A/N: This is a somewhat alternate universe, so there are a few differences in the characters and the character histories which are hopefully well-explained enough to understand. Bear with me. I'm just having fun here.
Raoul said it was because he needed a Pet.
Raoul was perceptive, and his judgment was usually sound, but in this particular area Iason found his commentary suspect. While Iason had no regrets about their relationship, he was aware of Raoul's attempts to resurrect it—and Mink had no interest in pursuing another liason with him. He had needed a sexual instructor when he came of age, someone to introduce him to physical pleasure and ensure that he was as good at sex—or rather, the few quasi-sexual games permissible to blondies—as he was at everything else. Once the skill was mastered, however, he saw no need to continue the sessions. He found the loss of control unsettling, and the nudity vaguely ridiculous. He far preferred time spent at chess or billiards—intellectual games between intellectuals. Games he usually won.
Raoul did not seem to feel the same way, and Iason would not entirely put it past him to use the Pet scenario as a segue into another 'casual' offer of sexual services.
On the other hand, he had been without a Pet for some time. And something was troubling him. He had been feeling pensive. In need of a challenge. In need of something to focus his mind and will.
" . . . a hobby," Katze said from the front seat.
"Hmm?" Iason had been staring out the window, with his chin resting on the knuckles of one white-gloved hand, and he had missed the first part of what his Furniture said.
"I was saying the market is doing well. It doesn't require as much of your supervision, and there's no resistance to Jupiter worth speaking of. There's no need to push yourself so hard. It seems a number of blondies are taking up hobbies. You could spend some time in a personal pursuit, too, if you wanted to."
"Like what?"
Katze wasn't sure.
"But something to draw you out of yourself," he said. "You live in your own mind too much."
Iason frowned. It was unlike Katze to voice a direct criticism, and still rarer for him to give personal advice. Perhaps Raoul had gotten to him. Raoul's 'hobby' was breeding Pets for various desirable traits, and he had offered Iason his choice of any of the pedigreed lines he had created.
Unfortunately, Raoul was always making the rarer, more expensive female Pets with hair so a light shade of red as to be nearly blonde. Pretty enough, but the private, inexplicable truth was—Iason preferred dark hair. Katze, his first Furniture who was now his driver and supervisor of the black market, was a red, but such a dark shade of red as to be nearly auburn. His current Furniture was a mere brown. His Pets, when he kept one at all, were all varying shades of brown.
He had never felt like attempting to explain the attraction to Raoul, whose Pets were all female and all classic beauties, even though Raoul, of all his acquaintance, was the most likely to accept the idiosyncrasy. Once, in the days when they occasionally played bed games together, Raoul had insisted that Iason join him at an auction, which had included the sale of several exotics—boys with lactating breasts, bearded dwarves, and wretched little children whose minds had been tampered into a perpetual state of fear, sold as part of a set with a many-tentacled monster. Iason had stopped in the entryway to the stockyards. One of the rape-children was screaming and a fairly pretty youth from one of the low-end pedigrees had started a fire. The auctioneer was beside them, and Raoul had wanted to let him vent about the qualities of the nearby merchandise, but Iason was already leaving, saying to no one in particular, "None of these."
This had earned him a somewhat long-winded lecture from Raoul, who felt that the auctioneer should have been afforded more respect.
That was the trouble with Raoul. He cared so absurdly much about what other people thought. Raoul was, presumably, something of a mistake on Jupiter's part. Of all the blondies, he was the most likely to make a mistake if left in charge of the subcomputers that ran Tanagura, or forget some small but vital piece of information, and so his primary duties included the unenviable task of tampering with the minds of blondies who had failed Jupiter. For all the complexity of that task, it made Raoul into a social pariah. Everyone knew someone who had been made into a sexdoll, and while they voiced no protest over such measures, they also did not like to be haunted with the specters of pretty blonde brothel boys who had once been friends, lovers, family.
Iason was one of the few who valued skill over status, and who realized that when Raoul made a mistake it was never due to ineptitude or laziness, but rather a misdirection of a vast talent. What Raoul had, which was quite singular for a blondie, was an almost uncanny ability to sense change within a person, or in the atmosphere of a room or a society. He often knew the ones he would have to visit before any crime had been committed, or even expressly thought of.
They had become allies—Jupiter's favorite son and the executioner of Eos— and both benefited from the association. Iason gained a valuable second, who could reliably alert him to trouble before it came. Raoul gained social status among the blondies, and the welcome company of one who, like Jupiter, remained as cool and unchanging as steel.
Iason himself was an experiment in a new form of intelligence, and the first such to be truly successful. He had the ability to know by instinct what mere observation could not reveal, and his gift bordered on precognition. He could usually tell when someone he knew was looking at him, and knew what they were going to say before they spoke. When he dreamed, he dreamed of major events on Amoi.
It was that unconscious knowing, he decided later, that made him look up at that moment, that moment on which the whole of the rest of his life hinged. He had been about to reach for the factory report from the Endril district, when something caught his eye—or perhaps it was nothing visible, simply the press of fate, of the invisible thread that bound him forever to Riki the Dark.
Years later, while he sat broken and bleeding amid the burning rubble of Dana Bahn, amid the tortured screams of rending metal and the smoke that burned his eyes like tears, he would think back on this moment, and know that he would change nothing.
Nothing at all.
If he had the opportunity, he would once again speak to his Furniture suddenly, sharply, saying:
"Stop the car."