Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  ‹Shrapnel?› Li asked. ‹Or did she have a rifle blow up in her face?›

  ‹Love tap from a grenade. Sayeret Golani training exercise.›

  ‹Ah. So you do know her.›

  ‹I told you, I don’t want you having any contact with people from the Office unless it’s absolutely necessary. I thought we agreed about that.›

  ‹No. I just stopped arguing about it so router/decomposer wouldn’t have to waste his time playing magical moving files for you.›

  Cohen ignored the jibe. Li could complain all she wanted to about unequal file-sharing protocols, but he wasn’t going to drop the firewall he kept between her and the boys on King Saul Boulevard as long as he had a choice in the matter. She could think up enough ways to get herself killed on her own without his help.

  ‹So what should I know about her that you’re actually willing to tell me?› Li asked.

  ‹Let’s just say that Tel Aviv might not be the most tactful topic to raise.›

  The woman stopped in front of their table, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw her head a little back and sideways in order to get her good eye on them. “Oh, so it was you back in the airport. You could have said so. Or don’t you remember me?”

  “Of course I remember you, Osnat. I just didn’t know you’d gone private sector.”

  “Lot of people’s careers went down in flames after Tel Aviv. Can’t complain. Could have been worse. Could have ended up with a bullet in the head.”

  The fury radiated off her like a bomb blast. Well, Cohen couldn’t blame her. They’d known each other very slightly. As far as she was concerned he was Gavi’s friend, end of story. And Osnat had special, complicated, and intensely personal reasons for hating Gavi.

  “I heard Gur died,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Everybody’s sorry.”

  She pulled the empty chair free of the table and sat down in it. No one spoke for a long and extremely unpleasant moment.

  “When do we get to talk to the sellers?” Li asked finally.

  Osnat ignored her. “You were supposed to come alone,” she told Cohen flatly, “not bring a golem of your own.”

  Li made her move so fast that even Cohen missed it. One moment she was on the far side of the table from Osnat. A blink later, she had her hand around the other woman’s wrist and was squeezing hard enough to drain the blood from her face.

  “Being a golem has its uses,” she said in a companionable tone. “Also, the only way to ALEF is through Cohen, and the only way to Cohen is through me. So the next time I talk to you, you’ll look me in the eye when you answer.”

  Osnat gave her a pale hostile stare. Then she did what every well-trained infantryman does when pinned down by enemy fire; she called for air support. And she called for it, of all places, from the next table.

  Cohen followed Osnat’s glance just in time to see the Ha’aretz reader put down his newspaper and smile politely at them.

  “May I join you?” he asked. He folded his newspaper into precise halves, picked up his drink, and walked over to sit next to Osnat. “Moshe Feldman,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you. Can I buy you coffee?”

  A waiter they hadn’t seen before appeared before Moshe had even raised his hand, carrying a filigreed coffee service. He deposited it on their table, poured out two eggshell-sized cups of cardamom-flavored coffee, produced a bottle of mineral water and two glasses from his apron pocket, and left.

  Cohen reached for the water.

  Moshe reached for Cohen’s hand.

  Li reached for her gun.

  “Please,” Moshe said. “Drink your coffee first.”

  Li picked hers up, drank, grimaced.

  ‹Are you all right?› Cohen asked anxiously.

  ‹God, that’s shitty coffee!›

  ‹Is that a yes or a no, Catherine?›

  ‹Yeah, I’m fine.› But as she set the cup back in the saucer he felt a chilly little quiver of pain and shock run across the intraface.

  All her systems, biological and synthetic, natural and artificial, kicked into overdrive to identify the attack and tally up the damage. Cohen could feel the churning, chaotic, complicated process unfolding as clearly as if he were inside her skin and not sitting in his own chair with two feet of air between them. Eventually she identified the cold prick of pain as the point of a needle sliding into the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. ‹It’s fine,› she told him a moment later. ‹DNA sampler.›

  ‹He’s a suspicious bastard, isn’t he?›

  ‹Unless he has some reason to mistrust us that you’re not telling me about?›

  As he picked up his own cup and felt the needle slide into Roland’s flesh, Cohen decided that the implied question in that statement was one he’d rather leave unanswered.

  It took Moshe an hour to do the genetic work.

  “Well,” Li asked when he finally returned, “are we who we say we are?”

  “Apparently. Even Cohen’s…er…”

  “Face,” Cohen prompted.

  “Right. Even the, er, face is who you told us he would be.” Moshe paused uncomfortably. “How do you acquire your bodies, by the way? Do you grow them?”

  “Good heavens, no! We’re not the Syndicates. He’s a real person. Parents, passport, bank accounts. Bank accounts that are substantially better funded since he started working for me.”

  Cohen crossed his arms, realized the gesture looked defensive, and asked himself whether deep down inside he might not have something to feel just the tiniest bit guilty about. Hadn’t Roland been meaning to put himself through medical school back when they first met? When was the last time he’d heard anything about that? Was Li right, God forbid? Did he just sort of…swallow people? He pushed away that unwelcome thought, telling himself that he’d ask Roland how med school was going next time they saw each other.

  “And how much does it cost to…what’s the right word…rent someone?”

  Cohen grinned. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

  “And it’s legal, is it?”

  “Well, mostly.” Cohen felt Li’s smirk tickling at the back of his mind. “As my associate has just pointed out, it’s easier to bend the rules when you’re filthy stinking rich.”

  “Mmm.” Moshe’s expression sharpened. “Speaking of bending the rules, I understood that ALEF would send one representative to the bidding. And that it would be someone we could vet beforehand to make sure they didn’t pose any security risks.” His eyes touched briefly on Li, then skittered away again. “But now here you are with one of the, uh, least vettable individuals in UN space.”

  ‹He could talk to me about it,› Li said. ‹What the hell’s wrong with these people, anyway?›

  “You could talk to her about it,” Cohen repeated, mimicking her annoyed tone with such painstaking precision that only someone who hadn’t grown up surrounded by the twenty-four-hour hum of spinstream traffic could have mistaken the words for Cohen’s.

  Moshe turned to face Li. “I have no problem with talking to you. Or with your genetics. Or your enhancements. Or your status under UN law, Jewish law, or any other law. What I do have a problem with is trusting a former Peacekeeper with information that we most assuredly do not wish to share with the Controlled Technology Committee.”

  “The operative word there is former,” Li said. “I lost my commission three years ago.”

  Moshe’s eyes flicked to Li’s throat and wrists. “But you didn’t lose your wetware. What assurance can you give me that everything you see and hear isn’t feeding straight into UNSec data banks?”

  A slow smile spread across Li’s face. “I’m not a very subtle person, Moshe. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.”

  “Just that I wonder why they didn’t reclaim your wetware. And how it could have taken your superiors eleven years to get around to prosecuting you for shooting those prisoners.”

  “I bought my wetware by signing my pension back to the government.
Any soldier’s entitled to do that, and most do, if only to avoid the surgery. As for the rest…you’re spinning fairy tales. The court-martial proceedings were public. Man on the street knows as much about it as I do. Just look at the spins.”

  “Spins can be faked. Anyone who’s worked on EMET knows that.”

  Li stared across the table, her face calm, her eyes level. This must be costing her, Cohen realized, but he had no idea how much. Three years after the court-martial they’d still never talked about it. And even his most cautious attempts to cross that particular no-man’s-land had been violently rebuffed.

  “Unfortunately,” Li said when he’d just about decided she wasn’t going to say anything, “those particular spins don’t seem to have been faked.”

  She and Moshe stared at each other, locked in one of those testosterone-fueled battles of will that Cohen, three centuries removed from his only unmediated human memories, was beginning to find increasingly incomprehensible.

  Finally Moshe leaned forward in his chair, the flimsy metal creaking under his weight. “The thing is, Major, I just don’t trust you.”

  “You want ALEF as a bidder, you’ll have to trust me.”

  Moshe pursed his lips.

  “Do you need to talk to someone?” Li asked. The question came off of a collective work space shared by Li, Cohen, router/decomposer, and a gaggle of chattering semisentients, but it seemed politic to let Li ask it. Moshe had clearly slipped into the trap of treating the two bodies in front of him as separate entities…and you never knew when that sort of misconception might work to your advantage.

  “No. I have discretion.” He hesitated for another instant. “All right then. We go forward. For now. But we may require additional bona fides after the next meeting.”

  “You may not be the only one,” Li retorted. “We still have nothing more than your word that the seller’s genuine. What about his bona fides?”

  “That’s between you and the seller.” Moshe got to his feet, left the paper on the table, and dropped a few shekels on top of it. “I just open the cage and crack the whip. Whether the bear decides to dance for you or eat you is your problem.”

  SEX, WATER, GOD

  The individual’s enhancement of his or her reproductive chances never happens in a void but only in relation to the reproductive chances of other members of the species. Just as corporations seek to externalize their costs of production, individuals inevitably seek to externalize their costs of reproduction, enhancing the value of their own genetic property by reducing the value of their neighbors’ genetic property. When twentieth-century existentialists sipped coffee in Parisian cafés, or twenty-first-century shoppers flocked to Wal-Mart for cheap consumer goods, they were both participants in a global economy whose ultimate evolutionary effect was to shift the means of reproduction (high protein diets, high standards of living, paid child care, etc.) to the Consuming Nations, while shifting the limiting factors on reproduction (war, poverty, pollution, etc.) to Producing Nations…

  Viewed in this light, Earth’s ecological collapse can be seen as the logical, even inevitable conclusion of four millennia of human evolution. Earth died not because humans strayed from the path of “nature” or “instinct,” but because individual humans obeyed their natural instincts far too well for their own collective good…

  —INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOBIOLOGY (APPROVED FOR THE SIXTH-YEAR CURRICULUM BY KNOWLESSYNDICATE STEERING COMMITTEE, YEAR 11, ORBIT 227)

  They held the first bidding session on the dangerous but neutral ground of the International Zone.

  Arkady and Osnat crossed through the Damascus Gate checkpoint at just past ten in the morning, elbow to armpit with a sweating crowd of religious pilgrims, under the hard watchful eyes of the Legionnaires. By the time they cleared the checkpoint and plunged into the Old City, Arkady had already realized that this was a different city from the one they’d walked through before reaching the great gate. Where the lines at the checkpoint had been dominated by pilgrims and commuters, the actual streets of the Old City were dominated—at least to Arkady’s Syndicate-bred eyes—by beggars. It took him a while to understand that they actually were beggars. They didn’t ask for money. They just sat slumped along the stone walls lining the narrow streets, looking like they’d been there so long they’d given up even hoping for money. Arkady’s instinctive response was impatience. Why didn’t they just go to collective supply, take out what they needed, and get on with life? But of course there was no collective supply here. And when he looked more closely at the beggars he saw that many of them were crippled or deformed or obviously crazy.

  “It’s a euth ward,” he said wonderingly.

  “They try to chase them away,” Osnat said with a fatalistic shrug, “but there are only so many cops around.”

  “But there must be some kind of renormaliza—er, rehabilitation program.”

  She gave him an incredulous look out of the corners of her eyes. “If someone in the Syndicates has figured out how to rehabilitate people from being poor, they ought to apply for the freaking Nobel Peace Prize.”

  Arkady stared at the crumpled forms, trying to take the measure of the people inside the rags, but none of them would meet his eyes. And they weren’t the only ones.

  There was a special quality to the gaze in the International Zone, a quality of nonlooking, nonseeing. The Legionnaires wore their mirrored sunglasses like body armor and did their level best to pretend not to speak any language but French when anyone had the effrontery to ask them questions. Hasidim hurried along under their dreary hats, assiduously shielding their eyes from any contact with the godless present. NorAmArc Christians lumbered through the stations of the cross, eyes glued to their spincorders, doing their best to turn a real living city into a theme park. Muslims glared into the near distance as if they thought some Sufist act of will could make the hordes of unbelievers vanish from their holy sites. Even the crazy people—and there seemed to be a great many of them—shouted through you instead of at you. The only people who actually looked at anyone were the Interfaithers…and the way they looked at you made you realize that being ignored was far from the worst thing that could happen to you.

  “Why are there so many Interfaithers?” Arkady asked.

  “Open your eyes. Why is right in front of your nose.”

  He looked. He saw bored Legionnaires, sullen locals, dusty walls crumbling in the ozone haze of a warm fall afternoon, six thousand years of history surrounded by sandbags and reinforced concrete. “I don’t see it.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re not pointing your nose the right way.”

  He glanced at her in confusion, then followed her hiked thumb skyward and finally saw it.

  The Ring. Strung out along the declination of the equatorial belt some 35,786 kilometers overhead, it was faintly visible today through one of those quirky contrapositions of star and satellite that physics teachers throughout UN and Syndicate space set their frustrated students to calculate. The Ring wasn’t an actual ring, of course; just the area of space that contained all of Earth’s stable geosynchronous orbits. But it had been packed so full of residential and manufacturing habitats and commsats and solar collectors and offshore tax shelters, that by now it was as visible and clearly defined as the rings of Saturn.

  The Ring’s traffic control and dynamic stabilization requirements were so impossibly complex that they had been the primary driving force behind the evolution of Emergent AI over the course of the last three centuries. The Ring was also—because of the sheer volume of reflective metal whipping around up there—one of the thousands of complex mutually interacting causes of the artificial ice age. A little reduced insolation here; a little increased albedo there; a gentle nudge of the coupled water transport systems of ocean and atmosphere. Arkady, terraformer that he was, appreciated the subtlety of the system: controlling chaos by the flutter of the butterfly’s wing rather than the fall of the sledgehammer. And of course the Ring’s terraformers, prodded onward by the
unmitigated disaster they’d inherited, had done what station designers on the thinly populated Syndicate planets had never had to think about doing: They had crafted an orbital Ring that was so perfectly integrated into the biome of the planet below it that Ring and planet could almost be thought of as a single organism.

  Still…he didn’t think Osnat was suggesting that the ice age had caused the Interfaithers.

  “We’re poor,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “And the Ring is rich. And we have to watch Ring-siders being rich every night on the evening spins. Knowing that we’ll never have what they have. Knowing that our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, won’t live nearly as long or as well as their children. Knowing that everything that counts in our lives is decided up there by people who think Earth is just a sponge they can squeeze the water out of. That kind of thing makes you hate, Arkady. And no one’s ever invented a better excuse for hate than God. The Americans figured that one out a few centuries ago, and now we’re all catching their new religion.”

  “You speak as if the Interfaithers had taken control of America.”

  “Not officially. Unofficially…well, just look at all those freaky Constitutional amendments they keep passing. And they haven’t had a president or even a member of Congress in living memory who wasn’t a member of the Interfaith.”

  “But they can’t do anything, can they? They have no power. They’re not UN members. They have no modern technology…”

  “They have oil. And they have an army. And they’re willing to burn both. That gives them power.”

  “They’re not going to bid on the weapon, are they?”

  “I’m sure they’d try to if they knew about it. And all they have to do to get a foot in the door is threaten to tattle to UNSec. That’s the game we’re all playing. We want your little bauble for ourselves, but if we can’t keep it to ourselves, then better our next-door neighbor should have it than the UN getting hold of it. After all, if the Palestinians or even the Americans get hold of a genetic weapon, they might use it, or they might just threaten to use it in order to get a bigger water allowance. But if the UN gets hold of it, you can bet your life they’ll use it sooner or later. They’re not afraid to fight dirty. Look what they did to ZhangSyndicate.” Arkady caught his breath at that name and had to force down a nauseating surge of panic. “In the end,” Osnat continued, either not noticing or misinterpreting his silence, “the only number the UN cares about is the one we all try not to talk about: Every person born on Earth represents an eleven-million-liter lifetime allowance of water that can’t go to the Ring. It’s all about water, Arkady. Everything on this planet comes down to sex and water.”