“It’s the same for us,” Osnat said, making the same connection Safik had made. “Human nature. And apparently not just human.”
The bottom stick on the fire flared bright red, popped loudly, and crumpled into charcoal, setting the rest of the fire sliding and slithering and realigning itself above it. Beyond the firelight Arkady could hear the muted and furtive night sounds of the living desert.
“That woman who got pregnant, Arkady. Was your friend sure it was because of the fever?”
“As sure as you can be about work done in the field and under time pressure.”
“What do you think it would do to humans? What…just as an example…what do you think it would do to me?”
Arkady stared across the fire at her, but the eyes looking back at him weren’t Osnat’s eyes; they were the eyes of a rabbit racing ahead of the fox’s jaws. Arkady felt a guilty dread grip his chest and bear down on him. If Osnat could begin to covet the Novalis virus and the fertility that came with it, then what would the rest of her species do? How deep would the insanity run? And how brutal a price would Earth’s people pay if their surging population pushed them into outright war with the Orbital Ring? For the first time, Arkady really understood the myriad effects that the virus would send rippling across Earth—as dramatic and irreversible as the effects of triggering a cascade reaction in a newly terraformed biosphere. How far would the ripples spread? Would they bring down the fragile spider’s web that linked Earth to the dependent populations of her far-flung colonies?
How many deaths were going to be on his hands before it was over?
“The human immune system is so different from ours,” he told her, skirting the question. “It might do nothing. Or it might kill you.”
“That’s assuming I can catch it from you.” A log slithered to the ground in a shower of sparks. Arkady heard the blood thrumming in his ears, felt the curve of the planet falling away into darkness beneath him. “Can I?”
“You might already have caught it.”
He spoke the words without having consciously decided to say them. Even as he watched comprehension spread across her face, he was far from certain that he’d done the right thing.
“Are you sure of this?” Osnat asked. The hunger was gone from her voice. She had gone back to being the hard-bitten and practical soldier. “What’s your evidence?”
“No evidence. It just…everything fell into place so neatly as soon as I asked myself whether Korchow had sent me to sell the virus or to spread it.”
“Have you told anyone else?”
He hesitated. “No.”
She doubted. He could see that she doubted. But she looked aside and let it pass.
“This changes things,” she said after a minute. “Didi needs to know about it.”
“But how do we get to him?”
“Not through Ash. Anything that goes through Ash is going to have to cross too many desks before it hits Didi’s. We need to go through someone who has a direct line to Didi and doesn’t have to go through the normal channels.”
“Gavi?”
“No!”
He thought wistfully of Safik. He dismissed the thought, knowing without having to ask what Osnat’s reaction would be to the idea of putting their trust in PalSec. Then he remembered what Safik had said about Cohen going out of his way to protect his friends.
“What about Cohen?” he asked. “Does he have a direct line to Didi?”
“As direct as anyone’s.”
“Then let’s go to Cohen. Directly. Not through Li. Let’s ask the machine to help us.”
It turned out, however, that it wasn’t so easy to get the machine.
“He’s not here,” Li said when they finally succeeded in putting a call through. She said it in a tone that implied it was all the information they were entitled to.
“Well, when will he be back?”
“How should I know? Look, who is this? Why do you have the screen blanked?”
Osnat took a steadying breath, glanced at Arkady—more for support than permission—and switched on the visual feed.
“Oh,” Li said, blinking. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
“I don’t think—”
“I don’t care what you think.” She glanced sideways, her eyes focused on the middle distance. “Right. Gotcha. There’s a bar two doors down from you. The Maracaibo. It has a back room. I just reserved it for a private party at seven. Meet me there at seven-twenty.”
“What if we don’t?”
“Then you can go back to whoever’s chasing you and throw yourselves on their mercy. You think I care? It’s not my fucking planet.”
“I want to speak to Cohen.”
“You are speaking to him.”
And that was it. She was gone, signing off without so much as a good-bye or a by-your-leave.
“How did she know where we were?” Arkady breathed when the screen had fizzled through static into blackness.
“I don’t know.” Osnat bit her lip. “I’m out of my league, Arkady.”
“Should we meet her?”
“I don’t see what choice we have. But we can still take precautions. We don’t need to walk in with our eyes closed and a kick-me sign stuck to our backs.”
Arkady expected Osnat to investigate the bar when Li hung up, but instead she led him down the block to a quiet residential building. They reached the door just as a middle-aged man was leaving, and Osnat slipped in on a smile and an apology. Arkady clung to her heels all the way up the stairs and through a fire door onto a moonlit roof that had a clear view of the bar’s entrance. There he waited for almost forty minutes while Osnat prowled along the neighboring rooftops and poked and prodded at doors and windows.
“Jerusalem’s amazing this way,” she told Arkady. “You can travel halfway across the city on the rooftops. Get practically anywhere. I’m betting Li won’t know about that. Or at least that it won’t be the first thing she thinks about.”
When she’d completed her survey of the local roofways, she led Arkady back down onto the street and into the Maracaibo. She strode over to the bar, Arkady in tow, and stood on her toes to tap the bartender on the shoulder.
The man turned around, quick and wary. “What do you want?” he asked when he’d satisfied himself that she didn’t mean trouble.
“I want you to look at me.”
“I’m looking. I’m not too impressed.”
“No skin off my nose. Now look at my friend.”
“I looked at him when you walked in the door, lady. He’s bad business. And you’re bad business as long as you’re with him.”
“Think you could describe us if someone asked?”
“Depends who asks.”
“That’s just what I was hoping. This place have a back door?”
“Past the toilets. Which are for paying customers only even when they’re not broken.”
“What about a back room?”
“It’s reserved.”
“I know it. And I’m willing to pay double whatever they paid if you’ll promise to tell the guys who are about to come in here looking for us that we’re already back there.”
“And will you be?”
“How much would I have to pay for you not to care?”
Ten minutes and seventeen hundred shekels later they were across the street, on their rooftop.
Arkady started to ask Osnat how long she planned to wait, but she put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.
He looked down, following her gaze, and saw two men emerge from the shadows.
He could feel his palms sweating in the dank air. His left ankle was twisted awkwardly beneath him, but he was afraid to move, afraid of the telltale rasp of fabric or the scrape of a shoe sole against concrete. A thick fog hung over the city, blowing on a stiff westerly wind so that it split around building fronts and streamed in coarse white threads down the narrow streets. The two men stood just under them, looking across the wet pavement at the bar’s brig
htly lit windows. They seemed to be talking, but they were too far below the rooftop for even Osnat to make sense of the scattered words of Hebrew that wafted up to their hiding place.
One of the men went into the Maracaibo, was gone for several minutes, then strolled out again. As he returned to his companion a third man joined them.
“Shalom.” His voice carried alarmingly through the dank air. “They’re there?”
“In the back room.”
Arkady felt Osnat’s body relax beside him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know those guys. They’re straight from Didi. We’re safe, kiddo.”
She stood up and started to pull Arkady up after her.
Arkady never felt the blast. He saw its phosphorus-blue flash. He heard a sound like the tearing of a thousand sheets of paper. For a long frozen moment the street lay silent below them, with the few passersby either knocked off their feet or crouching in terror. Then sound returned to the world, and the building began to disgorge a bloody, screaming, weeping stream of people onto the street that suddenly seemed too narrow to begin to contain all of them.
Osnat pulled him back from the roof’s edge, and they were off, running down the moonlit tumble of rooftops toward the Green Line and the only refuge left to them.
ARITHMETIC OF THE SOUL
DOMIN: Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.
HELENA: How do you know they have no soul?
DOMIN: Have you ever seen what a Robot looks like inside?
HELENA: No.
DOMIN: Very neat, very simple. Really a beautiful piece of work. The product of an engineer is technically at a higher pitch of perfection than a product of Nature.
HELENA: But man is supposed to be the product of God.
DOMIN: All the worse! God hasn’t the slightest notion of modern engineering!
—KAREL CAPEK (1923)
It was evening again when arkady and Osnat came to Yad Vashem’s iron gate.
Arkady felt an exhausted sense of déjà vu as he watched Gavi descend the hill—still with the dog playing around his legs, still with the sinking sun behind him.
“We need help,” Osnat said when Gavi was finally standing in front of them. She sounded like her gut was twisting with the effort of asking for it.
“Well, okay. I’m glad you think you can trust me.”
Osnat glared into the middle distance with a look of profound disgust on her face. “I should probably bat my eyelashes at you, and tell you I was all wrong about Tel Aviv, and do my best to play the dumb blonde in the red Ferrari.”
A smile stole across Gavi’s lips. “You would never do that, Osnat.”
“Don’t be so fucking sure. But anyway…the truth is we have nowhere else left to go.”
Gavi led them up the hill, and scrounged up clean clothes and clean sheets and clean towels, and gave them bread and soup and chicken, all washed down with cold clear well water. He might have been any lonely homesteader on any colony planet welcoming the rare guests who wandered by. Only when they had finished eating did he begin to ask the real questions.
“Go ahead, Arkady,” Osnat said. “Tell him what you told me.”
Arkady told him.
“Do you want more chicken?” Gavi said when Arkady’s explanations and excuses finally petered out. “There’s more if you want it.” And then he meandered off into the shadowy depths of the kitchen and all Arkady and Osnat heard for a few minutes were pots rattling and spoons scraping.
When Gavi came back he was frowning. “Explain this Turing Soup thing again?”
Arkady tried to walk him through Arkasha’s explanation of Turing Soup, neutral networks, gateway mutations, and search engines and only got hopelessly tangled.
“So fertility’s almost a side effect,” Gavi said when he was done. “Except that whereas it offers you in the Syndicates something that you don’t want—or at least that most of you don’t want—it offers us exactly what everyone wants. So however slim your chances of putting it back in the box might be, our chances are even slimmer.”
“How long do you think it’ll take before it turns into war between Earth and the Ring?” Osnat asked. “Ten years? Twenty?”
“Actually,” Gavi said, “I was thinking months not years.”
“We need to get to Didi,” Osnat said. She seemed to be watching Gavi while she spoke, as if she were looking for an answer that she expected to be written on his face.
“Getting to Didi is easier said than done,” Gavi answered. He hesitated as if he were playing out possible counterarguments in his mind, one after another, and rejecting them.
“You talked to Li,” he said finally, “not Cohen. Do you have any reason to believe your message actually reached Cohen?”
“Well, no, but I thought they were the same person.”
“They are. But I’m not sure that means what you think it means. I think our next step should be to go back to Cohen. Directly.”
Osnat shook her head violently.
“I don’t argue that we should trust Cohen blindly,” Gavi said. “But I still think he’s the best person to feel out if we want to get a firmer grip on what’s actually happening in the Office without sticking our necks out too far.”
“I don’t know.” Osnat sighed. She wiped a hand across her face. “I’m so tired I’m about to pass out sitting up.”
“We don’t need to decide anything tonight,” Arkady suggested. “We can always sleep on it and see what we think in the morning.”
But in the morning Osnat was too sick to talk, and Arkady and Gavi were too busy trying to keep her alive to remember the conversation they were supposed to have had.
Her fever was worse than anything that the survey team members had suffered from. For three days Gavi and Arkady nursed her through it, spelling each other, falling back on aspirin and cold-water-soaked cloths when none of the normal remedies seemed to work.
“Is this the same sickness?” Gavi asked at one point. He was sitting with Osnat, mopping her brow with a cold cloth while Arkady looked on in an agony of guilt.
“How should I know?” Arkady said desperately. “I’m not a doctor, and even the doctors on the survey didn’t know what they were dealing with.”
“I’m not asking you for a diagnosis,” Gavi said coolly, “just an opinion.”
“You’re the human!” Arkady protested. “For all I know it could be the flu.”
Gavi gave Arkady a long level look over Osnat’s unconscious body.
“Okay. I don’t think it is either. But…what do you want me to tell you?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything else you should tell me?”
“Can I speak with you, Gavi?”
“Of course, Arkady. But come outside. I need to get dinner ready.”
They walked through the visitors’ center, pausing in the gloomy industrial-sized kitchen long enough for Gavi to pick up a hard-used metal bowl and a vicious-looking knife. They stepped outside—that shocking moment of transition that Arkady would never get used to no matter how many brief planetside stays he made over the course of his mostly stationbound life. Gavi set off down the hill toward the shantytown jumble of the chicken coops. When they reached the little flock, Gavi slipped in among them, gesturing to Arkady to wait on the edge. He spoke companionably to the birds, and they clustered around him looking for handouts and caresses.
Gavi took one of his hens in his arms and murmured to her in Hebrew too soft and quick for Arkady to make any sense of it. He ambled back over to Arkady and sat down. The hen rested in his lap chuttering quietly to herself, her eyes all but closed. Gavi smoothed down her feathers and caressed her until she hunkered down into her feathers and closed her eyes in pleasure. Then he gripped her with firm, expert hands and drew the blade across her throat so smoothly and quickly that Arkady only understood what had happened when he saw the blood coursing into the bowl Gavi had nudged into place wi
th his good foot.
“Is that for keeping kosher?” Arkady asked when he had recovered his voice enough to speak.
“No.” Gavi turned the hen’s limp little body in his hand and began plucking the feathers with sharp, practiced turns of his wrist. “It’s for Dibbuk.”
“You don’t keep kosher then?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because, if God actually exists, I can think of a long list of things He ought to be more worried about than the contents of my intestines. What did you want to talk to me about, Arkady?”
“I…I wanted to apologize.”
“What for?”
“For, well…everything. I thought I was doing the right thing. Or at least one right thing. I didn’t know Korchow had turned me into a weapon. I wish I could make you believe that.”
“I can see that you’re well-intentioned. This is a very complicated situation. You really don’t owe me anything.”
Gavi was still plucking away at the chicken so that it was impossible for Arkady to meet his dark eyes. His voice, however, struck a chill down Arkady’s spine: cool, smooth, gently distant. The voice of a man who had gone through anger and come out the other side. Arkady could imagine going to great lengths to avoid hearing it again.
“I never hid anything from you intentionally. I didn’t understand what Korchow had done myself until after we’d talked. And then, with Safik…well…”
“Safik could wring secrets out of stones. I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am if I thought you wouldn’t tell him everything.”
Arkady looked doubtfully at him. “You’re not angry, then?”
“Being angry would imply that I expected you not to tell him. Or that I felt you had some kind of obligation not to. Why would I think either of those things?” Gavi stood up, the chicken hanging limp and bedraggled and naked in his hand. “Angry’s silly, Arkady. It makes people feel better in the short term, but in the long term it just makes them not think straight. And what possible good can it do anyone if we let ourselves be seduced into not thinking straight?”
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