“GOLEM doesn’t have to do it,” he said at last. “I do.”
OVERLAPPING HIERARCHIES
There is no unique way to describe an ecosystem, any more than there is a unique way to describe an economy or a nation. Meta-agents are aggregates of agents and smaller meta-agents, and themselves may be bundled into even larger meta-meta-agents. Any system is a mess of overlapping hierarchies or aggregations, limited in any particular description only for the convenience of the observer.
—SIMON LEVIN (2001)
The Day of Atonement fell into Jerusalem on a blanket of snow. The cold front hit the afternoon before Yom Kippur, flowing down off the glaciers above the Jordan’s headwaters. The snow began at sunset and thickened through the night and into the early morning. It was still falling when Cohen stepped out of the King David Hotel, nodded to the solitary doorman still on duty despite storm and holiday, and began the cold walk to the Damascus Gate checkpoint.
The entire city drifted and planed like the veil of snowflakes that fluttered from the sky. There was no traffic, just a slow Yom Kippur tide of bicycles gliding through the white streets with the frictionless silence of watch gears. Women’s faces looked pale and vulnerable without their everyday armor of cosmetics, and men glanced at each other over their bundled scarves with the solemn amazement of children.
The house on Abulafia Street was just as Cohen remembered it. Tall walls, a high gate, and a garden as hidden as the one Solomon sang of. Surely the house must have been a caravanserai. Six centuries ago it would have been a relay on a camel-powered network as vital as the quantum spin-encrypted interplanetary web of streamspace. Now it was just a dusty ruin: a waypoint on a forgotten road between two nowheres.
He stepped through the little door cut into the bottom left-hand corner of the gate. A door within a door. Hyacinthe had loved those little doors, so common in the Mediterranean architecture of his native city. That childish love of pattern and paradox had perhaps been a first hint of the intricate twistiness that would be so characteristic of his later work.
The courtyard lay empty under the white sky. Snow weighed down the few leaves still rattling on the rose vines and drifted in the corners of the winter-stilled fountain. There were no lights on in the main house, but a line of footprints skirted along one side of the courtyard. The prints were faint and fading; a long undulating snowdrift had covered them here and there so that they seemed to have been the work of a being who possessed the power of flight, but only sometimes.
Suddenly Cohen felt very alone. And the fact that he was alone by design—that he’d winnowed his active programs down to the bone and told most of his associates to wait Ring-side for their own safety—didn’t make him feel any less alone.
He feathered along the still unfamiliar edge of the EMET interface he and Gavi had hacked last night. All quiet. As it should be. They would need every advantage they could get to make this work, including the advantage of surprise. The Yad Vashem golem he didn’t have to look at. He could smell the black reek of its despair. He could track its tortured progress behind the firewalls he had built around it…walls that would burn like tinderwood if the flickering spark of quasi-sentience ever exploded into the real thing.
The footprints veered off toward a mean little side door half-hidden by a leafless corpse that looked like it had once been a lilac tree. Cohen followed the footprints inside and waited for Roland’s eyes to adjust to the darkness. The tracks continued: not footprints now but merely icy flecks and puddles on wooden boards scarred and hollowed by generations of travelers’ feet.
He climbed a flight of stairs that twisted back on itself to give onto the second-story balcony, and continued around the angle of the balcony past rows of lawn furniture stacked up against the walls like enchanted courtiers in a fairy tale. The house was largely abandoned, and the punishing hand of time and weather had lain heavily on it; Cohen saw missing tiles, exposed lath and stucco, even the narrow hides of mice and squirrels.
The footprints were crisper up here, and now Cohen could see that two people had passed this way. One large and flat-footed. The other small enough to set his heart pounding.
Before he even reached the right door, Turner began speaking to him from the shadows. He turned in at the point Turner’s voice seemed to be coming from and found himself in a room, bare and dark, with no furniture but one battered chair that Turner had pulled in from the next room to judge by the grooves it had cut in the dusty floor. The only other thing in the room besides Turner and his chair was a small, crumpled pile of clothing propped up in the angle of one corner.
Li.
Her eyes were closed, but he could see her breath on the air.
“She’s running a bit of a fever,” Turner said. “You might want to get that looked at.”
Li’s left arm was in a sling and tucked inside a jacket that someone had flung over her slumped shoulders. There was no way for Cohen to estimate the extent of the damage. But even leaving aside the horror hidden by the sling, it was clear that they had worked her over with ferocious thoroughness.
“So much for the mighty Peacekeepers.” Turner sounded almost wistful. “Oh well. Maybe she was behind on her upgrades.”
Cohen started toward Li, only to run smack into a guard who came at him out of nowhere. The pink face and well-fed body were all-American, but the gun in his beefy hand was bleeding-edge Peacekeeper tech.
Turner lumbered to his feet with a lurching clumsiness that Cohen suspected the man could put on and off like old socks. “Well, whaddaya say?” he asked as pleasantly as if there wasn’t a gun around for miles. “Should we take the nickel tour?”
Cohen pulled himself together and forced his eyes away from Li’s face. “Let’s just get it over with.”
Arkady stood outside the door in the gate while Gavi knocked. Then he followed Gavi into the courtyard, bending his head to avoid the sagging lintel. As they stepped into the high narrow space he couldn’t help glancing around in search of Arkasha.
“Don’t worry,” Turner called from the second-story balcony. “He’ll be here soon enough. They have to get through the checkpoint at King Hussein Bridge. And the snow’s slowing everything down today.”
It took Arkady a moment to see Cohen, slightly behind Turner and almost lost in the shadows. The AI gave no sign of recognizing him or Gavi. He barely gave any sign of being alive.
“Have the Palestinians’ Enderbots been held up at the bridge too?” Gavi asked.
It didn’t sound like a joke to Arkady, but Turner laughed anyway. “They’ll be along.”
“And you’ve looked at the source code?”
“I’ve had my people look at it.”
“The Enderbots won’t step in unless something goes wrong. They’re just here to make sure everyone stays honest.”
“Who wouldn’t be honest?” Turner asked on one of his wide, white, brutal smiles.
Half a minute later the Enderbots arrived. They flowed through the courtyard like water, skimming along the walls and pooling in the corners, imposing upon the spare geometry of the courtyard an invisible and deadly calculus of kill zones and lines of fire and angles of attack and retreat. Arkady looked for Osnat among the Enders. But he couldn’t recognize her behind any of the tinted goggles and red monitor eyes ranked around the courtyard’s edge.
When PalSec’s Enders arrived, the process unfolded a second time, just as smoothly and in the same eerie silence. By the time the two opposing squads of Enderbots finally sorted themselves out and came to rest, you could barely distinguish two separate armies in the motionless ranks of dusty uniforms, free of all sign of rank or unit, with only the stylized corporate logos on weapons and equipment to distinguish one force from the other.
Then they waited. Gavi shifted his weight nervously from flesh-and-blood leg to prosthesis and back again. He looked like he was struggling just as hard as Arkady to keep his eyes from straying around in search of Osnat.
Finally Arkasha arrived. And th
e symmetry held. Like Arkady, he came with only one companion: the green-eyed Yusuf.
As they passed by Gavi and Arkady, Yusuf slowed. The carefree, frivolous mask Yusuf had worn the two times Arkady had met him was gone, and he looked young and scared and angry.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he hissed at Gavi.
Gavi didn’t answer. When Arkady finally tore his eyes away from Arkasha to glance at Gavi, he saw him staring at Yusuf with the pained, confused look of a dog who’s just been stepped on and is trying to figure out if it was by accident.
Cohen and Turner were still waiting, though Arkady had no idea what for. It was bitterly cold. Arkasha didn’t have a coat and was shivering where he stood. Arkady began to say something to Gavi about it—but then he realized that no one seemed to have a coat and that a lot of people were shivering, himself included.
“Go,” Gavi whispered at last, responding to some signal Arkady had missed.
Arkady stepped forward toward the Palestinian side of the courtyard, shuddering when one of the Enderbots’ laser sights played across his leg. He and Arkasha crossed paths just beside the snow-stilled fountain, each of them staring sideways at the other. By the time Arkady realized he could have put a hand out to touch Arkasha, the moment had passed and they were each alone again behind their own line of Enders.
Turner made his move as soon as Arkady and Arkasha were out of the line of fire. He caught Yusuf’s attention with a brusque flick of his big hand. “You have what you came here to get,” he told him. “Now do what you promised to do.”
Something flickered in Arkady’s peripheral vision. When he looked toward the movement, he saw that Yusuf had drawn a gun, and it was leveled at Gavi’s head.
A quiver ran down the line of Enders as one rifle after another rose to track the two men.
“No!”
The word echoed through the courtyard in a voice that Arkady only recognized as Gavi’s when he realized that Gavi had put his own body between Yusuf and the Israeli Enders.
Gavi and Yusuf faced each other in the snow, as isolated as the last two pawns left on a chessboard before checkmate.
Yusuf cocked his weapon.
“It was supposed to be Ash,” Yusuf said sadly. “You weren’t supposed to be here. How could Didi have made such a mistake?”
For Cohen, the few seconds that Yusuf stood poised to shoot encompassed an eternity.
An eternity in which he had ample time to wonder where Ash was and if the promised backup was ever coming. An eternity in which he had ample time to take the measure of everything he owed Gavi—and everything he had done to insulate himself from Gavi’s rightful demands on him. He sent a query snaking through the Enders’ now fatally compromised gamespace, regretting the loss of router/decomposer more bitterly than ever. The Enders were a mess, trapped in a fugue state that reduced a dozen human soldiers and all of EMET’s brilliant command and control algorithms to a malfunctioning synthetic weapons platform. Gavi’s GOLEM was chaos…but a chaos that was rapidly tuning itself toward criticality.
Cohen cast a tentative datastream across the firewall and recoiled in horror. He poised on the brink of commitment, in a state of what would have been shivering hesitation if he’d had the spare bandwidth to make poor Roland’s long-suffering body tremble.
But as Cohen hesitated, Yusuf steadied his gun with firing range precision, whipped his slender body around, and shot Turner dead.
Turner’s bodyguard reached for his gun, but Osnat put a bullet through his head before he could even unholster it. And suddenly the Enders were on the move. Everyone was on the move.
But the two men remained still at the center of the storm, staring at each other.
No, Cohen corrected himself. Not two men. A man and a boy.
And then he saw it. That something around the mouth that you wouldn’t notice unless you knew you were looking for it, and that you couldn’t not notice once you’d seen it. And those extraordinary green eyes that were nothing like Gavi’s eyes…but exactly like the eyes of a woman at whose wedding Cohen and Didi Halevy and Walid Safik had all danced twenty-five years ago.
Yusuf glanced down at the gun in his hand and blinked as if he’d just remembered it.
“I’d better be going,” he said. “Our Enders will take Arkady across the Line. Korchow will be waiting for him on the other side.”
He retreated to the gate and paused to take a last look back into the courtyard. The snow had started up again; a faint shroud of white dusted the boy’s bare head and glittered in his eyelashes.
“Joseph,” Gavi said.
Yusuf’s eyes locked onto Gavi’s.
“Tell your father…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just tell him thank you.”
Yusuf smiled. “Call it a gift from Absalom.”
He stepped into the stormbound street. In two steps he was just another anonymous pedestrian hurrying along under the swirling snow. Then the gate swung closed behind him and he was gone.
Arkady slipped into the shadows of the house behind Arkasha, moving on feet that were suddenly sure and silent. He’d seen Arkasha duck into the house in the stunned instant when everyone’s eyes were on Gavi and Yusuf, and he’d known that this would be their best and only chance to speak to each other. He felt that he’d rehearsed this moment, that he’d known in his heart he would face some test in the crumbling rooms of the old house.
“Hurry!” Arkasha whispered. “There’s no time. Everything’s gone wrong. I can’t explain. Just take your clothes off. We’re to switch, and Korchow has a plan to get them to trade you back once they realize they’ve got the wrong man.”
Arkady knelt on the dusty floor in front of Arkasha. He noticed now that Arkasha’s hair was longer than usual and had been ruffled into a fair imitation of Arkady’s cowlicked mop. And he was rough-shaven just as Arkady was. And he’d put on a good ten kilos and even gotten some sun somewhere between now and the last time they’d laid eyes on each other. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make Arkasha and Arkady look alike.
He could have laughed. All Korchow had to do was ask him; he could have told him perfectly well that no human would look closely enough to see the minute differences between them.
But Korchow would have known that. Just as Korchow must have known that he didn’t have to send Arkasha…any Arkady would do.
Korchow has a plan.
Arkasha’s hands were at Arkady’s collar, fumbling with the unfamiliar buttons. He put his own hand up to force Arkasha’s into stillness.
“Arkasha—”
“Shh. Hurry.”
“Korchow has a plan? Or you do?”
Arkasha silenced Arkady with a kiss. His cheek was rough with stubble, but his lips were as smooth and cold as the snow outside the walls. “Don’t ask,” he whispered against Arkady’s lips. “If you don’t know, you can’t get in trouble for it.”
Arkady returned the kisses, but his hands and his heart felt deathly cold. “Why?” he asked. “All you have to do is walk out that door and you’re free. No more renorming ever again. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Not alone.”
Arkasha’s lips were on Arkady’s, his arms were around him. But it was no good; knowing it was the last time made it worse, not better.
He put his hands on Arkasha’s chest and pushed him back to arm’s length. “If you go back,” he said harshly, “you’ll end up on the euth ward. Not tomorrow, maybe. Not next month or next year. But sometime.”
He said it without thinking, but as soon as he spoke the words he saw the truth in them. There was something human about Arkasha. Arkady could see it clearly now, with his new, hard-won knowledge of humans. The men who had built Earth’s cathedrals and cured her diseases and discovered her continents must have shared Arkasha’s very human virtues. But they were virtues of Earth, not space. And humans had eaten all the fat and left only the lean, and there was no room for people like Arkasha. Except, perhaps,
on Earth.
He stared into Arkasha’s eyes, steeling himself for the lie that was all he had left to offer him. It was funny how Arkady had always thought that he was the weak one, and Arkasha the strong one. In fact Arkasha wasn’t strong at all. Just brittle. If you knew where to push you could knock him right over.
“You’re a fool,” he said, forcing his voice into the same austere tones that so terrified him when Korchow used them. “Do you really think it only began between me and Korchow after we got back from Novalis?”
Arkasha’s face was so blank that at first Arkady wasn’t sure he’d heard him. Then he swallowed convulsively. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered.
But Arkady could see in his face that he was already starting to believe.
And then it really was over. Osnat was there beside them, tugging at Arkady’s elbow, telling him it was long past time to leave.
“Let’s go,” Arkady told her. “There’s no reason for me to stay.”
Ash finally rode in with the cavalry just when Cohen had given up expecting her.
She came through the gate with Moshe and a phalanx of GolaniTech muscle to back her up. She crossed the courtyard to Turner’s body, looked down into his face, and prodded him with one polished boot toe.
“Well, that settles that,” she murmured.
“Nice of you to drop by,” Osnat told her. “We could have used you ten minutes ago.”
And just like that, the courtyard was not a battlefield any longer, but merely a cleanup operation. Everyone was stowing away their ordnance and collecting their gear, and the Palestinian Enders were shepherding Arkady toward the door, and Ash was taking Arkasha in hand and talking about chains of custody and secure transport.
“Let go of him, Ash!”
Cohen knew Li’s voice instantly, despite the ravages of thirst and fever. Everyone in the courtyard froze at the sound of it. Then they began surreptitiously glancing around, trying to figure out where she was hidden. Ash, meanwhile, was scanning the many doors of the second story, looking for the one the voice came from.
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