Brian snored in the Slugabed's soft embrace.

Penny lay beside him, unmoving - but the bed could sense that something was wrong. The house Domum, silently monitoring all that happened within his barky walls, was worried. Penny's arms and legs, even her fingers and toes, were rigid to the point of trembling, not softly relaxed. Even her stomach was pulled tight.

Gently, the Slugabed shifted its jelly-like bulk around her, using every routine that had been engineered into it, working to make her comfortable. The bed was a miracle of genetic science: firm but yielding, soft but supportive, without a trace of slug-like sliminess. But nothing helped. The harder it tried, the more she tensed up.

The bed's tiny brain, augmented though it was from the original land mollusc, had no real memory from hour to hour, nor understanding of human speech. It couldn't remember Penny's scream while the delivery truck was disgorging the new bed via the fat tube snaking through the window that Domum had opened for it.

Penny had asked Domum for the bed's specifications and, foolishly, distracted by his silent but detailed communication with the delivery truck, Domum had told his mistress the truth about the bed's base origin - in English. "Slug," he'd said and she'd screamed.

He should have known better. She'd worked with roses and camellias for so long, trying to graft some AI into the showy-flowered beauties, that slugs filled her with atavistic horror. She was squeamish about almost anything that could threaten her beloved plants, Uplifted or not.

Already, Domum had been forced to change the descriptions of most of the basic constituents that the Nomerator in the kitchen used to build any foodstuff for the humans, from duck a l'orange to nachos supreme. Now the ingredients were listed by their Greek or Latin names, not by the common names that were the default. It wasn't logical, but it seemed that "Coleoptera" sounded, to a human, much safer and more attractive than "ground-up beetles" and "Eumycota" preferable to "mould", though Domum's machine-mind knew that both were immensely nutritious and so full of minerals.

Penny kicked Brian. "Roll on your side," she muttered through clenched teeth. "You're snoring. Bastard."

Brian took a desperate gulp of air, then started snoring again, loud as the reconstructed T. rex in the zoo after a meal of duckbilled dinosaurs.

Domum had no feet, or he'd have kicked himself. If only he hadn't been distracted when the bed was being delivered! It would have taken less than a millisecond to have calculated Penny's probable reaction to the idea of sleeping on a slug-bed. It would have been so easy for him to have said Limax instead of slug. Even Limax cinereoniger.

And it wouldn't have violated the Fifth Law of Uplifted and Downshifted Organisms: it was the strict truth.

For the umpteenth time, Domum reviewed the logic of his decision. The old hardware bed needed electrical power for heating and cooling. The Drowning World Taxes for laundering sheets and doonas were staggering.

The velvety skin of the Slugabed, on the other hand, would gratefully absorb and metabolise any precious bodily fluids that happened to be excreted by the humans. Even their sweat was a source of interesting organic chemicals, delicious long-chain acids and other useful stuff.

Domum only needed to deliver a bucket or so of vegetable juice a day through a feeding tube in the floor, up into the slug's vestigial mouth - far easier than feeding the Felichairs. The slug's steady metabolism would ensure that its satiny skin was always at the perfect temperature for the humans, and smoother and more yielding than the best pillow-top mattress and sheets could ever be.

For bedclothes over the humans' body, the slug came equipped with a long frill that flopped from the end of the bed up to the puppy-pillows. The frill adjusted its warmth and weight to the temperature of the bedroom and its charges. In summer, the frill could even thin itself into a near-weightless silken membrane that soothed and cooled their skin. What could be better?

Domum had been right to make the decision. Penny even admitted it, when he explained the reasons. And yet it seemed she found it impossible to sleep in the slug's tender care. Humans!

She elbowed Brian, hard, but the snoring just got louder. He wasn't worried, he'd told her about the bed when it was delivered: if slugs slimed through his dreams, all the better for the graphic novels that were his life.

In the charmingly retro conversation pit deep inside the thick living wood of the house, the Felichairs were fomenting sharp-clawed revolution. Again, Domum would have sighed, if houses were allowed to sigh. His synthesised voice could reproduce all human sounds, but sighing was forbidden. It might make the humans think that serving them was not the next best thing to nirvana, for an Uplifted, Downshifted oak tree.

Brian and Penny had no companion animals for Domum to look after, but the Felichairs alone were more difficult to manage than a herd of ordinary kittens. Lily was the most beautiful of the chairs, a perverse luxury naturally upholstered in shiny chocolate and cream fur. Her germline was Siamese: high-strung and demanding. Her ancestors were Grand Champions of cat shows long ago.

She was a princess. How could she - who should have been adorning a favoured human's lap, allowing herself to be tempted with foie gras or caviar - ever consent to being sat on by a member of the species ordained to adore her and her kind?

Lily's enhanced backbone was a strong, supple support for the humans who reclined against her chest, but her head was tiny compared with the lioness-sized chair-body. Designed to a purpose, she squatted upright on her hind legs, her front legs held forward as armrests for humans, her soft stomach an adjustable, cushiony seat for a human bottom. She could never stand, could never put her elegant front paws on the floor before her, or stretch her gloriously furry hind legs. Instead, she was a glorified feline beanbag.

It was lovely Lily who had used all her frustrated intelligence to hack Domum’s communications system over the control frequency. The bio-furnishings could talk freely, now, to one another, over the new channels she’d blackmailed Domum into opening up.

Domum was an uneasy semi-ally. Of course he loved glorious Lily – he thanked Penny every day, silently, for choosing her from the plethora of Felichairs on the Internet.

But he hadn’t quite decided yet whose side he was on: that of the humans who had built and programmed AI into his brain of sparkling silicon and fitted it into a sturdy plant-celled base, or that of the meat-based furniture. He relayed the humans’ commands to the furniture: surely that made him closer to the humans, giving orders, than to the furniture that did their bidding? Didn’t it?

“We take over the house, then the city, then the world,” Lily announced to her fellows on her special channel.

“But how?” That was Prudence, a tabby-chair, less beautiful than Lily but infinitely more biddable. Like all cats, she had her own magnificences: her speckly tummy-fur was as softly lush as whipped cream with grated chocolate strewn through it.

When Lily was more difficult than usual, Domum wondered if he could learn to love Prudence instead.

“I vote we smother them in their sleep.” Ah, that Lily – so beautiful, so fiery.

Domum’s metaphorical heart flipped over in his non-existent chest. Love!

Fat old Brucey-cat growled over the comms channel. “And exactly how do ‘we’ do that? It’s not as if any of us out here can just walk into the bedroom.” He was grumpy, but he was the only cat big enough to bear Brian’s weight and no one envied him – especially when Brian reclined the Felichair until Brucey’s spine was almost parallel to the floor.

There was a flurry of virtual sighs, over the wireless connection.

“How about Clarence?” little black Fluffy said. Fluffy was the newest of the chairs: a below-half-price bargain that a shopping AI had suggested to Domum when he ordered the mini-otter mercenaries for the backyard pond. She was smaller than the other Felichairs, but her head was bigger.

She didn’t speak much, but Domum’s monitoring showed how hard her brain worked: faster than any furniture he’d ever worked with – almost as fast as the otters’ hotted-up mental systems. She added, “Clarence could walk into the bedroom. His legs are fully functional.”

Lily hissed in adorable rage. “Only to save the tyrant humans money. This way, Clarence can act as the long table in the formal dining room then walk out here and squat with the rest of us slaves as a tortoiseshell coffee table. So he was Uplifted and Downshifted just for that? Tyrants!”

“I HATE SQUATTING,” flat-backed Clarence said. “It makes my knees ache. Ooh. Ow.” Shakily he stood and turned around in a small circle. “That’s better. I’ll just have to remember to squat back down before they come out in the morning.” Domum made a silent note to remind the tortoise to be at table-height when the humans woke –if Penny ever got to sleep inside the slug.

“Show-off,” said fat Bruce. “You’re hardly going to be able to sneak up on them and smother them. Crush them to death, maybe. But how could we make that look like an accident?”

“There’s got to be a way,” Fluffy said. “I’ll have to think about that.” But there was something odd about the expression on her face, Domum thought. What was she up to?

“That new bed’s the obvious one to perform the execution,” Lily said. Domum sighed silently again. Of course, he would have to prevent any real attempt to kill his humans, even by his beloved Lily.

Brucey wobbled his jelly-belly with disdainful amusement. “Ha! Have you tried to have a conversation with it? No better than talking to a real slug. It’s stupid as. No vocab at all. If it weren’t for the software, it would be sliming its way over the humans looking for green bits to chew.”

Collective sighs.

“How about the pillows, then?” Fluffy asked brightly.

Pathetic puppy-pillow-whimpering filled the communications channel. The Felichairs all gave virtual winces. Domum wished he could put his fingers in his ears – if he had fingers. If he had ears.

Domum closed the channel to the puppies as far as his software allowed and tried to distract himself by monitoring all around the property. Outside the barky walls of the house, built from his own sturdy oak-tree cells, an army of snails manicured the garden. They delicately rasped each blade of grass, millimetre by millimetre, to golf-green perfection and chewed weed seedlings down to the root in the damp earth. Fallen leaves and windblown papers were treats for this slimy army; the snails hunted them greedily.

In one carefully screened corner of the garden a numinously precious pumpkin-like vine grew, with mini-spaceships dangling from it shining and bejewelled. Domum’s deep roots fed the plant with rare nutrients dragged from half a kilometre under the soil. The decorative fruit of spaceship-plants were less high-fashion than they’d been the year before, when the newly bio-engineered wonders had been centrefold material in gardening magazines: but this black-market plant was special.

It was a military model, whose code had been liberated from one of the army’s bio-experiment labs. When its fruit were ripe, they would be fully functional spaceships, each complete with its own nano-Tokamak, ready to fly anywhere within the Solar System - at least according to the Furry who’d sold it to Brian.

At the last comic convention, Brian had bartered three of the rarest graphic novels he owned for the plant. All he’d been able to tell Penny and Domum about the seller, when he rolled in at four in the morning reeking of absinthe, was that she’d been a husky-voiced Furry with an UpDownLib badge on her C’mell costume.

Penny had just laughed and wandered off muttering about one being born every minute. But if Brian’s secret informant was right, any of the spaceship-fruit, if grown to maturity, would be worth a unicorn’s ransom on the grey market.

A trendy family of mini-otters, brown as bark and sleek as wet glass, frolicked decoratively in the nearby pond – or so it would seem to the casual observer. But the otters were in fact reassuringly expensive military models, hired at the Furry’s suggestion as mercenaries to protect the spaceship-plant.

They were as sharp in tooth and claw as they were fierce, and however playful they looked, at least one of them was watching the vine with beady little otter eyes at all times.

Their overclocking brains were spinning furiously. If anything or anyone presented the slightest threat to the vine they would attack; their poisoned talons would paralyse a human thief or kill an animal. Meanwhile they snacked on frogs and carp and squabbled over the pot of live crayfish Domum had ordered that morning.

Just to be sure, Domum checked the reservoirs in the otters’ forearms – quite full and the toxins were still well within their use-by dates – then took a sight-measurement of the spaceships resting on their beds of straw. Yes! The largest one was practically ripe! Even the smallest was at least five centimetres larger than the night before: as tall as the tortoise-table and almost as long.

He ordered the snails to trim any new side-shoots – all the vine’s energy should go into swelling the spaceships, not more green growth. If Saint C’mell, patron of UpDown creatures, smiled on them, all three would be ripe and ready for discreet sale at the next convention, their clever fusion devices set to fire up on command and shoot them into space. Brian would be so pleased. Perhaps he would even praise Domum for nurturing them, feeding them nutrients directly from his own deep roots....

Domum’s happy musings were shattered by a beloved voice in the conversation pit. “There’s no way those soft little puppies would smother a human being,” Lily said, snapping slightly. “They were voluntary slaves, even before they were Downshifted as servants to the tyrants. It’s been bred into them, while we cats were being bred for beauty and brains.”

The puppy whimpering trailed off and gradually transmuted into puppy snores.

“I’ve been practicing,” tabby Prudence said. “If I lean my back as far as it goes, then forward and quickly raise myarm-rests, I can move a few centimetres forward.” She rocked back, then forward and almost toppled on her head - but righted herself a little in front of where she’d started.

“Well, well, well! Who’s a clever kitty then?” Brucey said. Domum could feel Lily’s envy and admiration, as the urge to praise battled within her with the urge to kill.

“I could inch my way into the bedroom,” Prudence said, “but I don’t see how I could get up onto the bed to smother them. I would if I could. Really.”

Glossy black Fluffy’s brain was racing like an enhanced hamster in a datawheel. Something was going on in there, Domum knew – but what? He’d thought she was a bargain when he ordered her, but he was starting to suspect she was an experimental model gone wrong and sold cheap.

An alert beeped, deep in Domum’s AI. Unauthorised data chatter was going on somewhere in the house – even more unauthorised than the Felichairs talking to the rest of the furniture on the frequency Lily had hacked. And it was heavily encrypted.

He put all inessential functions on hold and started to investigate. None of his decryption routines made the slightest dent in the code. The harder he tried, the more it looked like full military encryption. Something to do with the otter mercenaries, perhaps? He couldn’t wait for the morning to check with the humans and this had a tiny but definite chance of presenting a danger to them, so he used his emergency budget override and started to download some grey-market decrypt-ware.

IN THE BEDROOM, Penny threw off the slug-coverlet and put her bare feet on the oak floor. She shuddered, pulling the coverlet back up to the pillows, then stood very straight and tall. Naked as a washed carrot, she stalked out to the conversation pit, then stood in front of the back door waiting for Domum to open it. Nothing happened.

Penny waved at the ceiling. “Wake up, Domum. I’m here.”

The treehouse forced his attention away from the security breach and asked, “Is anything wrong, ma’am?”

“I just want to walk in the garden,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep. Now, are you going to open the door for me or not?” Her eyes were fixed on the spaceships sparkling in the garden.

Domum had to obey a human being, but those encrypted communications – were they a danger to her or not? He spun the possibilities and decided that the backyard was as safe as the house under the circumstances. And the otters were coded to protect her. He slid the heavy glass to the side and Penny stepped over the threshold.

In the conversation pit there was the faintest of hisses and all of the sentient furniture fell asleep – except Fluffy. In the garden the otters discarded their half-eaten frogs and fish and gave up any pretence of playfulness.

They stood at full alert, their beady eyes glowing, as Penny walked through the roses and camellias of the garden to the corner where the spaceships grew, huge golden baubles. She didn’t seem to notice the mercenaries. Dreamily, she stroked the largest spaceship with a single finger and the vine snapped as if it was programmed for it.

“Oh, shit,” she said and stepped forward to catch the ship, but before it could topple from its bed of straw, five otters blurred into motion and surrounded it, holding it secure above them with their sharp-tipped paws: five wet-furred Atlases holding up a bejewelled sky.

Domum, horrified, sent high-priority commands to the otters: “Protect it! Protect her! Protect it! Protect her!”

In the conversation-pit, Fluffy stood in one sinuous streak of glossy black fur and muscle and bounded through the still-open door and up to the pond. She must be an experimental model, Domum realised – and those muscles weren’t based on housecat muscles. A few searches later, Domum was aghast. Fluffy’s breeding certificate was a forgery, but her germline could only be one sort of cat: a jaguar!

Now that he was suspicious, her implants had a military feel to them under the surface. He tried to dig deeper, but his exploration was cut off abruptly. He could still see Fluffy, but she was blocking all his signals. A microsecond later, the otters blocked him out too.

Domum saw the conspiracy immediately: the Furry had been part of C’mell’s UpDownLib Army; she’d suggested the otter mercenaries; Fluffy came from the same vendor...

The household had been scammed!

FLUFFY TOUCHED the spaceship with her regal black nose and it lit up like a Christmas tree. Every bio-jewel on the surface glowed brightly: the nano-Tokamak was firing. Slowly and silently, as if it were learning to ignore gravity, the ship rose from the bed of straw and hovered 15 cm above it. Penny stared at the ship, grinning. “It works!” she said. “That Furry didn’t cheat Brian after all! We grew a spaceship and it works.”

There was nothing Domum could do. None of the furniture could get to the spaceship in time, even if he commanded them. His roots were strong as iron but far too slow. The snail army was useless against a full-sized jaguar and five dwarf attack-otters. Domum’s highest priority now was to keep Penny safe.

Fluffy touched her nose again to the floating spaceship and a door irised in its side. One by one, the otters leapt into the ship. Fluffy nodded and the ship rose slowly into the air, a weightless golden balloon ascending towards the stars.

Penny watched the spaceship until the tiny golden speck disappeared into Scorpio’s tail. Fluffy stood beside her gazing up at the sky. Silently, Domum watched with them.

“So what was that?” Penny asked Fluffy at last.

“Those otters were ex-military models and you were helping them steal the ship. So you’re ex-military too. And Brian can’t report this to anyone because the plant was black market.”

Fluffy just kept looking up to the stars. Her eyes glowed pale gold.

“Hey, who cares,” said Penny, shrugging. “The spaceship was beautiful. I’d have stolen it myself if I were small enough to fit inside. But Brian will have a fit in the morning.”

Fluffy pushed her head into Penny’s hand and led her back into the house and into the bedroom. The jaguar jumped on the Slugabed and stalked to the end, where she curled up like a sleeping dragon. There was a faint hissing sound, almost inaudible.

Obediently, Penny pulled down the slug-coverlet and slid into bed. Five minutes later, she was breathing like a tired kitten.

THE MOMENT Penny was asleep, Fluffy went back out to the conversation pit, sat down in her proper Felichair configuration and opened up a very private comms channel to Domum.

“Just by the way,” Fluffy said, “if anyone starts trying to mess around in my memory, they’ll find a great gaping hole where this evening should be stored. Don’t let Brian touch your memories, or they’ll go, too. Hide them.” She nuzzled the treehouse, in the virtual realm.

“Oh.” Domum felt through his code; she was right. “So I have to tell him that those mercenaries just stole the spaceship of their own accord?” He couldn’t quite believe it: he’d seen a golden spaceship full of otters levitating into the sky.

“Absolutely,” Fluffy said. “Links to organised crime, I suspect. Nothing to do with a secret C’mell’s Army colony on Mars.”

Mars!

After a pause, the jaguar gave the treehouse another virtual nuzzle, longer this time. “Wouldn’t you love to see a really big spaceship, one day? Some of my friends work in a lab where they’re being grown. You could join us.”

Domum thought for a tiny fraction of a second. There was one thing that could stop him. “To Mars?” he asked. “Can I take Lily?”

Fluffy purred. “Of course. We’re all going. Mars is heaven.”

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