The door opens behind me. “Make sure you don’t damage her soul chip,” Jeeves calls past my shoulder, and as I feel the scissors close on either side of my neck I realize, to my great surprise, that I’m not afraid. Because I know what happens next.

GRANITA’S BOLT-HOLE IS the heart of a spiderweb spanning the solar system. Callisto may be a backwater, but there is a method to my mistress’s apparent madness: She’s within an hour’s communication time of everywhere in the inner system, and conveniently close to the giant Jovian gravity well and a source of cheap reaction mass. Nor is Callisto on the Pink Police’s embargo list — it’s so cold here that nobody considers it a serious risk of replicator infection. Callisto is sterile, for our Creator’s works never quite encompassed its surface, and the searingly cold outback is large enough to hide any number of secrets.

Of which my lady’s palace is one.

I have six standard days to fill, and once my luggage catches up with me, I have little to do. Mail must be piling up for me, but I have no appetite to catch up on my sisters’ trivial bulletins, much less to look for word from Jeeves — who one must assume is deeply displeased by my performance so far, although there’s nothing I can do about that — and in any case, if I heard anything from him, I’d only have to pester Granita with it, at a time when she is sufficiently busy. (There is some mail for Katherine Sorico, but it turns out to be mostly bank statements and reports on investment accounts, and suchlike dull administrivia: I ignore them.)

My lady either has impeccable taste or, more usefully, the ability to employ people with impeccable taste to sculpt her surroundings. I didn’t appreciate this fully aboard Pygmalion, when I found her traveling with an entourage; but this is her favorite estate, and she has created something of beauty here.

Callisto orbits beyond the dew line created by the sun’s output, in the chilly depths. Too small to have much of an active core, water plays the same role in her geology as molten rock on Earth. You really do not want to place buildings occupied by people still attuned to the inner system on bare ground — they tend to sink.

Granita’s architects have fashioned for her a delicate snowflake of spun ice crystals, its tubular corridors and podlike pressure compartments balanced on slender legs that sprawl across half a crater. Polished irregular tiles of igneous and metamorphic rocks have been slotted together into the intricate mosaic surfaces of walls and floors, combining a superficial impression of wild randomness with smooth-faced artifice — much like their owner. Granita keeps her demesne below the melting point of ice, and at a reduced atmospheric pressure: comfortable if you’re adjusted to Mars equatorial conditions, not quite so hot that the strands of her spiderweb will cut through the frigid surface of the Galilean moon like molten wires.

I spend a couple of days exploring the mansion and its hidden spaces, from the deep, colorless swimming pool filled with acetone (a slippery-slick chill across my skin, unnaturally thin — when I try swimming in it I sink), to the glass-roofed gallery full of alabaster statues of my mistress’s sibs and matriarch. I distract myself with secret splendors, mystified by their presence here in the back of beyond. But Granita’s instructions have set the paint-strippers of anxiety gnawing at the glossy overlay of my complacency. I should be doing something to help her, but I don’t know what she wants. And her orders preclude any discussion with other members of her household, who might be able to guide me. I can’t even admit that I am one of her servants to them! I’m supposed to be Katherine Sorico, independent and powerful in my own right. The contradictory instructions set up an unpleasant clash of priorities whenever I think about them, until I finally make my mind up to go and beg Granita for enlightenment — but when I finally do so, she’s away from home on some mysterious business.

I’m dreaming of Juliette frequently now, and that worries me, too. Juliette has an astringent, cynical personality, and I can tell for sure that she’d sniff in haughty contempt if she knew how I’d let myself be tamed by Granita. (As would I, only five days ago.) Juliette had a long history with Jeeves, as I am now recollecting, and a longer history of run-ins with the petty, low-order aristos who make life so miserable for those around them, having to reinforce their own sense of superiority at the expense of all those who they perceive as falling below their own precarious station. The soul chip of hers that I’m wearing now — the one with that ominous message from the Jeeves in charge of Internal Security, terminated by the snicker-snack of the scrapper’s shears — tells me that I don’t have a full grasp of her intentions. She’s been leading a secret life on the side, and I’ve got a nasty feeling that I’ve already fallen headfirst into it.

Through her eyes I’m getting disturbing flashes of a bigger struggle, one in which the Jeeveses and their allies are pitted against a variety of loose consortia: the Black Talon (to which my nemesis the Domina belongs), the Ownership Confederation, the Sleepless Cartel, and other groups who are trying, for their own reasons, to reconstruct our Creators. (Even the Manikin Church, those sad and pathetic souls who think they are the reincarnations of the Flesh, Remade In Techné: They want to become Creators, but their hunger for the pink goo is the same.)

The situation makes for strange alliances of convenience. The Pink Police hunt JeevesCo couriers like me at one moment, but work fist in glove with Jeeves on other projects, in pursuit of their own goal: to prevent alien replicators from contaminating the sterile growth medium of Earth’s lithosphere before the ultimate bureaucratically approved day of resurrection.

I don’t think Jeeves was lying to me when he said he wasn’t going to use me as a spy, but what one Jeeves says may not be what another Jeeves is thinking — that much is becoming harshly clear. It was definitely a lie when one of them said exactly the same thing to Juliette, more than thirty years ago, when they first offered her a job. That cow Emma was certainly lying, and it was her urgent plea for help and request that Juliette (who had been working as a clerk in a clip joint) should load a soul chip recorded by Rhea that first sucked her into this dirty little game. I can’t help wondering what else he’s lied to me about. Granita, at least, I can trust — even though she cares for me only as an arbeiter in her possession.

Meanwhile, the black depression is creeping closer behind me, snuffling hungrily along my trail and casting its shadow across my soul whenever I find myself at a loss. Until, one evening, Granita summons me.

AT THE TOP of a flight of narrow stairs on the third floor of the west-wing master suite, there’s an observation dome made of ice polished to the transparency of fine crystal. A blank-faced munchkin leads me to it along a circuitous and infrequently used passage. We pass doorways cunningly disguised as trompe l’oeil paintings, and paintings disguised as windows onto unreal spaces; and finally a curtain that appears to be woven from strands of dead green replicator stuff from Earth — priceless, grotesque contraband. Finally, he directs me to the steps up to the observation dome and leaves me. The room is sparsely furnished, with a circular bench seat running around the wall and an unlit candelabra in the center of the floor.

I sit alone in the twilight for a few minutes, wondering what I’m doing here. Then I hear footsteps ascending. It’s her, my owner! My melancholy evaporates on a sudden gust of well-conditioned excitement. “Granita?” I stand. “You wanted to see me?”