Saturn's Children

I throw myself backward onto the oversprung mattress and summon up my mail on my pad. There’s a total lack of communication from Freya’s liquidators back on Earth, which I take to be a good sign, but there’s some news for Kate. I pull up the Martian Jeeves’s imago, looking slightly flustered and hot around the collar. “Fr — Katherine, my dear? I’m, ah, I hope this message finds you well.” He swallows. Dear Creators, just talking to my imago triggers his homomimetic reflexes? I tense nervously. “I’m afraid I had to disclose our, er, little dalliance, to, ah, my senior partners in the enterprise. They are all very understanding, but suggested in no uncertain terms that I should explain to you, er. Ah. Certain.” He runs a finger around his collar. “Facts.” He clears his throat.

I clear mine right back at the imago. “Would you mind getting to the point? I don’t have all day.” Stupid imago. Recording its Creator’s quirks is all very well, but replaying them ad nauseam is somewhat less amusing.

“Ah, yes! Well, indeed, that is to say, they told me to tell you to” — his face morphs into a stony mask, from which icy little pebble eyes glint like soulless cometary fragments — “keep your hands off the junior partners, minion, or we will be forced to withdraw our employment, just as one did with your elder sister.” For a moment his chilly gaze holds me transfixed, then something changes, and his expression collapses into helpless sorrow. “Um, I don’t know what I can add to that. I’m… oh dear.” He sniffs. “Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules, and that’s an end of it. Kate, what can I say?”

I shudder violently, take a deep breath, and try to throw off the memory of that cryogenic stare. “It’s alright, Jeeves. I get the message.” Well, truly, I don’t; I find it deeply baffling. Do Jeeveses exchange soul chips while they’re still alive? That might explain his extraordinary personality change. And also the similarity between them — they’re much closer than my sibs and I. A stab of remorse: I thought it was just harmless fun. Maybe extreme arousal lies outside Jeeves’s normal operational parameters? “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again. Oh dear. Um. What am I supposed to do now?”

Jeeves’s imago struggles to pull himself together. “Your next mission is to present yourself at your earliest convenience to our local office, at” — he rattles off an address — “where my senior partner will discuss your assignment with you. You should know” — he pauses; the stony-eyed expression is abruptly back — “that the Jeeves-in-Residence was transferred to Callisto under suspicion. We have now traced your incorrect orders to this office. We believe the Jeeves-in-Residence is the traitor responsible for betraying our organization, and we hereby instruct you to, ah, kill him.” Beads of oily biomimetic sweat stand out on his forehead. He stops abruptly. “That’s all I’m supposed to say to you. I’m's-sorry. Good-bye.”

“Hey, wait one…!” I shout, but the imago has autoerased itself, taking what’s left of his love-struck gaze with it, leaving only a faintly apologetic eyebrow to hover in my visual field for a moment longer.

“Idiot!” Baffled and fuming (and humiliated, and trying not to admit it to myself), I pace back and forth across the suite, giving in to agitation. Kill the Jeeves-in-Residence? Because he’s a mole? Transferred under suspicion? What in our Creator’s name is going on here? A nasty thought strikes me — how do I know that the Marsport Jeeves isn’t the traitor? I’ve got nothing but his unsupported word that this one’s the bad ’un, after all. “Fool!” I kick the side of the bed, cracking the icy sheet. Romantic entanglements with the hired help are Against The Rules — as long as you don’t count fucking with their heads, it seems.

Let’s see. Jeeves is working against the Domina and her Black Talon friends, but he’s also colluding with her. Or one of him is. Which one? Who knows? The colluding one is using me to send messages — possibly in the form of my own neck — unless the noncolluding one is trying to convince me that…

I turn to the next message in my queue, hoping it’ll stop my brain melting. Instead, I realize only too late that it’s anonymous and there’s no imago — just a speech stream.

“Sister.” I hear heavy breathing, as if in a pressurized atmosphere with an oxidizing component. A metallic, hatefully familiar voice. “You should have kept your filthy claws off him. He’s mine.”

I recoil. The Domina? What’s she doing in my inbox? “What do you want?” I ask.

A breathy little chuckle. “You,” she says. And then the message runs out of branches and — damn it, just like Jeeves! — autoerases. One of these days, when I’m domina-of-dominas, I’ll issue a decree that bans self-erasing mail. Until then, all I can do is swear at my pad, and my empty queue, and my purposeless so-called life. And then, a brisk dry-cleaning shower being not at all appealing, it occurs to me that I might as well go forth and visit the Jeeves-in-Residence. At least I can ask him some questions before I make up my mind whether to kill him. The alternative is to lie here staring at the cracks in the ceiling and wonder if I’m going crazy; because while my poison caller sounded like the Domina, I’ve heard that breathy laugh before — in my very own throat, while I’ve been dreaming of Juliette.

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when I landed in Nerrivik, which is on the equator, and it’s edging slowly toward dusk as I step out. (Callisto’s diurnal period is more than sixteen standard days long.) Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky — it covers almost as wide an angle as Earth, seen from the Lunar equator — while the sun, a shrunken, glaring button, sinks slowly toward the horizon. There is never a truly dark night on Callisto, although total solar eclipses are not uncommon and bring an eerie twilight to the crumpled desolation.

It’s chilly outside, and I’m very glad for the cold-weather mods I installed on Mars. Out beyond the edge of town, distant flecks of light inch across the broken horizon. I can’t tell if they’re bulk carriers crawling along the ground or more distant freight buckets riding the magnetic catapult up to their parking orbit. In the opposite direction, the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows. My map-fu is loaded, and I let it guide me toward a paraboloid structure that claims to be a run-down office complex occupied by a variety of mining-support businesses and body shops. JeevesCo supposedly maintains a presence there, although I can’t for the life of me see why — this isn’t exactly a high-class joint. There are gambling dens and juice joints and whorehouses galore, for even mining overseers have needs, but there’s precious little market for a gentleman’s gentleman. Still, I suppose he has his reasons…

I wait impatiently for the air lock to cycle and flush me with warm carbon dioxide. The sooner I can get off this ball of mucky ice, the better. Hopefully this particular Jeeves simply wants me to carry something back to the fleshpots of the i

The reception desk blinks at me. “Fourth floor,” it says. “But there’s a visit—”

“Never mind; he’s expecting me.” I head for the elevators.

I step out of the elevator into a drab vestibule. It’s completely empty but for two doors at either end. One of them has a discreet plaque, brass untarnished by exposure to oxygen. Facilitators Unlimited. I approach it and electrospeak the lock: “Freya, to see Jeeves.”

“Come in.”

The lock clicks and the door opens before me and hands close around my wrists and drag me inside. And in a split-second instant of crystalline clarity, I realize I’ve been very, very stupid.