“Helen Nguyen and I have known each other since before you kissed your first boy. Or girl. Or whatever. We aren’t friends anymore, if we ever were. So why don’t you skip the dance of the seven veils and tell me what she wants from me?”
“Your help,” Ash said simply. “Your help to get the Interfaithers out of Israeli Intel.”
“And I should care about this because…?”
Ash’s perfectly made-up eyes widened. “I would think you’d be the last person to ask that question.”
“Are you about to become the next rich Ring-sider who takes one look at my DNA and thinks she knows what I should think and who my friends should be? It’s a long line. You’ll have to take a number.”
“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Well, I’m not very bright, I’m afraid. You know how those Xenogen constructs are. Bet you’ve sat through any number of nice dinner parties where your mother complained about how hard it was to turn them into decent kitchen help.”
Ash’s lips tightened in anger.
Li—finally—allowed herself the faintest of smiles.
We have a decision, gentlemen. Bottom card fight to the lovely Miss Catherine Li on a technical knockout. And may it not come back to bite her in the ass when it really counts.
“Fine,” Ash said. “Here’s what Nguyen told me, and you can do whatever you want with it. I’m just the messenger. No need to shoot stray voltage my way.”
Stray voltage? Just the messenger? Had the woman watched so many action spins that she thought people actually talked like that?
The baby hiccuped twice and seemed about to cry. Ash leaned forward and patted absently at his diapered bottom. Amazingly, the gesture seemed to calm him.
“Mind if I smoke?” Li asked, taking out her cigarettes.
“Yes, actually. I never got used to it Ring-side.”
“Thought you were from the Ring.”
“Not exactly.” And there it was again: the momentary sensation that the real person behind the mask had appeared and just as quickly vanished. Like those times in hard-vac ops when a teammate cleared his visor to get an unmediated look at the field of battle. Mirroreyesmirror. All in such quick succession that you were left doubting you’d even seen the face inside the helmet. “It’s complicated.”
“Can’t see how that would be.”
The real person—or whatever it was in there—peeked out once more. “I’d say I was surprised to hear you say that if I didn’t think you’d jump down my throat again.”
“And I’d ask you what the hell that meant if I thought you’d tell me.”
“Right then.” Ash leaned forward, jeans hiking up over ankles that were, okay, yes, Li could admit it, fabulous. Even if the woman was sent straight from the treacherous hands of General Helen Nguyen.
Li sat up, blinking at a sudden and surprising thought. Was Ash Nguyen’s latest and greatest protegée? Had this lovely package filled the void left behind by Li’s defection? Well, Helen had always had eclectic taste.
“You heard Didi’s briefing. Everything he said was true. But there’s more. And that more is why I’m talking to you. Didi was surprised by Absalom’s resurrection. We weren’t. We’ve been tracking high-level leaks for a while now. Information has gotten out that was very, very tight band. So we took a page out of Gavi Shehadeh’s book—or should I say Didi Halevy’s book?—and cooked up a few barium meals of our own. We sent them through Didi’s office. And had them pop out in some of the last places anyone wants to see them.”
“The Interfaithers,” Li hazarded.
“Try KnowlesSyndicate.”
“The Interfaithers and the Syndicates aren’t exactly fellow travelers.”
“No, they aren’t.”
“But the Syndicates and the Palestinians are another matter. So we’re back to Absalom.” Li caught her breath. “Or are you suggesting that someone in Didi’s office is directly tied to Korchow?”
“Does it matter?” Ash let the question hang fire for a while. “You know about the prime minister’s list?”
“The kidon list?” Legend had it that there was a list, the single most classified document in Israel, containing the names of men and women with Jewish blood on their hands whom the Mossad’s kidon, or assassination teams, were cleared to kill as and when opportunity presented itself. “Sure. I’ve heard of it. So what?”
“Gavi Shehadeh’s name is on it. Naturally. But the prime minister hasn’t initialed it, so they can’t do the hit. Didi’s the one who’s keeping it from happening.”
“So they’re old friends.”
“Did I say different?”
No. Just walked me up to the brink and let me look over the edge all by my little self. Helen couldn’t have done it better.
“What are you saying? That Didi is Absalom and framed Gavi to keep from taking the fall himself? Or that Gavi really was Absalom and Didi’s in it with him? Or…I mean, what actually? You open up that can and you’ll find out it’s pretty hard to get the worms back inside.”
“Look, if Helen’s wrong, then no one will be happier than me. But if she’s right, we’ll be glad we played our hand close to the vest.”
“The problem with Helen—can I have a drink of water?”
Ash rose wordlessly and padded to the kitchen. Li heard the clink of glasses jostling each other in the cupboard, the burp of a bottle being uncapped, the rippling pour of water.
“The problem with Helen,” Li said loudly enough for Ash to hear her in the next room, “is that sometimes when she gets a hard-on for someone, it’s patriotism. And sometimes, at least in my experience, it’s just politics. And I really dislike being the hatchet man in a back-alley political brawl.”
“This isn’t political.” Ash came back to stand in front of Li, glass in hand, water dripping off her long and immaculately manicured fingernails. “I’ve seen it unfold firsthand. I’ve seen the spinfeeds and the office logs. This is the real deal. Your country calls. Rough men report for duty.”
“The last time Helen quoted Orwell at me, she ended up trying to kill me.”
“You just got between her and Cohen. It wasn’t personal.”
“Bullshit,” Li snapped, dangerously close to losing her temper. “Killing’s always personal. I know. I fucking do it for a living.”
“Not anymore, last time I heard.”
They stared at each other. This time Ash didn’t budge or blink or even smile.
“Tell me true, Catherine. ’Cause there are some people up at UNSec HQ who really want an answer from you. Are you ready to come in from the cold?”
And there it was. The long drop. With no warning at all to let you steel your nerves and your stomach for it. One step you’re on solid flight deck, next one you’re free-falling into the gravity well of some godforsaken ball of dirt that looks like you could fall past it into open space if you twitch wrong.
Ash was a messenger from Helen Nguyen, as she had so subtly insinuated she might be the other night at Didi’s house. And Helen Nguyen had just handed Li her own personalized, customized dumb blonde in a red Ferrari.
She wanted it. She couldn’t deny that. She wanted the power. She wanted the independence. She wanted the sense of setting her own course in life rather than being dragged along in Cohen’s wake. She wanted the ego-gratifying feeling that she mattered: that she was one of the rough men who stood ready to wreak violence so the good people of the world could sleep peacefully in their beds at night. And, yes, she wanted the adrenaline and the danger. She wanted the life, when you really came down to it.
But she knew exactly what Cohen would have to say about all this, when she eventually got around to telling him. Which she would. Eventually.
What she didn’t know was where that left the two of them.
She met Ash’s eyes. The other woman was watching her as intently as a cat tracking a songbird’s erratic progress toward its claws.
“Very poetic.” Li’s voice was steadier than she�
�d thought it would be. “Is Helen offering a main course after the entrée of worn-out clichés?”
“She said to tell you that there’s a proposal on her desk to allow individually cleared genetic constructs to work for the Security Council on an independent contractor basis. It would be done quietly, administratively. Without a General Assembly vote. But the effect would be the same: You’d be a Peacekeeper again, without an official commission, of course, but with everything else. Everything. She’s ready to bring you all the way in. You just need to give the nod and let us know you’re ready to come back.”
“And Cohen?” Li asked. “Is Nguyen warming a pair of slippers by the fire for him too?”
Ash shrugged. “I find it hard to believe that you’re really that happy with him. If it is a him. I mean…what are you exactly? His mistress? His bodyguard? His pet?”
But Li couldn’t answer that question, even though she’d been asking it of herself on and off for the last three years.
“Seriously,” Ash pursued. “What’s it like being part of…that?”
Li shrugged. Inarticulate in the best of circumstances, she truly had no words to describe the twists and turns and myriad contradictions of life on the intraface. And whatever words she might have put together over the course of the last three years had long ago dried up in the face of the obsessive hunger that every spinfeed reader on the Ring and beyond seemed to have for the most minute details of Cohen’s life, sexual and otherwise.
“He’s not just one person.” Was she actually about to talk to Ash about something she’d never talked about to anyone, including Cohen himself? Maybe it was just the sheer relief of dealing with someone who couldn’t reach into your head and rip the thoughts out of it before you had time to decide if you even wanted to share them or not. “He’s a lot of people. And…you kind of agree to pretend that there’s this single, identifiable, permanent person there. Just like you agree to pretend that that person doesn’t change every time he associates another network or autonomous agent. And after a while you start to wonder about yourself. If you’re just one person or many. If you ever really knew who that person was, and whether it’s really that simple for anyone.”
“It sounds terrifying.”
“No. Well, not most of the time. But you wonder sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m becoming a new species. Like…there’s a line somewhere where posthuman gets so far away from human that it needs a new name.” And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the first person to cross that line.
Night had fallen while they were talking, and the shofar was already blowing in some nearby synagogue. Christ, what a dismal noise! Ten days of it were going to be enough to drive Li well near crazy.
“Maybe the next ten days would be a good time to do a little Arithmetic of the Soul,” Ash suggested.
“According to the Interfaithers,” Li pointed out, “I don’t have a soul.”
Ash shrugged and began moving around the room, retrieving scattered toys and tossing them into a bin in the corner. “Don’t think the Interfaithers are that simple, Li.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled. “No one’s that simple.”
Ash turned to face her, the seriousness of her expression at odds with the purple plush stegosaurus clutched against her midriff. “Remember what you said about killing being personal? You were right. But this is personal too.”
Li waited.
“You were the general’s student. Her protegée. You hurt her deeply when you betrayed her. She’s giving you a chance to set things right now. To go back and remake past choices. Not many people get that kind of chance.”
“I’m grateful to her,” Li said. And in that moment, amazingly enough, she really was grateful. “But I did what I did on Compson’s World because I thought it was right.”
Ash twisted the stuffed toy in her hands in a gesture that was either unconscious or supremely skilled acting. For some unfathomable reason it reminded Li of that brief glimpse of the silver stretch marks on that otherwise flawlessly engineered body. “What about what you did on Gilead?”
Li’s shooting eye twitched, and she rubbed fiercely at it. It was intolerable, she thought angrily, to have her own body give her away like that.
“I don’t remember Gilead,” she told Ash. “Or are you the only person in UN space who didn’t tune in to the trial of the century?”
“Nguyen said to tell you she can get you the real feed. But only on the understanding that it’s for private consumption.”
In other words, it would be yet another in the long series of “real feeds,” none of which could be parity checked or authenticated. “Thanks, but I’ve already walked down that hall of mirrors.”
“She said you’d say that. But she said you’d still want it when you’d had a chance to cool down and think about it.”
Li was thinking all right.
She was thinking of a clear blue morning sky on Gilead, and the soft wet sound of wind in the trees after the night’s rain, and the way you could hear songbirds all the time there, twittering back and forth from treetop to treetop; but only once in a while would you suddenly catch a bright flash of feather in the corner of your eye, gone before you’d had a chance to know anything except that it was beautiful.
“Good shot,” said the voice that haunted her shredded memories.
It could have been her voice. But then so could the next one.
“Not good enough. Fuck. I must have missed his spine by a millimeter. What do we do with him?”
“Mecklin? You getting anything but static? How far back is battalion?”
“I still can’t raise them, Sarge…uh…sir. Far as I know, they still haven’t made it across the river.”
“Chaff?”
“No chaff, sir. They’re just not picking up the phone.”
“And we got, what…twenty-eight prisoners?”
“Twenty-nine if this one lives.” A fourth voice, whose name hovered annoyingly on the tip of Li’s tongue. “Six A’s. Twenty-two tacticals. All Aziz except for this one. Must be their SigInt officer. Jesus Christ, what a mess! How the fuck can he still be alive anyway?”
“What do we do now, Sarge? Tag ’em for pickup?”
“Can’t. Orders. Prisoner pickup has to be cleared at the battalion level.”
Li remembered that particular order. Or thought she did. Good sharp solid block of soft memory of some blowhard bird colonel standing in the drop ship’s cavernous briefing room yakking on about crèche production schedules, and the impossibility of getting a draft resolution through the General Assembly in the current political climate, and how this was a war of attrition in which the key to victory was “draining the bathtub” faster than the Syndicates could fill it up again. Her lawyers, even the ones Cohen hired after she fired the idiot UNSec assigned her, hadn’t been able to dig up a shred of evidence that the guy had ever existed, let alone been deployed to Gilead. And when it came to he-said-she-said, machine memory beat meat memory every time.
“So what are we supposed to do if we can’t raise battalion? Take them with us? Gonna be like herding fucking cats. And there’s only eight of us.”
“Seven. Pradesh didn’t make it up the hill.”
Long pause there. Pradesh had been well liked.
“Has the medtech gone back to check on him?”
“Medtech didn’t make it up the hill either.”
Which feed was Li’s? The captain’s? The sniper’s? Had she been giving the orders that morning or just following them? If it had ever been possible to know, then the full-court press UNSec had put on for her court-martial had muddied her decohering memories beyond any hope of recovery.
She could just have been the sniper, she told herself for something like the eight thousandth time. She’d dropped into Gilead as a sniper. It was the best way to go to war if you had the skill and nerves for the job. You sat up above the carnage, too far away even to smell it if you were lucky. You did your breathing exercises, and you kept your trigger finger warm, and you let y
ourself float into the cool blue readout-flooded world behind your glareproof goggles. And if you were well and truly fucked up you could even convince yourself for pretty long stretches of time that you were just playing a bootleg beta release of a really kick-ass video game.
As long as the killing didn’t bother you.
Except that after a while the fact that the killing didn’t bother you started to bother you.
The shofar blew again. Li jumped as if someone had set off the air-raid sirens.
“You understand,” Ash said, “that this offer is off if you tell Cohen about it.”
“I guessed as much.”
Li knew what was supposed to happen next. Hell, she could have scripted the next scene single-handedly. She was supposed to protest that she couldn’t lie to Cohen. Ash was supposed to offer her justifications, excuses, and ultimately money. Li was supposed to say that the money didn’t matter, that it was a matter of principle. Then Ash was supposed to ask her to think about it, just think about it. Whereupon Li would agree. Reluctantly. Because of course she was almost completely entirely sure that she was going to have to say no…
All hypocritical nonsense when they both knew that everyone took the fall eventually.
And the money.
It was amazing how no one ever, ever, ever turned down the money.
“Fine,” Li said. “How long do I have to think about it?”
“As long as you want,” Ash said.
She offered the lie so sweetly that it was almost believable.
As Li stepped into the wet street, she almost collided with an old man hurrying home or to synagogue or to wherever normal people went on the last night of the year in Jerusalem.
“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” he said, bowing and touching a withered hand to his hat brim.
He couldn’t see her face, she realized; the lobby was too bright behind her, the street too dark; and the fine drizzle scattered the electric lights into a misty halo around her head and shoulders.
She returned the gesture, instinctively turning her wrist to hide the fine gunmetal-gray tracery of her wire job.
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