“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?”