“She doesn’t know what she did. They wiped her memory. She only knows what they want her to know.”
“And even you can’t get the real files?”
“Even I can’t get the real files. I’m beginning to wonder if they still exist.”
“You could go crazy over a thing like that,” Gavi said earnestly.
“Yes, you could.” Cohen blinked and shook his head, suddenly bothered by the flickering of one of Gavi’s many monitors. “Can you turn that off? Thanks. No, that one. Yes.”
“Are you still having seizures?” Gavi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “I thought you’d solved that bug long ago.”
“So did I. But I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze Catherine or discuss coupled oscillators. How are you?”
“Great.”
“Mind wiping that shit-eating grin off your face and giving me an honest answer?”
The grin broadened. “Shitty.”
“Gavi! Come on.”
Gavi gave him a cool, smooth, faintly amused look.
“Why are you acting like this, Gavi?”
“Like what? Like a man talking to someone he hasn’t seen for two years?”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine.” The grin was back in place. “I was going to call you when I was done feeling sorry for myself and ready to come out and play again. Admit it, Cohen. You just don’t like people who don’t need you.”
“No. I love people who don’t need me. That’s why I married Catherine. What I don’t love are people who pretend not to need me because they’re too pigheadedly proud to ask for help when they need it. And will you kindly have the courtesy to stop laughing at me?”
“I’m laughing with you, little AI. And has it occurred to you that you just might be seeing Hyacinthe these days when you look at me? I mean the man, not the interface program.”
“You’ll really do anything to make this about me instead of about you, won’t you?”
Gavi was shaking with repressed laughter now. “Come on, Cohen. If you traipse all the way out here to visit me and then spend the whole time crying on my shoulder about how I’m not crying on your shoulder, it’s just going to be too ridiculous for words.”
“There’s got to be something someone can do. Have you at least talked to Didi?”
“No. And I’m not going to.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Honestly, Cohen. What for? So he can tell me he thinks I got three of his boys killed and stashed the blood money in some Ring-side bank account, and the only reason I’m still alive is that I happened to be the dumb schmuck who pulled the future PM out of the way of a bullet once upon a time? You saw the way Osnat looked at me just now. I think we can take her feelings as representative.”
“I just—”
“Look.” Gavi let each word drop slowly and clearly into the silence. “There is nothing you can do. So do me a favor and forget about it. I have. And by the way, you can stop trying not to stare at my leg.”
“Was I?” Cohen winced. “You’d think having spent the last several years of Hyacinthe’s life in a wheelchair would have cured me of that.”
“It’s not as big a deal as you obviously think it is. I mean, I’m not minimizing it. It’s pretty fucking unpleasant. But I got up this morning and took a nice 10K run before breakfast. I’d have to be even more self-absorbed than I am not to realize it could be a lot worse.” Gavi’s eyes narrowed and his voice took on a not-so-subtle edge. “Okay. Enough small talk. We both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a hall pass from Didi. So what does Didi want from me?”
Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.
When he was done, Gavi stared at him over crossed arms. “So Didi read you your orders and you picked up your friends and marched them all out here like little toy soldiers, no questions asked, ’cause you’re my ‘friend,’ huh?” The word friend was framed in cruelly ironic quotation marks.
“That’s a shitty way to put it,” Cohen said.
“Oh, you think?” Gavi jerked his chin toward the jumble of hardware hulking in the shadows. “Does Didi know I’m an inscribed player? No, don’t bother, I’ll answer the question for you. He knows. He knows because I told him in the reports I filed when I was your case officer. And I told him so he could use it to control you. Which is exactly what he’s doing now. Or do you want to tell me I’m missing something?”
“No, Gavi. You never miss a trick.”
Hy Cohen had done a terrible thing when he wrote those innocent little lines of gamer code into Cohen’s core architecture. And then he’d slipped out during the intermission; gotten out dead before his prize creation found out how painfully confusing it was going to be to live in a world full of alien and beloved humans.
Cohen loved Gavi—or Gavi was an inscribed player, which amounted to about the same thing. He couldn’t bear to watch a friend tear himself apart—or he was programmed to reweight his fuzzy logic circuits on receipt of negative affective stimuli from inscribed players. He was more loyal than the most loyal human friend, more selfless than the most ardent lover. But if you went to the source code it was right there, staring you down in pretty print: not love, but a recursive algorithm that directed him to reformat gameplay in order to maximize positive emotive “hits.”
And it only made things worse to know that the code that compelled him wasn’t the chance result of evolution or natural selection or environmental pressures, but the personal choice of a combative little French Jew who had the chutzpah to hand you the keys to your soul and tell you to go ahead and rewrite it from the ground up if you thought you could make a better job of it than he had.
“I am your friend,” Cohen protested, dogged by the humiliating feeling that he was arguing as much with Hyacinthe as with Gavi. “Why do you have to tear me down to my logic gates to find out what that means? I’m doing what any friend would do.”
“Well that’s the funny thing, Cohen.” All the feeling had leached out of Gavi’s voice, leaving it as coldly impersonal as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Because now that we’re on the subject of friends, maybe I should point out something that appears to have escaped your notice. I don’t have any.”
“They weren’t real friends,” Cohen whispered, aching to wipe the look of self-loathing off Gavi’s face. “You’re worth a hundred of them.”
“No one’s worth that!” Gavi snapped. And then the floodgates let loose. “Who are you, fucking Graham Greene puking and mewling about how Kim Philby was worth more than the poor slobs he sent out to die for him? You think I’m worth more than Osnat? Or Li? Or poor little Roland there? You must. You dragged them into a war zone because Didi told you I needed a shoulder to cry on.”
“It’s not that simple…”
“Isn’t it? Name one solid piece of evidence you’ve ever seen that I’m not Absalom. Name one real reason for believing I didn’t send those kids out to die in Tel Aviv.”
“Stop it, Gavi.”
But Gavi didn’t stop. “Delete me from your inscribed players’ list.”
Cohen gasped. What Gavi was suggesting would have been dauntingly complex back when Hyacinthe wrote the original code. Three centuries later it was inconceivable. It would mean wrenching out all the tangled threads that connected Gavi to Cohen’s past: every conversation they’d ever had; every job they’d ever done together; everything that had ever so much as reminded Cohen of him. And it would damage the virtual ecology of Cohen’s nested hierarchies of agents and networks in ways that he couldn’t begin to predict or guard against.
The only person Cohen knew of who had ever done such violence to her own memory was Li. She’d done it to escape from the corporate-run hell of the Bose-Einstein mines…and she was still trying to paper over the su
cking hole she carried around where most people carried their family and friends and childhood.
“Do it,” Gavi told him.
“No.”
“I’m ordering you to.”
“I’m not a word processor. I don’t accept keyboard programming.”
“Then let me speak to router/decomposer. He’ll see reason even if you won’t.”
“He’ll see no such thing!” Suddenly all Cohen’s humiliation and distress coalesced into fury. “How dare you drag him into this? It’s not his decision to make!”
He could feel router/decomposer rattling the bars inside, saying that it was so his decision, or at least partially his decision. And there was something underneath his usual logic-chatter. Something that the DARPA programmers had squashed in Cohen when he was at about router/decomposer’s level of psychological development, and that he had sworn he would never squash in anyone.
He squashed it.
Then he throttled down router/decomposer’s bandwidth and slapped all his nonessential internal traffic out of circulation in order to drive the point home. It was for router/decomposer’s own good, after all. And why the hell did everyone have to reach their critical bifurcation points in the same fucking millisecond, anyway? Why couldn’t they all just slow down and let him breathe for a few cycles? Who did they think he was? God? “Don’t you ever do that again,” he told Gavi. “I don’t run my brain by committee. And I’m in no fucking mood to be tolerant.”
Resounding silence, inside and out.
Finally, Gavi’s shoulders slumped. The skin of his face looked bruised, and the tears he’d talked so mockingly about a few short minutes ago glittered along the edges of his eyes. Dibbuk roused herself from her blanket, whimpering, and pressed her nose between his knees until he sent her back to lie down again.
“Didi’s just doing what he has to do,” Cohen said. “So am I. Can’t you see that?”
“Of course I can.” Gavi’s voice dropped to a heartsick whisper. “And it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made a mistake. One stupid, trivial, miniscule mistake somewhere along the line. And I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life watching innocent people pay for it. Gur dead. Osnat, one of the best agents I ever trained, wasting her life playing corporate rent-a-cop because no one will trust anyone who came within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. And you’re worried about my leg? I’d laugh if it wasn’t all so awful!”
Cohen reached out a hand, but Gavi flinched away from him.
“So where do we go from here?” he asked when he thought Gavi was ready to speak again.
“Well, I guess I might as well do what Didi wants and talk to Arkady. If Didi’s pushing it this hard, then you can bet it’s because he’s scoped all the angles and knows he can turn even a betrayal from me to Israel’s advantage. That ought to be enough for you. It would be for me if I were in your shoes. After that…well, that depends on whether you trust me or not.”
“Should I trust you?”
They locked gazes long enough for Cohen to see fear, guilt, doubt, and anger chase each other through the black depths of Gavi’s eyes. Looking into them was like being hotwired to Gavi’s soul. How could there be a lie at the bottom of all that naked clarity?
“I can’t tell you,” Gavi said, looking away. “I can only answer for my intentions. And all my good intentions seem to be doing lately is getting people killed.”
“Well, I can’t kill the fatted calf,” Gavi told Arkady, “but I can offer a choice of goat or chicken. Have you ever met a goat? No? Then walk with me. You are about to have the pleasure of making first contact with a superior life-form.”
The little group strolled down the hill, basking in the last failing warmth of the evening sun. Arkady was having trouble squaring the living breathing fact of Gavi with the traitor Osnat had described to him. Indeed, Osnat herself seemed to be having a hard time making the edges match up.
Meanwhile, Gavi seemed naturally to gravitate toward Arkady, until what had begun as a group venture turned into a private tour of Gavi’s little kingdom. Arkady knew that the seeming casualness must be carefully scripted, but it didn’t lessen the flush of pleasure he felt when Gavi bowed his head to listen and turned those dark, burningly serious eyes on him.
It was that intensity rather than any physical resemblance that reminded Arkady so strongly of Arkasha. Gavi was far more controlled and subtle than Arkasha. The fires were banked and smoldering and masked behind a façade of self-deprecating humor. But looking at him, Arkady still had the same feeling he’d had about Arkasha: that he seemed more alive and less defended than it was safe for a person to be.
The goats had names. Gavi introduced them formally, one by one, as if he were presenting Arkady for the approval of a staid group of society matrons. Arkady had never seen a mammal close up other than humans, dogs, and cats. He looked at the geometric perfection of their hooves, met the measuring gaze of their golden eyes. “They’re perfect,” he said. “Just like ants are perfect.”
“Well, I think they are.” Gavi bent to scratch one of the more assertive goats behind her tricolor ears. “There used to be wild goats here, can you imagine? And ghizlaan. What’s ghazaal in English? Oh. Well, there you go. I guess they really did come from here.” He sounded wistful. “I would have liked to meet a gazelle.”
“Maybe we’re still learning to live without all the other species we used to share Earth with,” Arkady said. He paused, struggling to find words for an idea that, if not new, was at least new to him. “I some-times think that we—the Syndicates, I mean—evolved because humans have made themselves so alone in the universe that the only way to belong again was to belong to each other.”
Gavi gave him a sharp, appreciative look that reminded him painfully of his first conversations with Arkasha. “I like that,” he said after considering it for a moment. “I never saw it that way. I’ll have to think about that a bit. Thank you.”
And so it went. By the time they’d fed the goats and the chickens (another marvel!) and walked the perimeter with Dibbuk dancing around them like an electron orbiting its atom’s nucleus, Arkady had fallen completely under Gavi’s spell.
Every now and then, he would surface—from listening to Gavi’s tales of the hidden lives of goats and chickens and sheepdogs, or from telling Gavi about ants—and think, Why am I telling these things to a perfect stranger?
But it was no good. Caution and suspicion rang hollow against Gavi’s questions, Gavi’s fascination, Gavi’s enthusiasm, Gavi’s knowing and determined innocence.
“So, Arkady. Cohen and some other people you don’t know have asked me to talk to you about Novalis. Especially about what happened to Bella. Do you understand why we’re so interested in her?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Is there anything you don’t understand? Any questions you’d like to ask? Anything you’re worried about? Anything I can help you with or explain to you?” Gavi had put the charm on hold, Arkady realized. Now he was all cool, competent, dispassionate professionalism. There was something almost courtly about his change in demeanor; as if he were warning Arkady that it was time to get his guard up and put his game face on.
“Uh…I can’t think of anything at the moment.”
“Okay. No hurry. If you think of anything later, really anything, feel free to stop me and ask. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“First let’s set the ground rules. I know a number of people have been asking you questions lately, some of them not very politely judging from the state of your hide. In fact, you look like you’ve been through hell. So let me tell you right now that you’re not going to get any of that from me. This interrogation—and it is an interrogation; we can leave the we’re-all-just-friends-having-a-chat act for amateur hour—this interrogation is going to be tedious, and probably long, and certainly annoying. But that’s all it’s going to be. I don’t deal in violence. I deal in information. I hope the information you give me will be true, but if it’s not
…well, lies are information just like truth. And anyway”—a brief flash of the nonprofessional smile here—“you won’t lie to me, because I’ll catch you out at it sooner or later, and that’ll just be embarrassing for both of us.”
And then, with the jokes and self-deprecating smiles and humorous asides that Arkady would come to see as the very essence of the man, the interrogation began in earnest.
Gavi’s interrogation method, if you could call it that, was simply to take Arkady through his story, again and again, questioning, probing, asking for details, dates, names, endless clarifications. And all the while Gavi listened, crossing his legs and arms, hunching his back and nodding sympathetically, seeming to shrink in upon himself until there was nothing on the other side of the table but those liquid black eyes. It was as if Gavi were effacing himself—becoming the bare idea of a listener—in order to let Arkady’s vision, Arkady’s memories, Arkady’s version of Novalis, take over their shared universe.
And then he would step in—never obtrusive or confrontational, just curious—to ask the question that would pull loose a new thread of memory, open up a new set of questions, recast past words in a new and revealing light, narrow down meanings and implications and insinuations until every word of Arkady’s story possessed the crystalline clarity of a mathematical equation.
If Arkady had still been trying to sell Korchow’s carefully crafted lies, the effects would have been devastating. As it was, however, it seemed like wasted effort.
“I’m not lying to you,” he finally blurted out. “I’m asking for your help. What can I do to make you believe me?”
“I already believe you,” Gavi said, backing up the words with one of his defenseless smiles. “You had me after the first five minutes. But I also happen to think that Moshe was right”—they’d worked their way around, through, and out the other side of Moshe by now—“You know a lot more about Novalis than you think you do. To be honest, I’m hoping that if I can just keep working you through the story, turning the whole thing over, looking at it from fresh angles, you’ll get one of those aha! moments and we’ll be able to pull some of the things you don’t know you know out into the light of day. Make sense?”
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