The Third Claw of God (12 page)

There was a sound building in the room. It was between my ears and it was burning at the pit of my stomach and it was crumbling the bones in my spine to powder. It was the sound of cracks forming in every assumption I’d ever made, and of the entire superstructure of all the further assumptions that followed them beginning to list, and then to sway, and then to fall. I felt the room turn red at the edges, and did not want Pescziuwicz to continue, because now that he’d taken me this far I didn’t need his help to travel the rest of the way.

But he went on, every word out of his mouth a fresh spike driven into the base of my brain. “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 had just handed all the alien governments who wanted to paint humanity as a bunch of homicidal bastards who let their own get away with murder.”

I closed my eyes, desperate to shut him out, hating the way his voice insisted on making itself heard through the pounding of my heart.

He asked, “Why would they put themselves through that?”

Stop, I thought.

“Why would they put you through that?”

Please stop.

“And why would you let them?”

My eyes rolled into my head, and the darkness flickering at the corners of the room swallowed me whole.

6

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 calledThe 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 mesomething! 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 youjust 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 beCounselor 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.