Saturn's Children (41 page)

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.