Spin Control

THE ALMOST INFINITE DISTANCE BETWEEN A CAUSE AND ITS EFFECT

The real problem with chess, in Cohen’s opinion, was that the options for any given world state were so limited. What fun was it, after all, to intuit your way through a game that you could beat into submission by brute processing power?

Not that chess lacked historical and aesthetic interest. In fact, he was currently running a simulation of the Deep Blue-Kasparov match—worthwhile if only for the opportunity to admire the angels-on-pinheads acrobatics of the old-time code jockeys. But Cohen had been built with a bigger game in mind.

Life, if you wanted to call it that.

And every ant algorithm and Kohonen net in his far-flung systems was telling him that this moment—here under the tall sky of Earth, sitting in an outdoor café on the treacherous edge of the International Zone, waiting for a man who was going on forty-two minutes late by Cohen’s favorite, albeit hopelessly inaccurate, wristwatch—was one of life’s dangerous moves.

They’d waited while dawn burnished the Dome of the Rock and pressed her ice-age-cold fingers into the crooked squares and narrow alleys of the Old City. By the time the first real sun of the morning set the dust motes dancing over their table, early-rising Hasidim were returning from the Wailing Wall and the automated muezzin was wafting the call to prayer through the Temple Mount’s loudspeakers, reminding the faithful that there was no god but God and prayer was sweeter than sleep.

The streets swelled with a rising tide of early-morning commuters. Metal shutters rattled up on shop fronts. Shopkeepers called to each other in the archaic, Arabic-inflected Hebrew of the Jerusalemites.

“It’s so quiet,” Li said.

Cohen didn’t have to ask what she meant. To posthuman ears, the morning cacophony was overwhelmed by the absolute silence where all the accompanying streamspace chatter of a busy commercial street should have been.

Cohen threw out a hand to encompass the whole crooked, claustrophobic tumble of the Old City. “Behold the Great Unwired, brought to you by a multigenerational coalition of SUV-driving Americans and self-serving orbital corporations and a UN General Assembly whose environmental watchword is not-in-my-backyard!”

The technological embargo had been imposed in the late twenty-first century, when Earth was in ecological free fall and the rats were just starting to realize that they didn’t have another ship to jump to. By then the only people left on the planet were the Exempt Populations—aboriginals and major world religions—and the rogue nations. The aboriginals hadn’t caused the problem and thus, in a brilliant display of what router/decomposer liked to call human illogic, weren’t given a say in solving it. The fundamentalists just wanted to kill each other in peace without tripping over any stray Peacekeepers. And the rogue nations (a polite way of saying America) had parted ways so decisively with the UN by then that no one even bothered to ask if they wanted to participate.

America resisted, of course. But economies can’t survive indefinite solitary confinement any more than people can. Doing business with America soon became bad business as well as bad politics. The American juggernaut sputtered to a slow crawl, crippled by climate change, economic isolation, and a massive multigenerational brain drain that was gleefully encouraged by Ring-side immigration policy.

Meanwhile the technological gap between Earth and the Ring got wider with every new advance in AI design or microgravity manufacturing. The generation ships lifted off from every overpopulated and impoverished corner of the globe. And the Embargo, ostensibly a simple moratorium on sale of space-based technology to Earth, began to achieve its true purpose: the reduction of Earth’s human biomass to a level that the crippled planet could sustain.

It worked. Suburbs were swallowed up by weedlot wilderness. Trees and plants—albeit only self-pollinating ones—replaced concrete. Frogs were gone. So were butterflies, non-genetically-modified honeybees, most large mammals, and the migratory songbirds whose flocks had blackened Earth’s skies in a time beyond the reach of even Cohen’s earliest stored memories. But their ecological niches had been filled in, more or less, by other species. The world might not be as complex or as beautiful as it had been before man’s Industrial Age, but it worked. In fact, it worked well enough that people were even starting to talk about loosening the Embargo.

People on Earth, that is.

No one Ring-side wanted to hear a word about it.

The humans who imposed the Embargo had meant it to be temporary. Industrial activity would be shut down until the planet’s biogeological functions righted themselves. And when the environmental remediation was complete, everyone would move back downstairs and get back to life as normal. After all, Earth was home.

But Earth wasn’t home to the 18 billion humans and posthumans who now inhabited the Orbital Ring. To them, Earth was just another moon. But a moon with a difference: a moon that had something they desperately needed.

Water.

Earth was dry and getting drier. The Ring was thirsty and getting thirstier. And every human who wasn’t born on Earth meant a few hundred thousand extra liters of drinkable water for the Orbital Ring. So the UN offered Earth’s few remaining humans a Solomonic choice, wrapped in the neutral language of the Tech Embargo: stay on Earth and accept the overwhelming odds against ever producing live offspring, or emigrate to the Ring and enjoy all the benefits of modern genetic engineering. And in the poisoned Holy Land, where one could go days on end without seeing a single child, that choice was as stark as the choice between life and death.

A pair of Legion fighter jets flashed overhead, wreathed in a virtual mist of encrypted spinstreams.

“Stop looking at your watch,” Li griped. “It’s always slow, then you get the wrong time in your head, and I catch it from you, and it screws with my wetware.”

“That sounds fun,” Cohen quipped. “Can we try it when we get back to the hotel?”

A squadron of Legionnaires walked by, their faces young and hard behind mirrored sunglasses, the creases in their uniforms sharp enough to threaten innocent passersby with paper cuts. As they passed the café one of the young men skipped a step, bringing himself into marching rhythm with his companions with the naturalness that only comes of long training.

“The real problem,” Cohen said, returning to the subject of the watch, “is that I can’t take it to Geneva for revision anymore. No one knows how to clean a real watch properly anymore. No one has the patience.”

“Just waiting for the barbarians, are we?” Li said in a voice of patently fake sympathy.

“Yes, darling,” Cohen drawled, “but who are the barbarians these days? There are so many people lining up for the job it’s getting hard to pick a winner.”

Li smiled, but her mind was only half on the banter. She was back at work again; Cohen could feel her on the other end of the intraface, scanning the approaches, converting the three-dimensional world into a relief map of lines of fire and points of cover and potential kill zones. “If I were this late,” she muttered, “it would only be because something was wrong. Or because I was planning to make something go wrong.”

A lone Israeli man settled at the table behind them, shalomed politely, ordered a cup of black coffee, and opened up the weekend section of the Ha’aretz. A moment later two camera-toting NorAmArc pilgrims sat down at the next table over and began a high-decibel argument about whether the cog railway ran to the Dome of the Rock overlook on Saturdays. Cohen goggled at them, only to realize that his friendly Ha’aretz reader was doing the same. Their gazes crossed, and the two men shared a moment of anonymous amusement.

“You watch,” Li muttered. “The contact’s not going to show up until after lunch. And meanwhile we’re goddamn sitting ducks.”

“Relax, Catherine.”

“If you wanted relaxed, you shouldn’t have brought me. Speaking of which, why the hell are we here anyway?”

“My country calls and I answer,” Cohen quipped.

“Your country called all right. But they don’t seem to give enough of a shit about you to provide bandwidth for the return call. Sometimes I could just strangle Hy Cohen for saddling you with this baggage.”

“He probably never thought twice about it. He could be a bit lacking in subtlety sometimes. And he never could get his brain around the idea that Israel wasn’t perfect.” Cohen grinned sheepishly. “Not all of my pig-stubborn loyalty is the Game’s fault. Some of it I come by honestly.”

Li stopped scanning the approaches and actually turned in her chair to stare at him. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit he wasn’t perfect?”

“He was anything but perfect. He slept around behind his wife’s back for one thing. I hated that. Not the adultery so much as the lying.” Cohen felt the familiar flutter of self-loathing stir somewhere near the pit of what would have been his stomach if he had one. “I despised the lying.”

“But you never told her.”

Cohen stared into the middle distance, seeing the face of the first woman he had ever loved…and who had slipped away from him just as Li was now slipping away. “She didn’t want to know,” he said at last.

“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”

He reached out for her instream, ran into a wall, and stared into her eyes only to find that they were equally unreadable. “Not you,” he whispered. “I love you.”

At that instant their contact stepped out of a narrow alley between two restaurants, glanced at them—so briefly that Cohen only caught the look when he replayed Li’s spinfeed—then looked quickly away.

Li settled in her chair, shifting her weight forward, sliding her feet farther apart. Her face was expressionless, but onstream she radiated a profound and wordless satisfaction that Cohen suspected was pretty close to what you’d get if you tapped the neural feed of a cat who’d just found a nice fat mouse to play with.

The contact turned out to be a woman, and a woman who had the history of Israel written on her face. She could have stepped straight out of a 1950s kibbutz harvest photo or a grainy black-and-white movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The rawboned farmer-turned-soldier body. The tousled fair hair and the hawklike face. The steel-blue eyes—one of them dark with the stain of an old injury.

‹Shrapnel?› Li asked. ‹Or did she have a rifle blow up in her face?›

‹Love tap from a grenade. Sayeret Golani training exercise.›

‹Ah. So you do know her.›

‹I told you, I don’t want you having any contact with people from the Office unless it’s absolutely necessary. I thought we agreed about that.›

‹No. I just stopped arguing about it so router/decomposer wouldn’t have to waste his time playing magical moving files for you.›

Cohen ignored the jibe. Li could complain all she wanted to about unequal file-sharing protocols, but he wasn’t going to drop the firewall he kept between her and the boys on King Saul Boulevard as long as he had a choice in the matter. She could think up enough ways to get herself killed on her own without his help.

‹So what should I know about her that you’re actually willing to tell me?› Li asked.

‹Let’s just say that Tel Aviv might not be the most tactful topic to raise.›

The woman stopped in front of their table, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw her head a little back and sideways in order to get her good eye on them. “Oh, so it was you back in the airport. You could have said so. Or don’t you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you, Osnat. I just didn’t know you’d gone private sector.”

“Lot of people’s careers went down in flames after Tel Aviv. Can’t complain. Could have been worse. Could have ended up with a bullet in the head.”

The fury radiated off her like a bomb blast. Well, Cohen couldn’t blame her. They’d known each other very slightly. As far as she was concerned he was Gavi’s friend, end of story. And Osnat had special, complicated, and intensely personal reasons for hating Gavi.

“I heard Gur died,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry.”

She pulled the empty chair free of the table and sat down in it. No one spoke for a long and extremely unpleasant moment.

“When do we get to talk to the sellers?” Li asked finally.

Osnat ignored her. “You were supposed to come alone,” she told Cohen flatly, “not bring a golem of your own.”

Li made her move so fast that even Cohen missed it. One moment she was on the far side of the table from Osnat. A blink later, she had her hand around the other woman’s wrist and was squeezing hard enough to drain the blood from her face.

“Being a golem has its uses,” she said in a companionable tone. “Also, the only way to ALEF is through Cohen, and the only way to Cohen is through me. So the next time I talk to you, you’ll look me in the eye when you answer.”

Osnat gave her a pale hostile stare. Then she did what every well-trained infantryman does when pinned down by enemy fire; she called for air support. And she called for it, of all places, from the next table.

Cohen followed Osnat’s glance just in time to see the Ha’aretz reader put down his newspaper and smile politely at them.

“May I join you?” he asked. He folded his newspaper into precise halves, picked up his drink, and walked over to sit next to Osnat. “Moshe Feldman,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you. Can I buy you coffee?”

A waiter they hadn’t seen before appeared before Moshe had even raised his hand, carrying a filigreed coffee service. He deposited it on their table, poured out two eggshell-sized cups of cardamom-flavored coffee, produced a bottle of mineral water and two glasses from his apron pocket, and left.

Cohen reached for the water.

Moshe reached for Cohen’s hand.

Li reached for her gun.

“Please,” Moshe said. “Drink your coffee first.”

Li picked hers up, drank, grimaced.

‹Are you all right?› Cohen asked anxiously.

‹God, that’s shitty coffee!›

‹Is that a yes or a no, Catherine?›

‹Yeah, I’m fine.› But as she set the cup back in the saucer he felt a chilly little quiver of pain and shock run across the intraface.

All her systems, biological and synthetic, natural and artificial, kicked into overdrive to identify the attack and tally up the damage. Cohen could feel the churning, chaotic, complicated process unfolding as clearly as if he were inside her skin and not sitting in his own chair with two feet of air between them. Eventually she identified the cold prick of pain as the point of a needle sliding into the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. ‹It’s fine,› she told him a moment later. ‹DNA sampler.›

‹He’s a suspicious bastard, isn’t he?›

‹Unless he has some reason to mistrust us that you’re not telling me about?›

As he picked up his own cup and felt the needle slide into Roland’s flesh, Cohen decided that the implied question in that statement was one he’d rather leave unanswered.

It took Moshe an hour to do the genetic work.

“Well,” Li asked when he finally returned, “are we who we say we are?”

“Apparently. Even Cohen’s…er…”

“Face,” Cohen prompted.

“Right. Even the, er, face is who you told us he would be.” Moshe paused uncomfortably. “How do you acquire your bodies, by the way? Do you grow them?”

“Good heavens, no! We’re not the Syndicates. He’s a real person. Parents, passport, bank accounts. Bank accounts that are substantially better funded since he started working for me.”

Cohen crossed his arms, realized the gesture looked defensive, and asked himself whether deep down inside he might not have something to feel just the tiniest bit guilty about. Hadn’t Roland been meaning to put himself through medical school back when they first met? When was the last time he’d heard anything about that? Was Li right, God forbid? Did he just sort of…swallow people? He pushed away that unwelcome thought, telling himself that he’d ask Roland how med school was going next time they saw each other.

“And how much does it cost to…what’s the right word…rent someone?”

Cohen grinned. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

“And it’s legal, is it?”

“Well, mostly.” Cohen felt Li’s smirk tickling at the back of his mind. “As my associate has just pointed out, it’s easier to bend the rules when you’re filthy stinking rich.”

“Mmm.” Moshe’s expression sharpened. “Speaking of bending the rules, I understood that ALEF would send one representative to the bidding. And that it would be someone we could vet beforehand to make sure they didn’t pose any security risks.” His eyes touched briefly on Li, then skittered away again. “But now here you are with one of the, uh, least vettable individuals in UN space.”

‹He could talk to me about it,› Li said. ‹What the hell’s wrong with these people, anyway?›

“You could talk to her about it,” Cohen repeated, mimicking her annoyed tone with such painstaking precision that only someone who hadn’t grown up surrounded by the twenty-four-hour hum of spinstream traffic could have mistaken the words for Cohen’s.

Moshe turned to face Li. “I have no problem with talking to you. Or with your genetics. Or your enhancements. Or your status under UN law, Jewish law, or any other law. What I do have a problem with is trusting a former Peacekeeper with information that we most assuredly do not wish to share with the Controlled Technology Committee.”

“The operative word there is former,” Li said. “I lost my commission three years ago.”

Moshe’s eyes flicked to Li’s throat and wrists. “But you didn’t lose your wetware. What assurance can you give me that everything you see and hear isn’t feeding straight into UNSec data banks?”

A slow smile spread across Li’s face. “I’m not a very subtle person, Moshe. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.”

“Just that I wonder why they didn’t reclaim your wetware. And how it could have taken your superiors eleven years to get around to prosecuting you for shooting those prisoners.”

“I bought my wetware by signing my pension back to the government. Any soldier’s entitled to do that, and most do, if only to avoid the surgery. As for the rest…you’re spinning fairy tales. The court-martial proceedings were public. Man on the street knows as much about it as I do. Just look at the spins.”

“Spins can be faked. Anyone who’s worked on EMET knows that.”

Li stared across the table, her face calm, her eyes level. This must be costing her, Cohen realized, but he had no idea how much. Three years after the court-martial they’d still never talked about it. And even his most cautious attempts to cross that particular no-man’s-land had been violently rebuffed.

“Unfortunately,” Li said when he’d just about decided she wasn’t going to say anything, “those particular spins don’t seem to have been faked.”

She and Moshe stared at each other, locked in one of those testosterone-fueled battles of will that Cohen, three centuries removed from his only unmediated human memories, was beginning to find increasingly incomprehensible.

Finally Moshe leaned forward in his chair, the flimsy metal creaking under his weight. “The thing is, Major, I just don’t trust you.”

“You want ALEF as a bidder, you’ll have to trust me.”

Moshe pursed his lips.

“Do you need to talk to someone?” Li asked. The question came off of a collective work space shared by Li, Cohen, router/decomposer, and a gaggle of chattering semisentients, but it seemed politic to let Li ask it. Moshe had clearly slipped into the trap of treating the two bodies in front of him as separate entities…and you never knew when that sort of misconception might work to your advantage.

“No. I have discretion.” He hesitated for another instant. “All right then. We go forward. For now. But we may require additional bona fides after the next meeting.”

“You may not be the only one,” Li retorted. “We still have nothing more than your word that the seller’s genuine. What about his bona fides?”

“That’s between you and the seller.” Moshe got to his feet, left the paper on the table, and dropped a few shekels on top of it. “I just open the cage and crack the whip. Whether the bear decides to dance for you or eat you is your problem.”