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.”
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.”
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