“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.”