They were from RostovSyndicate’s A-12 series, and as the numbering suggested they had a high rate of genetic overlap with Arkady’s own A-11 line. A higher rate than was normal, in fact; it was quite unusual for newly spliced genelines to be cleared for large-scale production two years running, and it had happened under the auspices of a now-legendary design team. Looking down the table at them, Arkady felt a swell of possessive pride at the phenomenal quality of his fellow Rostovs’ work—a pride that was enhanced, rather than reduced, by the fact that he would never know their names or be able in any way to distinguish them from their thousands of cogenetics.
The final workpair was represented by only one of its members—the other one presumably being on bridge duty at the moment. Both the Banerjees on the Novalis mission were astrophysicists with a secondary specialization in engineering that allowed them to cover for the Aziz pilots during the in-flight portions of the mission. Ranjipur…and Shrinivas, wasn’t it? Arkady found it very difficult to remember individual names. He couldn’t begin to imagine how humans managed the trick. But Banerjee was one of the original pre-Breakaway Syndicates, and it took pride in not using the post-Breakaway naming conventions. It also took pride, like RostovSyndicate, in resisting the newer Syndicates’ move toward caste-based genelines. So all the Banerjees, no matter what bizarre letters their names might start with, were A’s.
“All right,” said Laid-back Ahmed when the introductions had wound down and Arkady had begun to make some inroads into his curry. “On to important things. Like who’s going to make breakfast tomorrow?”
“I actually like cooking?” one of the Bellas said in a voice so hesitant it sounded like a question.
Arkady had already given up on telling the Bellas apart. Now he realized that the one speaking was standing holding a dish towel in her hands and apparently getting ready to do everyone’s dishes. The Motai Bs couldn’t be thinking that the others expected them to clean up after them, could they? That wasn’t just series specialization. It was rank humanism !
“On the other hand,” Bella went on, “Arkasha does seem to have started off very well…”
“Arkasha?” Laid-back Ahmed was grinning incredulously at her. “The rest of us haven’t even exchanged a full sentence with him and you’re already on a nickname basis?”
“He’s nice…”
“You think everyone’s nice,” her sib said, making a sour face. Suddenly Arkady realized that it wasn’t going to be at all hard to tell the two Bellas apart.
“Well, he is nice.” Shy Bella—as Arkady was already privately calling her—twisted the dishrag between her pale hands and appealed to Arkady for support. “Isn’t he?”
“Uh…I’ve never met him, actually.”
Six pairs of amazed eyes turned to stare at Arkady.
“Shit,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “On a three-year mission? That takes balls.”
“Well, we were supposed to meet first. But his last assignment ran over. And then there was something about a delayed surface-to-station flight. And then…well…”
“Sounds like the beginning of a bad romance novel,” scoffed Aurelia the surgeon.
“Don’t listen to her!” her sib cried. “There is no such thing as a bad romance novel. Besides, he’s cute, Arkady. A little skinny but really, really cute.” She winked conspiratorially. “Not that I’d know what boys think is cute, of course.”
“Oh, leave him alone, you two, he’s turning red as a beet!” Laid-back Ahmed gave Arkady a reassuring clap on the shoulder. It felt like being hit by a cargo hauler. “They’re just being silly women, Arkady. Arkasha’s a hard worker and a good pre-citizen in every way that counts. It’ll be fine. I’m sure it will.”
“You’re sure what will be fine?” said a voice Arkady knew like his own skin.
Arkasha—though it would be weeks before Arkady actually began to call him that—had paused in the doorway to take stock of the room before entering, just as Arkady himself had. But where Arkady had hovered hesitantly on the threshold, smiling and looking for answering smiles, his sib lounged against the door frame eyeing his crewmates with the cool detachment of a designer evaluating preculls for conformity to geneline norms.
“Uh, nothing,” Ahmed covered. “The curry’s fantastic, by the way. We were just talking about whether you might be willing to share cooking duty with Bella here.”
“I might. The sweater looks good on you, Arkady.”
Syndicate children learned very early not to say the words my or mine in polite company. Our was socially acceptable, as long as it was never applied to any group smaller than the whole geneline. But the singular possessive was beyond the pale. Still, there was a way of saying the that meant my. And that was the way Arkasha had just said it.
Arkady felt a hot flush creeping up his face. “Oh. Um. It’s very warm. Thank you.”
“Too warm for me.” Arkasha gave him a measuring look, squinting and tilting his head to one side. “And you fill it out better across the shoulders. You should keep it.”
Before Arkady could think to thank him, Arkasha slung his wiry frame onto the bench next to Laid-back Ahmed and started haggling over what scut work he and Bella could get out of in exchange for cooking. He adopted a sly, self-mocking tone that soon had Bella laughing and blushing and Ahmed threatening to take up cooking himself if it was that advantageous.
Meanwhile Arkady took advantage of the momentary distraction to covertly ogle his new pairmate.
He saw a slighter, slenderer, more refined version of himself. Arguably a little too refined; but beyond that quibble he was as perfectly norm-conforming as any A-11 Arkady had ever met. And of course he had the sleek, dark, classic Rostov hair instead of the chaotic whirl of cowlicks that greeted Arkady in the mirror every cycledawn. Aurelia had been right. Arkasha was very handsome. But he was also…unsettling.
Arkasha looked up and caught Arkady eyeing him. Then he glanced at Arkady’s heaping plate and raised an eyebrow. “The condemned man ate hearty.”
“I’ll probably throw it all up in half an hour,” Arkady answered. “But the body wants what the body wants.”
“It certainly does,” Arkasha acquiesced. “And speaking of the body, for what sins were you sent here?”
Arkady choked. “Uh…I do ants.”
“Well, that’s certainly grave. But I suppose we can forgive you.”
Shy Bella giggled again.
“What about you?” Arkasha asked her. “What obese, wrinkled, and importunate steering committee crone did you refuse to sleep with in order to achieve the dubious honor of this assignment?”
“I didn’t. None of them asked. Just grilled me on ideology so they wouldn’t have to admit they knew less about terraforming than a lowly B. Come to think of it I’ve never slept with an A.” She cocked her head prettily—a move that had a visible effect on her sib. “Should I be insulted, do you think?”
“Well,” Arkasha announced magnanimously, “I’m always available if you’d like to broaden your repertoire.”
And everyone laughed the nervous, keyed-up, self-conscious laughter that always accompanied the mention of the ultimate taboo.
“You should be more careful what you say,” Arkady told Arkasha when they were finally alone together in the relative privacy of their cabin.
That hadn’t come out the way he meant it to, he realized. He’d meant it to sound…well, how had he meant it to sound? What the hell had he been thinking, actually?
He cleared his throat nervously. “Top or bottom bunk?”
“I’d prefer the top if that’s all right with you.”
“Okay.”
But neither of them moved toward the bunks. Instead, Arkasha seemed to be taking cautious stock of his new pairmate; and Arkady took the opportunity to get another look at the man who was going to be the most important person in his life, for good or bad, for the next two years.
He saw him with a crèchemate’s well-trained eye. He passed over the things a stranger w
ould have noticed first: the graceful proportion of hip and shoulder; the refined intellectual’s face that spoke so clearly of their geneline’s unique character and talents; the clean planes of jaw and cheekbone and temple; the slight Cupid’s bow of the upper lip that the Rostov designers had settled on as the perfect compromise between beauty and manliness.
Instead, he saw the little details that crèchemates learned early to take heed of. That his new pairmate carried a good five kilos less than their crècheyear average, a sure sign of a nervous disposition. That he had a habit of balancing on his toes as if he were perpetually expecting the unexpected, and had learned from experience that the unexpected was usually unpleasant. That his narrow face radiated intelligence and character, but also a wounded reserve that did not bode well for Arkady’s personal life over the course of the next two years.
The sardonic façade was just that, Arkady realized. A defensive weapon honed to a sharp edge in order to keep others off-balance and at a distance. Except that a Syndicate construct had no more reason to keep his crèchemates at a distance than a human child had to keep his own brothers and sisters at a distance.
Arkady’s first impression of the man had been right; he was about as safe and predictable as an unexploded bomb.
Arkasha grinned suddenly. “That’s some set of cowlicks you’ve got there. Classic fuzzy 18 defect. Some poor slob at the splicing scope must have caught an earful of misery over that screwup.”
“Gee, no one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Scarred for life, were you?” The grin broadened. “Children can be such monsters.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Arkady lied.
“Then your crèche must have been a kinder, gentler place than mine was.”
Arkady cleared his throat. “You’re from Crèche Seven?” he asked, trying to paper over the silence with small talk.
“That’s right.”
“I had a pairmate from Seven, uh, let’s see…the assignment before last? A glaciologist. Big guy, seventy kilos easy, played goalie for the Crèche Seven team. Ring any bells?”
“Not that I can hear.”
“Most of the Arkadys from Seven are above height norm,” Arkady babbled on. “At least in our year.”
The grin faded to a sardonic smirk. “They put in a special order for big and dumb our year.”
“Good footballers too.” He assessed the lean but well-muscled frame of the man in front of him. “You play?”
“Alas, I’m not temperamentally suited to team sports.”
“Me neither, actually. Not that I don’t like the company. But I suppose when it really comes down to it, I’d rather be poking around under dead logs looking for ants.”
This elicited a broader smile from Arkasha—but no answering confession.
“I read your articles on the Aenictus gracilis,” Arkasha said. He fixed Arkady with an intense stare, as if he were trying to send or decipher some vital secret message. “It’s extremely fine work. As good as anything I’ve seen in years. I particularly liked your paper on the adaptive value of dissent in collective decisionmaking. It was…thought-provoking.”
Arkady’s academic advisory committee had thought that paper was thought-provoking too. And a few other less complimentary things that had earned Arkady a friendly but still highly unnerving visit from a renormalization counselor. He hadn’t exactly abandoned his dissent research after that…but he’d certainly been more circumspect in the words he used to write about it. Ants had such overwhelming symbolic value in Syndicate society that people were apt to make overheated comparisons. Metaphor creep could twist even the most solid science into politics. Sometimes Arkady envied the pre-Evacuation human entomologists who had done the pioneering work on social insect societies. They’d been able to draw much bolder conclusions than he could…mainly because the moralists of their day and age had been too busy pestering the beleaguered primate researchers.
Now Arkasha was saying something about multivalent superstructure, whatever that was. “You were careful not to cite it, of course, but surely the reference to Kennedy on Althusser is implicit?”
“They’re just ants,” Arkady said, falling back on the same formula that had always gotten him out of trouble before.
“You don’t write about them as if you thought they were just ants.”
They stared at each other. Arkasha seemed to be searching for something in Arkady’s face and not finding it. Finally he sighed and settled back on his heels a little. When he turned away there was a sad little slump to his shoulders. “Oh well,” he murmured. “The work’s still good. That’s the main thing. And I certainly won’t give you anything to complain about in that department.”
“Listen,” Arkady stammered. “I didn’t mean to offend you earlier. What I said about Bella, about watching what you say…it came out all wrong. I just meant that…well, sometimes it’s better to be a little careful at the beginning of an assignment when you don’t know everyone yet. Some people can’t tell the difference between a joke and reality.”
Arkasha squared his shoulders and set his sardonic mask firmly back in place. “What makes you think you offended me?” he asked. “And for that matter what makes you think it was a joke?”
That was when Arkady really began to panic.
“Uh…top bunk you said? I’ll just leave this stuff here on the bottom then, and…er…uh…I really need to get down to the lab now and make sure everything got on board in one piece and—”
“Relax,” Arkasha said, with that same mocking little smile lingering on his lips. “My perversions aren’t nearly that simple.”
Later Arkady would hear the seed of Arkasha’s sickness in those words. He would parse them, shuffle them, turn them over like a fortune-teller’s cards, looking for the first misstep on the long slide toward exile.
But in that moment he saw only the face that was his and not his; the eyes that were his and not his; and the soul behind the eyes, as complex and intractable and miraculous as a living planet.
A POLITICALLY USEFUL TOOL
Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare…will be vastly different than it is today…the distinction between military and commercial space systems—combatants and noncombatants—will become blurred…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.
—Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces, and Resources for a New Century. A Report of the Project for the New American Century. (SEPTEMBER 2000)
All Arkady ever knew for certain about running the blockade was that he was drugged into dazed half-consciousness for most of the trip.
He remembered the ship; the stretched, surreal claustrophobia of jump dreams; an interlude of bright refracted sunlight slicing through the mirrored canyons of Ring-side skyscrapers; the hard eyes and sunburned faces of the security guards at the El Al boarding gate. Then he was waking up and his fellow passengers were bursting into the chorus of “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” and the shuttle was streaking over impossibly blue water toward the white rooftops and glittering solar panels of Tel Aviv.
Ben Gurion International Airport was a marvel of architectural design, but it had been built a century before the Evacuation and the artificial ice age. By the time they’d been on the ground for five minutes, Arkady’s fingers were aching with cold.
Osnat dove down the concourse, pulling Arkady along in her wake. People hurried past, jostling and pushing. There were so many faces, each one shockingly different from every other, and all hardened by the grim battle of all-against-all that seemed to constitute normal life for humans.
“Who’s that?” Arkady asked, pointing to a vast, grainy photograph that filled most of the wall above the Departures and Arrivals board.
“Theodor Herzl. And don’t point. People are jumpy here.”
Two girl soldiers strod
e by, automatic weapons held at the half-ready. A man with the reddest hair Arkady had ever seen elbowed between him and Osnat, practically tripping him. While Arkady was still flailing for balance, a raucous group of women barreled into him, several of them with screaming children in tow. They all had the same blond curls and freckled skin, and there was a faint but reassuring similarity to the shape of their faces. Not the clear, clean melody of a single geneset, but something at least approaching the harmonious chord of a Syndicate’s component genelines. The group enveloped Arkady, carrying him along in their wake. When Osnat backtracked to rescue him, he turned to stare over his shoulder, reduced to openmouthed amazement by his first sight of a “family.”
And then came the ads.
There were no visibly wired people in the crowd—ceramsteel filament was Earth-illegal because it had to be manufactured in microgravity—but the airport itself was still on-grid, and the air overhead crackled and glittered with publicity spins.
NORAM-ARC JEWS FOR PEACE NOW said one banner that popped alarmingly into midair just over Arkady’s head. A second ad plunged him into a sunlit grove of frost-resistant oranges populated by smiling kibbutzniks who urged him to “exercise your Right of Return right now” by buying from Kehillot Tehilla Realty. A third spin, which perplexed Arkady enough to bring him to a standstill, proclaimed j-cupid.com “the number one Jewish singles dating and matchmaking service” and advised him in a perky voice that fertility/virility stats on all registered singles were just one click away. “Don’t you deserve someone special?” the voice-over asked in a tone that seemed actually to imply that “special” was a good thing.
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