For lovers they certainly were. There was no mistaking either the meaning of the image or the forbidden nature of the passion that suffused it.
And there was no doubt in Arkady’s mind about what would surely happen, what had to happen, in the next moment of that frozen eternity.
“Well,” Korchow pressed. “What do you think?”
“I think—” Arkady cleared his throat. “I think the man who painted this was a great artist.”
“One of the greatest,” Korchow agreed. “He was said to be the lover of the Shah for whom he painted it.”
“And was the Shah pleased by the painting?”
“It isn’t known. He died before it was finished.”
Arkady turned away, unable to look at the thing any longer.
“You still haven’t said if you like it or not,” Korchow pointed out. “I ask because I’m thinking of making a gift.”
It took a moment for Arkady to parse the unfamiliar phrase. The word gift existed in Syndicate Standard, but it applied, in the absence of personal or biological property, to a completely different concept.
“Unfortunately,” Korchow continued, “I’m not familiar with the taste of the young man in question. I thought you might advise me. After all, you know him so much better than I do.”
They looked at each other, the long-dead Shah and his doomed lover lying forgotten between them.
When Arkady was six he had witnessed the Peacekeeper attack on ZhangSyndicate. It had been over in seconds, and it had happened miles away across empty space, but it still dogged his nightmares. The great orbital station’s outer hull had held, staving off hard vac; but the fireball had ripped through the habitat modules and gutted them with all the crèchelings on board and unrescued. That attack had killed ZhangSyndicate. Its arks had been contaminated, their precious gene-sets rendered unusable. And where there were children there could be no Syndicate. Most of the surviving Zhangs had chosen suicide over the sterile prospect of life as walking ghosts. Sometimes it was hard to remember they’d ever existed. But Arkady remembered the terrible beauty of the burning. The white-hot fire lighting up one viewport after another as the inner bulwarks gave way. The condensation steaming off the hull and refreezing in the void. His body felt like that now: a dead shell dissolving into a glittering ice storm of hope, pain, terror.
“It’s understandable that you would still have feelings for him,” Korchow said in the bland, reasonable, sympathetic voice that still haunted Arkady’s nightmares. “Why be ashamed to admit to them? What you did, you did because you loved him. No one holds that against you. After all, what else did they intend to happen when they assigned you to each other?”
Arkady froze. Had Arkasha said something? Was Korchow still playing them off against each other? Would Arkady hurt his pairmate by acknowledging Korchow’s insinuations?
“Tell me,” Korchow asked before Arkady could decide how to answer. “Do you begin to understand what we’re doing here?”
Arkady shook his head. “Here…where?”
“Here on Earth.” Korchow pointed to the carpeted floor, the walls of the room, the city beyond the walls. “Think, Arkady. Use that handsome head of yours for something other than ants.”
But Arkady had thought. He’d lain awake thinking month after month, night after cold night. And he still knew nothing he hadn’t known back on Novalis. So he waited, schooling his face into impassive stillness, not wanting to say or do anything that might jeopardize the sudden and unexpected flow of information.
“What do you know about the colonization of the Americas?” Korchow asked, in an apparent change of subject.
Arkady stuttered something about sociogenesis and intersocietal competition and the perverse incentives of social systems based on sexual reproduction—
“Yes, yes. Forget all the tripe from your tenth-year sociobiology class. We teach you that because it’s good for you, not because it’s true. In any case, when the Europeans first arrived in the Americas—they actually called it the New World, if you can imagine such parochialism—they encountered a civilization as well established in many respects as their own. Mexico City had more residents than the largest cities of Europe, and they were a hell of a lot cleaner and better fed judging from the Conquistadors’ letters home. And even the Aztecs were practically savages compared to the Incas.
“Unfortunately for the Incas, the collision of the Old and the New World turned out not to be a clash of cultures, but a clash of diseases. A plague of plagues swept through the Americas in the wake of the first explorers. Black Death. Syphilis. Influenza. Smallpox. The first explorers discovered a continent of vibrant cities—and by the time the first colonists landed all that was left were graves and charnel houses. It was a classic case of an isolated population encountering a much larger one…and any competent evolutionary ecologist can tell you where that leads.
“At some point during this scourge, the Spanish developed a new and devilishly clever strategy of conquest: gifts. They gave the Incas blankets that had been used by smallpox victims. The blankets were warm and beautiful. They were passed from hand to hand, treasures from another world. And they ended up killing more people than European gunpowder ever did.”
Korchow looked at him expectantly—but whatever lesson he meant Arkady to draw from the tale, Arkady couldn’t make the connection.
“Never mind,” he said after a moment. “You’re a good boy, Arkady. And it’s not lack of intelligence that keeps you from understanding. It’s the same thing that kept you from seeing what was happening on Novalis: idealism. Rostov did a beautiful job when they detanked you. A really fine piece of work. No sense in trying to play country fiddle on a Stradivarius. Do you have any questions about the auction? If you want to ask me anything, now is your moment. It may be difficult to talk this privately again.”
Arkady hesitated, thinking. “There was someone missing,” he said at last. “Someone you told me to look for. Why wasn’t Walid Safik there?”
“I don’t know. The Palestine Security Services are…opaque. It can be very hard to tell what’s going on beneath the surface. People fall in and out of favor unpredictably. But don’t count Safik out. If he’s not invited to the party he’ll find a way to crash it sooner or later.”
“And what about the other party crasher? Turner?”
Korchow’s hand crept to his throat in the same nervous gesture the construct Catherine Li had provoked back at the auction meet. “I didn’t expect the Americans to take an interest. I don’t like it. Still…we may still be able to make use of him.”
“Will he be allowed to interrogate me?” Arkady asked, thinking of the cold eyes behind Turner’s easygoing smile.
“I assume so. But I’ll ask to have it done under GolaniTech supervision. The Americans have a bad habit of changing the rules when they don’t like them.”
“What should I tell him?”
“Whatever he asks you to tell him. I believe in sacrifice, Arkady, but not in pointless sacrifice.”
Korchow fingered the miniature that lay forgotten on the table between them. Arkady glanced at it and shivered.
“You never told the bidders about Bella,” Korchow said.
“You mean about her…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, so he settled for a more neutral term, “…illness? But you told me not to tell them.”
“Did I? Well, I suppose I might have at that.” Korchow was smiling at him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. But when Turner has his little talk with you, why don’t you drop that in his ear and see what happens?”
Arkady blinked at Korchow, comprehension beginning to dawn on him. “This is all about Bella and Ahmed. You want the humans to know about them. Then why all the subterfuge? Why not just tell them?”
“Human nature, Arkady. A beast you must be getting to know rather well by now. Humans aren’t fundamentally selfless. They don’t give themselves, not in the way we do. And they don’t trust any gift”—again that u
nsettling use of the word—“that’s given too easily.”
Neither did Andrej Korchow. One more way in which the Knowles-Syndicate spy had become as much human as construct. But Arkady suspected that was a thought best kept to himself.
“Then this really is a gift?” he asked. “Not some kind of trap?”
“It’s both. Like everything in life worth having…or giving for that matter. In the short term it may throw Earth into chaos, which will hurt the Ring and therefore help us. Or at least that’s how Knowles sold our plan to the central steering committee. But in the long term it just might give the human race a chance to outrun extinction.”
“And how does that help us? Last time I saw humans anywhere near Gilead they were trying to kill me.”
“Those were UN colonists and genetic constructs, not humans. And even their Ring-side paymasters are as posthuman as you and I are, no matter what their Schengen implants say. The only wild humans left are here on Earth. And as for why we’d want to save them…well, you’re the ecophysicist, not me.”
Arkady knew the theory. It was politically unacceptable, especially in the newer Syndicates like Motai and Aziz. But in scientific circles people talked openly about the problem. The Syndicates were dogged by the question that lurked behind every population-wide genetic engineering project: What were the engineers splicing out of the genome that they wouldn’t know they needed until it was too late?
In a strictly genetic sense, the Syndicates, like any genetically modified posthuman population, were parasites. In order to survive permanently they needed to be embedded within a larger human population that they could draw genetic material from and fall back on if things ever went catastrophically wrong. No posthuman along the Periphery had the genetic diversity to maintain a viable population indefinitely. And though the Ring was huge, its population was so homogenized by commercial splicing that it had a worse diversity deficit than even the Syndicates.
The only piece of “wild” human genome left—and therefore the only safety net if things went wrong—was the rapidly vanishing human population of Earth. The Ring, the Periphery, and even the Syndicates might all be benefiting from Earth’s depopulation in the short term, but in the long term it was disastrous.
And Korchow, for his own devious and cynical motives, had decided to avert the disaster…or at least that was what he seemed to want to make Arkady think at this move in the game.
“Why couldn’t you have told me all this before?” Arkady asked.
“I’m sorry, Arkady. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get you past Moshe. I had to get you to Earth. I told you what I thought you needed to know to accomplish that. And the rest…well, I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“But are you telling me the truth, or just the next lie?”
Korchow grinned in genuine amusement. “So there is something behind the pretty face after all,” he said. “Arkasha always said there was.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“You will.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“When?”
There was something fundamentally uncategorizable about Korchow. For weeks, even months, Arkady would think of him as a chimera who had become more human than construct by the constant stress and abrasion of living with humans. But then, just when he had decided that he knew what Korchow was, the spy’s artifices would slough away to reveal the rigid scaffolding of ideology that everything else hung upon.
“You will speak to Arkasha,” Korchow told him in a voice that wasn’t even remotely human, “when I believe it is in both of your best interests to speak to each other. Which is to say when it is in the best interest of the Syndicates. Unless you no longer believe that those two things are one and the same?”
“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean to…forgive me.”
“That Arkasha continues to defy me is one thing. I expect it of him. But you, Arkady. You disappoint me. Back on Gilead I decided you were ready to do your part and make the necessary sacrifices. Don’t make me wonder if I was wrong about you.”
“I just—”
Korchow held up a hand. “Don’t. If what you’ve already seen of humans—the misery right outside this window, for God’s sake—hasn’t convinced you of how important it is that the Syndicates survive and thrive, then we have nothing else to say to each other.”
Back at the house on Abulafia Street, Osnat took charge of Arkady as seamlessly as a relay runner taking the baton from a teammate. Twenty minutes later, Arkady was sitting in the helicopter, buffeted by wind and noise, while Osnat slept in the seat across from him as comfortably as if she were safe on the ground and tucked into her bed.
Arkady’s brain spun feverishly, turning over every word Korchow had spoken, inspecting every nuance and inflection as if he were reading tea leaves. Any way he looked at it he reached the same conclusion:
Arkasha was alive. Arkasha was alive and not cooperating, whatever Korchow meant by that. And if Arkasha wasn’t cooperating, then Arkasha was still himself.
And that single fact changed everything.
Could Osnat be trusted? He looked at her face, grimy with sweat and khamsin dust. Everything he knew of her said no…but he’d seen something in her face when she looked at him, something harder and more honest than pity, that whispered yes.
He would ask her. He would ask her the next time she brought his food. He’d beg if he had to.
Because if Arkasha really was alive and unbroken, then Arkady would run any risk and suffer any humiliation to save him.
NOVALIS
The Six Percent Rule
Experience from prior missions has shown the vital importance of allowing for the impact of unpredictable small group dynamics; SGD has often been a determining factor in the success or failure of such missions. Failure to address SGD at the preplanning stage can rarely be remedied en route. Attempts to replace sensible SGD planning with artificial authority hierarchies have been farcically disastrous. Thus, a critical task of mission preplanning is to ensure that individual crew members enhance, rather than detract from, each other’s ability to complete the mission. Distasteful though such considerations may be to the ideologues among us, space is ruled by reality, not dogma.[1]
—REPORT OF THE INTERSYNDICATE SUBCOMMITTEE ON LONG-RANGE SURVEY MISSION PREPLANNING, YEAR 24, ORBIT 18.
The Big Wood: 6:00 A.M., third day postlandfall.
Sunbeams sliced through the forest canopy a hundred meters overhead and slanted toward Arkady through the green haze of quivering leaf edges and fluttering insect wings. There was still a predawn, underwater cast to the forest light, but the night’s deep-sea shadows were fast giving way to the midmorning glow of shallow surf under sunlight.
Arkady had found a dacetine, one of the Beautiful Ants, and she was on the hunt.
She’d spied a springtail grazing on the waterlogged edge of a fallen leaf. Arkady watched her stalk her prey, her finely sculpted legs lifting and arcing with the graceful precision of the huntress she was. He knew what would happen, but, no matter how many times he watched it, the hunt retained its otherworldly magic.
The dacetine would approach the springtail, her movements growing slower and more deliberate with every step, until she stood so close that it was grazing literally between the razor-toothed prongs of her widespread mandibles. She would let the fine hairs between her mandibles, so delicate that they were invisible except under a microscope, brush across the oblivious springtail’s thorax. And then, twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, her mandibles would snap closed with enough force to cut the poor springtail in two.
Arkady shivered, wondering what it would be like to have the last thing you felt in life be the fine tickling of those intramandibular hairs on your neck. He had a sudden disturbing vision of the survey team as springtails, innocently sampling and measuring and mapping Novalis’s bewildering diversity while the razor-sharp mandibles closed in on them.
And yet…and yet there was
nothing concrete, no real problem that he could point to to justify the feeling. The initial disputes among the crew had died down, quelled by the insane pace at which they’d all been working since planetfall. Meanwhile the survey progressed so spectacularly that so far it had largely consoled him for the mission’s more personal disappointments.
By the end of the first week afield, Arkady had documented five major nest complexes. Dozens upon dozens of the massive, man-high, aboveground nests constructed by the European wood ant, dotted in military formation across the woodland clearings, with their southern slopes precisely canted to maximize winter solar gain. A vast underground complex of leaf-cutter ants, which he suspected and would later confirm, had been artificially adapted to the temperate climate of the main continent. And in the warm open pastures, the exotic pyramids of the Cataglyphis, Herodotus’s legendary gold-digging ants, its surface dotted with precisely distributed specks of glittering gray schist.
But his most spectacular discoveries were all made under the deep green shadows of the forest they had begun to call the Big Wood. It wasn’t really a wood at all, but a temperate rain forest, and it hosted a diversity of ant life almost unimaginable by the normal standards of terraformed worlds. Some of the species were ones Arkady knew from RostovSyndicate’s genetic archives but had never expected to see in the wild. Others were so rare that he had to scurry back to the ship and consult his reference books to identify them.
He found the legendary hanging gardens of the Crematogaster longispina, some of them containing forgotten species of bromeliads that Arkady thought had died with Earth’s Amazon Basin. He found a plethora of ant birds and ant butterflies who followed the monstrous swarm and column raids of the army ants, though the army ants themselves had so far eluded him. He found ponerines and dacetines in all their stupendous variety. And most significant from an ecological standpoint, he found a number of leaf-cutter ants, Atta sexdens as well as Atta cephalotes, whose vast vaulted underground colonies could contain as many as 150 million minor workers, all toiling over their subterranean fields of tame fungi. They were Novalis’s single greatest herbivores and dirt movers, filling to overflowing the ecological niches of terrestrial species as various as cattle, aphids, and earthworms.
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