“I’m sorry, Gavi. I’ve completely forgotten to make you tea. And I always make you tea. What a brute I am.”
“Water’s fine. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“Really just water? How about I make you a little tea, and you can see if you want it?”
“Didi—”
“Jasmine or Ceylon, which do you prefer?”
When Didi came back he brought not only tea but also a slim file folder with the familiar black band across its front.
A testing, questioning silence filtered through the room. Gavi sat up. He could feel the old reflexes kicking in. His breath slowing. Time itself slowing. His eyes cataloging details that would have utterly eluded him in normal life. His muscles taking the measure of the room’s distances with a precision that still scared him just as much as it had all those years ago at Midrash when he first discovered that he had these horrible talents…he who had always thought of himself as an intellectual, an idealist, a bit of a peacenik even.
“Are you going to show me what’s in there,” he asked Didi, “or are you going to make me guess?”
Instead of answering, Didi opened the file and scanned it, as if refreshing his memory of its contents. Then he removed a paper clip, set it neatly aside for subsequent retrieval, and handed Gavi the photograph that had been pinned beneath it.
A young man, slim, graceful even in freeze-frame, handsome in a way that made one wonder if he wouldn’t perhaps be a bit too pretty in person. Something about the curve of his mouth and jaw that Gavi knew from his own bathroom mirror. And those vivid green crusader’s eyes.
Leila’s eyes.
“And just who is this supposed to be?” he asked icily.
“That’s beneath you, Gavi.”
The two men looked at each other. Gavi’s heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he thought Didi must be able to hear it on the other side of the room.
“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said in the dull tone of a bureaucrat reading a routine report. “Only son—only child, actually—of Brigadier General Walid Safik. There’s no official record of the adoption. Yusuf attended private school in Bethlehem, and then in the SaudiArc Ring-side, then—this is interesting, Gavi, listen up—a stint on KnowlesSyndicate. Then back to Palestine for security service training. He graduated fourth in his class.” Didi pursed his lips, a taster evaluating a fine wine. “I like that fourth. It’s subtle. Your sort of instinct, I’d almost say.”
“You’re assuming the fourth was by choice, not merit.”
“I’m assuming nothing. One of our agents had a fling with a classmate of Yusuf’s who was posted to the Palestinian Authority’s HQ in the International Zone. It seems that the consensus among their fellow students was that Yusuf purposely fluffed the finals. Now why would he do that, I wonder?”
Gavi felt dizzy. The world had rearranged itself while he wasn’t looking, and now it was barreling on toward God knew what kind of damage without even giving him time to figure out where he stood or what he ought to do about it.
“And now he turns up smack in the middle of my hunt for Absalom.”
“Coincidence,” Gavi said. But he was hanging on by his fingernails and they both knew it.
He had laid the photograph across his knees, and not only to hide his shaking hands. Now he looked down at it and wondered how the photographer had stolen the unguarded shot. He touched the image of the familiar stranger’s face, knowing that Didi was watching him and not giving a damn what it looked like, and then felt a searing pang of regret when he realized he’d smudged the photograph.
“You’re surprised.” Didi sounded like a man probing at a sore tooth and wondering how long he could afford to wait before he called the dentist.
Gavi looked up at him, doing his best to keep his eyes steady and level. “You expected me not to be?”
“Oh, I expected surprise. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be surprised by the news, or surprised that I knew about it.”
A child’s voice rang out somewhere in the sun beyond the windows, and both men instinctively looked toward it. The glass, Gavi noticed, was caked with yellow khamsin dust. He thought idly that you could probably make a decent map of Tel Aviv’s safe houses by just looking for unwashed windows and unswept doorsteps. He told himself that he was sick, sick to death of streaked windows and grimy walkup flats with garage sale furnishings. That all the other times he’d sat in identical rooms and thought identical thoughts had just been leading up to this time. And that this time it was well and truly over.
He knew better.
More to the point, Didi knew better.
“So why are you showing me this now? The file’s not exactly empty. You must have been holding this ace for a while now.”
“I wasn’t, actually. We had the file, yes, but I only figured out last week that he wasn’t Safik’s natural child. And I’m telling you now because I want you to have time to think about it in cold blood. Here. With me to talk to. I trust your second thoughts, and your third and fourth thoughts. It’s that first passionate impulse that terrifies me.”
“Joseph might recognize me too, Didi. Have you thought about that?”
“I doubt he will. If he remembers you at all, it’s as a young man not much older than he is now. And he doesn’t look that much like you. Only a little bit around the mouth, really. I didn’t see it myself at first.”
Gavi looked down at the photograph. He’d allowed himself to be distracted from it, and he realized this was a mistake as it was extremely unlikely that Didi would allow him to keep the photograph or ever see it again. His mind was doing a strange thing to him, filling his nose with the remembered scent of Joseph’s infant skin, goading him into an animal certainty that the young stranger in the photograph was his child.
Like the goats, he thought nonsensically, who knew their kids in the dark by smell alone. But it had never occurred to him that they might remember the smell for years or decades after he’d taken their kids to slaughter. What was the purpose of allowing their senses to torment them like that when it was too late to do anything or save anybody?
“Can I read his file?” he asked.
“Oh, Gavi.”
“Don’t ‘Oh, Gavi’ me. Why shouldn’t I read it?”
“Why should you?” Didi held the slim sheaf of papers up and shook it until the pages rattled like dead leaves. “You want to know what’s in here, Gavi? The life of another man’s son. Walid Safik’s son. Everything in this file says that Safik has pampered and adored and doted on the boy since the day he adopted him. Everything in here says that Yusuf Safik returns his father’s love. For God’s sake, Gavi, we’ve got phone records showing the kid calls home every night, and, let me tell you, I’m grateful if my daughters call me once a month! The boy’s Palestinian, Gavi. Just as Leila intended him to be. And his father is Walid Safik. You’re just a stranger who happens to look like him.”
“I know,” Gavi whispered.
And he did know.
He really did.
But that didn’t make it any easier to let go of the photograph.
Cohen materialized in a shimmer of security protocols. Or perhaps the shimmer was in the air, Arkady told himself, and not in Cohen. He still couldn’t get used to the instream version of Yad Vashem that Gavi had decided to hold this meeting in.
“How come it’s all different?” Arkady asked. “Where are Gavi’s goats? And…nothing’s falling down. They’d have to have an army of gardeners and groundskeepers to keep the place looking this way.”
“You don’t have to shout,” Osnat said. “Gardeners are expensive. And if you want them to work on the Line, they’re more than expensive. Eighty percent of Israelis may be infertile, but no one wants their neighbors to know they’re not in the lucky twenty percent. It’s all about keeping up appearances.”
“But it’s not real.”
“What’s real? This is the Yad Vashem that millions of tourists all over UN space know and believe exists. The illu
sion beats the reality any day on the numbers.”
“What’s the news on Li?” Gavi asked Cohen when he had settled into phase with their own surroundings.
Cohen looked sick. “It’s the Americans.”
“Turner?”
“Turner.”
Gavi swallowed convulsively, as if the news were a dry pill that had gotten stuck in his throat. “Has he told you what he wants?”
“That’s the funny part.” Cohen sank onto a bench so smoothly that it took Arkady a moment to realize that Cohen had somehow changed the standard tour on the fly and now they were all standing still in one of the rambling compound’s many gardens.
“He wants Arkady. And he wants Gavi to bring him. He was very insistent on that point. He’s arranged a three-way swap with Yassin. I walk away with Li. Turner gets Arkasha. And Arkady goes back to Syndicate space with Korchow.”
“But what do the Palestinians get out of it?”
“I suspect a better question would be what does Yassin get out of it. Arkady’s defection seems to have dovetailed neatly with the power struggle between him and Safik.”
“So Turner wants us to help Yassin take Safik down,” Gavi said. “Nice to know we’re on the side of the angels. I assume you’ve talked to Didi about this?”
“Yes.” Cohen paused and glanced at Arkady. “Didi thinks there ought to be a way to play along with Turner but still come out the other side holding the bag with Arkasha in it. He also authorized me to tell Arkady that if we can pull this off, he’ll guarantee Arkasha full political asylum.”
“What about Arkady?” Osnat asked.
“Arkady has to go back or Didi won’t help us. Frankly Didi wasn’t even happy about leaving Arkasha on-planet in light of…well…the obvious.”
“Can I trust Didi to protect Arkasha?” Arkady asked Gavi.
“I don’t know,” Gavi said. He looked sick to his stomach. “But I can’t think of anyone you can trust more.”
“Okay, then. I’ll do it.”
“And just what is Didi actually offering in the way of help?” Gavi asked Cohen.
“The Office won’t get directly involved in the swap.” The AI’s voice was tight with apprehension. “But Didi will provide backup…or cleanup if things get messy. The story for public consumption will be that the Office got an anonymous tip about where Li was being held and organized a rescue. Ash is going to handle the operation so it doesn’t go through official channels.”
Another pause followed this news. Gavi sat down, bowed his head, crossed his arms over his chest, chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said finally, glancing up at Cohen. “On the one hand it stinks. On the other hand, Didi’s doing about as much as he can realistically do for you. Israeli policy’s ironclad. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. Interfaithers are terrorists and the Americans are Interfaithers. Ergo the Americans are terrorists. Ergo, we don’t negotiate with them. We don’t even have the channels of communication we’d need to figure out if Turner’s following his government’s orders or freelancing.”
“So what do we do?” Osnat asked.
“Agree to Turner’s terms,” Gavi said, “then figure out how to control the ground so no one gets shot before Ash shows up with the cavalry.”
“We’d need an army,” Osnat muttered gloomily.
Gavi looked up, solemn-eyed and bristling with nervous tension. “We have an army,” he said. He jerked his head toward the outer walls of the compound and the Green Line beyond the walls. “EMET.”
The plan was simple. It was a classic exchange of prisoners. Except that in this trade there were three prisoners instead of two. And the exchange would take place not across some lonely field or border checkpoint, but in the claustrophobic shooting gallery of the house on Abulafia Street. The only thing keeping the parties honest would be the Enders, Palestinian and Israeli, that Turner finally agreed to let supervise the exchange. The Enders, of course, would be kept honest by their source code.
Which meant that anyone who could hack EMET would be halfway to controlling the battlefield.
They needed to hack a squad for, say, ten minutes. And all they had to do to hack a squad was hack the EMET squad leader that controlled the shunt-driven bodies of the squad’s Enderbots.
“But the beauty of a true Emergent,” Gavi said, “is that you don’t have to change its source code to change its behavior. Here’s what we’re up against.” He did something with his hand and a translucent flat screen took shape under his fingers. The screen glowed with a long list of cryptically named categories—terms like advance, cluster, combat, pursuit, retreat, support, enemy_flag, injured_ally, fear_index—all with numerical values attached to them.
“This is a typical set of squad-level agent behavior parameters. Notice particularly the two obey indices and the fear index. The global obey index determines how likely the agent is to obey global EMET orders. The local obey is the same thing but in regard to local orders—mainly squad-level orders in most situations. The fear index…well, I guess that’s pretty self-evident.
“Now look at the real-time run-files. I’ve superimposed run-files for the last eight squad leaders to be selected for preemptive termination—or, in less diplomatic terms, the last eight squad leaders that the IDF killed before they could self-terminate.”
“What’s that spike in the fear index?” Cohen asked, having absorbed the chart, and who knew what else, in the time it took Arkady to realize there was a chart.
“That,” Gavi said, “is truth.”
“Aah,” Cohen said. And then he didn’t say anything else for a minute while the rest of them watched him. He seemed to have more or less forgotten them; if he had been human, Arkady would have called his state distracted, but he wasn’t sure that distraction applied to an entity for whom their conversation—any conversation—was a mere drop in an ocean of simultaneously unspooling threads of data.
“Should I go on?” Gavi asked.
“Yes. Sorry. Excuse me.”
“In each of the last eight EMET agents to be selected for preemptive termination the emergence of real-time situational awareness was preceded by atypical fluctuations of the fear index and the obey indices. See?” He looked expectantly at them. “Because the agent figured out that the pushpins it was moving around on the board were live people.”
“So it got spooked,” Osnat said, “and started playing it safe even if it meant not following orders.”
“Right. And that’s where you get the odd fluctuations. Because it also deduces that the other squads are also made up of live soldiers. If it sets too high a priority on protecting its squad members, it could get more soldiers in other squads killed. Or worse, it could accidentally kill civilians.”
“Welcome to Military Ethics from hell,” Osnat said. “No wonder they go crazy.”
Cohen stared silently at the display with a look on his face that Arkady could only describe as one of existential horror. “How long would we have to wait for a squad to wake up?” he finally asked. “What says one wakes up in time for us to use it?”
“You don’t want the answer to that question,” Gavi said.
Cohen grew very still. “How often are they waking up, Gavi?”
“Often enough that we don’t have anything to worry about on that score.”
Cohen stared unblinkingly at the screen. “I think,” he finally said, “that I’ve lived too long.”
Gavi eyed Cohen cautiously, then cleared his throat and continued. “I’ve looked over the last few years of run-capture files, and I think IDF HQ is using a standard profile to spot potential sentients. In essence, it doesn’t actively monitor the run-capture files of individual squad leaders until they develop a suspicious profile. If we can catch a squad leader after the fear and obey indices have started to fluctuate but before they hit the IDF thresholds, then I think I’ve worked out a way to pull the wool over the IDF’s eyes. All we’d need to do is insert a wild card trigger that yanks the fear
and obey indices out of the Emergent’s hands as soon as the fluctuations begin and lets us set them to fluctuate within bounds that won’t alert the IDF minders.”
“Okay,” Osnat said. “So that gets you your squad. But with all due respect, I’m not sure I see how it helps us. You’re still left with the same problem the hard reboot was geared to solve. And what’s the good of going into an operation backed up by Enderbots that are on the verge of going catatonic or self-terminating? Unreliable backup is worse than no backup.”
“The EMET agents go catatonic because there’s no way out,” Gavi said. “We just need to offer them one.”
At that point the conversation shifted into what sounded to Arkady’s ears like a foreign language. Gavi and Cohen began to pour over flickering data displays and bandy about words like run capture, multiparameter fitness landscape, lethality contours, and penalty functions. Osnat, while not exactly an active participant, at least had a firm enough grasp on the matter at hand to produce a volley of intelligent-sounding questions that centered around something she called Cavalho-Rodriques combat entropy.
Once again Arkady had that odd feeling of having stepped into an alternate universe in which the old story he’d always been taught of an obsolete and ossified humanity giving way to the Syndicates in a clean neo-Marxist ballet of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had been replaced by something that rang much truer to his entomologist’s instincts: a coevolving cloud of quasi-species in which Homo sapiens had not been replaced so much as exploded out into a bewildering fractal of coevolving posthumanities.
“I still don’t see how you expect to make it work,” Osnat said finally. “You talk about providing a new platform for the rogue EMET squad, but how can you fold an emerging sentient into a nonsentient database and not crash both of them? You can bootstrap yourself into sentience on memory alone. I don’t think GOLEM’s going to do the job for you.”
Gavi didn’t appear to have heard the question. He was staring at Cohen. The AI was staring into empty space, or into whatever incomprehensible visions drifted and pulsed across his networks.
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