She placed a placatory hand on my wrist. “Yes, I know. I was there when he told you, remember? But you won’t find a contradiction here. I do know who he’s talking about, but I was a very naïve young girl at the time and thought they were just close in the usual way young ladies can be close. I’m afraid I never watched them at length and never registered how they functioned as a unit. I never even heard them speak at the same time, the way your lovely Oscin and Skye do. Is it really so terrible for me to be dazzled, a little? Even a little envious?”
“No,” I said, watching Skye chuckle as the Bettelhine men glanced my way. I supposed I’d become a subject of conversation. “I suppose not.”
“How did you ever meet them?”
I almost launched into a summary of my posting to the cylinder world known as One One One, but stopped myself and appraised Jelaine anew. “You know, you’re very good.”
She went wide-eyed. “At what?”
“The way you pulled me aside with hints of explanation, delayed me with a drink, and now change the subject to something safe. The way you give the impression you’ve opened up without telling me a damn thing. The way you take a wary and unpleasant person who has no intention of making friends and make her relax in her presence. Whatever else you are, you’re a born politician. But I’m not fooled, and I’m losing my patience. What is this all about?”
Her secretive smile never wavered. Only her eyes reacted, and then with a twinkle of affection. “I was told you could be difficult, Andrea. I was also told that you’re well worth the effort. I do want to be friends.”
I almost demanded to know who the hell told her that, since the Porrinyards were pretty much the only people I knew capable of tolerating me without being ordered to. But it would have meant changing the subject again. “The explanation. Please.”
She sighed, betraying not irritation but a deep, pervading sadness that might have been about me and might have been about something else. For a moment I could see the same shadow of terrible suffering I’d spotted on Jason’s face. “You may have guessed at least part of this already, but you’re here, at least in part, for what might loosely be termed a job interview.”
“No shit.”
“Not at all. My father has a specific position in mind, and believes that he can offer you terms capable of luring you away from your current employers.”
She had to mean the Corps, as she couldn’t have known about my association with the AIsource. “No.”
She raised an eyebrow. “We know that you’re not happy with the way the Corps has treated you. It can’t be home.”
“It isn’t. In fact, I hate the bastards. But neither am I eager to sell my loyalty to an organization I’ve always considered evil for a little more money and a slightly fancier job title.”
“I appreciate that, Andrea, but there are factors here that you can’t possibly guess. It wouldn’t be a little more money. Or a slightly fancier job title. And evil is only a function of how the power’s used. Frankly, I believe that my father will be able to make the case that your loyalty’s a commodity better invested with us at this critical point in your history than with any of those self-righteous slavemasters at New London.”
She seemed so sure. But then, a sense of entitlement, of being able to collect people, would just naturally go along with being a Bettelhine. “I’m still not hearing any answers.”
She sighed. “My father really does deserve the pleasure of telling you the whole thing. He’s done so much to arrange this, and it will mean so much to him. But perhaps I can save him some time covering the background.”
“Anything,” I said.
“Well, let’s start with this. Have you ever experienced a turning point? One of those moments so profound that it not only changed your life after that moment, but also how you interpreted everything you’d seen and done beforehand?”
I thought of the day I’d lost my family on Bocai, of my mission to the world known as Catarkhus, and of the way the Porrinyards had looked at me after the second time they’d saved my life in just about as many days. “Yes.”
“Well, as it happens, the fortunes of the Bettelhine Family have experienced such a historic moment, one that’s likely to alter the way we conduct business and how we relate to the rest of human civilization.”
“Would this be Jason’s disappearance?”
The guess did not surprise her. “Would it surprise you to hear that his absence almost destroyed us?”
“No.”
“You’re alone, then. I know what people say about us. They look at all the damage we’ve done, at the blood spilled because of us, and declare us soulless monsters profiting off human lives. I’d wager half my share in the family fortune that you’ve said something like it yourself, certainly before you got here and absolutely since you’ve arrived. Am I right?”
I decided not to insult her with empty denials. “Your money would be safe.”
“We’re used to that. But sometimes, when we suffer a family trauma, outsiders don’t even give us credit for the ability to feel for our own. They question our tears and attribute our grief to public relations. It’s different when you’re in the middle of it. It almost tore us apart.”
“I understand.”
“No, Andrea, with all due respect, and more affection than you could possibly know, I don’t think you do. A missing child is supposed to be horrible for any family, and I’m certain it is, but I think a big family with a small mob of children, like ours, feels it more. The suffering, the fear for him, the sense of loss, is not subdivided, as you’d suppose, but multiplied. We all reflected each other’s heartbreak and uncertainty, and we all felt more hopeless in the face of it. But that may have been a good thing, in the long run. We may have been the first generation of my family in many years to not grow up feeling invulnerable.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not arrogant enough to say that it was worse for me than for any of the others, but I became a shadow of myself. Jason and I were about the same age, and up until that day he’d always been my closest friend among all my brothers and sisters.”
The hubbub of soft music and surrounding conversation seemed as far away as New London. For the moment, at least, there was no one in the room but us. “Why did he leave?”
“In part, idealism; in part foolish rebellion. He thought he’d return home a conquering hero. I was such a starry-eyed little idiot that I believed him, and even wished him luck when he left. To my eternal shame, I even helped him slip away.”
“That must have gone over well.”
“Nobody knew until long after he got back. And by then, the damage was done. Have you ever heard of a cylinder world known as Deriflys?”
The word sounded elegant, the way she uttered it horrific. I found part of me not wanting to know. But I’d opened this door, so I just shook my head.
“There are places where the machinery of civilization carves out a habitat for people to live, only to abandon them when the people who pay the bills either go bankrupt or decide to move elsewhere. Deriflys was one of the all-time worst.”
“What happened?”
“It was supposed to be a travel and manufacturing hub, with plenty of work, but the backers disappeared and left two million human beings stranded there with no way to evacuate. No human or alien government anywhere in civilized space considered the looming catastrophe their problem. The local economy crashed. Legitimate shipping went elsewhere. More and more, the only vessels interested in stopping at Deriflys became those run by criminal enterprises intent on profiting from the misery of those left behind. Drugs and weapons flooded the place, gangs took over, and the residents who did manage to book passage offworld found themselves delivered against their wills to lives worse than the ones they’d left. Everybody who stayed had to live with the chaos. There were a few well-fed leaders and absolute wretchedness on every level below them. The inhabitants were left starving, desperate, filthy, and clawing at each other for
every gram of food, breath of air, and square centimeter of space. In short, life there became a daily litany of atrocities, and an exercise in how low you were willing to sink, how cheaply you were willing to sell yourself, in order to survive.” She told the story as if she’d lived it herself. She dabbed at her eyes with a soft linen. “This, Counselor, is the place where my beautiful brother Jason, my best friend, spent five years while we didn’t know whether he was alive or dead.”
It wasn’t the only such story I’d heard. Civilized space was dotted with worlds that had made themselves hells, sometimes out of sheer suicidal neglect, other times by turning on each other with the very same weapons responsible for providing the ancestors of Jason Bettelhine with the wealth he’d forsaken when he went wandering, bright-eyed but blind, through a hostile universe. There was no reason I should have felt sympathy for him, given who he was, but he’d been a child, much like another whose innocence had ended with brutality and blood. It took me several seconds to muster words. “Why didn’t he tell somebody who he was, and promise a big reward to the first ship that sent him home?”
Once again, her smile crossed the border into the pity she’d shown for Monday Brown. “Surely a woman as wise as yourself knows the answer to that.”
It had come to me as soon as I’d asked the question. Of course, he couldn’t have. The kind of people capable of clawing their way to the top of a world falling apart would have seen a Bettelhine heir as a commodity more valuable than any mere ransom could be. There were entire civilizations ravaged by his family trade that would have given half their treasuries just to have him handed over for execution, others that would have loved to have him chained to a wall and tortured a different way every day for the rest of his natural life. Still others would have pointed a gun at his head and advised the Bettelhines that he would remain alive for only as long as the family made regular payments. In none of those cases would any thought be given to actually returning him. Hard as it would have been to accept, Jason would have been far safer as a ragged little corridor rat, or as the plaything of powers greater than himself, than he ever could have been as the long-lost Bettelhine son, expecting a comfortable ride back to the luxurious estate he’d forsaken in favor of the adventure gone bad.
But there was another factor, even more terrible, that loomed above all of those nightmares like a massive weight set to crush everything beneath it to insignificance. Exactly how long could a naïve, pampered boy live in hell before survival meant doing something that he could never bring back to his family? How long before the only possible conclusion for him would be that he’d ruined himself, and belonged nowhere but where he was?
I said, “How did he get out?”
“He’s not willing to share that at this time. But I can say that when he got home it was almost another additional year before he was willing to accept the family’s joy at seeing him again. The boy we’d known had been…broken.”
I glanced at the confident young man enjoying his conversation with Skye. “He seems fine now. As do you.”
“Thank you. You don’t know what it cost us, by which I mean, the two of us. We help each other carry the weight. It’s one reason we remain so close now.”
“And—excuse me—all this helps explain why I’m here, how?”
Jelaine spread her hands. “A changed man can change his family, and what his family stands for. Even, I daresay, how far the web of family extends. We want to reflect that with our policies, Andrea, and we believe that you can help us realize that ambition. We believe that you’re uniquely suited to help guide us into that future. But the rest is for my father to say. I can see we’re out of time anyway.”
I heard another sylvan tinkle, like the one that had summoned the Porrinyards and me from our suite. It was followed by a gentle mechanical hum, somewhere above me. I followed the sound to its point of origin and saw a formal dinner table, draped with a golden embroidered cloth and equipped with twelve settings, descending from an invisible recess in the ceiling, sans wires. The table itself had no legs, just the dining surface, which found its natural level at the altitude appropriate for diners. Just as it settled into place, twelve chairs, including eleven built for the human posterior and one designed for the bonier Bocaian rump, came into view, lowering themselves through the illusory solidity of the ceiling, and settled into their positions. Atop the table, gleaming silver holders anchored a pair of scarlet candles, burning fore and aft, their reflections dancing on each of the bejeweled table settings. Each place had a printed name card, tented behind the plate, establishing the prearranged seating order.
Across the room, the middle-aged couple went aaaaah and just barely resisted clapping their hands. I stifled the same impulse I’d obeyed at the suite when confronted with the bed that had made itself. I did not exclaim, Oh, come ON! But I thought it. I may have liked one Bettelhine at least, more than I’d imagined I was going to, but I hated what seemed to be a family habit of doing everything as if it had to be accompanied by a flourish of trumpets.
Somewhere, Arturo Mendez said, “Dinner is served.”
T o me the common dinner party is as alien an environment as an ocean of liquid mercury, or an ice field on a frozen moon.
But some things can’t be helped.
We took our seats, and I got to meet the other members of the party.
It turned out that I did know the dazzling redhead seated opposite me (“Counselor Cort! How wonderful! I heard that you were here!”), but that was no great accomplishment on my part. Everybody knew her. Her name was Dejah Shapiro, and she was the famous mistress of a personal empire as star-spanning as the one commanded by the Bettelhines, much of it based on the sale of high-end orbital habitats for markets throughout human space. It was said that she’d built more worlds than a year’s output of the Bettelhine factories could have blown up. It was also said that, despite her youthful appearance, she’d lived longer than any human being now alive. We’d spent a week working together, about ten years ago, when she’d been engaged to double the size of an expanding New London, and I’d been the young Dip Corps attorney assigned to ease her through the permits. She’d claimed to like me, at the time, even though I’d done everything within my power to discourage it.
When the Porrinyards were introduced to her as my assistants, she sized them up and brightened at once. “Oh, wow. Counselor, you haven’t.”
The Porrinyards, seated at opposite ends of the long table, but enjoying themselves a little too much, said, “Surprising, isn’t it?”
“Not now that I think about it. It would take more than one person, acting in concert, to break past Andrea’s defenses.”
Dejah’s latest marriage, to a low-end petty thief named Karl Nimmitz, had been the stuff of tabloid journalism, impossible to escape even if, like myself, that was the kind of news you tried to. But he wasn’t here. I wondered why. Had they fought? Broken up? Or were there just some pets you didn’t take out in polite company? I rejected those questions as irrelevant to the moment at hand and asked a polite, deceptively casual, “And is this your first trip down to Xana?”
Dejah gave me a look of total understanding, which in her case gave the impression that she could map every stray neuron that decided to fire in my brain. “In fact, yes. I’m afraid that relations between myself and our hosts have not always been as cordial as they’ve been tonight.”
The other Bettlehine brother emitted a laugh that sounded more like a bark. “Let’s not understate the case, Dejah. The proper word, before today, has always been enemies. There have been times when you wouldn’t have dared come here without an armada.”
“Well, yes,” she said, with a genteel tip of her goblet. “But I hope this marks the start of a more congenial relationship.”
He matched her toast. “As do I.”
Best wishes like that make the air between them seem full of broken glass.
His name was Philip Bettelhine, and he was introduced to me as the half brother of Jason and Je
laine, born a decade before them to one of their father’s previous wives. The Bettelhine genes remained dominant, of course, and he had the same strong jaw, the same piercingly intelligent eyes. But his complexion was darker, a polished mahogany where theirs was a milk-fed pink. His gray hair was the color and consistency of lamb’s wool and had been trimmed to meet his forehead in a jagged line like a sawtooth, suggesting either the points of a crown or the teeth of a shark, I didn’t know which. As a man he seemed wearier and less prone to politic smiles than either of his younger siblings, more bent by whatever responsibilities marked his own contribution to the Bettelhine enterprises.
Tonight he sat at Jason’s right hand and murmured soft comments toward his younger brother whenever conversation lagged. Only Skye, sitting to his immediate left, managed to establish that he was capable of smiling with actual mirth, rather than just sublimated tension. At least one of her comments made him glance my way with genuine amusement. I burned to know what the joke was, but would have forgone that for some understanding of whatever was going on between him and his brother.
Sometime during the salad—orange, crunchy spheres that I probed with little appetite, and much dismay, and which Jelaine leaned over to describe as a “delicious, tangy” spore native to Xana’s frozen continent—Philip turned my way and uttered the only words he’d directed toward me since our terse introduction at the meal’s onset. “Excuse me, Counselor? Jason and I were talking about this new job title of yours? Prosecutor-at-Large?”
I dabbed at my lips with a napkin, having rearranged the spheres in my bowl without quite managing to consume any of them. “What about it, Mr. Bettelhine?”
“It’s downright unprecedented, as far as I know. In fact, from what I know about the Dip Corps leadership, it flies in the face of any of their policies maintaining command oversight over agents in the field.”
The Third Claw of God Page 8