The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

  The closest Mercantile translation to the phrase he’d given me was Judgment Denied the Heavenly Fathers, an odd combination of words given that no Bocaian sect I’d ever heard of had any orthodox creation myth. It didn’t matter; passwords are hardest to crack when random, and the Khaajiir would have been just as baffled by one I’d used to shield my personal files during one nasty dispute over interspecies jurisdiction: Pity the Fat Tchi with My Elbow up His Ass. I asked the Porrinyards, “Did you get that?”

  “Decch-taanil,” Oscin began.

  “Blaach nil Al-Vaafir,” Skye concluded.

  “Great. Pick one of you to stay here and one of you to work on it on private.”

  They nodded. Without any discussion, Skye remained where she was, while Oscin took the Khaajiir’s bloody staff down the stairs.

  I tried not to let my satisfaction show on my face. It made sense for the Porrinyards to pore through the Khaajiir’s files; their data-absorption speed was so far beyond mine that relegating this job to them could save me hours in pursuing false leads. Still, there was no need to make them do more work than necessary, so I turned my attention back to Jason. “Anything in particular you think we should focus on?”

  “Yes,” Jason said, his tone now determinedly upbeat, as if he could only be happy now that the strain of keeping secrets was safely in the past. “The Khaajiir’s writings relating K’cenhowten’s Enlightenment to his theory of historical momentum. A failed and then aborted Bettelhine project, from some three generations back, called Mjolnir, a reference to the hammer of the ancient-Earth Norse thunder deity, Thor. The writings and eventual fate of one Lillian Jane Bettelhine, my paternal aunt, now deceased. These are all things your friends would no doubt uncover within a couple of hours; you might as well find them now and then get back to me once you’re done, if you have any questions. Or, you could just take me aside and ask me. I won’t make you waste any more time.”

  “You’re too late. Besides, I’ll have more questions for you soon enough.” A deep breath. “Right now I’d like a few minutes alone with your brother.”

  Philip stirred himself and began to stand.

  Vernon Wethers raised his hand. “Ummm…I object.”

  It was the first time he’d spoken in quite a while. His soft, hesitant voice, an open apology for itself, startled in ways that angrier interjections might not have.

  I said, “This is not a court of law, Mr. Wethers.”

  His lips moved for a beat or two before words emerged. “No, but it is still my duty to stand for Philip Bettelhine’s interests, and I take that mission seriously. I must insist on being present during any consultation.”

  I liked that: consultation rather than questioning. Even his word choice cleansed any implication of guilt from the moment.

  What I didn’t like was Wethers. The man was a shadow, not just in terms of his habitual proximity to his employer, but also in personality as well. I had sensed no structure to him, no emotional depth that did not exist except as an imprint of the man he served. It would be dangerous to conclude from this that handling Philip would amount to handling him as well. Fanatics always have their own trajectories. But now that he’d spoken up…“Very well. Understand that some of my questions will be of a personal, and perhaps embarrassing, nature. You might find yourself intruding on Mr. Bettelhine’s feelings.”

  Wethers dabbed at the corners of his lips with a napkin, then stood, adjusting his jacket to bring it incrementally back in line with the character-deprived perfection he owed the Bettelhine empire. “That is all right. Mr. Bettelhine knows that wherever his personal life is concerned, it has never been my function to form opinions…”

  P hilip Bettelhine sat on the edge of the couch in the outer suite, downcast, his wrists propped on his knees and his hands dangling like dead fish. His eyes avoided mine, making contact only long enough to establish that every instant of the process was being catalogued for future resentment. His creature Wethers stood against what would have been the panoramic window, his arms folded over his chest and his colorless eyes maintaining a strict focus on his employer that suggested years of reading volumes from every micro-alteration in Philip’s facial expressions. I would have found constant appraisal of that kind both off-putting and creepy, but Philip seemed used to it, and accepted his vassal’s gaze as his due even as he took mine as impudent intrusion.

  Paakth-Doy, uncomfortable in this company, sat apart from all of us, trying not to make eye contact.

  I said, “Mr. Bettelhine, you don’t like me very much, do you?”

  He looked tired, the question already pushing him to the limits of his patience. “From what I’ve been able to determine, not all that many people do.”

  “Your brother and sister seem to.”

  “Is that what this discussion’s going to be? Juvenile tallies of who likes whom? Please. I know I’m comfortable disliking you, I know you’re comfortable disliking me, and I think you and I have much more pressing business to talk about.”

  He didn’t know it, but I found myself respecting him more after that little speech than I had at any point since meeting him. Honest dislike is always a breath of fresh air. “You don’t know why they invited me.”

  “They didn’t invite you. My father invited you. But no.”

  “You resent my presence.”

  “I resent you strutting around like you own the place, especially when I’m the bastard who owns the place. Your actual presence doesn’t bother me one way or the other.”

  “What do you think of me being the honored guest of your father?”

  His tone dulled. “It baffles me.”

  “The same would go for his close association with the Khaajiir.”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t know what that’s about, either?”

  “If my father wanted me to know, my father would have told me.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “He has let me know that he considers the matter classified.”

  “Is this typical of your relationship?”

  Philip rubbed his eyes, as much, I think, to continue avoiding mine as to alleviate any strain he may have felt over the disasters of the evening. “My father and I have more than one relationship, Counselor. As a father with a respected and accomplished son, he has often been very close to me. As Chief Executive Officer commanding one of his chief lieutenants, he has sometimes been obliged to keep information flow on a need-to-know basis. I understand this. It is not atypical.”

  “And yet,” I said, leaning in close, “as an accomplished executive in your own right, one often assumed to be your father’s most likely successor, who would at the very least hope to be groomed for greater and greater responsibility as you rise in the family profession, you would also expect to become privy to more classified and secret material as the years passed and the time of succession grew ever closer.”

  “Yes, that would follow.”

  “So the significance of the few secrets still being kept from you would also be increasing throughout this time?”

  “Yes.”

  “These secrets would currently include the reasons for my visit, or Dejah Shapiro’s, or for the Khaajiir’s long stay, or for the involvement of your siblings Jason and Jelaine?”

  “Yes.”

  I excused myself, went to the bathroom, poured myself a glass of water, and downed it to the dregs before returning. When I came back, he was still where I’d left him, neither his position, nor Vernon Wethers’s, having moved a millimeter. It was impossible not to wonder how many strings bound these two men, and how many misdeeds they’d plotted in rooms as luxurious as this one.

  I smiled at him. Like most of my smiles, it was not meant to be a pleasant one. “A number of years ago Jason went missing.”

  “That’s common knowledge,” Philip said.

  “He returned after what are alleged to have been hellish experiences on a crumbling wheelworld called Deriflys, and was welcomed back into the b
osom of his family. How did you feel about that?”

  The question didn’t surprise him, but the color rose in his cheeks, and his eyes blasted me with still-gathering heat of his resentment. “How do you think I felt about that? He’s my brother. I was older, and had a different mother, so I hadn’t spent as much time with him while he was growing up as Jelaine and some of the children closer to his own age, but he was still important to me. Nobody was happier than me when Jelaine was able to straighten him out, and he was able to find some purpose in his life.”

  “It didn’t bother you that he’d been welcomed back when you’d been a loyal, dependable son all along?”

  More anger. “Maybe it would have, if I’d been a selfish brat insecure about my own place in the family’s affections.”

  “And were you?”

  “Which, a selfish brat or insecure in my family’s affections? I’ll cop to the first, at least sometimes; it’s an occupational hazard of being wealthy. But never to the second.”

  “There was no question of jealousy?”

  He rolled his eyes, spared a do-you-believe-this-bitch look for the impassive Wethers, and then faced me again. “There it is. The most noxious cliché ever concocted about wealthy families. The siblings are always corrupt caricatures, sniping at each other as they jockey for favor. The parents are always malignant, domineering old farts, emitting a constant barrage of slicing remarks as they threaten to exclude the unfit among their offspring. Is that how you like to picture us, Counselor?” He snorted. “Unfortunately for your preconceptions, that’s never been true of the Bettelhines. Whatever you may think of the way my family treats other people, we’ve always cared for our own.”

  “So no sibling rivalry.”

  “None? Please. We’re human. Just none of the kind you’re positing.”

  “Not even when you lost Jelaine?”

  He scowled. “I haven’t lost Jelaine.”

  “True,” I allowed, “but Jason and Jelaine appear to be a closed unit that excludes you, not just from whatever they’ve been doing with your father and the Khaajiir, and not just from the business divisions they’ve been able to wrest from you, but also from any emotional connection to them as siblings. They don’t seem to hate you. They just don’t seem to have need of your presence. Are you going to claim that doesn’t bother you, either?”

  I almost expected him to deny that as well, and for a moment he seemed about to, but then he glanced at Wethers again, and exhaled a lungful of hoarded breath. “No. I won’t claim that. I resent the hell out of it. Are you satisfied?”

  “How did it happen, Mr, Bettelhine?”

  He was angry again, but not at me. “I’m not sure that any of this is your goddamn business, Counselor, and we’ll have to talk about making sure you don’t take it anywhere outside this room, but when Jason returned from that place, he was not quite right. Oh, sure, he said the things he was expected to say, and did the things he was expected to do, and even managed to charm the eligible ladies when our parents threw a weekend ball in his honor, but he never really reconnected with us or with the life he’d thrown away. He was just playacting, giving us what he thought we wanted from him, and though it was goddamned convincing much of the time, we couldn’t spend time in his presence without seeing the look that came into his eyes whenever he thought we weren’t watching. I still don’t know everything that happened to him, during those years—it’s one of the many things he hasn’t seen fit to share with me—but I can tell you that we all knew it was still happening. I thought the family was going to lose him again, one way or the other.”

  “And then?”

  “One day after that ball I told you about, which is best described as a restrained disaster, Jelaine told me she’d made arrangements with Father to let her take Jason on an extended tour offworld. She said there were things Jason needed to deal with, leftover business from his days away. She said she was going to make sure he got the chance. Now, me, I absolutely hated the idea, since leaving Xana the first time had been such a disaster for him, but Jelaine seemed sure, and she’d already gotten Father’s approval, so it was going to happen, one way or the other.”

  “Did you ask your father why he’d said yes?”

  “He told me he wanted his son back.”

  “And you?”

  “I wanted my brother back.”

  “But you were still against the idea.”

  “I considered Jason toxic,” Philip said. “I’d seen him, a favorite son, flit off and subject himself to horrors the rest of us couldn’t even imagine. I saw him come back a shell of himself, not connecting with us or with anything around him. And now I saw him sucking Jelaine in too. Don’t you see? I was afraid of losing her too!”

  “How did you deal with that?”

  “Since I couldn’t stop them from going, I offered to jettison my responsibilities and come along. I said it was to help support Jason, but by then I didn’t think anything could help Jason. I was more interested in being the voice of reason, standing between him and Jelaine. But Jelaine said no. She said she knew what she was doing. She said I should trust her. And so I did what a brother does. I let her go and hoped for the best.”

  “And is…‘the best’… what you got?”

  He clenched his fists, opened them, then massaged each hand with the other, as if subconsciously washing them. “When they returned, Jason was a new man, centered, secure in himself, and content in a way he never had been before. Jelaine was different too. She’d always been a fine girl on her way to becoming a remarkable woman, but she’d become…there’s no other way of saying it…a lady. Royalty, really.”

  “And why would this make you so unhappy?”

  “They were cooler to me. They talked to me and asked me how I was and even congratulated me on my marriage and on the birth of my daughter. They were not unfriendly. But somehow, their relationship with me was no longer something they wanted, but something they felt they were obligated to have.”

  “They don’t love you anymore.”

  “I don’t know if they love me or not. That’s the damnable thing. But if they do it’s just because I’m their brother and they have to. Aside from that, they started treating me as an obstacle to be handled. As part of the problem.”

  “Part of what problem?”

  “I don’t know! Part of whatever fucking problem they have! Excuse me.”

  Now it was his turn to retreat to the bathroom. He closed the door, ran the water, and returned with another glass, filled only halfway. His sips were tiny, and controlled, but furious. He wasn’t crying—I don’t know if he was capable of it—but his eyes were glazed, and his hands trembling. The man was a captain of industry, one of the wealthiest human beings in the universe, and by dint of the business he supported quite possibly a sociopathic monster, but at this moment he was just a boy, upset that his siblings had excluded him from their secret club.

  I gave him time to compose himself, and assessed his shadow, Mr. Wethers. The man remained stony, not an iota of concern or sympathy on his bland corporate features. Of course, open pity for the boss was probably a good way to get fired, and that would be a bad idea indeed when your boss owned the very planet where you lived. But this man’s ability to hide empathy, if he felt any, was extreme—better than his ability to hide self-consciousness, since he colored and looked away in discomfort the second he registered me looking at him. I remembered that he’d acted pretty much the same way with Skye, Jelaine, and Dejah. He certainly had trouble tolerating the casual attention of women. I wondered who had hurt him in the past, and just how deep the scars ran.

  Philip said, “Is there anything else?”

  I gave Mr. Wethers some relief from the unwelcome heat of my gaze, resuming my interest in his master. “Mr. Bettelhine, what are your responsibilities for the corporation?”

  “I command about two hundred ongoing research and development projects on behalf of my father, the company CEO.”

  “You develop weapons.
”

  “I research new technologies.”

  “Which,” I pointed out, “you most often use in the development of weapons.”

  “By other divisions. I’m more interested in mapping the regions of undirected potential. It’s understood, at the corporate level, that at any given time, approximately seventy percent of the projects I command will turn out to be blind alleys. It’s with the remaining thirty percent that I justify my budget.”

  “Still, the practical applications of your researches have the potential to kill vast numbers of human beings.”

  He rolled his eyes, tired of the conversation. “Counselor, do you honestly believe that I’ve never had this debate with myself? I contribute to an industry that gives people the ability to affect their own destinies. How they manifest that power is up to them. What does this have to do with the situation we’re in?”

  He was right. I could have debated the morality of Bettelhine Family business practices with him forever, and never reached a conclusion satisfactory to him or to myself. I returned to the central thread of my investigation. “I’m aware that a number of your divisions have been shut down or handed over to the control of Jason and Jelaine, and that this is extremely irregular given your long service and Jason’s uncertain personal history. I am certain that you have approached your father to ask him why this is happening. Has he given you any answer that makes sense?”

  His answer was stony. “He’s only said that the corporation must retool for changing conditions, and that everything will be made clear to me in time.”

  “You’ve also said that you had more than one relationship with your father, one as a son and one as a corporate officer. What you just said sounds like the answer he’d give a corporate officer. Forgive me for asking, as I know this must be painful, but has he given you any answers as father to son?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. It’s been more than a year since he gave me any answers as father to son. I haven’t even been in the same room with him for three months. That’s what I’m doing here. I changed my schedule, and the schedule of my associate here,” he indicated Wethers, “in hopes of catching up with him and maybe getting some answers. When Father canceled his trip at the last minute, I thought I’d at least spend some time with Jason and Jelaine and get some answers from them instead. But you know how that’s worked out.”