“That doesn’t make you innocent of profiting from a system that enslaves people.”
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”
That stopped me.
She continued. “That system existed before we were born. It didn’t leave me, or Jason, much of a choice over a status quo we were too young and too powerless to change. I never walked away, so you may hate me if you must. But Jason left. He left while he was too young to forge his own way, and paid a terrible price for it. And returning didn’t mean he’d changed his mind. It’s just as I told you before. The two of us intend to change what our family stands for.”
I quoted the rest of what Jelaine had said, on that occasion. “‘And how far the web of family extends.’”
She flashed a secret smile. “Quite so.”
Philip turned in his seat, either not quite understanding what he’d heard or unable to accept it coming from her. She raised her eyebrows at him, not in affront but in mute apology. I don’t think he understood whatever unspoken message she was trying to send. Nor did he receive the answer he needed from Jason, who offered him the same sad, sorry, apologetic look, more loving than confrontational, and more infuriating for that.
Skye still refused to look at me. She was paying attention, but wasn’t sharing what she thought, either about the situation or about me. I ached to wonder if the damage was permanent, but could not afford to, not now, not with the worst looming all around us.
Philip did me the favor of giving me another reason to hate him. He straightened his collar and fixed me with the full weight of his contempt. “You’re very clever, Counselor. And you do enjoy your unearned moral superiority. But you’ve never once considered that people operating at our level might have good reason to for the decisions we make.”
I glared at him. “Such as?”
He looked tired. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that our business model requires us to prevent the human race from exterminating itself?”
“Go on.”
“I can’t say we haven’t profited, but we deal in skills that must be kept out of the hands of monsters like Magrison, or some even worse than him. When we race to acquire dangerous technology, it’s so we can control it, limit the number of governments with access to it, or keep it off the market entirely if we feel it’s too risky to allow even in the context of savage warfare. You don’t know how much we’ve locked up or just thrown away over the years. But if our best people were ever able to consider going into business for themselves, either by seizing control of Xana or by wandering from system to system dispensing our secrets at will—”
“So you put hobbles on their brains.”
“Not on their creativity,” he said. “Not on their cognitive abilities. Not even on their ability to enjoy the pleasures of life. Just on their capacity for betrayal. So we install, not hobbles, but governors: internal fences, if you will, ensuring that everything they develop for the Bettelhines remains in the control of the Bettelhines.”
“Even if that warps their lives beyond all recognition? It didn’t take me long to see how many of your people don’t seem to have priorities beyond their service to you. One of the first things I learned about Brown and Wethers, for instance, is that they’re both so focused on their work that they have nothing else.”
“It’s not that overt with most of the people affected. Most just go to work and do what they need to do before returning home to live their normal lives. What you see with Brown and Wethers is not at all uncommon among any high-level executives. I know officers of your Diplomatic Corps who exhibit the same behaviors, without any internal governors as excuse.”
“So Brown and Wethers are not being controlled?”
“Controlled is the wrong word. They still possess free will, within certain parameters. If they wanted social lives, we wouldn’t stop them. But you need to understand, the potential for corruption, not just penny-ante corruption, but corruption on a destructive societal scale, with people of their level is worse than you can possibly imagine. An unaltered Monday Brown, left to his own devices, has the capacity to bring down the entire corporation. He can embezzle, he can steal secrets, he can use what he knows to forge an empire of his own. Somebody like him needs to take so much satisfaction in his work, in serving the Bettelhines above all other personal considerations, that this becomes impossible.”
Damned if he didn’t make it seem almost reasonable. But it didn’t take me long to find something capable of stoking my outrage back to its previous heat. “And how would this justify rape by mind control? Like what’s happened to Colette?”
His prior righteousness faltered a little at that. “I don’t deny it goes on. Every once in a while one of us takes a predatory liking to one employee or another and reconfigures the governors to define loyalty as sexual compliance. It’s frowned upon, and I’ve never done it myself, but we all recognize that it still goes on more than any of us would like. The worst you could say about it, though, is that it’s contemptible only to those of us who stand outside it. The people it’s done to are all almost blessed in their way. Colette’s happier than anybody I’ve ever met.”
“At the expense of everything she once was.”
“As I said, I don’t approve of using the technology for anything but security purposes, and I’ve talked to Magnus about returning her to her old life.”
This was maddening. “And what of Arturo Mendez? His sponsor, Conrad, is dead. He’s been dead for years. He’s never coming back. And yet Arturo’s still here, working year in and year out under conditions utterly at odds with the way he’d live his life if allowed to choose for himself.”
Philip didn’t seem proud of that, either. “Arturo’s like all of our low-level employees. He’s spent time with us, heard our conversations, and has been privy to our secrets. He knows things that can never be allowed to fall into the hands of outsiders. So we’ve counteracted his ambitions to work elsewhere. It’s ugly, but to him it’s just an alteration in the criteria that keep him happy. Someday, sooner than he thinks, he’ll receive a retirement package far greater than any a man of his resources might have ever been able to earn otherwise. Whether or not you believe it, Counselor, it’s a win-win situation.”
“It’s slavery.”
“Of a kind. On a world where unfettered freedom could mean mass destruction.”
“And what prevents some individual Bettelhine lower in the pecking order from seizing the opportunity to use your compliant little robots for a power grab?”
“Aside from the fact that any Bettelhine who thought of it has everything to lose and almost nothing to gain? We’re too sophisticated to let that happen, Counselor. At most higher levels, our employees are not loyal to any individual Bettelhines, but to the Bettelhine power grid as a whole.”
“So there are some employees more powerful than Bettelhines?”
“There have to be. It’s a necessary check on the destructive potential of Family rivalry. I heard Jason mention our aunt Lillian Jane before; her tutors were certainly loyal to her, but they were still able to report her activities. The real reason we’ve never had some scheming sociopathic cousin poison all the people above him and seize control is the presence of parties like Brown and Wethers, whose true loyalties are to the corporate structure and to the principles that have guided our family since—”
He stopped in mid-sentence.
He frowned.
He mentally reviewed everything he’d just said.
He started to get it.
I said, “What are the Pearlmans doing here today? Do they normally get surprise trips on the Royal Carriage? Or are they usually not much more than well-treated prisoners, working in their little island gulag?”
“N-no. I—”
“You knew something was up with Jason and Jelaine. But your suspicions were focused on Jason, the half brother you would never trust again. And so you came up with an entirely mistaken theory. You suspected that, in some way, Jason was controlling Jelaine.
You worried that somebody working for Dina Pearlman might have gone off the reservation and helped him install controllers in her. So you used your influence to get the Pearlmans a free elevator ride and directed Dina to conduct her own covert observation of your brother and sister, in the belief that this would turn out to be the explanation.”
Jelaine shook her head. “Oh, Philip. You could not possibly be more wrong.”
“No, he couldn’t,” I said. “And not just about that.” I hit him with the full force of his family’s great mistake. “Your grandfather wanted to make it impossible for key employees to ever raise moral objections to Bettelhine orders or to defect to other powers and corporations. He wanted to prevent any one of them from ever drawing a line in the sand and saying, This is as far as I go, I won’t go any further. And he thought that’s what he accomplished. For decades every Bettelhine with access to the tech has believed that this would keep you safe. But what it’s really done is create a chain of command even more vulnerable to middle managers with their own definition of loyalty.”
Philip stood.
I approached him, placed my hands on his shoulders, shoved him back down into his chair, and lowered my face to his as I delivered the angry summation. “Loyalty that may include agreeing to commit terrible crimes, even against Bettelhines, as long as somebody above them, one of your precious internal auditors, can tell them it’s for the good of the Family as a whole.”
Philip’s lips moved without sound.
This time he didn’t warn me to get off him.
A fter a moment I walked away from him again, pacing the room with a fury that some observers might have mistaken for hysteria.
“Whatever your justification,” I said, “the point remains. This evil program of yours exists, and it’s what made these crimes possible by enforcing blind obedience up and down your chain of command. And it’s what endangers us most now, because it limits the number of people we can trust, even aboard the carriage. I’ve done the math. Would you like to hear it?”
“Please,” Jason said.
Philip nodded, with an unwillingness that suggested he would have much preferred to forestall the grim truth by ignoring it.
“Fine.” I resumed pacing. “There are sixteen of us. I know that I’m innocent and I can say the same for my companions as well.”
Philip opened his mouth.
I raised my hand to silence him. “If you won’t take my word for it, consider that I’ve never been to Xana, and that I only knew I was coming to Xana hours before I left New London. Will you agree for the sake of argument that it makes more sense to just agree we can’t be guilty?”
Jelaine surprised me by laughing out loud. It was the heartiest merriment I’d ever heard from her, utterly undisturbed by the grimness of the occasion, or the danger we were in. Almost a guffaw, it testified to a capacity for enjoyment that must have rendered her a genuine life-force among the members of her family. “I never suspected you, Counselor.”
The weariness that had overtaken me a few minutes before now seemed to affect Philip as well. “Get on with it.”
I began ticking off points on my fingers. “After that, any attempt to use the process of elimination enters the realm of speculation. Since this is a crime that endangers the Bettelhines in general and the Bettelhine chain of command in particular, I’m willing to declare the three of you probably innocent as well. I’m more sure about Jason and Jelaine than I am about you, Philip, since it was their own agenda under attack, but I’m somewhat inclined to give you a pass as well, as you went out of your way to be aboard and would not need to endanger yourself when any assassins in your employ did their work. That’s not a certainty, of course. Just an extreme likelihood.”
He allowed himself a wry grimace. “I’m touched by your opinion of me.”
“I would say the same about Dejah; she has the resources, and even a reasonable motive given your family’s past attempts on her life, but even if she was financing this thing, I see no reason why she’d feel the need to place herself on the front line. I may be wrong about any or all of those last four names. But the rest are wide open. If I allow your own tentative removal from the list of suspects to stand, that still leaves nine people out of sixteen—nine people out of sixteen who might have been co-opted. Nine people out of sixteen whose actions, once I name the single murderer I am certain about, cannot be predicted. Nine people out of sixteen who might be harboring weapons of their own and may be more than willing to leave another corpse or two cooling in your parlor, if we interfere with the agenda that brought them together.” I took a deep breath and focused on Philip again. “Are you beginning to see how precarious our situation is, sir?”
The silence that followed that question was profound. Philip bit his thumb, glanced at Jelaine (whose expression had not changed), and then at Jason (whose own air of invulnerability echoed hers). Again, they’d given him nothing. Then he turned back to me and said, “What do you suggest?”
“I suggest that when I do get around to providing the name, we should all be ready to fight for our lives. And,” I said, focusing my next attention on Jason and Jelaine as well, “I suggest that the best way for that to happen is to let your brother know just how inaccurate his guess was.”
Philip started at that. His eyes widened as he realized he was about to get some of the answers he’d longed for, and he turned toward them, measuring their own reaction, probing their blandly pleasant expressions as if in determination to ferret out the truth before they got around to giving it.
Jason rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Do you need to know all of it now, Counselor? What happened to me on Deriflys? What my sister and I were looking for, when we left Xana? Why we then did what we did?”
I considered it. It was tempting. But then I shook my head. “No. I can wait for those answers, and the reason you had your father invite me here, until we’re safe. I just need you to admit what you are, so Philip can see how it’s going to affect what’s coming.”
Jason nodded, and for just a moment allowed a look of great sadness to come over his face as he regarded his older half brother with unapologetic affection. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry, brother. It was never any reflection on the way we felt about you. But it’s such a difficult secret to hide from the people who know us best. And this thing we’re trying to do together is so very, very important.”
“We do love you,” Jelaine said. “Never question that.”
Philip’s gaze darted between Jason and Jelaine and back, his lips moving without words as he tried to pull the answer from the air. After about a million years, still not getting it, he managed, “…what?”
Jelaine brushed the back of her hand against her gown and stood, the charming half-smile still tugging at the corners of her lips, the tears so much like Jason’s shining at the corners of her beautiful eyes. There was no defiance in her stance, no anger, nothing but a love so bright that it pained me to look at it.
I wondered about the kind of courage it took to share a confidence like this when it could destroy as much as it healed, and found against my will that I envied her, as much as I’d always envied the Porrinyards, for their courage in taking this journey that still remained beyond my own powers of faith.
Even as she stood, Jason stood and joined her, so they could stand together as they faced Philip as the united force they’d been for so long. A subtle change overtook their expressions as they synched up, emphasizing their already strong resemblance, rendering them more than mere siblings, closer than they would have been even if born twins.
They each raised complementary eyebrows as they faced their older brother in shared entreaty and challenge.
Philip’s eyes went wider. He was not a stupid man, and I think he figured out the truth a fraction of a second before his strange brother and sister spoke in unison, their shared voice not male or female, but some gender that was both and neither. Maybe that heartbeat of advance realization made the mome
nt easier to absorb when his siblings said, “Once upon a time I was two people, a brother and sister named Jason and Jelaine Bettelhine. Once upon a time they left Xana as separate people and came back as one. Now I’m a linked pair. Now I’m both Jason and Jelaine, together….”
P hilip fell out of his chair. Literally.
He tried to stand but his legs collapsed underneath him and sent him falling to his knees as the slackjawed attention he owed his siblings swallowed all other capacity for thought. It would have been comical if not for the horror and revulsion and incomprehension and denial warring on his handsome, aristocratic features. When he finally managed words he said, “How…could you?”
Jelaine spoke alone. “I know this is difficult, Philip, but you must understand. Jason was shattered by his time on Deriflys, and by…some other things that happened when we went away. He could not live inside his own skull, not by himself. So Jelaine, the single Jelaine, offered to seek out the procedure and help him carry the weight.”
“He was wrong! He shouldn’t have let you destroy yourself to save him!”
Now Jason and Jelaine spoke together. “That’s what he thought. He fought her. He tried to tell her he wasn’t worth what she would have to sacrifice.”
Jelaine let out a soft laugh. “He was wrong. It was no sacrifice.”
Philip recoiled from them as they approached in a misbegotten attempt to comfort him.
Stymied for the moment, the linked siblings turned to the silent Skye and said, “Oscin? Skye? You’re what I am. Please back me up on this. Tell my brother that neither Jason nor Jelaine sacrificed a damn thing. Tell him that everything that made up the two people they were, from their memories to their loves to their heartbreaks and their convictions, all still exists inside this new individual created at the moment they joined. Tell him how healing the process is, how insignificant it made your old concerns seem, how much better it became to look at life through two sets of eyes instead of only one. Tell him that there’s nothing horrible about it, nothing in it that needs to change how he sees my shared self as a sibling or how I can see him as a brother. Tell him.”
The Third Claw of God Page 28
