Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  “I was too young.”

  “Too young to remember it, or just too young to fight in it?”

  Visions of burnt-out crèches. Visions of the once-vibrant rings of ZhangSyndicate gutted to hard vac. Visions of shooting stars that were dying ships and pilots…but, hush, don’t tell the crèchelings. “Just too young to fight,” he said at last.

  Arkady had been six when the shooting started. The official fighting between the UN and Syndicate armies had been bloody beyond the imagination of a spacefaring age, but the riots had been worse. Posthuman populations all along the Periphery had revolted, whether because they supported the Breakaway or merely because it thinned out the omnipresent UN Peacekeepers enough for them to make a bid for their own independence. The UN had met violence with violence, and Peacekeepers had fired on demonstrating crowds in eight of the fifteen trusteeships. The shootings touched off riots throughout the Periphery, forcing the UN to fight a war on two fronts…a war that many people had come to see not as a political conflict but as a struggle to the death between two species battling for possession of the same ecological niche.

  Arkady eyed Moshe, taking in the clever resolute face, the thin yet strong body. “Did you fight in the War for Independence?”

  “If you’re going to talk about it to humans, you might want to consider calling it something else. But no, I didn’t. Earthers aren’t required to make troop contributions for off-world Peacekeeping missions.” Moshe sat down again and leaned forward to stare at Arkady. “But I saw the war on the evening spins. You fought like ants. You died and died and died until the Peacekeepers had nervous breakdowns from having to shoot so many of you. What do your officers threaten you with to make you fight like that?”

  “We have no officers.”

  “Then what are you afraid of? People only fight like that when they’re faced with something that scares them worse than dying.”

  Later Arkady would see this moment as a turning point. Before it, he had managed, just barely, to keep Moshe guessing. After it, Moshe and Osnat both knew in their guts what he really was…even if it took their brains a while to catch up with the knowledge.

  “Some things are stronger than fear,” he whispered.

  “Name one.”

  He hesitated, acutely aware of Osnat’s gaze boring into his back. There were plenty of safe words he could have chosen. Duty. Honor. Gene loyalty. Genetic gifting. If he’d latched on to any of those abstract concepts he could have kept up the lie. He could have remained the empty vessel that Korchow wanted him to be: a vessel into which Moshe could pour his own beliefs and desires without ever touching on the real truth of what had happened on Novalis.

  Instead, Arkady uttered what seemed to be the only word left inside his rattlingly empty skull:

  “Love.”

  NOVALIS

  The Spirit of the Hive

  Sex is an antisocial force in evolution. Bonds are formed between individuals in spite of sex and not because of it. Perfect societies, if we can be so bold as to define them as societies that lack conflict and possess the highest degree of altruism and coordination, are most likely to evolve where all of the members are genetically identical.

  —E. O. WILSON (1973)

  ARkady woke to the smell of curry.

  No solid food for twelve hours before the coffin: that was the rule for all cold shipping on the Syndicate’s creaking fleet of Bussard-drive-powered interstellar ships. It was rumored that this precaution had been rendered obsolete by the newest generation of UN-built jumpships. But that kind of wishful rumor, fueled by privation, envy, and cryophobia, was always winging its way through the vacuum between the various Syndicate orbital stations. And given the fact that Arkady felt as if he’d fasted through every day of the long months of slow drift from Gilead to Novalis, the extra twelve hours hardly seemed significant.

  He sat up, rubbing at skin raw with freezer burn and fighting his way out of the bruised haze of jump hangover. There was a thrumming, flickering whisper in the air, below and beyond the normal shipboard noises, as if quick fingers were tap tap tapping along the ship’s hull out there in the starless dark.

  A dust field? Please let it only be a dust field.

  They were running ahead of the charts now, flying half-blind on spectrometry that was years out of date before it ever reached them, with only the skill of their superbly spliced and trained pilots standing between them and hull breach. In its wake the ship shed a maelstrom of astronomical and navigational data that would guide later ships on the same journey. But up ahead there was only the razor-thin spin-stream from the unmanned probes. And though space was empty, it wasn’t so empty that you could jump off the edge of the map and be sure you weren’t going to hit something.

  Arkady’s clothes lay in the hold-all beside his coffin, neatly folded in an airtight insectproof flatpack: orbsilk shirt and trousers that hung loose on his dehydrated body and still smelled faintly of the sweet clean air of KnowlesSyndicate; soft stationside shoes whose soles and uppers blended into each other with a seamlessness that went a long way toward explaining why hand-thrown orbsilk had become the Syndicate’s number one cash crop since the Trade Compact with the UN worlds; the little rucksack, neither indecently large nor puritanically small, that contained all the moveable property he held separately from RostovSyndicate’s communal stores.

  Someone had left a sweater beside the rucksack: a thick rollneck with the soft hand and deep rippling color that only the most carefully spliced and cosseted worms could produce. It was a “think of me” if Arkady had ever seen one: the kind of beautiful luxury object that might be passed to a crèchemate setting off for a distant assignment with the ritual words: “think of me when you use it.” And it was just the thing for a body still in the shivering grip of cold sleep.

  He stood up and felt the sharp tug of the ship’s .4 gs on muscles raised in microgravity. The retrofitted lab and ark modules of the ship would be in the old zero-g cargo bays—places that the human designers had never meant to be shirtsleeve working environments but that were the closest thing to home the retrofitted UN ship could provide for its new passengers. In contrast, the cryobay, bridge, and crew quarters had all been designed to provide humans with the rotational gravity their skeletons and immune systems required. The Syndicate crew, who needed fake gravity not at all, would just have to live with the sore muscles and broken equipment.

  Arkady had to squeeze past the tacticals’ still-active coffins to reach the corridor. He slid past with a shudder, trying not to look too closely at what slumbered beneath the backlit viruflex. He hadn’t seen a tactical since the UN invasion…and he hoped never to see another.

  The corridor hugged the outer hull of the ship, and sure enough the rustling whisper was louder there. He peered through the nearest viewport. White hull plunging away into blackness. And out on the edge of darkness something so strange that it took him several stunned moments to identify it.

  They were flying through a forest.

  Leaves pattered on the hull like raindrops. Twigs and branches rasped down its length like fingernails scrabbling for purchase. A mulberry leaf tumbled past, and the shipboard running lights flashed on the bright tracery of veins that had exploded into ice crystals when they hit hard vac. The leaf was followed by an orbsilk cocoon, its priceless golden worm dead inside it. Then a woman’s hairbrush, turning lazily end over end, its momentum so close to the ship’s own that it seemed to slide sternward at little more than strolling speed.

  This was the ship they’d been sent to overtake, hurtling along their same trajectory, its hull open to the void, its silk gardens shredded by decompression, its little ark of living treasures cast upon the deep. Arkady tore his eyes away from the viewport. He had known, they had all known, that another ship had tried to reach Novalis before them and failed. But it was one thing to know it. It was another thing to hear the lost lives picking at the hull like hungry ghosts.

  There are so very few of us, he whispered to th
e gods of the void, if there were any. I can stand dying. But not for nothing. Let Novalis be the home we need so badly. Who knows how many more chances we’ll have?

  Arkady had spent only four hours on the ship before going into cryo, so the smell of the curry led him more surely than his vague memories of the hab module’s configuration. The ship seemed smaller and harder-used than he remembered it. A trick of perception; in point of fact, it had barely been used at all during the two years they’d spent in cold sleep. And it was just the right size for the ten members of the survey team, most of whom were already in the dayroom, nursing their cryo hangovers and watching Novalis slowly stealing real estate from the black void on the wall monitor.

  They’d put the dayroom in one of the old UN-designed zero-g lab modules on the theory that if you were going to relax, you might as well be comfortable. But it still had the oddly cramped look that so many UN-built ships did; as if the humans who designed them had never quite grasped that there were no ceilings in free fall. And the survey team were all sitting at the table on the “floor” side of the room rather than lounging comfortably around its various corners the way they would naturally have done in a Syndicate-designed room.

  Arkady scanned the faces around the table, but he didn’t see the one familiar face he most wanted to see. His pairmate had arrived, hadn’t he? Surely they wouldn’t have launched without the mission’s head geneticist?

  “Hair of the dog?” someone asked, proffering a squeezeball of beer.

  The entire ten-person survey team had agreed, in a deal brokered by the two Banerjees, to use half their personal weight allowances for brewing supplies. Arkady had taken the agreement as a good omen for the people who would be his only companions for the duration of the mission.

  He took a sip and blinked in surprise. “Hey, that’s actually good!”

  One of the Banerjee A’s grinned. “Pride of the Banerjees,” he said in the noble but slightly pompous tones that crèchelines learned young to associate with the Heroes of the Breakaway.

  “Plates, food, forks,” one of the Ahmeds said, pointing.

  Arkady crossed the room, aware of half a dozen pairs of eyes weighing and measuring him. He bent over the simmering pot. “Fantastic,” he said in his best fitting-in voice. “Three cheers for AzizSyndicate.”

  “Actually, we didn’t cook it,” the other Ahmed admitted. “You can thank your sib for the feast.”

  “That would make him the first Arkady I’ve ever met that could cook worth a damn.” Arkady looked at the curry with renewed suspicion, tasted it, and had to admit it was good. “And where is this marvel of culinary talent?”

  He turned around just in time to see the two Ahmeds exchange a cryptic glance.

  “Working?” one of them hazarded. And already there was that little something in his voice that should have been a warning.

  Someone ruffled Arkady’s hair, and he turned around to the welcome sight of another Rostov face. “Aurelia, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And where were you when I woke up?”

  “Hey, don’t look at me. I’m the rock doctor, not the people doctor.”

  “I see.” Arkady took a closer look at her; as the team’s single geophysicist she might well be working closely with him, depending on what they found on Novalis. “I’ll make sure to bring you any sick rocks I stumble over.”

  “I’m the people doctor,” said the other Aurelia from down at the far end of the table. “You met me an hour ago. You just don’t remember it. I’ve been sitting up with you since they popped your top, but I thought I’d let you do your last little bit of waking up in private.”

  Functioning within Syndicate society required a good dose of what Keats had once famously called negative capability: the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand you had to learn to recognize individual constructs for the purposes of work and social interaction; the human brain, however profoundly reengineered, couldn’t be entirely freed from the individual consciousness that had powered the first four hundred millennia of its evolution. On the other hand, the structures and customs of Syndicate society were all geared toward eliminating distinctions between individuals in the same geneline. A Syndicate was a family, with the same consanguinity between its various genelines that welded together human families. But your sibs, the fellow members of your own geneline, were more than family. They were you. And the individual body you inhabited—the lone physical organism inside its prison of skin and skull—was no more a whole person than an ant was a whole swarm. Geneline names reflected this. Each individual construct had a dossier, compiled over the course of his or her life by docents, professors, crèchemates, steering committee representatives; but the dossier filing number was as unreal as paperwork. On a day-to-day basis, from the moment he or she was detanked, every one of the thousands of Arkadys was simply Arkady, every Bella, Bella; every Ahmed, Ahmed; every Aurelia, Aurelia.

  If you wanted to single out one of your sibs in normal conversation, you were reduced to ad hoc nicknames or to complicated formulations like “the year seven who led the mission to Karal-20,” or “the year five who spent last year planetside working on the arctic core survey,” or “the one who told that awful joke about the dog,” or “the one who wrote the paper on cryogenesis in amphibians.”

  Or, in the grammatical construction that had fueled more grief, joy, strife, and passion than any other in all of Syndicate history: “the one I love.”

  Arkady instinctively thought of his new crewmates as geneline members first and individuals second. First—the phrase pari inter pares came somewhat sarcastically to mind—came the two AzizSyndicate Ahmeds. Their Syndicate name reflected its founder’s North Indian heritage, as did their tall soldierly frames and square-jawed faces. Arkady had met both Ahmeds briefly before launch, and had privately dubbed them “Laid-back Ahmed” and “By-the-Book Ahmed.” Laid-back Ahmed was a full centimeter taller than Aziz-8135 gene-norm, and had adopted a habitual slouch to disguise the deviation. Something about the combination of the slouch and his levelheaded self-deprecating manner promised to Arkady that he might be that rare treasure: a pilot who was tough enough to command a ship in the Deep, but modest enough to back off after planetfall and let the scientists do their jobs. By-the-Book Ahmed, on the other hand, was a cold fish and a bit of a martinet…the last kind of personality Arkady would have assigned to command a crew full of science track Rostovs and Banerjees.

  But perhaps he was just stereotyping. One of the Ahmeds’ older cogenetics was a wildly popular spin star. His sex- and violence-laden adventures were one of the great guilty pleasures in a society that had been increasingly cold and austere and rationed since the UN invasion. No one could look at any Ahmed’s muscular frame and commanding features without thinking of their famous sib, and the manly virtues that AzizSyndicate embodied in the Syndicate collective consciousness. Or that it was supposed to embody, anyway. Arkady certainly hoped that this particular pair of A-8s would bring the strengths of their phenotype to the mission at hand, rather than its failings. Because if either of them acted with the kind of impetuous arrogance their spin star sib displayed on-screen, then the whole survey team was headed for heavy weather.

  After the two Ahmeds came the two Bellas, also both present. And how typical of MotaiSyndicate to send two B series constructs. Had that really been a purely technical decision—the need to put together a work-pair with the right mix of skills for the mission—or was it a subtle transhuman dig at the older Syndicates’ resistance to caste-based series design?

  Other than the fact that they were B’s, the most remarkable thing about the two Bellas was their eerily perfect resemblance to each other. Normal constructs differed from their sibs almost as much as natural twins did. They might look identical to human eyes, but they could always tell each other apart by little variations in features, height, coloring—even cowlicks, as Arkady had reason to know. But the MotaiSyndicate B’s weren
’t twins; they were living, breathing mirrors. And the massive in vitro and postpartum culling that MotaiSyndicate used to achieve such perfection was almost as controversial among the older Syndicates as their caste-based genelines.

  It was all ideologically impeccable, of course: a ruthlessly elegant expression of the highest and purest principles of sociobiology. But it still made Arkady’s stomach curl. What would it do to a person to know that his place in life had been preordained while he was still under the splicing scope in a hierarchy as inflexible as the most rigid human class system? What would it mean to have not one or two repressed memories of culled playmates, but dozens? And what would it mean to know that at every cull you were more likely than not to fail the cut yourself?

  He saw no answer in the two Bellas’ faces—only a pale and polished beauty that didn’t even make the usual ritual nod to humanity. His first sight of those violet eyes, rimmed round with the delicate filigree of the MotaiSyndicate logo, was enough to make Arkady decide that transhumanism, for all its much-vaunted political purity, was an evolutionary step toward a future he didn’t want to live in.

  The Aurelias, on the other hand, were balm to Arkady’s homesick soul. They were Rostovs, like Arkady and his pairmate. Lean and tall, with long-fingered surgeon’s hands, and long noses, and long narrow faces that would have been forbiddingly severe if not for their humorous, sensible, intelligent expressions. They loafed elegantly at the far end of the table like a matched set of wolfhounds, leaning against each other with a casualness that made Arkady suspect they were already old friends or lovers. One look at Aurelia the surgeon was enough to tell Arkady that she must have spent her schooldays sitting in the front row, hand permanently raised, eager to prove she knew the answer to everything. One look at her sib left him equally sure that she’d spent her time in the back row passing notes and throwing spitballs and looking forward to soccer practice. The geologist was particularly recognizable at the moment because she had a little more of a tan than her cogenetic. But even when the tan faded it would be easy enough to tell those two strong personalities apart.