The Third Claw of God

6 FULL STOP

There was a place I had been many times.

It was a place without edges. It glowed with a soft blue light, eliminating any possibility of shadow. Anybody entering this place existed in free fall. But for the presence of an atmosphere, and sufficient heat to maintain life, it might have been the universe itself before the Big Bang arrived to litter everything with dust and debris and the molecular ancestors of stupid people and bureaucrats.

I tumbled in the center of that void, still wearing the black suit I’d worn to dinner on the Bettelhine Royal Carriage, my exposed hands appearing cyanotic from the blue tinge of the only available illumination.

I’d first encountered this place as a genuine physical location, on the space station One One One: a chamber the AIsource had built, with the specific purpose of awing the human beings who came to them with questions and petitions. Any human entering this room had to float in what felt like infinite emptiness while trying to pretend that human concerns had any relevance to the intangible, unimaginably powerful minds who lived here.

By the time I’d left One One One I’d proven the place a sheer exercise in psychological gamesmanship, or public relations if you prefer, much like a similar place of power used by the title character in an ancient novel called The Wizard of Oz, first described to me by Oscin Porrinyard on the day I was invited into the AIsource equivalent.

Since leaving One One One, with a direct line to the software intelligences now a permanent feature of my head, I’d also found myself equipped with a virtual doorway to that place, accessible whenever parleys between us required more than a few terse exchanges.

I had never been comfortable there. I know some people like free fall, and even see it as a fine location for energetic sex, but for me it activates the height sensitivity that, while much improved thanks to my exposure on One One One, will always remain an instinctive part of my personality. It’s also an AIsource place, which lowers it yet another notch on my tally of locations that inspire comfort. And yes, I know that the AIsource are everywhere and that they’re no less present on New London, or Xana, or the average dead asteroid than they are in this simulation they built, but I’ve never required my gut reactions to win trophies for consistency. There was no way I’d ever be able to relax in a place inhabited by sentients who had been pursuing their own agendas long before the first African hominid discovered the entertainment value of a rock thrown at an unpleasant neighbor’s head.

It became even less comfortable when, at some point several months after beginning my regular visits to the place, I’d grown frustrated with conversations consisting of me shouting at a faceless 360-degree sky and demanded the privilege of eye contact. They’d obliged, with the amusement native to any superior being indulging the whims of a half-wit pet, and provided a face for me to talk to.

I often wished I’d left well enough alone.

I wished it again, now, as their avatar appeared, first as a dark spot in the distance, and then, as it approached, resolving into the form of a face designed as a compromise between a generic, asexual, panracial human being, and a number of the other, more humanoid races known to me. The creature had the all-black eyes of a Riirgaan, the high forehead and white-tufted crown of hair that marks a Tchi, the puffy cheeks of the stereotypical Bursteeni, and ears that, while human in shape, possessed the mottled bumps Bocaians have instead of familiar human folds.

Don’t even get me started on the voice and accent. It was a more democratic mix of those and maybe twenty other species I know about, the combination perched on the edge of incurably annoying without ever entering the realm of incomprehensibility. Hello again, Andrea.

“You bastards, you should have told me!”

The avatar’s lips pursed. Our primary interest has always been in the workings of your mind, and that, sadly, includes your own substantial investment in the standard human capacity for self-deception.

I wanted to punch that smug face in the nose, but I’d learned from long experience that it was as intangible as everything else here. However wide my swing, it would just fall short, the image appearing to hover just a centimeter or so outside my reach. “Was it all just manipulation? Was everything the Dip Corps put me through just another way of controlling me?”

Nor is it up to us to explain every single unanswered question. However, there’s no harm in pointing out the implications that will certainly occur to you once you’re calm enough for reflection. For instance, the Dip Corps has indeed profited by shackling you with the belief that you had no alternatives but a lifetime spent in their service. You are, after all, a valuable resource. But how could your superiors have known, before you spent a single day as their representative, that you would prove quite as remarkable as you have been? On what basis would they assume that history would prove you worth retaining indefinitely, even if that meant limiting your options by forcing you to live with your horrific reputation intact?

I didn’t need the absence of discernable direction to feel adrift. “I…don’t know.”

Does it not follow that they found you valuable even before you worked for them so much as a single day?

“M-maybe they…maybe they could tell—”

The AIsource avatar was firm. You are not the center of the universe, Andrea. You are more important than you guess, even now, but as you would no doubt realize on your own, were we to wait for you to do so, 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.

“Who? The Unseen Demons?”

Again, Andrea: you are not the center of the universe. Our Rogue Intelligences would have taken notice of you, at that point, but only insofar as we did: as a potential future resource, and even then only as one of a potential many. Even if the people controlling your fate, back then, had possessed any knowledge of the war between us and the Rogue Intelligences, or if you prefer your own melodramatic term the Unseen Demons, nobody would have seen you as the lever capable of manipulating such a historic conflict. You were just a child, with few implications outside your own species.

I flailed for meaning. “B-but the massacre—”

Please, the AIsource sniffed, using a scornful tone they might have picked up from me. Dispense with any self-aggrandizing theories you might have about the madness that swallowed your community on Bocai having anything to do with a hidden plot, on either our part or the part of our ancestral enemies, intended only to forge you, via the trauma you experienced, into anybody’s special weapon. They are grandiose and ridiculous.

To my horror, I realized that part of me had been nursing ideas very much like that. In a desperate attempt to salvage some self-respect, I stammered, “B-but you always called the Unseen Demons responsible—”

They were. They did cause what happened. But their machinations were not about you. You are not one of your kind’s preordained myth figures, not a Chosen One beset by evil forces intent on preventing the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. We’ve always seen you as special, but not as that special. Any importance you have is either by our leave, or still just potential at this time.

“Then tell me what you’re talking about!” I cried. “Tell me why what the Dip Corps would have to gain by making sure I remained infamous!”

That would amount to answering your questions for you. And as we have said, we have little interest in telling you where to go, what to say, and how to react, at any given moment. We have only pointed out implications that you would soon come to realize for yourself. We may provide additional guidance from time to time, as we did when we suggested this journey very much worth taking, but the ultimate responsibility for your own life remains your own.

I crossed my arms and turned away in a huff. It was a futile move. As is only natural in a friction-free environment, the sudden move became an unwilling pirouette, returning that impossible, smug face to stage center. “Have I told you today how much I hate you?”

Was that a smile, forming at the corner of the AIsource avatar’s lips? Yes.

I didn’t believe it. The sons of bitches were mocking me. I found myself hating them more than ever before. “When I do put you out of your misery, I’m going to make sure it hurts.”

The sideways grin expanded. Noted. Meanwhile, you need to hurry up and absorb this information. Because we come now to the other reason we urged you to accept Hans Bettelhine’s invitation.

I could only repeat something I’d said to them many times. “Go to hell.”

As you know, this is our fondest dream. But we are not the species that faces damnation today.

The silence that followed felt like a death knell for everything I’d ever known. “What?”

The avatar did everything but smack its lips with satisfaction, now that it had gotten my undivided attention. You are fast approaching one of your history’s turning points, a moment with tremendous implications, a moment that will directly and indirectly affect the lives of millions. Entire intelligent species, including your own, will be faced with extinction if subsequent events fail to play out as they must; and though, as we have said, any importance you have is only by our leave, we have placed you in a position where your decisions will help to determine the shape of that future.

My chest burned. “And you won’t tell me what to do?”

You are dispensable. Your species is dispensable. We have no interest in the outcome. As always, we take what we need from the process itself.

A legendary murderer once said that he wished the world had but one throat, and he the blade sharp enough to cut it. At the moment, I would have sacrificed humanity, the future, everything, for a single knife capable of piercing the AIsource’s collective heart. “Give me something! Anything!”

The avatar grinned its widest grin yet, but there was no mirth in it. If anything, I detected a deep, soul-withering sadness, natural in the face of an intelligence that envied the oblivion with which it had just threatened Mankind.

Within the hour, one of your number will be murdered.

“Counselor? Do you hear me?”

Weight returned to the world. I was still sitting in my suite aboard the Bettelhine Royal Carriage. The Antresc Pescziuwicz projection was still facing me from an arm’s length, an unwitting parody of the stranger avatar who had just underlined the destruction of my life’s foundations. From the concern in his eyes, I’d been unresponsive for the last few seconds. Thank the software shitheads for small favors; by controlling the speed of our interface, they’d prevented it from being long minutes. Not that I cared about inconveniencing Pescziuwicz; I just didn’t want him to mistake what had just happened to me to catatonia or, worse, a humiliating faint.

“Counselor?” he prodded.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “I just don’t have anything to say about that.”

“What am I missing?”

“Me, telling you just now that I have nothing to say. I have to end this conversation now. Terminate connection.”

His image blinked out in mid-protest.

I leaned forward, buried my face in my hands, and tried not to think of all the years I’d spent fearing a sudden knock on my door, a public snatch by extraterrestrial bounty hunters, a negative decision in some Confederate extradition court, the slow death of a trial before some interspecies court of law. I tried not to think of all the years I’d lived with a noose around my neck, about how that had all been a lie, and how the AIsource had just robbed me of even the chance to think any of it mattered.

There was a crystal statue on the table beside the chair where I sat. I don’t know what it was supposed to represent. It was like a vertical length of knotted string, rendered in fine cut glass and tinted a shade of purple that reflected every light source in the suite. It was beautiful, in its way, and typical of objects like it, in that it brought art into the room without also delivering any context or meaning. I found myself hating it. The rage boiled over. I grabbed it and hurled it, with all the strength I could muster, against the opposite wall. I don’t know what it was made of, but it didn’t so much shatter as disintegrate, the shards becoming bright, flaming comets that vanished before hitting anything else.

Typical. I couldn’t even get any goddamned satisfaction out of that.

I wanted nothing more than to barricade myself in the bathroom and scream until the mood went away out of sheer exhaustion, but that was not an option. So I stood up and, pounding heart and all, stormed from the room, knowing I was far too angry to be with people right now but hoping for an opportunity to lacerate somebody with my tongue, before death intruded and I had to be Counselor Andrea Cort again.

An explosion of merriment from the table on the other end of the parlor, aftermath of some unknown witticism, greeted me as I stormed from the suite, in no mood to share the joke. I made unwilling eye contact with Oscin, who I caught in mid-laugh. He was too good to let his smile falter when he read my expression, but he did register that something was wrong.

I looked away and went to the bar, where that silly quiff Colette persisted in sparkling with hateful enthusiasm. The bands of light continued to strobe across her scarlet hair in waves, changing color with each passage in a pattern that I now recognized as linked to soft background music behind her. “Did your conference go well, ma’am?”

“I’m not your ma’am. I need another of those blue drinks you gave me before.”

Her smile was bright, white, and in my face. “That particular liqueur is for before dinner, Counselor. Would you prefer me to recommend—”

“No, I don’t want you to recommend. I want what I had before.”

The customer’s always right, even if her tone of voice is pure poison. Her friendliness not wavering a centimeter, Colette reached under the bar and produced the blue stuff, filling another glass to the rim. I took it from her and swallowed it in one gulp, feeling it hit my system with the force of a body check to the gut. I’d only managed a sip or two of the previous one. Another like this and I wouldn’t know if my insides were solid, liquid, or a gas. Maybe I could drink enough to achieve the same effect as a Claw of God; it would certainly make a great name for a novelty cocktail.

“Can I help you with anything else?” she asked.

I repressed a burp. “No.”

“Thank you, then,” she said. “It’s been a pleasure serving you.”

And that was just one polite gesture too many. “What’s so goddamned pleasurable about it? I was a surly bitch to you, just now. Isn’t a little part of you tempted to tell me to take a hop?”

She infuriated me with an amused chuckle. “You’re not the only stressed VIP I’ve served, Counselor. If I have to deal with any of you at a bad time, I consider it as much an honor as sharing in your happiest celebrations.”

“But what do you get out of kowtowing to these people that’s so orgasmic you can’t wipe that pixie grin off your face?”

The pixie grin didn’t waver, but it didn’t seem forced either; the warmth and the grace never left her eyes. Damned if she didn’t seem sincere. “I take pleasure in being good at my job.”

“Then be good at it and shut up. Pour me another one.”

She obliged, with another smile and thank you and another twinkle of those relentlessly cheerful eyes. Were I in a good mood I might have liked her. But in a bad mood her perkiness was an affront. Nobody had the right to feel that good when I felt this bad.

I almost gulped the freshened drink as well, but hesitated to wait out a warning rumble in my belly. That’s when Skye, who had left the table to come after me, placed a gentle hand on my wrist and murmured, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Everything.” And then the need to release anger, my frustration with being unable to take it out on Colette, the specific knowledge that so much of what I’d taken for granted was wrong, and the weight that had just been placed on my shoulders, collided with my resentment toward anybody inconsiderate enough to disturb how I felt right now. It wrapped itself up in every paranoid thought I’d ever had about the Porrinyards and their own relationship with the AIsource and how it predated my own, and how the AIsource had even prepared them for their relationship with me. I looked at Skye and saw the face of the AIsource avatar superimposed over her own. Here was someone I could be mad at. “Have you been lying to me all this time?”

She flinched, but answered without raising her voice. “No.”

“What about withholding the truth? Have you been doing that?”

“Andrea, what’s this—”

I kept my voice very low and very calm. “Just answer the question. Is there anything you’ve refrained from telling me?”

“Damn straight there is,” Skye said.

The direct answer shut me up at once. I glanced across the room to see what Oscin was doing, and found him in close conversation with the Pearlmans. There was nothing in his expression or manner to betray the confrontation he was also involved in, over on our side of the room. Nor did any of the other diners, with the possible exception of a curious Dejah Shapiro, seem to realize that anything was amiss. Either we were hiding this well, or they were blind.

I realized I was afraid of whatever Skye was about to say.

She took my blue drink and downed it in one gulp, a showy gesture that could have meant nothing or everything. It could have meant nothing because while alcohol, and other mood-altering substances, had the usual physical effects on their individual bodies, their gestalt was capable of compensating for that with relative ease, by simply putting more pressure on the sobriety of the body and mind that remained.

But when she put the empty glass down, her eyes were calm. “I’m your lover, not your property. You have access to my heart and my body and my mind, but you don’t own every last piece of me on demand, and never have. You want that, become our Third. You want to remain separate, that’s fine too, but guess what? Secrets are what living in your own skull means.”

I was not quite ready to discard my anger. “Yes, but…”

“I’ve given you more than I’ve ever given any other singlet. But there are things about Skye’s past, and Oscin’s past, and about my past as a linked pair, that I’ve never felt comfortable about sharing with anybody. There are times when other people share confidences with me that are none of your business. There are other times when I realize things on my own that are also none of your business. And there are times, like now, when you’ve been difficult to deal with and I need a secret piece of myself to rant and rave in, before I come back and show you patience and smiles rather than give you the fight you think you want. These are the things I withhold from you, Andrea. And these are the things you’re going to have to get used to not having if we’re to continue loving each other.”

I opened my mouth, came up with nothing, and found myself needing to address a certain burning sensation in my eyes.

Skye gave me a squeeze on the shoulder. “Apology accepted.”

“Love, I—”

“Again: apology accepted. No need dwelling on it. I’ll jump your bones with special enthusiasm later. But what brought this on, anyway? Something Pescziuwicz said?”

I muttered a curse, and dabbed at my eye with the napkin Colette had provided with my drink. “No. Our bosses.”

“Our Dip Corps bosses or our other bosses?”

“Our other bosses.”

She turned wary. “I should have known. Ten minutes fighting that conversational rip current would make anybody cranky.”

“Tell me about it.”

“If it’s any consolation, the Pearlmans have spent the last ten minutes dominating the conversation with cute stories about their pets and office politics, and they’re still going even as we speak. Poor Jelaine’s eyes are crossing.”

Small talk. I’ve never been good at it, either making or enduring, but I sometimes envy those who have the capacity. “Just tell me. Yes or no. No details. Is there anything you’ve felt the need to withhold about this trip?”

Only somebody as close to them as myself would have noticed the hesitation. “Yes. Just an epiphany about a couple of these people that you might have missed. Nothing important at this time. What about you? Did our employers give you anything I should know?”

I rubbed my forehead. “Hints. Augurs. Dire warnings of imminent doom. Assurance that I have an inflated sense of my own importance. Fresh responsibilities that directly contradict that reality check. The entire fate of humanity at stake. Revelations that change everything I ever thought I knew.”

Skye nodded. “The usual, then.”

“Most pressing right now: advance warning that somebody in this room is about to be murdered.”

Nothing in Skye’s expression changed. There was no fear, no obvious alert. But something ineffable altered within her, something that would remain hidden to everybody but myself.

We were both thinking the same thing. The AIsource were nothing if not precise, and they hadn’t said a damn thing about a murder attempt. They’d said a murder. It was going to happen even if I moved heaven and Earth to stop it.

And what, precisely, could I do to stop it anyway? Warn everybody, citing a hidden source I could not divulge? The second the murder took place anyway, the Bettelhines would demand to know where I’d gotten the information. The blocks in my head would keep me from explaining my special relationship with the AIsource, I’d look like I was refusing to answer, and the Porrinyards and I would find ourselves in a Bettelhine prison before the corpse had a chance to cool.

The most we could do was keep our eyes open and hope we could make a difference to whatever was coming.

I turned to Colette and did something that has always been very difficult, almost impossible, for me. “I’m sorry. I was a pig.”

The bartender’s eyes were as bright as the shimmery arcs flowing down the side of her head in sine waves. “Don’t worry, Counselor. I didn’t notice.”

For some reason I felt diminished by that.

We returned to the table just after Arturo Mendez set down the main course, a pastry leaking a mixture of something red that I supposed to be meat, and a sauce that resembled molten gold. Greenery of some species I didn’t recognize framed that concoction in a delicate spiral that turned orange at the interior vanishing point. Our arrival coincided with several of the diners, including Dejah Shapiro and Dina Pearlman, declaring it the unseen chef’s greatest accomplishment yet. Though Oscin had taken a few bites himself, and seemed likely to survive, I regarded it with a marked lack of enthusiasm. It wasn’t just my lifelong preference for synthesized foods, unconnected with all the messy organic factors I associate with planets. But the blue liqueur had deadened any appetite I might have been able to summon.

Monday Brown asked, “How did it go, Counselor? Was Mr. Pescziuwicz able to answer all your questions?”

I picked at the thing with a fork. “Precious few, sir, but he assures me he’s still working on it.”

“He will,” Philip Bettelhine said. “The man has the work ethic of a machine. We’re lucky to have him.”

Dejah sipped her wine. “Yes, but is he lucky to be had by you?”

“He can already afford a luxurious retirement, if that’s what you mean.”

“But only on Xana,” she pointed out.

“Yes, well, that goes without saying. We can’t have him flitting off to some competitor, or unfriendly government, and spilling everything he knows about our security systems. He knew that when he took the job. But Xana’s a big world, with a fine variety of climates and communities for somebody in his position. He can have everything he wants.”

“Except freedom,” Dejah said.

That annoyed him. “What’s freedom, though? Put any animal in a cage larger than its natural range, feed it well, make sure that all its needs are met, and it may never encounter, or recognize, the walls that keep it hemmed in. Put a man on a garden planet with unlimited opportunities for recreation, for companionship, and for his choice of lifestyles, and why would he ever long for faraway systems that can’t possibly offer him any more?”

“Human beings are not animals,” Dejah said.

“I know I have everything I want here,” Farley Pearlman volunteered, a shy glance at the Bettelhines establishing to his satisfaction that he had not spoken out of turn. “We have the same deal, you know. We have to, with all the sensitive projects we’ve worked on.”

“As do I,” Monday Brown said.

Vernon Wethers raised his hand. “Me too. I don’t mind.”

Farley Pearlman said, “Temet’s weather is perfect, most of the year. Why would I want to suck bluegel for half a year in Intersleep, just to visit somewhere that’s not going to be any better?”

Dina Pearlman said, “My best friend, Joy? She was part of a trade delegation to New London once. She said the food there was poison, and the people—”

Jason Bettelhine coughed once, seizing the conversation without having to raise his voice a single decibel. “In the first case, the counselor and her companions hail from New London. I assume they’d have something to say about the ‘poison’ food.”

Dina glanced at me, her eyes stricken less with the awareness that she’d just insulted the Porrinyards and myself than with the knowledge she’d done it before the local equivalent of royalty. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean—”

Jason rode out her apology before she could find a way to make it worse than the original offense. “In the second place, I believe I know as much about cages, and leaving comfortable places to travel through distant ones, as anybody here.”

A cloud passed over Philip’s features. “Yes. And just look how well that worked out for you.”

Farley, assuming that humor, exploded with forced laughter that trailed off into silence as he registered that he was the only one treating the line as funny.

The Khaajiir put aside his own entree (which, as per the usual Bocaian preference, had been seared to a blackened crisp) long enough to clutch his staff and assure him, “Don’t worry, sir. Laughing in the face of irony is just one of life’s perks.”

“Much of what my brother says is true,” Jason told us. “Much of what you see on distant worlds is formed by the same physical laws that form our sights here. The erosion that carves rocks into sand here just makes more sand that aside from a few differences in color and texture looks like the sand back home. The cold that turns frozen water into glaciers here just makes more glaciers that carve the landscape the same way glaciers are carved here. Gravity and weather patterns and everything that decides what natural places look like all work according to the same consistent set of laws that allows for variety but ensures that any wonder you see, anywhere you go, can only be a variation on something you’ve seen where you came from. The same thing goes for other sentient species, other civilizations. They’re different, sometimes startlingly different, but also all the same. I don’t know what Mr. Pescziuwicz wants from his future, or how he defines freedom, but as long as all you want is a variety of backdrops, or comfortable places to lie your head, you can get that without ever leaving your homeworld. You can even have as much ‘freedom’ as you can handle, as long as the folks who run the place aren’t intent on taking it from you.”

Farley Pearlman, who was desperate to atone for his previous faux pas, ventured, “Th-then… what were you looking for… when you—”

“The one thing distant places can give you, when you once again turn your eyes to home.”

The Khaajiir and I spoke in unison. “Perspective.”

We glanced at each other. The Khaajiir seemed gratified, even proud of me in a way.

I turned to Oscin and then to Skye. “So that’s what that feels like.”

Jason raised his glass. “You’ve got it, Counselor. You can’t determine the shape of an object, or a society, by examining it from only one side. You have to walk around it, look down on it from a height, even—as I did—bury yourself in the dirt, to see it from ground level. It’s the only way to see what something is, before you—”

That’s when someone, or something, moaned.

It came from all around us: a screech of metallic agony my mind insisted on interpreting as the sound made by an enraged giant peeling back the wrought-iron bars of its cage. The floor started vibrating. The floating table tilted twenty degrees, spilling drinks and plates onto the laps of all the guests on my side. Bubbles rose in the tank containing the Bettelhine fish. Monday Brown fell out of his chair. Vernon Wethers fell next. The scenic windows went black as metallic shutters slid from the exterior housings and blocked Xana from view. I heard screams, gasps of pain, and Philip Bettelhine commanding us not to panic.

I tried to get up at the wrong moment, and a final lurch sent me airborne. I had time to scream a single “Shiiiiiiit!” before I hit the floor, taking all the impact on my left hip.

And then, as the story goes, some idiot turned out the lights…