The Third Claw of God (32 page)

She—no, they; I still had to keep reminding myself, Oscin was part of this even if he wasn’t physically present—theywere handling me. I hated being handled, hated that I was so easy to manipulate, hated that they were so goddamned good at it, hated that they had every right because their skill at handling me was one of the things I most needed them for. “When we’re done with Colette, I’ll be too mad for anything but chewing on Bettelhine ass.”

“Then we have our priorities settled, don’t we?”

There was the other source of irritation, raising its ugly head again. Whenever they talk to me like that I feel the invisible hand of the AIsource manipulating them to manipulate me. Again, it was the AIsource that linked them, the AIsource that brought us together, the AIsource that gave us our marching orders. I said, “I know we’ve already had this conversation once tonight, and I apologize for bringing it up again. Are you withholding anything from me? I’m not talking personal stuff. Are our employers using you to control what I know and when I know it?”

She sighed, shifted the staff’s weight in her hands, and said, “You know, Andrea: there’s going to be an upper limit to the number of times you can ask that question without inflicting permanent damage on our relationship.”

“I still need an answer.”

“It’s true. I’m an AIsource agent. It’s part of the deal made by the single-minds Oscin and Skye once were, when they asked for their souls to be linked. It’s part of the deal made by any pair the AIsource enhances in that manner. I’m also loyal to you. It’s part of the deal I made when I became your friend and lover. I have never been asked to pit one loyalty against the other. If I ever withhold anything from you it’s either because, by my considered judgment, it’s none of your business or nothing you need to know. I’ve told you this. You need to accept that it’s no poor reflection on my feelings for you.”

Just a few short hours ago, when she’d last made a speech like that, I’d backed off in shame. This time I held my ground. “None of that affects the essential question, love…especially since you’ve admitted that what you withheld from me earlier was a key realization about Jason and Jelaine.”

“You didn’t need it then!”

“No, I did not. And, true, I’ve since figured it out for myself. But we’re approaching the endgame now. So I need to know. Have you found it necessary to withhold anything else since then? Anything you’ve observed about the guests? Anything you’ve found in the Khaajiir’s database?”

She hesitated. Just a moment. But she hesitated.

Then she said, “Yes.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve absorbed entire volumes of information, Andrea. I’ve only boiled it down to the highlights because it eliminated anything that would distract you from the problems at hand.”

“Why would it distract me? Because it’s irrelevant or because it would disturb the AIsource agenda?”

It was rare for the Porrinyards to retreat from anything, but they retreated now; Skye just looked away, and refused to meet my eyes. “Because it would upset you.”

There was nothing I could say to that.

She went on. “Trust me, Andrea. Keeping you on track is not the same thing as betraying you. The way I feel, the way I’ve always felt, if it ever comes down to a choice, I’ll tell the AIsource to go to hell.”

I studied her for a long time. There was nothing especially earnest in her expression. But there were times, like now, when the presence of one Porrinyard did not just indicate, but also evoke, the presence of the other, when their faces seemed superimposed like a pair of images linked in deliberate montage.

“You really would.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Have you ever noticed that conversations convey more emotional information when they don’t include any words?

After a while, I said, “I think we better get back to work.”

“As you wish.” Showing palpable relief, she crossed the room to hand over the Khaajiir’s staff, retaining her hold even as I claimed my own grip below hers.

It wasn’t necessary, but we both said, “Decch-taanil blaach nil Al-Vaafir.”

“This,” she said, from a million miles away, “is everything I found out about the failed Bettelhine project, Mjolnir.”

Technical stats and progress reports, hundreds of pages long, flipped through my mind, too fast to read. I caught a diagram in which two lines emanating from a satellite in orbit enveloped an entire planetary hemisphere in an area shaded to show effective range. I saw other tables labeled with titles like atmospheric diffusion and ideal surface densities, before the raw data became too much and the volumes of information backed off in favor of Skye’s thumbnail summary.

It turned out to be a typically disgusting sample of Bettelhine hubris, with a minor but potentially interesting connection to the K’cenhowten Claws of God: a misbegotten attempt by a previous Bettelhine administration to amplify the technology involved into an orbital cannon capable of taking out entire regions. The focus requirements had proved harder to overcome than any moral objections the Bettelhines of the era might have had to producing weaponry capable of making every man, woman, and child in range suffer the same fate as the religious heretics the K’cenhowten had once sentenced to death by torture. The project had been abandoned not because it was morally and physically revolting—I almost retched at the thought of billions suddenly pausing in their tracks as everything inside them gushed from their orifices—but because the Bettelhines had lost a fortune trying to get it to work. I moaned. “Are you sure they gave this up? I don’t even want to live in a universe where they can put something like this on the open market.” Nor one where this was the means of the genocide I’d been warned about.

“Then I won’t make you feel worse that this is no more severe, in terms of its destructive potential, than several items the Family’s been selling for some time. I don’t even want to know about all the projects the Bettelhines must have completed but withheld for fear of their destabilizing impact on the economy. But in this case, I understand enough of what I’ve read to confirm that the project managers ultimately judged the technical difficulties insoluble.”

This established little beyond confirmation that the Bettelhines, or at least past generations of the family, were not unfamiliar with the Claws of God, a disturbing but wholly unsurprising revelation given that reverse engineering the innovations of others would have to be part of their business model. It also underlined everything I’d always believed about what pricks they were. But Skye was right. It established only that the Claws of God used today might have been Bettelhine re-creations, a possibility already considered that was, at best, a small piece of the puzzle. I filed the data away and told her to move on.

The Khaajiir’s writings on the subject of K’cenhowten’s Enlightenment turned out to be just one of several volumes dealing with the bloody histories of multiple species, from the Third Millennial Self-Immolation of the Cid to the Nazi Holocaust of humanity’s homeworld. He seemed fascinated by the subject, returning again and again to a special thesis: the often just-as-bloody periods of adjustment that tended to follow any extended period of tyranny and injustice. I had not yet picked up the knack of pulling the relevant facts from the explosion of information that overwhelmed me when I tried to read part of one of those theses for myself, but as it had taken the Porrinyards mere minutes to speed-read the specific volume dealing with K’cenhowten’s Age of Enlightenment, Skye was able to point me to the point she found most central.

“The Khaajiirel are the key,” Skye said. “The late professor—I’ll call him that for the time being, to avoid confusion—noted that tyrannies and dictatorships are often so successful at repressing their peoples that chaos, borne from the various grudges and hatreds kept at bay for so long, often follows when the source of that repression is removed. He listed a number of historical strongmen who upon being overthrown or persuaded by liberalizing forces to loosen the chains on their respective societies, were replaced with even more ruinous anarchies. In short, the conquerors and despots ease up and the societies left behind chew off their own legs, reacting with auto-genocides and civil wars that end only when history provides a new order just as bad as the old one. He wrote,‘A people hip-deep in fire will not stop burning just because would-be reformers decide that fire can be ordered to become water.’ End quote.”

I nodded. “But that didn’t happen to the K’cenhowten. They had the Khaajiirel.”

Skye left me holding the staff and started to pace. “True. Utopian idealists who preached peace and, instead of having their words twisted over the years and centuries to a new dogma capable of prompting inquisitions just as bad as the Age of Terror, actually got what they wanted: the tyrants overthrown, the hatred felt against their kind forgotten after only a few years. It’s not unheard of for peacemakers on any world to accomplish such a thing, but most often that occurs only when the emancipation arrives after a handful of generations. According to our professor, that’s a far cry from sudden changes of regime that have stood for centuries or longer. They possess a historical momentum almost impossible to stop without a disastrous crash. To put it another way, you can sit the various factions down at tables and tell them to play nice, but they’ll still start arguing over crimes the privileged committed against the not-so-privileged among their great-great grandparents. Again, if I can quote:‘Claiming that the Khaajiirel accomplished otherwise, with just the force of their own ideals, is to embrace a naïveté stunning in its idiocy. The miracle claimed of them would have required a despotism dedicated to benevolence, one that forced their world’s first free generation to also become its first generation unpolluted by past evils. It was not a despotism they could have had the power to create in secret, not without leaving yet another black stain on their history. And yet they did what they did, burying all memory of their own brand of tyranny as they had buried the reign of terror that had made it necessary.’ End quote.”

I found myself seized by a chill. “Does he specify how he thinks the historical Khaajiirel managed it?”

“No. It’s just a vague suggestion, nothing more. But that’s the theory of historical momentum that Jason referenced when you pressured him for more information.”

I said, “I’m not sure I like the idea of Bettelhines, any Bettelhines, reading that paragraph. Let alone idealist Bettelhines like Jason and Jelaine.”

“Neither do I. Nor am I encouraged by the idea of Hans Bettelhine, who has never been an idealist, and who would no doubt prefer for his family to continue doing business as usual, suddenly deciding he wants to spend a year in our professor’s presence. It makes no sense.” She hesitated. “If it helps, I’ve determined the reason the Khaajiir’s such a hated, controversial figure on Bocai. Why some factions would like to assassinate him.”

“What is it?”

“He made light of their hatred for you.”

My heart thumped. “What?”

“He stood up in front of a large crowd at his university and said,‘The phenomenon that led to the massacre is not, as so many of us would have it, solely a human one. We know better than that. Nor is it confined to Bocaians, even if so many Bocaians trapped in that community on that day committed crimes just as brutal as those committed by the Hom.Saps among them. Harping on that terrible day, urging the never-ending hatred of those who participated on one side, while ignoring the universality of the community-wide spasm, ignoring the clear evidence that this was not a tragedy of clashing cultures and moralities but of unknown other factors that would have affected any sentient creature present on that day, is the equivalent of allowing the terrible anomaly to make our decisions for us. And it is especially tragic that, betraying everything that is great about our people, we focus the impulse to demonize the people present on that day on the face of the most innocent, whose subsequent lives have been the most blighted.’” She looked up at me and concluded, “Then he said,‘If we are ever to achieve understanding, we need to do what the historical Khaajiirel would have done. We need to stand up as one and forgive the massacre’s most maligned innocent, the human Andrea Cort…’ ”

I had seen the last line coming for more than half of her recitation; indeed, I’d suspected something like that since the Khaajiir first treated me with genuine warmth. But the words hit like a hammerblow anyway. I tried to say something, but found myself obliged to excuse myself and spend the next several minutes locked in my suite’s bathroom, thinking of the siblings I’d seen murdered and of the weight of a night I’d already carried with me for too many years. This was something I’d rarely admitted to myself: not only that I’d loved Bocai as much as I’d loved my family, but that I still felt the same way after so many years of being demonized as the girl who plucked out the eyes of a Bocaian neighbor and used them as playthings. It would have meant a lot to me to hear forgiveness from a Bocaian’s lips. After a few minutes the immediate emotional tsunami subsided, and I was able to return to Skye with dry eyes and more troubling questions. “But why would the Bettelhines give a royal shit one way or another?

They’ve never been a part of my life and I’ve never been a part of theirs. Are they commencing new careers as angels of compassion, forcing feuding peoples to shake hands and play nice? Was I invited here as an honored guest just to scratch the Khaajiir’s moral itch?”

“I have no contribution at this time, Andrea.”

“Even if they did decide it was important to give their pet Bocaian professor a present, what difference would it make? He’s just one Bocaian, not even a decision-maker. The majority would still hate me. He’d tell me he was sorry about the way things are between his people and me, I’d say I appreciated the gesture, and we’d have nothing else to say to one another. That’s one hell of a stupid reason to drag a total stranger from her home with minimal notice.”

Skye bit her lip. The Porrinyards must have wanted to take the nobler view of things, but they were also prevented from doing so by their very common sense, and it hurt them to give up on the happy ending. “I suppose it’s possible.”