Adam-Troy Castro - The Third Claw of God

“Nobody knew until long after he got back. And by then, the damage was done. Have you ever heard of a cylinder world known as Deriflys?”

The word sounded elegant, the way she uttered it horrific. I found part of me not wanting to know. But I’d opened this door, so I just shook my head.

“There are places where the machinery of civilization carves out a habitat for people to live, only to abandon them when the people who pay the bills either go bankrupt or decide to move elsewhere. Deriflys was one of the all-time worst.”

“What happened?”

“It was supposed to be a travel and manufacturing hub, with plenty of work, but the backers disappeared and left two million human beings stranded there with no way to evacuate. No human or alien government anywhere in civilized space considered the looming catastrophe their problem. The local economy crashed. Legitimate shipping went elsewhere. More and more, the only vessels interested in stopping at Deriflys became those run by criminal enterprises intent on profiting from the misery of those left behind. Drugs and weapons flooded the place, gangs took over, and the residents who did manage to book passage offworld found themselves delivered against their wills to lives worse than the ones they’d left. Everybody who stayed had to live with the chaos. There were a few well-fed leaders and absolute wretchedness on every level below them. The inhabitants were left starving, desperate, filthy, and clawing at each other for every gram of food, breath of air, and square centimeter of space. In short, life there became a daily litany of atrocities, and an exercise in how low you were willing to sink, how cheaply you were willing to sell yourself, in order to survive.” She told the story as if she’d lived it herself. She dabbed at her eyes with a soft linen. “This, Counselor, is the place where my beautiful brother Jason, my best friend, spent five years while we didn’t know whether he was alive or dead.”

It wasn’t the only such story I’d heard. Civilized space was dotted with worlds that had made themselves hells, sometimes out of sheer suicidal neglect, other times by turning on each other with the very same weapons responsible for providing the ancestors of Jason Bettelhine with the wealth he’d forsaken when he went wandering, bright-eyed but blind, through a hostile universe. There was no reason I should have felt sympathy for him, given who he was, but he’d been a child, much like another whose innocence had ended with brutality and blood. It took me several seconds to muster words. “Why didn’t he tell somebody who he was, and promise a big reward to the first ship that sent him home?”

Once again, her smile crossed the border into the pity she’d shown for Monday Brown. “Surely a woman as wise as yourself knows the answer to that.”

It had come to me as soon as I’d asked the question. Of course, he couldn’t have. The kind of people capable of clawing their way to the top of a world falling apart would have seen a Bettelhine heir as a commodity more valuable than any mere ransom could be. There were entire civilizations ravaged by his family trade that would have given half their treasuries just to have him handed over for execution, others that would have loved to have him chained to a wall and tortured a different way every day for the rest of his natural life. Still others would have pointed a gun at his head and advised the Bettelhines that he would remain alive for only as long as the family made regular payments. In none of those cases would any thought be given to actually returning him. Hard as it would have been to accept, Jason would have been far safer as a ragged little corridor rat, or as the plaything of powers greater than himself, than he ever could have been as the long-lost Bettelhine son, expecting a comfortable ride back to the luxurious estate he’d forsaken in favor of the adventure gone bad.

But there was another factor, even more terrible, that loomed above all of those nightmares like a massive weight set to crush everything beneath it to insignificance. Exactly how long could a naïve, pampered boy live in hell before survival meant doing something that he could never bring back to his family? How long before the only possible conclusion for him would be that he’d ruined himself, and belonged nowhere but where he was?

I said, “How did he get out?”

“He’s not willing to share that at this time. But I can say that when he got home it was almost another additional year before he was willing to accept the family’s joy at seeing him again. The boy we’d known had been…broken.”

I glanced at the confident young man enjoying his conversation with Skye. “He seems fine now. As do you.”

“Thank you. You don’t know what it cost us, by which I mean, the two of us. We help each other carry the weight. It’s one reason we remain so close now.”

“And—excuse me—all this helps explain why I’m here, how?”

Jelaine spread her hands. “A changed man can change his family, and what his family stands for. Even, I daresay, how far the web of family extends. We want to reflect that with our policies, Andrea, and we believe that you can help us realize that ambition. We believe that you’re uniquely suited to help guide us into that future. But the rest is for my father to say. I can see we’re out of time anyway.”

I heard another sylvan tinkle, like the one that had summoned the Porrinyards and me from our suite. It was followed by a gentle mechanical hum, somewhere above me. I followed the sound to its point of origin and saw a formal dinner table, draped with a golden embroidered cloth and equipped with twelve settings, descending from an invisible recess in the ceiling, sans wires. The table itself had no legs, just the dining surface, which found its natural level at the altitude appropriate for diners. Just as it settled into place, twelve chairs, including eleven built for the human posterior and one designed for the bonier Bocaian rump, came into view, lowering themselves through the illusory solidity of the ceiling, and settled into their positions. Atop the table, gleaming silver holders anchored a pair of scarlet candles, burning fore and aft, their reflections dancing on each of the bejeweled table settings. Each place had a printed name card, tented behind the plate, establishing the prearranged seating order.

Across the room, the middle-aged couple went aaaaah and just barely resisted clapping their hands. I stifled the same impulse I’d obeyed at the suite when confronted with the bed that had made itself. I did not exclaim, Oh, come ON! But I thought it. I may have liked one Bettelhine at least, more than I’d imagined I was going to, but I hated what seemed to be a family habit of doing everything as if it had to be accompanied by a flourish of trumpets.

Somewhere, Arturo Mendez said, “Dinner is served.”

To me the common dinner party is as alien an environment as an ocean of liquid mercury, or an ice field on a frozen moon.

But some things can’t be helped.

We took our seats, and I got to meet the other members of the party.

It turned out that I did know the dazzling redhead seated opposite me (“Counselor Cort! How wonderful! I heard that you were here!”), but that was no great accomplishment on my part. Everybody knew her. Her name was Dejah Shapiro, and she was the famous mistress of a personal empire as star-spanning as the one commanded by the Bettelhines, much of it based on the sale of high-end orbital habitats for markets throughout human space. It was said that she’d built more worlds than a year’s output of the Bettelhine factories could have blown up. It was also said that, despite her youthful appearance, she’d lived longer than any human being now alive. We’d spent a week working together, about ten years ago, when she’d been engaged to double the size of an expanding New London, and I’d been the young Dip Corps attorney assigned to ease her through the permits. She’d claimed to like me, at the time, even though I’d done everything within my power to discourage it.