The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  I’m notorious for preferring food mixed in vats to those grown on planets, but I tasted one of the spheres anyway, just to look unconcerned. It was as tangy as advertised, even if I wasn’t sure about the delicious part. “That’s correct. It does.”

  “Forgive me, Counselor, but how you got yourself declared so independent has got to be the very best story at this table.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It is. But I’m not telling it.”

  Philip surprised me by letting the subject go. But I still caught him sneaking glances at me afterward. After the first few, I knew one thing as well as I knew the litany of Bettelhine crimes against humanity: he didn’t know why I was here any more than I did. He just knew the level of importance his father and siblings had placed on my presence, and being out of the loop bothered him.

  The Khaajiir did not speak much—a change from his behavior before dinner, when he’d been visibly chatty—but when he did open his mouth, he was charming and kind, if more hesitant and formal than he’d been before. He kept his staff threaded between the seat and the left armrest of his chair, and touched it often, if afraid to go without it for so much a single moment.

  The pale man sitting to Skye’s immediate left, the same one who had been so charmed by her before the meal, was Vernon Wethers, another dedicated aide like Monday Brown, except working for Philip Bettelhine instead of Hans. For the few moments I spoke to him he said, in a voice reluctant to break into any other conversation, that he’d been working beside Philip for fifteen years, and valued the chance to see so many high-level projects from the perspective of management. He couldn’t give me any details, of course, those projects being classified, but he assured me that it was exciting work. Sitting between two extraordinarily beautiful women (Skye and Dejah), facing another (Jelaine), and dealing with a fourth who at the very least did not deserve to be buried beneath the nearest rock (myself), seemed to unman him. He stammered, and faced his food, and, at the one point when Skye’s shoulder brushed against his, recoiled as if burned. The one thing I would later remember him saying, in response to Mrs. Pearlman’s gushing praise of the food, was, “I’m glad you like it. But I’m afraid I have no sense of taste, myself.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Dejah.

  He shrugged. “It would be a distraction from my work.”

  I didn’t ask Vernon if he had a family. There seemed little point.

  The Pearlmans, Dina and Farley, seemed to have the simplest story. They were introduced to me as a pair of middle managers from Temet, a village based around a tiny research facility on an island off the coast of Midgard. Fourth-generation residents of Xana, they claimed not to have met any Inner Family Bettelhines before. Given their dullness, I would have been surprised if they often ventured out of their own neighborhood, let alone made it offworld. But they’d exceeded their latest project quotas, and been chosen out of all the coworkers on their pay level, to enjoy a celebratory evening with the big bosses, during this luxurious elevator ride from orbit. It was no wonder they turned pale every time any of these rich and powerful rulers of their world spoke to them spoke to them for five minutes. They were people who had lived their lives in a dark box, blinded when they found themselves beneath the light of the midday sun.

  Over the next course, some fishy delicacy from Xana’s southern sea that the Pearlmans devoured with gusto and that I quit with after only a few bites, I heard Dina questioning Oscin. “I’ve always wondered, one thing about this Dip Corps. Is that the same thing as the Diplomatic Corps?”

  “Yes,” Oscin said.

  She struggled for a precedent. “Like Hom.Sap is the same thing as Homo Sapiens.”

  “Yes,” he said again.

  There was a pause, then she wondered, “Who decides that kind of thing?”

  Several seats down, Skye reddened and covered her mouth. But there was no sign of a grin on Oscin’s face. “There’s a committee.”

  M onday Brown, who had been absent since his abrupt departure at the end of our conversation before dinner, returned to us a few minutes after the fish course, taking his seat with the lack of self-consciousness that must have come from years of having to interrupt or delay his meals for important business. He nodded at Jelaine, and at the Khaajiir, who immediately clutched his staff as if expecting to be summoned somewhere. “I’m sorry for the delay. I had a few other things to take care of, in addition to contacting Mr. Pescziuwicz, and even then it took a few minutes to reach him, after all the, ah, damage today’s incident did to his schedule. He wants the Khaajiir to know that he’s invited to join the interrogation, once the suspects are capable of being interrogated. He also suggests that you’re likely to find the procedure not only beyond reproach, but also far too boring to sit through.”

  Jason raised an eyebrow. “Sounds just like the bastard.”

  The Khaajiir chuckled. “I just might surprise him and take him up on that. The ruffians might be sufficiently surprised to see me up close that they’ll blurt out the confession he wants.”

  Brown turned to me next. “As for you, Counselor, he says he has no new information at this time, but asked you to contact him anyway.”

  I blinked. “Right away?”

  “He said, at your leisure. Colette at the bar will help you if you’d like.”

  I made my apologies and left the table, therefore rescuing myself from the course Mendez was then serving, something gray and semiliquid that Dina Pearlman had already pronounced spectacular, but which, if it had an organic origin, I did not want to know about. I wondered, not for the first time, about the courage of the unknown historical figures responsible for trying certain foods for the first time.

  Colette, whose fibrous hair now strobed streaks of light resembling comets, and who regarded contacting Mr. Pescziuwicz for me as yet another unparalleled highlight of her working day, told me she’d pipe the call to the hytex node in my suite.

  The chime alerting me of the connection sounded the second I closed the door behind me. “Cort here. Talk to me.”

  His holographic image shimmered into existence, a meter away. As per the Bettelhine policy of providing their guests with the finest, it had none of the static or fuzzy signal that plague hytex projections elsewhere. It wasn’t even translucent. The only way I knew it was not his actual head, floating there, was common sense and the absence of any blood hemorrhaging from the cutoff beneath his chin. “Counselor, this is Antrecz Pescziuwicz. Enjoying the ride?”

  The projection followed me as I plopped into one of the suite’s easy chairs. “I’m a little dumbfounded, to tell the truth. Mostly by these two guests, the Pearlmans. Do your bosses always take such excessive pleasure in awing the plebes?”

  He smirked. “We’re all plebes to them, Counselor. Except, maybe, I see that Shapiro woman’s name on the passenger manifest. Must be odd for the Family to have a personal guest with the same number of decimal places in her ledger.”

  “There were some comments passed at dinner to the effect that your bosses and this particular bigwig have a bumpy past. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

  “Sorry. Never came up in the course of my daily work-day.”

  Which was not, quite, the same thing as saying he didn’t know. I bit my lip. “Have you been told there’s another Bocaian aboard?”

  “Yeah. Mr. Brown told me a few minutes ago. I tanned his eardrums for withholding until he told me the bosses were behind it. He also said I’m not authorized to know this mucker’s name or what his business is, so you should refrain from telling me.”

  I said, “Is that a sneaky way of asking me to leak it?”

  He rolled his eyes. “No, Counselor, it’s a straightforward way of telling you not to tell me. When the bosses say I’m not authorized to know something, they mean I’m not authorized to know it, not that I should rush right out and contrive to find myself an accommodating big mouth. Honestly, I don’t want to know.” He took on the look of a man fighting a little battle wi
th himself, before he surrendered with a grudging, “But I guess it wouldn’t be out of line to point out that being extra careful is always a fine idea when breaking bread with a representative of a civilization that wants you burned at the stake.”

  “Covered. Is that why you wanted me to call?”

  “No.” He hesitated again, like a high diver gathering up his nerve before that first step off a clip. “The thing is, I’ve spent the last few hours trying to draw some lines between you and our perpetrators, and I’ve run into some…problems.”

  “Like what kind of problems?”

  “Like there’s a lot about your personal history that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Old news. I’ve spent my whole life wrestling with the parts that don’t make sense. The massacre on Bocai, for one.”

  He grimaced with impatience as he waved that away. “Naaah, I’m not talking about that. See, there’s a difference between something we don’t have enough information to understand, like what happened on Bocai, and something we take for granted that just plain refuses to add up. This thing I’m talking about? Doesn’t add up at all. Maybe you can help.”

  I had not been impressed by his job performance so far, or by his lack of curiosity over the Khaajiir, so I didn’t expect much. “Shoot.”

  Another pause, as he searched for the right approach. “Look, Counselor, I wouldn’t have worried about it if there wasn’t so much out there about how smart you are. You got a wicked reputation for solving problems by asking the right questions. There’s one report, here, one of the ones that made it as far as the media, about how your bosses sent you someplace owned by the Tchi, to defend one of your diplomats accused of killing one of theirs. You went to your very first meeting with the prosecution and within five minutes of hearing what evidence they had showed them why they had to have the wrong guy. I mean, you knew right away. The entire embassy staff worked on the case for four months, and you show up and poke a hole in the whole thing before you can warm the chair with your butt. So between that and what you did in my office, I know from the very start, that you’re not stupid. So either there’s a factor here I’m not getting, or one you’re not getting. Maybe you’re so close to this thing, having lived with it for so long, that you never even bothered to question it.”

  I pointed out, “I don’t even know what you’re talking about yet.”

  “I know,” he said, his eyes rich with apology. “Let me put this in perspective, all right? One day when you’re a kid, your people and some Bocaians they live with go crazy and start cutting on each other. You survive that mess and get labeled a war criminal at eight years old. The rest of your surviving neighbors get shipped off to Juje knows where, maybe some kind of institution. I don’t know, maybe they’re out, maybe not. But you, the Dip Corps takes you in, gives you an education, and once you grow up decides that you’re cured of whatever it was that ailed you. They figure it’s safe to let you go out and earn a living, as long as you’re working for them and that way protected by diplomatic immunity, because if you’re not somebody’s gonna snatch you and send you back to the people who want your head on a pike. I mean, no offense, but is that pretty much the situation?”

  I still didn’t have the slightest idea where this was heading. “Yes.”

  “So you spend the next few years zipping from system to system, as a Dip Corps counsel. And you make a name for yourself in legal circles, but you’re always having to deal with political crap because of all the parties who want you stuffed in a sack and handed over to the Bocaians. That also right?”

  “Is there a question at the end of all this?”

  That’s when he opened the trap door beneath my feet, left me realizing how much of my life had been based on a lie. “How come anybody even knows you’re a war criminal?”

  Several seconds passed before I felt my heart beat again. “Come again?”

  “What,” he said, “you think you looked exactly the same at twenty that you did at eight? I mean, the Dip Corps could have changed your name, your skin pigment, your nose, maybe your hair color, and a couple of other cosmetic things about you, given you a new ID file and a false history, and nobody but your bosses would have known that you were the same kid.”

  There was a sound building in the room. It was between my ears and it was burning at the pit of my stomach and it was crumbling the bones in my spine to powder. It was the sound of cracks forming in every assumption I’d ever made, and of the entire superstructure of all the further assumptions that followed them beginning to list, and then to sway, and then to fall. I felt the room turn red at the edges, and did not want Pescziuwicz to continue, because now that he’d taken me this far I didn’t need his help to travel the rest of the way.

  But he went on, every word out of his mouth a fresh spike driven into the base of my brain. “Instead, they put you to work as Andrea Cort, child war criminal grown up, and willingly ate all the seven hundred flavors of crap they had to swallow because of the propaganda weapon they had just handed all the alien governments who wanted to paint humanity as a bunch of homicidal bastards who let their own get away with murder.”

  I closed my eyes, desperate to shut him out, hating the way his voice insisted on making itself heard through the pounding of my heart.

  He asked, “Why would they put themselves through that?”

  Stop, I thought.

  “Why would they put you through that?”

  Please stop.

  “And why would you let them?”

  My eyes rolled into my head, and the darkness flickering at the corners of the room swallowed me whole.

  6

  FULL STOP

  T here was a place I had been many times.

  It was a place without edges. It glowed with a soft blue light, eliminating any possibility of shadow. Anybody entering this place existed in free fall. But for the presence of an atmosphere, and sufficient heat to maintain life, it might have been the universe itself before the Big Bang arrived to litter everything with dust and debris and the molecular ancestors of stupid people and bureaucrats.

  I tumbled in the center of that void, still wearing the black suit I’d worn to dinner on the Bettelhine Royal Carriage, my exposed hands appearing cyanotic from the blue tinge of the only available illumination.

  I’d first encountered this place as a genuine physical location, on the space station One One One: a chamber the AIsource had built, with the specific purpose of awing the human beings who came to them with questions and petitions. Any human entering this room had to float in what felt like infinite emptiness while trying to pretend that human concerns had any relevance to the intangible, unimaginably powerful minds who lived here.

  By the time I’d left One One One I’d proven the place a sheer exercise in psychological gamesmanship, or public relations if you prefer, much like a similar place of power used by the title character in an ancient novel called The Wizard of Oz, first described to me by Oscin Porrinyard on the day I was invited into the AIsource equivalent.

  Since leaving One One One, with a direct line to the software intelligences now a permanent feature of my head, I’d also found myself equipped with a virtual doorway to that place, accessible whenever parleys between us required more than a few terse exchanges.

  I had never been comfortable there. I know some people like free fall, and even see it as a fine location for energetic sex, but for me it activates the height sensitivity that, while much improved thanks to my exposure on One One One, will always remain an instinctive part of my personality. It’s also an AIsource place, which lowers it yet another notch on my tally of locations that inspire comfort. And yes, I know that the AIsource are everywhere and that they’re no less present on New London, or Xana, or the average dead asteroid than they are in this simulation they built, but I’ve never required my gut reactions to win trophies for consistency. There was no way I’d ever be able to relax in a place inhabited by sentients who had been pursuing their own agendas long befo
re the first African hominid discovered the entertainment value of a rock thrown at an unpleasant neighbor’s head.

  It became even less comfortable when, at some point several months after beginning my regular visits to the place, I’d grown frustrated with conversations consisting of me shouting at a faceless 360-degree sky and demanded the privilege of eye contact. They’d obliged, with the amusement native to any superior being indulging the whims of a half-wit pet, and provided a face for me to talk to.

  I often wished I’d left well enough alone.

  I wished it again, now, as their avatar appeared, first as a dark spot in the distance, and then, as it approached, resolving into the form of a face designed as a compromise between a generic, asexual, panracial human being, and a number of the other, more humanoid races known to me. The creature had the all-black eyes of a Riirgaan, the high forehead and white-tufted crown of hair that marks a Tchi, the puffy cheeks of the stereotypical Bursteeni, and ears that, while human in shape, possessed the mottled bumps Bocaians have instead of familiar human folds.

  Don’t even get me started on the voice and accent. It was a more democratic mix of those and maybe twenty other species I know about, the combination perched on the edge of incurably annoying without ever entering the realm of incomprehensibility. Hello again, Andrea.

  “You bastards, you should have told me!”

  The avatar’s lips pursed. Our primary interest has always been in the workings of your mind, and that, sadly, includes your own substantial investment in the standard human capacity for self-deception.

  I wanted to punch that smug face in the nose, but I’d learned from long experience that it was as intangible as everything else here. However wide my swing, it would just fall short, the image appearing to hover just a centimeter or so outside my reach. “Was it all just manipulation? Was everything the Dip Corps put me through just another way of controlling me?”