The Third Claw of God (8 page)

Is it better when neither one’s driving blind at any point? For them it is. Twice as much viewpoint to enjoy, at every moment. I like to tell them it’s better for me, too, but the truth is that I don’t often catch them at it. There have been times when only one of them was physically present, the other absent because of one errand or another, and I could have sworn that I felt the other there, not just in spirit but in physical form. I once made love to Oscin and felt Skye touching me, even though she was three thousand kilometers away at the time. And there was no point in asking them how I could feel her there, when their only response would be an amused, “Well, she was.” Of course she’d been. But from the point of a poor, broken single-skull:What the hell?

On the other hand, I didn’t understand how starship propulsion worked either, and that hadn’t stopped me from zipping back and forth across civilized space for half my life. As long as we get where we want to go, who cares how it works?

When we were done, I rested my head on Oscin’s shoulders, allowing him to carry me to the bed while Skye dabbed my back with a towel large enough to sop up a continent. He placed me on the bed, accepted another kiss, and lay on his side facing me, while Skye spooned me, her skin still steaming from the shower.

We’d be days coming down from this glow.

I tried and failed to replace my exhausted grin with a look of determined concentration. “So what have you got?”

Skye massaged my shoulder blades. “The Khaajiir.”

The K’cenhowten were squat, neckless things with an affinity for shallow water and a phenotype that would have resembled the terrestrial turtle, if turtles walked on their hind legs and had shells covered with spikes. From appearance alone you would expect them to be warlike, and they did like to pick fights, though their definition of picking a fight was so leisurely that you could swallow their provocations for centuries on end before realizing that they wanted you to shoot back. They’d once owned over a thousand worlds, and still called what they had an empire, but the incursion of races with speed settings above interminable now limited them to less than two hundred, none of which anybody else wanted. I’d dealt with the K’cenhowten a few times in diplomatic settings and had always found them dull and irritable. They’ve never been among my favorite sentient races, if I could be said to have any, but I’d mark them as more congenial than the Tchi and a lot less explosive than human beings. That’s because they don’t change their minds easily. There’s a saying in the Dip Corps. Point a K’cenhowten in any given direction, give him a reason to walk, leave for a few hours, and chances are that when you come back he’ll still be lumbering toward the horizon when you get back.

Alas, that went for bad directions, too, and whenever they wandered into one of the historical morasses that afflict all sentient races from time to time, they didn’t retreat but rather kept moving until it was well over their heads.

In the case of their dark age, it was a period of religious tyranny as vile as the Spanish Inquisition or Third Jihad of old Earth, or the Scouring of Deyasinq only a few centuries back. Skye didn’t claim to understand the theology involved, except to say that it resembled the same old crap. More to the point, it gripped the K’cenhowten for centuries. Entire generations lived knowing that if denounced for any reason, including insufficient piety, they could be brought to the dungeons of the church and treated to the fruits of the clergy’s endless ingenuity for inflicting pain. Some involved starvation, a process that given the slow K’cenhowten metabolism could take up to two years. Others involved the removal of the exoskeleton and the application of caustics to the digestive organs. But the most feared was the Claw of God, no caress for human beings but especially terrifying to members of a race that counted on their shells to protect them. It was one thing for a K’cenhowten to be pierced by a weapon capable of penetrating his shell. But the Claw was worse. The Claw was a way of telling nonbelievers:Your shell is nothing to us. We don’t even need to damage it to get to the meat of you.

It was hard to believe that a regime that demented could fall after holding their power for that long, but it did, after a rebellion that ripped the ruling party from its throne. A countertyranny that lasted a century or so subjected many of the descendants of that first reign of terror to much the same treatment, for equally trivial reasons. Then the Khaajiirel, a word related to the K’cenhowten word foragriculture , arrived. There appeared to have been no single, messianic leader, just a determined consensus among many individuals capable of saying no when they believed enough was enough. They stopped the cycle, restoring K’cenhowten politics to something approaching sanity, within a mere generation. Sixteen thousand years later, enter our Professor Kassasir, a Bocaian academic of impeccable credentials known for his works in fields that corresponded to history, mathematics, exohistory, exoneurology, and exopsychology. Those latter specialties, devoted to the wiring and function of alien minds, were of sufficient disinterest to most Bocaians that his achievements in those fields had earned him little more than footnoted obscurity. But that was before his fascination with K’cenhowten’s reign of terror, a lurid subject that had brought him a low level of celebrity when his paper on the subject earned him more offworld attention than he’d ever received among his own people. That had changed things for him. He’d been the local boy who made good. He’d spent most of his time, in lectures, trying to explain how the Khaajiirel, who he called the “splendid miracle,” could have halted the fevered momentum of all the bloody history that came before them. Then he’d done something that had led his university to fire him for cause. And some time after that, he’d left Bocai, leaving no forwarding address.

“That’s all very interesting,” I said, my tone establishing that it was not, “but what are the Bettelhines doing with him?”

The three of us were still in bed, the Porrinyards bracketing me on both sides, the remaining moisture from the shower prickling as it dried on our bare skin. Skye had stopped rubbing my shoulder, and now rested her hand on my hip. I could only damn the dinner invitation. We’d have to get ready before too long.

“I don’t know,” the Porrinyards said. “It could be anything. I know that rich people sometimes adopt artists like pets. There’s no reason to believe the Bettelhines wouldn’t do the same thing for obscure utopian alien academics.”

“Jason called the Khaajiir’s presence a sensitive corporate secret.”

“True. But there’s sensitive and there’s sensitive. The Bettelhines could be underwriting his historical research out of noblesse oblige, keeping his presence classified until they have something sufficiently glorious to merit a public unveiling. Or they could have found some practical application to some discovery he made in one of his other disciplines, something big enough to make them want to make him a personal guest. Right now we don’t have enough data to know.”

Flailing for a pattern, knowing it useless, I ventured, “We have those assassins.”

“True. And what do they prove, at this point?”

I hated to admit it, but the answer was Nothing. Even if we could confirm that they’d been his target, we still didn’t know whether their reason for wanting him dead had anything to do with any work he might have been doing for Bettelhine. “We have me. We know it has something to do with me.”

“We know it looks that way, because the Bettelhines have made such a point of withholding the information until we can connect with their father. But maybe he just considers it too sensitive to be left to the kids. And maybe he just wants you to tolerate a few hours in the Khaajiir’s presence until he can you get you dirtside, separate the two of you, and tell you why he really called you here. Again, we don’t have enough data. And you shouldn’t need us to tell you that.”

No, I shouldn’t. I was, after all, the one talented at solving puzzles. “So what else have you got?”

Oscin surprised me by sitting up and staring at the blackness on the other side of the suite’s transparent wall. “Jason Bettelhine.”

The disappearance of Jason Bettelhine for much of his childhood had been a major story throughout the Confederacy, if one I’d ignored because of my own level of disinterest in what amounted to a celebrity scandal.

The mystery had received special coverage here on Xana. I had to expect that. He was, after all, one of the heirs to the Inner Family birthright, famous from the day he was born. Still, most of the particulars had remained vague, with the Bettelhines keeping most of the investigation away from the media’s hands. About all that came out, aside from the usual conflicting rumors and empty speculation, was that there’d been no particular reason to suspect kidnapping, a claim that by process of elimination established that Jason had left his home and his great expectations of his own volition. This seemed an extraordinary step for a boy who’d been all of thirteen. Maybe he’d been an unhappy kid and maybe he’d just been a romantic one, his head addled with dreams of offworld adventure.

For five years there’d been no more word, his fate just a perennial question, mentioned anew on his birthdays and on every anniversary of his departure. Then came the thunderbolt of an announcement. Jason was alive and well and on his way back. There was no information on what he’d been doing, or why he’d decided to return at that particular moment, even if it had in fact been his own idea. If the Bettelhines knew, they’d kept that proprietary as well.

The hytex provided access to an old holo of Jason arriving at Layabout alone, looking even more drawn and haggard than he looked now. His father, Hans, greeted him with an embrace, genuine tears running down the older man’s face. It was an oddly public reunion, given that the Bettelhines never had to use Layabout if they didn’t want to, but the Porrinyards didn’t know whether to find anything suspicious about that. The public venue may have been nothing more than an acknowledgment, by Hans, that the boy’s absence and unknown plight had been mourned by his world’s general public as well. Following that, the two of them had taken the Royal Carriage, either this car or the other one, back down to the surface, and Jason had disappeared from sight for almost two years, his doings explained away by regular Bettelhine updates to the effect that he was “recovering” or “getting to know his family again.”

Sixteen months after his return, Jason was guest of honor at a ball held at the main Bettelhine estate. From precedent established by the practice among prior Bettelhine offspring, and the sheer number of articles about all the beautiful and bright-eyed young ladies from both continents who’d been invited to meet Jason at the affair, the occasion had amounted to a cattle call for consorts of high social standing, with Jason expected to determine in the few minutes he would have to dance and converse with those few that caught his eye whether there were any he considered of special interest. Local news sources around Xana identified this girl and that girl as the one they expected Jason to call again, but the absence of any further gossip implied that no Cinderellas ever received any followup visits from this particular prince.

The Porrinyards wondered if Jason might be hiding homosexual preferences, since there were worlds stupid enough to make that a secret worth hiding, but a few seconds of paging through Xana’s social register confirmed that several previous past cattle calls of this type had catered to Bettelhine offspring intent on meeting candidates of their own gender. As long as there were always new generations capable of carrying on the Family name and running the Family business, the Bettelhines didn’t give a damn how the parts interfaced.

No, it was just as likely that Jason was a true neuter. Or that he might be as close to Jelaine as I’d supposed. Or that his demons were still tormenting him one way or another. In any event, Jason had started to travel again, this time with Family approval. He made a few public appearances on Xana before moving on to other systems in Jelaine’s company, traveling alongside Jelaine and other Family members to worlds that included Tchius, Vlhan, and my own home, New London.

That trip had taken another year.

Then they’d returned, and Jason had disappeared from sight for a few months before surprising everybody by appearing beside his father at executive functions.

Jelaine had also been present at a number of those, as quietly radiant as she had been during our own brief meeting, but the same was true of several other Bettelhine siblings. She’d also been romantically linked to a number of eligible bachelors during that time, even if none of them had lasted long enough to become more than dalliances. But she was still young.

Her reserve, like Jason’s, might mean something. And it might not.

Oscin sat on the edge of the bed, brooding. Skye, lying on her side beside me, looked just as disturbed. Something about Jason Bettelhine’s story bothered them, in ways deeper than the ones that bothered this limited single-skull.

I had to ask. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Try.”

They hesitated. “It’s just a feeling. Not even anything I can define.”

“Try.”

The Porrinyards always know how to express themselves. It’s a gift that comes with being your own committee. But now, for the first time I could remember, they needed to grope for their answer, before producing a tone more halting than any I’d ever heard from them. “His life…has much in common with the broken singlets who became Oscin and Skye. A boy like that, living like royalty, but determined to flee his gilded cage—he’s either running to something, or away from something.”

The words hung in the air for a moment, before Skye finished alone. “Leaving our homeworld was a…difficult decision for us. But our singlets knew that we could never go back. He returned under his own power. What did he want?”

“His inheritance,” I guessed. “His family. His home. A place to feel safe again.”

“Maybe.” The answer seemed to acknowledge all of those possibilities without believing any of them.

“And maybe he had just figured out whatever he wanted to figure out, and needed the Bettelhine resources to accomplish whatever came next….”