The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  I trembled with fury. “We don’t have any of Magrison’s people working for us. We hunt Magrison’s people.”

  His pitying look only threw fuel on the fire. “That’s naïve, Counselor. Your Confederacy has several of Magrison’s people on the payroll. If you want, I’ll provide you with a list.”

  The wearer of the chip, Dina Pearlman, met my gaze with a cold, defiant look of her own, her eyes transformed from the red weeping springs they had been a few minutes before to dry, reptilian marbles absent not only of fear but any human warmth. It was impossible to reconcile that look, and its dangerous intelligence with the vapid, fluttery idiot she had been pretending to be only a few moments before.

  Her husband, by contrast, had deflated utterly, the cheerful confidence he’d projected replaced now with resignation and, yes, relief. There was no surprise in his eyes, just like there was no fear. He mostly looked like he just wanted to sit down.

  I jerked a thumb his way. “What about him?”

  “Farley? He’s who he’s supposed to be. A third-generation corporate citizen. He married her the day she entered our employ.”

  The Porrinyards noted: “That sounds like a marriage of convenience.”

  The woman known as Dina Pearlman expelled one brutal, explosive laugh. “Of inconvenience is more like it. The man’s useless to grown women. If I told you what age he prefers—not just single digits, but low single digits—you’d all forget your civilized scruples and kick him to death right now.”

  “Possibly,” the Porrinyards said. “You might have to wait your turn.”

  Farley Pearlman just hung his head, waiting for it to be over, so much a puppet of forces beyond his control that he had nothing to do or say once those strings were cut.

  Dejah Shapiro placed her drink back on the bar and dabbed her lips with a napkin. “You know, Philip, every time I dare hope that your family can achieve some kind of collective redemption, new evidence wipes my face in the cold, ugly reality. I’m honestly sorry I came.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk,” Philip said, his own voice just as controlled.

  “Really?” she asked. “What have I done?”

  “You’re married to a criminal, for starters!”

  Dejah’s smile communicated disappointment that his best shot had been so pathetically feeble. “I’ve been married to a couple of different criminals, in my time. Indeed, I’ve already mentioned Ernst. Which one are you referring to right now?”

  “That moron you left at home!”

  “Oh, Karl.” She picked up her drink, treated herself to another drink, savored the taste, put the glass down, and replied, “You’re absolutely right. My current husband, whom I love with all my heart, has a criminal record. That’s common knowledge. He’s also of subaverage intelligence. That’s a verifiable medical fact. He was led astray by people with will greater than his own. What’s your excuse?”

  For a tenth of a second or so I thought Philip was going to hurl himself at her throat. Dejah must have thought so, too, because she turned toward him, her expression calm but her chin outthrust, her arms free, and her posture transformed into a warrior’s.

  Before anything could happen, the Porrinyards stepped between Philip and Dejah, positioning themselves back to back with a calm efficiency that placed any possibility of the confrontation turning violent in the distant past. They spoke, as they’d moved, as one.

  “Andrea? I believe you have the subject of your first interview…”

  T here was another tiresome pissing match with Philip over whether I’d be permitted to speak with Mrs. Pearlman alone, or whether I’d have to bring Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers along, as Bettelhine counsel. I might have argued longer about the idiocy of suggesting that she even needed counsel when interviewed on the home soil of a power that had no interest in prosecuting her for past crimes, but I was eager to get past the preliminaries and into a room with a monster who, unlike myself, had committed her crimes as an adult. I let Brown come along.

  The five of us (Paakth-Doy, Brown, Wethers, Skye, and me), escorted Mrs. Pearlman into my suite, taking seats around the outer room in what, without consultation, turned out to be a perfect circle with the defiant Mrs. Pearlman at dead center. She appropriated an ottoman for her own use and perched there with legs crossed, as comfortable in her interrogation as she would have been making arrangements for a formal party.

  Most people who wore her current expression were dealing with unwanted infestations of insect life in their homes. “I didn’t kill the Bocaian. And I didn’t send those other idiot Bocaians after the bitch counselor. I’m not that stupid.”

  “Exactly how stupid you are,” I told her, in a voice that reeked of loathing, “is yet to be determined.”

  “Hans Bettelhine doesn’t think so,” Mrs. Pearlman sniffed. “He compensates me very well for my intelligence. If you knew the amount that gets put into my retirement fund, every year, just for sharing the fruit of that intelligence, you’d likely kill yourself. Of course, Andrea, I’ve read in your file that getting you to attempt suicide isn’t all that difficult, considering it’s been—how many? Five or six incidents over the years? So that’s not saying much.”

  I found myself missing the old Mrs. Pearlman, the abrasive but essentially innocent one that had never really existed. “What’s your real name?”

  She looked bored. “I’ve been called Dina Pearlman for as long as I wore the name before it, so you might as well use that one.”

  “For the moment,” I agreed, aware that I didn’t want to get bogged down in this one point, and that consulting the Confederate Intelligence files on known associates of the man responsible for that chip would likely uncover her identity later. “How did you become involved with the man known to the authorities as Peter Magrison?”

  “He recruited me in my youth.” She made it sound like some ancient epoch, as far removed from our own as the Cretaceous.

  I asked, “Where was this?”

  “On my homeworld. Ottomos. I was a student of nanopsychology, enrolled in a school known as Pastharkanak University, in a small town called Vivakiosy. Of course, I’m certain these names mean nothing to you. Would you like to know the names of my idiot professors, as well as the address of my dormitory?”

  “Maybe later. How did Magrison approach you?”

  For a moment her eyes went soft, seeing not the hostile faces around her, but whatever passed for blessed memory in a soul lost to darkness. “People only know him from the usual image, in the few holos that exist: that blurry, sneering face, half obscured by shadow, half washed-out by excessive light, with those knit black eyebrows and the eyes like bottomless pits. I think the powers-that-be have nicer images, in their archives, but publicize that one because it’s so easy to sell as the face of evil. In truth, he wasn’t like that at all. He had a gentle smile, the face of a saint, and the voice of a healer. Less than five minutes after he found me, sitting under a tree eating lunch between classes, I knew that I’d go anywhere with him, and do anything for him.”

  “Must have been one hell of a five minutes,” Skye said.

  “It was less than that. Maybe one question. I was hytexing my assignments for the next class period, and he walked right up, passing through the projection, and asked me: ‘Do you honestly think they’ll let you make a difference?’ I don’t know how he knew. But it was something I’d been asking myself all semester. Nanopsych had such potential, such possibilities for changing the way people thought and dreamed and interacted with one another, that nobody before him had thought of asking the tough questions. He—”

  I waved away the rest of it. “Why would he pick you?”

  “He said later that he’d been sitting in the back monitoring classes, looking for a mind capable of following where he needed to lead. It may even be true. I don’t know. I just know that I don’t remember seeing him, at all, until that moment.”

  “You went with him,” I said. “Did it ever occur to you that he might have b
een controlling you against your will?”

  “Oh, I knew that right way. He had a subteemer aimed at my pleasure center, and he gave me a happy jolt every time I considered what he was saying, a negative jolt every time I doubted him. Of course, it was very tiring for him, keeping such a close eye on me for days on end, but he was able to manage until we met up with his people and he was able to install the automated system.” She indicated the octagonal chip on her wrist. “But the truth is, it wasn’t even all that necessary by then. I’d seen the brilliance of his ideas. I believed in him the way earlier generations believed in God. His dreams were my dreams, his ambitions my ambitions. I lived to realize his vision of Mankind’s future.”

  The Porrinyards grimaced in disgust. “Soul-rape.”

  “Love,” Mrs. Pearlman shot back. “Passion.”

  I said, “He made you feel that way.”

  “The finest gift he could have given me.”

  Skye said, “The girl he found on that university campus might not have thought so.”

  “She was a vapid little idiot.”

  Yes, I thought. A vapid little idiot capable of thinking for herself, and acting for herself, and of some concern for human beings other than the one who had replaced whatever value system she might have had with one designed to serve his own purposes.

  I found myself remembering the night of madness that had overtaken my family and neighbors on Bocai. We’d lived in peace until the moment when, with no warning, we’d all found ourselves wanting to kill each other. Then we became other people. Could Magrison’s means of mind control be the same weapon the Unseen Demons had used on us?

  Could it be associated with the upcoming extinctions the AIsource had spoken of?

  Skye was asking Mrs. Pearlman, “Did he ever take physical advantage of you?”

  Mrs. Pearlman’s eyes darkened. “You’re mocking me. You know his philosophy. He hated to be touched. He thought all human beings are deprived of their true potential by the animalistic drives that force us to crave the approval of others. He wanted to free us from that. As far as sex was concerned, there was only one thing he liked, and he refused to render it pleasurable for me; the defilement and degradation his lovers experienced was very much the central point.”

  Vernon Wethers, whose prissiness had already impressed me during dinner, went a little green at this; he murmured an excuse-me and rushed to the bathroom, his cheeks ballooning.

  Mrs. Pearlman watched him go, with defiant pleasure at his discomfort. Then her eyes softened again, and her voice became breathless, even giddy. “Want more? Sometimes, when I was good, when I’d solved a problem or furthered his plans in some other fashion, he’d send as much joy as my heart could stand, directly into my brain, and stay with me for hours while I felt touched by God. Once he even went on a trip for six weeks, and as a special treat left the transmitter on maximum while he was gone. He had to leave people behind to keep me fed and watered and clean and turn me so I wouldn’t get bedsores. It felt like hundreds of years. When he came back and turned it off, I would have done anything to be touched like that again. Anything. I wept. I even begged him to do the thing he liked. I told him he could befoul me as much as he wanted if he’d just leave me in that place again, even if only for another five minutes. One time, he—”

  Monday Brown interrupted. “Counselor! Isn’t this enough, already?”

  Much as I hated to admit it, the man was right. The psychological destruction of one young woman, and her transformation into a creature capable of furthering the nihilistic ambitions of the terrorist history knew as the Beast Magrison, did exert a sick fascination, especially given its resemblance to what my people had endured on Bocai, but it had little to do with the reason we were here. I took a deep breath, glanced at the now-weeping Paakth-Doy, felt a moment of sympathy for her that made me hope she did not turn out to be the Khaajiir’s murderer, and pressed on. “What was your personal contribution to the development of Magrison’s Fugue?”

  “For five years I worked on the team that developed the strain. It was not easy, you know. Anywhere people can afford AIsource Medical they also have nanites, screening out all biological infestations, whether natural or artificial. The developers had to make a sheath capable of interacting with those defenses and turning them into allies. I was one of those refining the actual symptoms, taking out everything that damaged cognitive function and enhancing only those elements that caused pain at the sight and sound of other human beings.” She beamed. “When the chaos started on the worlds we infected? He said that the victory was at least ten percent mine. He was even moved to kiss me.”

  The room fell silent, no two of the observers willing to look at each other. We all knew the history that followed. Before it was contained, Magrison’s Fugue had infected seventeen inhabited worlds and over fifty billion people, with over ninety-five percent dying in whatever hiding places they could find because they preferred starvation and thirst to the agony they only felt in the presence of other human beings.

  There was still life, and civilization of a kind, in the places that remained. The people who lived there wore AIsource prosthetics over their eyes and ears, to prevent them from sensing anybody else except as hypothetical abstractions, more like the stick figures in a child’s drawing than as living, recognizable individuals. Their prosthetics talked to each other and negotiated agreements with each other and allowed something like an organized, sustainable society on worlds where every inhabitant, down to the infants being born to mothers who would never love them, could only view every other as silhouettes rendered indistinct by sensory veils.

  Only military blockades on the part of the Hom.Sap Confederacy, imprisoning all the victim populations on their affected worlds, and blowing several infected vessels out of the sky, had prevented Magrison’s contagion from infecting all of humanity.

  There was no cure. Those worlds remained quarantined today.

  But even that was not the worst of it.

  The Confederacy remained in contact with the survivors, who had no problem communicating with us in text format, as long as we eliminated all personal pronouns and all details of social interaction in the outside universe from our responses. They could make their needs known. We could send food drops, tech, even a few brave volunteers in isolation suits, to deal with whatever they required to keep their infrastructures going. But we couldn’t call what lived on those worlds anything but damned. A few more generations of artificial insemination brokered by AIsource proxies, and automated child-rearing by more AIsource proxies, and I’m not even sure you could call the beings who walk there human.

  But that was not the worst of it.

  Wethers returned from the bathroom, looking pale, tiny beads of moisture glistening on his forehead. He murmured an excuse to Brown as he sat. It would have been easy to feel sorry for him, had he not been a willing participant in the empire that employed a monster like Dina Pearlman. He was like other bureaucrats, guilty of signing the papers that made atrocities possibility but lost the stomach the second they were shown the abattoirs they’d authorized.

  But he was not the worst of it, either.

  I coughed, swallowed spit to soothe a voice that would emerged as a dry croak, and dealt with the very worst of it: The question that obsessed some of my colleagues in the Dip Corps to this very day. “Mrs. Pearlman…do you know where Magrison’s hiding today?”

  “N o,” she said, with a tinge of regret. “We had to separate, during our time as fugitives. I don’t know where he went. Otherwise I’d have gone to him already.”

  In Confederate custody, this woman would have been interrogated for the rest of her life, by grim men ill-inclined to take no for an answer. Even those inclined to believe her, as I found I did, would have pressed the question forever, using techniques that approached and exceeded all possible definitions of torture. There would have been no choice. He was Mankind’s single greatest bogeyman, and we all lived in paranoid fear of his return, this time a
rmed with something that made the Fugue look like a stuffy nose.

  I did not have the time or the authority to do what so many of my colleagues would have done, but I couldn’t accept a simple no, either. “Do you have any reason to believe he’s still alive?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Faith.”

  “Do you have any reason to believe the Bettelhines are in contact with him?”

  Monday Brown shifted in his chair, looking as unhappy as any child receiving a sweater as his only gift for Specday. “That’s a bit much, Counselor.”

  I whirled on him with something like a snarl. “You’re the bastards putting his old slaves to work. I’d say it’s absolutely fucking called for.” Then turned my attention back to Mrs. Pearlman. “Answer the question.”

  Her lips pursed, hiding the smile that had threatened to form when I’d snapped at Brown. “Why would they want anything to do with him? They make their riches from human beings at war with one another. Human beings who can’t interact at all are useless to them.”

  “The Fugue ravages any civilization it touches. That’s a pretty powerful prize for a munitions empire.”

  “Not really,” she said, with the slightest shade of boredom. “It’s useless as a weapon of conquest. In any battle between nations confined to a single planet, the first country using it is unable to avoid being infected in the process.”

  Skye said, “Fear of Mutual Assured Destruction has never prevented the development of doomsday weapons.”

  “A good point. But, unlike most devices of that kind, the Fugue is not the kind of tech martial cultures can be persuaded to covet. Dying at the same time as your enemies has such a romantic cache that any population can be persuaded to crave it. But damning yourself and everyone you know to a state you perceive as a living death is a different prospect entirely.”

  “And in any battle between worlds, separated by space but capable of bombing each other into oblivion?”