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.)