The Third Claw of God (43 page)

Just because I bought her explanations when not in my right mind—and I had only her word for that—was no guarantee that I’d feel the same way when capable of reason. “I refuse to believe that the Porrinyards abandoned me.”

She reached out and touched the back of my hand. “They haven’t. They stayed with you, or nearby, throughout the most difficult stages of your recovery. I was awed by their devotion.”

“Then where are they now?”

“In orbit, staying aboard your personal transport, which is still docked at Layabout. I assured them that they could remain here as personal guests, and they said they didn’t want to pressure you in any of the difficult decisions you’re going to have to make. That was how they put it, at least. Nobody’s keeping you from speaking to them, or even leaving with them if that’s what you want.”

This still felt wrong. Oscin and Skye were my partners. There were no difficult personal decisions I’d keep from them, or any they’d expect me to. I grabbed a lock of my luxurious new hair and said, “What about this? I have trouble accepting that it’s one week’s natural growth.”

She grinned. “What about it? It’s gorgeous.”

“It’s also disturbing. What gave you the right?”

Her smile never wavered. “You did. My father asked to see what you’d look like with shoulder-length hair, you said it was all right with you, so we applied some nanostimulants to your follicles and had one of our stylists sculpt the results. You can cut it short again, if you like. Though I’d consider that a genuine shame.”

I was growing more and more frustrated by this private joke I was failing to get. “I’m not your father’s doll to dress up. What is this? Is he infatuated with me or something?”

Jelaine winced. “Oh,Juje , no.”

“Then what the hell difference would it make to him what my hair looked like? Whether it was long, short, braided, absent, purple, glowing like Colette’s, or replaced with scales?”

The animal I’d spotted sleeping on the swing now leaped up on the table before her, inviting attention. Jelaine scratched the fuzzy head and made it purr. She said, “He just needed to see what you would look like with shoulder-length brown hair. Come on, Andrea. Think. I’ve already seen you astonish my father by anticipating the explanation for all this. I’m sure you can put it all together a second time if you try.”

Now irritated beyond all measure by her teasing ways, I rolled my eyes and this time found myself focusing on the Khaajiir’s staff, still propped up against the planter like any other design element in this fussy little garden.

Why was it here? Had I been using it before?

I remembered Skye’s words:“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 at the moment.”

She’d said that on the Royal Carriage, while giving me a tour of the Khaajiir’s database. She’d indicated her intension to leave out issues unrelated to the current problem, issues that I might have to deal with later. It was the only way to keep me on track.

But her briefing had seemed pretty complete anyway. Hadn’t it been?

She’d even allowed me to hold on to the staff myself, providing me direct access to the data she’d judged pertinent as she guided me through everything Oscin had found. How could she have hidden anything from me then?

I thought back and realized.

No. She hadn’t let me hold the staff throughout that briefing.

Near the end, she’d taken it away before sharing her findings.

She’d done it with such casual skill, such a lack of apology, that I hadn’t seen anything suspicious. But now I remembered that she’d taken the staff away while covering the only subject she claimed she hadn’t learned everything about. Her answers on that subject had been fragmentary at best, containing no information relevant to me. When that subject proved irrelevant to the identity of the murderer aboard the Royal Carriage, I’d allowed her to put the issue aside.

What issue had she been talking about then?

What was so big it might have hurt my ability to resolve this crisis threatening all our lives?

I found myself thinking of other moments, all the way to the beginning of this whole sorry business. The AIsource had said,We hope you’ll survive the shock.

Jelaine had told me, “Youneed to stay.”

She’d also said, “We have more in common that you can possibly know.” Later on, when I’d figured out the true extent of the connection between her and Jason, I’d imagined that she was just talking about cylinking. But that was something she had in common with the Porrinyards, not with me. She’d spoken to me with affection and looked at me with undisguised love. They’dboth looked at me with undisguised love.

The Bettelhines had made me not a personal guest, but honored guest. And then there’s what the Dip Corps had done to me, their pet war criminal. Antrecz Pescziuwicz had seen it right away.“The Dip Corps could have changed your name, 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. 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 handed all the alien governments who want to paint humanity as a bunch of homicidal bastards who let their own get away with murder. Why would they put themselves through that? Why would they put you through that?”

The AIsource had given me part of the answer.Any conspiracies that have been around you since unformed childhood must have had less to do with manipulating you than using you as a tool to manipulate others.

But who could I have been used to manipulate, when still a child?

Jelaine had said,“A changed man can change his family, and what his family stands for. Even, I daresay, how the family sees its obligations toward its own.”

Too many other offhand comments to list, all now making a terrible kind of sense. I could think of a dozen more without even trying hard.

Among them, the AIsource assuring me that the tragedy on Bocai was the last thing any Bettelhine would have wanted.

Wethers, at the end, acting like he recognized me for the first time. Saying,“I’ve…been stupid. Didn’t see what was in front of me. Didn’t see what I should have known.”

And them, finally: when I struck Colette in anger, when I searched for the limitations of her inability to say no, Skye had looked at me as if just then discovering who I was for the very first time. She already knew, from what she’d read in the Khaajiir’s files. But how must it have felt for her, to see it demonstrated with such awful clarity?

I watched myself, as if from a distance, rising from the bench and approaching that planter, and as my right hand closed around the Khaajiir’s staff and as I thought a woman’s name. The image that formed in my mind portrayed her the way she’d looked when she lived on Xana. She was a bright-eyed, wistful young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and the kind of face that makes light shine on any world where she chooses to walk.

I’d known her years later when she wore a different name and when that hair was cut short but still sleek enough to shine beneath the glow of a Bocaian sun.

Dejah had said,“You’d be surprised how many outcast Bettelhines live in other systems under assumed names.”

Lillian Jane Bettelhine.

Younger sister of Hans.

Aunt of Jason, Jelaine, and Philip.

Exiled idealist.

Name changed to Veronica Cort.

Resident of a doomed experimental Utopian community on Bocai.

Participant in the auto-genocide that community inflicted upon itself. Loving wife of the late Bernard Cort.

Loving mother to my late brother and sister.

Loving mother to—

I dropped the Khaajiir’s staff and fell to my knees, crying a word I had not spoken in decades.

“Mommy…!”

20

I’ll skip over the hysterics of the next ten minutes. I was overwrought, wrapped in loss, mourning a family torn from me that I’d refused to remember with love for more years than I care to count. An idyll had been transformed in one horrid night of blood and madness to a hell of sterile incarceration and institutional rape, leaving me not just hard but also brittle, capable of shattering into pieces on those rare occasions when something scraped the scabs off my wounds.

The Porrinyards had been very good at dealing with me at such times. Now the shared persona of Jason-and-Jelaine proved the same, its Jelaine avatar embracing me, telling me that she knew what I’d been through, that it was all right, that I had a real home now if I wanted one. I’d be lying if I claimed that I didn’t hug her back, or that many of the tears I shed in that ten minutes were grateful ones. But I’m also Andrea Cort, and not blind.

Even as I howled, part of me was picking it apart.

Sometime ten or twenty minutes after it all came back to me, we had returned to the stone table and I was sitting opposite her again, my eyes burning but my mind working at full capacity again. The furry white thing that lived on the balcony had decided that I was its friend, or at least its pleasure slave, and was now curled up on my lap, vibrating with pleasure; my usual impulse would have been to kick it off but I stroked it anyway as I sipped the sweet juice Jelaine had gotten me. “And am I supposed to believe that this is just about family? And nothing else?”

She spread her hands. “It can be about as little or as much as you want it to be.”

“Why didn’t the Family ever reclaim me before?”

“Because that’s never been the way things were done before. Because Bettelhines who leave the corporation or allow themselves to be exiled for cause have historically never been trusted again. Offspring born to exiles are sometimes repatriated, if they have a case, but they’ve never been allowed to become Inner Family in status again, even by marriage. The risks of subversion have always been deemed too great.”

I took another sip of my juice. “So where does that leave me?”

“You?…were a special case. You were notorious. Your lovingCorps ”—she filled the word with special contempt—“knew who you were and did everything they could to enhance your notoriety, just so they could hold you over my father and grandfather’s generations.”

“That’s all I was? A blackmail tool?”

“Somewhat short of a doomsday weapon. Our family’s well used to being hated, and could have weathered the scandal had your identity ever been revealed. But threats to reveal your lineage could still sway certain issues of contention a few precious points toward Dip Corps advantage. And that grew even more of a factor once you embarked upon your diplomatic career and became an even more divisive figure among the other major powers. Overall it became easier, for the small number of Inner Family leaders of these past two generations who knew who you were, to let you be and just let smaller issues slide.”

I was still sure I discerned an ulterior motive. “And that’s why you’re trying to get me back now? To neutralize my effectiveness as a political lever?”

“No, Andrea, that’s the way my grandfather might have seen it. Or even my father, once upon a time. But you haven’t been an effective political lever in some time. Most of the new generation coming up now still has no idea who you are. Philip, for one, didn’t know who you were until we were all back on Xana and Jason took him aside to tell him. I wish you could have seen the expression on his face.”

“Don’t tell me you’re just being sentimental.”

“If you think that’s not a factor, you’re wrong. Aunt Lillian was exiled before either of the singles Jason and Jelaine were born, but I have researched her case and believe it a miscarriage of family justice. There was never any need to deprive her of her birthright. Or, by extension, yours.”

Damn it, she seemed sincere. And I could not afford tears again. “But that’s not all of it. That can’t be all of it. I’m not that important.”

“You are, actually, but you’re right. That’s not all of it. I suppose that to understand it all you need to start with Jason’s experiences on Deriflys.”

“What happened?”

The pain of Jason’s early life now showed on his sister’s beautiful face, not as an experience she’d heard about at a remove, but as one she could now remember herself, with a pain capable of burning her. “I’ve already given you an idea how bad it was there. Now multiply your worst perception of that world’s brutality by a factor of ten. Jason lived like an animal. There were times he had to sell himself, times he had to kill or be killed, times he was no better than a slave, and times he had to give up every shred of his dignity just to avoid starving. When the AIsource pulled him out of there—”

I sat up a little straighter. “The AIsource?”

“Yes,” she said, with defiant calm. “They sent a force into Deriflys to pull out somebody else they wanted, a brave, special girl named Harille. They had important plans for her, but Harille wouldn’t go with them unless they also rescued the boy who had loved her and protected her and kept her alive even when it might have made more sense for both of them to just lie down and die.” Jelaine’s eyes turned wistful. “It’s amazing how much love a boy like the single Jason can feel when he’s lost everything and only his ability to feel concern for another person is left, or how much a girl like Harille, who never quite loved him back, can still appreciate all he’s done for her. She gave them no choice.”

I asked, “What happened to her?”

“The last time Jason saw her, aboard the AIsource vessel that pulled them off Deriflys, she was dying. And that, Counselor, is the real reason he was so shattered when he came back to Xana. Harille had kept him sane, and now he couldn’t even know whether she’d survived.”

“And this is why the singlet Jelaine went away with him?”

“Yes. Everybody was told it was a goodwill tour. But in truth none of the other worlds the singles Jason and Jelaine visited during the tour mattered at all. It was all about finding out whether Harille was alive or dead.”

“Was she?”