Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  He washed his face and prodded at his teeth until he was sure nothing had been knocked loose. He wasn’t surprised. Moshe had worked him over so expertly that even in the midst of the pain Arkady had had a perversely comforting feeling of safety; if he just submitted and lay still, some instinct had whispered, no real harm would come to him. Maybe that had been the real purpose of the beating. If so, Moshe had pounded the point home pretty effectively.

  Arkady leaned over the sink and inspected the face staring back at him from the mirror. He hadn’t shaved since he’d reached UN space, and the black shadow of a beard pooled in the angles and hollows of a face sucked thin by gravity. It made him look hungry and breakable…and disconcertingly like Arkasha.

  He covered his broken nose and warped cheekbone with the palm of one hand and looked at the pieces of his face that were still recognizable after Korchow’s hammer job. There were the dark eyes, so like Arkasha’s eyes; the fine-featured Slavic face, so like Arkasha’s face; the pale skin, so like Arkasha’s skin.

  And the soft doubtful uncertain mouth that had never been anything like Arkasha’s mouth, even before Novalis.

  He curled his upper lip in the mocking half smile that had always been Arkasha’s first line of defense, and tried to summon the illusion that kept him going. The trick to making it work was not to ask for too much. He couldn’t imagine Arkasha in his arms. That was far too obviously impossible. But he could call up his hoarded memories of his pairmate: all the moments and movements that he’d never quite paid enough attention to as they slipped by. The intent curve of Arkasha’s back as he bent over his splicing scope. The fine-boned hands, nervous in idleness but precise and graceful when they turned the pages of a book, or mounted samples, or handled a splicing scope. The mercurial combination of strength and fragility that had called forth a devotion Arkady had never thought himself capable of feeling. Sometimes he could convince himself that the face looking back at him in the mirror was real and that Arkasha was safe. Far away—perhaps too far away for Arkady to ever hope to see him again—but alive and well and, most important, happy. That wasn’t too much to imagine. And it made sleep possible. It made everything possible.

  Arkady sighed and dropped his hand. He crossed the room to the narrow bed, slipped under the unnerving blanket, and whispered the lights off.

  Nothing happened.

  He got up and circled the room looking for a manual switch, but there was none. He reached for the door, acting on reflex, intending to open it and find the switch in the corridor outside.

  It wouldn’t open.

  He rattled it, yanked at it, slammed his shoulder against it, feeling a thrumming panic start to build in his gut.

  And then he understood.

  They’d done something no one had ever done to him in his life. Something there wasn’t even a word for in Syndicate-standard English. Something he’d never heard of anyone doing except in the most ancient and appalling tales of human cruelty. They had locked him in.

  He backed away from the door. His fingers stung from wringing at the unyielding metal latch. He was panting like an animal, and he made a conscious effort to slow his breath. Had Osnat done this? Did human beings do such things to each other and not just to constructs? And if so, then why hadn’t Korchow warned him?

  Arkasha would have known, he caught himself thinking for the thousandth time. Arkasha with his insatiable fascination with humans. Arkasha with his history books and his political philosophy and his ancient literature. Arkasha could probably even have come up with some explanation crazy enough to make sense of such a crime.

  So why am I here instead of you, Arkasha? And what has Korchow done to you?

  He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and paced back and forth trying to tire himself out, but the mere thought of the locked door made his guts churn. He tried the latch again, working at it systematically, hoping he’d just failed to understand the proper way to open it. But no. It was locked after all.

  Finally, out of options, he did what he should have done in the first place and sat down on the floor to watch the ants.

  There were perhaps three hundred of them. They emerged from the narrow crack between wall and deckplating, wound across the floor in the classic branching and puddling fractals of a colonizing swarm, and disappeared into a facing crevice just as lightless and impenetrable as the first. They were a river, a living stream of thoraxes that glittered like spilled oil under the sickly gleam of the shipboard lighting. They shouldn’t have been here. They were pests. No one had ever meant to bring them into space. And yet here they were, welling from the ship’s intestines like blood from an open wound: poor ravaged Earth wreaking her revenge through these, her smallest foot soldiers.

  Arkady dipped a finger into the flood and let the tiny minor workers swarm onto his hand so he could get a closer look at them. He felt a mild sting as one of them took an experimental bite out of him. He blew the ants off his hand—brushing them off might have crushed delicate legs and antennae, and he’d never been able to bear hurting ants avoidably. He rubbed at the bite pensively and forced his mind back to the same question that had obsessed him since that first meeting with Andrej Korchow.

  Why Arkady? What made him different from all the thousands of other Arkadys on the half dozen Syndicate orbital stations and surface settlements? Why had Korchow extended his miraculous offer of clemency to Arkady and Arkasha? Arkady had spent his whole life studying ecosystems and biospheres: mapping the complex web of interlocking energy cycles that drove the metabolism of a living planet. It was only natural for him to apply these skills to his current situation. But all his attempts to construct a coherent picture of Novalis and its aftermath had failed miserably. Whatever confidence he’d had in his ability to grasp the underlying structures of his own life, it had vanished into Novalis’s impenetrable jungle.

  He shuffled back to the sink, poured a fresh glass of water, and entertained himself by sprinkling it in the swarm’s path. A few solitary foragers responded, dipping into the spilled water and marching back to their companions with miniscule droplets glittering between their raised pincers like diamonds set in amber. But the main body of the swarm flowed on, too firmly in the grip of the swarm-colonize pheromone to turn aside even for life’s ultimate necessity.

  Arkady kept up the attempt for a while, wishing he had his collecting gear. He searched for the telltale elongated thorax of an ambulatory queen, trying to recall whether colonizing Pharaoh ants took their supernumerary queens with them or sequestered and assassinated them.

  Then he just sat, numb with exhaustion, and watched the ants hurtle from one darkness to another in search of a moveable idea called home.

  Arkady woke with a start, knowing, though he couldn’t have said why, that he wasn’t alone.

  He rolled over and saw Moshe sitting in the chair beside his bed, bathed in the secondhand starlight refracted off the tanker’s solar collectors.

  “We need to talk,” Moshe said.

  Arkady sat up, pulling the rough blanket around his nakedness.

  “What time is it?”

  “Early. Or late, depending on how you want to look at it. But then I guess people who grow up in space don’t get station lag. You want to get dressed, go ahead.”

  He got up and put his clothes on. Moshe’s eyes tracked him across the room.

  “Can I use the toilet?”

  “No one’s stopping you.”

  He went into the bathroom, shut the door behind him, blew his nose, and went back out again.

  Moshe was still in the chair, but now the lights were on. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing Arkady back to the bed.

  The bed that had seemed so hard when he was trying to fall asleep now felt too soft. He couldn’t sit up straight in it. And there was some-thing ignominious about slumping in the ruins of his crumpled sheets while Moshe sat on his chair as neat and straight as a toy soldier.

  “It seems my superiors have gotten cold feet, Arkady. The
y’ve decided to make me decide whether we should run you through the Embargo or just dump you back into the pond to be snapped up by the next fish that happens by. In other words they’ve figured out how to put my ass on the line for decisions they’re getting paid to make. Do they promote self-serving incompetents in the Syndicates too? Or have you people evolved beyond that sort of thing?”

  “Uh…not quite yet.”

  “Well, I guess that should make me feel better.” He cocked his head as if he were taking the measure of his feelings. “It doesn’t. By the way, Arkady, we’re on spin. Is that a problem for you?”

  “Would it make any difference if I said it was?”

  “No. But I thought I’d ask. My mother raised me to be polite. You do know what a mother is, don’t you?”

  “I’ve seen dogs have puppies,” Arkady said doubtfully.

  Moshe gave him a hard unfriendly look. “Novalis,” he said after a moment. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything. Tell me about the survey mission. Tell me about this genius, Arkasha, and his brilliant discovery. That’s what you’re selling, isn’t it? Some genetic weapon this Arkasha person discovered?”

  “Not a weapon. An antidote.”

  Moshe snorted. “If you think there’s a difference between the two, then you’ve grossly misunderstood the last five hundred years of human history.”

  Arkady blinked and cleared his throat. This line of conversation felt dangerous; technical knowledge was one thing, but Moshe could read him far too well when they strayed into broad-brush ideological debates. “Arkasha didn’t discover it. I told you. The UN spliced it and tried to use it against us in violation of the Treaty provisions. Arkasha just isolated a sample. I’m willing to trade it to you.”

  “In exchange for what? And don’t give me some candyass speech about genetic diversity.”

  “For Arkasha’s safety.”

  “Keep talking.” Moshe’s face remained impassive. “I’m listening.”

  Arkady collected himself and tried to pull the story together in his mind the way Korchow had told him to tell it. But it was like giving a shape to water. And Korchow wasn’t the one who was going to have to face Moshe’s fists and feet if he was caught out in a lie.

  “Novalis wasn’t just a survey mission,” he began tentatively. “It was more of a survey and a terraforming mission all in one. Novalis was selected based on unmanned probe telemetry. We’re looking for the same thing everyone’s looking for: abandoned Evacuation-era terraforming starts. Bare branch colonies are the best, of course, but synthetic biospheres are tricky. If something killed off the original colonists, there’s always the chance it could still be around to kill you.”

  “What do you mean, killed off?” Moshe interrupted. “Like…predators?”

  “Uh…no.” Was that a joke? “More like mold. Anyway…what we do isn’t really all that different from what UN terraformers do. We just do it with a smaller team.”

  And a smaller safety margin. But there was no reason to tell Moshe about that. God knew what he’d make of it. Probably file a report about how the Syndicates were so desperate they were throwing terraformers away like soldier ants.

  “But you guys are a hell of a lot better at terraforming than humans are,” Moshe prompted.

  “Well, half the planets on the Periphery were terraformed by corporate-owned constructs. And some of them came over in the Breakaway. We have a lot of expertise. And we don’t have the evolutionary baggage humans have. We don’t try to treat synthetic biospheres as if they were Earth before the ecological collapse. We’ve shaped our entire social organism to respond to the ecophysical realities of postterrestrial…”

  Moshe shifted restlessly. “Okay. Let’s start with the team members. How many of you were there?”

  “Ten.”

  “Home Syndicates?”

  “Two from Aziz. Two B’s from Motai. Then the two Banerjees and us four from Rostov.”

  “Why four team members from Rostov? Was Rostov commanding the mission?”

  “I’m not sure what…”

  “I mean did Rostov have some kind of final say on mission-critical decisions?”

  “No.” Arkady grimaced. “The Aziz A’s did.” That had been the first fatal error the joint steering committee had inflicted on them.

  “And what’s the communications lag between Novalis and the nearest Bose-Einstein relay?”

  Arkady looked at Moshe, thought about lying, and decided it wasn’t worth it. “Six hundred and twelve days if you hit the short trajectory launch window.”

  “Which would mean the closest BE-relay has to be…let’s see, somewhere offshore of Kurzet’s star? Don’t worry,” Moshe said in reply to Arkady’s stricken look. “I’m sure UNSec would care, but we don’t tell them everything. Actually, we don’t tell them shit unless they really lean on us. Still, I would have thought the Syndicates were seeding thicker out there.”

  “Bose-Einstein relays cost money. And the kind of people who are willing to sell to the Syndicates want cash.”

  “Thought you clones were making money hand over fist since peace broke out.”

  “Not BE-relay kind of money.”

  Moshe acknowledged this truth with a rueful nod that made Arkady realize tech poverty must be a daily fact of life on Earth, just as it was in the Syndicates. “So you guys were real old-time explorers, huh? Alone in the Deep with no one on the other end of the comm but a two-year-gone ghost. What was supposed to happen if you ran into real-time trouble?”

  “We had a tactical unit on ice we could wake up. If we had to.”

  “And you were going to keep them under for three years plus travel time? Haven’t you people ever heard of fair labor practices?”

  Arkady guessed this must be a joke, so he smiled.

  “Seriously, though. Why didn’t you thaw them out as soon as things started to go sour?”

  Arkady repressed a shudder. “You’ve never met tacticals.”

  “Weren’t the Ahmeds tacticals?”

  “The Ahmeds are A’s. Military, yes. But not tacticals.” Not by a long shot. And the fact that Moshe could confuse the two things suddenly seemed like a measure of the profound hopelessness of ever coming to an understanding with humans.

  Moshe must have sensed Arkady’s dismay, because he backed off suddenly. When he spoke again his voice was casual, almost companionable.

  “Do you mind if I ask a personal question? It’s silly, really. But let’s just say I’m curious.”

  “Okay,” Arkady said cautiously, the memory of the last time he’d failed to answer one of Moshe’s little questions still throbbing in his gut.

  “Why is Korchow so ugly? By Syndicate standards, I mean. By human standards he’s perfectly decent-looking.”

  “Dishy,” Osnat drawled.

  Arkady practically jumped out of his skin. When had she come in? And how in God’s name had she done it without his seeing her?

  She looked like she’d just woken up. She’d swapped her civilian clothes for a faded but carefully ironed T-shirt, desert drab fatigues, and brown leather paratrooper’s boots. The boots were run-down at the heel, but they had that glassy sheen that can only be achieved by years of spit and parade wax. And the short sleeves of her T-shirt rode up over her biceps to reveal a tattoo on one arm that Arkady hadn’t seen before: a flying tiger, its bared fangs and unsheathed claws neatly framed by long-pinioned eagle’s wings.

  “The Knowles A’s are meant to look human,” Arkady explained, speaking to both of them. “It makes their work easier.”

  “But it must make life difficult for them back home.”

  “No. They…they look the way they’re meant to look. A Knowles construct who looked any other way would be norm-deviant.”

  Moshe laughed. “And what about you, Arkady? How do you norm out? You’re quite the pretty boy. Osnat’s been making calf eyes at you ever since she marched you through the airlock. Was Arkasha a pretty boy too? Or was he a deviant?”

&nbs
p; “Arkasha’s not a deviant!”

  “Then how come Korchow threw him in a euth ward? Because he tried to defect, like you? Let’s face it, Arkady, the only Syndicate constructs who defect to UN space are spies, perverts, and deviants. Which one was Arkasha? And which are you?”

  But Arkady couldn’t answer. Moshe’s first sentence had raked through his mind and left it too raw and tattered to comprehend the rest.

  “Who told you…how do you know that Arkasha’s in a renorming center?”

  “Come on, Arkady. You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then at least tell me how old the information is. You can tell me that, can’t you?”

  “Our last news from your side of the Line is about a month old.”

  “Then we have to hurry,” Arkady said urgently. “You have to make up your minds fast.”

  “Why? It’s not like Arkasha has a date with the hangman. All he has to do is act normal and he’s out. And even if he can’t do that…well, what about that famous poet, what’s his name? People can sit on the euth wards for years.”

  “Arkasha won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he told me if he was ever sent for renorming again he’d kill himself.”

  Moshe made a sceptical face. “Very convenient. I start to balk and you pull a potential suicide out of your hat to make sure I gulp down the bait without taking the time to look at it too closely. Nicely done…for an amateur.”

  “I’m not making it up! And I wasn’t ordered here either, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

  “Don’t play word games with me, Arkady. You people don’t have to be ordered to throw away your lives. That’s why you’re the next step on the evolutionary ladder, isn’t that right? That’s why you’re going to wipe us out and usher in a brave new world without humans.”

  “We don’t want to wipe you out,” Arkady whispered. “We just want to be left alone.”

  Moshe stood up, circled the room, went to the porthole, and stared out at the sharp silver night. “Did you fight in the war, Arkady?”

  No need to say which war. The struggle between the UN and the Syndicates had subsided to a lethal simmer, but it was still the axis along which every other conflict lined up. Even on lonely backward Earth.