The staff was just as slippery, which made it an odd choice as spare limb for a sentient of failing strength. What mishap would result if the Khaajiir lost his grip? But further investigation revealed an invisible circular band, about three-quarters of the way up, that exerted the same pull toward the palm of my hand that a magnet has on iron filings. Gripping the staff there, I could not let it go unless I made myself let it go.
Nice trick. Some kind of imbedded tech, invisible despite the staff’s total transparency. It might contain an entire battalion of nanoweaponry that I’d never be able to detect outside a lab, and I’m useless in a lab. My AIsource masters could probably catalogue everything, if they ever deigned to tell me. But I could see nothing. There were no openings, no hidden compartments, no obvious uses other than as a walking stick.
I didn’t want to trust it. But I had no cause to suspect it. “It’s fine workmanship.”
“Thank you,” he said.
I extended the staff back toward him, handle side first.
He took it by the adhesive band, and once again rested it across his knees. The simulated smile and look of genial warmth never left him. “Do you know, Counselor, that your name is a very ironic one?”
“How’s that?”
“Cort, in Mercantile, sounds the same as Court, in the antiquated Hom.Sap language known as English. A Court is a room where legal hearings are held, and thus a splendidly appropriate name for a legal professional like you. Nor is that all. Have your partners here ever informed you of the secret significance of their individual names, Oscin and Skye?”
It had never occurred to me to wonder. “No.”
“Oscin and Skye are both members of a pantheon of minor Gods worshipped by a cult on the arboreal colony of Farjanif, from whence I presume they hail. The names of the deities, simultaneously siblings and lovers if my knowledge of the mythology serves, are English puns as well, as they’re near homonyms for that language’s words designating Ocean and Sky. Splendid appellations for a pair with such an, ah, elemental union, wouldn’t you say?”
I glanced at the Porrinyards, one at a time. They both avoided eye contact with me. Interesting. They’d known and never told me.
“Porrinyards is also a significant appelation,” he said. “It comes from an extinct dialect known as Hectaish, with some roots in the ancient-Earth romance languages, and it means multiple births. There is a possible secondary meaning if you look up antiquated patronymics among the Cid—”
“Sir,” I said.
The Khaajiir did not seem affronted. “Excuse me. I told you I liked multilingual puns. Start me up and I’ll go for hours. But Bocaian and your own Hom.Sap Mercantile are both such inadequate languages for wordplay that I leap at the opportunity to dip into others whenever possible. It’s one of the few pleasures I can still afford at my advanced age. I do hope that making your acquaintance will be another.”
Maybe he meant it. Stranger things had happened.
“It’s been a long, hard day,” Jason Bettelhine said. “We’re running late, and we haven’t even begun our descent. We also just received word of another late arrival, one of my brothers, who’ll be docking with us in about twenty minutes. Plus we have the other guests to get situated. It’s a nightmare. So why don’t you three—you two, whatever—repair to your suite, get some rest, make use of the facilities, and meet everybody for dinner three hours after we embark? We’ll make introductions, get better acquainted, and perhaps answer some more of your questions then. Is that fair?”
Once upon a time, not too long ago, I’d made a policy of never dining with other human beings. I still didn’t like to accept invitations from anybody but the Porrinyards, but they’d loosened me up quite a bit. I could tolerate it for business. “I suppose it will have to be.”
Jelaine Bettelhine’s eyes twinkled. “I promise, Counselor, we’ll be friends before this journey is done. We have more in common that you can possibly know.”
Swell.
I got that a lot, too, and it had never been good news.
Somehow, the things I have in common with people who like to say so are always their worst qualities.
We returned to our suite, feeling less secure than ever despite surroundings so plush that I could have fallen face-first anywhere and not received a bruise upon hitting the floor. I hadn’t noticed, on my first tour through these rooms, but the luxury here extended to the quality of the air. It was not just fresh, free of that tinned quality you find in some orbital environments, but downright bracing, thanks to what may have been an increased percentage of pure oxygen and what may have been some other stimulant, jacking my metabolism in ways that might do a lot to lessen the crash that always followed Intersleep by about twenty-four hours. I tried to build up a nice load of resentment over this and failed, a serious lapse for me given that the Porrinyards say they can track my grudges in geographical strata.
Maybe I was mellowing, after all. And maybe not all the euphorics in this decadent conveyance were topical and stored in jars. The Bettelhines already seemed willing to go to extreme lengths to keep their guests happy. Maybe their efforts extended to technological means. Subaural suggestives in the hum of the air compressors? Subclinical teem-flashes in the lighting?
Paranoid? Sure. But I’d never, not even once in my life, been too paranoid, only not paranoid enough. And this was a family that had earned its obscene fortune by developing newer and more brilliant ways to kill great numbers of people.
But any difficulty I was having maintaining a mad-on could also be a mere reaction to the sheer luxury around me. The Porrinyards, who had thrived in some of the most hostile environments known to mankind, had already demonstrated their own susceptibility to the comforts this place offered. If I was brutally honest to myself I had to admit that I was having some of the same feelings.
I wondered, not for the first time, just how the obscenely wealthy ever managed to develop thick skin, with everything in their environments so carefully designed to cushion their painless ride through life.
I also wondered just why I sensed something worse in the background of the young heir, Jason.
I stood at the transparent curving wall of the suite, looking down on the bright green landscape now greeting the first hours of daylight. “I confess, love, I didn’t read up on this place as well as I should have. Do you know which land-mass we’re looking at?”
“There are three,” the Porrinyards said. “Ice, a frozen one nobody ever goes to, Asgard, the one that belongs to the Family, and Midgard, the one inhabited by their inner circle of employees.”
“That’s what I heard. But which one is that, below us?”
“Think about it.”
I did, then felt stupid. “Of course. The Bettelhines would never sully their own continent with anything as landscape-defiling as an orbital elevator.”
“Asgard is more like a nature preserve, I understand. Between the estates, the support staff, and the environmental stewards, its entire full-time population is less than eighteen thousand people. I think they use, actually use, less than one percent of the available land, though they make much of the territory available for scenic and recreational purposes. Not that Midgard is all that spoiled a place to live, either. Three million people, total, from coast to coast, most of them in a tiny handful of cities. If mankind had kept the homeworld that pristine, we never would have left.”