“Ignore the caviar communist commentary,” Li told Arkady. “The point is that the Legion held out to the death, then went down fighting.”
“The point, Arkady, is that Catherine here has a little thing for pointless suicide missions.”
The soldiers all around them were up on their feet now, peering after the Enders in the next shell crater over, gathering their gear and stowing water bottles and nonstandard-issue candy bars.
“If you two are done sniping at each other,” Osnat interrupted, “would you mind terribly if we got our shit together and got the fuck out of here before your friends leave us behind?”
After that things got vague.
Arkady remembered passing reel after reel of the indestructible obsolete fiber optics that littered half the Judean desert. He remembered an entire field of school buses, standing snout to tail, their doors flapping open as if they were still waiting to transport a generation of children who had never shown up for school. He remembered passing through a village whose inhabitants gathered in the dark doors of their hovels to watch the Enders jangle by, and whose hostile faces could have been Jewish or Palestinian or anything in between.
They spent most of the night in another flooded-out crater.
“Know much about cannibalism?” Li asked him sometime well after darkness had fallen.
Even she was lying down by then, though she was still smoking another in her endless succession of cigarettes. How she managed to smoke lying down like that and not end up buried in a mountain of cigarette ash was a mystery to Arkady.
“Uh…no.”
“Some bright bulb did a statistical study of space wrecks. You know, the classic scenario: twenty people stranded in a life pod, food and air for thirty days, going to take ninety for the SOS to ping to the nearest BE relay and back. So who are the eaters, and who are the eatees? No pun intended. Turns out that you can predict who’s going to eat and who’s going to get eaten pretty reliably. Even when they draw straws, believe it or not. Able-bodied human males come last. They don’t generally start eating each other until they’ve run out of everyone else. Before that they go through the human women and children. And before they start on the lesser humans, they eat the posthumans. And before they eat the posthumans, they eat the constructs.”
“That’s sick.”
“Don’t be a cynic, Arkady. It used to be worse. Used to be they’d eat all the blacks and Asians before the first white woman got cooked. Now it’s ladies first regardless of incidentals like skin color. That’s what we in the UN call progress, Arkady. Anyway, here’s the real question: The guy who did the study only assumed one kind of construct. He didn’t take the Syndicates into account. So my question, Arkady, is: When the food runs out which one of us do you think these clowns’ll eat first?”
Morning found the squad on the banks of the river looking up the long slope of Mount Herzl past the IDF military cemetery.
They had penetrated into the Line’s dead heart: a no-man’s-land that no army was willing to defend, a place of ghosts where last summer’s oranges lay uneaten beneath the trees and the grass around the graves grew waist high. They might have been on Novalis, the world lay so still and quiet around them.
Li and Osnat were hunched over a map-fiche with the Israeli captain. Arkady was sitting with Cohen, who didn’t seem to have any more interest in the proceedings than he did. When the women finally came away from the map, Osnat had a sullen look on her face and was fiddling with the trigger guard of her weapon in a way that made Arkady’s stomach curl.
“You asked for help,” the AI told Osnat.
“Not from a Palestinian traitor!”
“Half-Palestinian,” Cohen corrected blandly.
Osnat fingered her weapon again. None of the Israelis seemed to register the movement; but suddenly, and without ever seeming to have moved at all, Li was standing right next to Osnat, her hand on the other woman’s trigger hand. The touch looked light, almost casual. But in fact Osnat’s fingers were turning white with the pressure of the other woman’s grip. Slowly, as if everything were happening under running water, the rifle slipped from Osnat’s grasp and slithered down her side until it hit the end of its webbed sling.
“We’re fine,” Cohen assured the Israeli captain. And, ever so gently, he lifted the rifle away from Osnat’s side, removed the ammunition clip, and pocketed it.
Osnat turned to the captain for support, but he was studiously inspecting the slime that had accumulated on his boots during the river crossing.
“You know the road home,” Li said in the take-it-or-leave-it tone Arkady was beginning to think expressed some core component of her emotional architecture. “You want to turn around, this’d be the time to do it.”
“And Arkady?”
“What do you think?”
There was a lot more walking after that. It was all uphill, and most of it was through the tall grass and tangled weeds of the vast IDF cemetery. Arkady, his mind slack with exhaustion, only noticed that the others had stopped walking when they were face-to-face with the tall iron gates of Yad Vashem.
Li reached out and gave the latch a brisk shake. It held, and when Arkady looked closer he could see why: someone had wrapped a heavy chain through the bars and closed it with a thick-hasped padlock.
Li glanced at Cohen, and again Arkady had that eerie sense that some communication the others couldn’t hear was passing between them.
“Well, have you actually talked to him yet?” Li asked aloud.
Cohen seemed to gather himself to argue, but then the shunt’s shoulders dropped slightly. “No. But he’ll be here. Where else would he be?”
Li snorted. “It’s not whether he’s here I’m worried about. It’s whether he wants to come out and talk to us.”
“There’s no wall,” Osnat pointed out. “We can just go around the gate if we want.”
“Bad idea.” Li strolled back down the road, pried a loose piece up from the decaying asphalt, and tossed it into the trees to one side of the gate. It arced lazily through the air—and then vanished in a cloud of vapor as it passed some invisible boundary. “I’ve been wanting to lose weight,” she quipped. “But not that much.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“For him to realize that we’re not going away until he comes down to talk to us.”
It took nearly an hour before a distant and wavering figure appeared at the top of the long tree-lined avenue leading down to the gates. At first Arkady thought he was watching a machine or a monster. The being seemed to have many legs, and it rippled and moved with a sideways motion that he could make no sense of. As the figure descended the hill toward them, the wavering shape resolved itself into two shapes: a man, tall and supple and graceful, with a dog following at his heels. The late-afternoon sun gilded the man’s head with fire and flickered around his feet in a way that only made sense when Arkady realized that the man was wearing shorts—and that his right leg below the knee wasn’t flesh at all, but a delicate architecture of ceramsteel and silvery neuromuscular thread.
Man and dog continued their unhurried progress down the hill until they finally reached the gate. The man looked out through the bars at them, but he made no move to open the padlock that hung from the iron latch. He was smaller than Arkady had thought he would be; not a big man at all, but built so straight and true that he seemed tall until you stood next to him. The expression on his face was calm, mildly interested, completely noncommittal. The face itself was one of those brown-skinned, strong-nosed, finely hewn faces that were equally common among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews. The man’s only really remarkable feature, Arkady decided, were his black eyes. And those were as deep as the dark between the stars.
The dog poked her sharp nose through the gate, growling anxiously. The man laid a calming hand on her. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“It’s me,” Cohen said. “Cohen. Didn’t you get my message?”
>
“Sorry. I’ve gotten rather bad about checking my mail lately.”
“Well, I’ll give you the executive summary: we’re here.”
“So I see.” The bottomless eyes touched on Cohen, then Osnat, then Li and Arkady, then returned to Osnat for a pensive moment.
“Hello, Osnat.”
Osnat nodded curtly.
“Are you going to let us in?” Cohen asked.
“The thing is…I don’t exactly have the key at the moment.”
“You lost it?”
“I never lose things.” A self-deprecating smile lit the thin face and warmed the dark eyes. It occurred to Arkady that people would lay their lives down for this man. “I just put them down. And then I put other things on top of them. I figured that when I remembered what I’d put on top of the key, that would be soon enough to open the gate again. But now here you are standing on my doorstep and accusing me of losing things! I ask you, is there no justice in the world?”
He pulled what looked like a tiny nail file out of his pocket, and bent over the heavy padlock securing the gate. In a matter of seconds the lock fell open and the chains rattled to the ground. The gate opened stiffly, then stuck. They had to slide through the narrow gap one by one, taking care not to get caught on the ornate iron thorns that sprang from the bars.
“I take it the key’s been under something for a while?” Cohen asked as he squeezed through.
The man smiled again, and Arkady finally put his finger on what it was that was so entrancing about the expression. It was the smile of a child, open and vulnerable. Or rather it was the smile of an adult who had somehow managed to remain childlike. It made you feel that you were looking at a person who had been wounded by the world but not diminished by it.
The dog, meanwhile, was sniffing at their knees and ankles, whining under her breath, glancing back at her master, putting her body between him and the as-yet-unknown arrivals. He quieted her with a murmured word. She brightened, and her frothy tail began to wave hopefully.
“What a beautiful girl!” Cohen exclaimed, kneeling to bring his face within licking range.
She was beautiful. Arkady knew theoretically that she must be no bigger than average size for a dog, but she was so much larger than the tiny, petted, cosseted canines that he’d seen in the Syndicates that he could barely believe they were the same species. And this was no pet either, he suspected. He didn’t know what job she’d been bred to do, but not even the most casual observer could miss the honed, streamlined, powerful purposefulness of her.
“What is she?” Cohen asked. He was now thumping energetically at her ribs, whipping her into a delighted frenzy. “She’s too big to be pure border collie.”
“I don’t think the breed has a name. The shepherds in the Line bred them from whatever was left after the die-offs. Tough on sheep, easy on the eye.” He cleared his throat and made a formal gesture. “Ah. I’ve been remiss. Cohen, meet Dibbuk. Dibbuk, meet Cohen.”
Cohen laughed and buried his face in the dog’s thick fur. Then he stood up, and after the briefest of hesitations, stepped forward and embraced the stranger. They kissed each other elaborately in the Arab manner. Then Cohen took the human’s face between his hands and held him out at arm’s length in a way that made Arkady realize suddenly that the AI must be very old, and that even the humans he called friends must seem like mere children to him.
“You didn’t have to roll in with the cavalry,” the human said. “You could have just asked me to meet you at your hotel. Uh…right…well, I guess I should try to check my mail more often.”
“Oh Gavi,” the machine said, caressing the man with the same open, uncomplicated, unshadowed affection he’d shown to the dog just a few moments ago, “what on earth am I supposed to do with you?”
They followed Gavi between the tall trees to a building buried in the hillside like a knife blade. He stopped in front of a plate glass door sized to accommodate busloads of tourists and smiled his sweet, wounded, self-deprecating smile. “We all know what the spider said to the fly and how that ended up,” he told them. “But come in anyway.”
The vast lobby ran away on all sides into dust and shadows. Gavi struck off across the echoing expanse of marble and dove through a sagging fire door into an ill-lit warren of maintenance corridors and administrative offices.
Arkady felt as if he’d walked into a theater, stepped onto the stage, and slipped through the wings to the cramped back passages and dressing rooms where the actors really lived. This part of the building looked at once abandoned and cluttered. Gavi seemed to be camping in it as much as living in it, and the whiff of kerosene on the air hinted at more than occasional power outages.
At one point they passed an entire room full of dirty laundry. Gavi pulled the door closed, grinned sheepishly, and muttered something about the maid’s day off. “I would have put shoes on when I saw you coming,” he said in an apparent non sequitur, “but I forgot to buy socks last time I was in town. And I meant to wash the ones I have. But somehow the whole laundry thing just never quite got off the ground this month.”
Li snorted.
“I have Superhuman Powers of Procrastination,” Gavi announced. He could do the same capital letters trick that Osnat did, Arkady noticed. Maybe it was something about Hebrew. “But the problem with powers of procrastination,” he continued wistfully, “is that you can’t Use Them for Evil. You can only use them for Nothing.”
Osnat stared for a moment, perplexed, then burst out laughing.
“It’s nice to see you,” Gavi told her. “How are you? Well, I hope?”
She frowned and looked away. “So what are we here for, anyway? I don’t want to walk home after dark in this neighborhood.”
Gavi turned to Cohen, a look of alarm spreading across his mobile features. “You’re not thinking of going back tonight? That would be terribly dangerous. I don’t want to get my neighbors in trouble, but I happen to know that at least four EMET patrols have been rolled for their tech in the last six months.”
“You happen to know?” Osnat asked in a voice as hard as her eyes.
“I have to live out here,” Gavi said simply.
Osnat turned away, her mouth twitching as if she wanted to spit.
Gavi looked after her for a moment before turning back to Cohen. “You are staying, though? Aren’t you?”
“We’re staying,” Li broke in. “I just cleared it with EMET.”
“Good. Excellent. Then shall we get down to business? Um…what is business, by the way?”
Cohen cleared his throat. “Would you kids mind terribly going off and playing on your own while I have a private word with Gavi?”
Gavi moved around the room, piling clothes, books, and data cubes on one surface; moving them to another; rearranging and consolidating and buttressing sedimentary layers of computer printouts in a comical attempt to free up space for Cohen’s cup, Cohen’s knees, Cohen himself.
Watching him, Cohen felt at once relieved and disoriented. He had expected to see a broken man, or at least a changed one. But this was Gavi as he’d always been. The body blessed with the spare, tendon-on-bone grace of the born long-distance runner. The face that had far too much of the intellectual in it to be what most people called handsome. The black, black eyes whose liquid brilliance you couldn’t imagine until you’d been subjected to one of Gavi’s tell-me-no-lies stares.
And a right leg that ended just below the knee and had been replaced by a prosthesis that, if Cohen knew Gavi, was one of the most obsessively babied, upgraded, optimized, and tinkered-with pieces of hardware on the planet.
“How’s your mother?” Cohen asked.
“Oh, you know, the usual. Finding fascists under the furniture. Predicting the fall of the free world before lunch every morning. For her, happy.”
Gavi’s mother had been an old kibbutznik and a prominent Labor Party politician known for her fierce intelligence and her ability to sniff out and stamp on even the subtlest manifestations of bu
llshit. His father had been her diametric opposite: a dreamer, an intellectual, a minor Palestinian poet whose elegantly crafted poems were turning out to be not nearly as minor as everyone had at first thought they were.
Gavi’s father had died of an early heart attack before the war started, which Cohen couldn’t help thinking had been a mercy. His mother had resigned from the Knesset and left Earth permanently the day the first appropriations bill for EMET went through. And since she’d been berating her only son over his “fascist” career for decades, neither Gavi’s dismissal from the Mossad nor the swirling rumors of treason had clouded their affectionate but extremely long-distance relationship.
In Cohen’s opinion, each of Gavi’s parents had represented the best their respective cultures had to offer. And Gavi in turn had gotten the best parts of both of them. But that was Cohen’s opinion. And at the moment his idea of the n-optimal human being didn’t seem to be very popular in either the new Israel or the new Palestine.
“I like your tough girl,” Gavi said when he’d finally consolidated things sufficiently to clear knee and elbow room for the two of them. “And you finally got her to marry you too, I hear. How’s happily ever after going?”
Cohen shrugged.
“I’m sorry. And here I’d been getting so much enjoyment out of staring up at the stars thinking of all the fun you were having.”
“Fun, my friend, is seriously overrated.”
“So what’s the problem exactly?”
“If I knew, I’d fix it and there wouldn’t be one.”
“The frightening thing is that you actually mean that!”
Gavi leaned forward and looked deep into Cohen’s eyes. The effect was hypnotic. Mother Nature really did know best, Cohen decided. Put next to Gavi, even Arkady looked like a second-rate knockoff of the real thing.
“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but did Li really do what they say she did on Gilead? I can’t see you with someone who’d do that.”
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