Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

“Hmm.” I raise an eyebrow. “Would you mind giving me a signed statement to that effect? Notarized? I’ll pay — I’m just thinking of suing.”

He buzzes. After a moment I realize it’s laughter. “All part of the service!”

And so I rub my face ruefully as I trudge back across the square toward the hotel, reflecting that in almost two days I’ve succeeded in spending a lot of my remaining funds but not in actually doing anything useful.

Back I go to the Nerrivik Paris, which is as gloomy and slightly down-at-heel as I feel. The moment I step through the air lock, I’m drenched in a thick, steaming fog of condensation that sluices off my clothes and forms tiny hailstones that clatter to the floor around me: I hadn’t realized just how cold it was outside. “I’ll take my room key now,” I tell the bored front desk, tapping my fingernails on his polished-granite counter. “Any mail for me?”

“It will be in your queue, madame.” He’s as icily polite as the moment I checked in. “Here is your key. Feel free to let us know if there is any further way we may make your stay enjoyable.”

I take the “up” elevator, feeling slightly miffed, which is silly because I’ve taken no steps to assure a warmer welcome — other than traveling as Kate Sorico, of course, but that’s just a harmless indulgence out here (and a thumb in the eye to those bitches who’re chasing me). The Domina’s on her way to Saturn, and Granita isn’t in the big picture. All that’s left for me here is to meet up with Jeeves and dig out of him whatever it is that Daks was so cagey about — there’s no real hint of my reason for being here in my orders, just some random muttering about Callisto being the gateway to the outer system — and then I can do whatever needs doing. I think.

Being an aristo in a mining town means I get to have the big suite. But it also means that the big suite is small and dingy, with rising permafrost and teensy-tiny porthole windows, quadruple-glazed, looking out at a landscape that makes the marshaling yards on Mars seem like a tourist resort. The carpet crackles under my feet, and I turn the lights up, then the heating (which is set to a less than balmy 230 Kelvins), then contemplate what it will take to thaw out the shower cubicle. Obviously nobody’s stayed here for a long time, and my spirits are not improved when I see that the mixer head gives me a choice of solvents to clean myself with: acetone or carbon tetrachloride. (The thermostat goes up to 260.) In fact, my spirits are about to come crashing down if I don’t find something to occupy myself with, real soon now.

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.