I remembered another conversation, from earlier in the evening. “Jelaine was talking about her brother earlier. She told me, ‘A changed man can change his family, and what his family stands for.’”
“She said something like that to me too,” Dejah said. “And it would be truly wonderful to believe it, because it’s just too tempting to embrace the story of a poor, angst-ridden rich boy who discovered that the little people suffer, and who returns to his position of power only to bend all his wealth to the betterment of mankind. But dynasties as established as the Bettelhines just don’t work that way. They have procedures in place to make sure that no changes that radical ever take place. It’s one of the reasons they always have so many children: so that whenever one offspring or another develops a social conscience and starts talking about the dismantling of everything that’s made the family powerful—as happens every couple of generations, since guilt has always been endemic among the rich—the rest of the Family is in place to stop them before they do permanent damage.”
Paakth-Doy looked fascinated. “Stop them how?”
“Any number of ways short of assassination, if that’s what you’re thinking. Usually, they just make sure the offending youngsters are shunted into positions like labor relations that carry the trappings of power but don’t really affect the direction of the business. In more extreme cases, the youthful idealists are bought out and sent somewhere offworld, to work with refugees or operate relief agencies, or otherwise exercise their moral qualities to their heart’s content, also without ever again making a decision that changes anything. At the absolute worst extremity, they can even be declared incompetent and subjected to exile, either internal or external. You’d be surprised both by how many outcast Bettelhines live in other systems under assumed names, and how many of the more secluded Bettelhine estates down on Xana are occupied by cousins, or whatever, who are provided everything they could possibly want except the freedom to change things. But to believe that an Inner Family Bettelhine like Jason could possibly return from some offworld hellhole like this place Deriflys, where my intelligence alleges that he found himself, and just out of charisma and empathy for the suffering of others succeed in changing an institution that has existed for centuries…that’s just way too good to be true. Unless there’s something else going on.”
I asked her. “And so your ‘reasons for special concern’ are—?”
“—that sooner or later the other shoe has to drop.”
It was more or less the way I’d figured things, but Dejah’s take gave it even more urgency. These were people who had already contributed to more human suffering, on a grander scale, than any one family in the history of Mankind; it was tempting to think of any change of course for them as good news, but could there ever be good news where the Bettelhines were concerned? Was it not more likely that we were seeing a different shade of bad?
I was about to ask Dejah another question when Mendez cried out, “What the devil are you doing, you? No, dammit, no!”
I deactivated the hiss screen and rushed to his side, closely followed by Dejah, Paakth-Doy, and Skye. For a moment I didn’t know what he was looking at. Then I saw that the image on the screen had changed. It was no longer dominated by the curves of the Stanley but by the black void above us. The Stanley itself had retreated to the point where its running lights were just a bright spot, so far up the cable by now that it might have been just another star. Even farther above us, the thin line known as Layabout blinked a constant tattoo, on and off, on and off, like a distant lighthouse mocking castaways adrift without any further means of traveling the storm-tossed kilometers remaining between them and land.
Dejah said, “What’s the Stanley doing all the way up there?”
Mendez grimaced. “I don’t know, madam. It went from a full stop to a full-speed retreat, shimmying up that cable so fast it was like we were on fire and it was afraid of being burned. It’s now… wait. It’s slowing down. Stopping. Full stop, one kilometer above us. And holding. This doesn’t make any sense. What do they think they’re doing? Abandoning us?”
There followed a ten-second pause while the four of us tried to figure it out.
I got it first, but I happened to see it strike Dejah as well, and she was the first to say what we were both thinking, her disgust matching his and adding a nice, healthy dollop of fear for good measure. “No. If I’m right, it’ll stay there, observing us from that safe distance. Within the hour there’ll probably be another one a kilometer below us, courtesy of the security people at the ground station. We’ll also see some orbital vehicles, before long. But none will get any closer. Not until somebody on their negotiating team or aboard this carriage finds a way out of this.”
“Out of what?” he demanded.
The Porrinyards got it. I could tell because that’s when Skye’s eyes registered shock, fear, anger, and finally disgust. I could only wonder whether their shared feelings were as obvious on Oscin’s face, and how that look would then affect the composure of the people still remaining on the parlor deck. Whatever happened, the mood up there would be dark indeed by the time we got around to joining them.
I said, “This is a hostage situation.”
“Or a quarantine,” Dejah said.
12
PHILIP, EXCLUDED
Philip Bettelhine sat with his face in his hands, his rigid manner now fully given way to the dazed retreat of a man whose foundations had turned to sand beneath him. “I don’t understand,” he said. “This should be impossible.”
I don’t think he was speaking to me but to the universe in general, a structure that, having proved the invulnerability of the Bettelhines a fraud, might have also been planning to jettison gravity, relativity, and thermodynamics as well. Whatever veneer of defiance he’d displayed earlier, when it was still possible to place hope in the prospect of a rescue from the support systems his family had paid for, had crumbled with this latest blow. He was too strong a man not to bounce back, but this was his nadir. This was when he’d be most vulnerable.
I asked him, “Why would it be impossible, sir?”
“I… don’t understand.”
“You know what I’m talking about. Every human society since the beginning of the industrial revolution has known its anarchists, its saboteurs, its terrorists. The more we advance, the greater the stakes, the easier it becomes for mal-contents to knock over our sand castles. Why would this be impossible? Why would this not happen?”
His eyes were red-rimmed, his tone petulant. “It just…shouldn’t be able to.”
“Again: Why not? Why would you have security if you didn’t have at least the possibility of criminals?”
“We have criminals,” he said, as if clinging to this one fact. “We have prisons.”
“Certainly. That’s a human society down there. I’m willing to bet you have any number of run-of-the-mill thieves, rapists, murderers, and sociopaths; in fact, I’m sure that Farley over there cannot be your only pederast, though he’s certainly one too many. But how come you’re so shaken by the revelation that you may have more than that? After all, you have thousands, maybe millions, of people directly involved in the development of newer and deadlier weapons, including I presume those that would permit the hijacking of this elevator. Why would you consider it impossible for some disgruntled tech to gather together whatever resources they needed for exactly this kind of stab at the Bettelhine heart? In a world where advanced weaponry has been the very basis of your daily business, why have there never been any ambitious would-be conquerors willing to attempt a coup d’état?”