The Third Claw of God Read Online Free PDF

to complain or say something unbearably wise. It had a family resemblance to the Bettelhines. I wondered for whom it was bioengineered to flatter, and answered my own question: some Bettelhine patriarch, of course. It was not a form of immortality I would have wanted.
    There were no free-fall issues. As with Layabout itself, the interior was equipped with Specific Gravity systems, maintaining a pleasant .8 gee that wouldn’t budge one fraction of a percentage point whether the craft was in ascent, descent, or dry dock. The sofas and lounges were ornately carved antiques of the sort that might have seen service on more worlds than I had, without a fraction of the wear. The ceiling glittered with jewels the size of my fists. The observation window, made of some material that refused to take a fingerprint even when I flattened my sweaty palm against the “glass,” covered the entire exterior wall of the shared lounge and the one suite assigned to us, and offered a panoramic view of the planet below, including a wedge of daylight blessed by more green than most worlds inhabited by human beings have historically managed to keep.
    Arturo led us to one of the four suites on our level, which included a bed large enough to welcome not only the Porrinyards and myself but also any other half dozen sentients we might have elected to invite. (There was, he said, another suite level, less luxurious than this one, giving the car sleeping accommodations for thirty.)
    After a dazzling tour of the other wonders we’d been provided in our quarters, he led us back into the central parlor with that discomfiting fish and showed us a bar stocked with the finest liqueurs of a hundred worlds and the most popular narcotics of a hundred more. An actual, real-paper book set into its own recess on the bar, bound in something that felt organic, turned out to be a menu of available delicacies longer than some encyclopedias.
    “Please make yourselves comfortable,” Arturo said as the Porrinyards and I collapsed in grateful heaps.
    “I’m afraid it will be another hour or more before all the other passengers are reboarded, and we’re ready to depart.”
    “There are other passengers?”
    “Yes. Two of Mr. Bettelhine’s children, three Bettelhine employees, and a pair of personal guests. I believe more may be coming, but you’ll have to ask the Bettelhines about that when they arrive.”
    “They weren’t the target of assassination attempts today. Why aren’t they here with us already?”
    “They expected to be, Counselor. The Bettelhine youngsters and their personal guest rode up from the surface with the express purpose of greeting you, and several others boarded at various times while we awaited your arrival. Then the unpleasantness occurred, and all of those notables needed to be evacuated offstation for security reasons. Now that Layabout’s docking facilities are opening again, they can return to the station and rejoin us for the descent to Xana proper.”
    Interesting. I was not just some peon summoned to await the pleasure of the Great Man, but a personage of sufficient importance to deserve an escort by his offspring. “Can you tell me how long they were waiting for me?”
    “The youngsters? About twenty hours, if you only count all their time in dry dock, thirty if you include their hours of ascent.”
    I moaned. “Flights to and from the ground would be faster.”
    “The Bettelhines limit ground-to-space traffic for security and environmental reasons. In any event, the other guests all arrived by various transports in the past day or so, the tardiest among them joining the party some five hours before your arrival. I’m afraid that there may have been some unkind words about your own late arrival, words that grew more heated as the unfortunate crisis required their own evacuation, but I assure you that neither of the Bettelhine youngsters held this against you in the slightest.”
    “That’s a relief,” the Porrinyards