She doesn’t make it too obvious, at first. She’s got her entourage, her little world of courtiers to distract and pleasure her. But she pays too much attention to me for it to be accidental, asking me to teach her card games that she obviously knew centuries ago, and has since forgotten, discussing sixteenth-century Hungarian folk music with a familiarity that is itself suggestive. She even, coyly, asks my opinion about the proper running of an orgy — as if the Honorable Katherine Sorico might have anything useful to contribute other than a fetching coral-eared flush and a heaving bosom.

One day, well into our deceleration phase — Pygmalion is tacking hard against the solar wind, and Marsport is close enough that I’ve carried out Dr. Murgatroyd’s activation process and installed my cargo in the incubator in my abdominal cavity — Granita raises an eyebrow. She has me well trained: I fold my game board and bounce across the room to her side, slotting neatly into her circle between faceless nonentities who make way for me by instinct. “Good morning, Kate!” Granita contrives to sound spontaneously delighted by my presence. “Do you have a minute to spare? I have some matters I should like your opinion on.”

“Of course.” I smile back at her.

“In my stateroom, if you please. In private, I’m afraid,” she adds for her courtiers. She floats from her chair, layers of carbon-fiber chiffon belling around her. “Follow me, Kate?”

This is new. Curiosity, excitement, and a minor key of dread jumble my perceptions as I follow her back through the corridors that lead to the hotel deck.

My little cabin’s relative poverty becomes obvious as I follow her through the air lock into the owner’s quarters. Granita’s room is nearly as large as the grand saloon. Thickly piled carpets on the walls and ceiling, with thin tapestry hangings to divide up the volume, lend it a plush sense of overfurnished intimacy. Her bed is a huge gauzy cobweb of a hammock that occupies half the end wall, strewn with cushions and throws that don’t quite disguise the wrist and ankle restraints. “Privacy, up,” she orders, as the door closes. “Pygmalion, leave me.”

“I obey,” says the ship, in a quite unfamiliar tone of voice. Abruptly, we’re alone. I shiver. I have a sudden sense of how much emptiness lies on the far side of the wall behind that web-hammock.

“Come, join me, my dear.” Granita pats the throw beside her. Subtle cues tweak my awareness; the systolic beat of my thoracic pumps accelerate. “I won’t bite.” Her smile is roguish. It’s an invitation I can’t refuse, don’t want to refuse, in fact. Her intentions are clear enough as she murmurs sweet nothings, and I permit myself to be fussed over with a sense of gathering relief. At last.

She’s clearly happiest as a hunter, so when she kisses me, I accept her passively, opening my arms to receive her embrace. And then her program takes an unexpected twist. “I want to be yours, Kate. Put this on.” She passes me a small-eyed mask. I pull it on while she works at the fastenings of her intricate aristo outfit with digits that shake from overcontrol. “You want to own me, don’t you, dear? I’m yours, your property! Use me!” So the icy aristo harbors secret submissive fantasies, a covert hankering for a strict Creator? I boggle slightly, even as my training takes over, and I start working out how best to satisfy her needs.

Later, as I’m lying exhausted and glistening beside her, she turns her head slightly and smiles at me. “I know what you are,” she whispers.

“What am I?” I can barely speak; my metabolic debt is high. I haven’t had a workout like this since I bedded Paris — Granita is a very demanding sub.

“I’ve met your kind before. Your disguise is very good, but your primary conditioning gives you away.”

I sigh, very quietly. I was afraid of this — but I’ve got a secondary cover ready and waiting. “What am I?” I ask again.

“You’re no runaway serf, certainly. But your kind make poor aristocrats, dear. It stands out like a sore…” She glances down at her chest and tugs on her bonds: I take the hint, and unstrap her hand. “You have too much empathy for this age. You were never designed to hold and to own. Are you certain you don’t need a protector? I’d make a place of honor for you in my household — dress you in blackened steel armor and call you my mistress—”

For a moment I picture my life as this ancient slave-owning aristo’s house dominatrix. Not indentured but a free associate — indentured arbeiters, fitted with slave chips and stripped of their free will, simply can’t perform this calling — brandishing a barbed whip at her word. A pampered favorite, as long as I can avoid looking her beneficence in the eye. “I’d love to, but I have a prior commitment,” I say. And it’s true. I would love it — I love to be wanted — but I’d feel corrupted by it, too, not by the sex but by knowing the source of her wealth. Of all the other bodies chained by her word, unwilling and unable to resist.

“You didn’t just bring me here for a quick fuck, did you?”

She makes an odd noise. After a moment I recognize it as a chuckle. “Oh child, you’re delightful. No, of course I didn’t.” She falls silent.

“Why, then?”

“Ah, me. One becomes paranoid in one’s old age; do I surprise you? One learns to jump at shadows… you’re very similar to my personal nemesis, Kate. Don’t look so surprised; assassins and spies have disguised themselves as concubines and lovers since the dawn of creation. Surely this can’t be news to you? I had to make sure.”

An ugly fear twists at the edges of my awareness. “What have you done?”

She runs a fingertip idly along my ribs, leaving a trail in the thin sheen of silicone sweat. “I had my retainers search your compartment,” she admits. “Certain parties — a consortium of black labs, run by a fellow known as Dr. Sleepless — is trying to smuggle a living weapon to Mars. One of my sources thought you might be the courier. But I must apologize — they were wrong.”

I shiver. “What kind of living weapon?” I ask coolly, forcing myself to keep my hand away from the pit of my stomach.

“A — a fully autonomous piece of pink goo,” she says reluctantly. “A generator module able to produce more of its own kind.” It’s her turn to shudder now. “Horrible!”

“But you know it’s not me,” I insist angrily. “Why did you do it?”

“I’m—” She pauses: “I’m sorry, Kate. I should not have suspected you, but I had to be sure. The enemy is not above using your kind as couriers.” She reaches out to me, and I shove her hand away with carefully calculated anger, narrowing my achingly oversized eyes at her.

If only you knew…

When things go wrong in space, they tend to go wrong with very little warning. This time it’s an exception.

We’re on day eighty-eight of the cruise. After a stormy argument and a sulky three-day cooling-off period, I allowed Granita to woo me back into her web, where her submissive contrition and shameless self-abasement went a long way to assuaging my indignation. Who knew? It can’t be easy being a ruthless industrialist by day and yearning for the kiss of a Creator’s lash by night. So we use each other furtively, working out a wary accommodation until we fetch up gasping on the far shore of ecstasy. It must be making us the talk of the saloon, but Granita is old enough and ruthless enough that she doesn’t care — and as for myself, I’m used to being a freak.

So when Pygmalion electrospeaks me one night in my stateroom, she takes me completely by surprise.

“Lady Sorico,” says the ship, “we have a problem.”

I boot straight into wakefulness from a confusing dream of pole-dancing dwarfs. I’m alone in my room; Bill and Ben are elsewhere, doing whatever it is that they get up to in the night. My precious cargo is a warm ovoid pressure inside me, where a Creator female would harbor her reproductive fabricator. For a dreadful moment I think Pygmalion has scanned me and recognized it for what it is, but the moment passes. “What’s happening?” I reply.