The Third Claw of God (7 page)

“That’s what I heard. But which one is that, below us?”

“Think about it.”

I did, then felt stupid. “Of course. The Bettelhines would never sully their own continent with anything as landscape-defiling as an orbital elevator.”

“Asgard is more like a nature preserve, I understand. Between the estates, the support staff, and the environmental stewards, its entire full-time population is less than eighteen thousand people. I think they use, actually use, less than one percent of the available land, though they make much of the territory available for scenic and recreational purposes. Not that Midgard is all that spoiled a place to live, either. Three million people, total, from coast to coast, most of them in a tiny handful of cities. If mankind had kept the homeworld that pristine, we never would have left.”

And all of those people worked for the Bettelhines, either directly or for the infrastructure that made those cities active, breathing communities. With that much space to deal with, that many natural resources to support themselves, even before regular cash infusions from the family trade allowed the importation of anything they preferred not to manufacture locally, the local standard of living went beyond privilege. The poorest of the poor, around here, must have lived in conditions that matched the upper middle class anywhere else. “I wonder how many worlds were reduced to industrial hells, or smoking ruins, so the Bettelhines can afford to live like this.”

“I could look it up and give you a precise figure,” the Porrinyards said, “but I don’t think any one of us is in the mood for that much higher math.”

I turned away from the window, and saw them, curled on the huge bed in attitudes that suggested a pair of human parentheses just waiting for me to take my place between them, as the phrase being singled out for special emphasis. Neither had disrobed. They had no need to hurry me along. There was no urging in either set of eyes, just a certain confident patience.

Oscin spoke alone. “They’re dancing around something.”

“Maybe they’re trying to recruit me.”

“That seems likely.” Skye rolled over on her back, faced the infinite spaces of a ceiling that, though only a meter or so above our heads, was designed to look as vast and the skies of heaven. “I would not put it past them; they’ve bought out Dip Corps contracts before. We knew a fellow, back on One One One, who sold himself to the Bettelhines as a high-altitude specialist. But if they offered you a position, would it be anything you’d want to do? Anything that would leave you room for your mission for the AIsource?”

Oscin added, “And would you want to contribute to any enterprise that has caused so much human suffering on so many worlds?”

“The AIsource can’t be accused of having clean hands, either.”

“True. But the AIsource prize you as an implacable enemy. They appreciate you wanting them dead; they would be delighted if you found the means. The Bettelhines, on the other hand, only want to prosper, and would only hire you for some reason that advanced their own fortunes. That’s not you, Andrea. It’s never been you.”

Comments like that always make me uncomfortable, as if being seen as some kind of moral paragon driven by principle amounts to a guarantee that I’d someday prove a disappointment. “From the hints they dropped, they expect me to embrace whatever they have to say.”

“The Bettelhines didn’t get where they are by being bad salesmen, even when all they were selling was death. Whatever they want of you, they will make it sound like the greatest offer you ever had.”

“Present company excluded,” I said.

The Porrinyards grinned together. “Quite right.”

“What do you make of these two in particular?”

Oscin said, “You did notice that Jason did almost all the talking, and that Jelaine came in only when it was time to seal the deal.”

“Of course. Do you think she’s in charge of, well, whatever this is?”

They spoke together again. “My perception of that will depend entirely on how much Hans Bettelhine involves himself. But no. To the extent these two are active players, I think both siblings are in charge, and that each is as formidable as the other. I think Jason’s the face of this business. Whatever hurt him—and I know the way you think, so don’t be surprised, I agree that something has hurt him—may even be the motivating force, in some manner. But I also think Jelaine’s behind her brother, backing up his moves, and picking up the slack whenever his own considerable resources prove insufficient. I think she is, if you allow the phrase,the will that drives his determination. Does that make sense to you?”

It was much what I’d been thinking, and I usually trusted their shared perceptions over my own when it came to questions of human behavior. But right now their assurances failed to satisfy. I didn’t know what it was, but something about the young Bettelhines reeked of illicit secrets. Incest? Maybe. As I’d already noted, the Bettelhines were nothing if not royals on their own ground, and the one immutable element of life as a royal is the way it relegates every other human being to the level of social inferior. No doubt their family kept this in mind, and that the local social season was in large part an exercise in providing these two, and their approximately one dozen siblings, with potential mates of appropriate station. But that would not be enough to prevent all possible infatuations among siblings segregated to a family estate. It certainly fit the bond I’d sensed between them, in those few minutes we’d spent together. But so would any number of sibling conspiracies, such as being of like age and the closest of confidantes when they were raised.

Still, it was odd that my instincts had gone directly to that.

I sensedsomething between them.

“Andrea?”

I felt a jerk, a brief moment of subaural vibration, and then movement. The Carriage had disengaged from Layabout. The view through the transparent wall looked exactly the same as before, as was only reasonable given our measured rate of descent; we couldn’t even see Layabout, as it was now in our blind spot, somewhere above us. But any chance we’d had of backing away from the Bettelhine plans for us, and returning to New London, without further involvement were now in the past. We were committed.

4

Life with the Porrinyards had its counterintuitive aspects.

They meshed so well that it was easy to forget that they’d ever been anything else. But they’d begun their lives as two people, lovers with a tempestuous relationship who had found that, as much as they needed each other, they could not coexist as individuals. They’d seen cylinking as the one way they could have a future together.

Was this the utter failure or the ultimate triumph of romantic love?

Answer: Yes.

And also: No.

The damnable thing was that both answers were equally accurate.

The shared being they were now was neither the boy who’d owned the body now occupied by Oscin or the girl who’d owned the body now occupied by Skye.

Even the names they used now were illusory, referring to the bodies alone, and necessary for convenience in describing their separate actions. They talked of the original people, now gone, with the same kind of affectionate pity that most human beings reserve for the disabled and deprived, sometimes expressing amazement that either one of them had survived long enough to reach the day when they’d walked into a branch office of AIsource Medical and asked to be rendered composite. They’d once told me that the biggest surprise of their new life was being able to look back on the experiences they’d shared and compare the memories from a global perspective. They were stunned by how many things vital to the boy had been dull to the girl, how many things the girl prized about herself the boy had considered stupid and vain. The girl had secretly seen the boy as weak and the boy had considered the girl too judgmental. As singlets, the two of them had spent at least half of their time together lying to each other. Their love, while genuine, had been tainted with all the resentments native to the constant rivalry for dominance that always comes from the proximity of any creature whose wants and needs and whims could never precisely synch.

“Knowing what I know now,” the Porrinyards told me, early in our relationship, “it’s amazing to me that any singlets tolerate each other for more than five days.”

That hit me especially hard, since five days had been about as long as I’d ever managed to hold on to any lover before them.

Sex after their union had been, in some ways, many times better than it had ever been before, since their shared consciousness could feel the physiological responses of both bodies, and each body was capable of instant reaction to the needs of the other. For more then a year after their transformation, they’d amused themselves doing it in every position their limber physiques could achieve. They still did, whenever I wasn’t available. I wasn’t the first to note that, directed at linked pairs, “go fuck yourself”

was not an obscenity, but a reasonable suggestion. (They sometimes thanked those who flung those words in anger with a sweet appreciation that drove those hostile people crazy.) Still, sex with each other amounted to masturbation. They still had only one soul, which could get lonely, and that soul required an other, one capable of seeing them as a single person and not as a pair. The first counterintuitive thing about being that other is that I never felt excluded, ever. I felt outnumbered from time to time, but it was a wry kind of irritation, identical to what I would have felt in the presence of anybody capable of out-thinking me. But there was no real sense of being the odd woman out in a crowd. They were just the other person, and the best kind of other person for any lasting relationship: the kind who was just a little bit more than I could handle.

The second counterintuitive thing about the Porrinyards had to do with their eagerness for me to undergo the procedure myself, and join them as a third.

I wanted that myself. It was impossible to be with them and not want what they had. But it was also impossible to want that without fearing what would come with it. Forget the reluctance people have just paying lip service to the commitment it takes to stay with another person forever. Imagine how much more difficult it is to take that step knowing that once you do, the person you’re committing to will no longer be the same person you care about now. Imagine that you won’t be yourself, either. Imagine that you’ll exist in the same skin, without any secrets of your own. Imagine looking back on the person you are now, and the person you love now, from the judgmental perspective of someone who isn’t really either one of you.

That was the future we faced. We wanted to link. We hoped we would, someday. But if we ever did, it would be the end of me and the end of the gestalt they were now. Andrea Cort and the Porrinyards would both be gone, replaced by a new entity who had a lot in common with us but who was, for all intents and purposes, someone else, someone who might not even like us. Someone we might not want to be.

Someone who, on top of everything else, would be alone again, and once again driven to find love. With the domestic circumstances even more complicated.

Was my resistance to becoming their Third the ultimate failure or the ultimate triumph of romantic love?

Answer: Yes.

And also: No.

Again, both answers were equally accurate.

For a full year now I hadn’t had the slightest idea what to do.

And some women think they have a dilemma because their men keep leaving the toilet seat up.

There’s another paradox, difficult for people outside our relationship to comprehend, something we took advantage of now: the convenience of multitasking.

The Porrinyards don’t always need to do everything in unison. One can sleep while the other eats. One can interrogate a suspect while the other pursues a different line of inquiry worlds away. One can play while the other works. They both get the benefit of every experience, real-time, but they don’t need to collaborate on every activity at every second to accomplish that. Two heads mean being able to concentrate on two things at one time, without compromising either.

To wit:

The Porrinyards had emerged from stasis so horny they could hardly bear it. They usually did. It may have had to do with the energy spike that always follows any space traveler’s release from bluegel, but they had lust to burn, and they had wanted nothing more since our arrival at Layabout but to get me someplace private and rip my clothes off.

The long delays since our arrival, from the sudden terror of the assassination attempt to the long hours of tedium in Pescziuwicz’s protective custody, had brought them all the way from simmer to boil. I felt the same way. But we had work to do, background to acquire if we were to face our next meeting with the Bettelhines prepared, and very little time to accomplish that as well as scratch our mutual overwhelming itch.

But if even a single-skull can make love while distracted, imagine how much easier it is for somebody with that much more shared mindspace to play around with.

While we were soaping each other in the shower, which as advertised offered real water as warm as liquid fire and enough water pressure to strum our skin like stringed instruments; while Oscin’s tongue explored my lips and Skye’s nimble hands spread the euphorics on my ass; while I closed my eyes, lost track of which Porrinyard was doing what and forgot to care; while I wept for my own cowardice in not joining their link and moments later found my cheeks strain from smiling; while I gasped from her touch and threw my hands around his shoulders, there was no single moment when I caught either one of them absent. But each one of them was present, and concentrating on the act alone, only about sixty percent of the time. The remaining forty percent of the time, at least one of them was paused, that half of their shared consciousness tapping their shared hytex link for more background on some of the questions we’d been handed.

That protocol to absorb information at a hundred thousand words per second, shifting back and forth between Oscin and Skye, didn’t prevent either one of them from enjoying the our interlude, or from perceiving it sans interruption. Oscin could be knee-deep in the history of the K’cenhowten religious wars, giving it his full attention, and still feel every individual sensation Skye felt as I knelt before her. He wasn’t being short-changed at all, nor was she when his body was needed. As long as one was present, both were.