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.
When the Porrinyards were introduced to her as my assistants, she sized them up and brightened at once. “Oh, wow. Counselor, you haven’t.”
The Porrinyards, seated at opposite ends of the long table, but enjoying themselves a little too much, said, “Surprising, isn’t it?”
“Not now that I think about it. It would take more than one person, acting in concert, to break past Andrea’s defenses.”
Dejah’s latest marriage, to a low-end petty thief named Karl Nimmitz, had been the stuff of tabloid journalism, impossible to escape even if, like myself, that was the kind of news you tried to. But he wasn’t here. I wondered why. Had they fought? Broken up? Or were there just some pets you didn’t take out in polite company? I rejected those questions as irrelevant to the moment at hand and asked a polite, deceptively casual, “And is this your first trip down to Xana?”
Dejah gave me a look of total understanding, which in her case gave the impression that she could map every stray neuron that decided to fire in my brain. “In fact, yes. I’m afraid that relations between myself and our hosts have not always been as cordial as they’ve been tonight.”
The other Bettlehine brother emitted a laugh that sounded more like a bark. “Let’s not understate the case, Dejah. The proper word, before today, has always been enemies. There have been times when you wouldn’t have dared come here without an armada.”
“Well, yes,” she said, with a genteel tip of her goblet. “But I hope this marks the start of a more congenial relationship.”
He matched her toast. “As do I.”
Best wishes like that make the air between them seem full of broken glass.
His name was Philip Bettelhine, and he was introduced to me as the half brother of Jason and Jelaine, born a decade before them to one of their father’s previous wives. The Bettelhine genes remained dominant, of course, and he had the same strong jaw, the same piercingly intelligent eyes. But his complexion was darker, a polished mahogany where theirs was a milk-fed pink. His gray hair was the color and consistency of lamb’s wool and had been trimmed to meet his forehead in a jagged line like a sawtooth, suggesting either the points of a crown or the teeth of a shark, I didn’t know which. As a man he seemed wearier and less prone to politic smiles than either of his younger siblings, more bent by whatever responsibilities marked his own contribution to the Bettelhine enterprises.
Tonight he sat at Jason’s right hand and murmured soft comments toward his younger brother whenever conversation lagged. Only Skye, sitting to his immediate left, managed to establish that he was capable of smiling with actual mirth, rather than just sublimated tension. At least one of her comments made him glance my way with genuine amusement. I burned to know what the joke was, but would have forgone that for some understanding of whatever was going on between him and his brother.
Sometime during the salad—orange, crunchy spheres that I probed with little appetite, and much dismay, and which Jelaine leaned over to describe as a “delicious, tangy” spore native to Xana’s frozen continent—Philip turned my way and uttered the only words he’d directed toward me since our terse introduction at the meal’s onset. “Excuse me, Counselor? Jason and I were talking about this new job title of yours? Prosecutor-at-Large?”
I dabbed at my lips with a napkin, having rearranged the spheres in my bowl without quite managing to consume any of them. “What about it, Mr. Bettelhine?”
“It’s downright unprecedented, as far as I know. In fact, from what I know about the Dip Corps leadership, it flies in the face of any of their policies maintaining command oversight over agents in the field.”
I’m notorious for preferring food mixed in vats to those grown on planets, but I tasted one of the spheres anyway, just to look unconcerned. It was as tangy as advertised, even if I wasn’t sure about the delicious part. “That’s correct. It does.”
“Forgive me, Counselor, but how you got yourself declared so independent has got to be the very best story at this table.”
“You’re right,” I said. “It is. But I’m not telling it.”
Philip surprised me by letting the subject go. But I still caught him sneaking glances at me afterward. After the first few, I knew one thing as well as I knew the litany of Bettelhine crimes against humanity: he didn’t know why I was here any more than I did. He just knew the level of importance his father and siblings had placed on my presence, and being out of the loop bothered him.
The Khaajiir did not speak much—a change from his behavior before dinner, when he’d been visibly chatty—but when he did open his mouth, he was charming and kind, if more hesitant and formal than he’d been before. He kept his staff threaded between the seat and the left armrest of his chair, and touched it often, if afraid to go without it for so much a single moment.
The pale man sitting to Skye’s immediate left, the same one who had been so charmed by her before the meal, was Vernon Wethers, another dedicated aide like Monday Brown, except working for Philip Bettelhine instead of Hans. For the few moments I spoke to him he said, in a voice reluctant to break into any other conversation, that he’d been working beside Philip for fifteen years, and valued the chance to see so many high-level projects from the perspective of management. He couldn’t give me any details, of course, those projects being classified, but he assured me that it was exciting work. Sitting between two extraordinarily beautiful women (Skye and Dejah), facing another (Jelaine), and dealing with a fourth who at the very least did not deserve to be buried beneath the nearest rock (myself), seemed to unman him. He stammered, and faced his food, and, at the one point when Skye’s shoulder brushed against his, recoiled as if burned. The one thing I would later remember him saying, in response to Mrs. Pearlman’s gushing praise of the food, was, “I’m glad you like it. But I’m afraid I have no sense of taste, myself.”