After a few minutes the immediate emotional tsunami subsided, and I was able to return to Skye with dry eyes and more troubling questions. “But why would the Bettelhines give a royal shit one way or another? They’ve never been a part of my life and I’ve never been a part of theirs. Are they commencing new careers as angels of compassion, forcing feuding peoples to shake hands and play nice? Was I invited here as an honored guest just to scratch the Khaajiir’s moral itch?”
“I have no contribution at this time, Andrea.”
“Even if they did decide it was important to give their pet Bocaian professor a present, what difference would it make? He’s just one Bocaian, not even a decision-maker. The majority would still hate me. He’d tell me he was sorry about the way things are between his people and me, I’d say I appreciated the gesture, and we’d have nothing else to say to one another. That’s one hell of a stupid reason to drag a total stranger from her home with minimal notice.”
Skye bit her lip. The Porrinyards must have wanted to take the nobler view of things, but they were also prevented from doing so by their very common sense, and it hurt them to give up on the happy ending. “I suppose it’s possible.”
“No, it’s not possible. Not with the Bettelhines involved. Not with everything else I know about them, not with what I intend to demonstrate to you when we finally get that sparkly slut of a bartender in here. There’s not an atom of instinctive benevolence in them. There must be something else, maybe in some of the other materials Jason suggested.”
“I’m sure there is. Alas, it took some time to get past the Khaajiir’s history, and I’ve yet to find any galvanizing connection.”
“What about this Lillian Jane Bettelhine Jason mentioned?”
Skye took the staff from my hands and walked away, spinning it absently as she contemplated the best route into whatever followed. “I think she may be one of those wastes of time I mentioned.”
“That bad?”
“That dull. She appears to have been one of the reform-minded relatives Dejah talked about; she caught the pacifism bug early and argued that the family needed to become a more positive force in human civilization. Her sentiments, as far as I can tell, were just standard Utopianism: not far from the Khaajiir’s in tone, but far inferior in depth.”
“Give me a sample,” I said.
“From an essay she wrote at nineteen, one that could not have gone over well with her private tutors: ‘I can’t look at the way we do business without seeing that our affect on the rest of the human species is toxic. We spread like a sickness, our very presence poisoning the wells that others drink from, our trade inspiring entire worlds to turn upon themselves like starving rats chewing off their own limbs. It is not enough for me to declare that I won’t be part of the corruption myself, if I still live life sharing in the profit. I have to do more. I need to do more. I ache to be an anti-Bettelhine: if not in the sense of warring on my family, then at least in some smaller way, proving by example that we can replenish some of the hope we’ve stolen.’”
“That sounds like more than typical adolescent rebellion.”
“You would think so. In truth, she was always very careful to separate her love for her family as people from her rejection of everything they stood for. Unfortunately, she was as naïve as she was idealistic, and so it never occurred to her that her statement of principles, mild as it reads to us, could get her into trouble with Mom and Dad. Not long after she penned those words she was deemed a disruptive force, useless for all corporate purposes, and subjected to internal exile at one of several estates the Family maintains for that purpose—hardly, as Dejah indicated, the first or last time something of the sort had happened. I doubt she wanted for anything in her life but freedom.”
“What happened to her?”
“The Bettelhine genealogy lists her as deceased, not many years afterward. I don’t know whether she remained in Internal Exile or left Xana, but she was certainly never a corporate force.”
I refrained from scolding Skye, even in jest, for this gap in her intelligence. Allowing for all the extreme compression required of them, the Porrinyards must have already gleaned more data from the Khaajiir’s files than I could have found given weeks to work with. But Lillian Jane Bettelhine’s scandalous opinions didn’t fill in a missing piece of the jigsaw so much as establish the existence of an entirely new region of the puzzle. I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “There’s got to be a connection, love. Do you think Jason intends to model himself on his late aunt?”
“That would be a step back for him. He’s hooked up with his sister and consolidated a substantial power base that threatens Philip’s role as heir apparent. Lillian Jane said a few intemperate things before being shuffled off to some cozy family gulag where she wouldn’t disturb anybody by causing uncomfortable silences at parties. On a global level, there was nothing to emulate about her but for a few principled words.”
Skye’s determination to minimize Lillian Jane at any cost was beginning to get on my nerves. “Words have been known to move mountains.”
“And mountains,” Skye said, “are easier to move than empires. Trust me, Andrea. I understand the natural impulse to paint Lillian as a great visionary, but there’s no indication that she ever had any truly revolutionary ideas capable of affecting more than her own personal conduct. You can translate everything she wrote up to that point as the bland self-serving declaration I will be a good person, devoid of any additional context or detail. I don’t think she ever presented a real threat to the Bettelhine status quo, at least not as much as Jason and Jelaine seem to.”
I had noticed the careful use of the phrase up to that point. “And yet Jason said she’s important. How?”
Skye spun the Khaajiir’s staff in her hands, not so much plumbing its data as distracting herself with baton twirls. The lights it reflected spun around the walls like glowing coins. “Not to the problem at hand.”
I waited for her to offer something else.
But the answer to that question, if it existed, remained locked in the crystal staff.
Part of me wanted to continue looking. I could feel something tremendous lurking in that direction. But the Porrinyards were correct about one thing. Right now, all other questions paled against the identity of the individual who had placed the Claw of God against the Khaajiir’s back.
If Skye was so certain that the travails of Lillian Jane Bettelhine were irrelevant to that question, then it was time to leave her behind and start setting off bombs.
Especially since I was already juggling several that remained undetonated.
I could feel a special kind of anticipatory anger, the kind that would give me strength for the confrontations to come, welling up inside me as I told Skye, “All right, then. Have Oscin send that annoying little quiff up here.”
“I’m already bringing her,” Skye said, her voice deepening to indicate Oscin’s. Then, in her own softer tones: “I could tell you were ready from the look in your eyes.”
Colette Wilson sat, puzzled but as obliging as always, in the suite’s most comfortable chair, offering several attempts at a tentative half-smile that only grew broader as I obliged her with a kind, encouraging look of my own. Her spirit and vitality had been depleted not at all by the stress of the hours since the Khaajiir’s death; though she’d been willing to take the chair, she perched at its very edge, her back straight and her eyes round as she awaited her opportunity to answer any questions I might provide. At some point in the last hour she’d washed up and replenished her makeup, providing a thin touch of eyeliner to accentuate her bejeweled eyes and bring her gamine look back into sharp relief. Her electric hair remained inactive, thank Juje. Either she continued to find its display programs too grim for the occasion, or she knew that they rendered any undistracted conversation with her almost impossible.