Arkady had been gazing at the floor, but now he glanced up sharply and found himself staring into the man’s eyes. And that was the second surprise.
The man’s eyes were brown. Not the liquid velvet of a Rostov construct’s eyes, let alone the intense black of Gavi’s eyes. Just the normal expected brown that usually went with Mediterranean coloring. Ordinary, like everything else about him. But you couldn’t look into those eyes and not know that they belonged to a thinking man who had done and seen enough in the world to be long past proving things.
“You’re Walid Safik,” Arkady said.
“So they tell me. Sit down, Arkady.”
Arkady sat down, trying to put the man before him together with the aura of mystery and danger that surrounded Absalom.
“Did you have a nice talk with Gavi?” Safik asked. “Oh, don’t look like that. I’m not pumping you for information. Not yet, anyway. Just curious. Gavi married my favorite cousin, did you know that? I danced at their wedding. Well, figuratively speaking. I don’t think I actually danced. I was a pretty bad dancer even before I got fat. My wife says so, and when she says rude things about me they’re usually true. Tell me, how did Gavi strike you?”
“In what way?”
“Personally. Did you like him? Never mind, of course you did. Everybody does. Or they used to, anyway. But did he seem happy within the obvious limitations?”
“He seemed fine, I guess.” Arkady remembered the missing leg and shuddered involuntarily. How did people down here talk about that sort of thing? There seemed to be a terrible number of people on Jerusalem’s streets with missing or deformed body parts. Did the commonness of such horrors make them lighter to bear and easier to talk about? Or did it just make them all the more frightening? “I doubt I know him well enough to tell whether he’s happy or not.”
“Fair enough. But there’s no harm in asking, is there?”
Safik got up, walked to the door, and conferred briefly with Yusuf. When he came back he had a pack of cigarettes in his hand.
“Do you mind?” he asked. “I’d open the window, but some idiot painted it shut last year.” He lit the cigarette and sucked at it with the intensity of an addict. “Terrible habit. I picked it up in my twenties because I was seduced by all those old romantic spy movies where interrogations happen in a haze of cigarette smoke. And when the romance wore off, I was left with the smoking. And when I tried to quit I just got fat, then started up again anyway. So now I’m a fat old man who smokes too much and has no youthful illusions to fall back on.”
He set the lighter down on the table between them, spun it around like a top, and watched it flash black and silver and black and silver and black until it drifted to a halting stop. “So what do I do now, Arkady? Do I try to outcharm Gavi? Do I try to outwit Korchow? Do I spin you around”—he flicked the lighter back into motion—“until you don’t know which way is up or who you can trust?”
Arkady looked up from the glittering spin of the lighter to find Safik gazing at him with those calm, extraordinarily ordinary eyes.
“Which body has Cohen brought down this time, by the way? Not the little Italian actress by any chance?”
“No…um. A boy.” He paused, suddenly uncertain even of that. “I think it’s a boy. It wears suits. They call it he.”
“They always call Cohen he, even when he’s in a woman’s body. It’s like the names of hurricanes. It doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, too bad it’s not the Italian girl. He ruined her career, of course. She really had talent, but she got lazy once she took up with him. He has that effect on some people. Still, the boys in surveillance just loved her. Practically had to pay them to go home. Don’t let Korchow make you lie to Cohen, by the way. He hates it when people lie to him. If he were human I’d say it was a neurosis. And I’ve seen him kill with a ruthlessness and a lack of hesitation that would be pathological…again, if he were human. On the other hand, I’ve also seen him go to quite a bit of trouble to protect his friends when an operation goes sour—something you might want to give a little thought to if you want to take your skin with you when you go home.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Safik shrugged. “You don’t get to be my age in this line of work without blood on your hands. If it doesn’t bother you, you’re a monster. If you’re not a monster, then you reach a point where the main thing you want in life is not to produce any more bloodshed on either side of an operation than is strictly necessary…which brings me right back to the problem of how to talk to you.”
“I thought you were already busy outcharming Gavi.”
Safik smiled. “You flatter me. But seriously, Arkady. What would be the point? You’ll serve whatever it is you love most. Money, if it’s money. In which case there’s no art at all in turning you; merely a matter of who has the larger departmental budget. Or, if it’s principle or love or loyalty, then you’ll serve that. And none of Korchow’s spy craft or Moshe’s intimidation or Gavi’s charisma or my plain talking is going to change that.” His cigarette spit and crackled as he took another drag on it. “So that’s all I can usefully ask of you, Arkady. What do you love? What do you serve? What makes you able to go to sleep at night and stand the sight of your face in the mirror when you wake up in the morning? You show me your soul, I’ll show you mine…and then we’ll see if we can profitably travel the next little bit of road together.”
“I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” Arkady said. And it was true. He didn’t belong to Earth, or believe in what humanity stood for. And yet all the truths he’d grown up honoring had been shattered under the terrible pressure of Novalis.
“Tell me about Novalis,” Safik said, as if he’d plucked the word out of Arkady’s mind. “Not the facts. Gavi already got the facts from you better than I ever could.” Safik had been fingering the blank sheet of paper on his desk for several minutes. Now he turned it over to show Gavi’s intricate flowchart on the other side. When Arkady gasped, he just smiled and gave him a conspiratorial wink. “I didn’t get it from Gavi, for what it’s worth. I wish the fools and bigots who think he works for me were right. When it comes to navigating the wilderness of mirrors, Gavi’s the best there ever was. On the other hand…sometimes Gavi trips over his own brains. And in your case I have a niggling feeling that things may actually be less complicated than he’s making them.”
“I told Gavi everything,” Arkady said, feeling suddenly tired and discouraged.
“Then tell me about Arkasha.”
“There’s nothing left to say.”
“Not even if I told you that we might be willing to give him political asylum?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because Korchow won’t give him up now.”
“You thought he might when you talked to Gavi last week. What’s changed?”
Arkady looked stubbornly at the floor.
“Talk to me, Arkady. Something’s eating at you. Something that wasn’t even on your horizon when Gavi talked to you. What do you know now that you wish you didn’t?”
Safik reached for his cigarettes, checked his watch, sighed deeply, and pushed them away again.
“I’m going to tell you something, Arkady.” Safik stood up and came around the desk to sit in the empty chair beside him. “Something I’ve never told anyone but my wife before. Not because it’s necessarily shameful—at least not any more shameful than a lot of other things I’ve done for my country. But if you get to be my age you’ll see that only a fool or a fanatic can spend much time in our line of work and not begin to…well…doubt. Worse, if you’re anything approaching a thinking person, you even begin to doubt your doubts. Are you really still working toward the great and good ends you used to believe in, or are your doubts merely a sort of mental washing of hands? A subtle kind of self-deception that lets you hold your nose and do dirty work while feeling all the while that what you do isn’t really you, that you’re better than that, more perceptive than tha
t, more moral than that.”
When Arkady didn’t answer, Safik sighed and went on.
“This happened to me when I was around your age, Arkady. This was before the doubts. I was still thin back then, believe it or not, and at least reasonably good-looking. Or so my wife tells me. Anyway, I’m making jokes about it because it’s not a very happy story. What it comes down to is that a young settler attacked one of our patrols and I was put in charge of questioning his mother. The Israelis were quite cooperative, of course. It was before the war, and that sort of freelancing is in no one’s interest.”
Safik’s manner had changed subtly, Arkady realized. He was casting little glances at Arkady at the end of every sentence, as if it was terribly important to make sure that Arkady understood every word he spoke. And there was a banked, smoldering fire behind the ordinary face that made Arkady see this was a man who was not controllable. By anybody.
“So anyway,” Safik went on, “here was this woman who had just lost her only son. And I—some young idiot who’d never been married, never had a child, knew nothing about anything—was supposed to question her. Naturally it was all the most offensively officious kind of nonsense. Who were her son’s friends? Who had given him the weapon? What had he said before he died? Why would he have done such a thing if he hadn’t learned at his mother’s knee to hate us? And on and on. Hopeless, of course. She didn’t have any real information, and wouldn’t have given it to me if she had. But she was more than happy to talk to me. She knew the clichés by heart, Arkady, and I heard them all that morning. Her son was a hero. He was fulfilling God’s mandate for the Holy Land. She’d achieved the highest purpose of a woman’s life by giving birth to a soldier. And on and on and on. But all the while she was making her patriotic speeches she was weeping. She was wracked with sobs every time she paused for breath. I have never seen someone weep so violently and still be able to force intelligible words out of her mouth.
“It was as if there were two women in her body, Arkady. An outer woman who had the power of speech, who belonged to the state, to civilization, to what you might call the superorganism. And an inner woman, who belonged to no government, and who knew damn well that all those patriotic words were dust next to her son’s dead body.”
Safik stopped. He was slumped in his chair, and he looked gray and ill and terribly angry. Arkady had the impression that he’d stopped talking not because he had run out of words but because he had lost faith that Arkady would understand him.
“So…”
“So what’s my point? I am telling you who I am, Arkady. I serve what I saw in that woman’s eyes. That every time you sacrifice the individual in the name of order and stability you’re only throwing fresh meat to the dogs of war. That martyrdom—be it the martyrdom of the soldier or the martyrdom of the suicide bomber—is a poor substitute for decent government. That’s what I serve, Arkady. And I don’t give a damn about the fanatics who only see lines on the map.” He smiled briefly and made that chin-flicking skyward gesture that Earth dwellers always made when they wanted to talk about the larger world that had left their planet behind. “Or lines out in space for that matter.”
“And what about Absalom?”
“Absalom’s an idea, not a man. And he won’t die as long as there are people on both sides of the Line who think like I do.”
They locked eyes.
Safik sighed and glanced away.
“Fine,” he said. “You have no reason to believe me. But I’ll tell you one thing, Arkady. I’m not your enemy. I’m not sure I’m anyone’s enemy. Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
But Arkady didn’t have to think about it. He trusted Safik. He knew he was playing the easy mark, just like he’d done with Gavi. He knew that any step he took might be the one that made a choice between protecting the Syndicates and saving Arkasha inevitable. But when he looked into Safik’s calm, decent, ordinary face and asked himself for some reason he shouldn’t trust him, he couldn’t find one.
So he told him everything, right up to that awful moment of revelation in front of Gavi’s flowchart.
“If that’s true,” Safik said when Arkady had finished, “then we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we, Earth and Syndicates alike?”
“No, we’re not!” Arkady burst out.
He never knew, then or later, whether Safik had planned it; but suddenly all the thoughts he’d kept to himself over the past weeks were spilling out of him, giving voice to his pent-up frustration at the intransigent human refusal to understand the Syndicates, to understand life beyond the Orbital Ring, to understand period.
“How can you people still be so ignorant?” he shouted. Then he realized he was shouting, caught his breath, and went on more quietly.
“How can you know so little even after centuries of sending ships and settlers out to die in space? How can you still understand nothing about what it’s like out there?”
“So make me understand. I want to understand, Arkady. If you can’t make me understand, you’ll never make any human understand.”
“You can’t understand,” Arkady said bitterly. He remembered again the terrible fire of ZhangSyndicate’s death throes. For the first time he realized that there had been men in those attacking ships. Men bred and trained in the Ring, where Earth was always one short rescue launch away, and the universe was still friendly and forgiving and crowded enough that a man could take it upon himself to loose a missile and destroy an orbital station that was all the wide world to its little ark of souls. “You hear the words. You nod and smile…and then five minutes later you say something that proves you haven’t understood a syllable. Earth itself keeps you from understanding. Even the Ring-siders still have Earth to fall back on if things go really wrong. You can afford to be selfish, inefficient, individualistic because Earth is big and rich and forgiving. You can afford to act like spoiled children because Earth will always bail you out. And even then you managed to turn getting to space into a race against extinction. How many billions of lives were thrown away on the generation ships? Humans make their sacrifices too. Despite all their brave words about rights and individuals. The collected quotient of individual misery and wastage and suffering in human society makes the Syndicates look like the ultimate humanists.”
“So it’s all just politics?” Safik interjected. He sounded gently disappointed by the idea.
“Politics! Reality. A reality you humans can’t see because you’re too busy telling each other fairy tales. I never understood before I came here why the UN got so taken by surprise when so many people around the Periphery sided with the Syndicates in the war, but now I finally get it. You actually think they’re still human. You think if you just wipe the Syndicates, your problems will vanish and you’ll step into the future you always wanted to have. But that future died with Earth. The only future left now is the one you made when you put Earth’s poor on the generation ships and threw them overboard to live or die. Well, we lived. And now you’re trying to stop evolution in its tracks because we aren’t the future you wanted to have.”
Arkady finished his speech and wound down into depressed and embarrassed silence.
“You don’t sound like a traitor,” Safik said at last. “You sound to me like a man who wants to go home.”
“Home isn’t perfect either,” Arkady whispered.
“Neither is my wife, but I still go home every night. Don’t you think Korchow has figured this out?” Somehow Safik managed to sound matter-of-fact and sympathetic in the same instant. “Don’t you think he knows enough of…well, I suppose I shouldn’t call it human nature…to have predicted you might feel this way?”
“You don’t think I’ve asked myself that again and again?” Arkady said bitterly. “I feel like a lab rat!”
Safik smiled. His gaze left Arkady’s for just long enough to light another long-awaited cigarette. “You seem to be focusing only on the negative aspects of being a lab rat. The up side of having someone like Korchow use you
is that there usually is a real piece of cheese at the end of the maze. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that Korchow might want to send Arkasha to Earth? The Embargo’s going to go up in smoke the minute people begin to really see what the Novalis virus has done. We’re going to be playing a vicious game of catch-up. And we’re going to be in desperate need of people like Arkasha. Maybe Korchow’s preparing the ground for a little…er, intellectual terraforming?”
Arkady tried to look impassive and undecided, but his mind had already gone into a tailspin of calculations, hopes, dreams, anticipation.
“I don’t want to rush you into anything,” Safik said. “Least of all anything Korchow’s trying to rush me into rushing you into. Go back to Moshe. Think about it. I’m sure we’ll have another chance to talk. That is as long as you don’t say anything that would make your keepers wonder just who you’ve been talking to over here.”
And if that wasn’t a way of buying his silence, Arkady wondered, then what was?
MET AND EMET
All art is born of science, just as all science has its origins in magic. Though it is hard to say exactly when AI design made the leap from science to art, two names are inextricably linked to the event: Hyacinthe Cohen and Gavi Shehadeh. Whatever you think of Gavi’s golem, its status as a watershed moment in the history of AI—and the history of Israel—is incontestable.
—YOSHIKI KURAMOTO TN 283854-0089. IS THE MOON THERE WHEN NOBODY LOOKS? MY IMAGINARY LIFE IN MATHEMATICS. NEW DELHI UNIVERSITY PRESS. INDIA ARC: 2542.
Gavi Shehadeh was so universally hated by the time he lost his leg that at first no one on either side of the Line could bring themselves to believe it wasn’t a richly deserved assassination attempt. The facts—the Shabbas visit to the one faction of his Jewish family that was still speaking to him, the impromptu soccer game, the lost ball, and the bloody carnage in the weeds—came out with such excruciating slowness that Gavi was up and walking before most of his old friends and new enemies could bring themselves to admit that he’d been crippled by a perfectly ordinary land mine.
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