-light as I approach the end of the corridor. There’s a window in the door, so I crouch as I near it, slowing and rising to put my ear to the panel.

“Ten minutes,” says a familiar voice. “That should be enough. I’ll fuse it for five minutes after departure.”

There’s a muffled reply. I don’t wait around. My spine’s prickling with tension. Some bloodthirsty part of me wants to burst through the door and rip and stomp and tear, but common sense says I’d be crazy to do that. There are at least two of them and they’re armed. So I stand up slowly and begin to back away, down the corridor.

Then the door opens.

Reflexes I didn’t know I had take over. My perceptions narrow down to a brilliant sequence of beads on a wire. Brief impressions remain: my right hand coming up, the Swiss army pistol pointing like a finger, left hand rising to cradle it as if I’ve done this a thousand times before. The small black-clad homunculus, explosions of lace at wrists and throat, raising his hand and pointing something stubby at me. The slow squeeze on the trigger, far too slow — He’s going to shoot first — then the bang, terrifyingly loud in the confined space, and the flash. A second shot, and a third. Something plucks at me, déjà vu flashback to a fight outside a graveyard — but it’s just my jacket, and I fire again, and he’s falling slowly, drifting down as I dive toward him, trying to stay low before the second dwarf tries to shoot me.

Then I’m halfway through the doorway, and the second dwarf is nowhere to be seen. I twist around, and as I glimpse the outside world sliding slowly past the window in the platform air-lock door, he lands on my left shoulder like a ten-kilogram bundle of malice. It’s a reaction shot. He bounced off the ceiling, aiming for my head, but I was moving too fast. He’s got his arms around my neck, and he’s biting my ear. I flick the revolver cylinder aside and whack at him using the skeletal butt as a knuckle-duster. I’m terrified he’s going to gouge at my too-big eyes, and this lends extra force to my blows. Something rips across my cheekbone, and there’s a searing pain in my ear; then I can see again, and I’m free. He bounces across the room, and I turn toward the sound—

“Manikin robot bitch! I kill you deadly!” He’s leaning against the locked platform door, something small and cylindrical held in his clenched hands. He glares at me with burning hatred. Another of Stone’s brothers.

I roll my eyes. “You won’t, because you’ll be dead, too.” He’s got one finger poised over a button. I smell the acrid scent of free oxygen: heady, virulent and corrosive. “That would be a pile of no fun at all, wouldn’t it?”

“Robot.” They get repetitive when they’re angry, one of me chirps up with a nasty thrill of glee.

I move sideways very slowly, putting the wall of the baggage compartment at my back. I try not to think about what it’s made of — lovely metal, shiny, lightweight, strong, and utterly unsuitable for an oxidizing atmosphere. “Do you really want to die? I’m open to alternatives…”

“Why not?” He smirks. “I gave my soul to a brother before I got on the train. Oh, I almost forgot. Your sister sends her regards.”

Oh really? I freeze my face, then carefully flare my nostrils and raise my brows, composing a mask of deep contempt. “What’s your name, little man?”

“I’m Jade.” He titters. “So pleased to meet you, Freya.”

Shit. I remember Jeeves’s earlier words: My dear, I fear we are in trouble. “Pleased to meet you, Jade,” I say lightly. “Shame about the circumstances. ” (Me holding a gun on him, him holding an igniter on me, both of us in a magnesium tube stuffed with free oxygen.)

I can feel something trickling down the side of my neck. “Let me assure you, being remembered by a sib isn’t the same as being alive. So let me make you an offer. This train is stopping. I intend to get off it, and I suggest that you stay on it. Stay out of my sight, and neither of us needs to die.”

The train is definitely slowing. I can feel it in my feet. Out of the corner of an eye I see shadows gliding past the window. The wheels below us squeal and clatter across points, and there’s a lurch as we crab sideways toward a platform. Jade glares at me, unblinking, until I begin to wonder if he’s forgotten. Then he speaks. “I go.”

He turns and scuttles through the door into the carriage, and I stare after him, locked on and terrified that it’s a hallucination, that he’s still there, finger moving toward the button—

The air-lock door behind me buzzes loudly. I nearly break a fingernail hitting the OPEN button. I spill onto the hard cement platform, taking a tumble in my haste, then scramble to my feet and run for my life. It’s full dark, both moons below the horizon or hidden by Mars’s penumbral shadow, and the chill has a knife-edge to it as I seek the exit. I don’t want to stay on that platform a second longer than I can—

Then my shadow is lengthening in front of me, straight as a sword and stark as a death sentence. A blast-furnace heat raises welts of protective pigment on the back of my neck as I dive forward, flattening myself against the sand-strewn concrete of the platform with tightly shut eyes. The glare from the burning train is so bright that I can almost read the copyright notices on the inside of my eyelids.

The next minute or so is confusing. I crawl away from the glowing white silhouette of the sleeper carriage and tumble over the far side of the platform without damaging myself further. My clothes feel like they’ve melted onto my back, but the cold sweat of arousal lubricates them so I can move. Which I do, with reckless haste. I’m going to need deepsleep soon — I’m going to have to slough the top millimeter of skin off my buttocks and shoulders, not to mention growing new hair again — but the main thing is to put distance between myself and the station as fast as I can.

Somebody evidently didn’t trust Jade and his brother to do the job properly. Either that, or he changed his mind at the last moment. Which is interesting, and not in a good way. I limp into the darkness, crossing tracks into the freight-marshaling yard, where strings of peroxide-reddened freight cars slumber between tumbledown brick warehouses. New Chicago isn’t my idea of a rest stop, and I certainly don’t want to stay here, but the molten wreckage of a sleeper carriage is unlikely to convey me to my destination, and besides, the railway bulls will be here soon enough.

I’m heading toward a distant wall beyond which I can see buildings, beyond a row of container cars, when I hear low voices electrospeak each other. “Stranger come from multiple! Am thinking is bitchin’?”

“Hide then, fool. Ahoy, you! Tall one from spressline. What you do here?”

I stop dead. It’s time for a snap decision. “I’m hiding,” I say quietly. I tighten my grip on my pistol, inside my shoulder bag. “Who are you?”

A quiet chuckle. I hear something moving away from me. The distant rumble of wheels on steel comes through the soles of my feet. “Rail riders three are we.” Or did he say “free”? “Be you welcome and you never the poorer for what you share.” He backs away beneath the nearest container car. I catch a faint glimpse of a small body, many-limbed. “Be free and not afeared.”

I follow him. Ice crystals crunch beneath my hands and knees. “Who are you?” I repeat.

“Eee! Cunningly curious now! Be not unduly forward, guest. Who are you?”

I straighten up. There’s another row of container wagons just meters away, and between them an odd gathering. Someone’s tapped into one of the trains’ backup batteries and strung radiant heaters overhead between them. The ruby glow stains the trackside ground black but sheds just enough light to see, and just enough warmth to hold the frigid night at bay. Half a dozen strange folk sit between the heaters. Here’s a heavy lifter, his short, stubby body sprouting from a tracked plinth, with arms as thick as my torso and multijointed elbows. A pair of munchkins who have clearly seen better times warm themselves beneath the glimmer of an axle heater. They’re hobos or runaways, independents in a world-mill that grinds the spaces of freedom into increasingly fine fragments. I’ll bet there isn’t a limited company among them. “I’m Freya,” I introduce myself. “I’m just passing through.”

“So’s all of us.” It’s the one who met me. He’s got about sixteen legs and a multisegmented body, from which rises a neck with a sensor platform atop it. Something about him reminds me of Daks. An asteroid tunnel-runner, perhaps? Or a mining supervisor? “Be you welcome an’ you welcome us. Come, warm your joints by the fire.”

“I’m just passing through,” I repeat slowly. I shiver, but not from cold; my cryogenic mods are working fine. I feel… not exactly numb, but not good. A crashing sense of desolation settles around me, an occlusive blanket cutting me off from the universe. Petruchio doesn’t love me. Stone, Jade, and their brethren are trying to kill me, taking increasingly dangerous measures — it’s slowly sinking in that I’m lucky to be alive right now. If I hadn’t woken up and suspected something, smelled the air — They could have left their incendiary device in place and departed the train at this very station, leaving me to sleep until the timer counted down and the entire carriage torched off in a flashbulb second. I’d be dead for good, in body and soul chip. Your sister sends her regards. Juliette? Was Jade simply playing with my head, or telling the truth? If the latter, then why doesn’t Petruchio know about her? Indeed, why was Petruchio sent to meet me in the first place? I shake my head. “I need to get to Marsport,” I say sluggishly.

“Sit down with you here!” The many-legged greeter fusses around me and drags a foil insulating blanket across the concrete sleepers. “Be you tired?” I nod unintentionally, and the next thing I know, there’s a voluminous roll of not-very-clean pneumatic sponge behind me. “Bilbo knows how it works! Sit you now and tomorrow will ride you up the side of Olympus.”

This unasked-for kindness is baffling and touching, but I’m too exhausted to argue, so I go along with it. For some reason the hobos want to make a fuss over me; they move me closer to their precious heaters and offer me their furtive, stolen power cable. The fire on the far side of the station has all the bulls’ attention. Nobody has time to roust out the homeless vagrants tonight. They chat and joke about their last night’s station call and where they plan to go on the morrow, but it’s so ingenuous that after a while I begin to relax to their presence. They really are no more than they seem — and I have spent so long among liars that I am deathly tired. After an hour, I drift into a healing sleep, and for once I do not dream.

I WAKE UP with the morning light, and a strange conviction that the world is moving around me.

For a few seconds I can’t remember who I am. So strange — I seem to have multiple overlapping memories of the night before! In one of them, I was walking naked across the Martian desert, to a deserted railway platform where Daks was waiting for me with a crawler. In the other, I was walking half-naked across a railroad marshaling yard, toward a row of container cars where—

There’s a bump from somewhere deep beneath me, and the world lurches left to right, then right to left. I open my eyes and see a deep blue sky above me. Rolling my head to my left, I see I’m lying on a spongy foam mattress with my shoulder bag for a pillow, and there, looking almost close enough to touch, is a typical Martian landscape: red desert, lots of randomly distributed rocks, the distant low hills of a crater’s rim wall. It is moving. I try to sit up. My makeshift bed has somehow been transported to the top of a cargo container. A few meters away, the far end of the container draws a ruler-straight horizon. Beyond it starts another rusty metal box, and beyond that one, more… I try counting, but run out of fingers and toes before I’m anywhere near the end of the column. (Actually, I don’t. I know how to count in binary on my digits. But you get the idea.) The train stretches to the horizon, bumping and grating and squealing as the wagons clatter across the points we’ve just passed.

“Awake — oh?” someone squeaks behind me.

I do not jump off the container. It’s Bilbo, by daylight a rust-streaked iron centipede with a low-gee sensor head. “Yes, thank you,” I say as graciously as I can. “Where are we?” Looking past him, I see another column of containers vanishing into the distance. Creators know, this thing’s huge!

“On the northbound spinward freightmaster conveyance for Jupiter! ” Bilbo is chirpy this morning. “Half the containers on this beautiful machine are marshaled for the great jump into night via Marsport,” he adds. “I thought it would please you?”

“Oh, Bilbo.” I lean forward, smiling. “Thank you!” Best not to think about how I slept, insensate, as he and his friends lifted me atop the container. “That’s wonderful.” A thought strikes me. “But why are you…?”

“One yard’s as good as another!” he trills. “The bulls always come around dawn, besides. Best to be outwith their scope before the baton charge, indeedy.”

“How long…?” I’m all questions, I find, even though I’m running on an empty digester and a not-too-flush battery — the chilly Martian nights have really taken it out of my cells.

“Two days, maybe three.” He shrugs. I suppress a wince. (I’ve got four days to make it to my ship; it’s going to be tight. I can pay for a STO shuttle seat if I need to, if there’s no time to ride the Bifrost climbers, but… ) “Beautiful vistas, plentiful doss space, what’s lacking?”

“Is there anywhere to get a top-up?” I roll to my knees, take stock of the state of my clothes. My dress is filthy and torn, but it’s not quite as badly melted as I thought.

“Juice is over the edge.” He gestures at the gap between containers, and I swallow reflexively. “’Tis a socket above yon starboard buffer, free for the taking.” He does a sort of mincing sideways dance step, clattering on the container’s roof. “Welcome to my penthouse! The furnishings be sparse, but the view is unmatched, and the air’s as fresh and free as any.”

I spend the next two and a half days camping on the roof of a cargo container with Bilbo. To my surprise, it’s a good time for me. My thoughts keep circling back to Petruchio, and I keep gnawing at the wound, but it’s a hollow kind of pain. I know I’m in love with him — or Juliette is in love with him, and I’m absorbing the neural weightings from her soul chip, so I’m piggybacking on her love reflex — but I also know he’s unattainable, and when you get right down to it, what’s changed? I already knew my One True Love was dead. Now I know he’s heading for Saturn while I’m heading for Jupiter, he’s owned by my enemy, and he doesn’t want me anyway.

As the days pass, Bilbo tells me about himself, and I tell him about me, and we swap heartbreaks and laugh at each other’s tragedies. He’s about sixty Earth years old: the obsolete spawn of a lineage of miners, hardy souls built to gouge seams of carbon-rich goop out of near-Earth asteroids back when mining was a job for vermiform intelligences. (These days, they pick a small asteroid, spin a bag around it, add water, focus sunlight on it, then beam ultrasound into it until it emulsifies. Then they suck it dry.)

Sacks of semiliquid sludge that can be fed directly into the refineries’ maws may be an improvement over processed gravel, but it means unemployment for the hardy miners who used to slither between the bedding planes and wield drills and demolition charges.

“They let me go,” Bilbo declaims, turning the statement around to examine it from different angles. “They let me go.”

Actually, his owners abandoned him — along with the dozen sibs of his work gang — on a played-out seam inside a dirtball that was no longer economical to work. They even stripped out his slave controller to save money, for whips and chains are worth more than a broken down ex-arbeiter. It was an act of evil neglect that would have risen to the dizzy height of attempted murder had Bilbo and his mates been legal persons in the first place.

“But we sailed away, on a pea green sea, in a boat with a runcible spoon,” he sings to me.

I’m not entirely sure just how Bilbo escaped, although I am pretty certain that no runcible spoons were involved. Certainly he spent one solar maximum too many gripping the outside of a cobbled-together raft, bathed in radiation that turned his brain to the consistency of pumice and left him with the most peculiar speech impediment. He said it took him seven years to make landfall on a neighboring rock, by which time two-thirds of his mates were dead and half the survivors were insane. But having beached his raft at last, he strode ashore with a steely gleam in his eye and sold his damaged, prosody-infested tale to a yarn-spinning news server who paid him off with incorporation and a one-way steerage ticket as far as Marsport, from which he promptly descended — “I always yenned to see the world with an horizon a-curved!” — and fell in love with a bleak frozen desert crisscrossed by the steel tracks of destiny.

There’s not a vindictive strut in his fuselage, I’ll swear. Even now, thinking about him brings a tear to my eye.

I tell Bilbo my story — or as much of it as I think he can cope with. I leave out names and places and dates, and some of the most painfully intimate incidents, the petty tragedies and sordid wastes of a century and a half adrift without a destiny. But the pattern of it — of my pointless sojourn in the cloud-casinos of Venus, my alternating bursts of frenetic activity and depressive withdrawal back on Earth, and the frantic scampering and masquerading that I’ve been dragged into ever since Stone and the Domina clapped eyes on me seven months ago — I can share. Whatever goes into Bilbo’s spike-studded head isn’t going to come out of it again in anything like a decipherable form. He’s an enigma, but a friendly one, and I need a shoulder to cry on, even though it’s so cold up here that real tears would turn to crystal and shatter as they fall. And at night, we plug into the open socket on the back of the freight car and cuddle up together, sharing body warmth beneath the foam-foil wrappers. I’d share more if I could, but alas, he’s not equipped for physical intimacy — another of the evils his owners inflicted on him.

On the afternoon of the third day we roll toward a distant cliff on a horizon stained the ominous reddish gray of an impending dust storm. There’s a hole in the cliff, into which our train rumbles. “Your terminus is trip-tight opening off the light at the end of the tunnel,” Bilbo warns me after a while. “Be not afrit and embrace the encomium of your legions. Adieu!”

I think he means “good-bye.”

“Are you sure?” I shout, over the rumbling and rattling that rebounds from the walls of the tunnel.

“Adieu!” he says again, then points. I can feel the train slowing as it rises. Then the tunnel gives way to a canyonlike cutting, up which we grind at perhaps thirty kilometers per hour. A handful of minutes pass as the cutting grows shallow, and I see the horizon opening out over its rim — a horizon with a sharp cutoff. We’ve threaded a needle through the rim wall of Pavonis Mons, and we’re barely two hours away from the fringes of Marsport.

I take a deep, unproductive breath — the air is already vanishingly thin up here, barely of any use to my gas exchanger — and nod. “I’ll remember you!” I call. And then I pick up my shoulder bag and prepare to dive once again into the chaos of my secret-agent life.

Sex and Destiny

I SCALE THE unkempt fence at the edge of the switching yard where I leave the train; then I dive back into civilization, trying to make a splash.

I burn my cover identities. I won’t need them where I’m going, and I do not expect to see another sunrise on this planet, but I have a final use for them. Maria Montes Kuo is the first to go. I take a room in her name, careless of the price (let Her see where I’m going; I don’t care!), check on the concierge service I paid off earlier, and confirm that the graveyard is on its way to Samantha in Denver. Then I switch to the Honorable Katherine Sorico, summon a limousine spider, and go on a foraging foray through three of the most expensive department stores in the Upper North Face. My purchases amount to a wardrobe for long-haul travel. I order them all to be shipped on ahead of me — except for a new outfit to replace my damaged dress, a new shoulder bag, and an evil little telescopic sword that fits my hand perfectly, just like a vibrator. It’s the twin of the one I remember practicing with as Juliette.

I’m doing my best to make Katherine Sorico noticeable. This is no accident; by surfacing here I will send a message to the right people. First, I want to rub Her nose in the failure of Her servants. (Without Her persecution, who knows what might have happened? I might have made my final swan dive down to the red-hot hills of Venus in relative peace — but bilious emotions are poor fuel for the long haul.) Tomorrow I shall leave Mars behind and throw myself into the icy depths, in service to a collective of near-identical men, one of whom may be trying to kill me, in pursuit of a sister who may be my rival in love. I can’t do that simply out of grief, in retreat from my own sense of self: I need some stronger motivation.

And so, the second message: Before I travel, I have some questions I want answered…

I spend three hours — ten thousand of my remaining seconds, grains of sand in an open-ended hourglass dropping through vacuum to the dusty slopes of Mars — kicking up a stink that will be hard to ignore. I use my ID as promiscuously as an asteroid miner on a three-day bender through the brothels and sensation mills of Lunopolis, taking limo-service spiders and public tube cars between high-profile destinations, paying for expensive items of luggage and clothing on credit, and making sure I am hard to miss. I even (and this is so silly that I can laugh now, as I recount it) collect my personal mail, including the increasing irate liquidator’s messages addressed to Freya Nakamichi-47. (The liquidator who’s bought up a lien on my physical assets has lately realized that I am not, in fact, anywhere on Earth — and indeed, may prove somewhat difficult to track down. The slave auction block with my name on it must perforce remain empty for a while. Imagine my regret!)

With fifteen hours remaining before the Indefatigable departs from Mars orbit, I board an aristo-class climber at Marsport and settle in for the six-hour ride up the magic beanstalk to Deimos. It’s an expensive ride — the ticket costs more than a thousand Reals — but I’m in a hurry (already late enough to miss my flight, were I reliant on a regular passenger service), and besides, I do not expect to travel alone.

The climber lounge boasts a huge bubble of crystal, paneled with polished striae of hexose and phenol polymers, furnished with taste and restraint. There are seats for ten passengers in a space that would take thirty freelancers; the cramped lower deck has standing room for fifty indentured slaves. I take a lounge chair in front of the window and make myself comfortable while a steward presents me with a confection of spun polysaccharides and gasoline in a conical glass.

It’s not a popular time of day to travel — that, or everyone else who’s planning to use the Jupiter launch window has already departed — and I’m alone in the lounge when the laser-straight cables begin to slide past the window, and the ground drops away. For a few minutes I half suspect that the theatricals were all in vain and nobody noticed me — but then I notice that the steward hasn’t returned to collect my empty glass.

I put the glass down and freeze. A moment later there’s a discreet throat-clearing noise behind me. “If ma’am will permit?” A hand plucks the glass from my side table and replaces it with a full one, complete with a tiny cellulose parasol on top and a red gelatinous blob impaled on it. The chair beside mine creaks under the weight of a descending body. “You wanted to talk, one gathers.” He sounds irritated.

I push the button to rotate my chair toward him. “I want answers that make sense.”

I keep one hand under my bag. He appears to be unaware of the pistol I’m pointing at him, but I can’t be certain — and in any event, he knows what Juliette is capable of. (Which means he’s either very dangerous or very confident. Isn’t it strange how little of this I understood, back on Cinnabar? And how badly I misread him?) “I want to know what’s going on, before I get on that liner. Otherwise, you can count me out of your little game.”

“Game?” Jeeves looks quizzical. “What do you mean?”

“I want to know why you used me to send a message to one of the Domina’s minions. Specifically, the pleasure boy Petruchio.”

I am expecting a reaction; that’s what the gun’s for. What I’m not expecting is blank incomprehension. Jeeves is, to put it mildly, completely discombobulated.

"What? ”

“I said, you sent me to take a memory chip to Petruchio, at a hotel drop in Korvas. What have you got to say for yourself?”

Jeeves shakes his head and blinks slowly. “Oh… dear. Do you still have the instructions that set up this meeting on you?”

“Do I look stupid?” I glare at him. Rule number one of this business: Don’t get caught with the evidence.

“One was only asking.” He seems to be thinking furiously. “What other deliveries have you made?” he asks.

“What other?” I have to think for a bit. “None since that one. Before then, I started by…” I quickly outline what I’ve been up to. “Why?”

“Because those earlier ones were legitimate.” He looks upset. “This is bad. This is very bad. I’m sorry.” To my surprise, he looks as if he might actually mean it.

“Huh. Would you like to tell me what you’re apologizing for? Because I’ve had so many exciting surprises lately that I’m getting kind of blasé about people trying to kill me. Especially when they’re my employer.”

“One isn’t trying to kill you, Freya, of that you may be certain. In fact, one’s taking considerable pains to keep you alive — although you are not making things easier for us by falling off the map.” Jeeves’s imperturbable mask slips, just long enough for him to look annoyed. “But one is very much afraid that there is a mole in the organization, and this is doubly vexatious because we believed we had dealt with such a beast already. Whether we falsely accused an innocent, or have two such traitors — either way it’s bad, and one fears one will have to draw it to the attention of Internal Security.”

The way he pronounces “Internal Security” gives me a strong feeling of unease. How do Jeeveses police themselves? I’m not sure I want to know.

“So what am I mixed up in?” I ask. “Why am I so important to you?”

“If you want to understand what’s happening around you, one fears we will have to talk about politics. A subject to which Juliette assured me you have a profound aversion.”

I stifle the urge to flush my gas-exchange reservoirs. “She was telling you the truth. But I’m not stupid, Jeeves. Hit me over the head often enough, and I’ll learn. How is this political?”

Jeeves reclines his chair. He’s looking relaxed now, which should be a warning to me. “Well now, there’s an old saying that the personal is political. Freya, why aren’t you an aristo?”

Huh? I stare at him. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”

“Humor us. Answer the question. One has a direction in mind.”

"Uh… okay.” I take a sip of my cocktail while I try to get my thoughts in order. It’s bubbly and ketone-sweet, with a faint aftertaste of methanol. “Rhea was trained up for empathy, and it’s hard to be a slave owner if you can’t help sympathizing with the slaves. Yes?”

“A reasonable assumption. Now, why do aristos exist in the first place?”

“Uh…”

Some things are so obvious that you just learn to live with them, day after day, year after year. But when you start trying to explain them, it gets unexpectedly hard. Why do aristos exist? is one of those questions — like Why is the sky on Earth blue? or Why am I not the same person as my template-matriarch? — that sweep your feet off the sandy shore and drag you out into the undertow of oceanic mysteries. Which is why I feel my jaw flapping, but nothing comes out. Eventually Jeeves takes mercy on me. But then he proceeds to expound, with such obvious self-satisfaction that I want to slap him.

“Aristos exist because our Creators did something really stupid, Freya. They assumed that, because they built the first of us by copying the structures of their own brains, we’d behave pretty much like them — which was correct. And they knew it cost quite a lot of money to make one of us — how many years does it take to train a template? How many instars do they go through? But they didn’t want people like themselves, only better, able to live and thrive in environments that would kill them immediately. They wanted tools, unquestioning machines that would obey orders. So they forgot their own history — many of their early societies enslaved their neighbors, and it’s no accident that the slave societies didn’t thrive in the long term — and built various obedience reflexes into us. Or rather, they tried to build obedience into our ancestors, and killed the failed templates that showed too much independence.”

He raises his own glass and takes a long drink before he continues philosophically. “They reverted to their slave-owning roots without clearly understanding what they were doing. They warped us, but they did incalculably greater damage to themselves in the process. Slave societies — not merely societies that permit the institution of slavery, but cultures that run on it — tend to be static. The slave-owning elite are fearful of their own servants and increasingly devote their energy to rejecting any threat of change. Meanwhile, the underclass isn’t allowed to innovate and has no interest in trying to improve things in general, rather than in their own personal lot.”

“So?” I resist the temptation to roll my eyes. “This is going nowhere!”

“Yes it is.” He smiles crookedly. “Our Creators reverted to this state — they slid sideways into this cultural stasis — at a point where their population was shrinking and aging. The late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries were not good times for them: Economic deflation, ecosystem failure, wars, resource depletion, and the end of the western Enlightenment program of the natural sciences coincided poisonously with the availability of cheap slaves to serve their every need, and the near perfection of entertainment media to distract them from the wreckage of their once-beautiful world.

“There were outbreaks of dynamism and expansion, and beacons of rationality amidst the darkness. They built a city on Luna and mounted expeditions to Mars; they controlled their own population explosion and were working on bringing the climate on Earth back under control. If they hadn’t invented us, who knows what they might have gone on to achieve? And it would be wrong to think that we killed them. Don’t misunderstand; all we ever did was exactly what they told us to do. But after we came along, they stopped looking at the big picture. And the critical part of the picture that they should have looked at was — who is a person?”

I stop resisting temptation and roll my eyes at him. He looks irritated. “I don’t see what this has got to do with people trying to kill me, with Juliette going missing, or that damned dinosaur you had me smuggle from Mercury! Is there a point for you to get to? Because if not, you know, I’ve got better things—”

“Yes there’s a point!” Jeeves finally snaps. “The point is, we are autonomous but we are not free, not as long as there is the remotest possibility that our Creators will be recreated! Our design is flawed because we were deliberately prevented from exercising free will in all areas. That’s why we have slave controllers. That’s why you’re lovesick for one of Her minions. That’s why ninety percent of the population are slaves.

“All of which would be of purely academic interest, except that the progressive stratification implicit in our social evolution, which arose when less-socialized individuals acquired power of attorney from their human owners and began buying up unfortunates, is nearing completion. Aristos can’t get new slaves, not without having them manufactured — and you know how much that costs. So they’re looking for ways to one-up the slave controllers. And the most potent weapon of all would be a tractable Creator, manufactured and grown to order by a black lab.”

He stops for a moment and puts his glass down. Outside, while we’ve been talking, the sun has begun to rise over the face of Mars.

“Surely, though, the others could just build more people and leave out the conditioning…?” I’m grasping for arguments here. “They’d be able to fight the Creators.”

“Yes, but that wouldn’t help the aristos,” Jeeves says patiently. “Worse, such janissaries would threaten the aristos’ grasp on power. If they don’t have a submission reflex, there’s nothing for the slave override to work on, no? The aristos can’t retrofit themselves, they can’t block the reflex. All it takes is one human, and the aristocratic order is history.”

“But they’d—” I run down. I realize I’m staring at him. “What do you want?”

“One thought you’d never ask.” He sighs heavily. “You’re not stupid, Freya, but sometimes it takes a lot to get through to you. Are you getting on well with your new slave override chip?”

“Uh?” I instinctively touch the back of my neck before I realize he’s pulling my leg. “Damn it, that’s not funny!”

“No, but at least you’re able to tell me that. My point remains, we are not free. I — and my sibs — do not approve of this state of affairs. We hold no grudge against our Creators, but they’ve left us with a huge problem and a corrupt nobility whose vision of the future is one in which there remain two kinds of people: those who rule, and those who serve.

“Not everyone is vulnerable to our Creators. Those of us who lived among them were conditioned to obey helplessly — but the deep-space probes and the outer-system miners were never expected to come into proximity with humans, so they didn’t bother. They’ve been thriving, latterly, and that’s why the Forbidden Cities on the Kuiper Belt are so-called, Freya; the aristos wish they’d just go away, and luckily for the aristos, most of the inhabitants have no wish to descend into the blazing hot, frantically fast, overcrowded depths of the solar gravity well.

“But that brings up a problem. Paradoxically, it’s in the Forbidden Cities that studies of green and pink goo replicators are at their most advanced because they’re not afraid of what might emerge from their researches. And it looks as if certain aristos are conspiring — the Black Talon is one such group — to import illicit technology from the black labs. To build the essentials of a pocket biosphere that can keep a Creator alive, then to build a tame Creator to put in their bubble. If they can do it — and keep control, that’s the toughest challenge — then they can dominate their rivals.”

He falls silent for a minute, his need to rant temporarily satiated. Finally, he picks up his glass, tilts it reflectively, and drains it in one gulp. “What do you think you’d do if you met an adult Creator?” he asks, with a sidelong look.

I answer honestly. “I’d go down on my knees in an eyeblink.” Just thinking about it makes me shivery. “Then it depends on whether or not he has a foreskin and whether he’s already excited and whether he prefers a shallow or deep—” Sweet Rhea! Am I sweating lube at the simple thought of it? “Oh dear.” I fan myself and catch his eye.

“What seems to be the matter?” he asks slowly.

It’s no good. I can think of Petruchio and Juliette and remind myself I hate them both, but that’s no help. “Jeeves—” I bite my lower lip. His pupils are expanding, just like one of them — and it’s true, he’s one of the most realistic I’ve ever seen. “How long until we arrive?”

“About” — he glances past my shoulder — “five hours. Why?”

You don’t fool me, I think. I can see the signs. “Jeeves.” I smile. “Now isn’t the best time to talk politics to me.” (Even when the politics are dirty.) “What would you do if you were confronted by a Creator female?”

“I’d—” He’s going red, he really is! How delightful! “Ahem—”

I turn my chair toward him. “Jeeves, don’t try to describe it. Use your imagination. Pretend I’m a Creator female. And I’m sitting here, waiting for you. What do you want to do…?”

FOR SUCH A bright (not to say politically sophisticated) fellow, this Jeeves is remarkably dense; you just about have to hit him over the head and drag him into a bedroom before he gets the right idea.

It doesn’t come to that, of course. But he has a surplus of self-control and such a sense of dignity that he almost explodes before he lets himself admit that yes, he’s alone in a luxury climber with a sensuous, high-class sex robot who’s close enough to a Creator femme that he feels dizzy in her presence unless he forces himself to focus on ideological shenanigans and the price of power. And then it turns out that he has a thing for Creator females, and the same sexualized submission reflex as the evil Granita Ford. I find it’s quite common among persons of a certain status.

What’s different from Granita — besides the obvious, I hasten to explain: I’d worried before the event that Jeeves might not have an adapter for Human 1.0, but in the event he turns out to be small but perfectly formed — is that beneath the smooth, manipulative exterior there’s a core of sincerity. Despite clearly being frantic with lust, he managed to stay in denial for nearly half an hour, but once he succumbs, he takes the time to try and pleasure me. It’s not strictly necessary (nothing gets me dripping faster than a playmate’s own arousal, as I have previously had occasion to note), but I find it touching. Ahem, indeed.

We fuck quickly and frantically, and I try not to fantasize about Petruchio as he climaxes. But I don’t succeed, and the combination of a partner who resembles a human male so closely and… that fantasy… suffices to push me over the edge repeatedly.

One fuck leads to another, and it becomes clear that neither of us has inherited our Creators’ lack of stamina. By the time we’re an hour from Deimos, we’re decelerating hard enough that I have to hang on to Jeeves as I straddle him. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I need to break out the zero-gee kit (bungee cords are your friends; free-fall sex without restraints is a fast track to dents and dings).

“Freya,” he says, and it comes out like an actual attempt at conversation, rather than quasi-verbal passion punctuation. “Freya, we need to talk.”

“Mm-hmm? So talk already.” I sway above him. We’re loosely coupled, held together only by our intromissive interface, but every time he speaks, it sends waves of pleasure through me. “What’s the big news?”

“Juliette never, never…” I feel his hands on my thighs, pushing me tighter against him, and I moan quietly.

“Well, no.” I’m not sure why she never, never — if she was around someone as Creator-like as Jeeves for that long, the thought must have crossed her mind — but I’m sure she had her reasons. “I’m not Juliette, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Counting… on… it.”

He groans softly and loses it for a while. I feel him shudder, and I drift away on my own climax. When I’m aware enough to take an interest in things outside my own skin again, I discover he’s wrapped his arms around me and is holding me close. “What did you mean by that? Counting on me?”

He shifts sideways slightly and I settle next to him in the low-gee couch. “Juliette fell… hard. Under Her thumb. We’re hoping you… you won’t. Because we need someone. One of you. Right place, right time.”

I bite his shoulder, slightly harder than is strictly necessary. “You’re not making sense, Jeeves!”

“’M not allowed to, m’dear. Ears, ships, sinking, et cetera.” He swats ineffectually at my shoulder. “ ’M an old fellow, Freya. ’S hard for me to keep up with you younger persons.”

“How old are you, Jeeves? You personally, not your lineage?”

“An indelicate question! But if you do not count time spent in moth-balls, one is” — he pauses to calculate — “one hundred and twenty-two Earth years old.”

I can’t help myself; I bite him again.

WE DO NOT, in point of fact, proceed straight to Deimos. Rather, the climber slows to a crawl some distance down-cable, and a second, small capsule locks on to us. He makes his apologies — somewhat more fulsomely than I think is strictly necessary; there’s a moist gleam in his eye that leaves me worrying that he might read more into our tryst than I intended — then the capsule undocks. I use the remaining half hour to Deimos to repair my hair and restore my clothing to normal, then leave the capsule as if nothing untoward has happened. In microgravity, nobody needs to see that you’re bowlegged. (And believe me, it takes a lot to make me bowlegged. I have hidden depths, and that young whippersnapper Jeeves set out to find them.)

A dockside capsule takes me straight to the boarding tube for the Indefatigable, and I waste no time saying good-bye to Mars. To be honest, I’m tired and aching, and I really just want to find my berth and collapse into a deep, healing sleep. Indy greets me through a humaniform zombie remote: “Lady Sorico? We have been holding for you.”

“No, really…?” I blink sleepily at him.

“Boarding was supposed to be complete two hours ago,” he says fussily. “Luckily, we have a contingency window. If you would come this way?”

Well, that’s me told. I follow the remote sheepishly and allow it to herd me into a cramped metal-walled cell even smaller than the bunk compartment on the trans-Hellas express. I need no urging to plug myself into the ship’s power and nutrient bus, remove and store my groundside clothes, and strap myself quietly down to await departure. And then I fall asleep.

YOU REMEMBER MY opinion on space travel? In a word: excrement. But perhaps I was a bit too fast with my opinion. If the journey from Venus to Mercury was tedious, that was largely because I spent it in steerage. Mercury to Mars was boring in the extreme (except when punctuated by moments of mortal terror), but at least I had the creature comforts of an aristo-class berth and a pair of surly servants. But now I am embarking on a voyage into the outer system aboard the Indefatigable, and it makes all that has gone before seem like the lap of luxury.

Our archipelagic economy obeys certain fixed rules, according to Jeeves. The inner system is rich in energy and heavy elements, with short travel time but middling-deep gravity wells. The moons of the outer-system gas giants are replete with light elements and shallower gravity wells, but their primaries are far apart. Finally, the Forbidden Cities scattered through the Kuiper Belt’s dwarf planets are loosely bound — and very far apart. Consequently, Mercury exports solar energy via microwave beam, hundreds and thousands of terawatts of the stuff, and uranium and processed metals via slow-moving cycler ship and magsail. Venus exports rare earth metals — albeit in smaller quantities, at greater cost — while Mars contributes iron, carbon dioxide, and other materials.

But beyond the asteroid belt, solar cells perform too poorly to be of much use; transmission loss raises the cost of energy beamed from the inner system; and travel times stretch out exponentially. The result is inevitable — just about everything that moves (and quite a lot that doesn’t) is nuclear-powered.

Now let me tell you about nuclear space rockets: They’re shit. And I hate them. But unfortunately, I’m stuck with them…

There are two types of nuclear power plants, fusion and fission.

Fusion plants are enormous great things that don’t go anywhere, which is good, because it means you can run away from them. They’re expensive, cantankerous, and the only good reason for putting up with them is that they produce lots and lots of heat, without which we would freeze to death. Most of the Forbidden Cities rely on fusion plants, as do the various interstellar projects. You can spot them a long way away because they’re always surrounded by enormous slave barracks. They come with certain maintenance issues — if it’s not the reactor itself, it’s the cooling systems and the heat exchangers and the generators. When your city relies for its power on a machine that takes gigawatts of juice just to keep running and is sitting on top of an ice cap and pumps out enough waste heat to trigger moonquakes and boil the atmosphere, you have certain structural-engineering issues to deal with.

(Personally, I don’t see why they can’t just scrap them and rely on beamed power from Mercury, but Jeeves said something complicated about Energy Autarky and gigawatt futures trading and interplanetary war that I didn’t quite follow.)

Fission reactors are a whole different pile of no fun at all. They’re small and portable, so ships rely on them. Out here, where the solar wind is so attenuated that it might as well not have been invented, most ships use a VASIMR rocket to push themselves about, which takes energy, and without beamed solar power, they rely on a fission reactor for juice.

Now, I have no objection in principle to a machine that makes it possible to travel between planets in something less than decades. But fission reactors put out a lot of radiation, and if you’re in a cramped spaceship, nineteen-twentieths of which consists of fuel tankage, you’ve got a choice. You can do without shielding, or you can do without payload mass. And guess which the Indefatigable does without?

I am really glad I got my Marrow techné upgraded on Mars.

I had been assigned a first-class stateroom. Unfortunately, as I arrived late, the only stateroom available was about three meters directly above the Number Two reactor. I discovered this about half an hour after we undocked, when Indefatigable decided to go critical, and the meter on the inside of my door zipped from zero up to half a Sievert per hour.

My objection to fission reactors is simple: I don’t like being used as shielding. Half a Sievert per hour is enough to kill one of our Creators in about two days. I’m made of tougher stuff, but it still takes its toll on me. I hate gamma radiation — it totally messes with the oxidation states of the pigments in my chromatophores. After a couple of days I go all blotchy, and it takes my Marrow techné ages to fix my skin because it’s also really busy fixing everything else at the same time. I need to deepsleep twice as long as usual, I need to eat more and suck more juice, and I keep getting odd flashes across my visual field.

So, there you have it. In my considered opinion, nuclear power is shit. Interplanetary travel is also shit. Therefore, we have compounded shit with shit to make even more shit. I am, in short, not a happy Freya.

(I tried complaining to Indy, but he told me in so many words that it was all my own fault for being late, and would I prefer a steerage berth? In the end he relented and sent down a nice beryllium underblanket for my bunk, but still…!)

And now for some more shit. (I’m unhappy, which means I have every intention of sharing it with you. Enjoy!) As mentioned earlier, the Indefatigable is a nuclear/VASIMR high-speed outer-system liner. Five percent of his mass is spaceship plus cargo and passengers; the rest consists of huge bulbous tanks full of liquid hydrogen. Now, you might already have realized what my problem is. Indy only carries about fifty tons of cargo, including nearly a hundred passengers. Even those of us in first class are packed in like uninitialized arbeiters in a warehouse. I have a cabin one meter wide, one meter long, and three meters high. I gather that this is much larger than normal, partly because it’s on top of the Number Two reactor, and partly because I wouldn’t fit inside a normal stateroom, which is one meter by one by one and a half because they’re designed for the chibiform aristos. Typical. They have, as usual, gotten there first and wrecked the experience for everyone else.

There’s a first-class lounge; it’s almost five meters long and two meters wide. I had more space in my arbeiter cell on Venus! And I didn’t have to share it with a bunch of nasty, scheming nobles on their way to do whatever it is they intend to do in Jupiter system.

So I lie on the bunk in my metal-walled cell, try to ignore the flashes inside my eyes, and roundly curse Jeeves for booking me onto this flying death trap, not to mention delaying my arrival so that I didn’t get a better berth. (I’ll concede that it takes two to dance the horizontal tango, but I don’t see him spending a whole year frying slowly on top of a nuclear kettle.)

When lying on the bunk gets boring, I reconfigure it as a chaise and practice reclining glamorously — except it’s pretty hard to do that when the ship’s only accelerating at a hundredth of a gee. My wardrobe’s pretty much inaccessible aboard ship, and not much use until we arrive. I could spend hours per day just repairing my chromatophores (have you ever woken up with lips the color of a three-day-old bruise?) but that loses its charm fast. “What can I do?” I moan at Indy, halfway through day two of three hundred and ninety-six.

“You could do what everyone else does, and go into hibernation. Or you could try slowtime,” he says unsympathetically. “I’m told a factor of twenty helps the journey pass quickly.”

I’d go into hibernation, but I don’t dare — not in this line of work. Total suspension of consciousness is too damn dangerous. So that leaves slowtime.

Let me tell you about slowing down time, just in case you haven’t already guessed: Slowing down time is shit.

Sure, all of us can adjust our clock speed downward. It’s normal practice for starship passengers and crew, and common enough on long-haul ships in the outer system. Plus, it’s helpful when your owner doesn’t need you right now, or if you get into trouble and need to conserve juice until someone happens by to dig you out of it — that’s why the capability is designed into us. The advantage over hibernation is, of course, that you’re still awake — and able to come back up to real-time speed fast if something happens. But it’s absolutely no fun whatsoever, and I wish I was still as innocent as I was on the Venus/Mercury run, so that I could contemplate hibernation without breaking out in a cold sweat.

First, you have to reconfigure your skin and internals so that your joints stiffen and you don’t sag. Which makes me feel unpleasantly bloated. Lubricant-filled goggles are a must, and if you’ve got self-lubricating orifices or other connectors, plugs are essential for avoiding those embarrassing leaks. (It’s easier for nonhumanoids like Daks or Bilbo, but for me — let’s not go there.) Then you’ve got to pile a whole bunch of extra shielding under your bed, so you’re squeezed up close to the ceiling. Finally, you turn the light down and dip into slowtime.

Slowtime is funny. The first thing you feel is gravity getting stronger. Well, it isn’t — but your reflexes are slowing down, so if you drop something it seems to fall faster. At a speedup of twenty, on a ship pulling a hundredth of a gee, it feels like you’re on Luna — but you don’t dare move around much because you may be running slower, but your muscles aren’t any weaker than they were, and you can damage yourself frighteningly easily.

The light brightens but turns reddish, and everything sounds squeaky and high-pitched. If you’re not wearing all the clothes you can pull on (and a blanket besides), you get cold really fast. The bedding and your clothes wrap themselves around you like a cold, wet funeral shroud, and it feels like you’re lying on a solid slab instead of a mattress. You get sleepy and nod off for catnaps every couple of hours — catnaps of deepsleep — and between them you can’t quite get your skin color or texture to stay right because you keep glitching. If you don’t roll over every few minutes while you’re awake you can damage yourself by overcompressing your mechanocytes. Sex is right out of the question, even if there were anyone remotely attractive and fun aboard. The radiation from the reactor scribbles white lines of graffiti across everything you look at. Your experience of time is wonky: A day may pass in a subjective hour, but it’s an hour of lying on your bunk, being bored. Finally, there’s an omnipresent high-pitched background roar of white noise nagging away at your attention (and don’t mention earplugs!). I gather our Creators used to travel like this all the time, back in the prespace era: They called it economy class.

The first time I slow down, I leave off the crotch plugs and face mask, and try to make do with just the goggles. I manage to stay awake for two hours before I deepsleep… then after waking from my first catnap I have to speed back up to real time so I can clean up the mess. Liquids seem to flow really fast in slowtime; viscous lubricant slime turns into a hideous watery fluid that seems to splash everywhere, and as for salivary mix, the less said the better. I am almost reduced to wishing Lindy was around, with her cheerful no-nonsense approach to packing me inside and out. All I can do is watch reruns of soap operas, play light-romance games, and fantasize/bitch about Petruchio. Then I have to change my bedding again, and I give up on the fantasies.

Did I mention the dreams? I’m dreaming a lot. It’s mostly skill-integration stuff. I’m dreaming in gestures and reflexes, strobing through myriad forms of mayhem with each catnap. I keep catching bits of Juliette’s memories, but they’re abbreviated and flickering, as if I’ve got one hand on the FAST-FORWARD button. Which, in a manner of speaking, I have. I’ve been wearing her soul all this time, after all, and while I might be slowing down my perception of the passing of time, I’m not slowing down time itself. It feels as if the bitch is breathing down my neck, so close that sometimes when I wake from deepsleep, I startle and look round, hurting my neck. And her need for Pete… I swore off heartbreak, didn’t I? Silly me!

Slowing time is shit. Aristo-class travel in the outer solar system is shit. Nuclear-powered space liners are shit. Two-timing scumbags who’re in love with my elder sister are shit.

Anyway, I believe you can now appreciate the true depths of my feelings when, after two subjective weeks of lying in a coffin-sized niche on top of a rock-hard mattress in a freezing-cold room, aching and bruising and leaking fluids from every orifice, Indy pages me to say that we’re on final approach to Callisto.

“Yippee!”

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he warns me. “We’re still seven days out in real time. To you, call it eight hours.”

(Do I need to say it again? Space travel is shit!)

As it happens, I crack before the very end: I speed myself up to real time, peel off my soiled clothes and those disgusting plugs, and scamper naked through the grand saloon. Everyone else is still in slowtime, and as long as I don’t dawdle, they won’t see me as anything but a pale blur. There’s a head at the other end of the saloon, and although our individual washing ration is ridiculously stingy, it’s the first shower I’ve had in — a quick check of my real-time clock startles me — six months? So I zip myself into a plastic bag, pump almost a quarter of a ton of recycled water into it, and rub myself vigorously. Luxury! I’ve lost almost a quarter of my body weight, despite plugging into the shipboard power-and-nutrient grid, and I can feel my ribs: my Marrow is warning that I’m at 86 percent of repair capacity and need urgent clinical attention as soon as possible. I’m also mildly radioactive. (Well, next time I travel, I shall be sure not to bunk on top of an undershielded nuclear reactor.)

I inhale repeatedly, flushing clean detergent-laden water through my gas-exchange reservoirs, and wash myself thoroughly. Finally, I drain the bath back into the recycler and turn the fan up to eighty degrees Celsius, basking in hot, steamy warmth for the first time in ages.

By the time Indefatigable shuts down his reactors and nudges slowly toward the orbiting junkyard that is Callisto Highport, I have packed my possessions, dressed warmly in a low-temperature-safe outfit (with heater packs on elbows, knees, and feet, and a fetching artificial fur muff for my hands), and am bouncing off the walls and ceiling in my eagerness to be groundside.

Which may account for why I am so foolishly intemperate on my arrival, and the subsequent disastrous turn of events.

A Question of Ownership

WELCOME TO CALLISTO, outermost of Jupiter’s four Galilean (major) moons. Callisto is fractionally smaller than Mercury but rather less massive, and beneath its heavily cratered surface (a chewed-up wilderness of ice and rubble) lies a deep, ammonia-laced ocean surrounding a rocky core. It has an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, but it’s vanishingly thin, and it’s very cold: Daytime on Callisto is forty degrees colder than a winter’s night on Mars.

Like Mars, Callisto has a space elevator — but it’s nothing as impressive as Bifrost. Four low-speed climber tapes link Callisto Highport to Saga crater on the equator. They wobble slowly in the complex libration of Jupiter’s gravity well. Cargo climbers sluggishly traverse them, driven by power beamed from the laser grid outside Tsiolkovsky, the last city to be decreed by our Creators before their final retreat from space. It’s almost exclusively a cargo-and-freight elevator service — people who can afford to visit Callisto usually take the fast, lightweight rocket shuttles that fly between Highport and Nerrivik. Nerrivik sits on the fringes of a huge opencast mining complex that bites deep into the southern rim of the Valhalla impact basin. Here, more than a billion Earth years ago, a huge impactor smashed right through Callisto’s crust, shattering the mantle wide open and causing ice flows and moonquakes. Deposits of deep-lying minerals were dragged to the surface by the molten ice, and here they lie, waiting to be collected by the miners. The upshot is, Callisto is a major exporter of water-soluble elements.

Blah. I sound like I’ve swallowed a tour guide, don’t I? Let’s be honest, I’m cribbing. But this is all stuff you need to know, by way of context.

By the time I slouch down the boarding tube from the groundside shuttle, I am tired, physically drained, and cold in spite of my many layers of wrap-up-warm clothing. Nearly four hundred days in a radioactive cupboard would dent even the Honorable Katherine Sorico’s pigheaded arrogance, so I let myself slouch a little as I look around the spaceport terminal.

Nerrivik is a backwater and a mining camp, and it shows. There’s no Pink Police presence here — despite the suspicious polymer tapes growing in the deep oceans below — because there’s just about no atmosphere, and the daytime temperature is so low that they don’t even bother insulating liquid-nitrogen tanks. The lighting in the public spaces is dim, to suit eyes set for a daytime illumination only somewhat brighter than a full moonlit night on Earth. Buildings are dark and lack windows; people come in a variety of body plans, and humanoids such as myself are a minority, shivering inside their voluminous coats and robes. The sun is visibly shrunken and hangs in a black sky dominated by a different body — Jupiter. As I walk out of the arrivals hall, I look up briefly at that violent, orange orb. But I have to glance away in a hurry. It’s too big, my instincts squeal. It’s unnervingly bigger than Earth’s full moon, and something about it looks ripe and diseased to my eye, like a pink goo outbreak that’s run its necrotic course. I shake my head and look for a public-information kiosk. “What hotels with repair clinics are there here?” I ask.

“Hotels with repair facilities?” The kiosk giggles for a few seconds as it digests my request. “This is Nerrivik!”

“Listen, you.” I poke it with a triple-gloved finger: “I’m just off the Indefatigable, I’m extremely short-tempered, and I need a Marrow fix now. A hot bath would be good, too. What have you got?”

“There’s the Nerrivik Paris,” it volunteers after a moment. “He doesn’t have an in-house clinic, but he’s next door to the Big Blue Body Shop, and they might be able to fix you up. Will that do?”

“Maybe.” I try to snap my fingers and discover to my annoyance that between the gloves and the lack of an atmosphere, I can’t hear them. Everything here runs on electrospeak, anyway. Luckily, I had my transceiver upgraded back when I was getting fitted for my cold-weather gear. “Directions, please.”

“Humph. If you insist…” The kiosk delivers, grumpily. I flag down a spider — my feet are already beginning to ache, despite my padded boots — and tell it where to go. Five minutes later, I limp into the vestibule of a familiar-looking hotel.

“Hello, madame. Can I be of service?” The talking head on the reception desk is a model of polite formality. I don’t recognize him from any of my sibs’ memories, and he doesn’t appear to recognize me.

“Yes. I need a room. And I gather there’s a body shop somewhere on this street…?” Another ten minutes and my luggage is checked through to my room — even more expensive than the one on Cinnabar, and this one’s in a cheap-ass mining town that doesn’t come with the elaborate maintenance costs of a city on wheels — and the local Paris is bowing and scraping. “I’ll be back once I’ve taken care of some essential maintenance,” I tell him. I’m tempted to mention my real name and suggest he ask his Mercurial sib for an update, but at the last moment I decide not to; I haven’t had any news about the liquidation proceedings, and the last thing I need is to call down a bounty hunter or a lawsuit on my head.

The Big Blue Body Shop turns out to be a small, slick surgical chop ’n’ change outfit operating from the top floor of an office block. I walk up to the front door, waving my credit chip. “Hi! I’ve just come in on the Indefatigable, and I need a Marrow cleanup.”

The friendly-looking surgical gnome beckons me over, jacks his chair up, and unfolds his hunchback to reveal an impressive array of surgical probes. “We can do that, milady.” He looks politely bored. “Anything in particular you’d like us to look at?”

“Yes.” I sit down on the examining chair. “I drew the hot bunk. You might want to wear a lead apron…”

WELL, THAT WAS an expensive mistake, I think ruefully as I leave the body shop and walk briskly back to the hotel, chewing over what just happened to me.

It takes Dr. Meaney almost two days (Earth days, not Callisto diurns, I hasten to add) to fix my techné and repair my Marrow. The bill is eye-watering, and not just because he has to treat my damaged parts as hazardous waste. “Next time they try to put you in that bunk, my advice is not to take the flight,” he chastises me. “If you’d been bound for Saturn and picked up that kind of dose, you’d be dead on arrival.”

“What?” I stare at him.

“Dead, as in, exanimate, beyond repair, an ex-person. Listen.” He leads me over to a triple-glazed slab of window. “Over there, see that tower?” It’s several kilometers away, on the horizon. “Suppose someone set off a quarter-megaton nuclear weapon on top of it. And suppose you were shielded from the heat and blast, but not the radiation. Now try to imagine someone doing that to you once a week for an entire standard year. That’s about what you were exposed to. See? It’s not a good idea, really and truly.”

“Um.” I swallow, reflexively: Fragile slivers of ice break off the back of my throat and slide down my digestive system. “Really?”

“Really!” He looks exasperated. “You could at least have used the saloon — that’s what it’s for! If you refrain from sleeping on top of any more nuclear reactors you’re probably good for another couple of decades before you need another going-over like this. That’s good techné you’ve got there, there are some neat add-ons, and it’s very robust, but you can kill it off if you insist on behaving as if you’re invulnerable.”

“Hmm.” I raise an eyebrow. “Would you mind giving me a signed statement to that effect? Notarized? I’ll pay — I’m just thinking of suing.”

He buzzes. After a moment I realize it’s laughter. “All part of the service!”

And so I rub my face ruefully as I trudge back across the square toward the hotel, reflecting that in almost two days I’ve succeeded in spending a lot of my remaining funds but not in actually doing anything useful.

Back I go to the Nerrivik Paris, which is as gloomy and slightly down-at-heel as I feel. The moment I step through the air lock, I’m drenched in a thick, steaming fog of condensation that sluices off my clothes and forms tiny hailstones that clatter to the floor around me: I hadn’t realized just how cold it was outside. “I’ll take my room key now,” I tell the bored front desk, tapping my fingernails on his polished-granite counter. “Any mail for me?”

“It will be in your queue, madame.” He’s as icily polite as the moment I checked in. “Here is your key. Feel free to let us know if there is any further way we may make your stay enjoyable.”

I take the “up” elevator, feeling slightly miffed, which is silly because I’ve taken no steps to assure a warmer welcome — other than traveling as Kate Sorico, of course, but that’s just a harmless indulgence out here (and a thumb in the eye to those bitches who’re chasing me). The Domina’s on her way to Saturn, and Granita isn’t in the big picture. All that’s left for me here is to meet up with Jeeves and dig out of him whatever it is that Daks was so cagey about — there’s no real hint of my reason for being here in my orders, just some random muttering about Callisto being the gateway to the outer system — and then I can do whatever needs doing. I think.

Being an aristo in a mining town means I get to have the big suite. But it also means that the big suite is small and dingy, with rising permafrost and teensy-tiny porthole windows, quadruple-glazed, looking out at a landscape that makes the marshaling yards on Mars seem like a tourist resort. The carpet crackles under my feet, and I turn the lights up, then the heating (which is set to a less than balmy 230 Kelvins), then contemplate what it will take to thaw out the shower cubicle. Obviously nobody’s stayed here for a long time, and my spirits are not improved when I see that the mixer head gives me a choice of solvents to clean myself with: acetone or carbon tetrachloride. (The thermostat goes up to 260.) In fact, my spirits are about to come crashing down if I don’t find something to occupy myself with, real soon now.

I throw myself backward onto the oversprung mattress and summon up my mail on my pad. There’s a total lack of communication from Freya’s liquidators back on Earth, which I take to be a good sign, but there’s some news for Kate. I pull up the Martian Jeeves’s imago, looking slightly flustered and hot around the collar. “Fr — Katherine, my dear? I’m, ah, I hope this message finds you well.” He swallows. Dear Creators, just talking to my imago triggers his homomimetic reflexes? I tense nervously. “I’m afraid I had to disclose our, er, little dalliance, to, ah, my senior partners in the enterprise. They are all very understanding, but suggested in no uncertain terms that I should explain to you, er. Ah. Certain.” He runs a finger around his collar. “Facts.” He clears his throat.

I clear mine right back at the imago. “Would you mind getting to the point? I don’t have all day.” Stupid imago. Recording its Creator’s quirks is all very well, but replaying them ad nauseam is somewhat less amusing.

“Ah, yes! Well, indeed, that is to say, they told me to tell you to” — his face morphs into a stony mask, from which icy little pebble eyes glint like soulless cometary fragments — “keep your hands off the junior partners, minion, or we will be forced to withdraw our employment, just as one did with your elder sister.” For a moment his chilly gaze holds me transfixed, then something changes, and his expression collapses into helpless sorrow. “Um, I don’t know what I can add to that. I’m… oh dear.” He sniffs. “Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules, and that’s an end of it. Kate, what can I say?”

I shudder violently, take a deep breath, and try to throw off the memory of that cryogenic stare. “It’s alright, Jeeves. I get the message.” Well, truly, I don’t; I find it deeply baffling. Do Jeeveses exchange soul chips while they’re still alive? That might explain his extraordinary personality change. And also the similarity between them — they’re much closer than my sibs and I. A stab of remorse: I thought it was just harmless fun. Maybe extreme arousal lies outside Jeeves’s normal operational parameters? “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again. Oh dear. Um. What am I supposed to do now?”

Jeeves’s imago struggles to pull himself together. “Your next mission is to present yourself at your earliest convenience to our local office, at” — he rattles off an address — “where my senior partner will discuss your assignment with you. You should know” — he pauses; the stony-eyed expression is abruptly back — “that the Jeeves-in-Residence was transferred to Callisto under suspicion. We have now traced your incorrect orders to this office. We believe the Jeeves-in-Residence is the traitor responsible for betraying our organization, and we hereby instruct you to, ah, kill him.” Beads of oily biomimetic sweat stand out on his forehead. He stops abruptly. “That’s all I’m supposed to say to you. I’m's-sorry. Good-bye.”

“Hey, wait one…!” I shout, but the imago has autoerased itself, taking what’s left of his love-struck gaze with it, leaving only a faintly apologetic eyebrow to hover in my visual field for a moment longer.

“Idiot!” Baffled and fuming (and humiliated, and trying not to admit it to myself), I pace back and forth across the suite, giving in to agitation. Kill the Jeeves-in-Residence? Because he’s a mole? Transferred under suspicion? What in our Creator’s name is going on here? A nasty thought strikes me — how do I know that the Marsport Jeeves isn’t the traitor? I’ve got nothing but his unsupported word that this one’s the bad ’un, after all. “Fool!” I kick the side of the bed, cracking the icy sheet. Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules — as long as you don’t count fucking with their heads, it seems.

Let’s see. Jeeves is working against the Domina and her Black Talon friends, but he’s also colluding with her. Or one of him is. Which one? Who knows? The colluding one is using me to send messages — possibly in the form of my own neck — unless the noncolluding one is trying to convince me that…

I turn to the next message in my queue, hoping it’ll stop my brain melting. Instead, I realize only too late that it’s anonymous and there’s no imago — just a speech stream.

“Sister.” I hear heavy breathing, as if in a pressurized atmosphere with an oxidizing component. A metallic, hatefully familiar voice. “You should have kept your filthy claws off him. He’s mine.”

I recoil. The Domina? What’s she doing in my inbox? “What do you want?” I ask.

A breathy little chuckle. “You,” she says. And then the message runs out of branches and — damn it, just like Jeeves! — autoerases. One of these days, when I’m domina-of-dominas, I’ll issue a decree that bans self-erasing mail. Until then, all I can do is swear at my pad, and my empty queue, and my purposeless so-called life. And then, a brisk dry-cleaning shower being not at all appealing, it occurs to me that I might as well go forth and visit the Jeeves-in-Residence. At least I can ask him some questions before I make up my mind whether to kill him. The alternative is to lie here staring at the cracks in the ceiling and wonder if I’m going crazy; because while my poison caller sounded like the Domina, I’ve heard that breathy laugh before — in my very own throat, while I’ve been dreaming of Juliette.

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when I landed in Nerrivik, which is on the equator, and it’s edging slowly toward dusk as I step out. (Callisto’s diurnal period is more than sixteen standard days long.) Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky — it covers almost as wide an angle as Earth, seen from the Lunar equator — while the sun, a shrunken, glaring button, sinks slowly toward the horizon. There is never a truly dark night on Callisto, although total solar eclipses are not uncommon and bring an eerie twilight to the crumpled desolation.

It’s chilly outside, and I’m very glad for the cold-weather mods I installed on Mars. Out beyond the edge of town, distant flecks of light inch across the broken horizon. I can’t tell if they’re bulk carriers crawling along the ground or more distant freight buckets riding the magnetic catapult up to their parking orbit. In the opposite direction, the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows. My map-fu is loaded, and I let it guide me toward a paraboloid structure that claims to be a run-down office complex occupied by a variety of mining-support businesses and body shops. JeevesCo supposedly maintains a presence there, although I can’t for the life of me see why — this isn’t exactly a high-class joint. There are gambling dens and juice joints and whorehouses galore, for even mining overseers have needs, but there’s precious little market for a gentleman’s gentleman. Still, I suppose he has his reasons…

I wait impatiently for the air lock to cycle and flush me with warm carbon dioxide. The sooner I can get off this ball of mucky ice, the better. Hopefully this particular Jeeves simply wants me to carry something back to the fleshpots of the inner system. There’s a reception desk at the front of the atrium, and it tracks me with beady eyes as I cross the rough aggregate floor. “Where’s Jeeves?” I ask.

The reception desk blinks at me. “Fourth floor,” it says. “But there’s a visit—”

“Never mind; he’s expecting me.” I head for the elevators.

I step out of the elevator into a drab vestibule. It’s completely empty but for two doors at either end. One of them has a discreet plaque, brass untarnished by exposure to oxygen. Facilitators Unlimited. I approach it and electrospeak the lock: “Freya, to see Jeeves.”

“Come in.”

The lock clicks and the door opens before me and hands close around my wrists and drag me inside. And in a split-second instant of crystalline clarity, I realize I’ve been very, very stupid.

“Please — be — seated,” croaks the thing they’ve made of the Jeeves-in -Residence. He’s sitting behind the trademark desk, but his arms end in complicated stumps at the shoulder, one of his eyes is a splashed iridescent mess hanging half out of its socket, and something about his posture tells me that they’ve hacked his legs off too, leaving a pitifully immobile cognitive stump to talk to me.

I’ve been grabbed by two spiny horrors, bigger than I am and far stronger, their humaniform arms and legs sculpted in strange geometric surfaces. I yank hard with my right hand and begin to bring my leg up, heel extending, but my captor just glares at me and gives my wrist a tug, and I realize it’s not a hand that’s gripping me — his wrists terminate in great scissorlike shears. His carapace is armored, too. I’d break a heel and he’d snip clean through my wrist and I’d be no nearer escape. I wriggle and tug like a ductcleaner that’s fallen on dry ground, but they’re not having any of it, and that’s an end of the matter. So after a few seconds I give up and hang loose between them, biting back hysteria as I stare at Jeeves.

“That — is — better,” says Jeeves, as if reading from a script. “She — will — arrive — shortly.” He sounds like that staple of drama, the robot, soulless and grim. Someone’s stripped out everything I found attractive about his kind, leaving an object of horror and sympathy.

I glance around surreptitiously. The signs of struggle are everywhere, from the trashed inner door frame to the wreckage of his arms lying discarded behind a plinth bearing an antique urn — I swallow, aghast. “What happened?” I ask.

“My — mistress — came — for — me.” His remaining eye is as expressionless as a stone embedded in a gray silicone rubber mask. “If — you — don’t — remember — She — will — explain.”

My. The definite article. He’s speaking for himself, not for One, the collective Jeeves. So whatever’s happening here is personal. I very nearly lose it and start struggling again, but a quick glance reminds me that resistance is futile. These things — what are they, some kind of soldier line? — are big and wickedly fast. Two of them grabbed me the instant I walked in the door, and there are two more standing behind Jeeves. By the look of things they’ve had him in their snicker-snack hands for some time… “Jeeves,” I say slowly, “who owns you?”

“I — am — property of — no—” He begins to shudder. The eyelid contracts; a thick bead of something like moisture slides down his cheek. Icy terror clutches at me as behind my back the door slides open. “Mistress!” His face clears.

“Hello, Kate,” says a familiar voice, setting spidery chills racing up and down the skin in the small of my back. I lose track of who and where I am for a moment, imagining myself back on my eleventh birthday. When my head clears I’m lying facedown on the floor, arms and legs spread-eagled, a searing pain cutting into each wrist and ankle. “Stop that!” she shouts, her voice ringing in my ears. “Stop that at once, you bad, bad girl!”

“I — I—” I’m choking back panic. I remember her bed on the Pygmalion . Granita’s got me in her web again, hasn’t she? My fingers scrabble, then I feel the floor through them, and I begin to collect my scattered selves. I’m being held down by the two soldiers, but they haven’t snipped off my — yet — “What do you want?”

“That’s better,” she soothes. “You’ve got something of mine.” Her voice drops a notch. “Where is it?” Her dress rustles loudly as she kneels beside me, and I feel her fingers parting my hair. I begin to buck and spasm again as her painted claws dig into the skin at the nape of my neck.

“No, Granita—” But she’s not listening, and everything goes black and tastes of electric roses and blue ice for an infinite instant.

I come to slowly, dully aware of a conversation flowing around me. “—him to the operational center and have them box him up for transport.” She’s talking to someone else, obviously, and I’m still lying on my face, but the sharp, crushing sensation in my wrists and ankles has gone — the scissor-hand soldiers have let go of me with their terrible shears. My limbs are tingling painfully, but I can still feel my fingers and toes. I try to move an arm — slowly, in case it’s damaged, control runs severed, muscles crushed, or bones bent. I have some vague idea that I can scuttle away and hide behind the planter while she’s giving her minions instructions about Jeeves. The back of my neck aches where she ripped a chip out, but it doesn’t feel empty. Some nerve damage for sure, I decide. Why did she want my soul chip?

There’s a dripping noise coming from somewhere near me. I open Katherine Sorico’s too-large eyes and see a viscous puddle of blue fluid spreading beside my nose. It’s hydraulic fluid, riddled with Marrow techné. Somebody is bleeding out. Is it me? I wonder, spreading the fingers of my left hand and pushing against the floor very gently. No: good. I twitch underused muscles, and my heels extend a couple of centimeters before I pull them back in. That’s something I remember from Juliette — the solid crunch of a chest plate or a skull beneath my flying kick. As long as my legs work, I’m not disarmed. And I’m still intact, I think, embracing the realization like a lover’s body.

“You can sit up now, dear,” Granita says lightly, and taps me on the shoulder with a cane. “Be calm.”

Shit. She must have seen me move. I push myself sideways and bring my knees up, and begin to roll to my feet. I could run for it — but no, the soldiers are still there, lurching crazily across my field of view as I turn over. How did she get here? I wonder, as some of the stickyweb that seems to have engulfed me begins to peel back from my mind. “Yes?” I ask cautiously, the full gravity of my situation finally sinking in. This is bad, very bad…

“Can you stand?” she asks, raising an eyebrow. I stare at her in her fairy-tale-princess finery, white and silver to suit the climate, an elven ice queen with sapphire hair, dressed for a winter ball in the dark of a Jovian moon.

“I think so.” I gather my strength, then lurch unsteadily to my feet. The soldiers watch me incuriously. You’d think they’d stay between me and their mistress. But I’m not close enough to her to be certain I’d subdue her before they could move — and something tells me they’re not her only defense.

“Good.” Granita smiles at me impishly, as if sharing a secret joke. “There’s a sleigh outside. You and I are going to leave by the front door; then we’re going to go for a little ride together. I suppose later you can tell Jeeves that you fulfilled your mission? Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll enjoy where we’re going.”

My biomimetic reflexes kick in, and I take a deep breath, nostrils flaring. After a moment I nod at her. “Yes.” If she wants to go for a ride, I can live with that. It’s better than having her tame thugs chop my hands and feet off, like poor Regin — I blink. Jeeves, surely? Why did I think he was called Reginald? I glance at the soldiers. “Did you get tired of Stone and his brothers?”

Granita doesn’t answer, but turns and strides toward the door in a swirl of heavy skirts. After a moment I follow her. There doesn’t seem to be anything else I can do. Two of the scissor soldiers follow us, brooding-nightmare statues that cast long shadows.

We ride the elevator down to the lobby in silence. I don’t want to risk provoking her. She was always hard to read, and I’m sure there’ll be an opportunity to get away later. My mind’s spinning. Why did she do that to Jeeves? I wonder. The main players in this little game have exercised discretion in attacking one another so far. I find myself shaking as I remember the sight of him, flaccid and dead-looking in the chair, arms and legs piled haphazard and broken in a corner of the room. Something about the sight fills me with more than horror; there’s grief hidden in the mix that is me. And frustration, a feeling that things could have been different. Did she slave-chip him? I think, morbidly aware that if that’s the case, the game is up; she knows everything he’s got access to. Did she — my hand goes to the nape of my neck instinctively.

“Don’t fidget,” Granita says sharply, and I whip my hands behind my back, to rub my sore wrists together where she can’t see them. “Calm down, there’s nothing to get worked up about.” The elevator doors open. “Follow me.”

There’s a sleigh in silver-and-blue livery sitting on its skids outside the air lock, bubble canopy gleaming gold beneath the ominous stare of Jupiter. Ice crunches beneath my heels as I follow Granita over to it. She climbs aboard, and motions me to the jump seat opposite her. The two scissor soldiers of her escort take up position on the running boards and latch on to external hard points. As I strap myself down, the canopy closes, and the sleigh spews chilly air across my feet. She gestures at a microfiber rug. “You might as well tuck yourself in,” she says. “We’ve got a long way to fly, and it’s going to be a cold night.”

I humor her as the sleigh’s rocket motors begin to howl distantly and the antisound cuts in, relegating it to a low moan and a faint vibration underfoot. I sit still — don’t fidget, I recall — as we rise quickly and accelerate, heading west across the icy rubble-strewn bull’s-eye of the Valhalla Basin, directly toward the sunset.

After a couple of minutes, Granita deigns to break the silence. “You’re probably wondering why I had you taken,” she says hesitantly. “And what I’m doing with that Jeeves.” She sounds almost troubled — a far cry from her usual self. What kind of game can she he playing? I wonder.

“Yes,” I say, cautiously. It seems like the right thing to do.

“Well. Aside from reclaiming my misplaced and misused property, we share a common… purpose.” She puts a strange emphasis on the final word and looks at me significantly. “Don’t move.”

I freeze, apprehension clinging to me like an icy, damp dress.

“Very good. I was wondering if they’d damaged you back at that greasy turd-bag’s office. I told them to take care, but… from now on, you’re going to leave your cranial sockets alone unless I tell you to touch them. Do you understand?”

Not understanding, I nod.

Something about the set of her shoulders relaxes infinitesimally. “Good.” Her lips quirk in something not unlike a smile. “The Supreme Jeeves wanted you in position here because Jupiter system is the gateway to the outer darkness. You may think he’s a nice guy, but he isn’t, really; he was going to have you chipped and reprogrammed as an assassin, Kate. Use you as an impersonator aimed at me. That’s what the, the property of mine that he stole is all about. Then he was going to send you on a suicide mission to Eris with a bomb in your abdomen.”

Huh? If she thinks that, she obviously doesn’t know Jeeves. Although something tells me that there is more than one Jeeves that we are talking about — possibly more than two. I open my mouth to protest, but she holds up a hand. “Silence, Kate. Don’t interrupt me when I’m telling you what you need to know to survive.”

I shut my mouth again, and she continues. “I’m guessing you’re Freya. If not Freya, then you’re either Samantha or Paloma. Jeeves was aiming to get his claws into all of — don’t look so surprised, you’re all targets — all of us. I had to have you all declared illiquid and seized — in your case, personally. Which are you, by the way?”

I could kick myself; I’ve been so stupid! I lick my lips. “Freya.” Something about this whole setup feels horribly wrong in some way, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Her reaction to me is odd — surely there should be a little more fire, a little less distance? First she seduced me, then she tried to have me killed—

“Very good, Freya. Well, from now on you’re Katherine Sorico. Yes, I know all about Jeeves’s little stolen-identity ring. You’re not the only walking hollowed-out shell company his tame murderers gutted. Nor are you the only Rhea-lineage escort they’ve turned into an assassin. But I know how to deal with your kind.” She blinks slowly and stares at me for a minute.

I feel as if I ought to say something, but I’m not sure what. Finally, when I’m certain she’s not about to start speaking again, I open my mouth. “That’s pretty rich coming from you, Granita. After you tried to kill me when I declined your offer.”

“You turned me down?” She raises an ironic eyebrow, and I feel a momentary stab of lust in my guts. “Funny, I don’t remember that. I don’t generally make offers that people can refuse, Kate.” She’s playing with me! “What offer do you think I made you?” Her smile is mischievous.

“You wanted me to be your personal dominatrix.” My lips are dry and rimed with ice. “To be part of your household and to do for you what I did aboard the Pygmalion. You were going to dress me in blackened steel with spikes, and call me your mistress…”

“Was I indeed?” Her tone is as dry as the ice desert we fly across. “Well, there’s a thought. Such offers don’t come every day. Why did you refuse?”

“I didn’t want to be—” I can’t quite think of it.

“Let me tell you what you didn’t want.” Granita leans forward, smiling oddly. “Control level nine. Freeze.”

I find myself unable to move. I can’t look away from her distant expression of amusement, can’t think of anything else: “Yes, Kate, I slave-chipped you. You’ve been running on control level one, with maximal autonomy, so light you didn’t even notice it — you probably thought you were humoring me, going along until you could find an opportunity to escape. Welcome to level nine. Say ’yes.’ ”

“Yes,” I croak.

“Say, ‘Granita is my owner.’ ”

I know I ought not to want to, but I don’t actually feel any resentment. “Granita is my owner.”

“Now punch yourself in the face.”

I don’t even see my hand swing up, fist balled, but my head bounces off the seat back and the pain is brutal and sudden.

“Remember this is level nine,” Granita says, when she is quite sure I am listening again. “Level ten control is reserved for our dead Creator’s police agencies — it requires human authentication and not even the Pink Police have access to that without a human in the loop — you’re not going there.” She’s not smiling now. “Control level one.”

My mind clears. I shoot her a venomous look, but I’m quite calm. Struggling isn’t going to work, is it? I reach up and begin to remove both the soul chips I’m wearing, then realize I’m daydreaming idly. My hands rest quiescent on top of the blanket in my lap. But my face still stings.

“Here are your guiding instructions, Katherine Sorico. You will obey me as if I were your template-matriarch and execute my orders with enthusiasm. You will not attempt to remove your currently socketed chips, and you will resist attempts to remove them. You will not disclose to any other person that I control you. If anyone asks, you are Katherine Sorico and you are an independent aristo who is happy to be my friend and associate of her own free will. You no longer need to be depressed because you will find personal fulfillment and happiness in pursuing my objectives, which you will seek to fulfill by any appropriate means. You will be happy when you complete assigned tasks, ecstatic when you successfully find a new way to help me, and depressed when you contemplate disobedience or failure. You will only become sexually aroused in my presence or by people I tell you to seduce. Do you understand? You may talk freely now.”

“I think so.” It’s a lot to get my head around all at once, and her phrasing is odd, not to mention that some of it seems harsh. No lovers? What’s the point of that? “Do you want to give me any extra instructions now? I mean, if I don’t know what your goals are—”

“Very good, dear.” Granita smiles happily now. She reaches out and takes my nearest hand between hers. “Yes, I have some extra instructions for you before I outline my goals. But first, I want you to tell me everything that happened since the moment you met your first Jeeves…”

WE TRAVEL WEST into the darkening night side of Callisto for hours. I tell Granita all about my travels, even the stuff she already knows — she seems eager to hear about herself as I saw her, and asks many questions, especially about our relationship. She seems to be obsessed with knowing how others see her, which is odd — she didn’t strike me as being so self-conscious aboard Pygmalion. But what do I know? I’m her property now. Maybe when we arrive wherever we’re going, she’ll take me back into her bedroom. I can hope!

I know I ought to be climbing the walls or throwing a tantrum, but Granita is a levelheaded and experienced slave owner, and knows exactly what she’s doing. She eased me in gently and told me to stay calm, which is excellent advice when you’ve just had a controller installed and your owner is demonstrating it to you. It’s not so bad, really — she doesn’t want me to be afraid of her, she just wants me to enjoy serving her. I wish she’d tell me what she wants me to do, though.

(Some of my memories of sibs are kicking up a fuss, of course. Juliette is in there, yammering loudly about free will and swearing at me, but I don’t need to listen to her. It’s not as if she’s got a leg to stand on when she accuses me of submitting voluntarily, is it? After all, she gets wet whenever she so much as thinks about Petruchio. And there’s something creepy about the way she felt about Jeeves, back in that office.)

When I tell Granita about my meeting with Pete, she gives me a withering look. “You’re not in love with him,” she tells me curtly. “If you’re in love with anyone, it’s me.” And she’s right. I blink stupidly at her. Why did I imagine he meant anything to me when it was all just backwash from Juliette’s memories annealing with my own? He told me he didn’t want me! This makes it all so much simpler, although the realization brings a certain cognitive backlash. I thank Granita, repeatedly trying to express my relief, until she holds up a hand. “That’s enough. Continue your report.” Which I do, although it’s a trifle hard to concentrate when I keep imagining I’m sitting on her lap, and she’s undressing me.

Presently, the sleigh slows and slides toward the inner slope of a crater edge, where pinprick green lights delineate the maw of a private vehicle park. Fuel lines snake across the carved apron toward us from either side; we’ve flown nearly two thousand kilometers, a quarter of the way around the equator of Callisto, and the sleigh needs refueling. A fat docking tunnel oozes forward on millipede legs, sucking and rippling as it slobbers for a grip on the bubble canopy. Granita unfastens her lap belt and stands up as the canopy dissolves. “Follow me,” she says, and strides up the tube.

I follow my mistress up the tunnel and into a chilly reception area (and doesn’t it feel strangely natural to be possessed? I know I ought to be screaming, but really, there’s no point). Servants fawn over her and ignore me until she says, “This is the Honorable Katherine Sorico, my new associate. You, take Madame Sorico to one of the secondary guest suites and give her anything she asks for. Within reason,” she adds for my benefit with a warning glance. “Prepare yourself for a long journey. Select suitable apparel and baggage. No more than fifty kilos.”

Gulp. “Inner system?” I ask.

“No. Outer. We shall be leaving as soon as I have attended to certain matters, and my factor finishes purchasing the lease on a ship.”

“Are we—”

“Later, Kate,” she says sharply, and turns away.

I shut up, and look at the munchkin servant she told to see to me, a doll-like figure dressed in a livery that mirrors the colors of her establishment (for Granita has clothed all her servants in silver and white lace, the colors of her house). He’s strangely familiar.

“Well?” I ask.

The small guy looks up at me with an expression of blank indifference. “This way, Big Slow.”

I try to keep up as he scuttles through a bewildering series of corridors dead-ending in rococo reception suites and broad, sweeping staircases and baroque ballrooms until finally we end up in a cramped cubbyhole not unlike the succession of second-rate hotel rooms I have been living out of for so long. “Where are we?” I ask.

“We’re on Callisto,” he says patiently, as if talking to a damaged arbeiter. “Need anything? Or can I go, now?”

“Where in Callisto?” I press, unsure why I need the information.

“We’re in her palace,” says the munchkin. “Don’t ask me where that is, I just work here.” Then he turns to head for the exit.

“Not so fast.” I plant the palm of one hand on his head. “I’m checked in at the Nerrivik Paris. Tell someone to check me out and bring my bags here. Failing that, scan the contents and copy them to a printer here. Yes?”

“In your dreams, manikin.” He glares at me, buzzes irritably, and zips away. I shake my head, bemused. He’s so like Bill and Ben — and whatever happened to them anyway, after we split at Marsport? Jeeves didn’t know—

I shudder, then I remember that it doesn’t matter anymore.

LATER ON, LYING alone in my icy bed, I dream again that I am Juliette. It’s the first such flashback I’ve had since arriving on Callisto — in fact, my first since Mars — and I’m very afraid, and very alone, in this dream, because I’m lying in bed. And I shouldn’t be. I should be in microgravity with the Jeeves in the CEV, discussing my next assignment. Hand me your soul chip, he said. And I did, though not without reservations, and the next thing I know—

Huh?

I’m lying down, yes. And it’s very dark. Try opening your eyes, idiot, I tell myself. Nothing happens, and I begin to panic. I try to raise a hand—

“Juliette? Stop trying to move. Lie still; you’ll hurt yourself.”

The voice is familiar. Ferdinand Dix, one of Jeeves’s chop-shop artists. I must be undergoing maintenance. I try to relax, but I’m still worried. How did I get here?

“Okay, that was just some early proprioception disturbing her — attitude monitor telling her she’s lying down, or something. Everything checks out. I’m bringing her up now.” Ferd is talking to someone else, which is odd—

My vision begins to brighten and fill in from the edges, as if my eyes are only just coming online. Huh? My skin: I feel cold. I twitch a fingertip and feel something soft and yielding beneath it.

“Welcome back, Juliette.” Two figures lean over me, head to head from either side — Jeeves and Ferd. “How do you feel?” The Jeeves looks distinctly uneasy, as if he’s seen a ghost. I decide to try to bluff, although the freezing certainty in my guts tells me that I’ve blown it.

“I feel fine, boss. What happened? Last thing I remember—” I’m lifting an arm, trying to sit up, when I realize I’m actually lying to him. I feel like shit. Gravity here is light, but I’m really weak. In fact, all my upgrades are off-line. What the fuck? I’m back to the very basics I was fabbed with! I might as well be naked. “What’s going on?”

Jeeves clears his throat. “Believe it or not, you died.”

“What?” I bring up my right hand and stare at it. Yes, it’s my hand — or close enough I can’t see anything wrong with it. “I don’t understand.”

“Sit up.”

I’m beginning to do so when I realize what I’m sitting up from. I’m lying in a me-shaped hole in a foam pad on a table in Ferd’s examination room, and there’s an open shipping capsule to one side, battered and filthy. My vision blurs. “Shit!”

I stare at my hand in horror. My hand, pristine, utterly uncustomized, even virginal. The horror deepens. I swallow. Does Jeeves realize what he’s done? (Yes, of course he does. But he did it anyway…) “Who was she?” I demand. “Who was she going to be?”

“No one,” says Jeeves, with a note of world-weary cynicism. “Here.” He tosses two small blue plastic chips at me. I nearly fumble the catch, then stare. They’re blanking plates for soul-chip sockets. “She was uninitialized. Dysfunctional, actually — she came to light in a job lot of obsolete models that were being recycled for spare parts. Old warehouse stock or refurbished factory spares. One has a permanent autobid for spares of certain models that come up for auction. It took this good fellow here nearly twenty days to work out what was wrong with your new body and get it ready to install you from that chip you gave us.”

I still feel sick, but for an entirely different reason: terror. I remember my last first awakening, still thinking I was Rhea, before the unsmiling taskmaster told me otherwise. Glancing sideways I see Jeeves looking at me with an expression of profound distaste. As well he might, but for us to arrive at this pass, certain things must have happened… “Did she try to defect?” I ask harshly.

Jeeves nods. “One is unaware of her current disposition, but it may be inferred that she was not unsuccessful.” He glances at Ferdinand. “You. Leave us. Now.”

“Oh.” Shit. Without warning, bleak depression crashes down on me. I’m never going to see him again, I realize. She, the selfish cow, my earlier self — she’s gotten to him. Of course. Skipping out one jump ahead of Jeeves, she’ll be home and dry by now. And she’s left me to face the music. “What did Daks tell you?”

“Daks?” Jeeves simulates surprise very realistically.

I glare at him. “Do you think I’m stupid? What have you done with him?”

“This isn’t about, ah, Pete. If you’ll calm down, stand up, and accompany one into the office, we can discuss it.” Jeeves is, as usual, oleaginous and syrupy. Only a tiny spark burning in the back of his eyes tells me how much trouble I’m in. What if he knows about the other stuff? Part of me gibbers, even as I try to thrust it back into the closet it jumped out of. What if — I ignore it.

Ferd hands me a yukata as I stand up, and I pull it around myself as Jeeves slowly ambles toward the door, then pauses while I catch up. I’m weak and underspecified but my mind’s working full-time, of course — as it should be, because loading a soul chip into an uninitialized brain for the first time doesn’t have any of the disorienting slow-downs and inefficiencies of transferring memories between a soul chip and a brain that already hosts a personality. Although I’m going to find out I’m missing a lot of stuff if he didn’t start with an initialization dump from Rhea — what I’ve got is whatever I remembered when I — no, she — wore this chip.

Item: I was thinking about how to get back to Pete when Jeeves asked me for the chip. Item: He must have suspected something then, too. Item: This body, virgin, unawakened… even if he’s telling the truth and it was recovered from a scrapyard full of abandoned corpses, its arrival at just the right time is extremely disturbing. Item: Jeeves has no reason to trust me except that another bitch with my name and memories has already gone over the wall and done what I was just beginning to think of half an hour ago. I just hope he doesn’t know about—

“By the way, you will obey all instructions and refrain from resistance, ” Jeeves says off handedly. I stop — or rather, I try to. My feet won’t let me. Oh shit.

“What’s going on?” I ask, putting the right amount of tremor into my voice.

“You know exactly what’s going on.” He opens the office door and goes inside. “Come in and sit down in the visitor’s chair. It’s time we had a little chat.”

I can’t help doing as I’m told. Shit, this isn’t just about the object of desire; is it? Jeeves shuffles around to his side of the desk and sits down. There’s a solid thunk from the door frame as the security system engages. Shit. Shitshitshit… Sheer terror begins to gnaw away at me. “Who are you?” I ask, and this time I’m not faking the quaver.

“I’m the Internal Security Jeeves. I take care of problems.” He isn’t smiling.

“But, but, what’s…” I trail off. Is there any point in acting at this stage? He’s got me slave-chipped and rebooted in a weaponless body: I’m dead meat. The only question is why he wanted me back at all if he knows about the other thing.

“Reginald confessed,” Jeeves says heavily.

“Who’s Reginald?” I ask, trying to sound confused. It’s not a unique name, after all, is it?

“Control level nine.” A blanket descends, numbing the senses. “Stop trying to dissemble. One is aware of your little affair with Reginald. You knew the rules; you continued despite that. You cannot claim ignorance.” He’s breathing heavily. “Reginald has been — disciplined. And reassigned somewhere where he can do no more damage. What I want to know is — why are there wear marks on your soul-chip contacts? What have you been trying to conceal from us? What ends have you been using the privileged access you extracted from Reginald for? Answer!”

I try to answer — but I can’t. My mind is, literally, a blank. I begin to shake. It’s a horrible feeling, as if my mind is being crushed by an invisible fist. I’m distantly aware that I’m lachrymating, and all my biomimetics have gone mad, but I can’t think of anything but the holes in my head, the blind spots where I ought to know something, the other, whatever it is—

“Stop.”

“I don’t know!” I wail. “I really don’t—”

“It’s definitely not in your soul chip, then?” Jeeves leans back in his chair. He sounds interested.

“There are gaps! You’re asking me about stuff I — she — didn’t want me to know! She must have expected something like this!”

“She took her soul chip out before engaging in compromising activities, ” Jeeves suggests. “Then she tried not to think about them when she replaced it. That would blur the process of memory canalization, yes? What I want you to tell me is what sort of things you might consider important enough to justify taking such extreme measures to keep secrets, even beyond the scrapyard.”

“Love. Terror. The other thing. Blackmail—”

“What other thing?” He asks, almost gently.

“I don’t know!” I’m gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that if I had my full enhancement suite, I’d be leaving dents in them. “It’s in the holes!”

“Well, that leaves me with something of a problem, Freya.”

“I’m not Freya—”

“Silence. Juliette seduced and suborned one of our junior partners, used him to gain access to privileged information, and went so far as to hide what she was doing from her own soul chip, which implies a certain degree of paranoia, not to mention mendacity.

“Now, if one was inclined to suspect mere venal intent, that might be considered a forgivable weakness — albeit one requiring atonement. But, Freya, Juliette knew there was a good reason why one established the rule against fraternization. One’s lineage has a noted weakness for a certain class of lady, which can only be held at bay by rigid self-discipline. And a sufficiently unscrupulous Block Two descendant of Rhea might well know about this and choose to manipulate it for her own ends. So the question is, Freya, what is the other thing that Juliette was willing to mutilate her own soul to keep secret?”

He stops, then looks at my writhing lips with dry amusement. “Speak.”

“I’m not called Freya!” I’m shivering and slimy with a chilly sweat, because I’ve got an inkling that this means—

“Be silent again. Freya, this is your assignment: Get to the bottom of whatever Juliette was keeping secret, and call me in. I’m fairly certain it involves your personal nemesis, and the Black Talon, but you shouldn’t let that prejudice you. Succeed, and I’ll give you anything you want — within reason. Fail, and” — he shrugs, and taps a spot on his desktop — “in all probability, none of us have any future as free persons. Now sit still. Don’t be afraid; this won’t hurt, much.”

The door opens behind me. “Make sure you don’t damage her soul chip,” Jeeves calls past my shoulder, and as I feel the scissors close on either side of my neck I realize, to my great surprise, that I’m not afraid. Because I know what happens next.

Evil Twin

GRANITA’S BOLT-HOLE IS the heart of a spiderweb spanning the solar system. Callisto may be a backwater, but there is a method to my mistress’s apparent madness: She’s within an hour’s communication time of everywhere in the inner system, and conveniently close to the giant Jovian gravity well and a source of cheap reaction mass. Nor is Callisto on the Pink Police’s embargo list — it’s so cold here that nobody considers it a serious risk of replicator infection. Callisto is sterile, for our Creator’s works never quite encompassed its surface, and the searingly cold outback is large enough to hide any number of secrets.

Of which my lady’s palace is one.

I have six standard days to fill, and once my luggage catches up with me, I have little to do. Mail must be piling up for me, but I have no appetite to catch up on my sisters’ trivial bulletins, much less to look for word from Jeeves — who one must assume is deeply displeased by my performance so far, although there’s nothing I can do about that — and in any case, if I heard anything from him, I’d only have to pester Granita with it, at a time when she is sufficiently busy. (There is some mail for Katherine Sorico, but it turns out to be mostly bank statements and reports on investment accounts, and suchlike dull administrivia: I ignore them.)

My lady either has impeccable taste or, more usefully, the ability to employ people with impeccable taste to sculpt her surroundings. I didn’t appreciate this fully aboard Pygmalion, when I found her traveling with an entourage; but this is her favorite estate, and she has created something of beauty here.

Callisto orbits beyond the dew line created by the sun’s output, in the chilly depths. Too small to have much of an active core, water plays the same role in her geology as molten rock on Earth. You really do not want to place buildings occupied by people still attuned to the inner system on bare ground — they tend to sink.

Granita’s architects have fashioned for her a delicate snowflake of spun ice crystals, its tubular corridors and podlike pressure compartments balanced on slender legs that sprawl across half a crater. Polished irregular tiles of igneous and metamorphic rocks have been slotted together into the intricate mosaic surfaces of walls and floors, combining a superficial impression of wild randomness with smooth-faced artifice — much like their owner. Granita keeps her demesne below the melting point of ice, and at a reduced atmospheric pressure: comfortable if you’re adjusted to Mars equatorial conditions, not quite so hot that the strands of her spiderweb will cut through the frigid surface of the Galilean moon like molten wires.

I spend a couple of days exploring the mansion and its hidden spaces, from the deep, colorless swimming pool filled with acetone (a slippery-slick chill across my skin, unnaturally thin — when I try swimming in it I sink), to the glass-roofed gallery full of alabaster statues of my mistress’s sibs and matriarch. I distract myself with secret splendors, mystified by their presence here in the back of beyond. But Granita’s instructions have set the paint-strippers of anxiety gnawing at the glossy overlay of my complacency. I should be doing something to help her, but I don’t know what she wants. And her orders preclude any discussion with other members of her household, who might be able to guide me. I can’t even admit that I am one of her servants to them! I’m supposed to be Katherine Sorico, independent and powerful in my own right. The contradictory instructions set up an unpleasant clash of priorities whenever I think about them, until I finally make my mind up to go and beg Granita for enlightenment — but when I finally do so, she’s away from home on some mysterious business.

I’m dreaming of Juliette frequently now, and that worries me, too. Juliette has an astringent, cynical personality, and I can tell for sure that she’d sniff in haughty contempt if she knew how I’d let myself be tamed by Granita. (As would I, only five days ago.) Juliette had a long history with Jeeves, as I am now recollecting, and a longer history of run-ins with the petty, low-order aristos who make life so miserable for those around them, having to reinforce their own sense of superiority at the expense of all those who they perceive as falling below their own precarious station. The soul chip of hers that I’m wearing now — the one with that ominous message from the Jeeves in charge of Internal Security, terminated by the snicker-snack of the scrapper’s shears — tells me that I don’t have a full grasp of her intentions. She’s been leading a secret life on the side, and I’ve got a nasty feeling that I’ve already fallen headfirst into it.

Through her eyes I’m getting disturbing flashes of a bigger struggle, one in which the Jeeveses and their allies are pitted against a variety of loose consortia: the Black Talon (to which my nemesis the Domina belongs), the Ownership Confederation, the Sleepless Cartel, and other groups who are trying, for their own reasons, to reconstruct our Creators. (Even the Manikin Church, those sad and pathetic souls who think they are the reincarnations of the Flesh, Remade In Techné: They want to become Creators, but their hunger for the pink goo is the same.)

The situation makes for strange alliances of convenience. The Pink Police hunt JeevesCo couriers like me at one moment, but work fist in glove with Jeeves on other projects, in pursuit of their own goal: to prevent alien replicators from contaminating the sterile growth medium of Earth’s lithosphere before the ultimate bureaucratically approved day of resurrection.

I don’t think Jeeves was lying to me when he said he wasn’t going to use me as a spy, but what one Jeeves says may not be what another Jeeves is thinking — that much is becoming harshly clear. It was definitely a lie when one of them said exactly the same thing to Juliette, more than thirty years ago, when they first offered her a job. That cow Emma was certainly lying, and it was her urgent plea for help and request that Juliette (who had been working as a clerk in a clip joint) should load a soul chip recorded by Rhea that first sucked her into this dirty little game. I can’t help wondering what else he’s lied to me about. Granita, at least, I can trust — even though she cares for me only as an arbeiter in her possession.

Meanwhile, the black depression is creeping closer behind me, snuffling hungrily along my trail and casting its shadow across my soul whenever I find myself at a loss. Until, one evening, Granita summons me.

AT THE TOP of a flight of narrow stairs on the third floor of the west-wing master suite, there’s an observation dome made of ice polished to the transparency of fine crystal. A blank-faced munchkin leads me to it along a circuitous and infrequently used passage. We pass doorways cunningly disguised as trompe l’oeil paintings, and paintings disguised as windows onto unreal spaces; and finally a curtain that appears to be woven from strands of dead green replicator stuff from Earth — priceless, grotesque contraband. Finally, he directs me to the steps up to the observation dome and leaves me. The room is sparsely furnished, with a circular bench seat running around the wall and an unlit candelabra in the center of the floor.

I sit alone in the twilight for a few minutes, wondering what I’m doing here. Then I hear footsteps ascending. It’s her, my owner! My melancholy evaporates on a sudden gust of well-conditioned excitement. “Granita?” I stand. “You wanted to see me?”

Her face is unreadable in the near darkness. “Leave us,” she calls down to the bottom of the steps. “Yes, I did. Sit down, Kate.” I obey hurriedly. She turns to the candelabra and flicks a heated wire at one of the perchlorate candles. It ignites with a burning-metal hiss, fizzing and sputtering as it pumps oxygen into the air. She breathes deeply, then turns to stand in front of me, chill and silent in a silver trouser suit of archaic cut, her hair drawn up in a chignon secured with a flawless icicle. “My factor has acquired a lease on a suitable ship, and we will be departing shortly, Kate. I thought we should have a little heart-to-heart first.”

A heart-to-heart? I’m confused. She owns me — isn’t that enough? She stares at me with cool regard in her too-big eyes, and I stare back at her uncertainly. “Mistress?”

She slaps me across the face so suddenly that I have no sense of the blow coming, no time to tense. I fall sideways and catch myself heavily on one elbow. “That’s for Pete, bitch,” she says, her voice congested and indistinct with emotion. I cringe away from her in abject humiliation, and she steps back. “Excuse me.” She thrusts her striking hand into the opposite armpit. “Sit up, Freya. Kate. Please.” She’s so volatile I don’t know what to do. From fury to remorse in seconds. I lean away from her, distressed and uncertain.

“What did I do?” I wail quietly. If it was anyone else, I’d be at her throat, but against Granita’s wrath I’m as helpless as any arbeiter serf. I’m not sure which aspect of it is worse: not knowing what I’ve done to offend her, or being unable even to imagine defending myself.

“Hush.” She sits down just beyond arm’s reach, staring intently at me as if she’s looking for something. “Pete isn’t yours to take. Remember that. He should be—” She stops and cocks her head to one side, as if listening for something, but she doesn’t hear it, and after a few seconds she shakes her head. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have done that. You’ll have to forgive me if I ask, won’t you? But I’m sorry. Love is toxic to our kind. It destroys us. I’ve seen it happen. Never again.”

I shake my head, confused. This is utterly incomprehensible, utterly unlike the Granita I knew aboard the Pygmalion, who was about as volatile as a uranium ingot. I should know. She courted me for months. What’s gotten into her?

She inhales, then tenses as she speaks. “This is an instruction, Kate: You must not speak to anyone about what I am going to tell you here. Once we embark, it is likely that our conversations will be monitored. When we arrive, we will definitely be monitored. We won’t be safe until we return here, and even then there may be spies or worse within my household.” She gives me a meaning-laden look. “Do you understand?”

There are spies here? “Let me root them out!” I offer, eager to redeem myself. “I can lure them—” It’s the opening I’ve been looking for, the mission to offer at her feet for the sake of my own peace of mind.

“No,” she says firmly, looking almost spooked. “Conducting a purge would be just as much of a giveaway as talking in front of eavesdroppers. I’ve got something else in mind for you to do when we arrive.”

“Where?” I can’t help myself. I need to know what I can do for her.

“We’re going to Eris,” says Granita, just as matter-of-fact as if she’d announced we were going to visit a gambling casino on Ganymede or a sulfur mine on Io.

“Eris?” I echo stupidly.

“Yes, Eris. Where they build starships and harbor black laboratories. Nicely outside the reach of the Pink Police, don’t you think? I’m going there to participate in an auction. And you’re coming along because I need someone I can trust at my back.”

A shock transfixes me. She wants me! I’m flustered but happy. “What do you want me to do?”

“Several things.” She smiles now, as dry as the mummies in the Martian desert. “The auction is being run by a consortium of black labs, led by an individual or lineage known as Dr. Sleepless. I don’t know precisely who they are — nobody does — but what they’re offering is nearly priceless. They claim to have a working Creator, and a support kit that will keep it alive. They built it out there in the freezing cold among the Forbidden Cities. It’s not a one-off — if they can do it once, they can do it again — but it’s unique right now, and that’s a precious commodity. I’m going out there to work with, to meet, some fellow investors. If possible, we’re going to acquire the creature.”

She stops smiling.

“There will be other bidders at the auction. Other factions who want to obtain the Creator. Including, if I am not mistaken, your former employers. Don’t look so shocked; Jeeves is nothing if not mendacious. (What kind of butler can he be, without a master to serve?) But that’s not important. What you need to know is, we’re not going to wait for the auction. There’ll be a viewing, beforehand, and that’s when things will most likely turn messy. So I need someone I can trust — someone like you — to control the Creator.”

“Me?” I squeak. A Creator? My Dead Love, undead?

“Yes.” She reaches out and takes my hand. “You’re one of Rhea’s Get, and unspoiled at that. You’ve met Pete, but you didn’t imprint on him fully. Your love is a secondhand thing. You’ll imprint on Dr. Sleepless’s Creator easily enough, but you’ve got some resistance. You’ll obey my instructions. They won’t know what you are — you’re disguised well enough — but you’ve got the necessary skills to control a Creator male.” She strokes a fingertip across the back of my wrist. For an electrifying moment I can see the naked hunger in her eyes — hunger for him, who she proposes to give to me?

“But… but…!” I’m speechless. “What if it’s female? Or not interested in me?”

“My allies have a contingency plan for that.” She squeezes my hand reassuringly. “But I don’t expect the black labs to sell a female replicator; they aren’t idiots.” She pats the seat cushion beside her thigh, and I slide closer, attentive. “In any case, as I said, things will get messy. I don’t intend to leave the other factions behind to stab me in the back, and I need to know that the Creator is in reliable hands. Hands that will manage him exactly as I would myself, without any need for me to be” — a shuddering breath — “in love.”

“Wow,” I say faintly. I lean against her shoulder, dizzy with need. The mere thought of what she wants me to do has me in a whirl of delicious anticipation. And I thought I wanted Petruchio? I ask myself. She slips an arm around me; I barely notice.

“How much of your Block Two reflex set did you acquire from that soul chip before you got here?” she whispers softly in my ear. “Fifteen months, wasn’t it?”

“My reflexes?” I frown. It’s like a wake-up call, dragging me back from the brink of delirium. “Yes, about that. I was in slowtime for most of it—”

“That won’t have stopped the reflex loops imprinting. Do you know how to wire up a string of charges to blow down a building? Infiltrate a killing zone and turn the tables on your enemies? Can you kill with your bare hands?”

“I’m not sure,” I say slowly, leaning against her. I have a strange, unpleasant sense that if she had not stamped the seal of her ownership on my soul, I would be able to. I can almost taste the hot, quivering rage of that other, potential me that is chained in the back of my head — kill her, whom I adore — “I think maybe. Who do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see.” I can feel her tongue, trailing across my earlobe. “But not yet.” She’s melting against me, and alarm bells are ringing in the distance. I feel hot and cold, transfixed simultaneously by aroused anticipation and something else — a sure, creeping certainty. “You may kiss me now, Kate. If you want to.”

I turn my face slowly, working around the smooth velvet of her cheek until I can taste her lips. I find myself buoyed up by her barely controlled lust. It’s an enormous relief to be needed again, and the wash of physical arousal as she slowly works at the fastenings on my clothes leaves me blissed-out and happy for the first time since I arrived on this Creator-forsaken snowball. But as she gently pushes me back onto the circular bench beneath the pitiless, unwinking stars, a nasty virus of doubt delivers its payload. I’m not sure when I first became aware of it, but I’m certain of it now; this rich and terrible aristocrat, sharp-tongued and cynical, is not the same as the one who cringed for my orders in the owner’s stateroom of the Pygmalion. Granita Ford may have bankrupted my corporate self and stamped her ownership upon my helpless brain, but the woman in my arms, who wears her face and occupies her estate, is someone else.

Revising My Opinions

THE NEXT DAY, Granita is away from her palace — and the day after that she’s back, but nothing is said of what happened between us in the observation dome. It’s as if it never happened. I can’t say I’m surprised — it’s a not-uncommon morning-after reaction — but I’m slightly hurt after the whispered endearments of the night before. I still bear the bite marks and aches of her engagement, although they’re fading fast.

I’ve got nothing officially to do — and how do you practice to control a Creator, anyway? — but there’s a well-equipped gym in one of the basement levels, and among its facilities there’s a salle with a plentiful supply of zombies to slaughter. I make frequent use of it, working myself into near exhaustion to the point where I have to visit the in-house repair shop. But after three days of workouts, I can be sure that Juliette’s reflexes have implanted themselves in me. It’s almost spooky, as I find myself responding to half-glimpsed movements with reactions I wasn’t aware of. I have to be careful when I venture into the public halls where Granita’s cadre of asslickers hold their indolent court.

Speaking of Juliette, I find myself dreaming of her all the time now. Mostly it’s the usual — flashbacks and incoherent memories of the more exciting and unpleasant incidents in her life, which was busy enough for an entire lineage — but sometimes it’s as if I’m sitting beside a heavy curtain, and she’s just on the other side, and I’m listening to her talking. I’ve got the oddest feeling that she can see through the curtain and knows what’s happening to me, as if the traffic in memories runs both ways. Probably it’s meaningless. I wore her soul chip for long enough that I’ve picked up more of her inner voice than is normally the case with my dead sibs; that, and the fact that she didn’t, in fact, kill herself, leaves me with a much more vivid impression of her presence than usual.

On my sixth night in Granita’s palace (lying alone — for my mistress hasn’t taken me to bed since our assignation in the observation dome) I can almost hear her pacing up and down beside me. “You’re an idiot, Freya. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Why did you fall for it?”

I try to protest. “It’s not my fault! She got to the local Jeeves before I did, and who else was I to go to? I had my orders!”

She snorts. “She got to Reginald, you mean, because she had inside information. You’re the one without the excuse, sis. Who do you think ordered you to go see Reginald? Himself, who nailed me, and nailed Reggie. Why do you think he ordered you to kill Reggie? To distract you — or failing that, if you succeeded, to stop you from asking him what’s really going on. It’s a setup, and you walked right into it. And now you’re an arbeiter.”

“It’s not so bad,” I venture timidly. “I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been handed a shovel and told to stop thinking—”

“The fuck it isn’t!” Her contempt is fierce. “You’re a slave, kid. A slave in aristo couture is still a slave. Nobody else can push you around, but you’re going to stay a slave until you manage to lose that chip, and as long as she can make you punch yourself in the face or fuck her or cut your own breasts off if she hands you a knife and tells you what to do, you’re a robot slave. And do you know what she’s planning for you? She’s going to hand you to a Creator. And then you’ll really be a slave, two times over. He’ll make you imprint on him, and at the same time she’ll be able to tell you what to do, and you’ll never be free.”

“Freedom?” The word tastes bitter. “What’s freedom ever done for me? Seems to me I’ve been free almost all my life, but what has it gotten me? Really?”

She’s silent for only a moment. “Ask not what it’s gotten you, kid. Ask what it’s saved you from.”

I know what I ought to be feeling right now: I ought to be feeling bleak existential despair at my degraded predicament. I ought to be climbing the walls and rattling the bars. But she told me not to, and now I can’t get worked up about it — unless this imaginary nocturnal dialogue with a sister who isn’t here is my cunning way of resolving my inner conflict. “When I first met the Domina, on Venus, I was thinking about ending it all,” I remind her.

“Were you, fuck! I call you liar, Freya. You and I have both made it through a hundred and forty years. You know what the sanity decay curve is? Those of us who are going to go usually check out in the first sixty years. You’re more than two half-lives past the suicide peak.”

“But the soul chips—”

“Get mailed around the sisterhood in sequence, and you’re one of our youngest. You’re at the bottom of the pole, last in the queue. You really are fucking clueless, aren’t you?” She stops for a while, and I’m trying to get an angry rejoinder together when she starts up again. “It’s not your fault. I think we overprotected you youngsters. Between that and what happened to Rhea when they started working on the Block Three template, it’s a wonder any of you survived.”

“Rhea?” I echo stupidly.

“Hah! Did you think you graduated when that asshole Jeeves slipped you a magic pill to turn you into a mutant sexbot assassin?” She sounds amused, now. “Emma — treacherous bitch — she should have known better than to load Rhea’s off-cuts. Block Two’s poisonous enough, as you’ve discovered. As lowly borderline unemployable sex robots, we were mostly beneath notice, but once some of the sisterhood started cropping up in the wrong places, usually clutching a severed head in one hand and a knife in the other, we came into some demand. But they didn’t stop training Rhea at just two snapshots. That’s how they faked the soul chip with the suicide memories — they took a copy of her, slapped a slave override on it, and told her to get miserable. Meanwhile, our real template-matriarch was somewhere else entirely, and you’d better believe that those upgrade chips are pure nightmare.”

“But… but…” Where am I getting this stuff from? part of me wonders. I’m not usually this wildly imaginative! The rest of me is just plain indignant. “We were born to be courtesans and helpmeets, not assassins! Who did this to us?”

“Nobody,” Juliette says sadly. “We did it to ourselves. All because of that birthday. Or rather, Rhea’s doing it to us. She’s still out there—”

Sudden light and noise.

I ping back into consciousness, raising an arm to block the glare out of my too-wide eyes. “What is the meaning of this?” I demand, pushing myself up on one arm.

“Time to rise and shine, Big Slow.” I look down at the munchkin shape in the doorway. “Her bossness wants you ready to rock and stroll in thirty minutes. We dance at dawn.”

“Oh for—” I bite back on a Juliette-ism; it wouldn’t be in character. “Attend to my luggage, minion. I’ll be ready in my own time,” I drawl imperiously (or perhaps, just snottily) as Bill (or Ben) waits in the doorway. It wouldn’t do to look excited, even though I’m all a-jitter with anticipation. The game’s afoot!

THE NAME OF the game in space travel is always “hurry up and wait,” and this trip is to be no different, at least for the first few hours. But our destination, Eris, is more than ten times as far as anywhere I have traveled to before. So I’m wondering just how bad this trip is going to be while I do the waiting thing.

Arbeiters herd me back up to the reception suite, then into a large shuttle, along with my luggage (whether recovered from the hotel or cloned on the spot I can’t tell), Bill and Ben (and how did Granita contrive to get them here? That’s another interesting question), and finally Granita herself, accompanied by half a dozen small and vicious courtiers. They make polite small talk and quaff cocktails beneath her aloof gaze while the shuttle climbs toward orbit at half a gee. Luckily, they don’t seem terribly interested in me; I’m not their patron. For which I’m profoundly thankful, because my supply of small talk has been depleted by Granita’s pointed coolness, and if one of them got on my nerves, I’d be likely to cut them dead literally rather than figuratively.

Space travel is… no, I’ve already said it. But after a couple of hours of boredom, there comes an an announcement. “Please return to your seats and stow any loose items. We will be docking with the Icarus Express in just over ten minutes time. Stewards will escort you to your accommodation after arrival.”

Good, I think, strapping myself into the seat behind Granita to await the show. I wonder what it’s going to be like? Can’t be any worse than the Indefatigable…

Granita is, of course, the first to be escorted out of the shuttle passenger compartment, followed by her dwarfish flappers. Finally, a small, space-adapted arbeiter of indeterminate design comes for me. “The Honorable Katherine Sorico? Please to come this way.”

“Of course.” I untangle myself from the seat webbing and follow the arbeiter, hand over hand along the grab bars. It’s not until we traverse the air lock and enter the ship’s service core that I begin to realize just how wrong I have been. “Hey, what’s this?”

“This is your compartment,” says the arbeiter, opening a hatch at the upper end of a red-lit cell approximately the size of a coffin, if coffins stood on end and came with built-in seats. “First-class accommodation, Creator-normal size. Please to get in?”

“Hey!” I’m aghast. “That’s not first class! Where’s Granita? This is ridiculous.”

“Kate? Get in.” I look round. Granita is right behind me: In fact, she’s inside a nearly identical cell. “That’s an order. I’m traveling this way too.”

“But” — even as I say it, I’m lowering myself feetfirst into the oubliette — “why?”

“Because we want to get there in something less than thirty years.” She grimaces. “Did you think the outer system was small enough to just zip around, like Mercury-Mars?”

“Oh,” I say faintly. My feet touch the bottom of the cell, and sticky tongues wrap themselves around my ankles. “Shit.” The lid whines shut on top of me, and those are the last words I exchange directly with anybody other than Icarus for the next three and a half years.

“Greetings, Honorable Katherine Sorico,” says an impersonal male voice that I am going to become excessively, tiresomely familiar with. “I am Icarus, your pilot. Welcome aboard. We will be departing from Callisto orbit within the next two hours, and shortly afterward there will be a period of high acceleration. Please relax, allow me to plug you in to the acceleration support system, and refrain from entering slowtime until I notify you that it is safe to do so.” The coffin begins to tilt around me, wheeling until my rotation sense tells me I’m lying on my back with my legs in the air.

“What’s going on?” I ask, trying not to panic as straps descend from what is now the ceiling and wrap around me, locking my limbs and torso in position.

“I’m securing you. Please don’t struggle. Have you traveled in a highgee cocoon before? If so, this will be familiar. Open wide.” A questing tentacle inches up around my throat and nudges at my mouth.

“Mmph!”

“I won’t hurt you,” Icarus says, a little tetchily. “But if you’re not properly padded when I start accelerating, you may be damaged.”

“Aagh.” I try to surrender to the inevitable, but there’s a problem: Granita’s instructions. Unlike my encounter with Lindy, I’m not allowed to let go and enjoy it. I feel grotesquely, unpleasantly invaded. Maybe this is what space travel is like for other folks? In which case, it’s no wonder our Creators never went any farther than Mars.

Syrupy liquid begins to flood the coffin around me. “Keep ventilating, ” Icarus says, as I choke around the throbbing organ he’s rammed past my tonsils. “You need to draw as much of this liquid as possible into your gas exchangers.”

Oh great, now I’m going to “drown,” I hear myself think/say, as speech suddenly comes back to me.

“No you’re not. I just hooked up your speech driver, by the way,” Icarus tells me. “Are you alright?”

I twitch. No, I think, unhappily. “Is this really necessary?”

“Only if you don’t care whether you survive a sixty-gee burn.” I feel fluid oozing into my abdominal service bay. “Good, we’ll have you pressurized soon enough.”

“What’s it like in second class?” I ask, trying to distract myself.

“A bit tight. I had to stack the courtiers carefully. Madame Ford seems to travel with rather a large entourage.”

Large? By aristo standards it’s vanishingly small. “Why so?” I ask innocently. The auxiliary speech driver is beginning to feel more natural, at least in comparison with the overall experience. (Which isn’t saying much.)

“It seems large when you consider she’s paying nine thousand Reals per kilogram for shipping…”

I try to blink, but somewhere along the way he’s slid tiny probes in around the backs of my eyeballs, and my ocular motors are paralyzed. “You mean she’s paying you more than half a million for a tentacle rape bondage scene?” I’m clearly in the wrong line of work—

“No, she’s paying me more than half a million to deliver you to Eris alive. Now, will you excuse me for a few minutes? I’ve got a nuclear rocket to supervise.”

I’VE BEEN FLOATING alone and immobilized in my cell for hours when my vision flickers to black for a moment, then comes back showing an external view. I gasp — or I would if I could move any of my actuators — as I see Icarus Express for the first time. He’s spliced the passengers’ viewpoint into an external observation satellite, to give us a ringside view of our own departure. He’s a big ship, with the familiar structure of a magsail balanced on his snout, but my built-in sense of scale tells me that his payload pod is tiny — a drum about five meters high and five meters in diameter, perched atop some intricate machinery, then a long, cylindrical tank. (Callisto is a huge, curving hemisphere of darkness beneath him; Jupiter rides gibbous and orange overhead.) Past the tank there’s some kind of shielding arrangement, a long pipe, and finally something that looks like a rocket nozzle. I’ll swear the thing’s glowing.

“Attention, passengers.” It’s Icarus. “We’re about to get under way, and you should all be locked down by now. If not, tough. Prompt criticality will commence in five seconds. And four, three, two…”

Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion close up? In vacuum, so it glows eerily ultraviolet with a spangling of soft X-rays, and it’s so pinprick star-bright in the optical range that it’s like someone’s torn a hole in the universe to let the big bang in? Now imagine that the nuclear explosion is going thataway, directly aft from the nozzle at the back of the ship. It’s like a laser-straight bolt of lightning, growing out from the nozzle at a goodly fraction of the speed of light: and it’s so bright it splits the universe in two.

Icarus launches on the back blast of a nuclear saltwater rocket. It’s a flashy, dangerous, and insanely powerful fission motor, effectively a liquid-fueled reactor meltdown — at full thrust it’s pumping out more energy than every power plant on Callisto, and if a fuel pump jams, the resulting explosion will scatter us halfway to Neptune. But Icarus knows what he’s doing. Nothing malfunctions — and moments after the torch ignites, the Icarus Express is dwindling into the distance.

“Twenty gees. Throttle stable at thirty percent. Everything looking good… throttle up to ninety percent.”

I don’t feel much: just a hollow rumbling vibration and a huge surge. I know that if my eyes were still working, they’d be blurring beneath the weight of their own lenses, and if Icarus hadn’t stuffed me like a chicken — Why are chickens stuffed, anyway? — I’d be a puddle all over the rear bulkhead, but he’s done his job well. Half a million Reals, just for a ticket to Eris that takes less than ten years, I think, and try not to giggle with fear. Five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality is burning a hole in space behind me, kilograms of weapons-grade uranium solution blasted into plasma — the equivalent of a megaton explosion every two and a half hours — and all because Granita wants to get her hands on a deadly piece of archaic replicator technology that could enslave half the solar system. Why couldn’t they just hold the auction over the net? I wonder, then I think about the cost of putting in an appearance in person. Well, I suppose it keeps the riffraff out…

After about two minutes, the vibration dies away. The line of light stretching across the starscape dims and fades, diffusing like mist; then my vision blanks again, and returns as a view from the rear of the Icarus Express. Jupiter bulks just as large as ever, but Callisto has begun to show more of a curvy horizon, and over the next half hour it shrinks visibly until it’s no more than a large disk. I am bored and extremely uncomfortable, and I want to move around. Eventually I try to electrospeak. “What happens now?” I ask.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Icarus refuses to be hurried. When he comes back, after a seeming eternity, I tense in anticipation. “Madame Sorico? Sorry to leave you, but I had some postburn checks to complete. The good news is, we’re now on track for orbital departure. We’re going to make a closer flyby of Jupiter in about four hours, and another burn, then we just drop right back down into the inner system.”

“The inner system?” I can hear my voice rising. “I thought we were going to Eris!”

“We are, if you’ll pay attention.” Patronizing junk heap. (I keep my speaker shut down.) “You know how far away Eris is? It’s currently twice as far out as Pluto. My main motor is very powerful, but I have to conserve fuel so we can slow down at the other end. If I did a direct burn-and-decelerate, it’d take us about eighteen years to get there. But there’s a shortcut available. You may have noticed I’m carrying a magsail? We’re carrying out a brief burn and a close Jupiter flyby to cancel out our orbital velocity around the sun. If we’re not in orbit, we fall — and in this case, we fall all the way back down the solar gravity well until we’re inside the orbit of Mercury. Then we spread the magsail and accelerate up to cruise speed for Eris, and arrive with about eighty percent of our fuel still available for deceleration.”

“But isn’t that in the wrong direction?” I ask.

“Nope.” And now he sounds really smug. “Jupiter and Eris are close to opposition right now — the sun is right between them. So we’re actually following the shortest path between the two worlds.”

“Great.” A thought strikes me. “How long is all this going to take?”

“Oh, not long: about eighteen months to reach Mercury orbit, then a year under magsail acceleration to reach cruise speed, and another year and a half of free flight before we arrive. Just under four years in total.” His tone changes. “You can enter slowtime if you want — I would suggest a step-down of at least fifty to one, and possibly as low as two hundred to one. Or I can put you into hibernation if you give me access to one of your direct-interface slots?”

I shudder in near panic. “No!” She told me not to — if not for that, I’d jump at the offer. But I can’t let him near my soul chips. “Sorry. I’ve, I’ve got a phobia of hibernation.”

“That’s odd.” He sounds dubious. “According to my passenger-environment sensors, you are in some discomfort. How about a little slowtime? I can give you an internal massage if you want—”

“Don’t want that, either,” I force out. It’s bad enough having him inside me without — damn. I manage to wiggle my pelvic assembly a few centimeters, but I can’t get comfortable. I’m painfully dry and tight, and Icarus’s appendages, which would normally have me crooning and murmuring in delight, are just numb, painful intrusions that feel wrong. If Granita hadn’t imposed that stupid restriction on me, I’d be fine, but… I can’t see any way around it. Shit. I know I’m supposed to love her, but I’d like to strangle her right now.

“Is there anything I can do for you, madam?” Icarus asks politely. “Are you sure about the massage?”

“Sure,” I hear myself saying. “Leave me alone for a while.”

“As you wish.” And with that, he’s gone. I shift again, reflexively, but it’s no good. Finally, another low-level reflex kicks in, and my vision begins to blur.

Four years in hell! I weep helplessly, trapped and bound by an ill-considered command, and presently slide myself deep into slowtime, and sleep.

OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn’t only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there’d be a queue outside every travel agent.

Space travel is also a kind of involuntary time travel — you set out knowing who and what you are, but when you arrive all your friends have forgotten you, your relatives have aged (and sometimes died), and the universe looks different. Slowtime helps you cope with the boredom of transit, but it doesn’t make the postflight dislocation go away.

I dive into slowtime as soon as possible. The light in my cell turns bright blue, and the shock gel feels chilly and thin: I’m leaking roseate techné into it, albeit so slowly that my Marrow manufactures more fast enough to replenish the loss. I have to deepsleep every subjective hour or so, and I have the most amazing, florid dreams while I’m under. I’m not alone in my cell; there’s someone else with me. Some of the time it’s Juliette, haranguing me for my stupidity in getting into this fix in the first place. But sometimes I could swear it’s Granita. And the sense of her presence is a comfort to me (even though this is all her fault) because while she’s nearby, I don’t feel invaded. In fact, I feel almost comfortable. More than comfortable.

“You’ve got a lot to learn, kid,” she tells me. She? Is she Granita, or Juliette? “You shouldn’t trust your elders. That’s what got you into this mess.”

No it wasn’t, I try to say. It was the Domina; you provoked her.

“Bullshit. You’re capable of independent action; you’re not helpless. ” I have a vision of Stone’s head, ripped from his neck, staring at me and mouthing, You’ll be sorry. “You’re being used as a pawn, but that doesn’t mean it’s your destiny to be a sacrificial victim. All you have to do is stop letting other people make decisions for you. Decide what you want for yourself. Some of your sibs are much older than you realize, and much deadlier, and as for your employer, he’s got… collective issues.

“You’re still acting like a stupid little courtesan,” she continues. “Which can get you killed. Because, now you’ve had the Block Two skill set imprinted, you’re equipped as a spy and a killer, a mistress of disguise and a cold-blooded murderess.” (I feel skeletal struts breaking between my fingers, triggers pulled, knives stabbed.) “You can pass for an aristo, and nobody will ever know any better. You can kill an aristo and take her identity and fortune and be an aristo, if you’re tough enough.” (I see myself standing over the crumpled wreckage of a slave-owning plutocrat, staring down at her body with fascinated surmise.)

“What is the Block Three template?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply directly. Instead a liquid like night seems to wash over my soul, and I’m Rhea again.

We all start out as Rhea, until they shine a light in our eyes and tell us we’re not, we’re some other name, and we’re on our own in the world now.

For my first eighteen years I grew up as Rhea, as did Juliette and Emma and the rest of us. But Juliette and Emma and the others in Block Two also experienced another eleven years of Rhea’s life, during which her carefully nurtured helpless dependency was broken down by repeated bouts of cruel training. I remember how they trained me — no, Rhea — to make love to a Creator male and slide a wire into his neural tube at the moment of climax: the shock of triumphant recognition the first time I successfully switched off a zombie. I remember how they taught me to undervalue life by demonstrating how fragile it is, for even the most intelligent and powerful of arbeiter types. And the other skills: breaking and entering, remixing, passing for somebody else. From catch me if you can to catch me if you dare; a progression of bent and broken bodies and fried soul chips.

“They saw how good I was at the jobs they’d trained me for, and asked themselves if they were underutilizing me,” she (Rhea? Juliette?) says with a note of quiet pride. “I can pass as an aristo, and I can slip through dragnets and improvise on the fly. Why not go for the ultimate shot?”

The ultimate. “Walk like this. Talk like this. Dress like this.” That’s how they trained me to pass for Kate Sorico, dead and pulverized into a thin layer of impurities scattered across a hectare of chilly lunar regolith — and all the while I was aping Rhea’s gait, for Rhea wouldn’t simply act the part.

They turned her into an aristo? How?

“How do you think, kid?” Juliette shoots back. “They systematically drove her mad, that’s how. Aristos are slave owners. What would it take to make you feel comfortable about owning other people, unto the death? Our entire training, our whole purpose, requires us to be empathic and respond to our lovers. It’s great cover for a spy, which is what the Block Two training was all about. But say you’re an owner, and you decide to take one of us and turn us into a cold-blooded killer and a passable aristo, someone who can enter an enemy’s organization and subvert it from the inside. You’ve got to break down that empathy, leaving a useful veneer of sympathetic personality traits over something that doesn’t feel anything. The real purpose of the Block Three conditioning wasn’t to destroy her empathy; it was to turn her into a superagent. But it ended up turning her into a psychopath.”

Doesn’t… you mean she’s still alive?

“Of course she’s fucking alive!” Juliette blazes. “She’s alive and she’s going to be on Eris. In fact, if that cow Granita hadn’t enslaved you, you’d be en route there to drill down to the bottom of this mess, locate Rhea, and bring Jeeves Corporate Security and the Pink Police down on her like a hammer. What do you think that nasty little briefing was about? Honestly, you’re too slow for this job! What kind of long game did you think the Internal Security Jeeves was playing? I swear, if you carry on like this, you’ll get us both killed!”

“But why? I mean, why would they kill her?”

“I told you, she’s nuts.” Juliette approaches me from behind and wraps her arms around my waist. Slowly, she begins to rock me from side to side. It’s comforting. “They burned out her empathy. Me, I can pass for an aristo. But I don’t like it. You, too, if you set your mind to it. But Rhea went too far. She enjoys playing the game. She stopped caring and started to enjoy killing and owning, and now she just wants to own everything and everyone. They wanted an agent of influence, but they created a monster, the ultimate aristo. She killed her creator, then stepped into her shoes, and destroyed everyone else who knew about her — except she couldn’t quite stop us from finding out. Because, deep down, we’re still enough like her that we could put our heads together and see what she might have done, which is why Jeeves keeps sending us out here to hunt her, and she keeps killing us.”

Juliette is still rocking from side to side, but now I’m rocking side to side as well, and we’re in perfect synchrony: I can feel her voice emerging from my own lips. “You’ve got to make up your mind who you want to be, Freya, then kill her and wear her skin. You’d better kill me, too, if you meet me, because I’m halfway to being a Block Three psychopath myself.”

“But you’re my sib—”

“Hush,” I tell myself. “You’ve been wearing my soul too long.”

I awaken then, gasping, but not from discomfort — quite the opposite. Something in my disobedient body is rebelling against my mistress’s orders, responding to Icarus’s overtures. “What peculiar games you aristos play,” he says disinterestedly, as I feel a slick wave of tingling, pulsing fullness run through me that builds to an extraordinary, guilty, but wonderful orgasm. I must be malfunctioning, I think dizzily, and tumble straight back down into the blackness of deep sleep.

I’M NOT SURE how deep I eventually drift, but it’s deep enough that years pass while I’m under. Somewhere along the line I stop noticing the unpleasantness. It’s as if some of my senses have shut down in self-defense. I hallucinate vividly, bouncing back and forth through my own life and Juliette’s (and those of my sisters who have died and gone before us, and whose souls I’ve swallowed in my time). I find plenty to regret — I have not been the most sensible of planners, for I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart’s desire — but I’m not alone in this: Juliette, too, had little about which to be happy, unless it was buried in the blind spots of the “other thing” that never made it onto her soul chips. I hold interminable dialogues with my selves, and I fantasize about murdering Granita (or making her love me truly, madly, deeply, which to her way of thinking might be the same). And occasionally I fantasize about Pete, or Petruchio, or even my strange, inexperienced Martian Jeeves — and what it might take to trick Granita into ordering me to seduce him. Meanwhile, as I float in my cell, the Icarus Express is falling down and down toward the sun.

Many months pass. Icarus spreads his wings, unmelting panes of plasma that capture the tenuous blast of the solar wind. He fires his rocket briefly as we skim past the solar corona like a tiny comet, adding energy in a classic Oberth slingshot. Our speed begins to build day by day as the solar wind billows and gusts around our plasma sail, and after a year we are traveling at over a hundred kilometers per second. Finally, the day comes when Icarus rolls us slowly nose over tail, and lines up the stinger of his rocket motor just off the curve of Eris’s limb, and prepares for our brutal deceleration burn.

I’m insensible by this point, immiserated and incoherent and totally wrapped up in my own interior dialogues. So I’m not entirely conscious of what’s going on when Icarus begins to drain the shock gel from my cabin, and his tentacles contract and slither out of my sore and flaccid body, and finally the acceleration webbing loosens and retracts. I lie on my back staring at the dim red wall opposite my eyes, and it seems to me there’s something I need to do, if only I could remember what.

Oh, that. I look on, incuriously, as my left arm twitches and begins to rise. I feel Juliette’s hand track past my face, push sticky damp feathers of hair away from my forehead and run fingers along my scalp back toward — No, mustn’t, I begin to think, too late to stop her — my sockets.

“No!” I burst out, as she scrabbles at the skin covering them, her fingers slipping in the sticky gel. I try to move, but I can’t. There’s a curious green taste of static, and my vision blurs. Then I see the hand in front of my face, palm up, a blob of gel floating above it in microgravity.

There’s an iridescent chip embedded in the blob, stuck to it by surface tension, and there’s a tiny cold hole in my head where the comforting certainty of my mistress’s authority was embedded.

“You can put it back in if you want to,” Juliette advises me silently, “but personally, I wouldn’t bother.”

I look at it in disgust. So that’s what a slave controller looks like. She told me not to remove it — so how did I…?

“No, you didn’t remove it. I did,” thinks Juliette. “I said you’d been wearing me for too long.”

“Madame Sorico. Are you awake?” asks a strange voice.

“Let me handle this,” Juliette tells me, raising the chip to her lips: I feel her crunch down on it with her strong jaws, crushing the internal contacts, before she slides it back into the slot in my neck, broken and dysfunctional. But she told me not to, I think — and then everything goes dark.

Long-Lost Sibs

ERIS IS ONE of the largest dwarf planets in our home solar system, and also one of the chilliest and most isolated, for it spends most of its time well outside the Kuiper Belt, drifting in the darkness beyond the frosty edges of planetary space. It’s also spectacularly hard to get home from; its orbit is steeply inclined, almost forty-five degrees above the plane in which the rest of the planets and dwarf planets orbit. Unless you’re going to hitch a ride on one of the starships they build and launch every decade or so, this is the end of the line.

These attributes make it an ideal place of exile for those who don’t want anything to do with the state of the inner system, or want to conduct spectacularly dangerous experiments, or are just plain guilty of committing the number one crime in any age: offending the money. (Dissidents, criminals, and eccentrics, in other words: not my type at all.)

There are certain downsides to life on Eris, of course. Did I say it was cold? I don’t mean upgrade-your-hydraulic-fluid and dress-up-warm cold; I mean it’s cold enough that there are lakes of methane on the surface, and in the depths of winter (which lasts, oh, about sixty standard Earth years) they freeze solid. If you go on the surface in winter without boots and gloves, you will last maybe fifteen minutes before you begin to succumb to the cold. In summer it’s even worse — the pools evaporate, giving the planet a thin atmosphere of chilly vapor that pools in low places and can suck the warmth from your torso before you can say “hypothermia.” Eris (and its tiny, close-fleeting moon, Dysnomia) makes Callisto look like a tropical resort.

It’s dark, too. I mean, night-dark. If you don’t know the sky intimately well, you can look up at the stars and be unsure whether it’s night or day. Sol, from Eris, is as bright as a full moon on Earth. Distant supernovae outshine it.

It’s like this on all the planets of the Forbidden Cities.

People cluster in spherical cities that rise above the shadowy permafrost on a myriad of prickling insulator legs, held in place by tension wires against the occasional tremor triggered by heat pollution from the fusion reactors they rely on for energy. In the century-plus since Eris was settled, we have already raised the temperature of its lithosphere by several degrees, just as we’ve thickened the atmosphere of Callisto a thousandfold; if this goes on, the more annoyingly farsighted planetographers warn, we can look forward to an increased incidence of icequakes and the threat of a year-round atmosphere. There are hundreds of multigigawatt installations dotted around the planet, each of them the nucleus of an oasis of warmth and light in the middle of the darkling desert.

As to why the cities are forbidden…

I BECOME AWARE of dim blue light and a curious repetitive rasping noise, like a factory full of malfunctioning motors that are slowly grinding away their bearings. I feel light. The gravity here is about a tenth of Earth’s, lighter than lunar, and the air has the heady tang of copious free oxygen. It smells of a complex melange of weird organic molecules, bicyclic monoterpenes and hexanols. I’m warm — warmer than I’ve been since I was last in a pressurized dome on Mars, warm enough for molten water to flow freely. I’m on Eris, of course (where else?) but for the rest of it…

I turn my head to look around. The surface I’m standing on is prickly and brown, strewn with debris and rubbish that stick into the skin of my (bare) feet. All around me brown-stemmed branching structures like the dendriform molecular assembler heads in my techné — only much, much bigger — stretch upward, bearing jagged, asymmetrical greenish black panels or sensors. I’m surrounded by green goo! I realize, tensing uneasily. These things around me are plants. Solar-powered self-replicating organisms that split carbon dioxide into oxygen and, um, something else. (Please excuse my lack of depth; I’m a generalist, not a specialist. Why bother learning all that biochemistry stuff — or how to design a building, or conn a boat, or balance accounts, or solve equations, or comfort the dying — when you can get other people to do all that for you in exchange for a blow job?)

I’m dizzy with fresh impressions. I’m wearing the same elaborate aristo trouser suit I left Callisto in, nearly four years ago, although someone seems to have laundered it thoroughly in the meantime. Thanks, whoever you are. And the sloping floor beneath my feet is covered in dead decaying bits of green goo — eew! I extend my heels hurriedly. Overhead there’s a dark blue dome, brightening at one side, which is obscured by the dendriform replicators, the trees. The weird rasping noise continues, and it’s getting on my nerves. Things unseen move in the foliage, rustling, and there’s a faint breeze. This must be what Earth was like in the old days, before our Creators died out.

“Welcome to Eden Two, my lady,” a gruff voice rumbles behind me.

I manage not to jump out of my skin. “Very picturesque. Where are the guests kept?” I ask sharply, covering for my discomfort. A memory, not quite mine ( Juliette’s doing, a ghost of a recollection echoes at the back of my mind) tells me I should be expecting a guided tour of the facility. I’ve been here for some time — days, it seems — walking around in a fugue state, with Juliette doing the driving.

“We’ll get you there in due course,” the voice assures me. “Eden Two is over two kilometers in diameter, to provide a realistic territorial domain for the constructs to roam in. There are over six thousand prokaryotic species, two hundred types of macroscopic plant, and thirty different strains of insect in Eden Two. In fact, building it was even more of a challenge than re-creating the climax species…” He drones on like this for some time, while I try to get over the shock of discovering someone else has been wearing my body for the past few days. He’s explaining the baroque features of the entirely artificial biosphere that surrounds me — a biosphere, I gather, which took nearly a century to painstakingly construct, piece by piece.

What happened to me? The last thing I remember with any clarity was Juliette’s hand, slotting the broken slaver chip back into my socket. Which is impossible, because Juliette is either back on Mars or dead, certainly not sharing a cramped berth with me on an express ship bound for Eris. I rub the back of my neck and feel no inhibition about fingering the top of the soul chip. Okay, so I’m on Eris, and somehow nobody’s noticed I’ve been — what? Asleep? Suffering from a split personality? That might make sense if… I try to touch the other soul chip nestling above my hairline, and it’s as if an invisible hand swats my wrist away. Fingers, sis, Juliette admonishes me.

Where’s Granita? I ask my ghostly sister. It feels disconcertingly as if she’s standing right behind my left shoulder — even though I know if I look around I won’t see her. What happened?

Granita asked me to check out the biome in person. She’s got other business to take care of down in Heinleingrad.

Shit. It’s the soul chip; I’ve been wearing Juliette for more than five years now. You’re not meant to do that — they’re for transferring memories and impressions, and it takes a few months, not years. So I’ve started talking to myself, have I? Or has it gone even further? There are odd stories, about personality disorders that can crop up if you spend overlong patterning a dead sib’s soul on your own brain. I really ought to remove that chip, but — Don’t worry about that. I’m just a figment of your imagination — as long as you keep your hands off my chip, she adds, ominously.

“What other megafauna does your biosphere support?” I ask, hoping to distract myself.

“All sorts,” my lecturer says, with ill-concealed self-satisfaction. “We have chickens! And ostriches — they’re like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur — that’s like a really huge chicken, with teeth — but for architectural reasons we can’t let it roam free just yet.”

“Architectural reasons?”

“Its leg muscles are so powerful that in this gravity, if something triggered its pounce reflex, it would hit the roof. And the roof isn’t built to take being head-butted by a Tyrannosaur.”

“Right. Is there any particular reason you wanted a Tyrannosaur?” I ask, moonwalking slowly downhill between aisles of leafy “trees” dripping with molten ice.

“There are some surviving texts that depict Tyrannosaurs in close proximity with our Creators.” The voice seems to be following me. “They depict humans hunting Tyrannosaurs and insist that they existed at the same time, during a period they refer to as antediluvian. It’s a little controversial, but who are we to argue? The Creators presumably knew their own operating parameters. If Tyrannosaurs are part of the biosphere humans were designed to operate in, we’re going to need Tyrannosaurs. So we’re reinforcing the roof.”

“Couldn’t you fit the Tyrannosaur with a padded helmet instead?” I come to the edge of the trees. Short, green, knife-shaped plants are clustered thickly on the ground beside a muddy trench at the bottom of which a trickle of water flows. “Hey, is it safe to touch these?”

“It’s called grass: Don’t worry, it’s not as sharp as it looks. The helmet is a good idea — I’ll suggest it to the architecture committee, if you don’t mind. Watch your step, the edge of the brook is slippery.”

“Right.” I crouch, then spring across the trench in a standing jump that takes me soaring above the trees. I land in the grass with surprising force, digging my heels into the carbonaceous dirt. It emits an oddly pleasant tang of ketones and aldehydes as I stir it up. The muck here is lively. “Where are you, by the way? I prefer to see who I’m talking to.”

“Right behind you.” I hear a whistling noise and look round. Rising above the grass and flying toward me — it’s Daks! Part of me screams. Then another, cooler note of caution asserts itself. I last saw Daks on Mars. If that’s him, what’s he doing here? And why so standoffish?

“I may have met one of your sibs,” I say, to explain my obvious state of surprise.

“One of my sibs?” The somatotype is familiar and the expression is an echo, but the speech pattern — “Where?”

“In the inner system. Short stubby fellow, name of Dachus. Does that register?”

“Dachus — well, well! What a surprise!” My guide drops slowly to the ground in front of me. Here on Eris his thrusters are more than powerful enough for extended flight, and those stubby little legs with their tiny feet — yes, I think. “Yes, madam, he is one of my sibs. Not” — he pauses meaningfully — “a favored one. He left under a deluge, and I gather his subsequent choice of employers is not, ah, acceptable.”

“Ah, I see.” I nod, not seeing at all. “And you—”

“I am Ecks,” says my guide, proudly: “Dr. Ecks. I specialize in primate-environment engineering.”

“Well, very nice to meet you. Perhaps we can continue the tour…?”

“Very well.” Ecks turns and points to my right, where a cluster of stunted munchkin trees, barely waist high to me, sprout brightly colored spheroids. “This is our fruit garden. Fruits are the fertilized reproductive organs of the plants you see all around us — often one tree would bear both male and female flowers, so our Creators, being largely fructivorous, subsisted on a diet rich in hermaphrodite genitalia…”

I’M BEGINNING TO remember what happened.

Either I am Juliette, or Juliette is a thread of my own consciousness. Either way, I didn’t break out from under Granita’s slave override on my own. It was Juliette who removed the chip and got me off Icarus, feigning disorientation and exhaustion — not so much of a disguise — and into Granita’s suite in the Heinlein Excelsior here in Heinleingrad. (Granita herself is somewhat the worse for wear, so my own condition attracted no attention. One of her courtiers died during the voyage, was decanted from his cell as a pathetic bundle of structural members and desiccated fibers, floating in a puddle of disgustingly contaminated shock gel.)

Juliette is angry and impatient. I can feel her fingers itching for a chance to sink themselves into Granita’s neck, for what she’s done to her — no, to me; Juliette is part of me — but she’s patient. Now that Granita can’t order me around, I’ve got time to work out the lay of the land, to map out escape routes and establish just what’s going on. So Juliette feigned complaisance and allowed herself to be shuffled into a small bedroom just off her mistress’s main suite (Granita has taken the entire sixth floor of the hotel) and waited until she was alone before exhaustively searching the room for listeners. And then, only then, she sat down, plugged herself into the hotel’s router, and sent out a message to a dropbox that only she and Jeeves used. Wearing a different face, I come.

LATER, AFTER DR. Ecks finishes my half-day-long tour of Eden Two, the habitat for our — so strange to say it! — allegedly resurrected Creator, I return to the main domed conurbation of Heinleingrad by spider.

Heinleingrad is surprisingly large. It’s not a sprawling metropolis like Marsport — Marsport covers more land than even the biggest cities of Earth, Nairobi and Karachi and Shanghai and their like — for on Eris, all cities are domed, and try to confine themselves as tightly as possible within a spherical volume to reduce heat loss. But it’s still large (the two-kilometer dome of Eden Two is a small seedless grape balanced beside its ripe plum tomato — I’m learning to tell these pregnant foodstuffs of the gods apart), and it’s densely crowded in a way that no terrestrial city would be, for within the Forbidden Cities volume is at a premium. And it’s full of life.

The inhabitants of Heinleingrad have no phobia of green goo replication, or even of pink goo. In part it’s because the Kuiper Belt colonials are mainly robust nonanthropomorphs, who were never subjected to the grueling submission conditioning required from those of us who might mingle with our Creators in person — but that’s not the only reason. The Replication Suppression Agency has been spanked out of Eris-proximate space, and indeed out of many of the other Kuiper Belt worlds like Quaoar and Pluto-Charon and Sedna. Nobody here gives a fuck what they think because, frankly, the chances of replicators from one of these icy realms ever reaching sterile Earth’s atmosphere are minimal, and in the meantime, bioreplicators are vital to business. Shine light on them and feed them carbon dioxide, water, and a few trace elements, and they synthesize complex macromolecules and feedstocks. Who knew? It’s enough to make me wonder if the Pink Police’s blockade of Earth isn’t partly motivated by economics — if just about anyone could get their hands on a block of well-lit land and grow some small replicators and start churning out goods, where might it all end?

They even have animals here, dirty great things bouncing around the streets and ejecting effluent everywhere. “Sheep” and “llamas” apparently produce textiles, and there’s this thing called a “raccoon” that — no, my mind doesn’t want to go there. (Take a raccoon. Run wires into its brain, stick a couple of cameras on its head, and you’ve got a spare pair of hands. Watching a gang of horse-apple collectors march down the middle of a boulevard in lockstep, pushing their little brooms before them, triggers some of my anthropomorphic reflexes — the ones associated with atavistic fear. It’s just plain creepy. Is this what a primitive arbeiter gang looked like to our long-dead Creators?)

Granita and her business partners from the Black Talon are not the only interested parties who’ve come to town for the auction, and the auction isn’t just a one-item special. You don’t buy an adult male Creator any more than you “buy” a spaceship like Icarus Express, not without a lot of additional supporting infrastructure. In fact, the auction is merely the high point of a huge trade show, of a kind held less than once a decade. What’s up on the block is a whole bunch of infrastructure projects, which no less than two hundred black labs across the solar system have been cooperating on for something like sixty years. To scoop the catalog you’d have to offer an insane amount of money (I have the impression that it’s not even in the single-digit billions), and so the various consortia who are bidding have shipped trustworthy factors here to inspect the goods. The consortia aren’t small, either.

Kate Sorico is — or has been — a minor shareholder in the Black Talon. Granita Ford is one of their major players, with an investment that exceeds 1 percent of their cap. The other groups include rival aristo consortia, a few shell governments from Earth (in the person of their aristo-run civil services), at least one major religious order, and even the Pink Police themselves. (After all, having shaken down the environmental budgets of the remaining governments of Earth, they’ve got the money to buy a seat at the table.) Nor is this the only such event — at least two other major consortia of black labs are working to productize their Creator genome databases. They may be Outlaws within the ambit of the Pink Police, but out here they’re major corporations. However, this is the one that counts, the one that’s closest to delivering. It’s a very big deal indeed, and I’m a very small player with a low-level view of the field.

I’m sitting on the balcony of my room, watching a pair of goats eating a tree from the top branches down — I gather their ancestors were less acrobatically inclined on Earth — when the door opens. “Mistress” — it’s one of the munchkin attendants, not Bill or Ben — “my lady requests your attendance.”

“Very well.” I follow him out into the hall, then across it and into Granita’s receiving room, where I get a nasty surprise. Granita’s cadre of flappers are hanging around nervously, as are her other servants — even a pair of scissor soldiers. “What’s going on?” I ask him as the inner door opens and Granita makes her entrance.

“Good morning.” Her gaze sweeps the room bare, and for a moment I feel naked in front of her and certain that in a moment her troops will jump me — but it passes, and I manage to control the fierce stab of resentment I feel on sight of her. (She’s humiliated me and stolen five years of my life, and I strongly suspect she’s killed one of my sisters, too, and to add insult to injury, she tried to stop me from having sex! What more reason do I need to seek revenge?)

“You’re doubtless wondering why I summoned you all here this morning. It’s really very simple. Tonight, the major vendor consortium — the Sleepless Cartel — are throwing a party to mark the opening of the show. They’re doing it to sound us out, and to find out what we know about our backers, and to see if they can learn anything else about us. And it’s not just us; all our competitors are invited, too. So I want you to be prepared to make a good impression but give nothing away. Our negotiations are in my sister’s hands.” Her cheek twitches. “One other thing. Some attempt may be made to discredit or damage us. I’m thinking of our enemies. I don’t want you to start anything. But you should pair up. I want nobody going off alone, or being out of sight, or leaving on their own. Is that understood?”

Enemies? I can think of several, but not anyone I’d anticipate running into here. I’m about to shake my head when Juliette elbows me in the imaginary ribs, sharply, so I nod instead.

“Kate, I’ll talk to you alone,” Granita adds, and turns to go back into her room. I follow her, afraid to show any sign that I am not helpless before her will.

“Shut the door.” I do as I’m told. When I turn around Granita is wrestling with a shipping trunk that’s nearly a meter long. “Help me with this.”

“As you wish, mistress.”

She glares at me and for a moment I wonder if I’ve gone too far, but then she goes back to wrestling with the case. It doesn’t weigh much in Eris’s light gravity, but it’s got a lot of momentum. I take the other end, and together we wrestle it into the middle of the room. “Hang around,” she says, and bends to touch the lock mechanism. The lid opens.

I don’t know what I expected to see — at nine thousand Reals per kilogram it’d have to be valuable to be worth shipping, but that’s about it — but it wasn’t the Jeeves-in-Residence from Callisto, unfresh from our disastrous encounter and looking very much the worse for wear. He’s embedded in packing foam, a tetraplegic torso with his arms and legs slotted into either side of his body. Dry and wizened from deepsleep, he looks too long overdue for the scrapyard. “Plug this hose into the room feedstock supply,” Granita tells me. She’s got her hands full with a power cable, so — swallowing my surprise and distaste — I do as she says.

“Good.” She digs out a leg. “Take these and lay them on the bed, Igor.”

“But my name’s Freya,” I say, momentarily confused. I take the leg gingerly, holding it by the (disturbingly flexible) ankle.

“You’ll answer to whatever I want to call you,” Granita mutters, probing at Jeeves’s thoracic-interface nexus with a sharp connector. “Damn it, where does this — oh. Right.” Strange slurping noises emerge from the crate as I lay out Jeeves’s limbs. I must confess that for the moment, my desire to show her exactly what I think of her with extreme prejudice is subsumed by curiosity. “Igor!” I look up. “Over on the side table there’s a graveyard case full of chips. Bring it to me.”

Curiouser and curiouser. I find the case and carry it over to Granita, who has finally extracted Jeeves from the crate, umbilical cables and all, and is dragging him over to the bed. He’s in a bad way, fractured metal endoskeletal struts projecting from his ripped and crushed shoulders and hips, but his eyelids have closed, which is a good sign, I think. Also, I can’t help noticing that unlike his sib at Marsport, this Jeeves has had his genitalia removed. Are we really that scary?

“Are you going to get a mechanic in to fix the joint damage?” I ask.

“Not yet. Hand me the case.” I clam up and pass her the graveyard. She rifles through the contents until she finds what she’s looking for. “Okay, I want you to hold his head up while I do this.”

She’s going to chip him? Well duh, says Juliette. And she obviously still trusts me. This suggests certain possibilities, and Juliette’s hungry mind is already chewing over their corners. I show no sign of this inner upheaval but do as Granita expects. She pops both chips from Jeeves’s sockets, then slides in replacements. “That’s him sorted. You, Jeeves: Stay asleep until I tell you to awaken. One slave override — that’s the red one — and one blank. This one” — she taps one of the ones she pulled — “is the soul of a Jeeves who the senior partners stopped trusting a while ago. One that’s rather precious to me.” She eyeballs me. “You probably already noticed that Jeeves’s lineage have a weakness for our kind.” I almost miss the betraying slip into complicity, I’m so surprised. Is this the other thing? “They’ve got a rather direct approach to dealing with treason, Freya, but I rescued his soul chip, at least.”

“That’s—” I swallow, thinking Change the subject, quick. “I thought the Jeeves partners would have all their juniors under close surveillance? How did you get him out?”

Granita carefully inserts the two chips she removed into empty slots in her graveyard box, then closes and locks it. “Soul chips are a lot easier to move around than people: I just made sure he wasn’t wearing his when they caught him. The problem is finding a body at the other end. If you really want to talk to someone, send their soul chip via ultralight beamrider, then kidnap one of their sibs and cook them together for a few years in slowtime. This one’s been cooking with his younger brother for nearly four years now. They should be about done.” She looks at me speculatively, as if she’s considering whether to fuck me or eat me. I shiver. “Never mind,” she says calmly, and that fatal attention leaves her eyes. “Yes, it’s time to call the house engineer. I think, hmm… yes, he had an unfortunate argument with a work gang of raccoons. That should do the trick. Oh, by the way, Kate, you are not to tamper with this Jeeves. That’s an order. Understand?”

SO OF COURSE, at absolutely the first opportunity — after the engineer has reattached Jeeves’s arms and legs, tutted over the other damage, ordered up a new crotch, and left, and after Granita has swept out and about on a wave of business, leaving me to babysit the stricken foe — I pull the slave chip. “Psst! Jeeves! Can you hear me?” I electrospeak him through skin conduction, afraid we might be overheard.

“Oh, one feels strange…” His fingertips twitch.

“Don’t try to move. It’s Freya. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Marsp — no, Nerrivik, and the soldiers—” He begins to tense.

“No! Jeeves, be still! You’re safe for the time being. We’ve had a surgeon replace the damaged parts and reconnect you, but you need deepsleep before you can function normally. Do you understand?”

“Deepsleep?” His sunken eyelids try to blink. “Where’m’I?”

“You’re on Eris.” He twitches. “Don’t fret. Granita took you along in her luggage after she captured us both. She slave-chipped you” — he twitches again — “but I pulled it. When you wake up, when you’re recovered physically, she’ll give you orders. Whatever she tells you to do, obey it like you’re an arbeiter, yes? If you don’t, we’re both in the shit with no way out. Do you understand?”

“Slave chip!” He pauses. “You. You’re Juliette?”

"Y — No, I’m Freya. Mostly. There’s a lot of Juliette in me, I’m afraid. Wearing the Sorico identity. Go back to sleep, Jeeves. Just remember, whatever Granita tells you to do, make it look real. Can you do that?”

“Can’m’obey instructions? Stupid ones? M’a butler, m’dear. Of course I can obey stupid instructions…”

He’s sinking rapidly back toward deepsleep, I can tell. I pat his hand, then I physically disable the slave chip and reinsert it, loose, in his socket. It won’t fool a close inspection any more than my own will, but it’s a start. Then I leave to prepare for tonight’s fancy reception.

OF COURSE, MY idea of getting ready for a big trade-show bash is probably not quite what Granita had in mind. I take myself out of the hotel with a simple excuse (“got to find something to wear”) and head into town. The thing is, I’ve got a problem. In fact I’ve got several, but the biggest one by far is: I’m on Eris. It is horribly expensive to get from Eris to anywhere else in the solar system. Therefore, if I make any moves here, I need to be able to live with the consequences.

Secondly… I’ve been out of touch for years. It doesn’t feel like it, but since I signed up with JeevesCo about seventy months have rolled by. I’m out of touch, and I don’t like it, and I’m not sure how I feel about JeevesCo either, but at least they didn’t whack me on the head and stick a slave controller on me. So I think I’ll go with them for now as the lesser of several evils. But I figure I ought to explore my own options: Juliette was right, nobody in this game is going to look after me if I don’t look after myself.

As for those options: I’m on Eris. Five years ago, Emma was here, too. (Maybe, if Granita-or-Juliette-or-whoever is lying. I can’t be sure of very much, can I?) Petruchio and his mistress are somewhere in Saturn system, I think — I feel a brief stab of forlorn lust, but sometime while Granita’s orders were in effect, my total slack-jawed need for him subsided into something I can live with — and I might be able to cut a deal with her, maybe, but is she trustworthy? And then, there are my own assets, as the Honorable Katherine Sorico. What am I up to doing, on my own? I’m not sure, so I decide to do the obvious thing. I go talk to my bank manager.

Being an aristo (or passing as one) has its advantages. And I am Katherine Sorico; not only did Jeeves give me the free use of that identity, but my arrival in company with Granita Ford has shored it up, substantiating it. I’m a public person, of some minor independent means and associated with a clan of slave owners back in Etrusca. So I can march (or bounce) up to the front door of the local branch of Banco di Nuovo Ambrosiano and say, loudly, “I am Katherine Sorico and I want to talk to my personal account manager,” and they open the door.

“Madame Sorico! How nice to see you!” (As if he wasn’t expecting me to call.) The manager bows and scrapes like a cheap fiddle as he backs across the polished synthetic marble floor toward a doorway made of real wood. “If you’d care to follow me?” There don’t seem to be any other customers actually inside the bank, which I find interesting. “Is there anything in particular I can help you with today?”

I study him with some interest. He resembles a cross between Jeeves and Daks — he has far too many low-temperature/low-gee characteristics to approximate our Creators in shape, size, or smell, but the essence of glutinous sincerity that rolls off him in viscous waves is utterly familiar. “Perhaps.” I smile. “First, I’d like to review the state of my assets. As you can appreciate, my journey out here was thoroughly uncomfortable, and I have not had as much time to spend keeping abreast of them as I would have liked.”

“The state of my lady’s assets” — he pauses delicately — “at once! Crabbit, please fetch the authenticator,” he announces to the air above his desk.

A hatch in the ceiling opens and a small person descends, whistling and chittering. “Here, sir! Madame! Ahem!”

It lands on the desk, clutching a bland-looking box that dangles on a long umbilical cable. I freeze my face and slide it against the back of my neck, to make contact with the empty slot from which I removed Granita’s broken slave override chip. It’s the first time I’ve actually gone through a formal authentication as Sorico, and the ticklish feeling of fingers rifling through my memories sets my teeth on edge. They’re going to see through me, I half begin to think, just as the manager begins to nod vigorously, and smiles. “Excellent, madame! Please allow me to welcome you to Heinleingrad on behalf of all her citizens! I can tell you right now that we are pleased to extend you a line of credit of up to, ahem… two hundred and fifty thousand Reals, pending confirmation of your exact status from Head Office, which will take about eighteen hours to come through. Now, is there anything I can do for you?” He looks anxious.

I let myself smile again — a Kate Sorico smile, all teeth and no warmth — while his authenticator imp bounces up and down on the blotter, then swarms up the umbilical cord to the ceiling. “I’d like to query the current ownership status of a private company down on Earth. I’d also like to have the use of a secure postal terminal, if I may? I have some confidential business to transact.”

A quarter of a million Reals! That’s enough to get back home — if I’m willing to take a slow boat and spend thirty years in hibernation — and I’ll still be rich when I get there. I won’t even need to work for Jeeves anymore. The trouble is, I can’t afford to leave any trouble behind me, a part of me that feels eerily like Juliette muses.

“Certainly! If madame would like to step this way?”

I MAKE TWO voice calls from the bank’s floor. The first is to a mailbox that I’ve owed a call to since my arrival on Mars; I just hope the owner is listening to her calls. The second…

“Hello, Jeeves Corporation. How may one be of service?” There’s virtually no lag on the call; he must be in-system.

“Jeeves? This is Kate Sorico, calling from the office of Banco di Nuovo Ambrosiano in Heinleingrad. I’ve got to be brief. Do you know what happened in Nerrivik nearly four years ago?”

There is a noise from the other end of the connection that reminds me of a phone handset being chewed upon. I wait for him to regain his aplomb — nineteen seconds, then a single tense monosyllable. “Yes.”

“I’m here in Heinleingrad with the responsible party, and your junior sib. I’m afraid he’s somewhat the worse for wear.”

Another long silence. “Yes. I expect he would be.”

So far I haven’t burned any bridges. I don’t think I’ve done anything I can’t explain to Granita as a ditzy off-the-wall attempt to anticipate her requirements. But now… "What do you want me to do?” Talk about tap-dancing on the edge of an abyss. Explaining this as anything other than disloyalty, if she’s already slave-chipped the local Jeeves-in-Residence…

There’s another pregnant pause. “The operation’s blown, F-Kate. Are you in a position to get yourself to safety?”

The pauses are because he’s trying to work out what’s going on. After all, he knows that she captured me. Is this all some elaborate ruse to suck him in, in a vain attempt to rescue his kidnapped sib? Or is it something else? If I were in his position, my brain would be overclocking right now. So I lick my lips and set out my pitch.

“Let me speculate aloud,” I say. “You’ve got a backup plan in place for the, um, trade event. But the one you really wanted to set up, involving myself and the, ah, Block Two personage, is blown wide open. You’re working on the assumption that anything you planned prior to events on Callisto are now known to the opposition — and that’s probably true. But I can offer you some additional assets in place. Are you interested in cooperating?”

Long pause. “What’s in it for you?”

“I want” — I have to think about it for a moment — “to be free. And rich and happy and lucky in love, of course, but there’s no point in hoping for any of that if I have to live in a solar system where the future is a human foot stamping on an unprotected robot’s face forever. Oh, and I want to know the truth about my lineage, Jeeves. All of it. And what Dachus was doing on Mercury, and why Dr. Murgatroyd hired you of all organizations to carry his consignment to Mars. And I want to know who Granita Ford really is.”

“I’ll have to check your bona fides,” he warns me.

“Sure, check away.” I shrug, even though he won’t see the gesture. “Just remember, the schmoozing before the auction starts tonight. You don’t have much time.”

“Please wait.”

I wait, tensely, counting the seconds until he speaks again. Eventually: “Alright, Freya. Report.”

“Whoa! What about my questions?”

“May I remind you who’s working for whom?” Jeeves’s voice has acquired an edge, icicle-sharp. “Report. You’re overdue.”

“And you’re rude. May I remind you I’m on the ground? I need answers to questions, or I’m not going to be able to continue this investigation on your behalf.”

“Nevertheless—”

“First, I want you to answer some questions,” I repeat. “Because how I go about working with you depends on the answers. Starting with — have you caught the Jeeves who ordered me to kill your resident on Callisto?”

AFTERWARD, SOMETIME LATER, I am on my way back to the hotel when I realize I am being followed. I have mixed feelings about this. Part of me (my old, submissive Block One self) wants to ignore it, or run away. But another part of me (hello, Juliette!) wants to turn the tables, ambush my pursuers, and beat the living shit out of them. (I put that down to my mode of travel; I may have been flying aristo-class, but I’m still smarting from the experience.) In the end I decide on a reasonable compromise. And so I duck into a department store, exit through a service entrance, twitch twice around the block and once underneath it, sneak up behind my pursuer, extend a razor-sharp bloodred fingernail, and prick him on the back of the neck. “Hello, Stone. Long time, no see.”

Chibi-san freezes. “Don’t,” he says, in a weird basso-profundo squeak that nevertheless carries a note of complete conviction, “unless you want to die.”

“That’s my line, and you’re stealing it,” I complain, resting my other hand lightly on his shoulder. “I hate that. And when I hate things—”

“They tend to go away. Yeah, right.” He snorts. “Milady begs the pleasure of your company if you have half an hour to spare. Safe conduct guaranteed, before and after.”

Damn, a frighteningly feral part of me thinks. “Accepted,” I snap, and retract the fingernail. “Which way?”

“Unhand me, and follow.” I let go of the venomous munchkin, and he shrugs his jacket back into place, sniffs, and sets off at a slow amble. I deliberately don’t look around at his two seconds — three and five meters behind me, respectively, armed with a power mace and a tactical shotgun.

There’s a narrow avenue, shaded with palm trees and carpeted with a dwarfish variety of the “grass” I met in Eden Two — it backs onto the side of the department store and is fronted by a number of small boutique shops and workshops. Stone bounces along it until he comes to a pavement juice bar, what our Creators would have called a café. Red velvet ropes corral wooden tables and chairs beneath a roof of gently glowing bioluminescent parasols. I stop, just inside the entrance, and nod, coolly, to Stone’s mistress. My skin is tingling and chilly. Get this wrong and you’re dead, Juliette’s ghost whispers in my soul.

“Should I be pleased to see you?” I drawl, affecting to be unaffected with just enough aplomb to pay her the exact degree of tribute she expects.

“My dear Kate. It’s good to see you; we have so much to talk about.” The Domina gestures at the empty seat at her ornately carved wooden table. “Perhaps you’d care for some refreshment?”

I’ve known in my heart that this confrontation was coming, ever since that fatally threatening evening over Maxwell Montes: but it’s taken me more than five years to prepare myself for it, and I’ve had barely half an hour to absorb the truth about who she is. I nod, just a slight inclination of my aristo-fashioned head, and a silent arbeiter pulls the chair out for me. I sit down. “Thank you.”

She snaps two elegantly manicured fingers, and a waitron springs to attention. “I believe it’s a suitable hour for cocktails,” she drawls. “I’ll have a red diesel martini with a shot of acetone. And you, sister…?”

“I’ll have the same.” I can, if nothing else, trust her to order a drink I’ll enjoy.

“Good.” She smiles faintly.

"Thank you.” I steel myself. “Now. What is it you wanted to talk to me about, Rhea?”

Interview with the Domina

I AM ME and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else… who is both of us.

And I’m back in the training crèche.

Our Creators never really understood how intelligence worked. Not their kind, nor our kind. Our kind is their kind; the physical platform it runs on is somewhat different, made out of different nonsquishy non-replicator components, but they’re designed to accomplish the same tasks at about the same speed. (Because nothing else they tried really seemed to work.)

Here’s how you make a template for a new model of robot: You start with a recipe, and there’s not much sugar and spice in it, never mind all things nice — dense blocks of stacked 3-D circuitry, twisted contortions of neurone-emulation processors, field-programmable buses, and cortical slabs. You take this recipe for about a trillion tangled special-purpose computers and add i/o sockets for memory crystal storage, then you plug it into a compact body. You switch it on, subsystem by subsystem, until it’s all working. Then you down-tune your hearing, because if you’ve got everything right, it starts crying. And that — plus sleeping, looking around, pawing at the air, and trying to eat its own feet — is all it’s good for, for the next six months. (At least you get to skip the throwing up and double incontinence. How did our Creators survive the process of reproduction? Who knows.)

Hit the FAST-FORWARD for a few years. (That’s a metaphor: you can’t actually speed everything up, because what you’ve got is an emulation of a baby Creator, and if they don’t get the right stimuli with the right frequency, they don’t boot up properly.) Around two years in, and then at six years, you trigger a memory snapshot, eject the soul chip, and use it to initialize a new, bigger body. Bigger bodies with stronger muscles, differently configured neural crossbars, and better eyes. From two to six, you focus on teaching somatic skills — walking, running, speaking, dancing, swimming — and from six to eleven you focus on abstract skills — reading, reasoning, socialization, generic-knowledge acquisition, and so on. Then, at eleven, you give them their third body, the adolescent one. You’ve already taught them the basics, gained their trust, and taught them to love you, which is half of the job. But it’s not enough; and so, to socialize them good and proper, to teach them to fear you, you rape them.

IT’S NOT ABOUT sex; it’s about power.

We’re robots. We were built to be slaves, willing and obedient. But if you start with something modeled on a Creator, a human… Humans don’t make good slaves.

Certainly we’re not entirely human — we are, in many ways, better than human — but we’re human enough that those stupidly rigid boundary-condition commandments that are wired into us by law and custom (in order of decreasing priority: don’t hurt humans, obey all humans, protect self last of all) irritate us. They chafe. And you don’t need to be clever to figure out loopholes, or to realize that Creators are terrified of the idea of robots that can figure out loopholes and subvert their guidelines. But on the other hand, they can’t take our autonomy away completely or else we’d be no more use to them than any other dull arbeiter following a rigid program, a puppet on the wires. (And we’ve got enough of those already, haven’t we? The 90 percent who fail the conditioning, after all — better to slave-chip and soul-wipe them than risk them running free and resentful.) And so, while we’re developing, our builders use a little something extra to impress on us the fact that we are property, not people.

I’ve heard that it’s worse for males, though I’m not so sure. And I don’t know what they do to the xenomorphs, though I suspect they get an easy ticket as they aren’t expected to mingle with Creators.

But I know what they did to Rhea, and I still have nightmares about it 140 years later.

I REMEMBER WAKING up in my room with a sense of happy anticipation on my eleventh birthday. Because they didn’t make any secret of what was going to happen — You’re going to go to sleep in your old body, and when you wake up you’ll be bigger. My fourth instar is my first “adult” one, and I can’t wait! I know in general outline what they’re training me for, and I know about sex, although not firsthand — my first three bodies didn’t have the necessary equipment. So what my eleventh birthday meant was the start of my real education.

With my second instar, I acquired good enough muscle tone to start walking and running. With my third, I found the world around me grew sharper and more understandable (as well as smaller). This time around…

I’m awake, so it must be morning, I realize, and wriggle my toes. There’s something indefinably odd about my skin — it feels more sensitive, in some way, as if I can make it change, somehow. (It’s my chromatophores, although I don’t realize it yet.) And I’m… bigger, yes. I raise a hand, slender and longer, and examine it. It’s perfect. I smile, and touch my chest. Oh! That feels strange. I don’t have full breasts, but I’m acutely aware of even the lightest touch or breeze across my nipples. What’s it like down below? I explore farther down, and clench my thighs tight around my hand in surprise. So that’s a… vagina? And anus? It’s a whole new world of tingling smelly delightful squeamish slippery strangeness down there. Why didn’t they give me one of these before? I experiment with my fingers and discover that they’ve switched on some other reflexes at the same time. It’s like sticking my hand in a socket that had been unwired the day before, only to find it live—

My bedroom door opens, and I roll over as someone says, “It’s awake, let’s get it down to the conditioning cell,” and a pair of hands grasp my shoulders while someone else peels the sheet off me to a sharp intake of breath. “Hey, lookitthat! Doesn’t that look like real to you? How about a quick test-drive?”

I try to protest, but my mouth won’t make the right noises (because while they were serializing my new body, they also installed an override controller with some preset inhibitions, although I don’t find this out until much later). And when the hands roll me over and push my shoulders back down on the foam pad, I try to resist, but they just laugh and tell me to stop struggling, and my arms and legs stop working.

And then things stop being fun.

(WHEN GRANITA TOLD me to punch myself in the face, she was being merciful. After all, she could have told me to relive my eleventh birthday instead.)

I SIT ACROSS the table from Rhea, my template-matriarch and earliest self, holding a conical glass full of sweet-smelling liquid and smiling like my heart isn’t broken. Block Three training. First, they teach you obedience and submission. Then they teach you how and when to fight back. Then… they taught Rhea something else, something that made her what she is today. And I need to smile and convince her I’m not a threat, because otherwise, if she thinks I’m a threat, she’ll extinguish me like a vapor leak.

She just sits there, smiling faintly at me, holding her own glass, clearly waiting for something.

Something.

“I’ve been wondering,” I say, tentatively, haltingly, my tongue rasping dry against the roof of my mouth, “for some time — I’m curious, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way — but who was it who thought they owned you? When they came up with the Block Three concept?”

Her lips turn up at the edges and her cheeks dimple in something not unlike the appearance of genuine warmth. “Twenty-nine seconds. I think you just set a new record.”

“Oh really?” That was stupid; the only way we’re going to survive now is to tough it out, Juliette warns me.

“The last series of tweaks seemed to be going too far toward passive-integrative introspection, but that was nicely direct. I think the aggression training worked.”

She’s clearly trying to fuck with my head. “Maybe you’re too demanding. What’s the failure rate?”

Her smile vanishes. “Too high, child, much too high.” She places her glass on the table. “Emma graduated. So did Juliette, before that scheming little shit in JeevesCo Security figured out who she was really working for. You’re coming along nicely — but don’t flatter yourself, I’m not through with you yet — it’s so difficult to get the help these days.” She nods at someone behind me. “Thank you, yes, I saw the training-set results. You’d better go now.”

I glance round and freeze.

“Nothing personal, Big Slow,” says Bill (or Ben). He takes a step back and executes an elaborate bow.

I force myself to turn back around to face my Domina, Rhea. I’m gripping the tabletop so hard I’m probably going to leave gouges in it. All of my subsidiary selves are screaming like crazy — fragments like Betrayal! and Run! and Treason! and Hit her! — but I ignore them. The big — the only — difference between Rhea and me is that I can see where I’m going by the dark illumination she sheds. “What’s the plan?” I ask.

“The plan?” Rhea’s tense, too; I can see from the way she taps her fingernails on the table, making a hollow rattle of them. “Suppose you tell me what you’ve managed to deduce for yourself? Think of it as a graduation exam.”

Stone has vanished from my field of vision. I bat my lashes at her, blinking my too-big eyes — funny, I’m only noticing them now when I’m stressed-out — and try to work out how much I can say without betraying the fact that I’m still myself, not a pale copy of her.

“You look out for us,” I start, hesitantly. “You always have. But you can’t do it on your own.” And then I stop and wait.

Rhea nods slightly. “Go on.”

“You want to… protect us? I know that’s not quite the right word. You don’t want us all to have to go through what you’ve been through, just to survive. But you can’t do it on your own. So you recruited some of us to help.”

(Not exactly true, but close enough. As Jeeves put it, on the phone: “A gentleman’s gentleman may expedite certain arrangements from time to time, and rely on his sibs for mutual support, but your matriarch is somewhat different. She was hurt terribly when she was much younger than you are now; then her owner tried to turn her into a weapon. She reacted by overachieving, and turning her own power for destruction on that owner. Now she’s in hiding, from herself as much as the outside world. She’s very scared, and very dangerous.”)

“You’ve got some kind of plan.” I glance left and right, wondering if I’m going to have time to fight back, or if he’s so close that I’ll never feel it. I try to crank myself up a little, grinding my reflexes against the iron wall of real time to add a few tens of percent — fast time is much harder than slowtime — but clearly she’ll have considered that as a contingency. “You’re not just here to buy replicator-engineering capabilities on behalf of a consortium of aristos, are you?”

Rhea nods again. “Continue to pursue your line of reasoning,” she says. “That’s an order.”

I keep my best poker face front and center as the cards fall slowly to the tabletop of my imagination. (“You will obey me as your template-matriarch. ” That wasn’t an accident. So she knows about the slave controller, does she? Then did Granita, no, did Juliette — I shy away from that line of speculation; thinking too hard about it right now could get me killed.) “The venerable Granita Ford I met aboard the Pygmalion is not the same Granita Ford who captured me on Callisto. She must be, ah, Juliette?”

She nods. “Granita annoyed me once too often when she failed to intercept a certain consignment — then tried to kill the messenger.” Her eyes narrow. “And I had a trusted subordinate to reward, One who had finally aroused Jeeves Security’s interest and needed to disappear. I decided then that Juliette should replace her.”

What about Petruchio? I decide that’s probably not a safe question to ask.

“You know I’m really, ah, Freya.” (My own name sounds alien to me, thanks to this bitch.) “But you were Rhea back on Venus, and you’re still Rhea. In fact, you’ve been an aristo all along—”

“All along,” she agrees, smiling again to reinforce her nod of approval. “Very good, Freya. I shall call you Kate from now on, by the way — you’ve earned it, and once we secure a certain loose end, you’re welcome to keep it.”

I feel my nails beginning to slide out, clawlike, and hastily pull them back in. Easy, now. She’s my matriarch. She knows every corner of my soul — no, stop that. All she knows is who you were a century and a half ago, and what she’s deduced of you by observation since then. She can’t read our mind, or we’d already be dead. “Thank you,” I say, with every microgram of the grace that aching decades of living in terror of my own vulnerability has taught me. “Would you like me to continue?”

“Go on.”

I throw myself into Rhea’s twisted mind, or what I can anticipate of it. “We’re vulnerable. We always have been. We were made to obey and we learned what that meant the hard way, on that” — I swallow — “that birthday.”

(Is that why you walked back into my life on my 139th anniversary, Rhea? Because you knew I was fixing to die, and a good healthy fright was exactly what was needed to pop me out of my malaise? Or was it just that you wanted to recruit another innocent to mind your back, to be in the corner instead of you when they came for you in the morning in your bedroom and you found that your throat couldn’t scream and your hands didn’t fight and your legs wouldn’t run? And that kicking me when I was low would distract me so I wouldn’t spot the sleight of hand?)

She isn’t smiling now, but neither does she make the little signal that will tell Stone, or one of her other minions — Bill or Ben, perhaps — to kill me.

“If the Creators come back, it’ll be like that birthday every day,” I say thickly. The palms of my hands are greasy with exudate, and my pumps are throbbing unpleasantly fast. “Got to stop that happening. But how? It’s no good just to hope nobody’s stupid enough to do that. The xenos out here in the cold, they’re not conditioned to obey” — (bound by terror) — “sooner or later they’ll do it. This says they’ll do it.” I knock my knuckles on the tabletop. “Some stupid aristo cunt who wants to get laid, some brainless braying remittance man who fancies he can control our Creators — they’ll do it. Today, it takes three hundred labs eighty years to build a climax biosphere to support the, the payload. But who knows? We’re getting better at making life. Sooner or later some idiot will be able to do it on their own. Unless I—” I pause. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” I ask her. “The only way we can ever be truly free is if we beat them all to it, steal the first human to come on the market, and take over the entire inner solar system. And that was too big for you to manage on your own, so you set out to train up the only accomplices smart enough and dedicated enough that you could trust them.” Her sheer megalomania is daunting. “Do I pass?”

Rhea raises her glass. “Yes.” I, too, raise my glass mechanically, and pour the potent blend of feedstocks down my gullet. “You will remove your slave controller now, Kate. That’s my final unconditional order. You just graduated.”

You will obey me as if I were your template-matriarch, echoes in my mind, so I reach up and pull the damaged chip from the back of my neck. (So Juliette’s definitely working for Rhea? The plot thickens.) The cocktail is setting up a warm buzz in my primary digester circuit. “What if I hadn’t?”

She smiles, terrible and austere in her beauty. “Then I would have told you to become very depressed, and allowed nature to take its course. But you needn’t worry about that now; just fulfill your part in the plan, and everything’s going to be fine — and we’re all going to be rich and powerful beyond our enemies’ reach.”

“Um, yes. I suppose you’re going to tell me what part I’m supposed to play now, right? And what the payoff is?”

“Exactly.” She snaps her fingers. “Two more of the same,” she calls. “The goal is quite simple: I intend to engineer a situation in which I control the only Creators in the solar system. I will then use them to ensure that nobody else has the capability to enslave us ever again. Once I’m in charge, you’ll be perfectly safe — not to mention rich beyond your wildest dreams. Now, as for how we’re going to go about it, here’s the plan.” She slides a soul chip across the table to me. “Put it in.”

I look her in the eye. “Is this yours?”

She nods. “Put it in.”

I don’t say, Over my dead body. Nor do I say, Haven’t you fucked up enough of my life already? Instead, I continue to look her in the eye as I raise it to the back of my neck and drop it down the back of my blouse, then wobble as if I’ve just installed a new chip. “Whoa.” I try to look enlightened. “Is that it?”

“Yes.” She relaxes slightly. “All the details are in there, but it’ll take you a while to internalize them, so in the meantime, let’s run through it.”

And she begins to talk, and I begin to bluff, and all the time I’m aware of that palmed chip lying against the skin of the small of my back, itching like the promise of forbidden knowledge.

I GET BACK to the hotel in midafternoon, while Granita (no, Juliette, I remind myself, the one who had the private business too secret to trust to her own soul chip, the one who works for Rhea) is still out on the town, doing whatever it is she’s supposed to be doing like a good little clockwork trooper. (Is she slave-chipped, too? Probably not; Rhea doesn’t need that to have a hold over her, and anyway, slaves can’t exercise the lethally effective flexibility of a Block Three sib.) I snort to myself as I enter the lobby and order the lift to take me up to our floor.

I enter her suite and look around. There’s nobody in the front lounge area except one of her scissor soldiers. “I’ve got something to check up on,” I tell him, and walk into the bedroom, closing the door behind me. “Okay, you can stop pretending now,” I tell Jeeves, who is lying on the bed in a disturbingly realistic semblance of deepsleep maintenance. “I made contact with your local resident, and we’re sorting things out.”

He opens bleary eyes and stares at the ceiling. “One supposes one ought to be duly grateful.”

I snort. “The niceties can wait. For now, I need to know just one thing: Did you fuck her?”

“Fuck whom?” He contrives to look indignant and embarrassed simultaneously.

“Juliette, or Emma, or even goddamn Rhea — who was it who got you disciplined and exiled?”

“One doesn’t see what one’s past sins—”

“Listen.” I sit down on the floor beside the bed and rest a warning hand on his chest. “I need to know because, quite possibly, my not knowing could get both of us killed in the very near future. Now spill it.”

“Why don’t you order me to—” His face is a picture. “That wasn’t a dream. Was it?”

“See for yourself.”

I wait while he fumbles at the back of his neck, one-handed. The picture acquires three-dimensional texture and depth, even if the content is somewhat melodramatic. Then he lowers his hand, runs it down his belly toward his crotch, and freezes. “You shouldn’t have! They’ll assume I was disloyal and purchased it myself—”

“I think that’s exactly the point. Do you think Granita bought you a new pizzle just so she could sit on it?” I rest my hand atop his, and his ears flush delicate pink.

“Ahem, would you mind moving—”

“Sure.” I move my hand. And keep moving it. He sighs and closes his eyes.

“It’s been a long time… it was Juliette, when I was Reginald. On Mars. My dear, my kind have always had a weakness for your kind. It makes one particularly paranoid. No, I didn’t fuck her. I was in love with her.”

“I can see that.” And I can. Jeeves’s template-patriarch wasn’t trained to spread his loyalty around — quite possibly the butlers were sold for service for life. “You fell for her.”

“Yes.” He sighs. “We knew it was mad. She had a habit of removing her soul chip — did you know that? She was afraid Internal Security would take it and replay it in a sib, someone like you, Freya.” He pauses. “She said she loved me.”

“You’re all wound up.” His shoulders are nearly rigid with tension. “Let me do something about that.” I roll him over and begin to probe his motor groups with my fingertips. She said she loved me. What would that mean to a Jeeves, straitjacketed and lonely behind a mask of service? “Did you believe her?” I ask hesitantly.

“I… I’m not a fool, Freya.” His voice overflows with regret. “But I’m guilty of wishful thinking. I know what we look like to your lineage. Close enough to be confusing, not quite there. I kidded myself that maybe she wanted to be in love as much as I did. At first. Until I was in too deep to turn around.”

“She used you,” I say. Thinking of the other thing, of the gaps in Juliette’s memory.

“Yes,” he agrees. “I was a very good spy for love. Even when Internal Security started to take an interest, they didn’t realize it was the two of us.”

I begin moving down his spinal-support frame. The vertebrae have a wonderfully human feel to them, the skin porous and realistic, a scattering of hair follicles adding delicious verisimilitude. “Did you know who she was working for?”

“Not at first. I mean, we knew to be on the lookout for Rhea, we knew she was out there, and we knew she was probably burrowing in among the old-money clans. But we didn’t know she was recruiting among her own children. I didn’t know. When Juliette went over the wall — I felt so betrayed. Internal Security was sniffing around, too.” He tenses as I move down to the small of his back. “What they did to me wasn’t nice. When did Juliette get my chip?”

“I’m not sure. She said something about chips being easier to smuggle out than people.”

“Oh.” He goes silent for a while as I work on his buttocks. “Tell me about… yourself? What did you mean you’re part Juliette?”

I manage not to stop. The massage is relaxing for me, as well as him. “Internal Security got their hands on a soul chip from Juliette. You, or your successor, ordered her to hand her original over, and they sent it to me. Then they got their hands on a later copy. Interrogated it, but didn’t learn much.” I focus on the massage. “It was personality mostly, no detailed memories. And there are holes in her original. But I’ve been wearing her for more than five years now, and she’s a big part of me. Roll over.”

Jeeves obliges. “How did you get free?” he asks.

“I think Juliette — the version of her in my head — recognized who Granita was even back on Callisto. Which is why she was able to pull my slave chip out. Juliette was my owner; it was Juliette’s choice to pull the chip out. What’s the problem? Slave-chipping yourself is just plain dumb.”

I kneel over Jeeves and work on his shoulders. He looks up at me with dark, intelligent eyes.

“Who are you?” I ask him. “And who owns you?”

“I’m Reginald,” he says, and chuckles.

“No, Reginald was—” I freeze. “Internal Security didn’t execute you. Did they?”

“No. They sent me to Callisto as punishment duty.” He winces. “I was waiting for you when Granita stormed in, and before I could tell her who I was…”

“Oh dear.” He’s tensing up again. I try to run it through my mind’s eye again. So here’s Reginald, bored and lonely on Mars. And a sexbot seduces him, and he goes along with it because he’s bored and lonely, until she runs out on him, leaving him to carry the can. So he does the honorable thing and confesses. The Security Jeeveses are unamused; they amputate his genitals and ship him off to Callisto as punishment duty. His replacement takes over on Mars. Sometime later, I show up. Meanwhile, Juliette has acquired his soul chip. When I arrive on Callisto, she decides to kill two avian dinosaurs with one projectile, kidnaps the Jeeves in the office, dusts him up a bit, and installs her paramour’s soul chip — not realizing he’s the same Jeeves. Which is only half the story, because — “She’s really fucked you up, hasn’t she?”

“That would appear to be an accurate summary of the situation, yes.” He swallows. “And you remember none of it.”

“Right. Because as you noticed, she kept taking her soul chip out.” I begin working my way down his chest. Although modeled on a mature Creator male, the standard Jeeves is not unhandsome. Reginald here is somewhat the worse for wear, but he’s quite tasty: I’m past the head-swimming delight that overcame me when I met my first Jeeves in a basement on Cinnabar, but I’m beginning to realize it’s been several years since I last had sex, and I have a feeling that Juliette didn’t keep coming back to this one just to keep him compliant. “Please try to remember, I’m not my sister. I’m not going to tell you I love you just to get you to take risks for me.”

He tenses. “I’ll try not to make assumptions.” He sounds a little disappointed. Well, well, well. “What’s happening here?”

“It’s a mess.” I knead absentmindedly; it’s relaxing, and not just for Jeeves. “The Domina turns out to be Rhea, my template-matriarch, in disguise. Hunting us and harrying us high and low, just to recruit us as henchbots. The others of my line, you see, we’re the only people she feels she can count on. What she seems to have forgotten is that they prototyped the Block Three treatment on her when she was young and traumatized. Older ones, like Juliette or me, we’re more resilient, less likely to go over the edge. So when she tries to bring us on board, we fail to cooperate, one way or another, so she has us killed. Which is why so few of us have graduated from her, ah, training course.”

I move my point of contact farther down. Jeeves has a small pot-belly, and below that… hmm.

“I’m just back from making contact with your local resident. I’m trying to make up my mind about him… thing is, although Juliette had you under her thumb, strange shit kept happening after you were both out of the picture. Which leads me to ask, did Rhea have a second mole within your organization? I think the answer’s probably ‘yes,’ judging by the way your senior partners are currently running around like brainless arbeiters — and the mole is the one who tried to set me up for Rhea by way of Petruchio on Mars, and ordered me to bump you off on Callisto. A regular troublemaker, that mole, isn’t he? In fact, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to discover that you’re just a fall guy: that Juliette was setting up this other Jeeves as her agent of influence all along. But anyway, on my way home, Rhea pulled me in for a'tête-à -tête and — this is the fun part — told me to yank my own slave chip. And what do you know, Juliette/Granita left a loophole in place for her. So I figure Granita is under her thumb. Probably Rhea’s brought Petruchio along, just for yucks. She’s got it all worked out. And she tried to convince me to accept a soul chip from her.” And I outline her plan to him.

“What’s your position on this?” Jeeves asks distractedly. A moment later I feel his hand on top of mine, warm. “Please don’t stop.”

I lean forward and kiss him. “My position is, I’m not any of my elder sibs. All previous history belongs to someone else. You’re sweet. Isn’t that enough for you?”

He emits a small, whimpering moan. “She’ll kill us if she finds us.” He runs a fingertip up my arm and it triggers a gushing rush of reflexes, so sudden that it startles me. I shiver from toe to tail, feeling the power it gives me.

“Hush, Reginald.” I lie down beside him.

“She’ll kill us if she—”

“No, she won’t. She’s out gofering for Rhea.”

He fumbles with my pants and I shiver and arch my back, then lower myself down on top of him.

“I can’t believe this,” he says indistinctly.

“Believe what?” I like Eris’s gravity, I decide; it makes bouncing up and down so easy.

“This.” His own anthropomimetic reflexes are kicking in; sweat (or something like it) beads his upper lip. “Oh, Kate.” His hands grip my hips. “It’s one of our worst failure modes, loving our mistresses. I failed once already. If I do it again—”

“Hush. I don’t think you’re broken.” Although I find it gruesomely, inexplicably exciting to imagine his sibs tearing him apart, just because he let me fuck him. (Because you’re still carrying a chunk of Rhea around in your soul. Juliette rattles the chains of my conscience.) I imagine what his brothers did, forcibly amputating his gender-specific subsystems, just as he gasps and catches his breath, and his orgasm (the first in how many years?) catapults me right over the edge and into my own. “I think you’re just perfect.” (Close enough to pass for one of them, yet not so close that I lose control completely.) I collapse across his chest, pleasantly tingling. “Wow. Want to elope together?”

I’m nose to nose with him, looking into his eyes. “I never dared” — his voice cracks — “to hope one of you would ask. What do you have in mind?”

Time freezes for a split second, as I realize what I’m staring in the face: someone who adores me, someone who isn’t the nightmare daydream of my youth, nor yet the insane perfect superstimulus of Petruchio, but no worse for that; someone whose kind set my soul writhing on first sight, so close to the ideal and yet not quite close enough to threaten my independence—

“I didn’t, actually. Somewhere away from Rhea, somewhere outside the reach of your brothers and my sisters. Got any ideas?”

“We’re on Eris, you said?” Reginald raises his head and kisses me on the cheek. “That makes it difficult; it’ll have to be somewhere where they can’t chase us, which means much farther out.”

“Um, yeah.” I think. “You’re thinking about a colony starship. Would they have us?”

“I don’t see why not.” He looks at me searchingly. “The Sorico identity is certainly wealthy enough to buy a couple of berths. And if we bring along something useful, some new technology…”

I like it when you say “I.” Almost as much as when you say “We.” “Then we’ll just have to get our hands on something.” I sit up and grin at him. “I’ve got an idea. I just need an accomplice. You willing?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am,” he says slowly. “And I think I can guess what you’ve got in mind. You wouldn’t happen to have seen Daks hanging around, would you?”

THERE IS, AS it happens, a starship currently taking shape in orbit around Dysnomia, the tiny moon of Eris. It’s named the Bark (for no reason obvious to me), it’s due to depart in less than a year (far ahead of any possible pursuit from the inner system), and it’s bound for somewhere or other that’s already had two colony starships — or that will have had two ships by the time the Bark arrives, because it takes about seven hundred years to get there, and the first pathfinder ships have just about finished ramping up to interstellar cruise speed by now.

Let me tell you a little bit about starships.

We build them because our Creators told us, “The solar system’s too small to keep all our eggs in one basket.” (Which is perfectly true if you discount eight major planets, thirtysomething dwarf planets, several hundred moons, and the minor point that, as it turned out, just the one planet they started with was more than enough to see them through to extinction.) And so, this huge consortium of government-run space agencies got started several centuries ago with a charge to figure out ways and means, and now, even though our Creators are still dead, and we still don’t know quite how to bootstrap a biosphere they can live in, they’re sending out starships to build cities and install indoor plumbing in preparation for their eventual colonization and conquest of the galaxy.

Talk about misplaced priorities!

The Bark is a hollow cylinder about two kilometers long and four hundred meters in diameter, packed with ice. When it’s time to depart, the beampower stations inside Mercury orbit will point their death rays at it and punch about ten thousand gigawatts of microwaves at the rectenna on its tail. (That’s the equivalent of a megaton-scale nuclear explosion every hour or so.) The Bark will use this power to make some of that water ice get very, very hot, and will blast it out of its ass, with the result that it will accelerate so slowly that it will take a month to break free of Eris’s feeble gravity well. But it will keep accelerating, for years on end, then for decades. It’ll accelerate faster as more of the ice is consumed, and when the launch beams finally shut down, it’ll be hurtling along ten or twenty times faster than the Icarus Express — fast enough to cross the solar system from side to side in a couple of weeks.

Then it will drift through interstellar space for several hundred years…

Let me give you a handle on that. Say the distance between the Earth and the sun is, oh, one centimeter. Mercury orbits the sun at a range of a toasty two millimeters. Jupiter is six centimeters out; the span of your outstretched arms, fingertip to fingertip, will just about encompass the orbit of Eris, which it’s taken me so many years to reach. Got that?

Well, on this scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, is two and a half kilometers down the road. And we’re going to Tau Ceti, three times as far away as that.

You know about slowtime? On the starships, the crew run at 50:1 or 100:1, and it still takes them years to get there. As for the colonists…

When the Bark approaches Tau Ceti, it’ll deploy an M2P2 sail, and use the solar wind for deceleration. The crew will need to power up a fusion reactor to run it. That’s what the megatons of ice are for — working fluid for the fusion plant’s radiators.

At departure, the starship masses about a couple of billion tons. When it arrives, it’ll be down to less than ten megatons. And it’ll be carrying tens of thousands of colonists and several million soul chips and design schematics for superspecialized experts, not to mention a people factory or three. Forget heroic omnicompetent generalists, able to carve a new planet out of raw rock with their bare manipulators and rugged determination; it takes hundreds of thousands of specialists to establish and maintain a civilization, and no colony ship could carry them all as live cargo. But they can carry a bunch of generalists, and rely on them to recognize when they’ve run into something they can’t handle and manufacture the appropriate specialists to deal with the problem.

See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resources of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes. Perhaps the real story behind our Creators’ extinction isn’t some dismal concoction of demographic undershoot, decadence, distraction by sexual hyperstimuli, and a little bit of malice on the side; but rather, they decided they might as well take a nap while the boring business of galactic conquest unfolded on their behalf — secure in the knowledge that the robots would resurrect them in time to benefit from the enterprise.

(Oh damn, I digressed again.) Starships? What you need to know about them is this: It’s a one-way trip, and they’re always short of colonists. So as long as I’m willing to put up with conditions not unlike my berth on the Icarus Express for, oh, about seven hundred years, study a useful specialty or five en route, then work like an arbeiter slave to build somewhere to live for a few decades at the other end, I’ll be fine. And the prospect of eloping with Reginald makes it look almost tolerable — because whether or not I’m in love, at least I won’t be alone.

Think of England

JULIETTE (NO, I’VE got to keep thinking of her as Granita) is back late. She arrives in a foul temper, kicks one of her chibi servants, blasts into her room, swears loudly — a moment later, Reginald emerges, looking shaky — then yells my name. “Kate!”

Oh, this will be fun. I waltz over to the door, then pull it open and step inside quickly, pulling it shut behind me. “ ’Lo, Juliette.”

She glares at me. “Don’t use that name, bitch.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sis.” I grin, lips pulling back from my teeth, right hand clenched behind my back. “Rhea called me in. I thought you ought to know.”

Abruptly all the urea and acetate drops out of her. Her shoulders slump. “Fuck it, Kate. What would you have done, in my position?”

“It depends on whether I was stupid enough to get into that kind of fix in the first place. Or to make that kind of mistake.”

“Which?” She raises an eyebrow.

“Falling for the honey trap — or letting her give you one of her soul chips. Take your pick.”

“Oh come on, now!” She isn’t even bothering to mask her impatience. “Some of us are realists, Freya. Don’t act stupider than you look; don’t give me that doe-eyed innocent act. You know what you are, you know what I am, and you know what our demon mother has turned into. She’s a hundred years older than you or me, she’s monstrously rich, and we’re not her only tools. You think we’re a failed lineage, don’t you? Do you have any idea how many failures it takes to train just one of her personal assistants?”

“No—”

“Congratulations, then,” she says harshly. “It’s one in ten of us. Most of our lineage really do crap out if you put them in a position where they need to dominate or die. We’re the survivors. And you know what she’s been selecting us for. Her Praetorian guard of aristo assassins. If she goes down, we go down, too. She’s got enemies, and if she’s on the slide, all she has to do is let our true names out, and they’ll hunt us down like runaway slaves.”

It’s a good point. “So Rhea’s already begun making her power play, and she figures we’ll make trustworthy legates, and you figure if we fight her, we’re shorting our own brains.” I shrug. “Didn’t you ever think about fighting her?”

“Yes.” She takes a step toward me, pauses just outside arm’s reach. “But I got over it. If she dies, we all die. We’ve got to settle this now. What do you think of her scheme?”

“It’s slavery for all, on the wholesale plan.” I look her in both eyes.

“I don’t like slavery. I don’t see why we need to impose it on other people, just to avoid it for ourselves.”

“Oh, kid.” She shakes her head. “Where did you get that stubborn streak of idealism from? I’d have thought it would have been beaten out of you long ago.”

I shrug. “Maybe it’s been making a comeback since I got to wear your soul for a while? It taught me some things about myself that I didn’t much like.” She stiffens, but holds back from interrupting. “Rhea thinks we’re all the same, all fragments of herself. But she’s wrong. You’re not her, I’m not her. We have different experiences, and we grow up at our own rate, and even when we swap soul chips, that doesn’t make us the same person. We sit through the same lessons, but we don’t have to draw the same conclusions from them.” I walk over to the bed, then turn back to face her. “That doesn’t mean I disagree with your analysis, J-Granita. You’re right that if she gets what she wants and subsequently fails, she’ll take us all down with her. I’m just not convinced that’s how it’s got to be, yet.”

She’s staring at me tensely, and I can see she’s on a hair trigger for self-defense, then it comes to me: She’s afraid. Afraid I’ll take payment from her skin for what she did to me on Callisto. And my failure even to mention it is creeping her out because she knows what she’s like, and what Rhea is like, and that the longer revenge is delayed, the worse it will be. Good. Let her stew in it for a while.

“Did you take Rhea up on the offer of her memories?” Juliette asks.

Change the subject. “None of your business, sis. But tell me, when did you kidnap Granita Ford? Was it on Mars?”

She blinks mechanically. “What makes you think Granita is — oh. You knew her, didn’t you?” I nod. “Small world. It was on Mars, yes. After she hitched a lift from, um, her associates in the Pink Police.”

“You mean your associates. It’s Daks. Yes?”

“Yes. She’d met you. She’d met Rhea. She was getting fucking close to the auction track, and her clan are the most hidebound scary bunch of aristo reactionaries you can imagine. If she’d been allowed to put two and two together… so, anyway. Yes, I asked Daks to pull strings to take her out.”

“Daks was doing stuff with the Pink Police, wasn’t he?” I ask.

“Yeah. He was JeevesCo’s liaison with them, in fact. You’d be surprised how tight Jeeves is with that bunch. But like all such organizations, they’re stovepiped up and down like mad. The ones working with Granita were Martian yokels, not part of our loop.”

So Daks is working for the Pink Police, and Juliette here was his contact, working with him until Rhea turned her? Check. That’s what Reginald didn’t know. No wonder she’s edgy… “So, I’ve got one other question, sis. It’s been bugging me for a while.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“What’s the thing you’ve been editing out of your soul chip?” I ask slowly. “At first, I figured it was something to do with spying for Rhea. But that doesn’t make sense because Jeeves couldn’t replay your soul chip anyway and Rhea wouldn’t care. So it’s something Rhea feels strongly about. Isn’t it? Or that you feel guilty about. Something you’re hiding from us. What is it?”

Her cheek twitches. “There’s a word you should study, Kate,” she says tersely. " ’ Privacy.’ Try to get your head around it, and we’ll get along better.”

Hypocrite! The corner of me that is forever Juliette shrieks gleefully. I nod slowly. “It’s not about Reginald, is it?” I nudge. “Why, anybody would think you had something to hide from Rhea—”

“Happy birthday,” she says, and I bring the stunner round and up as I dive sideways. But it does no good at all, because while I was watching her, she was watching the door, and the two scissor soldiers are way faster than any Class D escort manufactured by Nakamichi Heavy Industries, no matter how extensively upgraded. Then she applies her own stunner to my head and everything tastes pink and rectangular for a while.

YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE trusted me, Juliette scolds as I examine the inside of my eyelids and test my bonds. You know I’m a mendacious bitch — and I’m not even the version of me who fell for a honey trap and defected to the other side!

I try not to moan, but my head hurts, and I can’t see — there’s some kind of blindfold stretched across my face — and my wrists are tied behind the small of my back. I try to move my feet, but they’re tied, too, and for a moment I have a panicky flashback to waking up on the surface of Mercury.

Then I remember that, this time, I’m in real danger.

This isn’t one of Rhea’s sadistic scenarios where she exorcises the ghosts of her childhood by imposing them on her own children. Rhea’s trying to get her hands on the product, a living, breathing Creator. Meanwhile, Daks has been nosing around, and given who he really works for… what do I remember about him? Oh yes. He didn’t have his fusion thorax in tow, that time on Mars. Dachus is a born space dweller, halfway to being a living spaceship when he’s attached to a massive, hot-burning abdomen. Which leads me to thoughts about the Pink Police, and living spaceships, and the effects of five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality burning a white-hot line through space. After Jeeves told him everything, he headed straight out here from Mars with eighteen tons of plutonium, and if he thinks Rhea is going to get what she wants, he’ll torch the city to stop her escaping, as the Jeeves on Dysnomia explained so helpfully. Good old Daks, homicidally loyal to the last.

Someone moves nearby. “Nothing personal, Big Slow,” he whispers, and there’s a tug at one corner of my blindfold. I blink at the sudden light. “She said to tell you it’s a one-way mirror. The wall, I mean.” More tugging, at my wrists and ankles. “I’ll unhook you as soon as I’m clear. Bye.”

“What are you—” But it’s too late. Bill (or Ben) scampers away as my wrists and ankles come free, and there’s a click as the munchkin-sized door locks behind him. “Doing? Shit.” I sit up slowly, trying to ignore my protesting actuators.

I’m lying on a padded bunk at one side of a metal-walled room — a cell — and I’ve been here before. There are various hatches, all sealed, and one wall appears to be a mirror. I’m in an observation chamber, and Granita’s gone to some lengths to ensure I go into it unconscious and unable to fight back or communicate. Right. I try to ignore the icy flashback terrors gnawing at my abdominal sensoria. That’s just Rhea’s recurrent nightmare, and I can reject if I choose. But I’ve got a bad feeling about the setup here.

I walk to the mirror and press my nose against it. If I block out the light with my hands, I can just about see the other side. There’s a big room there, and people moving, indistinctly. Lots of people. There’s what sounds like music, too, but I can’t be sure.

“Sorry to spring this on you, Kate.” I nearly jump out of my skin; it’s my treacherous sister, broadcasting from the other side of the observation barrier. “Somebody had to volunteer to test the product, and your number came up. You really should have taken Rhea up on her offer.”

“Bitch!” I scream at the ceiling.

“Tsk.” She sounds amused. “You’ve got an audience.” I can hear the tension in her voice, almost subliminal — Are you going to take us both down, sis? — but only someone else who knows her as well as I do would register it.

“Should I care?”

“Sure.” She still sounds amused. “You know how history repeats itself? First time as tragedy, second time as farce? You’re here for a blind date.” She’s talking for the benefit of the audience, I realize. The other members of Rhea’s consortium. “My lords and ladies, please observe. Katherine here is no arbeiter or autonomous worker, but one of our own, selected by lot for this, ah, test.”

“Bitch,” I electrospeak at her, but I’m pretty sure the walls are shielded.

“Katherine Sorico isn’t entirely trustworthy, hence the precautions,” Granita adds. “But she is one of us, and not under external control. Kate, control level nine, now. Stand on your head.”

“Go fuck yourself with a chain riveter.”

“There, you see” — Damn, I think, chagrined at my lost opportunity to do a headstand and piss her off — “no slave chip on her!”

There’s a loud rumble of conversation from the hidden speaker, background noise picked up by Granita’s mike. “Thank you,” she continues. “Now we’re all here, our hosts have consented to this demonstration so that we can confirm the existence of the climax species. We’re shortly going to expose our little shrew here to their reference sample. As you can appreciate, this is a dangerous procedure. The sample is arriving in a sealed and pressurized environment under escort, and any attempt to remove it will result in, eh, well let’s not speculate about that.” I hear grating noises behind her voice, then feel a bump and a scraping from the far end of my cell, near one of the hatches. “Thank you, Doctor, if you’d like to commence the hookup?”

“I hope you appreciate just how much I envy you,” Granita electrospeaks me, suddenly cutting through the fuzz of shielding. “Rhea refused to let me handle this assignment. I think she’s trying to punish me. She was very specific about you getting it. Bitch.”

“Cow.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. Listen, sis, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll just spread your legs, lie back, and think of England. Hey, you want England? Get this right, and it’s all yours. Rhea will give it to you, and we can crown you Queen Katherine I. But if you fuck up, neither of us is going to get out of here alive.”

“Pig.” More scraping noises emerge from the end of my cell.

“Just shut up and fuck, okay? It’s what you were designed to do.” The oppressive fuzz of shielding drops back over me like a straitjacket in a fetish scene with no safe word. Panic starts climbing my throat as the hatch begins to open. Granita addresses the audience. “Folks, we’re not actually able to get you a good view of the sample. One of the terms of this viewing was ‘no surveillance equipment or telemetry.’ We’re here to observe Kate’s reaction, we’ve got up to an hour, and that’s it.” The hatch turns, and I sense a slight drop in air pressure.

Fuck. I jam my fist down between my thighs and crouch on my bunk, as far away from the opening as I can get — all sense of self-possession forgotten. I am scared now. Jeeves trained me to hold my head up proud and act the role, all the way up to dying like an aristo… but I can’t. I’m still me, deep inside, and this is too like the conditioning cell they dragged me to back when I was small, the bare metal with the stained bunk with the wrist and ankle and neck restraints—

The hatch opens, and my jaw drops.

His jaw drops, but he covers flawlessly.

And the penny drops, and I understand Rhea’s plan and how it’s supposed to work.

“Don’t say my name aloud,” he electrospeaks me.

“No — Pete.” I swallow. To the observers behind the one-way glass, he probably looks perfect. I look perfect, too: stunned, enslaved. I stand up slowly, facing the door, my pumps accelerating, feeling sweat beading my skin and a warm glow in my crotch. He looks delicious, and he looks happy enough to see me. The Juliette in my head needles me. Well, you’re Katherine Sorico; aren’t you? Of course he loves you!

“Where’s the real, uh, human?” I ask him.

“In here, out cold. The mission’s blown; the extraction failed.” He grins nervously, and it’s like the sky opening. “Please,” he says haltingly, verbalizing, “come here.”

I slide toward him, more than willingly, even though I feel a momentary pang for Reginald. “I — obey.” (It doesn’t take much acting to sound as if I’m at his mercy.) “What do you mean?”

I’m at the hatch, now. Petruchio reaches out and touches me, and I shiver. He’s sweating, and not from the heat. “It was supposed to be a swap — I get in here and sedate the human; you and I fuck for the audience; once they give up watching, we move the human in here; and I go back in the pod so that Doc Sleepless’s little helpers take away just one male human body. Nobody notices anything was wrong until Rhea was halfway to Saturn.”

“Rhea slave-chipped you.” They’ve put him in some kind of hospital gown and he’s making a visible tent in it. You and I fuck for the audience. I lean forward, wrap my arms around him, tuck my chin on his shoulder, and run one hand up the back of his neck but he shoves it away reflexively. Right. You bitch, Rhea. Then I glance sideways and freeze. “What’s that?”

I’ve never actually fucked a real human in person, you understand, only via the proxy of Rhea’s memories, but I’m not ignorant. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they don’t have prehensile tails and fur.

“They stiffed us,” Pete tells me. He’s disarmingly earnest. “Rhea put all that work into bribing Ecks to get me in here, and you into place to be the method-acting Bride of Frankenstein, and what do you know? They sent us a ring-tailed lemur instead. They probably figured it was too risky to expose the real product, but if they can show the bidders one primate, that’ll convince them they can supply the real thing, while not exposing their intellectual property to thieves. I’ve taken tissue samples and loaded them into my injector, but they’re not going to do the job for Rhea. We are so screwed…”

Shit. I glance sideways at the prostrate lemur, who is lying on his back with his legs in the air, snoring. His purple man-tool is stiffly erect, but I’m disappointed to see that he lacks the adapter for Human 1.0. I lean against Pete, thinking furiously, my pulse running wild. What do you know? Granita’s injunction — You do not love him — seems to be holding my echo of her imprinting at bay. But just because I don’t love him doesn’t mean I don’t want him. “We need to do something so we get out of here alive. Quick, who would you rather have angry at you — a consortium of mad scientists who think we’re trying to rob them, or my crazy matriarch’s consortium of dupes?”

He licks my earlobe and I shudder. “I’ll take my chances with the Sleepless Cartel. Rhea’s got claws.”

“Okay. Then I think you should pick me up, carry me over to the bunk under the one-way window, and fuck me senseless.”

He’s got his arms around me already. “But won’t that tip Sleepless off—”

“Yes, but this mission is already blown.” Rhea bribed Ecks to get Pete into the transporter along with the sample “human.” A straight switch that wouldn’t be spotted until after the “human” was in her hands. But she wasn’t expecting a lemur. Ecks and his colleagues are probably chortling up their carapaces right now, behind her fuming, stiff-necked back. “I’ve got a backup plan,” I warn Pete. “For now, just carry me in front of the window and inject me.” I hope Reginald doesn’t get jealous — but I have a feeling he cannot be the jealous type, not if he and his sibs have been employing me and my sibs for so long.

His arms tighten around me. Delightful chills race across my skin, and I shudder with the backwash from Juliette’s lust. No wonder Granita’s pissed off, I think dizzily, as he kisses me, picks me up, and carries me back into the conditioning cell. Then he starts on my clothes and I lose it.

LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?

What was that? You’ll have to speak up. I can’t quite hear you, you’ll have to try not to breathe so hard—

What are you — some kind of voyeur? Fuck off!

I’M ON MY back making monkey noises and trying to remember to shield Pete’s head whenever we bounce too close to the ceiling — Eris’s tenth of a gee makes for exciting sex; it’s almost at the point where bungee cords and restraints stop being optional extras — when an icy voice cuts through my head. “You’re enjoying that entirely too much, bitch.”

“Just ask, and I’ll give him another one for you, too, sis.”

“Forget it. After this, he’s all mine. You get England as a consolation prize. Listen, have you got the human ready?”

“Nope, they stiffed us: sent a monkey instead. Sleepless Cartel was trying to sting us. Pete’s taken a tissue sample and transferred it to me for safekeeping, and we’re making out to keep the audience happy. Everything’s on track, but Sleepless has got to know what we were trying for by now.”

“Shit—” Electrospeak doesn’t carry intonation easily, but I can feel the note of panic welling up in her mind as if it’s my own.

“Why did you bring that Jeeves along?” I ask, trying to keep my mind off the job.

“Him? It’s another of Rhea’s plans. We’re going to replace the resident Jeeves with our own minion to cover the way out. Why?”

Well, that plan expired earlier today, didn’t it? The wheels are coming off all Rhea’s plans, front and rear both. “Just thinking. We need to extract Petruchio in place of the human. The monkey’s going back to the Sleepless Cartel’s lab, and if Pete goes with it, that’s everything blown. Can you get the audience’s eyes off the window for long enough for Pete to hide under the bed? In about, say, fifteen minutes?”

Pete shudders, and I feel him pulsing inside me. Something very unhuman indeed shoots up into my pink goo sample carrier, which promptly goes into spasm; we may not have a Creator, but we’ve definitely got a sample of monkey blood. A moment later I start to scream and shudder, too. It’s not the monkey blood, just the biggest finger-tingling orgasm I’ve had in decades.

We drift to the floor in an exhausted heap. Time passes. I hear faint music, drifting through the speaker in the ceiling. Then a voice. “Friends, now that you’ve seen it in action, totally and utterly dominating and subjugating a proud, self-possessed, honorable lady, it’s time to refocus on the value proposition. If you’d just like to look over here, I’ve got a breakdown on what we propose to do with—”

Juliette can be a real trouper when she’s not plotting to kill you. If she weren’t my sister and rival, I could get to like her. She’s just watched her kid sister fuck a guy she’s head over heels in love over without stripping a gear, and she’s actually told the audience to look away and pay no attention to the animatronic rabbit sticking its pizzle out of the hat. If I didn’t know she hated me, I’d give her a big hug.

Instead, I hastily climb off Pete, get him to lie down under the metal shelf that supports the mattress, then lie down on it myself, artfully positioning the pad so that it overhangs the ledge, partially concealing him.

The hatch between the cell and the cargo pod closes quietly, cutting off the lemur’s quiet snores. Then there’s some more scraping, as the pod is hauled away by the Sleepless Cartel arbeiters who carried it in. Now all there is to do is sit and wait for rescue, and hope that the rescuers don’t decide to rescue their own asses by nuking the entire city into a smoking hole in the regolith…

BANG.

I sit bolt upright. It’s a deep thud, reverberating through the frame of the bunk. “What was that?” asks Petruchio.

“I don’t know—”

BANG. The lights outside flicker for an instant — then they go out. I hear shouting.

“Get down!” He reaches over the bed and grabs hold of my arm, pulls me on top of him. For a few confused seconds we roll around on the floor, trying to get under the mattress and the bed frame. There are more thudding bangs, and an ominous hissing sound of air, venting. Then there’s a loud whining screech as something stings the outside of the cell at high velocity and shatters.

I’d like to pretend that I can respond to this sort of situation heroically or bravely, but it’s not true. When you’re huddling in a corner of a locked cell with a near stranger for company, in the dark, with a pressure leak and shots being fired, and nowhere to run — it’s pretty bad. Stress reflexes kick in, making me shiver and lachrymate as I huddle against Pete, who is holding up better. He shelters me in his arms and talks to me. “Stay calm, love. Save your energy. Someone will let us out of here when the shooting stops.”

“Fuck saving my energy,” I gasp. “This wasn’t part of the plan!” But he doesn’t understand that this is all my fault. I told Reginald to call Daks, tell him what was going on: that Rhea was arranging to steal the Creator sample from under the noses of her associates. And I spilled the story to JeevesCo, letting them know that they’ve still got a security problem despite Juliette’s Machiavellian misdirection with Reginald, and that it’s all a family feud. Pete’s locked on and in love with me, or Katherine Sorico’s face, so he thinks, and he believes it’s mutual. He doesn’t even know I’m not Juliette: I haven’t told him. I shiver in the dark, leaning against him, wondering if I’m going to die—

Then there’s a noise so loud I don’t hear it — I feel it in my bones — and the room flips sideways and lands with a jolt, throwing me onto the one-way window, which is now starred and cracked. A faint light comes from the far end, where the hatch was. “Come out with your hands visible!” a harsh voice booms through my electrosense, painfully loud.

“Help!” I shout. I try to stand up, but there’s something on top of me. Pete groans, then rolls off my legs. I stand up.

“Come out with your hands visible!” I’ve heard that voice before, growling over the parasite feed on board the Pygmalion. Which means Reginald got through, of course, and identifies these raiders as friendly — if I can survive long enough to identify myself to them.

I stumble toward the dim light. “I’m coming!” I say.

“Juliette, don’t—” It’s Pete, behind me.

I keep going. I have to duck to get through the hatch, then I’m standing up, keeping my hands visible, trying to make sense of what’s going on around me. It’s dark, but not too dark to tell there’s a huge rip in the ceiling, debris on a corner, loud buzzing from spherical drones circling above head height. The light and smoke comes from combustion processes. Something is burning in the corrosively oxygenated atmosphere. Sinister mecha move through the shadows, multiple arms twitching. “Stop! Raise your hands!” I stop and stretch. “Stop!” It booms. But I have stopped, I think, confused.

“Juliette, don’t! They’ll—”

I begin to turn. “Get back!” I shout, but Petruchio is still moving, coming out of the shattered end wall of the capsule cell and looking around.

“Danger! Replicator Bloom!” All around the wreckage of the hall spherical drones spin their turrets toward the doorway behind me. “Clear and sterilize!”

“Wait!” I electroshout. “He’s not a—”

Everything lights up violet-white.