Spin Control ss-2

by Chris Moriarty

  “And God,” he said, glancing at yet another passing Interfaither.

  “Oh, you poor sap. Haven’t you figured it out yet? God’s just a way to pump up your ethnic group’s birth rate so you can demand a bigger share of the water.”

  “You seem to have a lot of theories,” Arkady said politely. “Do you have an interest in sociobiology? Have you ever thought about studying it?”

  She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she laughed. “Don’t tell me you had me pegged as the hooker with the heart of gold. Sorry to disappoint you. My brother’s a comp lit professor at Tel Aviv University. I’m practically considered a half-wit because I quit school after my master’s degree. In polysci. Which is the closest thing we have to what you call sociobiology in the Syndicates.”

  “Then how…?”

  “How did a nice girl like me go so terribly wrong? What, you thought only poor people joined the army? This is Israel. And I’m not an Enderbot. I’m a real soldier. Or haven’t you figured out the difference yet?”

  The house hunched over Abulafia Street like one of the weathered old men who shuffled down the International Zone’s crooked streets and loitered in its shabby coffeehouses. All you could see of it from the street was a high windowless wall whose stone bones were covered with a tattered skin of plaster. The only opening in the wall was a monumental wooden door, its planks so broad and long that Arkady would have been sure they were composite if he hadn’t touched them with his own hands. In one corner of the door, so small it was almost lost in the shadow of the lintel, hung another smaller door. It opened to Osnat’s knock, and they stepped through it into a tall courtyard.

  The courtyard had been built for a hotter climate. Its fountain was turned off for the winter already, its rusted pipes tilting forlornly over tiles streaked yellow with khamsin dust. Even the roses reminded Arkady less of plants than of construction site scaffolding: two stories of stem and thorn and leaf thrown up against the sagging balconies just to point a few anemic blossoms at what little sun trickled over the encircling roof tiles.

  It was a house out of time. The flow and chatter of the street faded away as soon as the gate fell to on its hinges. Even Earth’s stupendous sky was reduced to a precise blue square, as completely submitted to the spare geometry of the building as if it were the roof of the house and not the roof of the whole world.

  Osnat stopped, looked around the courtyard, and sneezed. She took a tissue out of her pocket and scrubbed at her nose with it while Arkady averted his eyes politely. “My God, I wish it would rain,” she muttered. “The fucking dust is killing me.”

  They waited, though Arkady had no idea what they were waiting for. A water seller passed by in the street outside, calling his wares, but it might have been a voice from another planet. A single petal fell from one of the high rose blossoms and fluttered to the ground, the only moving thing in the visible universe. Then the gate opened behind them, and the most perfect human Arkady had ever seen stepped through it.

  Her face possessed such flawless bilateral symmetry that Arkady had to look a second and third time before he decided she wasn’t a genetic construct. Only the subtle blend of race and ethnicity, so different from the distinct ethnic phenomes of the Syndicates, identified the woman as what she was: a member of the heavily genetically engineered Ring-side elite that biogeographers were beginning to describe as a new posthuman quasi-species in its own right. And thinking back to Korchow’s briefings, Arkady had no trouble putting a name to the woman:

  Ashwarya Sofaer. Ash to her friends…not that she has any. She’s the closest thing to pure ambition you’ll ever see; a walking cost-benefit analysis of mammalian dominance drives. Ex-Mossad of course, like all the higher powers at GolaniTech. She shouldn’t even be allowed to live on Earth, but she’s grandfathered in under one of their endless loopholes. She spent three years in the Ring as the UN-Mossad liaison, then back to Israel and through the revolving door to GolaniTech. Now that Gavi Shehadeh’s out of the way, she’s probably Didi Halevy’s most likely replacement if and when his enemies succeed in toppling him. As they say on King Saul Boulevard, the revolving door spins both ways. And it’s not out of the question that the lovely Miss Sofaer might be interested in using you to give the proverbial door a good hard push…

  Ash had the Ring-sider’s clothes to go with her Ring-sider’s body: a sleek white suit programmed to hug every curve of her lean body; high-heeled vat leather shoes that made her long legs seem even longer than they were; impeccably styled hair slicked back from an impeccably made-up face that gave away absolutely nothing of the person behind it.

  Ash and Osnat shook hands. Osnat looked stubby and flyblown next to the other woman.

  “Captain Hoffman,” Ash said.

  “Colonel.” Osnat gave the word a parade ground lilt that suggested respect entirely unalloyed by personal affection.

  “Moshe said you’d come over to us,” Ash said. “How did he convince you to make the jump?”

  “He told me the grass might be greener on your side of the fence.”

  “It is.” Ash eyed Osnat speculatively. “As green as you want it to be. We should talk sometime.”

  “Sure,” Osnat said, obviously not meaning it.

  A frown of irritation compressed Ash’s beautiful lips for a moment, then vanished before Arkady could even be sure it had been there.

  Briefly, she explained to Osnat that the room was being readied, that the bidders were still arriving, that she would make the introductions.

  “And then what?” Osnat asked.

  “And then we’ll see.”

  Ash shook hands with Osnat again and swept off into the house without having so much as glanced at Arkady. Osnat stared after her with a troubled expression, rubbing the palm of her right hand on her pant leg as if she were trying to rub off the smell of the other woman.

  Arkady, child of a world born only two years before his own birth, had never seen any place like the room he was eventually ushered into. Even the smell…the smell of wood and wool and furniture wax and all the other priceless things that were rare and inconceivable luxuries to the space-born. He tried to focus on the other people in the room, to match their faces with Korchow’s descriptions. But his eyes kept floating to the whirling ceiling fans, the shivering ladders of light and shade cast by the slatted shutters, the cedar and sandalwood shadows under the high rafters, the complex patterns of rugs and drapery, the nuanced colors of walls and windowsills and floor tiles, the endless tumble of old and incomprehensible objects scattered over the polished tables and sideboards.

  When he finally picked out Korchow, slouched in the shadowy depths of a leather wing chair, he saw that the KnowlesSyndicate A was laughing silently at him.

  “Poor Arkady. You look even loster than you are.”

  Arkady started toward him, stopped, looked at Osnat.

  “Go ahead,” she said, lenient in Moshe’s absence.

  Korchow put an arm around Arkady’s shoulders and gave him the traditional kiss of greeting. The sight of the Knowles A, after the weeks of isolation among humans, nearly unmanned Arkady. Back on Gilead, Korchow had seemed more than half human. Now he looked like home.

  “I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to see you safe and sound, Arkady.” Korchow had affected the avuncular air of an older series speaking to a younger member of his own geneline, but his smile remained as bland and carefully rationed as ever. It was the same smile Korchow had worn during the tense weeks of interrogation, and Arkady still sensed that Korchow’s every move was part of an act played out not for its apparent audience but for the unseen watcher behind the camera.

  Arkady returned Korchow’s kiss. “May we do our part,” he said, taking refuge in formality and formula.

  “Your part?” For a moment the diplomat’s mask gave way to a look of disdain and anger. Or was that merely another mask, just as calculated as the first? And if so, what audience was it intended for? “Is that what you thi
nk you’ve been doing?”

  Before Arkady could answer, the door opened and the first bidders entered.

  “Jesus wept,” someone said.

  Arkady turned to see the man-machine from the airport and the woman soldier who had accompanied him. This time, however, they were staring at Korchow.

  “I should have known you’d be at the bottom of this.” The machine sounded weary, as if the weight of unpleasant memories that Korchow suggested was too heavy for his shunt’s human shoulders.

  “How can a mere collection of neural networks and Toffoli gates attain such heights of melodrama?” Korchow countered in a voice that gave away even less than his smile did. “I’m behind nothing. I didn’t even know that poor Arkady was leaving us until he turned up in Maris Station. At which point we regrettably”—he glanced at Osnat—“lost track of him. Naturally, we were deeply concerned for his safety, the political situation being what it is. But now we have found our lost lamb again.”

  “Lucky little lamb,” the machine drawled, his eyes sliding sideways toward Arkady.

  “You’re not one of the bidders?” the woman asked Korchow incredulously.

  “No, no, Major. You misapprehend the situation. My only interest is in ensuring that Arkady retain the ability to exercise his…what’s that phrase you humans are always tossing around…free will?”

  The woman didn’t return Korchow’s smile. She leaned into his space, her jaw shoved forward pugnaciously, and tapped him on the chest firmly enough for Arkady to hear the thump of her index finger on his sternum. “I’m watching you,” she said. “I’m tracking you, Korchow, and don’t you fucking forget it.”

  Korchow’s smile remained firmly in place, but he tugged at his collar and fingered his old war wound. It was the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic.

  “My dear Major—”

  “Just plain Li now, thanks to you.”

  “Seeing you is always so…eventful. I sincerely hope we can avoid gunplay this time.”

  “That’s up to you,” the woman said.

  That was when Arkady finally put the stray clues together and realized who she was. Major Catherine Li, UNSec First Expeditionary Force, aka the renegade construct Caitlyn Perkins, aka the Butcher of Gilead.

  You wouldn’t know she was a Zhang construct if you weren’t looking for the resemblance. But she’d had plastic surgery. They’d said that at the trial. And of course she was a corporate-tanked construct, so you had to allow for the changes the Zhangs had made to their geneset after the Breakaway in order to tailor their phenotype to their own needs as free beings instead of corporate property. Once you did that, the lines of the murdered Zhang constructs shone through her stolid face and muscular body as clearly as printed letters through a piece of paper held up to sunlight.

  How could a child born into corporate slavery have grown up to fight a war for the very corporations who had enslaved her? How, being what she was, could she have done what she’d done? And how could she have done it for the same humans who had given the order to turn ZhangSyndicate, with all its crèches and its genebanks, into a firegutted ghost station? Suddenly Arkady found that he was having no trouble at all looking convincingly frightened.

  While Arkady was coming to terms with Li’s presence, the AI drifted over to the side table beneath one of the tall windows and began inspecting the artfully scattered objets d’art on its polished wood surface. It glanced back toward its companion and cleared its throat delicately. Could such a being have the normal fears and worries and apprehensions of a real person? If so, Arkady would have sworn the machine was trying to head off a conversation that frightened it.

  “So, Major—” Korchow began.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” Li burst out. “I don’t give a damn if it’s an original Eames! Can we make it through one goddamn minute without you interrupting me?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Korchow asked.

  “Never mind,” she muttered savagely. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Of course. I forget that you’re not quite the woman you were when we last met. How is life in the future, Major? Is being the ghost in the machine everything you hoped it would be?”

  “Better than life in the Syndicate chicken coop.”

  “Are you so sure of that? My offer’s still open—”

  “Catherine,” the machine interrupted, “why are you even talking to him?”

  “—I could get you on a Long March Rocket out of Guangdong Province next week. You’d be on Gilead within a month.”

  “The last person you made that offer to’s dead,” Li pointed out.

  “Yes.” Korchow agreed placidly. “But she put her hand up the wrong skirt. And humans are so touchy about that sort of thing.”

  “Just drop it,” the machine said, looking hard at Korchow. “She’s not interested.”

  “My, things have changed.” Korchow looked back and forth between the two of them. “The Catherine Li I remember never needed anyone to tell people what she thought.”

  “If you two are done socializing,” Ash said, striding in on the heels of two hard young men whose skin was marked by the subdermal filigree of Earth-illegal wetware, “perhaps this would be a convenient moment to make the introductions.”

  “Assuming all the bidders have arrived?” Korchow asked, letting the question hang in the air unanswered for a moment before he retreated to the shadows of his wing chair.

  It seemed that all the bidders had indeed arrived. And when Arkady had sorted out the bidders from the coteries of bodyguards that he was starting to suspect were a routine cost of doing business in Jerusalem, there seemed to be three of them.

  First the machine and his companion.

  Second an elderly Palestinian man whose suit looked like something from a pre-Evacuation history book, and whose immaculate cotton headdress gleamed like a pearl in the dusky light that threaded through the shutters. Arkady had no trouble recognizing this bidder either: Shaikh Yassin, spearhead of the Palestinian hard religious right…and not at all the man Korchow had hoped the Palestinians would send.

  “At last,” Yassin said when Moshe introduced Arkady to him. “Abu Felastineh, blessed be his children, and his children’s children, sends his greetings.”

  That wasn’t a name, Arkady remembered from Korchow’s briefings, but an honorific used to protect the anonymity and physical safety of the president of Palestine. Abu Felastineh. The Father of Palestine. And by now Arkady knew better than to begin to try to guess what any title that contained the word father really meant to humans.

  The Palestinian bowed courteously and extended a hand to Arkady. Arkady stepped forward to shake it…and ran into a solid wall of muscle as the man’s grim-faced bodyguards surged around him.

  “Forgive the boy.” Korchow had stepped up behind Arkady so smoothly that it was impossible to say when exactly he’d left his chair. Now he slipped a hand around Arkady’s arm and drew him back a few cautious steps. “We in the Syndicates lack the institution of political assassination. We are, as I like to say, a too-trusting people.”

  “A too-trusting people,” Yassin repeated. He made it sound as if the words were his and not Korchow’s. He made it sound as if he were the man who had invented the very idea of words.

  “Exactly so.” Korchow bowing yet again and drawing Arkady back to safety under the unblinking gaze of the bodyguards.

  “So how’s the water business?” Catherine Li interrupted.

  It took Arkady a moment to realize she was speaking to Yassin—largely because she spoke in a casual, almost confrontational tone that had nothing to do with the way every other person in the room had spoken to him.

  The Palestinian turned slowly to face her. Then he looked past her at Cohen. “I am always delighted to see the ghost of my grandfather’s friend. Your young associate seems to have been sadly misinformed, however. My family has no ties to the water trade, and I should be most sorry to think that you should have overheard any unfounded and m
alicious rumors to the contrary.”

  “My dear fellow,” the machine murmured, patting the air with both hands as if he were smoothing down the hackles of a possibly dangerous dog. “Not at all. Nothing of the sort. My, er, associate is a bit overemotional. Young people, you know.”

  “He sells water?” Arkady whispered to Korchow.

  “Absolutely not,” came the answer, whispered like his question from mouth to ear. “Shaikh Yassin is a perfectly respectable arms merchant.”

  “Arkady,” Ash said. “Come here.”

  Arkady wheeled around—and found himself face-to-face with the final bidder.

  “This,” Ash announced, “is Turner.”

  Arkady searched his mind for some memory of the exotic-sounding name and found none. What kind of a name was Turner anyway? And why hadn’t Korchow told him about this bidder?

  He tried to take stock of the man, but all he could glean was a series of piecemeal impressions. A wrinkle-resistant button-down shirt stretched over an incipient potbelly and a weight lifter’s muscles; a soft-palmed hand that had never done the hard work of surviving on a Syndicate space station, but still had the strength nearly to crush Arkady’s fingers; freshly laundered hair combed precisely over a pink, smooth, wrinkle-free face and the coldest blue eyes Arkady had ever seen.