“None, I guess.”
“I’m glad you agree with me. Let’s go have dinner.”
“So how come Gavi didn’t get sick?” was the first thing Osnat wanted to know when she was back in the land of the living.
“What do you mean?” Gavi asked, looking sharply at her. “Has someone else gotten sick?”
“Moshe. Well, I think so. The first week. But that’s twenty-twenty hindsight talking. At the time I thought it was just allergies. Same with the guards.” She frowned. “Ash Sofaer didn’t get sick either come to think of it.”
Gavi looked down at his plate. “Maybe Ash and I don’t have what the virus fixes.”
Osnat stared. A charged silence crept around the table and spread to the corners of the room.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Osnat asked.
“Well…Ash has a son. So do I.”
“You what?” Osnat asked. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Osnat grew rigid in her chair. She looked at her plate, her cup, the wall behind Gavi’s head. Everything but Gavi.
“You have a natural child?” she said finally, in an accusatory whisper. “And you just…abandoned him?”
“I like you, Osnat,” Gavi said in his blandest, most noncommittal voice, “but you’re a very judgmental person. And you seem to have the oddest idea that people are required to justify themselves to you when really it’s none of your business. It’s not attractive.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more attractive than thinking you have a right to float through life and break all the rules without ever explaining yourself to anyone!”
Arkady looked back and forth between the two of them, feeling the emotional undercurrent in the fight but completely unable to make sense of it.
“You want explanations?” Gavi said. “Here’s one. My wife was a doctor at a hospital on the Palestinian side of the Line. We lived over there so Joseph could go to Palestinian school. And don’t give me that look, little Miss Ashkenaz. You don’t know what it was like to be an Arab child in Israeli schools, even before the war. When the border crossing started getting sticky, we kept telling ourselves it would blow over. But it didn’t blow over. One day I went to work…and I couldn’t get back across. At first I could talk to them on the phone. Then the satlink was cut. Then I stopped getting any news of them at all. The last thing I heard was that Leila’s hospital had been bombed. Accidentally, of course. It’s amazing how often hospitals seem to get in the way of bombs. They found her body in what was left of the pediatric ward. The children were much harder to identify. But one of the survivors said she’d taken Joseph to work with her that morning because she thought it was safer than leaving him home.” He stood up, moving as clumsily as Arkady had ever seen him move. “So that’s how I deserted my son. Hope you enjoyed our little session of show-and-tell as much as I did.”
“Osnat—” Arkady began when Gavi had stalked out.
“Oh shut up, Arkady! What the hell do you know about anything, anyway?”
It took most of a day for Osnat and Gavi to start talking to each other again; and when they did it was with the quiet caution of a bomb squad tiptoeing around a possibly live piece of ordnance.
“I think we ought to at least put out a feeler,” Gavi said, talking mostly to Arkady. “There’s no reason I can’t drop by to see Cohen and feel him out a bit.”
Osnat raised one eyebrow. “You think you can find out more about him than he’ll find out about you in the first five seconds?”
Gavi got a funny look on his face. “Well…yes, actually. You know the old saying about AIs. It’s not that they’re smarter than us…”
“It’s just that they can be dumb so much faster. But that doesn’t mean you can lie to him and get away with it.”
“I’m not going to lie. I’m just going to offer what Cohen would call a selective sampling of the available data.”
“Are you sure that’s safe?” Arkady asked, thinking of Safik’s warnings about the AI.
Gavi gave him a quizzical look. “What’s he going to do, steal my lunch money?”
They kept Li awake until she’d never been so tired, even in combat. Exhaustion smeared thought and twisted perception. Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was the monster of all her childhood nightmares, hunting her through a distorted landscape while she ran and ran, unable to stop though she knew she would fall sooner or later.
And through the long fight with exhaustion, in the brief lulls between those nightmare flights, came the interrogations.
She was hooded of course. But she didn’t need to see her torturers to know them. Their attentions to her were invasive and intimate, and by the end of the second day she knew the three men better than their own wives did.
There was the one who laughed and joked and obviously enjoyed his work. There was the one who handled her with the brusque impersonalness of a butcher slinging meat. And there was the one who apologized. He was the worst by far because he reminded Li of the last thing she wanted to remember: that there were people on the other end of those cruel hands.
What they wanted was easy enough: her passwords.
They wanted the keys to her hard memory, her procedural backups, her archived spinfeeds, her accumulated knowledge base of past UNSec operations.
But she couldn’t give them the passwords because she no longer had them. They’d been changed by a deeply embedded Peacekeeper security loop the moment her internals processed the fact of her kidnapping. She’d heard rumors that UNSec built such things into Peacekeeper psychware, but until now she hadn’t entirely believed in them. Unfortunately, her captors didn’t seem to believe in them either.
And all the while, they kept hammering at her about some meeting with Turner that she couldn’t remember—any more than she could remember how she’d gotten here. Li, a connoisseur of memory loss, could feel the gap as clearly as she would have felt a missing tooth. And she could locate what was missing, more or less. Not that she really needed to, because her captors questioned her about it almost as incessantly as they questioned her about her passwords and security programs.
Where had she gone before she went to meet Turner?
Who had she spoken to before she spoke to Turner?
Who knew she had gone to see Turner?
Where had the woman and the clone gone to after she’d passed their location on to Turner?
It was no use. She remembered the call from Osnat and Arkady. Then nothing. And the more they asked about Turner, and Turner, and Turner, the harder it got to believe that she could have agreed to meet with him in the first place.
She couldn’t say just when she began to realize that there were other people attending the interrogation sessions. The watchers were silent and invisible—at least to Li, whose whole universe had narrowed down to a few centimeters of burlap darkness. But they exerted a tidal pull on the interrogators, as unmistakably as an eclipsed planet tugging at its neighbors in the dark. Li’s torturers were playing to their audience, like the miners of Li’s all-but-forgotten childhood picking up the pace at the cutting face when the straw boss was watching.
It was the watchers who made them start in on her hands.
They didn’t need to do much. Ceramsteel filament was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel and much harder. When a filament snapped and its severed ends started floating free against fragile flesh and bone, you’d better pray to whatever gods you believed in that you were within tossing distance of the surgical tanks. And no part of your body outside your relatively protected spinal column was as impregnated with monofilament-thin virally embedded ceramsteel filament as your hands. So when they strapped her hands down, she’d known immediately where the game was headed. The only question in her mind was how far the unseen watcher would allow it to go.
Answer: pretty damn far.
Far enough to make her glad she was blindfolded and couldn’t see what was happening at the far ends of her arms.
Far enough to trigger
the memory that had somehow become intimately and inextricably associated with what they were doing to her.
Far enough to send her mind spinning back to Gilead.
The whole operation on Gilead had been fractally fubard. Fucked up beyond all recall in every spatial scale and at every hierarchical level of complexity.
The UNSec spin doctors had made it out to be a positive orgy of heroism, and the war correspondents had bought their spin hook, line, and sinker. But in Li’s opinion Gilead had been just like almost every other episode of storied heroism in every other war she’d ever read about: a bloody mess that would never have been necessary if the deskbound lords of war had done their jobs right.
Most of Li’s colleagues had seen it differently—or at least pretended to. They’d started loudly celebrating the heroic dead of Gilead before the bodies were even buried. And if there were whispers behind closed doors about broken supply lines, endemic communications failures, and blue-on-blue orbit-to-surface strikes, then they only made the public celebration louder and the medal inflation higher.
Monday morning quarterbacking was bad for morale. That was the consensus. Better to celebrate what went right (most of it at the noncom level and below) than to dwell on what went wrong (most of it still alive and wearing stars and striped trousers). And if Li thought that this meant buying morale at a pretty high rate of interest, she’d soon learned that saying so didn’t earn her much love.
Of course, as one of the few Gilead veterans who was in the enviable position of being both a hero and alive, Li was one of the main beneficiaries of the hurricane of spin swirling around the bloody campaign. Not that she was even sure it was spin. All she had to set against the UNSec-washed spinstreams was a nagging feeling of déjà vu and a conviction that her mind had once held a different version than the one UNSec called reality.
It was impossible to explain to civilians what jump amnesia did to you. The jagged holes it punched into your past and your identity. The reflexes, violent ones included, that came at you from nowhere, then sucked back into some subterranean place you couldn’t remember your way down to. The sickening vertigo of having a second set of memories superimposed on the real ones. The gut certainty that what your own brain remembered and the history books and the newspins and the politicians and your next-door neighbors said was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
That must have been how Turner had drawn her into his web. He must have dangled in front of her the one thing she couldn’t refuse: proof. Proof that she hadn’t done those things on Gilead. Proof that she wasn’t the kind of person who could do such things.
She saw now that she had been chasing an illusion. She would never know the Catherine Li who had dropped into Gilead’s gravity well half a lifetime ago. Even if Andrej Korchow descended from the sky in glory to tell her she hadn’t shot those prisoners, he still couldn’t tell her what else she’d done…or been capable of doing.
She would never know her past self even in the illusory, self-justifying, half-fictional way that unaltered humans knew their past selves. All she could know—all she ever would know—was the person she was now.
And the really rotten piece of luck was that just as she was finally beginning to see a way to live with that, it was starting to look less and less like she was going to get a chance to live, period.
It was her own damn fault, of course.
She had known it was a bad idea to try to escape. But what was she supposed to do? Nothing?
And when her tormentors finally slipped up, she was waiting for them. With a scalpel that she’d managed to pilfer with the hand whose fingers still more or less worked.
The first guard’s neck broke with a crunch that made even Li’s stomach churn. She dropped him and drove forward to the next target, still hooded, moving on sound and feel. Her hands were useless, so she used her legs, her feet, her training, her hate.
She had her hood off almost before the second guard hit the ground. The room was dark, thank God, not too difficult to adjust to. But she still made the mistake of thinking she was alone.
The fact that the other person in the room with her was standing very still was only part of her confusion. The real problem was that the woman was covered from head to toe in dusty green cloth.
Was she a woman? Was she even an Interfaither? Or merely someone taking advantage of a disguise that blended all too conveniently into Jerusalem’s thronging streets these days?
Li seized the veiled figure. And then she did something she would never, not in a million years, have done if she’d been anywhere within spitting distance of thinking straight.
She grabbed the green cloth and yanked.
“That was unwise,” Ashwarya Sofaer said.
Li just stood there, swaying slightly, poleaxed by memory.
“It was you,” she whispered. “It was you I went to, not Turner.”
Ash shrugged. “I was a bit surprised at how well that took. Your brains really are scrambled, aren’t they?”
“Then it was all a false flag operation? You were never talking to UNSec at all?”
“Oh I was talking to UNSec.” Ash smiled her lovely masklike smile. It occurred to Li, in some relatively lucid segment of her brain, that Ash wasn’t as scared as she should be. “They just weren’t the only people I was talking to.”
“Turner—”
“Does it really matter? It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Before there was a chance. Now…” She shrugged.
“Oh, we’re going somewhere,” Li said…
…and the next thing she knew she was on the ground, her head throbbing with the aftereffects of some nerve agent, and Turner was standing there big as real life looking down at her.
“Well now,” he said, shaking his head like a country bumpkin getting his first eyeful of the bright lights and the big city. “You really are a lady who likes to do things the hard way.”
Ash stood just behind Turner. And she had her veil on again. “Why don’t you take that ridiculous thing off your head?” Li told her.
Ash’s hand emerged from the shadows, rose, hesitated. The veil came away with little more than a light twitch of her long fingers. But instead of removing it entirely she merely settled it around her head and shoulders so that only her face was showing.
That was when Li understood. The veil was no disguise. The veil was Ash’s true face: the face of an Interfaither who had turned her mind over to the men of God and violence.
That was the reality Li had glimpsed behind the beautiful but impersonal mask that Ash presented to the world. The white suits and the perfect makeup and the self-serving careerism were all nothing but the subtlest kind of protective camouflage.
Li had seen the real Ash just once: in the stretch marks that said she’d gone through natural birth and pregnancy, something only a vanishingly small number of Ring-siders still did. But she’d written that off as meaningless trivia. How could she have been so blind? And what better proof could there be that she herself wasn’t human, had never been human, would never understand humans no matter how long she lived among them?
“How long have you been working for the Interfaithers?” she asked Ash. “And when did you and Turner decide you wanted the Novalis virus?”
But instead of an answer, Ash had another question for her:
“Left hand or right hand?”
Cohen looked very much the worse for wear when he finally answered to Gavi’s knock. Rumpled and unshaven. Dark circles under his eyes. And around his left hand an immaculate white bandage.
Gavi stepped into the luxurious living room of Cohen’s hotel suite. “What happened?” he asked, pointing at the bandage.
“I stuck Roland’s hand through a window,” Cohen said in a voice that distinctly did not invite further questions. “What do you want, Gavi?”
Gavi raised his eyebrows. “Bad time? Should I come back later?”
Cohen slumped into a chair and rubbed his hands across his face. “No. Sorry. Things just…
aren’t so good at the moment.”
Gavi looked around. No sign of Li. How to broach the unbroachable question? Well, blunt was always an option. “Is Li around?”
“No. So show me this new source code you’ve cooked up.”
Gavi sat down, repressing the guilty sinking feeling that lying to Cohen gave him. It wasn’t a lie. It was self-protection. No, better than self-protection: the protection of two people who were in deadly desperate need of protecting.
They talked around the subject for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s programming ideas, the false starts he’d made, what he’d learned from them, the current state of his work on and thought about his so-called golem…all the while edging cautiously toward the dangerous topic of the other golem, the one of flesh and blood that was sitting in Gavi’s living room.
He should have been enjoying the conversation. He wasn’t.
At some point he realized that he’d dropped the conversational ball, and that Cohen had fallen oddly silent. He looked up to find the AI staring intently at him.
“So, Gavi. How are Arkady and Osnat doing?”
“How should I know?”
“That’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought Yad Vashem was crowded enough these days that you wouldn’t notice you were sharing the place with them.”
“How long have you known?”
“Since they arrived.”
“Then you know they went to you first. Why the hell didn’t you help them?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Li! Osnat went to her for help before she brought Arkady to me. And she almost ended up on the police blotter because of it.”
Cohen blinked. “Li’s been MIA for two days now. So I think we can assume that whoever came after your little lost lambs bagged her too.”
“Or,” Gavi pointed out in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “we can assume that they want us to think so.”
Spin Control ss-2 Page 42