The second message is unsigned. “We understand Ichiban sent you. You have now had sufficient time to orient yourself. Please call at our offices at your earliest convenience. Address attached.” And there is no third message. I check the elapsed time. Less than ten hours have passed, barely sufficient to expect a reply from Emma.

I sit at the dressing table, my mood sinking by the second. I came here at their expense; it’s time to pay my part of the bargain. And find out what’s going on, my suspicious selves remind me.

I throw my requirements at the printer: Close-cut trousers and a hooded mesh top covered in thermal-absorbent padding, black rubbery spikes on the shoulders. Sexual accessibility down, defensiveness up. Once garbed, I resemble a skinny, shock-headed thug. Under the circumstances, that feels good. I dial up surface-protective mirror-finished goggles as well, glassy lenses to fuse with the skin around my eye sockets. If I must egress to the surface again, I shall be prepared. I am sure Ichiban’s friends are not interested in me for my deportment and musical skills.

I make my way to the lobby unmolested but encounter signs of Parisian paranoia everywhere, from freshly blocked power sockets and service hatches to a lumbering, green-skinned monstrosity just inside the lobby door. It is three meters tall, two meters wide, has a gun turret for a head and missile launchers along its spine. “Mistress Freya?” it rumbles at me, keeping its muzzle politely tilted at the floor. “Management say am to accompany you. Please to confirm identity?”

I glance at the front desk. Paris is otherwise preoccupied with an irate patron, but has time to tip me a nod. “That’s me,” I say, and reach for the monstrosity’s offered tentacle to exchange recognition keys. “Do you know what offices can be found at this address?” I ask, and pass Ichiban’s friend’s mail to him.

“Excuse, please.” The green giant hunkers down beside me; the floor creaks under his weight. “Am asking Fire Control… yes. Is planetary branch office of Jeeves Corporation. Fire Control ask, do you want destroy it? Because—”

“No, no, that won’t be necessary!” I interrupt with all due haste. “But I need to go there. Do you know what they do, or who they are? Can you escort me?”

“Not know, not know, yes.”

I wait for more, but he is taciturn — a strong, silent type. I sigh, reflexively emoting. “What’s your name?”

“Blunt.”

“Alright, Blunt. Can we go there? If it’s safe. If not, can you protect me?”

“Yes.” Blunt pauses for a moment then adds, “If not self protect, then Fire Control protect.” How reassuring. I blink up a street map and head for the door, but Blunt blocks me with an arm the size of a small crane. “Blunt go first.” He steps through the outer lock, turret-head swiveling, then beckons me behind. I can feel his steps through the pavement, thudding like sledgehammers.

Jeeves Corporation resides in an unfashionable medium-height tower on the edge of the current business district, in an area zoned for reconstruction. As we approach it I see slave-chipped arbeiter gangs at work. They’re stripping out the fixtures from a skeletonized geodesic dome, scrabbling over the corpse of a great enterprise. The air here is underoxygenated, hot with a tang of silicone lubricant fractions. Blunt escorts me to the tower entrance, then pauses. “Will wait,” he rumbles. “Not go in.”

I look at the door. He’d never fit through it. “Well, thank you. If I’m not out of here in fifteen minutes, or if you don’t hear from me, call Fire Control and ask for backup. Can you do that?”

“Ma’am.” He turns to face away from the building, scanning the neighborhood with gunsight eyes. I go inside.

The office block has obviously seen better times. Half the address plates behind the vacant front desk are blank, but it still takes me minutes to locate Jeeves Corporation. They occupy the subbasement, sandwiched uneasily between Jordin Ballistics and the Travis Tea Import Agency. I take the stairs three at a time, feeling positively mercurial as I kick off each step and drift down. The stairwell is dusty and drab, a third of the lighting panels dead of old age. Someone has gnawed on the tarnished brass handrail. I half expect to see a dead dustbuster in a corner, husk sucked dry by someone or other.

Of course I have second thoughts about this meeting, but it’s half past time I was off this planet. Jeeves Corporation looks like my best bet for a free ride to somewhere civilized. And so I make my way along the corridor until I come to a plain glass door. It’s mirror-polished and clean, which is something, I think. I knock once, then enter.

“Harrumph.” The occupant of the big chair behind the desk clears his throat — and my world turns upside down.

I’m unsure what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. My knees go weak for a confused moment as I apprehend that I am in the presence; but as he looks up from the pad he is reading and turns his avuncular gaze on me, the effect shatters. He smiles. “Good morning, my dear lady! How remarkable! You wouldn’t be Freya 47 by some chance, would you?”

“G-g-good day,” I stutter, trying to hide my confusion. For a moment it feels as if an EMP bomb has taken out my higher functions. He’s perfect! But the partial pressure of oxygen is down around 1 percent and the temperature’s over seventy Celsius; my True Love’s kind would be passed out on the floor, blue in the face and dying by the second — and as if that isn’t enough, I begin to take in the giveaway details. “Who are you?”

“One is frequently called Jeeves. One may even answer to the name, when it suits one.” He smiles gnomically, and I take it all in, from his wrinkled pale pinkish skin and small eyes to his archaic, stiff-collared suit. He sits behind a desk patterned after the antique dendriform replicators called Mahogany, in a den paneled and carpeted to resemble an ancient club or social institution of the Third British Empire period. If he was of our Creator’s kind, he would be fifty years of age. The illusion is almost perfect; if the air-conditioning was working properly, I could have mistaken him for — I could have — “Please be seated,” he urges, and I collapse into the chair in front of his desk, gibbering and knock-kneed with the backwash of his primal aura.

“Did you encounter any difficulties on your travels?” Jeeves leans back in his chair and regards me with a raised eyebrow. He looks tense.

(It’s the major weakness of my lineage, you understand. Though we were designed from the outset to be slaves of pleasure, the later instantiations of our lineage — myself and the other youngest sibs — have never experienced firsthand the slack-jawed lust that comes of being in the presence of our One True Love. Rhea, our template-matriarch, was agape with desire for them, and she was raised in their presence, tutored in their ways; and we are all slightly randomized duplicates of Rhea. But I was assembled, as best as I can establish, nearly a year after the last of them died, and I spent my first six decades mothballed in a warehouse. I’ve never felt in my internals the hot flush of joyous surrender for which I was designed. Thus, to meet someone outwardly so authentic, so possessed of the true presence — and then to realize that he is not, in fact, destined to be my lord and master — is disturbing, to say the least.)

“Nuh-nuh” — Stop it! This is embarrassing! — "not until I arrived. Some unpleasant company tried to derail my plans, but it’s strictly a personal matter, and I have affairs well in hand.”

“By way of the main battle tank recumbent on the front steps?” The eyebrow relaxes beneath a slowly forming frown line. “One generally expects visitors to be somewhat more, ah, discreet. Not, one hastens to add, that one would dream of criticizing you—”