The Third Claw of God (13 page)

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 skullmeans .”

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 isperfect , 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 waspoison , 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.”