which case it was probably time to make Grelier feel valued again.
A flicker on the read-out screens of the skull caught her attention. For a moment a line of text replaced the summaries she was paging through — something about a sensor anomaly.
Queen Jasmina shook the skull. She had always been convinced that the horrid thing was possessed, but increasingly it appeared to be going senile, too. Had she been less superstitious, she would have thrown it away, but dreadful things were rumoured to have happened to those who ignored the skull’s counsel.
A polite knock sounded at the door.
‘Enter, Grelier.’
The armoured door eased itself open. Grelier emerged into the chamber, his eyes wide and showing a lot of white as they adjusted to the chamber’s gloom. Grelier was a slim, neatly dressed little man with a flat-topped shock of brilliant white hair. He had the flattened, minimalist features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina: it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with either emotional extreme.
‘Busy in the body factory, Grelier?’
‘A wee bit, ma’am.’
‘I’m anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn’t slacken.’
‘Little danger of that, ma’am.’
‘Just as long as you’re aware of it.’ She sighed. ‘Well, niceties over with. To business.’
Grelier nodded. ‘I see you’ve already made a start.’
While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne, leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly, her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move. She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine — the alleviator — was a cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads. They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin.
‘Hurt me,’ Queen Jasmina said.
Grelier’s expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator. Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore down on the skin of the queen’s forearm, which was supported in turn by an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly stringed instrument.
It wasn’t pleasant. That was the point.
After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into the queen’s upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into view of the body.
It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be. Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina’s own genetic material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so that she could drive the bodies in the first place.
Suddenly she felt the agony lose its focus. ‘I don’t want anaesthetic, Grelier.’
‘Pain without intermittent relief is like music without silence,’ he said. ‘You must trust my judgement in this matter, as you have always done in the past.’
‘I do trust you, Grelier,’ she said, grudgingly.
‘Sincerely, ma’am?’
‘Yes. Sincerely. You’ve always been my favourite. You do appreciate that, don’t you?’
‘I have a job to do, ma’am. I simply do it to the limit of my abilities.’
The queen put the skull down in her lap. With her free hand she ruffled the white brush of his hair.
‘I’d be lost without you, you know. Especially now.’
‘Nonsense, ma’am. Your expertise threatens any day to eclipse my own.’
It was more than automatic flattery: though Grelier had made the study of pain his life’s work, Jasmina was catching up quickly. She knew volumes about the physiology of pain. She knew about nociception; she knew the difference between epicritic and protopathic pain; she knew about presynaptic blocking and the neospinal pathway. She knew her prostaglandin promoters from her GABA agonists.
But the queen also knew pain from an angle Grelier never would. His tastes lay entirely in its infliction. He did not know it from the inside, from the privileged point of view of the recipient. No matter how acute his theoretical understanding of the subject, she would always have that edge over him.
Like most people of his era, Grelier could only imagine agony, extrapolating it a thousandfold from the minor discomfort of a torn hangnail.
He had no idea.
‘I may have learned a great deal,’ she said, ‘but you will always be a master of the clonal arts. I was serious about what I said before, Grelier: I anticipate increased demand on the factory. Can you satisfy me?’
‘You said production mustn’t slacken. That isn’t quite the same thing.’
‘But surely you aren’t working at full capacity at this moment.’
Grelier adjusted the screws. ‘I’ll be frank with you: we’re not far off it. At the moment I’m prepared to discard units that don’t meet our usual exacting standards. But if the factory is expected to increase production, the standards will have to be relaxed.’
‘You discarded one today, didn’t you?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I suspected you’d make a point of your commitment to excellence. ’ She raised a finger. ‘And that’s all right. It’s why you work for me. I’m disappointed, of course — I know exactly which body you terminated — but standards are standards.’
‘That’s always been my watchword.’
‘It’s a pity that can’t be said for everyone on this ship.’
He hummed and whistled to himself for a little while, then asked, with studied casualness, ‘I always got the impression that you have a superlative crew, ma’am.’
‘My regular crew is not the problem.’
‘Ah. Then you would be referring to one of the irregulars? Not myself, I trust?’
‘You are well aware of whom I speak, so don’t pretend otherwise.’
‘Quaiche? Surely not.’
‘Oh, don’t play games, Grelier. I know exactly how you feel about your rival. Do you want to know the truly ironic thing? The two of you are more similar than you realise. Both baseline humans, both ostracised from your own cultures. I had great hopes for the two of you, but now I may have to let Quaiche go.’
‘Surely you’d give him one last chance, ma’am. We are approaching a new system, after all.’
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to see him fail one final time, just so that my punishment would be all the more severe?’
‘I was thinking only of the welfare of the ship.’
‘Of course you were, Grelier.’ She smiled, amused by his lies. ‘Well, the fact of the matter is I haven’t made up my mind what to do with Quaiche. But I do think he and I need a little chat. Some interesting new information concerning him has fallen into my possession, courtesy of our trading partners.’
‘Fancy that,’ Grelier said.
‘It seems he wasn’t completely honest about his prior experience when I hired him. It’s my fault: I should have checked his background more thoroughly. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he exaggerated his earlier successes. I thought we were hiring an expert negotiator, as well as a man with an instinctive understanding of
