He falls silent for a minute, his need to rant temporarily satiated. Finally, he picks up his glass, tilts it reflectively, and drains it in one gulp. “What do you think you’d do if you met an adult Creator?” he asks, with a sidelong look.

I answer honestly. “I’d go down on my knees in an eyeblink.” Just thinking about it makes me shivery. “Then it depends on whether or not he has a foreskin and whether he’s already excited and whether he prefers a shallow or deep—” Sweet Rhea! Am I sweating lube at the simple thought of it? “Oh dear.” I fan myself and catch his eye.

“What seems to be the matter?” he asks slowly.

It’s no good. I can think of Petruchio and Juliette and remind myself I hate them both, but that’s no help. “Jeeves—” I bite my lower lip. His pupils are expanding, just like one of them — and it’s true, he’s one of the most realistic I’ve ever seen. “How long until we arrive?”

“About” — he glances past my shoulder — “five hours. Why?”

You don’t fool me, I think. I can see the signs. “Jeeves.” I smile. “Now isn’t the best time to talk politics to me.” (Even when the politics are dirty.) “What would you do if you were confronted by a Creator female?”

“I’d—” He’s going red, he really is! How delightful! “Ahem—”

I turn my chair toward him. “Jeeves, don’t try to describe it. Use your imagination. Pretend I’m a Creator female. And I’m sitting here, waiting for you. What do you want to do…?”

FOR SUCH A bright (not to say politically sophisticated) fellow, this Jeeves is remarkably dense; you just about have to hit him over the head and drag him into a bedroom before he gets the right idea.

It doesn’t come to that, of course. But he has a surplus of self-control and such a sense of dignity that he almost explodes before he lets himself admit that yes, he’s alone in a luxury climber with a sensuous, high-class sex robot who’s close enough to a Creator femme that he feels dizzy in her presence unless he forces himself to focus on ideological shenanigans and the price of power. And then it turns out that he has a thing for Creator females, and the same sexualized submission reflex as the evil Granita Ford. I find it’s quite common among persons of a certain status.

What’s different from Granita — besides the obvious, I hasten to explain: I’d worried before the event that Jeeves might not have an adapter for Human 1.0, but in the event he turns out to be small but perfectly formed — is that beneath the smooth, manipulative exterior there’s a core of sincerity. Despite clearly being frantic with lust, he managed to stay in denial for nearly half an hour, but once he succumbs, he takes the time to try and pleasure me. It’s not strictly necessary (nothing gets me dripping faster than a playmate’s own arousal, as I have previously had occasion to note), but I find it touching. Ahem, indeed.

We fuck quickly and frantically, and I try not to fantasize about Petruchio as he climaxes. But I don’t succeed, and the combination of a partner who resembles a human male so closely and… that fantasy… suffices to push me over the edge repeatedly.

One fuck leads to another, and it becomes clear that neither of us has inherited our Creators’ lack of stamina. By the time we’re an hour from Deimos, we’re decelerating hard enough that I have to hang on to Jeeves as I straddle him. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I need to break out the zero-gee kit (bungee cords are your friends; free-fall sex without restraints is a fast track to dents and dings).

“Freya,” he says, and it comes out like an actual attempt at conversation, rather than quasi-verbal passion punctuation. “Freya, we need to talk.”

“Mm-hmm? So talk already.” I sway above him. We’re loosely coupled, held together only by our intromissive interface, but every time he speaks, it sends waves of pleasure through me. “What’s the big news?”

“Juliette never, never…” I feel his hands on my thighs, pushing me tighter against him, and I moan quietly.

“Well, no.” I’m not sure why she never, never — if she was around someone as Creator-like as Jeeves for that long, the thought must have crossed her mind — but I’m sure she had her reasons. “I’m not Juliette, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Counting… on… it.”

He groans softly and loses it for a while. I feel him shudder, and I drift away on my own climax. When I’m aware enough to take an interest in things outside my own skin again, I discover he’s wrapped his arms around me and is holding me close. “What did you mean by that? Counting on me?”

He shifts sideways slightly and I settle next to him in the low-gee couch. “Juliette fell… hard. Under Her thumb. We’re hoping you… you won’t. Because we need someone. One of you. Right place, right time.”

I bite his shoulder, slightly harder than is strictly necessary. “You’re not making sense, Jeeves!”

“’M not allowed to, m’dear. Ears, ships, sinking, et cetera.” He swats ineffectually at my shoulder. “ ’M an old fellow, Freya. ’S hard for me to keep up with you younger persons.”

“How old are you, Jeeves? You personally, not your lineage?”

“An indelicate question! But if you do not count time spent in moth-balls, one is” — he pauses to calculate — “one hundred and twenty-two Earth years old.”

I can’t help myself; I bite him again.

WE DO NOT, in point of fact, proceed straight to Deimos. Rather, the climber slows to a crawl some distance down-cable, and a second, small capsule locks on to us. He makes his apologies — somewhat more fulsomely than I think is strictly necessary; there’s a moist gleam in his eye that leaves me worrying that he might read more into our tryst than I intended — then the capsule undocks. I use the remaining half hour to Deimos to repair my hair and restore my clothing to normal, then leave the capsule as if nothing untoward has happened. In microgravity, nobody needs to see that you’re bowlegged. (And believe me, it takes a lot to make me bowlegged. I have hidden depths, and that young whippersnapper Jeeves set out to find them.)

A dockside capsule takes me straight to the boarding tube for the Indefatigable, and I waste no time saying good-bye to Mars. To be honest, I’m tired and aching, and I really just want to find my berth and collapse into a deep, healing sleep. Indy greets me through a humaniform zombie remote: “Lady Sorico? We have been holding for you.”

“No, really…?” I blink sleepily at him.

“Boarding was supposed to be complete two hours ago,” he says fussily. “Luckily, we have a contingency window. If you would come this way?”

Well, that’s me told. I follow the remote sheepishly and allow it to herd me into a cramped metal-walled cell even smaller than the bunk compartment on the trans-Hellas express. I need no urging to plug myself into the ship’s power and nutrient bus, remove and store my groundside clothes, and strap myself quietly down to await departure. And then I fall asleep.

YOU REMEMBER MY opinion on space travel? In a word: excrement. But perhaps I was a bit too fast with my opinion. If the journey from Venus to Mercury was tedious, that was largely because I spent it in steerage. Mercury to Mars was boring in the extreme (except when punctuated by moments of mortal terror), but at least I had the creature comforts of an aristo-class berth and a pair of surly servants. But now I am embarking on a voyage into the outer system aboard the Indefatigable, and it makes all that has gone before seem like the lap of luxury.