“I’ll get you new ants, Arkady. Okay? I’ll go outside and trap the little fuckers. I’ll buy you a damned ant farm. Whatever you want. Just don’t look like that, for God’s sake.”
He smiled, making an effort. “The ants will be back. It’s their gift.”
He thought she would leave after that, but she didn’t. Instead, they both stared at the river of ants, significantly thinned by the carnage Osnat’s boot had wreaked, but still moving according to the unfaltering guiding logic of the superorganism.
“By the way,” he said, “you still haven’t answered my question.”
“What questio—? Oh. No, there’s nothing between Moshe and me anymore. Nothing like that, anyway.”
“Why not?”
One coppery eyebrow lifted in amusement. Obviously she was recovering her composure. “I didn’t explain it to him. What makes you so special?”
“Nothing.” Arkady closed his eyes and put a hand up to feel the rising lump above his cheekbone. “Nothing at all.”
Osnat put the towel back up to his cheek. “I’m sorry I hit you. I really am.” She laughed her laugh-not-to-cry laugh. “You’re having a pretty rough time of it, aren’t you, boychik?”
“Is it going to get better from here on in, do you think?”
“It’s going to get worse.”
“I don’t know if I can take it.”
“Most people can take a lot more than they think they can.”
He looked up at her. What could he tell her that would help Arkasha, if, please God, Arkasha still needed help? How could he hope to sway her, move her?
“Help my friend, Osnat. Please. He’s a good person. He deserves your help.”
She stood up, frowning, and pressed the towel into his hand. “Keep it on the bruise and keep running cold water on it every few minutes. It’ll make a big difference.”
“Osnat—”
“And don’t fool yourself into thinking you have some kind of relationship with me, Arkady. I’m not your friend. I’m not looking out for you. And pretending different is just going to make things harder on both of us.”
She was leaving, he realized. The conversation, which had never really gone anywhere in the first place, was over.
“No, Osnat! Wait!”
She turned in the open doorway to face him. “I feel bad for you. And I feel like a monster for hitting you just now. But I can’t afford to let things get personal. I’m here because they pay me to be. I take Moshe’s orders because I’m paid to take them. It’s not personal. None of it’s personal. I made that choice a long time ago.”
“And what if Moshe orders you to kill me?” He hadn’t meant it to be a question, but there it was, naked enough to make him cringe.
“Do you want me to lie to you?” Osnat asked. “You don’t seem like the kind of person who wants to be lied to.”
They crossed into Palestine twenty minutes before the border closed in a dusty, stinking, gasoline-powered minivan that Arkady suspected was older than KnowlesSyndicate.
The man who handled their travel papers sat at a large empty desk in a large empty office, under a large bronze relief of a lion disemboweling an antelope. He worked in the dark, with only the fading daylight that filtered through the dust-caked windows. There was no power, he explained in tones of austere self-righteousness, because the Zionists had turned off the water that fed the hydroelectric turbines. He apologized with distant courtliness for the fact that the lack of electricity had inconvenienced them by making it so hard for him to read their travel papers. He suggested that they try to make future border crossings between 10:00 and 12:00 A.M. Weekday mornings were, as a general rule, the best time for electricity.
He seemed to be under the mistaken impression that they were off-planet journalists—an error that Osnat made no attempt to rectify.
“You understand,” he told them, “that it isn’t always possible to guarantee your safety once you enter Palestine. It isn’t us threatening you, naturally, but the Zionists…” He let his words trail off into suggestive silence.
“Are you going to stamp our goddamn visas,” Osnat asked, “or do we have to stand here all day talking to you?”
The man eyed her narrowly for a moment. Then he stamped their passes, tossed the customs declaration forms on top of them, and scraped the whole little pile of paper off his desk and handed it to Arkady.
“I’ll be taking those, thank you very much.” Osnat snatched the papers out of Arkady’s hands and secreted them in the same pocket they’d originally emerged from.
Three sentries guarded the crossing. They were all female, all young, and all pretty underneath their jilabs as far as Arkady could tell. Two of them stood before the crossing arm. The third stood on the little hillock above the road, her eyes glued to the high-resolution sight of a tripod-mounted machine gun.
One of the girls at the crossing arm had a first lieutenant’s bar sewn crookedly to her sleeve. She asked for the papers in Arabic, then in UN-standard Spanish, pored over their small print with exquisite deliberation, stuck her head into the car’s open window to stare at them, and then retreated into the makeshift guardhouse.
Two minutes passed, then five, then ten. Once Arkady made the mistake of looking up to meet the second girl’s unwavering stare. After that he kept his own eyes resolutely glued to the dashboard in front of him.
They heard the Enderbots long before they saw them. And when they finally saw them there was something monotonously anticlimactic about the massed block of soldiers. Until you saw the eyes. The eyes were terrifying.
“Those…things are fighting civilians?” Arkady said.
“Not fighting. Occupying. That’s why they did it in the first place. Armies aren’t good at police work. And training only helps so much. Frankly, anytime you hand a bunch of teenagers assault rifles and put them in charge of unarmed civilians you’re gonna find out that some of those teenagers aren’t very nice people. Also, even the nice ones are terrified. And fear can make you one heap big trigger-happy. EMET stopped all that. It’s not afraid. It’s not mean. It doesn’t play the bully. It doesn’t panic. It just does its job. The year EMET came on-line, IDF casualties on the Line dropped twenty percent, and reported civilian casualties in the Line were cut almost in half. EMET is a better, cleaner, more human way to fight an occupation. That’s the official line, anyway.”
“But not what you think.”
She shrugged. “I see the good points of it. But I also see that there’re plenty of officers—in the IDF at least, and I assume it’s the same this side of the Line—who like the idea of soldiers who don’t think for themselves and can’t argue with stupid orders or tell reporters when the generals fuck up.”
“So is EMET good or bad?”
Osnat twisted around in the cramped passenger compartment and fished on the floor behind her seat until she came up with a beach towel decorated with fluorescent pink cartoon fish schooling across blue-and-purple seas between strands of electric-green seaweed. She shook the towel out and leaned out the window to wipe the yellow khamsin dust off the driver’s side mirror.
“Both, Arkady. Everything’s both. That’s the way the world works. Anyone who tells you different is selling you something.”
Finally, the phone rang in the guardhouse, and the lieutenant exchanged a few curt words with her unknown interlocutor, came outside, returned their papers, and waved them on. As they accelerated away from the crossing, Arkady saw the girl on the hill straighten away from her gunsights, kneading at a sore back and throwing her hip out to one side like a woman carrying a child.
It took ninety minutes to reach the airstrip Shaikh Yassin had directed them to, but they picked up his security escort—two late-model, American-built sedans with impenetrable mirrored windows—within a kilometer of the border crossing. When they turned off the pavement and through the barb-wire-topped gate of the airstrip, they were stopped, searched, and bundled onto an unmarked helicopter. Osnat submitted to the whole p
rocess with an indifference that verged on boredom.
They were in the air for almost forty minutes. And with every moment that they flew through Palestinian airspace unchallenged, Arkady became incrementally more frightened of the man to whom Moshe had just entrusted him for a span of time and under conditions of treatment that had no limitations Arkady knew about.
The helicopter finally touched down on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a weed-choked parking lot that looked big enough to accommodate every automobile still left on the planet.
“What is this place?” Arkady asked.
Osnat just pointed. Arkady followed her pointing finger and saw a rusted, dust-caked sign looming over the horizon like an artillery emplacement:
WELCOME TO THE GAZA CITY HYATT
PALESTINE’S NUMBER ONE LUXURY RESORT!
Arkady’s first thought when he saw the hotel itself was that it was a building that had been built in a more peaceful time. The near-transparent pavilion of glass and stucco had been replaced piecemeal by armored shutters and mirrored plexi-flex that reflected the world outside with that smeared, underwater quality that was a sure sign of bulletproofing.
Two vast beasts flanked the hotel’s main entrance. Winged hippocanths whose broad chests swept upward into enigmatic smiling faces framed by heavy stone ringlets that made them look, to Arkady, like the avenging angels of the Hasidim. One of the two statues was pitted with bullet and shrapnel scars. The other was in such pristine condition that Arkady wondered momentarily if it was a fake.
There was a sensor attached to the door. As Arkady stepped up to it the mirrored panel whispered sideways on hidden tracks and Arkady found himself face-to-face with Shaikh Yassin.
“You admire my sentries?” Yassin asked. “They come from Baghdad. Before people invented you, that’s what we used to think monsters looked like.”
The lobby was dominated by an immense fountain whose centerpiece was a massive limestone ziggurat rising from the middle of an eye-stingingly chlorinated reflecting pool. Water coursed from hidden spouts at the ziggurat’s summit. When the fountain was new the water must have run smoothly down the ziggurat’s steps, creating the illusion of a structure made entirely of water. But time had sloughed off the ziggurat’s limestone facing, exposing the rebar-reinforced concrete behind the luxurious veneer, and now the water rilled down the ruined, rust-streaked surface in a complex series of broken fractals.
Arkady looked at Osnat. She was transfixed by the water, staring at it with a slight curl to her lip that might have been disgust or incredulity or both.
Water is power, he remembered Korchow saying. On this planet water is the only power that matters.
Korchow had told Arkady that Yassin’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather had both attended Oxford University on Saudi oil revenues, at least according to Yassin’s version of the family history. But the myth of oil and Oxford was only kept alive to emphasize the family’s royal pedigree. The real Middle Eastern oil aristocracy had gone down in the general wreck of Earth’s industrial economy. The shaikh’s grandfather had made—or if the shaikh was to be believed, remade—the family fortune in a form of liquid gold more priceless and more fraught with political controversy than oil had ever been.
Arkady looked at the shaikh’s face, at the lines of cruelty carved into it beneath his smiling manner, at the subtle tics he was already learning to recognize as the signs of human privilege. He’d admired the man’s soft-spoken courtesy at the first bidding session, and had wondered several times since then if he ought to throw himself and Arkasha on Yassin’s mercy. But now he realized, with a certainty that went beyond reason or logic, that he could never entrust Arkasha’s safety to such a man.
“What are the limitations of this exercise?” Yassin asked Osnat, entirely innocent of the fact that he’d auditioned for, and failed to win, the role of Arkasha’s savior. “May I speak to Arkady alone, or are you required to provide some form of supervision?”
“Show him your wrist,” Osnat said.
Arkady lifted his left hand to display the biomonitor Osnat had strapped on before they left.
“You leave that on,” Osnat told him. “Other than that, you set the rules. And you have your privacy. I just go away and come back when you’re done with him.”
“That’s trusting of you.”
“Only if you mean that we trust you not to do something suicidally stupid.”
Yassin raised his carefully groomed eyebrows. “Yusuf,” he said, “would you mind showing the good captain to the kitchen? I’m sure we can find some sandwiches for her.”
He was speaking to a slim green-eyed boy dressed in civilian clothes. Arkady vaguely remembered the boy from the meeting at Abulafia Street, but he looked as unimpressive now as he had then. The young man hesitated as if he were about to argue with the order, but then slipped out of the room with Osnat behind him.
As soon as the pair was gone, Yassin gestured to one of the remaining guards, who stepped forward, seized Arkady’s sleeve, rolled it up above his elbow, jabbed a needle into him, and extracted a nauseatingly large quantity of blood into the same color-coded vials that littered half the Syndicate biotech labs Arkady had visited.
“Excuse our bad manners,” Yassin said, “but we wanted to get that over with. You understand, I’m sure. It won’t be necessary to mention it to anyone.”
“I feel dizzy. Can I sit down?”
“Oh, certainly.”
A chair was provided.
Arkady sat in it.
“Well,” Yassin said, “shall we begin?”
What followed was the strangest series of unconnected and apparently pointless questions Arkady had ever been asked in his life. No question was linked to any other in any logical way that Arkady could understand. And even when he grasped a question well enough to answer it sensibly, Yassin was as likely as not to cut him off in midanswer. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected that Yassin was deliberately trying to prevent him from relaying any useful or coherent information.
Yassin seemed to find the interrogation just as frustrating as Arkady did. The shaikh’s annoyance was reflected not in his own body, however, but in the increasingly threatening demeanor of his bodyguards. It was the first time Arkady had encountered this kind of complicated power by proxy. It was less impressive than Moshe’s personal ability to intimidate…but it was just as terrifying.
“My dear fellow,” Yassin said at last, interrupting Arkady’s fifth or sixth attempt to explain basic terraforming techniques, “do they have such things as schools where you come from?”
Arkady nodded.
“And do you happen to know where I went to school?”
Arkady shook his head. Yusuf, who had slipped back into the room, coughed.
“Al Ansar,” Yassin said. The name didn’t seem to have the anticipated effect on Arkady. “You’ve heard of it?” Yassin prompted. “Yes?”
“Uh…sorry.”
“It’s a prison camp. Run by the Zionists. I spent eight years there.” Yassin pinned Arkady under a stare intense enough to make him wonder what ants felt like when they were plucked up by entomologist’s pincers. “They tortured me. Can you tell?”
“No.”
“Of course you can’t. They’re a clever people, the Jews. They know how to extract the maximum information with the minimum damage. You would think that it wouldn’t work on a planet as violent as this one. You would think that people would become inured to anything less than the immediate threat of death or mutilation. But pain has its own power.”
The larger of Yassin’s two bodyguards shifted, intruding on Arkady’s space and making him move his feet away before he could repress the gesture.
“I’m not trying to hide anything from you.” Arkady screwed up his courage. “Why don’t you just ask me a question I can answer instead of threatening me for no reason?”
Yassin muttered something in Arabic and one of the bodyguards kicked Arkady�
�s chair out from under him, plucked him off the floor, and tossed him against the wall as offhandedly as if he were handling a piece of luggage.
At the other end of the room, Yusuf coughed again. Yassin turned toward him and snapped out a sentence in quick, angry Arabic. The young man shrugged.
“I was just clearing my throat,” he answered in UN-standard Spanish. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “I really couldn’t care less what you do to him as long as I get out of here in time to avoid the rush-hour traffic.”
“Someday,” Yassin said sourly, “your frivolity is going to get you into trouble that even your fancy friends can’t get you out of.”
“So you keep telling me.”
Yassin made an exasperated spitting noise and left, followed by the two bodyguards.
Yusuf stayed behind.
He and Arkady stared at each other.
Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, the young man crossed the room, righted Arkady’s chair, and sat down on it, resting his chin on the chair back. He treated Arkady to a smile so brilliantly friendly that it was impossible to believe it wasn’t at least a little sincere. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“For what it’s worth, Yassin actually went to Princeton. He’s never seen the inside of a public restroom, let alone a prison cell. He was just fucking with you.”
“Oh.” Arkady paused in confusion. “Um…thanks for telling me, I guess.”
“My pleasure, pussycat.”
“And what about you?” Arkady asked. He was probably doing something incredibly stupid, but after all the boy seemed so harmless.
“Where did you go to school?”
“I went to a severely fancy private boys’ school that you’ve never heard of. Then I went to LSE. Ringside, of course. Then I went through the PalSec officers’ training course.”
“And what subjects did you study?”
Yusuf laughed. “Let’s just say I have an advanced degree in kicking up trouble. I’m a spook, Arkady, in case you hadn’t guessed yet. And not an amateur like Yassin and his clowns. I’m just the poor unlucky bastard who was too junior to get out of the scut work of baby-sitting them.”
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