The Third Claw of God

by Adam-Troy Castro

Caught in the very act of rising, Paakth-Doy froze. There was no way of determining the specific arguments raised in the resulting internal debate, but gravity may been the tie-breaker. She collapsed back in her seat, wearing the special misery of any human being caught between competing faux pas.

  I kept my voice steady. “Tonight’s etiquette violations include murder, sir. With that on that table I could not care less about who stands, who sits, and who uses the wrong goddamned fork while eating their goddamned pretentious inedible entrée. Tonight, Paakth-Doy’s working for me, and tonight she’ll sit if she’s fucking comfortable that way, or if I fucking want her to sit. Is that clear?”

  Mendez didn’t show even the slightest sign of anger, behind his placid, butlerian exterior. “Whatever Counselor wishes. Am I to sit as well?”

  “No, you may do whatever makes you most comfortable.”

  “Then I’ll stand.”

  “All right.” A second passed before I damned myself for my shortsightedness in giving him a choice. Now, for as long as I remained seated myself, I’d have to spend the entire interview looking up at him.

  Suppressing a sigh, I rose, cracked my spine, paced a half dozen steps away and turned to face him across a level playing field. The most difficult part was ignoring the gentle grin on Skye’s face.

  “Mr. Mendez, your primary purpose here is to provide a timeline. But I’d like to know a little bit about you first.”

  “Is that necessary?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I must confess I wonder why.”

  It wasn’t the first time in my experience that a suspect in a major crime had objected to personal questions, or even the first time a witness had expressed confusion over their relevance. But that had usually been a sign I was striking too close to home. This may have been the first time, ever, that one had questioned the relevance of a basic profile. I stared at him for a moment, expecting insolence, but found none: just a bland, academic curiosity. “I find it helpful to develop a general sense of the person first. Why? Do you think it impinges on your privacy?”

  “No, Counselor. I recognize the importance of what you’re doing. I just don’t know why anything in my life would be considered of special interest.”

  Meaning that it very well could be. “Well, we’ll just let me be the judge of that. How old are you, sir?”

  “Forty-seven, Mercantile Standard.”

  “Have you lived on Xana all your life?”

  “No. I came here as a young adult.”

  “From where?”

  “I was born on a planet named Greeve, and lived there until I was seven.”

  “Greeve?” I had never heard of the place.

  “Yes, Counselor.” He spelled it for me.

  It still rang no bells, which was far from unusual, given the number of worlds that maintained a human presence, large or small. “Is it part of the Confederacy?”

  “Yes,” he said, betraying some amusement for the first time. “If only just.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s no jewel in the crown. It has a tiny population, no industry, no exports to speak of, no corporate debt, and a lifestyle so simple that the local economy is only a few steps removed from barter. It’s signed with the Confederacy, but contributes almost nothing to it except for its name on the registry, and takes nothing in return except for occasional imported staples, which are considered relief. I’m certain that you’ve heard of places that aren’t even dots on the map? Greeve is a dot compared to even those places.”

  I’ve been to worlds that fit that description. A number were dysfunctional hellholes, inhabited only because the people there were too stubborn or too mean to just pack up and let the hostile local conditions win. The few who left formed a large percentage of the indentured population in the Dip Corps. But he hadn’t said the name with the revulsion I’d heard from so many refugees. “What’s it like?”

  A slight smile pulled at his lips. “Something like ninety-nine percent ocean. The seas are deep enough to submerge almost all the land to an average depth of about seven kilometers. There’s a small spaceport carved into the northern ice cap, but the bulk of the human population, a grand total of some seven thousand people the last time I checked, lives on a chain of some three hundred tropical islands. There are only two islands big enough to support populations of more than five hundred. The rest of the people live in island villages or on houseboats.”

  It sounded horrid to me but, then, I’d spent most of my life in enclosed orbital environments and had never been able to reclaim my childhood appreciation for natural ecosystems. “Would you call it a pleasant place?”

  “It’s a paradise if you like sun, sand, friendly people, and gentle ocean breezes.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “I was a child.”

  “You liked it.”

  A tinge of regret shone through this rock-rigid demeanor. “It was the happiest time of my life.”

  “But you left when you were seven.”

  “My parents thought they could do better.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated, as if even that much personal information was too much to impart. “Our island, Needlefish, was home to two extended families with a total population of about forty people. We saw the same faces every day and faced the same challenges every day. If my parents wanted a big night out they had to make their way to another island, about twenty kilometers north, where she had cousins and my father had old school friends. Maybe once or twice a year, on the only island in our region large enough to accommodate it, there were socials, where the residents of some eighty villages got together to catch up on old gossip and introduce the young people to potential spouses farther removed than first and second cousins. But that’s about as exciting as our lives ever got. It wasn’t that there was no money. Nobody on Greeve ever needed any money. But my parents felt that lives had gotten to be a little…I suppose you would say, arid. When I was six they arranged passage on the next freighter offworld.”

  “Which happened when you were seven.”

  “Yes. Ships only came to Greeve when asked to.”

  I wondered how many places like that remained in the Confederacy: worlds of little interest to anybody except those who lived there, whether they wanted off or preferred to stay for the rest of their lives. “Where were you headed?”

  “I don’t remember. Wherever it was, we never got there. The ship suffered some kind of disaster between systems. My parents, my sister, and some two-thirds of the vessel’s complement never came out of bluegel alive.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Paakth-Doy told him.

  “As am I,” said Skye.

  He gave them a slight nod. “Thank you.”

  I asked, “How did you survive?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, with the terseness of a man who had long ago decided that the precise details had no further relevance for him. “I was revived, alongside the remaining survivors, aboard a Tchi transport that answered the distress beacon. I wanted to go back to Greeve, where I still had friends and relatives, but I had no money and no documentation, and neither the Tchi nor the Dip Corps were willing to pay for my passage back to a place where there were no scheduled transports. So I became a ward of the Dip Corps and found myself spending the rest of my childhood in a Confederate vocational school, being trained in hospitality.”

  I’d been a ward of the Dip Corps too. Had I not been a dangerous anomaly under close observation until the day my keepers decided that my intelligence merited higher education, would I have also received training only for the most menial positions available? Feeling somewhat more sympathy for the man now than I’d managed at the beginning, I pressed on. “And were the Bettelhines your first employers?”

  “No. I spent my late teens and early twenties working in-system cruises, in and around the Lesothic wheelworlds. But I sent resumes to the company for years.”

  “Why?”

&nb
sp; “Xana has some luxury resorts famous in the industry. Some are in the subtropics. I hoped to work at one.”

  “Because that was the kind of environment you’d left on Greeve.”

  “Not quite,” he said, with a knowing smile that poked fun at my naïveté. “Greeve evolved; Xana was engineered. Greeve has species like the tube-tree, the flopfish, and the glowswarm, and delicacies like cosweed wine. Xana’s ecosystem has none of those things. The places even possess different smells. I would never mistake one for the other, even with my eyes closed. But Xana’s tropics have cool ocean water, a warm sun, and beaches to walk on. It may not be Greeve, but it’s not bad.”

  I asked him, “Why didn’t you ever just go back to Greeve?”

  He stared straight ahead and answered in a voice that betrayed none of what must have been years of frustration and regret. “It’s not like there was ever direct passage to such an obscure place, from any of the hubs where I worked. I would have had to zigzag across systems, bankrupting myself for each leg of my journey, then once again earn enough for the next hop until I reached a place where I could wait for a freighter that happened to be heading where I wanted to go. And even then I would have had to earn my passage again, and wait a long time for a berth to be available. There were times when it seemed remotely possible. But most of the time, it was out of the question.”

  “But you did manage to find a position on Xana.”

  He gave a slight nod. “Eventually, yes.”

  “Did it pay well?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your off hours? Was it like being on Greeve?”

  “There was no way to return to Greeve so I made do.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “I had friends. Women. The prospect of family. A place as close to home as I was ever likely to know.”

  He described the heartaches of his life with about as much emotion as I would have devoted to listing the contents of my spartan quarters back on New London, a place that for most of my life had been less home than clean place to sleep.

  I realized that Skye was studying me. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was the sheer length of time I had devoted to the background of this one minor figure, who had not been upstairs with us during the emergency stop and could not have been the culprit responsible for the murder of the Khaajiir. Maybe she thought I’d gotten lost in the minutiae of a life with some sad parallels to my own. Or maybe she sensed what I sensed about this story that seemed no more than a digression: the ghost of a question larger than any of the answers Mendez had provided so far.

  I didn’t know what was nagging at me. The man’s situation was far from unusual, after all. Even before we’d left the homeworld, Mankind’s history had always been a long parade of expats and refugees, people who through no fault of their own had become trapped on strange shores and who were forced to make do while keeping an eye on the distant, possibly mythical, pleasures of the homes they’d lost. Hell, if you wanted to go that far, I was one of them. The few tidbits the Porrinyards had fed me about their past as individuals marked them as two others.

  But there was something else going on with Mendez. Something that verged on the monstrous.

  I found myself pacing furiously, my arms crossed before me, my thoughts racing so fast that they almost drowned out the pounding of my heart. “How did you wind up as head steward of the Royal Carriage? That strikes me as a pretty plum position around here.”

  The further we got from his tales of Greeve, the more he seemed to relax. “About fourteen years ago I served two months as personal valet to Mr. Conrad Bettelhine, youngest brother of Kurt, when he spent an extended vacation at one of the resorts where I worked. He was a lonely man who required little of me beyond conversation and companionship. But he was touched by my story, and offered to bring me aboard as junior steward. When the senior retired, I moved up.”

  “What’s your work schedule like?”

  “I live aboard the carriage, year-round, serving between five and ten complements of passengers per month.”

  “How much time off do you get?”

  “Thirty days a year.”

  “Consecutive or intermittent?”

  “Intermittent. Whenever this carriage is unoccupied or down for maintenance.”

  “Do you spend all those days enjoying the sun down on Xana?”

  “No. Much of the time, when I’m not needed, we’re docked at Layabout.”

  “How much of your down time is spent at Layabout?”

  “Maybe two days out of three.”

  Another piece of the big picture snapped into focus. “So you get maybe ten days a year, intermittent, to spend, if you can, in the sunny island environments you prefer.”

  “Yes. Sometimes more.”

  “But sometimes less.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you understand that those were the terms before you took the position?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why did you accept?”

  His expression, impassive for much of the prior interrogation, even during the discussions of the losses he’d known, now changed for the first time, with a subtle knit of his eyebrows. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Look around you. I don’t see any white beaches or turquoise ocean waters. This is not the past you miss, the present you settled for, or the future you would have liked to have. Why is this your life, and why aren’t you climbing the walls?”

  His eyebrows remained knit, but now the cords in his neck had become visible, straining with a tension that he still managed to keep out of his voice. “This is Xana, madam. Here, one’s professional worth is gauged according to one’s proximity to the Bettelhine Inner Family. One does not turn down such opportunities.”

  “How is this an opportunity? Will you ever advance any higher than chief steward?”

  He stood a little taller. “I might, some day, be privileged to work for the Inner Family, at one of the Bettelhine estates.”

  “Like,” I said, making a big show of searching for appropriate names as I circled him like a skimmer, looking from an appropriate place to land, “Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers.”

  His posture was proud, but stiff. “I do not have their management background, but yes.”

  Skye had paled, as if suffering jabs of pain from some unknown upset inside her. Paakth-Doy looked just as disturbed, but in a different way; there was actual fear in it, fear that may have had something to do with seeing Mendez as a future version of herself.

  I circled Mendez two more times. “What’s the greatest future you can imagine for yourself? After retirement, I mean?”

  He did not look at me but stared straight ahead, his posture reflecting a controlled fury. “I suppose I will buy a modest home on one of the islands I spoke about.”

  I allowed my voice to become a little dreamy. “A breezy island hideaway, where you can sit cross-legged on the sand, enjoying a cocktail and listening to colorful native music while the scarlet sun sinks beneath an unclouded horizon?”

  “I am not a poet, madam.”

  I let something occur to me. “But would this be an island on Greeve or an island on Xana?”

  “On Xana, of course.”

  “Why of course? Even if you haven’t saved enough, after all this time, to return home in style, the Bettelhines must appreciate all your years of service enough to send you where you’ve always wanted to go. For you, they’d consider the expense pocket change.”

  That fine sheen on his forehead had become a torrent, leaking rivulets down both cheeks. “Madam, I have done nothing to deserve your mockery.”

  “I was not aware that a simple question constituted mockery.”

  “I have been privy to some of the most private tactical conversations of some of the wealthiest and most powerful human beings alive. They know they can count on my discretion, but they still cannot afford to have everything I know out of their control, and thus in potential danger of exploitation by their competitors an
d enemies. When I took this position, I agreed that my future would remain on Xana.”

  I showed surprise. “So you work under the same terms that govern Mr. Pescziuwicz?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are these the same terms that govern anybody who works on classified projects or alongside the Inner Family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Mendez, I have no doubt that you make more money, or whatever the local economy uses for money, aboard this carriage than you would have made had you continued to work Xana’s resorts. But I need a basis for comparison. Had you remained dirtside, would you have been able to earn passage back to Greeve?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old would you have been by the time you made it back?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe sixty, if I’d wanted to arrive penniless.”

  “Not much of an issue, considering that you say that people on Greeve don’t have much use for money. When do you think you’ll retire now?”

  “When I’m fifty-five.”

  “So you saved yourself at most five years of bowing and scraping for people who consider you a handy household appliance at the price of denying yourself everything else that gave your life meaning. You threw away what you wanted and secured a default future that will be at absolute best an imperfect imitation of the one you would have chosen for yourself if you could. Am I unfair, sir, in considering this dollar wise and pound foolish?”

  Mendez said nothing. I somehow knew, without asking, that any repetition of the question would lead to the same stone wall. Either he didn’t know the answer himself, or facing it was more than he could stand.

  Either way, I was less interested in his silence than in Paakth-Doy’s. She looked white, her impassive features trembling with enough tension to qualify as pain. It some ways it may have felt like I was questioning her too. Or, at the very least, questioning some potential future version of her. When she looked at Mendez, did she see a man whose happy life had been twisted by circumstances beyond his control, or one who represented the face she might find herself wearing, another twenty years down the road?

  I excused myself and went to the washroom, running water over my hands and splashing some on my face. While I was in there, I tried to contact the AIsource again, and again received no reply. The blue room remained inaccessible to me.