“Perfect.”
“No, Arkady.” Moshe smiled, showing pink gums and straight white teeth small enough to belong in a child’s mouth. “You’re the one who’s perfect. I’m only human.”
Arkady couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said nothing.
“So,” Moshe said, putting the same vast volumes of meaning into the syllable that Osnat had—and making Arkady marvel at how the dry patterns from the training tapes came alive in Israeli mouths. “What do I need to know?”
“What do you need to know about what?” Arkady asked.
Moshe crossed his arms over his chest. He was small, even by human standards; but his legs were hard and sunburned, and with every movement of his hands Arkady saw corded tendons slide under the skin of his forearms. “First, it would be reassuring to know that you are who you say you are.” Another flash of the childish teeth. “Or at least that you are what you say you are.”
A flick of Moshe’s fingers brought a lab tech scurrying over with a splicing scope and sample kit. The sampling was ungentle, and it required the removal of the mask and filter—a risk that Osnat muttered darkly about and Moshe shrugged off philosophically.
“He’s for real,” the tech finally announced in Hebrew.
“How sure are you?” Moshe asked.
The man spread his hands.
“And what would it take to be completely sure?”
“I’d have to run it by Tel Aviv.”
“Then do it. I’m not taking any chances this time.”
This time?
The tech retrieved his scope and sampling gear and retreated to the streamspace terminal. Then, to Arkady’s surprise and dismay, they waited.
It should have taken days of queuing and relaying for the sample to reach Earth’s Orbital Ring. And then it should have taken weeks for it to be cleared for import by the ossified bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the Controlled Technology Addendum to the Kyoto Protocols. Instead, Arkady watched with growing unease as the tech fed his samples into the terminal and keyed up a streamspace address that began with the fabled triple w.
The implications of those three letters made Arkady catch his breath. Earth was offstream under the Tech Addendum. If Moshe could talk directly to Earth—let alone teleport tissue samples for analysis—then he must have a portable Bose-Einstein terminal and a secure source of entanglement outside the UN’s network of entanglement banks and BE relays. Only a handful of private entities in UN space had the financial means to maintain private entanglement banks: the largest multiplanetaries; the UN bureaucracy itself; the richest AIs and transhumans. And of course the constant wild card in UN politics, a type of entity so archaic that its very existence provoked horrified amazement among Syndicate political philosophers: Earth’s nation-states.
They’re animals, Arkady had protested back on Gilead when he’d first understood he might be dealing with nationalists. Worse than animals. What can we possibly have in common with them?
There’s an old Arab saying, Korchow had answered from behind that unfathomable KnowlesSyndicate smile: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And a thousand idealistic General Assembly resolutions can’t change the fact that Earth has her hand on the Orbital Ring’s water tap.
But Moshe didn’t look much like the nationalists in Arkady’s old sociobiology textbooks. And he certainly didn’t look like he planned to turn the water off on anyone unless he was logically convinced that he was going to reap some benefit from their ensuing thirst.
Arkady blinked, feeling an ominous stinging sensation behind his eyes, and realized that his nose was filling. He sniffed surreptitiously and looked around hoping no one had noticed.
“Have a tissue,” Moshe said.
Arkady took the thing reluctantly, wondering how he was supposed to use it. Then, to his horror and humiliation, he sneezed.
“Go ahead. Blow your nose.”
“May I be excused for a moment?”
“Why? We’re savages, remember? No need for your fine Syndicate manners here.”
Then he saw it. Moshe had set the trap, and he’d walked into it without a backward glance and ended up just where Moshe wanted him: more worried about sneezing in public than about doing the job Korchow had sent him to do.
He blew his nose—something he hadn’t done in public since he was six or so—then stood there holding the used tissue and not knowing what to do with it.
Moshe smiled.
“He’s clean,” the tech announced from behind his terminal. Everyone in the room must have been holding their breath, Arkady realized; he heard a collective sigh of relief at the news.
“Right, then.” Moshe sounded like a professor leading his lecture group into difficult theoretical territory. “Now that we know you’re perfect, why don’t you tell us to what we owe the pleasure of your perfect company?”
“I told you,” Arkady said, still following the script Korchow had laid down for him. “The Syndicates—”
“Yes, yes, I know the spiel by heart. The Syndicates have developed some kind of mysterious genetic weapon and they’re planning to use it against us. But as an ethical evolutionary ecophysicist you can’t abide the thought of wiping out Earth’s wonderful genetic diversity. So you’ve defected in order to do your modest little bit toward making the universe safe for humans.” He gave Arkady a quizzical look. “You don’t look stupid. Did you really think we were going to swallow such bunk?”
Korchow’s last warning echoed in Arkady’s mind: Absalom is the sharpest blade you have. Far too sharp to unsheathe unless you’re quite sure you can put it away again without cutting off your own fingers.
Was he sure? No. But if he failed through an excess of caution, it would be Arkasha who paid the price. He took a quick, nervous breath. “There’s more,” he said, “but I’ll only tell the rest to Absalom.”
“Absalom, indeed.” Moshe’s voice was soft, almost pleasant. He could have been discussing the weather. “And who told you to dangle his name in front of me?”
“No one.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Andrej Korchow no one.”
Arkady’s eyes snapped to Moshe’s face, but all he could see in the glare of the bridge lights were the two flat reflective disks of his glasses.
“Of course it was Korchow who told you to ask for Absalom.” Moshe made it sound trivial. Not a lie. Just a practical joke between friends. “He wants us to think Absalom’s back in the game again. He wants us to be so busy worrying about whether Absalom is playing us for fools that we forget to worry about whether you’re doing the same.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The first blow knocked Arkady to his knees. As he tried to stand, Moshe hooked his feet out from under him and delivered a flurry of surgically precise kicks to his stomach and kidneys.
Osnat laughed. But it sounded like a laugh of shock and surprise, not amusement. Arkady even thought he sensed a recoiling in her, a flush of pity under the soldier’s hard loyalty. Or did he just want to sense that?
“Get up,” Moshe said in the bored tones of a man for whom violence was a job like any other.
Arkady tried to stand. He only managed to kneel, head spinning, hands splayed on the cold deck.
Moshe crouched beside Arkady, his face bent so close that his breath caressed the skin of Arkady’s cheek. “I can’t let you lie to me, Arkady. You can see that, can’t you?”
A waiting silence settled over the bridge. Arkady realized that Moshe expected an answer to this apparently rhetorical question.
“Yes,” he gasped. Just the effort of speaking made him feel like he was going to throw up.
“How many Arkadys do they detank a year?” Moshe asked. “Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand?”
The real number was probably on the high end of Moshe’s guess. But Arkady had never asked about the actual numbers. He’d never even thought of asking. And for the first time in his life he wondered why. “I don’t know,” he answer
ed at last. “A lot, I guess.”
“A lot, you guess.” A cold edge crept into Moshe’s voice. “You’re a piece of equipment, Arkady, as mass-produced as sewer-pipe sections. And if we can’t get what we need from you, we’ll throw you away and order a replacement part. Just like your Syndicate’s already done. Or do you want to tell me I’ve got that wrong and you weren’t condemned meat from the second they shipped you out here?”
Osnat stirred restlessly. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Moshe. Give him a break. Can’t you see he doesn’t know anything?”
“He told you that, did he? And you believed him? Or did you just take a look into those big puppy-dog eyes and decide to trust him?”
Osnat flushed to the roots of her hair. Arkady felt the rest of the room freeze. What had Moshe done to make them so frightened of him? But perhaps a man like Moshe didn’t need to do anything to frighten people.
Moshe dropped back into Hebrew, speaking with quiet but unmistakable anger. Arkady struggled to understand, but the unfamiliar words spilled past too quickly. That it was a dressing-down was clear, though; Osnat absorbed the rebuke with the immovable stoicism of a soldier on parade ground.
Was she a soldier? Had he already been drawn so deep into the tangled web of Israeli Intelligence that he was dealing with government agents and not hired corporate muscle? If so, then which stray thread of the web had quivered in response to Arkady’s carefully choreographed offer of defection? And how much did the success of his mission—and with it Arkasha’s freedom—depend on his guessing correctly?
What if they’re Mossad?
The question spooled across his mind accompanied by old spinfeed of bombings and assassinations. He pushed the images aside. All Mossad agents couldn’t be vicious killers, he told himself, any more than their opposite Palestinian numbers could be the peace-loving posthuman sympathizers that Syndicate propagandists insisted they were. And as long as he kept Korchow happy, it didn’t much matter what the truth was.
Moshe turned back to Arkady, his voice cold and academic again. “Listen, Arkady. I have no personal grudge against you. I’m not some little boy pulling the wings off flies during recess. But the road to Absalom goes through me. And if you cross me, if you lie to me, if you so much as quiver in a direction that makes me nervous, I’ll kill you. The police won’t blink. My superiors won’t even give me a slap on the wrist. It’ll be like killing a dog as far as they’re concerned. Less than killing a dog; with a dog there’s always some schlemiel ready to call the animal protection society. And trust me, Arkady, there is no golem protection society.”
They stared at each other, Arkady sweating and panting, Moshe as calm as he’d been before the surreal outbreak of violence. “Do you remember my last question?” Moshe asked.
“Whether Korchow told me to ask for Absalom.”
“Good.”
“But I—”
“Don’t answer now. You’re leaving in the morning. I won’t see you until we’re both on the other side of the blockade. And meanwhile I’d like you to spend the trip thinking about the difference between what Korchow can do for you once you’re on Earth and what I can do for you.”
The freighter had been built in what Arkady thought of as the White Period of UN jumpship design.
For ten or twelve years, in one of those inexplicable emergent phenomena of fashion, white viruflex had come into style simultaneously on all the far-flung UN colonies that habitually sold their obsolete driveships to the Syndicate buyers. Everything that could be made of viruflex was made of viruflex, and every piece of viruflex that could be white was white. White deckplating. White walls. White ventilation grills, white water and power and spinstream conduits. And, hovering in the fading shadows above them, white ceilings with glimmering white recessed-lighting panels.
As Osnat led him through the ship, Arkady remembered with a twinge that he had used just this rather silly example of emergence to explain how ant swarms worked in his first real conversation with Arkasha. Arkasha hadn’t cared for the metaphor. And now, in the face of all this merciless whiteness, Arkady saw why.
The whole ship looked like a euth ward.
It looked like an empty euth ward whose patients had all shut themselves into their rooms and taken their terminal doses. He imagined cold white cells behind all the cold white doors, and cold white beds containing cold white bodies whose limbs and faces betrayed terrible deformities. Or, worse, bodies whose physical perfection hinted at even more horrifying deviations of mind and spirit.
Osnat stopped, tugging at his arm like an adult shepherding a crècheling through a pressure door, and led him into a room that was mercifully empty and ordinary. A battered viruflex chair stood beside a bed made up with square military corners. The blanket on the bed was wool, something Arkady had never seen outside of history spins. He could smell it all the way across the room: a faint animal smell, at once dry and oily.
“Bathroom.” Osnat pointed. “Washing water. Drinking water. Mix ’em up and you’ll be sorry. Recyclables disposal. Biohazards disposal. And biohazards include anything that touches your body until you clear your Syndicate-side flora. You need anything else, press the call button by the door. But only if you really need it. Moshe’s not a patient man.” Her eyes flicked to the corner of the tiny space and she frowned. “Sorry about the ants, by the way. I’ll bring some roach spray if I can find any.”
Arkady followed her glance and saw a gleaming rivulet of amber carapaces that he’d at first mistaken for a crack in the laminated viruflex flooring. “Pharaoh ants,” he said, intrigued by the unexpected discovery. “Is the ship infested?”
“If only it were just the ship. They’re taking over the fucking universe.”
“They’ve always owned it.” He corrected her without a second thought now that he was back on familiar territory. “Vertebrate biomass was negligible compared to ants, even before Earth’s ecological collapse. And as far as any biogeophysical cycles are concerned—”
He stopped, sensing Osnat’s stare.
“This isn’t one of those Syndicate suicide missions, is it?” she asked abruptly. “A…what do they call it…a gifting of biological property?”
“Right. I mean…yes, that’s the word. But no, I don’t think it is one.”
“You don’t think so? You mean they can order you to die without even telling you ahead of time?”
Who was this they she was talking about? And could humans still “order” each other to die the way they ordered meals at restaurants? But surely that was impossible, even on Earth. He must have misheard her.
“What about Novalis?” she pursued. “Was Novalis a suicide mission?”
He froze, forcing himself to wait a beat before looking into her eyes. This was the first time anyone had said the planet’s name. And hearing the familiar word on Osnat’s lips reminded him abruptly that she worked for Moshe.
“Fine,” Osnat said after a silence long enough to make his skin itch. “I was just asking.”
“How is Moshe going to get me through the UN’s Tech Embargo?” Arkady asked.
“I don’t know. The Americans are handling that part. We didn’t want to bring them into it, but no one else on Earth is still crazy enough to go head-to-head against UNSec.”
America! The mere name was enough to make Arkady catch his breath. The land where Audubon had seen the last legendary flights of the passenger pigeons. The land where de Tocqueville had walked through virgin forests so dense that uprooted oak trees hung in the surrounding branches and crumbled to dust without ever touching the earth. The land that had spawned the great twentieth-century myrmecologists, from Wheeler and Wilson to Schnierla and Pratt and Gordon. The country whose scientists had taken the first halting steps toward modern terraforming theory…even as the engines of their industry were shredding the fragile web that made man’s continued life on Earth possible.
“Don’t worry,” Osnat reassured him, misinterpreting his dazed expression. “We’re not actually goi
ng there. I can’t promise we won’t accidentally get you ripped limb from limb by a mob of religious fanatics, but it’s not Plan A.”
“Religious fanatics? In America?”
Osnat gave him a quizzical look. “How much do you actually know about Earth, Arkady?”
“Um…I know a lot about the ants.”
“Great. Well, just don’t talk to anyone. And by anyone, I mean particularly Americans and Interfaithers. Which should be easy since they’re usually the same people. And while I’m handing out free advice, you want to back off a bit with this Absalom business. Keep tossing that name around and you might just piss Moshe off so badly he decides no amount of intelligence value is worth the aggravation.”
“Why?”
Her good eye fixed him with an incredulous stare.
“You don’t even know who Absalom is,” she said finally. “It’s just a name to you. Korchow didn’t give you a clue what you were walking into. Unfuckingbelievable.”
He didn’t answer, and after staring at him for another acutely uncomfortable moment she muttered, “Like a goddamn lamb to the slaughter,” and stalked out of the room.
The first thing Arkady did when Osnat left was walk across the room to examine the wool blanket. It was warm to the touch, as if it still remembered the heat of the animal it had come from. He ran his hand over the rough surface, feeling the hairs—or were they called furs?—prick the skin of his palm.
He went to the sink and poured himself a cup of water. It tasted stale, as if the tanker was limping to the end of a long slow time run and her tanks were overdue for scrubbing. It also had a salt-and-copper tang that turned out to be the taste of his own blood.
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