Spin Control

NATIONAL ROBOTS

“Every war has its hotel,” Cohen opined. “Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with. Some hotels, however, have more than their fair share of wars. Would it interest you to know that you’re sitting in the single most frequently bombed hotel lobby in human history?”

“Great,” Li said wanly.

Cohen sank into the sofa cushions, crossed his legs, and tilted one calf-skin-shod foot this way and that, as if reassuring himself that his shoes really were as nice as they ought to be.

“Are those new shoes?” Li asked.

He smiled sleekly.

The lobby was starting to fill up with the usual mix of tourists, pilgrims, and locals. A band of young transvestites bubbled through the revolving door and boarded the elevator in a clatter of heels and a cloud of perfume. A gaggle of Interfaithers arrived at the elevator at the same moment as the youngsters, saw what they were, and huddled together like hypochondriacs stranded in a leper colony. Li preferred to imagine that at least some of their shocked middle-aged stares were really gazes of covert longing…but then she’d always liked to think the best of people. “Am I crazy,” she asked Cohen, “or was one of those kids wearing a yarmulke?”

“Yeshiva boy chic. Totally passé. They’re probably just in for the night from the Tel Aviv suburbs.”

“Yeshiva boy chic, huh? They must just love you down here.”

“Ahem. Well, not everyone relishes the idea of a Lion of Judah floundering in the fleshpots. I try to be relatively discreet about it.”

Li raised her eyebrows in a silent comment on the notion of Cohen being “relatively discreet” about anything.

“It’s all legal,” he pointed out. “Despite the best attempts of the ultraorthodox and the Interfaithers. In fact, Israel has the ideal combination of prudishness and libertinism. You can do anything you want, get whatever you want, sleep with whomever you want. But since there’s always someone around to tell you you’re going to rot in hell for it, it all still has the tang of the forbidden. Everything’s taboo…but none of it’s taboo enough to land you in jail. What could be better?”

“Speaking of which,” she observed casually, “Gavi’s quite the package. You two never…”

“Never.” Cohen sounded decisive, even fervent about it. “Never even thought about it. First of all, he’s such a strange combination of prudish and romantic that I’m not at all sure he’s slept with anyone since Leila died. And second…Gavi needs. I’d get eaten up alive if I ever let myself start trying to give him what he needs.”

“So instead you find yourself a cold, cynical, self-sufficient bitch like me?”

Cohen made an ostentatious show of pondering the question. He was doing his blonde bombshell act tonight. The fact that he could pull it off in Roland’s body was a display of pure programmer’s bravura. Li had spent just enough time around Roland while Cohen wasn’t shunting through him to know that he was boringly straight in every sense of the word. But somehow Cohen managed to pull shades of Marilyn Monroe from the kid. “Well,” he purred eventually, “at least you’re not a prude.”

She leaned into him in what even she knew was an unusual display of public affection, and pressed her lips to Roland’s smooth young forehead just below the hairline. Cohen returned her kisses, moving under her hands like water, making her forget the stranger’s body that came between them.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Is that why you went sneaking off to see Ash last night?”

She jerked back to stare at him from the farthest end of the sofa. He was sitting, hands folded in his lap, in the state of unnatural stillness that she’d learned to recognize as a sign of the most violent emotion.

Her mind raced. How did he know? Had router/decomposer told him? Or was this just one more sign that his access to her internals went deeper than he was willing to admit to her?

She looked at him, forcing her pulse to stay even, her eyes to remain level. “So you’ve been spying on me again.”

“Apparently with good reason.”

“Cohen—”

“Don’t make excuses. It’s beneath you.”

The silence was suffocating, both instream and off. Cohen bent his head to light a cigarette, and Roland’s eyes vanished beneath the thick golden fall of forelock. Roland’s eyes closed as he took a first long drag on the cigarette. Li sat there feeling like a mouse caught between a cat’s paws. Finally the cigarette dropped and Roland’s eyes opened. His face was so blandly expressionless that for a surreal moment she wondered whether Cohen was still on shunt.

“I can live with an innocent flirtation,” he said in a voice that made her soul squirm. “Or even a not-so-innocent flirtation. But I will not be lied to.”

His words hung in the air like one of the bright phosphorus flares that blossomed over the Green Line at night. Ash. Christ, it had never even occurred to her. Did Cohen really think she’d cheat on him for a pair of long legs and a pretty face? The idea was repellent. Infuriating. Humiliating.

But warring with her urge to set Cohen straight was the realization that he’d just handed her an unbreakable, uncheckable alibi for her meetings with Nguyen’s contact.

She’d be a fool not to take it.

Wouldn’t she?

“I was going to tell you,” she said, feeling her heart wrench with the lie.

“Of course you were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His voice was level and pleasant…but when she probed the intraface, none of his firewalls would so much as shake hands with her internals.

“Have a drink,” he told her, not even acknowledging the aborted contact.

Their eyes met. Li frowned. Cohen smiled.

Except it wasn’t his real smile. It was the bland, pleasant, impersonal smile that meant he’d decided to write someone off so completely he wasn’t even going to bother mentioning it to them. She’d seen that smile only twice before, and neither occasion had made for good memories. She’d never imagined she’d be on the receiving end of it.

“Right.” She picked up the cocktail menu and pretended to look at it. “What’s the plan then?”

“There is no plan. We’ll talk to Fortuné, then we’ll see.”

“And where do we go to talk to the man?”

“The International Zone. Fortuné’s got a favorite bar there, a little place called the Sauve Qui Peut.”

The Sauve Qui Peut was a Legionnaire’s bar: cheap beer, an abiding odor of steak and frites, and Brel and Bénabar chuttering out of speakers that had been blown long before the oldest of the place’s regulars had rotated into the Zone.

The bar back boasted a cluttered shrine of Legion paraphernalia. Flat photos and holos of soldiers fording swollen tropical rivers or jumping out of ancient airplanes, or marching with the medieval battle-axes and butcher’s aprons that the Fathers of the Legion (a few of them Mothers, at least technically) wore on parade days. The shrine’s centerpiece was an antique hand-colored photograph of Colonel Danjou’s famous hand, so immense that the screws where the metal hinges met the wooden fingers were visible at twenty paces. The place was packed but the floor around the back table was empty. And from the minute they walked in Cohen could see Fortuné waiting for them in the shadows.

“Bienvenues en l’Enfer,” Fortuné said, rising behind his table to greet them. His smile was friendly, but the eyes behind the smile were as sharp and precise as the creases in his dress shirt.

If the Sauve Qui Peut was the prototypical Legionnaire’s bar, then Colonel Jean-Louis Fortuné was the perfect Legionnaire. Five foot nine in thick socks and spit-shined jump boots, and not carrying an ounce of fat anywhere on his wiry frame except in the coffee-colored baby face that was the legacy of his Haitian ancestry. A fifth-degree judo black belt. An inveterate but eminently discreet womanizer…or so it was whispered around barracks. His hairline had already been receding when Cohen first met him, and now he was going bald in the no-nonsense manner that was synonymous, to French eyes, with being a man of intelligence, education, and virility.

Li took the hand Fortuné offered and delivered what Cohen suspected was her most bone-crushing handshake. Fortuné bore up well under it; but then he too was wired to the gills, though his dark skin hid the delicate subdermal filigree of ceramsteel filaments.

“I’m a great admirer,” Fortuné said when he’d retrieved his hand from Li’s grasp. “It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome the hero of Gilead.”

“Some people would say the Butcher of Gilead.”

Cohen had never been quite sure how closely Li followed the press coverage of her court-martial. Now he guessed he knew.

“Some people would not be me,” Fortuné said placidly. “They nailed you up for sins above your pay grade. That was the opinion on the chow line when it happened. It still is.”

Li blinked at that, but her internals were so tightly locked down that Cohen couldn’t get any sense of what was going on behind her eyes.

They sat down. Fortuné was drinking a Lorelei, and a wave to the bartender brought two more bottles over at double time. Cohen sipped the crisp, sweet Alsatian beer and smiled at the taste of Hyacinthe’s centuries-gone youth.

Li and Fortuné started talking war. Tours of duty. Planetside rotations. Combat drops. Cohen, who had never been a soldier nor wanted to be, let the talk flow past him like current lifting a swimmer. He came back to Earth with a thump when he heard the word employment roll off Fortuné’s lips.

“I’m not looking to get hitched again,” Li said into the silence that followed. “And even if I were, what’s it to you? Last time I checked you work for UNSec, same as I did.”

“Only in the most limited sense, I assure you.”

“Then who do you answer to?”

Fortuné smiled urbanely. “La France, ma chère, defender of the civilized world.”

“Is that like the free world but with better food?”

Fortuné laughed, and Li unleashed her most dazzling smile on him. She had charisma in spades when she felt like putting out the effort. And for reasons that Cohen didn’t want to think too closely about, she’d decided it was worth her while to charm Fortuné.

“She’s quite a woman,” Fortuné said when she got up to hunt down fresh drinks.

Cohen turned on him. “Don’t even think about it.”

“My friend, I’m neither wealthy enough nor handsome enough to compete with you. I was speaking merely in a professional sense.”

“Well, don’t think about that either.”

Fortuné’s eyes flicked to the front of the bar, where Li was standing on her toes in order to give an attentive reading to the ornate copperplate inscription below the photograph of Colonel Danjou’s hand. Cohen saw her as Fortuné must see her: taut, wired, preternaturally alert, right hand poised habitually over the pistol that she’d had to leave with the hard-faced ex-noncom at what had to be the most explosive coat check in the Holy Land. She ought to be commanding a division, he thought guiltily, not baby-sitting me. He squashed the thought.

“She’s retired,” he told Fortuné.

“Pity.” Fortuné eyed Li’s ramrod-straight back. “Still, if she ever changes her mind…”

“She won’t.”

The buzzing speakers broke out into a rendition of a song that had become the de facto Legionnaire’s anthem in the Evacuation era, and a few of the drunker soldiers around the bar sang along to the famous chorus:

Je voulais quitter la terre, mais maintenent je la regrette J’ai plus le mal du pays, j’ai le mal de la planète

Suddenly the song struck Cohen as sadly telling. A crowd of colonials singing about being homesick for a planet they’d never called home in the language of a country that only existed as a romantic idea and a Ring-side embassy.

“This is all very enjoyable,” Fortuné said, “and I certainly hope you’ll both stay to dinner—not here, somewhere with good food. I know a little one star in Haifa where the cook is pretty and the foie gras is impeccable. But in the meantime I think there was another reason besides my charm and good looks for your visit? What can I do for you?”

Cohen explained briefly the message they needed passed across the Line.

Fortuné stared intently at him, nodding and frowning and muttering oui, oui, oui, oui, as the French often do to indicate agreement…or at least attention.

In this case, it turned out to be only attention. When Cohen was done, Fortuné leaned back in his chair, his dark skin blending with the shadows so that all Cohen could see of him was the blazing white pleats of his summer uniform and the battered stainless-steel wristband of his much-abused Rolex.

“Et pourquoi tu veux te compliquer la vie?” he asked. Why do you want to complicate your life?

Why indeed?

“For a friend.”

“I hope he is a good one.”

“The best.”

Or the worst.

Because the truth was that Cohen still hadn’t decided whether he was doing this for Didi or for Gavi. And he was betting his peace of mind on a single article of faith: that when all the twists and turns were over the two of them would turn out to be on the same side.

The first sign Arkady saw that Cohen’s message had gotten through was a marked uptick in Moshe’s already-healthy sense of paranoia.

Moshe interpreted the Palestinian request for a second session with Arkady as a symptom of some grave security breach. Osnat began to look increasingly harried. Ash Sofaer flew out from Tel Aviv, apparently for the sole purpose of staring coolly at Arkady, asking a few unconnected questions, whispering into Moshe’s ear for a few minutes, and flying back home again.

“You’re hearing grass grow,” Osnat told Moshe finally.

“If I’m hearing grass grow,” Moshe said, “maybe it’s because grass is growing.”

Meanwhile, Arkady asked himself constantly what he could do, what he should do, about the revelation he’d experienced in the face of Gavi’s flowcharts.

He was by now absolutely certain that his first intuition had been right. Korchow’s “genetic weapon” had merely been the ball Korchow wanted the bidders to keep their eyes on. The real virus was already infecting the buyers every time they touched Arkady or talked to him or stood in the same room with him.

Arkady had seen the signs himself. He’d just read them wrong. For Arkady, used to the strong medicine of Syndicate immunoresponses, the slower maturing, more diffuse human immune response had looked like minor allergies, nothing more. Either that or the humans hadn’t really started getting sick yet.

His first reaction to the way Korchow had used him was outrage. He had never consented to be used as some sort of interstellar Typhoid Mary. And it was all very well to talk about throwing Earth into chaos in order to save humans in the long run…but Arkady had gotten to know some of those humans. And he didn’t relish the idea of handing out smallpox blankets to people like Osnat and Gavi.

Gradually, however, his outrage was eclipsed by fear. A second realization had come close on the heels of the first one and shaken him to his core like the aftershock of an earthquake flattens buildings still precariously standing after the first assault. He’d spent four months on Gilead while Korchow and his team interrogated him. During those months, Korchow and others had sat across tables from him, shared meals with him, passed hour after hour with him. Still others had prepared his food, washed his clothes and bedclothes, cleaned up the intimate entropy of daily life. There was no hope of maintaining anything like effective quarantine in the constantly recirculating air of an orbital station, so he could only assume the worst.

And if the worst had happened, then Korchow hadn’t launched Arkady toward Earth in an offensive attack. He’d sent him as a desperate last-ditch effort to buy the Syndicates some time and better their suddenly radically diminished chances of survival.

Arkady was still trying to decide how he felt about this—and what he should do about it—when the two humorless young men who’d flown in from Tel Aviv with Ash smuggled him across the Line and handed him over to the green-eyed boy, Yusuf.

There was a room.

There was a desk.

On the desk there was a single blank sheet of paper.

Behind the desk there was a man.

The man looked kind, slightly harried, moderately intelligent, and completely unremarkable. Average height, average coloring, average build running to sedentary flab in middle age. The bland gray buttoned-down look of conformity that Arkady was already learning to associate with midlevel bureaucrats and low-level career military officers.

A timeserver, Arkady decided. Short on initiative, originality, and imagination. Good at pushing the paperwork through on time. The kind of man who made it hard to believe humans had ever had the brains to bootstrap themselves out of the gravity well.

“Hello, Arkady,” the man said in fluent, unaccented English instead of the UN-standard Spanish that was Earth’s lingua franca. That was the first surprise.

Arkady had been gazing at the floor, but now he glanced up sharply and found himself staring into the man’s eyes. And that was the second surprise.

The man’s eyes were brown. Not the liquid velvet of a Rostov construct’s eyes, let alone the intense black of Gavi’s eyes. Just the normal expected brown that usually went with Mediterranean coloring. Ordinary, like everything else about him. But you couldn’t look into those eyes and not know that they belonged to a thinking man who had done and seen enough in the world to be long past proving things.

“You’re Walid Safik,” Arkady said.

“So they tell me. Sit down, Arkady.”

Arkady sat down, trying to put the man before him together with the aura of mystery and danger that surrounded Absalom.

“Did you have a nice talk with Gavi?” Safik asked. “Oh, don’t look like that. I’m not pumping you for information. Not yet, anyway. Just curious. Gavi married my favorite cousin, did you know that? I danced at their wedding. Well, figuratively speaking. I don’t think I actually danced. I was a pretty bad dancer even before I got fat. My wife says so, and when she says rude things about me they’re usually true. Tell me, how did Gavi strike you?”

“In what way?”

“Personally. Did you like him? Never mind, of course you did. Everybody does. Or they used to, anyway. But did he seem happy within the obvious limitations?”

“He seemed fine, I guess.” Arkady remembered the missing leg and shuddered involuntarily. How did people down here talk about that sort of thing? There seemed to be a terrible number of people on Jerusalem’s streets with missing or deformed body parts. Did the commonness of such horrors make them lighter to bear and easier to talk about? Or did it just make them all the more frightening? “I doubt I know him well enough to tell whether he’s happy or not.”

“Fair enough. But there’s no harm in asking, is there?”

Safik got up, walked to the door, and conferred briefly with Yusuf. When he came back he had a pack of cigarettes in his hand.

“Do you mind?” he asked. “I’d open the window, but some idiot painted it shut last year.” He lit the cigarette and sucked at it with the intensity of an addict. “Terrible habit. I picked it up in my twenties because I was seduced by all those old romantic spy movies where interrogations happen in a haze of cigarette smoke. And when the romance wore off, I was left with the smoking. And when I tried to quit I just got fat, then started up again anyway. So now I’m a fat old man who smokes too much and has no youthful illusions to fall back on.”

He set the lighter down on the table between them, spun it around like a top, and watched it flash black and silver and black and silver and black until it drifted to a halting stop. “So what do I do now, Arkady? Do I try to outcharm Gavi? Do I try to outwit Korchow? Do I spin you around”—he flicked the lighter back into motion—“until you don’t know which way is up or who you can trust?”

Arkady looked up from the glittering spin of the lighter to find Safik gazing at him with those calm, extraordinarily ordinary eyes.

“Which body has Cohen brought down this time, by the way? Not the little Italian actress by any chance?”

“No…um. A boy.” He paused, suddenly uncertain even of that. “I think it’s a boy. It wears suits. They call it he.”

“They always call Cohen he, even when he’s in a woman’s body. It’s like the names of hurricanes. It doesn’t mean anything. Anyway, too bad it’s not the Italian girl. He ruined her career, of course. She really had talent, but she got lazy once she took up with him. He has that effect on some people. Still, the boys in surveillance just loved her. Practically had to pay them to go home. Don’t let Korchow make you lie to Cohen, by the way. He hates it when people lie to him. If he were human I’d say it was a neurosis. And I’ve seen him kill with a ruthlessness and a lack of hesitation that would be pathological…again, if he were human. On the other hand, I’ve also seen him go to quite a bit of trouble to protect his friends when an operation goes sour—something you might want to give a little thought to if you want to take your skin with you when you go home.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

Safik shrugged. “You don’t get to be my age in this line of work without blood on your hands. If it doesn’t bother you, you’re a monster. If you’re not a monster, then you reach a point where the main thing you want in life is not to produce any more bloodshed on either side of an operation than is strictly necessary…which brings me right back to the problem of how to talk to you.”

“I thought you were already busy outcharming Gavi.”

Safik smiled. “You flatter me. But seriously, Arkady. What would be the point? You’ll serve whatever it is you love most. Money, if it’s money. In which case there’s no art at all in turning you; merely a matter of who has the larger departmental budget. Or, if it’s principle or love or loyalty, then you’ll serve that. And none of Korchow’s spy craft or Moshe’s intimidation or Gavi’s charisma or my plain talking is going to change that.” His cigarette spit and crackled as he took another drag on it. “So that’s all I can usefully ask of you, Arkady. What do you love? What do you serve? What makes you able to go to sleep at night and stand the sight of your face in the mirror when you wake up in the morning? You show me your soul, I’ll show you mine…and then we’ll see if we can profitably travel the next little bit of road together.”

“I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” Arkady said. And it was true. He didn’t belong to Earth, or believe in what humanity stood for. And yet all the truths he’d grown up honoring had been shattered under the terrible pressure of Novalis.

“Tell me about Novalis,” Safik said, as if he’d plucked the word out of Arkady’s mind. “Not the facts. Gavi already got the facts from you better than I ever could.” Safik had been fingering the blank sheet of paper on his desk for several minutes. Now he turned it over to show Gavi’s intricate flowchart on the other side. When Arkady gasped, he just smiled and gave him a conspiratorial wink. “I didn’t get it from Gavi, for what it’s worth. I wish the fools and bigots who think he works for me were right. When it comes to navigating the wilderness of mirrors, Gavi’s the best there ever was. On the other hand…sometimes Gavi trips over his own brains. And in your case I have a niggling feeling that things may actually be less complicated than he’s making them.”

“I told Gavi everything,” Arkady said, feeling suddenly tired and discouraged.

“Then tell me about Arkasha.”

“There’s nothing left to say.”

“Not even if I told you that we might be willing to give him political asylum?”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because Korchow won’t give him up now.”

“You thought he might when you talked to Gavi last week. What’s changed?”

Arkady looked stubbornly at the floor.

“Talk to me, Arkady. Something’s eating at you. Something that wasn’t even on your horizon when Gavi talked to you. What do you know now that you wish you didn’t?”

Safik reached for his cigarettes, checked his watch, sighed deeply, and pushed them away again.

“I’m going to tell you something, Arkady.” Safik stood up and came around the desk to sit in the empty chair beside him. “Something I’ve never told anyone but my wife before. Not because it’s necessarily shameful—at least not any more shameful than a lot of other things I’ve done for my country. But if you get to be my age you’ll see that only a fool or a fanatic can spend much time in our line of work and not begin to…well…doubt. Worse, if you’re anything approaching a thinking person, you even begin to doubt your doubts. Are you really still working toward the great and good ends you used to believe in, or are your doubts merely a sort of mental washing of hands? A subtle kind of self-deception that lets you hold your nose and do dirty work while feeling all the while that what you do isn’t really you, that you’re better than that, more perceptive than that, more moral than that.”

When Arkady didn’t answer, Safik sighed and went on.

“This happened to me when I was around your age, Arkady. This was before the doubts. I was still thin back then, believe it or not, and at least reasonably good-looking. Or so my wife tells me. Anyway, I’m making jokes about it because it’s not a very happy story. What it comes down to is that a young settler attacked one of our patrols and I was put in charge of questioning his mother. The Israelis were quite cooperative, of course. It was before the war, and that sort of freelancing is in no one’s interest.”

Safik’s manner had changed subtly, Arkady realized. He was casting little glances at Arkady at the end of every sentence, as if it was terribly important to make sure that Arkady understood every word he spoke. And there was a banked, smoldering fire behind the ordinary face that made Arkady see this was a man who was not controllable. By anybody.

“So anyway,” Safik went on, “here was this woman who had just lost her only son. And I—some young idiot who’d never been married, never had a child, knew nothing about anything—was supposed to question her. Naturally it was all the most offensively officious kind of nonsense. Who were her son’s friends? Who had given him the weapon? What had he said before he died? Why would he have done such a thing if he hadn’t learned at his mother’s knee to hate us? And on and on. Hopeless, of course. She didn’t have any real information, and wouldn’t have given it to me if she had. But she was more than happy to talk to me. She knew the clichés by heart, Arkady, and I heard them all that morning. Her son was a hero. He was fulfilling God’s mandate for the Holy Land. She’d achieved the highest purpose of a woman’s life by giving birth to a soldier. And on and on and on. But all the while she was making her patriotic speeches she was weeping. She was wracked with sobs every time she paused for breath. I have never seen someone weep so violently and still be able to force intelligible words out of her mouth.

“It was as if there were two women in her body, Arkady. An outer woman who had the power of speech, who belonged to the state, to civilization, to what you might call the superorganism. And an inner woman, who belonged to no government, and who knew damn well that all those patriotic words were dust next to her son’s dead body.”

Safik stopped. He was slumped in his chair, and he looked gray and ill and terribly angry. Arkady had the impression that he’d stopped talking not because he had run out of words but because he had lost faith that Arkady would understand him.

“So…”

“So what’s my point? I am telling you who I am, Arkady. I serve what I saw in that woman’s eyes. That every time you sacrifice the individual in the name of order and stability you’re only throwing fresh meat to the dogs of war. That martyrdom—be it the martyrdom of the soldier or the martyrdom of the suicide bomber—is a poor substitute for decent government. That’s what I serve, Arkady. And I don’t give a damn about the fanatics who only see lines on the map.” He smiled briefly and made that chin-flicking skyward gesture that Earth dwellers always made when they wanted to talk about the larger world that had left their planet behind. “Or lines out in space for that matter.”

“And what about Absalom?”

“Absalom’s an idea, not a man. And he won’t die as long as there are people on both sides of the Line who think like I do.”

They locked eyes.

Safik sighed and glanced away.

“Fine,” he said. “You have no reason to believe me. But I’ll tell you one thing, Arkady. I’m not your enemy. I’m not sure I’m anyone’s enemy. Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”

But Arkady didn’t have to think about it. He trusted Safik. He knew he was playing the easy mark, just like he’d done with Gavi. He knew that any step he took might be the one that made a choice between protecting the Syndicates and saving Arkasha inevitable. But when he looked into Safik’s calm, decent, ordinary face and asked himself for some reason he shouldn’t trust him, he couldn’t find one.

So he told him everything, right up to that awful moment of revelation in front of Gavi’s flowchart.

“If that’s true,” Safik said when Arkady had finished, “then we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we, Earth and Syndicates alike?”

“No, we’re not!” Arkady burst out.

He never knew, then or later, whether Safik had planned it; but suddenly all the thoughts he’d kept to himself over the past weeks were spilling out of him, giving voice to his pent-up frustration at the intransigent human refusal to understand the Syndicates, to understand life beyond the Orbital Ring, to understand period.

“How can you people still be so ignorant?” he shouted. Then he realized he was shouting, caught his breath, and went on more quietly.

“How can you know so little even after centuries of sending ships and settlers out to die in space? How can you still understand nothing about what it’s like out there?”

“So make me understand. I want to understand, Arkady. If you can’t make me understand, you’ll never make any human understand.”

“You can’t understand,” Arkady said bitterly. He remembered again the terrible fire of ZhangSyndicate’s death throes. For the first time he realized that there had been men in those attacking ships. Men bred and trained in the Ring, where Earth was always one short rescue launch away, and the universe was still friendly and forgiving and crowded enough that a man could take it upon himself to loose a missile and destroy an orbital station that was all the wide world to its little ark of souls. “You hear the words. You nod and smile…and then five minutes later you say something that proves you haven’t understood a syllable. Earth itself keeps you from understanding. Even the Ring-siders still have Earth to fall back on if things go really wrong. You can afford to be selfish, inefficient, individualistic because Earth is big and rich and forgiving. You can afford to act like spoiled children because Earth will always bail you out. And even then you managed to turn getting to space into a race against extinction. How many billions of lives were thrown away on the generation ships? Humans make their sacrifices too. Despite all their brave words about rights and individuals. The collected quotient of individual misery and wastage and suffering in human society makes the Syndicates look like the ultimate humanists.”

“So it’s all just politics?” Safik interjected. He sounded gently disappointed by the idea.

“Politics! Reality. A reality you humans can’t see because you’re too busy telling each other fairy tales. I never understood before I came here why the UN got so taken by surprise when so many people around the Periphery sided with the Syndicates in the war, but now I finally get it. You actually think they’re still human. You think if you just wipe the Syndicates, your problems will vanish and you’ll step into the future you always wanted to have. But that future died with Earth. The only future left now is the one you made when you put Earth’s poor on the generation ships and threw them overboard to live or die. Well, we lived. And now you’re trying to stop evolution in its tracks because we aren’t the future you wanted to have.”

Arkady finished his speech and wound down into depressed and embarrassed silence.

“You don’t sound like a traitor,” Safik said at last. “You sound to me like a man who wants to go home.”

“Home isn’t perfect either,” Arkady whispered.

“Neither is my wife, but I still go home every night. Don’t you think Korchow has figured this out?” Somehow Safik managed to sound matter-of-fact and sympathetic in the same instant. “Don’t you think he knows enough of…well, I suppose I shouldn’t call it human nature…to have predicted you might feel this way?”

“You don’t think I’ve asked myself that again and again?” Arkady said bitterly. “I feel like a lab rat!”

Safik smiled. His gaze left Arkady’s for just long enough to light another long-awaited cigarette. “You seem to be focusing only on the negative aspects of being a lab rat. The up side of having someone like Korchow use you is that there usually is a real piece of cheese at the end of the maze. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that Korchow might want to send Arkasha to Earth? The Embargo’s going to go up in smoke the minute people begin to really see what the Novalis virus has done. We’re going to be playing a vicious game of catch-up. And we’re going to be in desperate need of people like Arkasha. Maybe Korchow’s preparing the ground for a little…er, intellectual terraforming?”

Arkady tried to look impassive and undecided, but his mind had already gone into a tailspin of calculations, hopes, dreams, anticipation.

“I don’t want to rush you into anything,” Safik said. “Least of all anything Korchow’s trying to rush me into rushing you into. Go back to Moshe. Think about it. I’m sure we’ll have another chance to talk. That is as long as you don’t say anything that would make your keepers wonder just who you’ve been talking to over here.”

And if that wasn’t a way of buying his silence, Arkady wondered, then what was?