The Third Claw of God

17 THE KHAAJIIR’S TESTAMENT

By the time the five of us left the suite and returned to the sullied magnificence of the Royal Carriage’s parlor, the others were already filing in and taking their positions around the bar. The most common denominator among them was not fear but exhaustion. They’d all been up many hours under the most stressful conditions, and the adrenaline that had kept them going in the early stages of the crisis had tapped much that might have been remaining in their reserves. Not all of them wore the pressure on their faces. But they all showed it in the resigned quality of their stride, as if gravity itself had grown more powerful in the hours since we’d all gathered around the table for a friendly meal.

Of them all, Dejah seemed to be the one least touched by the events of the past few hours. Were our deliverance to arrive at this very moment, I would not have been surprised had she suggested a nice ten-kilometer run or perhaps a mountain climbing expedition or two. She may have been even more hyped from her own time in Intersleep as the Porrinyards and I had been, but I wasn’t willing to declare that the sole explanation. Exhaustion was just not a state in her body’s physical vocabulary, nor despair in her soul’s emotional one. Even now, I read a hidden message in the nod she gave me as she passed by on the way to claiming her seat: I’m ready.

Dina Pearlman pierced me with her glare as she searched my face for signs of further accusation. Storming past me, she muttered something about hoping this would be over quickly.

Her husband, Farley, looked more sweaty and bloodshot and miserable than anybody I’d seen so far. There was a shiny, fresh stain on his jacket, at chest level. Since there’d been nothing to eat or drink downstairs, I deduced that he’d been ill: not surprising, given everything he’d had to drink in the aftermath of the Khaajiir’s death.

Monday Brown gave me a professional nod before seeking out and standing beside Philip. It was hard to miss the way his very posture, ramrod-straight at rest, grew ever more formal the closer he approached the highest-ranking Bettelhine on board. I could imagine no other man being as formidable a right hand to the great Hans. But I now understood the air of sadness I’d sensed in him. I could only wonder what kind of man he would have been, had he been allowed the opportunity to live a life ruled by his own will.

Vernon Wethers picked a place by Philip’s other shoulder. Unlike Brown, who gained stature in the presence of his employers, Wethers diminished, becoming not so much a presence as another component of the overall atmosphere. When he saw me looking at him he just as quickly looked away. I wondered if he’d been conditioned to carry such a heavy burden of social inadequacy or if it was something he’d carried with him since childhood.

Arturo Mendez marched to a position beside the bar, his hands linked behind his back as he waited for the proper moment to excel at his personal duty. His ridiculous uniform, complete with sash and epaulets, had not been touched by any of the foul events of the day. Given what we now knew about him, it was tempting to imagine him in his natural habitat: tanned, stripped to the waist, his skin shining from a recent plunge into turquoise ocean waters. I suspected that some part of him, behind those obliging eyes, never stopped screaming.

Loyal Jeck chose an identical stance opposite him, his slight build and blander personality rendering him a virtual invisibility. There was nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, nothing in his personality suggesting anything but duty. He hadn’t said much in the hours we’d spent together. Nor had his input been missed. His brittleness, his hollowness, that gave the impression of a porcelain creature, just waiting for the moment when he’d be shattered.

Colette Wilson may have been no longer projecting light, but she still shone, her determined cheer and helpfulness showing on her face even as she entered this room filled with grim and scowling faces. She’d touched up her makeup at some point since I’d seen her last, and twinkled at me as she walked past, no doubt still imagining an immediate future being put to recreational use. To my special horror, she went back behind the bar, as if expecting to continue serving refreshments for as long as it took me to get around to pointing my finger at the guilty party. The Porrinyards saw her try to return to work, and Oscin took a moment to divert her to a nearby couch, and a seat beside Farley Pearlman. Her pretty face showed only obedient interest. If she was screaming inside, her cries must have been even more pitiful than Arturo’s. I did not want to know.

The party was now gathered in a semicircle, facing me. Colette Wilson and Farley Pearlman sat side by side on a couch, Dejah Shapiro and Dina Pearlman bracketing them in a pair of angled easy chairs. Arturo Mendez stood with Paakth-Doy to our left, Loyal Jeck at equal attention to the right. The Porrinyards stood a little behind me, Oscin on my left and Skye on my right. The Bettelhines and their execs remained standing five paces behind the couches bearing Colette and Farley, Jason to the far left beside Brown. After Brown came Philip and Wethers and, at the far right, Jelaine. It was impossible not to read Brown and Wethers as a pair of protective parentheses shielding Philip from the influence of his strange siblings, Jason and Jelaine.

The easy chair still bearing the Khaajiir’s body was behind us, his slumped figure just a shape sinking deeper into his cushions as everything inside him grew emptier.

If this was the way we’d march the rest of the way to the naming of the name, then so be it. It was not likely to go without blood.

I met everybody’s gaze one at a time, then coughed into my fist and began.

“I know this has been a long night. I’m sorry, but it’s going to get longer.

“A little while ago Mr. Bettelhine and Mrs. Shapiro offered the Khaajiir’s murderer amnesty in exchange for surrender. Those offers have been withdrawn, but I’m about to make another one. We already know who you are. I’ll be saying your name in a few minutes. If you step forward now and save me the trouble of explaining how we know, I promise that you won’t be injured or killed as we take you into custody.

“This is also a one-time only offer, and unlike the others I won’t add additional seconds at the end of my deadline in the hopes that you’ll relent.

“You have ten seconds.”

Nobody looked away from me. By this point, nobody expected an easy confession. I hadn’t either, but it was worth a shot.

At the tenth second I said, “Very well. You’ve been warned.

“This explanation leaves out certain personal information about the lives of some of the Bettelhines among us, and about certain questionable security measures taken by the corporation that have already been discussed in private with Philip, Jason, and Jelaine.

“It also leaves out a host of questions that remain unanswered. I’ll be pointing out a few of these along the way, but you do not need to know any of this information or much of the data we gleaned from the Khaajiir’s personal records to follow the specific route that leads us to the Khaajiir’s murderer.”

I coughed, searched the faces of the arrayed suspects for signs that anybody was anticipating me, and moved on.

“So this is what you need to keep in mind about the crime itself.

“The Khaajiir was murdered with a K’cenhowten Claw of God, the same kind of weapon the Bocaian assassins on Layabout had previously attempted to use on me.

“There was, much later, an attempt on the life of Mr. Wethers, and my own, using another ancient weapon known as a Fire Snake.” A murmur of surprise rippled through the room. “I believe this to have been a distraction, intended to obscure the murderer’s true purposes, and mention it now only for the sake of thoroughness. We will put it aside for now, and focus on the use of the Claw of God.

“The first critical question: why use something so rare, so obscure, especially in such close proximity to a civilization based on the development of weaponry that might have provided access to any number of practical alternatives?

“It’s certainly not for religious reasons. The sect that first designed and used the device has been extinct for some sixteen millennia. There’s no evidence that it has ever found any popularity among Bocaians. The Khaajiir’s own interest in K’cenhowten history was academic and based less on the crimes committed during their dark age than with the great achievement of the historical Khaajiirel in preventing a violent aftermath in the years that followed. Committing the murder with a Claw of God might have some symbolic value, I suppose, but who but a historian would ever care?

“No. Killing the Khaajiir, or me, with a Claw of God has no purpose beyond sowing confusion among those who would later be obliged to investigate the crime by focusing attention on a period long past and implying a connection to the Khaajiir’s scholarly work.

“The same is true for any other murder committed around him. This would have been doubly true if the attack on me had ended with my death. Everybody would have said, Oh well, of course, the Bocaians hate her, almost as much as they hate the Khaajiir for wanting to forgive her. Using a weapon he wrote about to kill her is just poetic justice.

“And yet the symbolic weight of the attack on me is almost certainly a coincidence, since one of the first things we determined was that the timeline suggests a conspiracy well under way long before anybody could have known I was even heading for Xana.

“The Bocaians needed to be recruited. The Claws of God had to be obtained. Further events establish also that the technical challenges posed by the sabotage to the Royal Carriage needed to be overcome. Same thing for seizing control of the Bettelhine security forces.

“No, for the assassins recruited from Bocai, I was just a target of opportunity, one they went after because they were Bocaians who hated me; they were in fact positioned to go after someone else, someone whose assassination using that particular weapon would have muddied the waters almost as much.

“Was the Khaajiir the main target? That was my first thought, especially since he was indeed targeted later. And it seemed to make sense, since he’d courted controversy by advocating amnesty for crimes I once committed on Bocai.

“But then, as we’ve also established, there was no reason to believe that he’d ever be passing through Layabout on this particular day. Anybody who knew about him knew he was infirm and that he rarely left the immediate company of his hosts. Setting up an ambush for him on a concourse he would never enter makes no sense.

“My most educated guess?” I pointed at Dejah, who looked entirely unsurprised, and nodded in appreciation that we’d now passed a rubicon she’d already expected. “Dejah is a powerful and influential figure, whose presence here was courted for months before she finally said yes. There would have been more than enough time for a conspiracy based on Xana, and acting against the wishes of the Bettelhines who invited her here, to arrange for a public attack on her timed to occur on the day on her arrival, committed by fanatic members of a minor species using the fanatic weapons of yet another species. Had she walked by instead of me, murdering her with a Claw of God would have directed further investigation into pointless blind allies involving possible connections between her and the Khaajiir and thus obscured the much more reasonable point that the Bettelhines and their people considered her a dangerous enemy and had tried to assassinate her before.

“This theory is incidentally supported by the fact that she arrived at Layabout not long after I did, and circumstances already gone into suggest the assassins saw me as no more than a target of convenience.”

I threw up my hands. “Frankly, the identity of the primary target on Layabout remains a mystery to me. I don’t know if the killers were after Dejah and were distracted by me, or if they were after the Khaajiir and distracted by me. I don’t even know whether they always did expect me and were distracted by some other factor. It doesn’t matter, because any of those scenarios fit the available facts equally well.

“In the long run it’s likely that all three of us were targets.

“We were all anomalies.

“We had all been invited through their father’s auspices, by Jason and Jelaine, the two figures who have been most active in pursuing radical changes in corporate policy and whose success at consolidating power at Philip’s expense could not have made any sense to those who knew that Philip was supposed to be the one being groomed for leadership.

“Could the conspirators have known exactly what was up between Jason, Jelaine, and their father? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. Consider: the leader of a corporation devoted to the development of powerful weaponry develops an inexplicable and inseparable bond with an obscure alien academic. He spends the next year reversing the priorities of the corporation, eliminating profitable programs, and initiating others of no immediately obvious benefit. He bypasses the son being groomed for power and starts handing more and more decision-making ability to another son whose stability and loyalty are suspect due to years of absence in childhood. He even invites a long-time enemy, Dejah, to meet with him. At the same time he also invites a controversial prosecutor from the Confederacy.

“Seeing all of these events from the perspective of parties who cannot know why they’re taking place, whose loyalty is only to the corporation, how could you not understand their inevitable conclusion that Hans Bettelhine has been co-opted in some way? That all of this represents an obvious threat to the Family and to the corporation as a whole? And that it needs to be countered by any means possible?

“For what it’s worth, I’m at the center of it and I’m still lost. I don’t know why I’m here and I don’t know what Jason and Jelaine are up to. And I tend to believe Philip when he says he doesn’t know, either.

“But antibodies don’t need the entire taxonomy of any given bacterial invader to recognize an infection when they see one. Anybody invested in preserving the Bettelhine Corporation they knew would have taken action first and worried about ferreting out the precise explanations later.

“So our conspiracy decided that the important, unexplained figures around Jason and Jelaine had to go. The biggest wild card, the Khaajiir, would have been a prime target. The same thing with Dejah. I suspect that I was the last and least of the names.

“But it couldn’t be done out in the open. There were powerful Bettelhines, Jason and Jelaine, who could not be hurt. A web of obfuscation needed to be spun over the crimes. The nature of the threat to the Bettelhine power structure needed to be identified. And—this is the critical part—Jason and Jelaine needed to be isolated from all possible resources, and closely observed in the hopes that they would say or do something to explain just what the hell they were up to.” I smiled. “In short, I’m not the only person who’s been running an investigation here.”

“So that’s what this is all about. The next question is, of course, who.”

“On the surface, at least, Philip seems the most obvious suspect. He’s the one who has to be most frantic about what his brother and sister and father have done. He’s had only limited access to that father, at a time in his ascendancy to power when he should be working with the man almost every day. He’s seen his own influence slipping from him, and handed in part to an alliance that includes a brother of noted instability. And yes,” I said, directing my next words to Philip himself, “I’ll give him credit for this, he’s also been heartsick and unable to understand his own estrangement from his siblings. He may be a Bettelhine, but he’s still human.”

“Thank you,” Philip said.

“You’re welcome,” I told him. Facing the others, I continued, “In any event, it was because he was faced with these issues that Philip forced his way into this party, sans invitation, in the hopes of obtaining some answers. He even brought the Pearlmans along, to help him resolve some suspicions we discussed in the other room.

“But that’s precisely what I think clears him of any wrongdoing here. Were he just a rapacious corporate bastard intent on regaining his power by killing anybody between himself and the corporate throne, he has any number of underlings, including some present here today, willing to do the dirty work for him. He wouldn’t be here, on the Royal Carriage, this close to the murder and thus exposed to all the danger if he knew that any of this was going to happen.”

“No, as far as I’m concerned, crashing the party might have been an act of desperation on his part, but it was definitely a peaceful one. Possibly the last before he took more extreme measures. But still a peaceful one.

“He’s the first we can declare innocent.

“Who else? The crew?” I directed my next words to the stewards. “I’ve already told the Bettelhines that any of you, Arturo, Loyal, Doy, or Colette, could have provided our culprit with material aid, either individually or in combination. If I didn’t know who committed the actual murder, you would have all been excellent suspects. When we’re done here, it will only be your guilt or innocence as a collaboration that remains in question.”

“No. In the end, the issue finally comes down to personal power. Who in this room has the influence to enlist vast numbers of people, including the authorities at Layabout and the military forces surrounding us in a conspiracy of this magnitude? Even if only by manipulation of a few key people at the top?

“Frankly, only two of you.

“Monday Brown, the personal aide to Hans Bettelhine. And Vernon Wethers, personal aide to Philip Bettelhine. Please join me here.”

The two aides glanced at each other, then at their masters, who nodded and gestured toward me in mute confirmation that they were expected to comply. Brown turned several degrees sterner, and Wethers emitted an audible gulp. But both left the Bettelhines behind, and came around the couch to join me at the center of the circle.

“I resent this,” Brown said.

“So do I,” Wethers said, with somewhat shakier authority. “After all the years I’ve spent—”

“Please,” I said, shutting both up. “Each one of you acts as representative, and frequently proxy, of the Bettelhine you serve. Each one of you is capable of flitting around this system at will, on agendas you don’t need to explain, putting together an operation on this scale. And each one of you can be forgiven for feeling so much identification with the Bettelhine Family that you’d be driven to desperate measures to protect their future.

I faced Brown. “Monday, you might have watched Hans steered into destructive policies and felt helpless to interfere any other way.” Then Wethers: “Vernon, you might have seen Philip shunted off to one side because of policies that could only hurt the Bettelhine business as you understand it.”

The two men started talking at the same time. Brown said, “This is…” Wethers said, “I don’t…”

Philip Bettelhine shut them both him with a single shouted, “QUIET!”

Both men stopped in mid-syllable.

I couldn’t tell whether it was his authority or their internal governors, but either way it worked. They both seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Volumes of hatred still burned on their faces, but they would cooperate with everything that came after this. They had no choice.

Dina Pearlman smirked. Pride in her work? Or the mere pleasure that a woman like her would naturally feel at the sight of her superiors being humiliated?

I waited for the silence to accumulate a weight all its own, and continued. “Either one of you might have been moved to drastic measures. Either one of you could have set these events into motion.

“And not incidentally,” I said, raising my voice, “either one of you would have been able to provide the final ingredients you needed: the Claws of God, and the Fire Snake. We found out in the course of this investigation that just a few short years ago the corporation was trying to reverse-engineer the Claws, for use as a long-range orbital weapon…”

Dejah covered her eyes with her hand. “I wish that didn’t come as a surprise, with these people.”

I grinned at her. “Yes. The very idea is revolting. But that’s beside the point. The very fact that such a project took place suggests that the corporation had working Claws on hand or the capability to construct prototypes for testing, somewhere in one of its many research facilities. It doesn’t matter whether they were actual antiques or modern-day prototypes. The same follows for the Fire Snake, which would also be of immense interest to a munitions manufacturer raiding old technologies for ideas. But in the case of both weapons, would the corporation dispose of the models on hand or just put them on a shelf somewhere? What do you think?”

“I vote for shelf,” Dejah said. “No reason to waste a potentially valuable resource.”

“Exactly. And either way, one of you,” I said, indicating Brown and Wethers, “hit upon the idea of using them in this business. So you obtained them. Nobody would have said no to either one of you. After all, anybody trusted with the responsibility to keep an eye on such dangerous objects would have been conditioned to allow authorized personnel access. And who could possibly be more authorized?

“Were we not in our current situation, were we able to contact the surface and track down the facility where the Claws of God and the Fire Snake were stored, we could leave it at that. After all, it would be an easy matter to determine which one of you demanded access.

“We would also be able to determine which one of you used your influence to summon Hans Bettelhine just before the Royal Carriage left Anchor Point and thus ensure that he would not be aboard to be threatened by these events.

“Alas, we’re cut off from the outside world and can’t ask those questions now. But we will be able to do so, when building our case against you later.

“Either way, the prospect of a long elevator ride with everybody who worries you—Jason, Jelaine, Dejah, the Khaajiir, and me—presented your last, best opportunity to find us all together in the same place, and isolated from the power structure you were protecting. You couldn’t wait until we reached Xana. You had to determine what we wanted, and if necessary neutralize us before we got there. Hence the importance of arranging for the emergency stop, the communications shutdown, and whatever false intelligence is keeping the security forces from rescuing us. Hence your failure, in all of these hours since the Khaajiir’s death, to kill again. It’s not just that everybody’s been keeping an eye on one another. It’s the fact that questions are being asked, and you want answers just as much as we do. Had I not insisted on starting our own investigation, you would have made the same suggestion yourself.”

My next words emerged as gentler than I’d expected them to be, gentler by far than anything I’d said so far. I spoke to the people behind the rigid faces, the souls in cages driven to their crimes. “I feel sorry for you, really. In a way, you’re not responsible for what you’ve done. Driven by a loyalty that’s been imposed on you, you’ve served the Bettelhines as best you could, the only way you could, given your suspicions of an internal conspiracy that must have left you agonizing over who to trust.

“But you still murdered the Khaajiir.

“And you’re still a threat to the rest of us.

“And since we cannot determine your identity by communicating with Xana and determining which one of you obtained the Claws and gave the necessary orders, we might have been left with nothing and been stuck here until the air or food ran out.”

I took a deep breath.

“But fortunately we’ve been handed a little help.

“The Khaajiir himself told us who you are.”

That caused a commotion among everybody except the Porrinyards and Bettelhines, who knew where I was going: gasps of astonishment, frenzied conversation among those desperate to remember what the Khaajiir might have said and when he might have said it.

I gestured for silence and got it.

“This is what you need to keep in mind about the Khaajiir. He was a Bocaian, representative of a species that possesses little if any talent for the acquisition of new languages past adolescence. To counteract that limitation he used his staff as a personal translation system, without which he would have been unable to communicate with others.

“We also know something odd about him that flies in the face of this central fact: he admitted to a penchant for multilingual wordplay. When we met he regaled me with a secondary meaning of my name, Cort, and with additional interpretations of the names Oscin and Skye. He had additional information about the derivation of Porrinyard. In fact, he embraced his title, Khaajiir, a K’cenhowten construction, because of its coincidental similarities to his Bocaian name. We know he regaled Mr. Mendez with similar information. I’m sure he did the same to the rest of you. Am I correct?”

Paakth-Doy raised her hand. “When I served him on the way up, he told me about an extinct beast of burden known as the Paarkth by the ancient Riirgaans who domesticated it. Not quite my name, Paakth. But similar.”

Jason said, “And he was fond of telling me stories about an ancient mythological hero with my name. An Earthman, known for journeying.”

There was a hubbub. Colette had been told of another antiquated word, coquette. Jelaine had been apprised of certain words similar to Bettelhine among races I had never heard of. Oscin had been treated to a discourse on witty derivations of the planetary name Xana. I had known of none of these, but I wasn’t surprised at all. They all fit the childlike delight the monolingual Khaajiir felt for the infinite possibilities of cross-cultural vocabulary.

I waited for the moment of mass discovery to die down, then said, “Off-the-cuff observations like these did a lot to further the man’s erudite reputation, but a moment’s consideration will confirm that they likely had nothing to do with him. He cheated.”

Dejah got it first. “His staff.”

“That’s correct,” I said. “He was able to use the databases of extinct and extant languages in its translation program and construct wordplay at a moment’s notice.

“He fell into the habit because he enjoyed it, because it impressed people, and—in my case, and who knows how many others—because it aided small talk and helped to defuse hostile situations. Look at me. I hated him before he pulled that Cort/Court comparison. Afterward I wrote him off as chatty and harmless.”

“Don’t forget boring,” Dina said. “And what does any of that have to do with anything?”

I nodded at Skye, who immediately turned around and crossed to the easy chair still bearing the Khaajiir’s corpse. It was on a swivel, and as she turned it on its base many of those gathered here all gasped at the further deterioration of the corpse, which remained in the same essential position but had slumped still farther into the cushions as its internal structures drained away. As far as I could tell, he had been a friendly and well-meaning sentient, with animus toward none. But now he was just meat.

Neither Brown nor Wethers had made a sound. When I turned to them they were both stone-faced and waiting for the point.

“It’s a hideous death,” I said. “But not as painful a death as it appears. I’ve been told tonight that the Claw of God offers a small mercy all its own, in that it fries the pain receptors and thus leaves its victims largely unaware of the changes taking place inside them. The Khaajiir could have been sitting in this chair for several minutes, melting on the inside and growing steadily weaker as the hemorrhage continued. Because the seat cushion soaked up much of the blood, and the armrests prevented any from leaking out at his sides, the rest of us missed what was happening until it was too late. The Khaajiir, who felt no pain, almost missed it himself. But I noted this at the time. Skye?”

Skye raised the Khaajiir’s left arm by the wrist, revealing a palm stained black with dried gore.

“And this.”

She pointed to the tiny little bloodstain at the tip of the Khaajiir’s nose.

“Now put him back the way we found him.”

She placed his left hand back on the armrest, positioning the palm on the stain it had left. Oscin, who had the Khaajiir’s staff, took it back to the chair and slipped it back where we had found it, resting across both armrests with his arms on top.

Dejah got it first. “Oh, Juje. He knew.”

“That’s right,” I told the others. “The placement of the bloodstains leaves no room for doubt.

“Think back to the first few moments after the emergency stop. We’re all running around dealing with our own concerns, including several serious injuries, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Jason and Jelaine escort the Khaajiir, the frailest and most vulnerable guest, to this chair, ascertaining that he’s all right before abandoning him to deal with other pressing injuries. Several others among us, including Mr. Brown and Mr. Wethers, also stop by the Khaajiir’s chair to check up on him. The application of the Claw of God may take place at any point during this interval. The Khaajiir may even feel a slight charge at the moment of contact, but he thinks nothing of it.

“Long minutes pass. The rest of us ignore the Khaajiir because we have other things to worry about. The Khaajiir starts feeling weak. But he’s fragile and old and no doubt attributes what he’s feeling to the shock he’s experienced.

“But then something happens.

“Either because he feels the wetness pooling underneath him and suspects what has happened, or just from random happenstance, he drops his left hand to his side, into the blood pooling around him.

“Golly. What’s this?

“He pulls his hand out of the muck and finds it covered with blood.

“He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He lifts his hand all the way to his nose, perhaps because he wants a closer look and perhaps because he’s begun to identify the smell we’ve all sensed by this time as coming from him. The act leaves a tiny bloodstain on the tip of his nose.

“Remember again who he is. He’s an expert on the K’cenhowten reign of terror. He knows that a Claw of God, a weapon from the society he wrote about, turned up in an attack on me earlier in the day. It must occur to him at once that yet another Claw of God has been used on him in the last few minutes. What’s more, he remains coherent enough to backtrack and realize just which one of us did this terrible thing.

“But he’s dying. He knows he’s dying. He feels himself losing consciousness. He can barely hold his head up even now. He certainly can’t raise his voice and shout out the name of the guilty party. And he may have only seconds to tell us what he knows.

“He can use his fingernails to scratch a message into the weave of the armrest.

“But time is fleeting. It will probably take more time and strength than he has to scratch out a complete word, especially if he uses the ornate Bocaian alphabet, which is likely the only written language he knows. Not that it matters. How can he have the time to scratch the complete name of a human being while using all those frills and flourishes?

“But he’s fortunate, our ailing Khaajiir. Because he’s clever and he has his staff, the tool that has allowed him such hearty play at the game of words. He has his right hand on the interface and barely has to stir at all to think the name of his murderer, hoping to be provided with a translation he can use.

“I don’t know how many possibilities it gave him in the next second or two. From his ease at using the translation system to impress people, there may have been several, including a number that may have been too hard to transcribe.

“But he was provided with at least one he could use.

“And so his last act before he lost consciousness was to draw three crude zigzags, side by side.”

The Porrinyards indicated the three claw marks the Khaajiir had made in his dying moments, miming the zigzag pattern with their hands.

I faced Brown and Wethers. “We know it was the last thing he did. As I noted at the time, one of the fibers he ripped from the armrest was still stuck under one of the fingernails he used.”

Oscin pointed to the fingertip in question.

“He must have died seconds later,” I said.

The Porrinyards left the corpse behind, with its bloody walking stick, and returned to their previous positions at either side of me, waiting.

Farley Pearlman was reaching into his jacket to scratch his ribs. “I don’t get it.”

“Don’t feel too inadequate,” I told him. “You wouldn’t have had a clue unless you knew the specific language the Khaajiir was referencing. I had to consult the staff myself, to compare the many possible explanations for those three zigzags with their potential interpretations in other languages.

“I didn’t get anywhere until after I realized that the message might have been meant for me, the one person here with a background in crime investigation…and remembered that when we’d spoken, he’d referenced an extinct human tongue known as English. Would it not make sense to concentrate on meanings I could access via that dialect?

“After that it was just a question of figuring out what he might have drawn that could have been as familiar to a Bocaian as it would be to any human being. And realizing that it was much more likely to be a natural phenomenon found all over the universe than any symbol restricted to our respective cultures.”

“Just say it,” Philip demanded.

I mimed the three jagged lines again. “Three lightning bolts.”

I spoke a single word familiar to all of us in the common tongue Hom.Sap Mercantile.

Still, nobody got it.

I hadn’t expected them to.

But now I faced the murderer and spoke its damning translation in English.

“Weathers.”

We only thought we were prepared for what happened next.

But there were two more murders in the next six seconds…