“What a week!” She sighed, settling next to Arkady in a flowing rustle of orbsilk. Arkady repressed the urge to move away from her. When the coffee finally spluttered to the end of its cycle he pushed off with alacrity. “Can I get you some?”
“Thanks,” she said. She made no effort to track down milk or sugar.
“Just look at that sink,” she said. “What a mess! But of course everyone’s too busy and important to do the dishes around here.”
This was pretty rich considering that Bella was undoubtedly the least busy person on board. Which gave her plenty of time to poke her sharp little nose into other people’s private lives, Arkady thought, and then repressed the thought as petty.
“Don’t you agree with me?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, settling cravenly for the path of least resistance.
“I blame the Ahmeds,” she continued. “We would never have allowed things to go this far in my home crèche. They’re too soft, too inexperienced—”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“I do. I may not be an A, but I do know enough to see when things need to be put back on track. A little constructive criticism—”
“I hardly think it’s worth calling a group critique session over a few dirty dishes, Bella.”
“Well…no…of course not. But it’s the idea, you understand.”
Arkady gave the Motai B a sideways glance, wondering once more what it would do to a person to grow up under MotaiSyndicate’s harsh normalization regimes. He tried to count up the crèchemates from his own year—very few of them, it had to be said in Rostov’s defense—who had mysteriously vanished after fifth- and eighth-year norm testing. It wasn’t easy. The docents firmly discouraged any discussion of culled crèchemates. And as always when you tried to separate the individual from the geneline, names became cumbersome. But he remembered his feelings about culled crèchemates with painful clarity. Fear. Insecurity. Gratitude to the docents who had approved and promoted and protected him. The panicky need to believe that the vanished children were deviants, and that he could avoid their fate if he just worked a little harder at being normal and well-adjusted. And, worst of all, the first dark suspicion that while most people soon learned to hate the suffering that came with culls and critique sessions, others learned that enforcing “normality” could be a source of pleasure and power.
He thought he knew which kind of person he was. And he was starting to get a pretty good idea which kind Bella was.
Meanwhile she was watching him, her beautiful features alert and hungry-looking. “I’ve noticed that your sib and my sib seem to be pretty friendly with each other,” she said.
Arkady had noticed too. He hadn’t thought much of it. After all, he spent nearly all his free time with the two Aurelias. There was nothing strange about it. The opposite sex was refreshingly…well, opposite. And you could be friendly to them without worrying about the awkward misunderstandings or sexual tensions that complicated relationships between crèchemates.
“So how are you and Arkasha getting along?” Bella asked.
“I have nothing to complain about,” Arkady said evasively.
“That’s not exactly ringing praise.”
“Well what do you want me to say? He’s smart…hardworking…uh, clean…”
They stared at each other. Arkady could feel a furious blush spreading across his face.
“Are you sleeping together yet?”
“I…uh…”
“I thought not.”
“Not everyone jumps into bed with his pairmate the first week of an assignment,” Arkady protested—and then could have kicked himself for the implicit admission. “He’s not deviant, if that’s what you’re implying.”
Bella smiled like a cat who’d just made a kill. Why hadn’t Arkady noticed that sleek, predatory complacency before?
“Deviant!” she said in a voice that was patently insincere yet somehow impossible to challenge. “I only meant that his behavior seems a bit selfish. But you’re his pairmate after all. If you’ve started wondering…and now that you mention it, he did make that odd joke the first night. And, really, the way he looks at my sib sometimes…don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”
Arkady hadn’t seen it. Arkady didn’t want to see it. Though of course now that Bella had put it into his head, he would see it. That was the problem with this kind of talk. Once someone had put the revolting idea in your mind, nothing could get it out. And you could never look at the person again without that little niggling blister of doubt rubbing at you.
In fact, Arkady did manage to put Bella’s insinuations aside for a few days, not so much through force of will but because the mission itself hit a long-overdue patch of smooth running.
The new DVI numbers were low enough to make sense but still high enough to reassure the Ahmeds. And from the moment the landing was greenlighted, the mission seemed to be running on rails. Site selection and GPS seeding went as smoothly as the most elementary training sim. Even the choice of a landing site went off with only nominal conflict. Arkasha argued for the southern tip of the larger continent, which jutted conveniently toward the equator. The Ahmeds, on the other hand, wanted to land in the temperate zone along the eastern flank of the continent. Arkasha stated his case: higher rates of evapotranspiration would translate into higher species richness, making their field time more efficient; they had a far better baseline for tropical ecosystems than for temperate ones, and so forth. But as Arkady had predicted, Arkasha had resolutely avoided doing anything since the last consult either to patch things up with Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed or cement his alliances with the other science track A’s. So while Arkady and (to everyone’s surprise) Shy Bella supported Arkasha’s preferred site, the rest of the team rapidly reached a consensus for the Ahmeds’ chosen site. To Arkady’s surprise, Arkasha backed down without a confrontation—and they settled on a likely-looking base camp site in the coastal flatlands of the main continent.
Ahmed was the first to the door when they made planetfall. He stepped up to the porthole and peered through the viruglass, gauzy white with decades of impact scratches—and caught his breath sharply enough to send a stab of fear coursing through Arkady’s body.
“What is it?” someone asked.
“Come see.”
The team bunched together in the airlock, staring up at the distant sky like miners peering out of the depths of a pit shaft. The Ahmeds had set the lander down in a broad open area that Arkady would have called a pasture had Novalis possessed any grazing animals, or any mammals at all for that matter. There was a river not far off, and it might have been visible from the landing site during what passed as winter on Novalis. At the moment, however, the line of sight extended for about sixty meters downhill and ended abruptly in a tangled, spiky, completely solid wall of greenery.
Arkady and the rest of the survey team stood in staring amazement. These were not the straggling scrub oak and cottonwoods of the Periphery’s terraformed planets, including Gilead. The trees—if you could call such giants trees—towered overhead for fifteen, twenty, forty meters. Even on a first, casual inspection Arkady counted some two dozen different species. He couldn’t begin to imagine the intricate network of interlocking water, air, and chlorophyll cycles it must take to maintain this world-girdling symphony of greenery.
Shy Bella was the first one to get her breath back and summon up words when they saw what was waiting for them outside the airlock.
“What is that?” she whispered.
Arkady craned his neck backwards, feeling like he was looking up out of a well, his ears full of a roaring like the sound of waves beating on a rocky shore.
“I think it’s a forest.”
THE ALMOST INFINITE DISTANCE BETWEEN A CAUSE AND ITS EFFECT
In war, more than any other subject, we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole…and…the vast, almost infinite distance there can be between a cause and its effect.
—CLAUSEWITZ (17
80–1831)
The real problem with chess, in Cohen’s opinion, was that the options for any given world state were so limited. What fun was it, after all, to intuit your way through a game that you could beat into submission by brute processing power?
Not that chess lacked historical and aesthetic interest. In fact, he was currently running a simulation of the Deep Blue-Kasparov match—worthwhile if only for the opportunity to admire the angels-on-pinheads acrobatics of the old-time code jockeys. But Cohen had been built with a bigger game in mind.
Life, if you wanted to call it that.
And every ant algorithm and Kohonen net in his far-flung systems was telling him that this moment—here under the tall sky of Earth, sitting in an outdoor café on the treacherous edge of the International Zone, waiting for a man who was going on forty-two minutes late by Cohen’s favorite, albeit hopelessly inaccurate, wristwatch—was one of life’s dangerous moves.
They’d waited while dawn burnished the Dome of the Rock and pressed her ice-age-cold fingers into the crooked squares and narrow alleys of the Old City. By the time the first real sun of the morning set the dust motes dancing over their table, early-rising Hasidim were returning from the Wailing Wall and the automated muezzin was wafting the call to prayer through the Temple Mount’s loudspeakers, reminding the faithful that there was no god but God and prayer was sweeter than sleep.
The streets swelled with a rising tide of early-morning commuters. Metal shutters rattled up on shop fronts. Shopkeepers called to each other in the archaic, Arabic-inflected Hebrew of the Jerusalemites.
“It’s so quiet,” Li said.
Cohen didn’t have to ask what she meant. To posthuman ears, the morning cacophony was overwhelmed by the absolute silence where all the accompanying streamspace chatter of a busy commercial street should have been.
Cohen threw out a hand to encompass the whole crooked, claustrophobic tumble of the Old City. “Behold the Great Unwired, brought to you by a multigenerational coalition of SUV-driving Americans and self-serving orbital corporations and a UN General Assembly whose environmental watchword is not-in-my-backyard!”
The technological embargo had been imposed in the late twenty-first century, when Earth was in ecological free fall and the rats were just starting to realize that they didn’t have another ship to jump to. By then the only people left on the planet were the Exempt Populations—aboriginals and major world religions—and the rogue nations. The aboriginals hadn’t caused the problem and thus, in a brilliant display of what router/decomposer liked to call human illogic, weren’t given a say in solving it. The fundamentalists just wanted to kill each other in peace without tripping over any stray Peacekeepers. And the rogue nations (a polite way of saying America) had parted ways so decisively with the UN by then that no one even bothered to ask if they wanted to participate.
America resisted, of course. But economies can’t survive indefinite solitary confinement any more than people can. Doing business with America soon became bad business as well as bad politics. The American juggernaut sputtered to a slow crawl, crippled by climate change, economic isolation, and a massive multigenerational brain drain that was gleefully encouraged by Ring-side immigration policy.
Meanwhile the technological gap between Earth and the Ring got wider with every new advance in AI design or microgravity manufacturing. The generation ships lifted off from every overpopulated and impoverished corner of the globe. And the Embargo, ostensibly a simple moratorium on sale of space-based technology to Earth, began to achieve its true purpose: the reduction of Earth’s human biomass to a level that the crippled planet could sustain.
It worked. Suburbs were swallowed up by weedlot wilderness. Trees and plants—albeit only self-pollinating ones—replaced concrete. Frogs were gone. So were butterflies, non-genetically-modified honeybees, most large mammals, and the migratory songbirds whose flocks had blackened Earth’s skies in a time beyond the reach of even Cohen’s earliest stored memories. But their ecological niches had been filled in, more or less, by other species. The world might not be as complex or as beautiful as it had been before man’s Industrial Age, but it worked. In fact, it worked well enough that people were even starting to talk about loosening the Embargo.
People on Earth, that is.
No one Ring-side wanted to hear a word about it.
The humans who imposed the Embargo had meant it to be temporary. Industrial activity would be shut down until the planet’s biogeological functions righted themselves. And when the environmental remediation was complete, everyone would move back downstairs and get back to life as normal. After all, Earth was home.
But Earth wasn’t home to the 18 billion humans and posthumans who now inhabited the Orbital Ring. To them, Earth was just another moon. But a moon with a difference: a moon that had something they desperately needed.
Water.
Earth was dry and getting drier. The Ring was thirsty and getting thirstier. And every human who wasn’t born on Earth meant a few hundred thousand extra liters of drinkable water for the Orbital Ring. So the UN offered Earth’s few remaining humans a Solomonic choice, wrapped in the neutral language of the Tech Embargo: stay on Earth and accept the overwhelming odds against ever producing live offspring, or emigrate to the Ring and enjoy all the benefits of modern genetic engineering. And in the poisoned Holy Land, where one could go days on end without seeing a single child, that choice was as stark as the choice between life and death.
A pair of Legion fighter jets flashed overhead, wreathed in a virtual mist of encrypted spinstreams.
“Stop looking at your watch,” Li griped. “It’s always slow, then you get the wrong time in your head, and I catch it from you, and it screws with my wetware.”
“That sounds fun,” Cohen quipped. “Can we try it when we get back to the hotel?”
A squadron of Legionnaires walked by, their faces young and hard behind mirrored sunglasses, the creases in their uniforms sharp enough to threaten innocent passersby with paper cuts. As they passed the café one of the young men skipped a step, bringing himself into marching rhythm with his companions with the naturalness that only comes of long training.
“The real problem,” Cohen said, returning to the subject of the watch, “is that I can’t take it to Geneva for revision anymore. No one knows how to clean a real watch properly anymore. No one has the patience.”
“Just waiting for the barbarians, are we?” Li said in a voice of patently fake sympathy.
“Yes, darling,” Cohen drawled, “but who are the barbarians these days? There are so many people lining up for the job it’s getting hard to pick a winner.”
Li smiled, but her mind was only half on the banter. She was back at work again; Cohen could feel her on the other end of the intraface, scanning the approaches, converting the three-dimensional world into a relief map of lines of fire and points of cover and potential kill zones. “If I were this late,” she muttered, “it would only be because something was wrong. Or because I was planning to make something go wrong.”
A lone Israeli man settled at the table behind them, shalomed politely, ordered a cup of black coffee, and opened up the weekend section of the Ha’aretz. A moment later two camera-toting NorAmArc pilgrims sat down at the next table over and began a high-decibel argument about whether the cog railway ran to the Dome of the Rock overlook on Saturdays. Cohen goggled at them, only to realize that his friendly Ha’aretz reader was doing the same. Their gazes crossed, and the two men shared a moment of anonymous amusement.
“You watch,” Li muttered. “The contact’s not going to show up until after lunch. And meanwhile we’re goddamn sitting ducks.”
“Relax, Catherine.”
“If you wanted relaxed, you shouldn’t have brought me. Speaking of which, why the hell are we here anyway?”
“My country calls and I answer,” Cohen quipped.
“Your country called all right. But they don’t seem to give enough of a shit about you to provide
bandwidth for the return call. Sometimes I could just strangle Hy Cohen for saddling you with this baggage.”
“He probably never thought twice about it. He could be a bit lacking in subtlety sometimes. And he never could get his brain around the idea that Israel wasn’t perfect.” Cohen grinned sheepishly. “Not all of my pig-stubborn loyalty is the Game’s fault. Some of it I come by honestly.”
Li stopped scanning the approaches and actually turned in her chair to stare at him. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit he wasn’t perfect?”
“He was anything but perfect. He slept around behind his wife’s back for one thing. I hated that. Not the adultery so much as the lying.” Cohen felt the familiar flutter of self-loathing stir somewhere near the pit of what would have been his stomach if he had one. “I despised the lying.”
“But you never told her.”
Cohen stared into the middle distance, seeing the face of the first woman he had ever loved…and who had slipped away from him just as Li was now slipping away. “She didn’t want to know,” he said at last.
“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”
He reached out for her instream, ran into a wall, and stared into her eyes only to find that they were equally unreadable. “Not you,” he whispered. “I love you.”
At that instant their contact stepped out of a narrow alley between two restaurants, glanced at them—so briefly that Cohen only caught the look when he replayed Li’s spinfeed—then looked quickly away.
Li settled in her chair, shifting her weight forward, sliding her feet farther apart. Her face was expressionless, but onstream she radiated a profound and wordless satisfaction that Cohen suspected was pretty close to what you’d get if you tapped the neural feed of a cat who’d just found a nice fat mouse to play with.
The contact turned out to be a woman, and a woman who had the history of Israel written on her face. She could have stepped straight out of a 1950s kibbutz harvest photo or a grainy black-and-white movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The rawboned farmer-turned-soldier body. The tousled fair hair and the hawklike face. The steel-blue eyes—one of them dark with the stain of an old injury.
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