As for Lucas himself, he was…still alive, still here, which put him in the black as far as his personal accounts went. Rove’s allocation of space and resources extended to staff, and Lucas found that the food was all right, and the new hand was holding up. When Rove set himself up as the techno-duke of some otherworld, or whatever, presumably Lucas would get to be chief of police or something. That would, at least, look good on the CV. Although he’d been told all worlds were facing extinction, so whatever ambitions Lucas harboured were probably moot. Rove had a plan to protect a small corner of infinity, and Lucas knew which side of that divide he needed to be on.

Right now, self-interest also involved playing serving staff, as Rove was dining with a guest. Perhaps being waited on by rats felt too ridiculous. Lucas’s own feeling was that Rove was the only one who was going to derive any satisfaction from the evening, and that thought was compounded when Dr. Khan entered the room with a pair of armed rodents.

Lucas had examined his opposite numbers here on Rat-Earth. He’d labelled them “BDSM troopers” due to their black rubbery uniforms, although he didn’t recall them being overly effective in the museum. Lucas had seen enough action to know the difference between an army and a repressive police force, and the latter weren’t soldiers, just bullies. Certainly they were pushy with Khan, shoving him into the chair despite him being halfway to sitting.

Him. Lucas stared at Khan, keeping his own expression neutral as a good butler should. Rove had given Khan new clothes, stolen from Earth or run up by rat tailors. There was a shirt, a tie, a jacket, trousers—all of it saying “beta male” to Lucas’s eyes. The difference was fascinating. Khan had been a loud, angry woman, full of expletives. The man before Lucas looked three inches shorter and a hundred decibels less pugnacious, too small for the made-to-measure clothes, shrunken in on himself.

Lucas felt that he should get a kick of satisfaction out of that, restoring the proper order of things and all. Except, seeing just how much had been ripped away from Khan—by new clothes and the scrubbing away of the make-up—he found he didn’t like it after all. It was a weird time for empathy to come calling, but he looked at Rove’s slight, polite smile and thought, Well, this is fucking pointless dickery, isn’t it. Oh, Rove would say it was to establish who was in charge, which would at least have been dickery with a point. But Lucas thought the dickery was its own point, here and now. It seemed Rove had a few Good Old-Fashioned Values he wanted to wave around, and who was going to say no to him?