Spin Control

MET AND EMET

Gavi Shehadeh was so universally hated by the time he lost his leg that at first no one on either side of the Line could bring themselves to believe it wasn’t a richly deserved assassination attempt. The facts—the Shabbas visit to the one faction of his Jewish family that was still speaking to him, the impromptu soccer game, the lost ball, and the bloody carnage in the weeds—came out with such excruciating slowness that Gavi was up and walking before most of his old friends and new enemies could bring themselves to admit that he’d been crippled by a perfectly ordinary land mine.

He was on administrative leave over the Absalom affair when it happened, and within a few months he found himself with a new ceramic compound leg courtesy of Hadassah Hospital’s special amputees unit and a growing realization that his career had died in Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem had seemed like an escape when Didi first suggested it. Only when he reported to IDF headquarters for the mandatory sperm and blood samples did he realize he’d accepted what amounted, in most people’s minds, to a slow death sentence. No matter, he’d told himself. His exile would be over in a few months, a year at most.

But by now it had lasted almost four years.

He wasn’t sure just when Gavi the traitor had begun to feel more real to him than the man he’d always thought he was. But there were external signs by which he could measure the rate at which his new identity cannibalized his old one. Before his second summer in Yad Vashem he’d stopped writing letters and calling on his former colleagues in hope of a new position. Then his visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, always sporadic, had stopped entirely. And sometime in the third year of his live burial he’d admitted to himself that if his former enemies knew how he felt every time he had to leave the thickness of the Line, they would spirit him straight back to the eighth floor out of sheer spite.

GOLEM had grown out of the routine work of file maintenance that took up so much of Gavi’s time in the first years at Yad Vashem. The number of survivors’ testimonies—the sheer mass of information—contained in the Yad Vashem archives was inconceivable. Those testimonies were the heart of Yad Vashem, the true Monument of the Eternal Name, and one like no other humankind had ever constructed. But monuments of silicon were just as vulnerable to the forces of time and gravity as monuments of marble.

Time passed. Spins decayed. Disks and data cubes crumbled. Files that weren’t recopied and saved on a regular basis lost the one-way battle against entropy. And just as in Europe’s ancient shuls and monasteries, the only files that were recopied were the files people actually used. The Warsaw Ghetto files. The files concerning famous Zionists or writers or artists. But the rest—the men and women and children who had done nothing that History cared about, and had appeared in the testimonies only because they had been someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s lost brother or sister or cousin—those people were slowly being wiped from human memory, just as their killers had meant them to be.

To Gavi the answer had seemed obvious. What was needed was a person. A person who would hold the obscure dead just as beloved as the famous dead. A person who would remember them because he would be them; just as Cohen, or at least some buried part of him, was Hyacinthe; just as Rabbi Loew’s golem had been in some mystical sense the lives and history and souls of the people of the Prague ghetto brought to life.

But there would be nothing mystical about this golem, unless you counted the mystery of how sentience emerged from the swarming maelstrom of data inside an Emergent’s networks. Gavi knew the name of the magic that could bring his golem to life; he had poured over the specs and wiring diagrams and bug reports. It was not the cold clay of Prague he needed, but the cold spin lattices of Cohen’s neural networks.

Of course there were other AIs who had the processing power to handle the job. But none of them was as peculiarly human as Cohen was. None of their personality architectures had been so stable for so long. And none of them was as intimately tied to Israel and to Gavi himself.

Cohen could do it. He could breathe a soul into the archives, and turn dead testimony back into living memory…though with what violence to his own identity no human could begin to guess.

And he would do it, whatever the risk, if Gavi asked him to.

It was precisely that certainty that had kept Gavi from asking.

Gavi caught sight of the tail just as he turned onto King David Street to begin the final approach to Cohen’s hotel. The kid was clearly trying to avoid looking at him: the classic amateur’s gaffe.

Gavi loitered in front of the window of a spintronics store, inspecting the merchandise with minute attention, feeling the rhythm of the crowd as it flowed behind him, listening to the monotonous drone of the crosswalk signals. Then he dashed across the street at the last minute before the light changed, only to loiter again on the far corner waiting for the next light, scanning the crowd all the while for the telltale signs of averted eyes or sudden changes of direction. Then he apparently changed his mind, walked back to the store, went inside, and spent nearly ten minutes haggling over the price of a mobile uplink and left without buying anything. He sauntered down the street for several more blocks, assiduously window-shopping, and repeated the performance at a second store.

In the end he decided that there was only a single team of watchers: a couple, boy and girl, playing well out in front of him, and to the rear a clean-cut young man who looked like his great-great-great-grandparents might have arrived in the Ethiopian airlift. They were kids, diligent but raw.

He thought wistfully of Osnat, who wouldn’t have made such basic mistakes on her first day of training. Then he told himself he couldn’t afford to think of Osnat when he was about to put himself under Cohen’s sharp eyes.

Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the team worked their plodding way through every classic amateur mistake, and threw in a few new variations for good measure. The teacher in him wanted to walk over, grab them by the collars, and make them do it again, right. But he wasn’t a teacher now. He was a target. A target without backup or a safe house or any of the usual safety nets. And it didn’t take a professional to put a bullet through your skull. He’d learned that in Tel Aviv, even if he hadn’t learned anything else of any earthly use to anyone.

He worked his way up King David Street and over to City Tower, where he browsed at the jewelry counters, circled back to the entrance, then turned back at the last moment as if he’d suddenly remembered something he needed. Finally he backtracked to men’s clothing, where he tried on a series of unforgivably loud shirts.

The tail was still there the third time he came out of the dressing room, looking implausibly interested in the new sock selection.

“You’re new, aren’t you?” Gavi said.

The poor kid looked like he’d gotten caught passing notes in class.

“What do you think of the shirt? That bad, huh? How’s Didi, by the way?”

“I, uh…think you’re mistaking me for someone else.”

Gavi stared into the blue eyes until they dropped away from his. “No. You’re mistaking me for someone else. An idiot. Now why don’t you take your two little friends and trot back to the Office and tell Didi that if he wants to know where I’m going, he can damn well ask me.”

The next time he came out of the dressing room the boy was gone. But he bought a white button-down shirt, just to be on the safe side, and changed into it, carefully folding away his old LIE⁴ T-shirt into the bag the salesgirl gave him. He left the store among a crowd of tourists and threw the bag in the nearest trash bin—regretfully, since he’d always liked that T-shirt. Then he skirted around an IDF safe house that he thought might still be active, checked one last time to make sure his babysitters really had gone home, and finally turned toward King David Street.

Cohen was alone.

“How’s your leg?” he asked, ushering Gavi into a hotel suite that would have had his mother screaming about runaway capitalism and the death of the kibbutznik mentality.

“Uh. Fine,” Gavi said. He was always caught off-balance by questions about it—wrong-footed he would have said if he hadn’t learned that other people didn’t find jokes about his leg quite as hysterically funny as he did.

People always talked about phantom pain, but Gavi had never felt it. What he felt those days was mostly …weirdness. The wrenching visual shock of looking down every now and then and realizing that he ended four inches below his right knee…and that he’d forgotten about it. Or, lately, bemused moments of looking down at his actual flesh-and-blood foot and feeling that the whole idea of it (a foot? toes? toenails?) was so much less natural and sensible than nice clean ceramsteel that the continuing existence of feet in general could only be evidence of some collective human neurosis.

“You don’t want to put it up? No? Well, can I at least get you something to drink?”

“Fine on all counts.” He peered at Cohen, who seemed even more opaquely unreadable than usual. “Are you all right? You’re doing that freezing thing again.”

“It’s nothing.”

A nothing named Catherine Li, if Gavi guessed right.

“So tell me about this golem of yours,” Cohen said. “I need a little comedy in my life.”

Gavi told him, walking him through the pieces of code he’d painfully stitched together over the past several years, explaining the places where he couldn’t make things work, or couldn’t decide which of several possible imperfect solutions to settle for. He presented it as a programming problem, one that he was submitting to higher authority. Which was perfectly valid, since Cohen’s abilities in that area would put any human to shame. He didn’t mention what the AI must have seen the minute he began looking at the source code: that the glue that would tie it all together and make the impossible, jerry-built kludge of databases and interfaces work was Cohen.

“You know how crazy this is, don’t you?” Cohen said at last. On the surface he was only pointing out a technical problem, but both of them saw the attached moral problem: How could an AI designer create a sentient being only to sentence it to a life dominated by memories that had driven so many humans to despair and suicide? The goal might be idealistically selfless, but for the newborn Emergent trying to come to terms with those memories the reality would be every bit as brutal as what EMET faced on the Green Line.

“Always so encouraging!” Gavi said, choosing to dodge the nontechnical question. “Don’t you know when your kid brings his little crayon scribbles home from school you’re supposed to hang them on the refrigerator, not give him an art history lesson?”

“I’ve never had kids. Strange, isn’t it? Well, I guess not that strange. The people who marry me aren’t exactly the settle down and have three point two children type.” He looked at the source code again. “Actually, Gavi, I don’t think it’s all that far from working. Which should be encouraging, considering the fact that it must be three centuries since an unaugmented human actually tried to write nontrivial source code. Where did you even find the SCHEME manuals?”

“The dump.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Well, that explains the smell, I guess.”

They talked around the problem for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s various false starts, and what he’d learned from them, and the current state of his work on what Cohen was now jokingly calling Gavi’s Golem.

“Can I ask you something?” Gavi said finally. “About your visit last week, not this.”

“Sure.”

“What’s ALEF after? What’s your endgame?”

“Mine personally, or ALEF’s?”

“Both. Either.”

“ALEF’s actually interested in the tech, insofar as they’re ever interested in anything in any organized fashion.”

“And you?”

The AI sighed. He’d never gotten sighing quite right, Gavi thought. Even his most sincere sighs rang false. Funny how a little thing like that could elude the best wetware. Or maybe the wet wasn’t where the problem was. “I’m after Absalom.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Cohen. I’m very sorry that Didi’s dragged you into this.”

“And what about you, Gavi? What’s your endgame? Why are you still here when there’s a whole universe up there that doesn’t know you’re a traitor to Israel? You could probably even get a real leg if you went Ring-side.”

“Not anymore. They would have had to ship me Ring-side within the first seventy-two hours in order for viral surgery to be any good. And anyway, I wouldn’t have been able to bring my new leg home, would I?”

“That’s my point, in case you missed it.”

“I spent six months Ring-side.” Gavi wrinkled his nose, remembering the curved, antiseptic, artificially bright expanses of plastic that Ring-siders called “outdoors.” “You can take the boy out of the country, but…”

“Well, there are always other planets if you don’t like life in the orbitals.”

“Other planets smell funny.”

It was a joke, at least partly. But Cohen gave no evidence of realizing that. In fact, he’d fallen oddly silent. And when Gavi looked up, the AI was staring intently at him.

“Are you still looking for Joseph?” Cohen asked.

“Of course I am. But it’s not the same now. When he was seven, eight, ten, I was desperate to find him. Now he’d be a young man, if he…well, I just have this nagging feeling that maybe I would be finding him for me now, not for him. And while that doesn’t make me want to find him any less, it does make it less urgent somehow.”

“Is Didi still helping you look?”

Gavi looked up to find Roland’s soft hazel eyes fixed on him. Talking to Cohen always brought home to him how much he, like all humans, confused the mind with the body. He knew as a technical and intellectual matter that only young and superbly healthy bodies could stand up to the stress of what any programmer would recognize as a biological version of overclocking. But he still couldn’t repress the shiver that ran through him when he looked into some shunt’s wide young eyes and saw the face of the swarm. And he was still eternally surprised that Cohen could take the same five feeble senses most humans got by on and damn near read your mind with them.

“If you want to know what Didi’s doing or not doing,” Gavi said, “you’d better ask Didi.”

Cohen appeared to accept this answer. “The thing is,” the AI said, “somehow I can’t help thinking that maybe your obsession with preserving the archives is just a little bit about Leila and Joseph.”

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, Cohen.”

“Oh for God’s sake! Are humans still quoting Freud at each other? Grow up, will you?”

But Gavi wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Have you ever read any of the testimonies, Cohen?”

“I’ve read enough to know I don’t want to read any more.”

“It’s a funny thing, those testimonies. You start to get numb after a while, from the sheer numbers, from the awfulness of it all. And then there’ll be one that gets under your skin and makes it all real again. There was one guy who went into Theresienstadt with his entire family: mother, father, two brothers. The whole family got sequential numbers. The boy’s father was number something something something five hundred and twenty. He was five hundred and twenty-one, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-two, the next brother was five hundred and twenty-three. But his mother was pregnant, so they pulled her out of the line and sent her straight to the gas chamber without even giving her a number.

The oldest son is the only one who survives. He goes to America. He makes a life for himself, a good life. But as he gets to be around the age his parents were when they died, he starts to have nightmares about his mother. He becomes obsessed by the fact that the Germans didn’t give her a number, that there’s no record of her death, no proof. It’s not that he thinks she’s alive, you understand. He saw her get sent into the nonworkers line, and he doesn’t have any illusions about what that meant. But he can’t process the idea that she just…vanished.

So he saves up his money. He goes back to Poland. He advertises in the newspapers, literally for years, offering a reward to anyone who can give him a photograph of his mother, anyone who even remembers his mother. No one ever answers. This woman had grown up, gone to university, taught grade school, been a daughter and a wife and a mother. But it was like she’d never existed. The Germans had simply wiped her from the face of history.

“That’s what’s happening to the testimonies, Cohen. When I took over, we’d already lost four hundred thousand files irretrievably. The rest are going. It’s only a matter of time. I want to save them. Not just for now. Forever.”

He looked up to find Cohen staring at him.

“I know. I know you think it’s a waste of my time. But, Cohen, I’m the first caretaker who’s had the expertise to actually fix it instead of sending endless unanswered spinmail to the Knesset budget office asking for funding that never quite arrives. If I don’t do it, who will?”

Cohen just kept looking at him, utterly still. “I know what you’re asking me to do,” he said finally. “And I know what I owe you.”

Gavi sliced his hand through the air abruptly. “You don’t owe me anything. If I hadn’t been afraid you’d say just that, I would have asked you for help far sooner. Hell, maybe I would even have answered your spinmails!”

“Oh.” Cohen grinned. “Now you tell me.”

“Cohen—”

“I know, I know.”

“—if you can’t say no, then how can I ever ask you for anything?”

“Harrumph. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you and Catherine and router/decomposer were all talking about me behind my back. By the way, Gavi, have you noticed that you practically went into orbit last week at the suggestion that I might lift a finger to help revive your career and now you’re cheerfully asking me to risk decoherence in order to help you with some quixotic scheme that no one else will take on for love or money?”

“What’s your point, little AI?”

“Nothing. Just thought I’d mention it. Sometimes you remind me the tiniest little bit of Leila.”

Gavi smiled—but his smile faded as he realized that he had heard her name on Cohen’s lips without feeling the old familiar pang of grief. “I wish I could remember her like you remember her,” he whispered, not trusting his voice well enough to speak out loud.

“Maybe not,” Cohen said. “There are folktales about ghosts who can’t rest until their loved ones stop mourning them. Maybe the dead are meant to fade, Gavi. Maybe the living are meant to forget.”

In Cohen’s dream, Gavi had his leg back. He stood on tiptoe because Cohen had become very tall in the dream, a mute giant of mud and clay.

Your job is done, Gavi said.

As he spoke the words Li was there, calm and clear-eyed, with Didi standing at her side.

Time to forget, they told him.

And then Li put her hands to his face, and gently, so gently, wiped the first letter of the name of truth from his forehead…

“I’ve made a life decision,” router/decomposer announced. “May I tell you about it?”

He was leaving, Cohen decided. What else could it be? And what could his departure mean but hassle and fuss, interviews and arguments, and the inevitable bad feelings that always led to further departures? Everything was falling apart, everyone was leaving him, it was all his fault, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

“Of course you can tell me,” he said with the internal equivalent of a forced smile.

“I’m going to change my name.”

“Great! I mean…er, to what?”

“Kuramoto.”

“As in Yoshiki?”

“Correct.”

Yoshiki Kuramoto. The boldly intuitive twentieth-century mathematician who had taken the first real stab at formalizing the emergence of spontaneous synchrony in certain types of complex and mathematically intractable systems, including router/decomposer’s Josephson Arrays and spin glass matrices. If router/decomposer was going to borrow someone else’s name, then Kuramoto’s was a logical, even an elegant choice.

“Why Kuramoto?”

“It’s an aspiration designation,” router/decomposer, now Kuramoto, announced with an ironic flourish that ill concealed his seriousness. “It indicates not what I am but what I aspire to become. And, uhhhh…I’m also quitting. Caltech just offered me a tenure track position in applied mathematics. Sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. What can I say? Things have been crazy.”

“Well,” Cohen said. “Caltech. That’s quite something. Have they ever hired an AI before?”

“I would seem to be the first.”

“Well, great. Wonderful.”

“It’s irrelevant, of course…but somehow I keep returning to the idea that I’d be…uh, happier, whatever that means, if you supported this decision.”

“I do. Wholeheartedly. Congratulations.”

“Do you mean that? Your affective fuzzy set for this exchange is very difficult to parse.”

“You’re telling me.”

“But you are happy?”

“I’m happy for you.”

Kuramoto chewed on that for a near eternity by AI standards.

“Being happy for someone else sounds like a less desirable state than actually being happy,” he said finally.

“Let’s just say it’s an acquired taste.”

And then—as soon as he was what passed for alone—he dropped his head into his hands and laughed until the tears sprang to Roland’s eyes.

“Where are you going, Catherine?”

“Out.”

“Out to see Ash?”

“You’re behaving badly, Cohen. Stop it. And for what it’s worth I’m not sleeping with her.” Li rubbed the back of one hand across her nose.

“Frankly, I’m too allergic to this hellhole of a planet to even think about sex.”

“Why don’t we sit down and talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you?”

“Since nothing’s bothering me, it would be a short conversation.”

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“Didn’t I just say I was?”

“I don’t mean right now. If you’d only talk to me…”

She softened, in one of those abrupt changes of mood that always threw Cohen off-balance. “You can’t help, Cohen. I know you mean well, but…you can’t.”

“So that’s it?” Cohen said. “No discussion? No questions? Just goodbye Cohen and have a nice life?”

He sat down on the bed and crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t help it. And why should he help it, anyway? It wasn’t as if Li was exactly being mature about things. To make matters worse, he could feel across the quiescent intraface that she knew exactly what he was feeling. The memory of their last breakup, with all its attendant humiliation and frustration. The fearful certainty that her departure would open the door to all the old, tired, nasty ghosts that had haunted him before her arrival. The panic at the prospect of losing her for good—a panic that was sharpened rather than blunted by the crippling suspicion that it wasn’t real love, but merely his feedback loops going into emotive overdrive at the prospect of losing an inscribed player. Router/decomposer would say that motives didn’t matter, only actions. But this motive did matter…

“I hope you’ll do me the courtesy of giving me some kind of reasonable notice before you quit,” he said. Was his voice actually trembling? Impossible. But apparently true.

“I wasn’t aware I was an employee,” Li said coldly. “But I’ll get you safely back Ring-side. Glad we got that clear.”

She left, closing the door behind her with a deliberate precision that made Cohen certain she wanted to slam it. He walked across to the window and stood there, one of Roland’s fine-fingered hands splayed on the glass, until he saw her walk out the front door of the hotel and turn down the street toward the Old City. He felt sick. He felt like he was dying. He could feel Roland’s heart pounding in his chest like a wounded bird. Who knew how many years Cohen’s conflicts were taking off the boy’s life? He hadn’t been so out of control since DARPA. And he’d been a hell of a lot smaller and weaker back then.

He slipped into the hotel’s network almost without thinking and shut down its power grid for just long enough to see the lights brown and dim overhead. That didn’t make him feel any better, though, so he bit into the citywide power grid and gave it an experimental squeeze. The results were gratifyingly spectacular. A black wave rippled across the skyline, lights dimming and winking out, the noises of the nighttime city giving way to stunned silence. A murmur rose from the adjacent rooms as his fellow guests chattered excitedly and stepped to their windows. And best of all, he caught a glimpse of Li on a storefront security camera a few blocks away, glancing fearfully over her shoulder into the deepening darkness.

For Christ’s sake, she snapped across the intraface. There are hospitals around here, Cohen. Get a grip on yourself.

In retrospect, he would decide it was the note of disdain in her voice that had really driven him over the edge. An icy wave of fury welled up from the hidden layers of his networks, and in an instant too fast for thought or doubt, he swept it all together, let it cascade down through his systems, gaining power and momentum like an avalanche roaring down a mountainside, and flung the whole lethal storm of data downstream.

He stopped short of actually letting it reach her. And even if he hadn’t, her safety override would have seen it coming and activated her cutouts. But none of that made it all right.

Catherine? he probed. But he was whistling into the wind. The other side of the link was down. And something told him it wouldn’t be coming back up again anytime soon.

He was pulled back to real time by a warm, tickling sensation that turned out to be blood streaming down Roland’s arm. He held up his hand and saw that the palm and wrist were crisscrossed by several vicious and alarmingly deep cuts. The floor beneath his feet glittered with broken glass, and the windowpane in front of him had been reduced to a lethal jigsaw puzzle.

The alarm had gone off when the window broke, of course, so he didn’t have to call anyone. Just stand there holding his wrist and watching poor Roland’s blood puddle on the floor until hotel security arrived to clean up his mess for him.

“I’m sorry,” Arkady said. “It’s difficult for me to tell humans apart. Perhaps if you showed me a photograph…?”

“If I showed you a photograph, then how would I know you weren’t just telling me what you thought I wanted to hear?”

Moshe had been all over Arkady since his return from the other side of the Line. Osnat was nowhere in sight. But behind him, her white suit glimmering in the shadows, her coldly beautiful face just visible at the edge of the lamplight, sat Ashwarya Sofaer.

Moshe stepped out of the room and returned with half a dozen pieces of paper. He fanned them out on the table like playing cards. Head shots. Old ID photos of men in uniform, none of them much above twenty.

“No,” Arkady said with relief. “None of these men are him. I’m sure of it.”

But then he saw it. The fourth photograph from the left. The face was thinner and firmer, but the calm brown gaze was the same one that had made him give up his soul and his secrets to Safik.

He looked up to find Moshe’s glasses glittering at him. The mouth beneath the lenses was intent and unsmiling and deadly serious.

And then back to his cell, and back to the waiting.

Osnat was nowhere. Was she gone? Had she been found out? Had she betrayed him to Moshe?

But no. She came in with his dinner. And before he could quite adjust to the idea of her actually being there, she was talking quick and low, telling him to shut up and listen when he tried to interrupt her because there wasn’t time for questions.

“At 1:52 A.M. the lights’ll go out. When they do, count to ten. Then go. Your door will be open. Turn left, count three doors down on your right hand, and take the third left turn—that door should be open too. It takes you into a corridor. Follow it straight ahead and take the fifth right. Go straight ahead through two fire doors, then up half a flight of stairs, and you’re outside. There’s no moon tonight. You’ll have decent cover. But move fast anyway. Your ride out of here will be waiting just past the wire.”

“Osnat—”

“Remember. Left three, left five, right and up the stairs. Don’t waste time and don’t even think about getting lost. If you get yourself caught, there’s not a thing on God’s green Earth I can do for you.”

Arkady woke to the feeling of rough hands on his body. For a split second he thrashed against the pressure. Then someone’s knee slammed into the small of his back, and when he regained his bearings he was on the floor, face pressed into the concrete, with one guard sitting on him and another’s boot planted solidly on the nape of his neck.

A few painful breathless minutes later he was sitting on the floor of a locked and empty cell staring at an ominously disheveled-looking Osnat.

“What happened?” he asked as soon as they were alone.

“Someone sold us out. Obviously.”

Arkady’s eyes flew to the room’s corners.

“There’s no surveillance here. If there was, I’d know about it. Though I could be wrong about that.” She laughed bitterly. “I’ve been wrong about a lot, it seems.”

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is I’ll handle it better after I get some sleep. So stop asking me questions, will you?” She rolled over on her side and pillowed her head on her bunched-up shirt. “And don’t look at me,” she added, giving him one last baleful stare over her shoulder. “I fucking hate it when people watch me while I’m sleeping.”

In the end they did leave in a helicopter…though Arkady seriously doubted it was the one Osnat had hoped they’d be catching. It touched down just before sunset, a bright corporate bird of paradise in the GolaniTech colors, piloted by two hard-faced ex-Sayeret something-or-others. If they recognized the former Captain Hoffman, they weren’t showing her any love.

“Buckle up,” Osnat told Arkady over the rotor noise. “Tight.”

Arkady never really understood what happened next. Were they shot at by someone on the ground? Was it a missile? An RPG? A simply mechanical failure? All he heard was a sharp pop somewhere out in the wind about ten minutes after takeoff.

The chopper jerked sideways, walloped by its own rotor wash, Arkady’s head slammed against the bulletproofed window with a sickening crack, and time took on a stretched surreal quality.

They hit the ground nose first and sideways, sliding through the final feet of their descent with deceptive, almost casual slowness. There was a first jolt, and then a second. And then came the wrenching, shrieking, screeching settling as the rotors began driving them into the ground and tearing the fragile craft apart.

The air stank of fuel and coolant. A lurid light shone in through the window by Arkady’s head. In his dazed confusion he took it for the familiar white flash of the orbital sunsets he’d known all his childhood. Then he saw sparks and realized it was the rotors scraping fire off bare rock.

He looked forward, trying to see why the pilot hadn’t shut off the turbines…and one look was enough to tell him that the pilot was dead. Beside him Osnat had somehow gotten her hands free and was struggling out of her harness. But too late, too late.

Then, suddenly, miraculously, the copilot roused himself and reached out a hand and switched the power off. The machine heaved a final horrible shudder and died. In the stunned silence that followed, Arkady heard a cricket singing in a nearby tree and the soft hiss of a leaking feedline.

“My legs are broken,” the copilot said in a blurred voice.

“Looks like it.” Osnat was bending over him, not to help but to remove his sidearm from its holster and thrust it into her belt where the deep groove of her spine ran down between her back muscles. She reached across the gearbox to the butchered remains of the pilot’s body and took his weapon too. Then she began patting the copilot down, transferring the contents of his pockets into hers.

The copilot said something to Osnat in Hebrew too quick for Arkady to follow. He must have hit his head as well as breaking his legs; he was delirious.

She came aft without answering the man and stooped over Arkady.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“Good. See that stand of junipers? No, not that one. Farther back, up at the crest of that hill. You’re going to walk to it. Don’t try to run, but don’t turn around or stop either. And don’t come back down here, no matter what you hear or see or think you hear or see.” She undid Arkady’s bonds. His hands were trembling, he noticed distantly. Hers weren’t. “I don’t need to be worrying about where you are on top of everything else I have to worry about.”

Then he spent almost forty-five minutes sitting under the junipers with no view at all of what was happening below, feeling guilty and terrified. Finally he heard the crack of gunfire, and moments later the whoosh and suck of a fierce explosion.

Osnat walked out of the inferno alone, and holding something in her hands.

“You didn’t get the copilot out?” he asked. Then he saw what was in her hands.

She emptied the chamber and slapped the ammunition clip out with practiced hands. Then she stowed the gun in its holster and strapped the holster onto her body. She had to adjust the holster’s fittings several times; they’d been sized to a man’s broad shoulders. At the sight of her hands on the buckles, Arkady remembered the copilot’s last muttered words and felt his gorge rise.

When she’d adjusted the holster to her satisfaction, Osnat looked at Arkady. There was an odd blank look in her usually sharp eyes; the mechanism was clicking along as smoothly and efficiently as always, but there was nobody at the wheel.

Osnat had pulled other things out of the wreck besides the sidearm and holster—though not, as she pointed out, enough things to raise the suspicion of survivors as long as the flames did their work. Still, they had water, food, and—what seemed far more important now that the cold fall night was pressing down upon the desert—a first-aid kit with its two silvery sleep sacks. She parceled out the supplies between the two of them, giving herself the lion’s share and merely rolling her eyes at his weak protests.

“Okay,” she said in a horribly normal voice. “Time to take a hike.”

“What made the helicopter crash?” Arkady asked several hours later.

They were facing each other across a small fire that Osnat had lit only after a forced march that took them into the early hours of the morning, and only because Arkady had begun shivering uncontrollably with shock, cold, and exhaustion.

“To me,” Osnat said in the hairsplitting tone of a connoisseur discussing a wine’s bouquet, “it sounded like someone set a timed charge on the tail rotor.”

“What kind of someone?”

“Well, I would have said Ash up to this point. You have to assume she was going to do something to break us out. But that was an awfully risky way to do it.” Her good eye measured him briefly. “I wasn’t going to say anything about it, and I don’t want to freak you out, but it’s pretty fucking unbelievable that we both walked out of that. Whoever set that charge was trying to get us out of GolaniTech’s hands, but they weren’t going to be crying on their pillow if we bought it in the process. I doubt Ash would have made that kind of call without it going up to the eighth floor. Maybe higher.”

“But that would mean—”

“—that Didi has decided to cut his losses and pull the plug on the operation while the tape’s still on the box.”

Arkady squinted across the fire, trying to gauge Osnat’s expression. The air rippled above the flames like running water, and the face beyond the scrim of the sparks was as unreadable as a text written in a dead language.

“What was it like growing up in the Syndicates?” Osnat asked suddenly.

“It was…happy. Until the war. A lot of things changed then.” Suddenly Arkady found himself struggling to articulate something he’d felt often but never put words to. “Before the war we had a very idealistic society. Not perfect. But…honest, somehow. When the UN attacked us, everything went out the window except pure survival.” He laughed softly. “And somehow ‘survival’ always seems to translate into the honest idealists being pushed aside and replaced by dishonest manipulators.”

“It’s the same for us,” Osnat said, making the same connection Safik had made. “Human nature. And apparently not just human.”

The bottom stick on the fire flared bright red, popped loudly, and crumpled into charcoal, setting the rest of the fire sliding and slithering and realigning itself above it. Beyond the firelight Arkady could hear the muted and furtive night sounds of the living desert.

“That woman who got pregnant, Arkady. Was your friend sure it was because of the fever?”

“As sure as you can be about work done in the field and under time pressure.”

“What do you think it would do to humans? What…just as an example…what do you think it would do to me?”

Arkady stared across the fire at her, but the eyes looking back at him weren’t Osnat’s eyes; they were the eyes of a rabbit racing ahead of the fox’s jaws. Arkady felt a guilty dread grip his chest and bear down on him. If Osnat could begin to covet the Novalis virus and the fertility that came with it, then what would the rest of her species do? How deep would the insanity run? And how brutal a price would Earth’s people pay if their surging population pushed them into outright war with the Orbital Ring? For the first time, Arkady really understood the myriad effects that the virus would send rippling across Earth—as dramatic and irreversible as the effects of triggering a cascade reaction in a newly terraformed biosphere. How far would the ripples spread? Would they bring down the fragile spider’s web that linked Earth to the dependent populations of her far-flung colonies?

How many deaths were going to be on his hands before it was over?

“The human immune system is so different from ours,” he told her, skirting the question. “It might do nothing. Or it might kill you.”

“That’s assuming I can catch it from you.” A log slithered to the ground in a shower of sparks. Arkady heard the blood thrumming in his ears, felt the curve of the planet falling away into darkness beneath him. “Can I?”

“You might already have caught it.”

He spoke the words without having consciously decided to say them. Even as he watched comprehension spread across her face, he was far from certain that he’d done the right thing.

“Are you sure of this?” Osnat asked. The hunger was gone from her voice. She had gone back to being the hard-bitten and practical soldier. “What’s your evidence?”

“No evidence. It just…everything fell into place so neatly as soon as I asked myself whether Korchow had sent me to sell the virus or to spread it.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

He hesitated. “No.”

She doubted. He could see that she doubted. But she looked aside and let it pass.

“This changes things,” she said after a minute. “Didi needs to know about it.”

“But how do we get to him?”

“Not through Ash. Anything that goes through Ash is going to have to cross too many desks before it hits Didi’s. We need to go through someone who has a direct line to Didi and doesn’t have to go through the normal channels.”

“Gavi?”

“No!”

He thought wistfully of Safik. He dismissed the thought, knowing without having to ask what Osnat’s reaction would be to the idea of putting their trust in PalSec. Then he remembered what Safik had said about Cohen going out of his way to protect his friends.

“What about Cohen?” he asked. “Does he have a direct line to Didi?”

“As direct as anyone’s.”

“Then let’s go to Cohen. Directly. Not through Li. Let’s ask the machine to help us.”

It turned out, however, that it wasn’t so easy to get the machine.

“He’s not here,” Li said when they finally succeeded in putting a call through. She said it in a tone that implied it was all the information they were entitled to.

“Well, when will he be back?”

“How should I know? Look, who is this? Why do you have the screen blanked?”

Osnat took a steadying breath, glanced at Arkady—more for support than permission—and switched on the visual feed.

“Oh,” Li said, blinking. “Where are you? I’ll come get you.”

“I don’t think—”

“I don’t care what you think.” She glanced sideways, her eyes focused on the middle distance. “Right. Gotcha. There’s a bar two doors down from you. The Maracaibo. It has a back room. I just reserved it for a private party at seven. Meet me there at seven-twenty.”

“What if we don’t?”

“Then you can go back to whoever’s chasing you and throw yourselves on their mercy. You think I care? It’s not my fucking planet.”

“I want to speak to Cohen.”

“You are speaking to him.”

And that was it. She was gone, signing off without so much as a good-bye or a by-your-leave.

“How did she know where we were?” Arkady breathed when the screen had fizzled through static into blackness.

“I don’t know.” Osnat bit her lip. “I’m out of my league, Arkady.”

“Should we meet her?”

“I don’t see what choice we have. But we can still take precautions. We don’t need to walk in with our eyes closed and a kick-me sign stuck to our backs.”

Arkady expected Osnat to investigate the bar when Li hung up, but instead she led him down the block to a quiet residential building. They reached the door just as a middle-aged man was leaving, and Osnat slipped in on a smile and an apology. Arkady clung to her heels all the way up the stairs and through a fire door onto a moonlit roof that had a clear view of the bar’s entrance. There he waited for almost forty minutes while Osnat prowled along the neighboring rooftops and poked and prodded at doors and windows.

“Jerusalem’s amazing this way,” she told Arkady. “You can travel halfway across the city on the rooftops. Get practically anywhere. I’m betting Li won’t know about that. Or at least that it won’t be the first thing she thinks about.”

When she’d completed her survey of the local roofways, she led Arkady back down onto the street and into the Maracaibo. She strode over to the bar, Arkady in tow, and stood on her toes to tap the bartender on the shoulder.

The man turned around, quick and wary. “What do you want?” he asked when he’d satisfied himself that she didn’t mean trouble.

“I want you to look at me.”

“I’m looking. I’m not too impressed.”

“No skin off my nose. Now look at my friend.”

“I looked at him when you walked in the door, lady. He’s bad business. And you’re bad business as long as you’re with him.”

“Think you could describe us if someone asked?”

“Depends who asks.”

“That’s just what I was hoping. This place have a back door?”

“Past the toilets. Which are for paying customers only even when they’re not broken.”

“What about a back room?”

“It’s reserved.”

“I know it. And I’m willing to pay double whatever they paid if you’ll promise to tell the guys who are about to come in here looking for us that we’re already back there.”

“And will you be?”

“How much would I have to pay for you not to care?”

Ten minutes and seventeen hundred shekels later they were across the street, on their rooftop.

Arkady started to ask Osnat how long she planned to wait, but she put a hand on his shoulder and shook her head.

He looked down, following her gaze, and saw two men emerge from the shadows.

He could feel his palms sweating in the dank air. His left ankle was twisted awkwardly beneath him, but he was afraid to move, afraid of the telltale rasp of fabric or the scrape of a shoe sole against concrete. A thick fog hung over the city, blowing on a stiff westerly wind so that it split around building fronts and streamed in coarse white threads down the narrow streets. The two men stood just under them, looking across the wet pavement at the bar’s brightly lit windows. They seemed to be talking, but they were too far below the rooftop for even Osnat to make sense of the scattered words of Hebrew that wafted up to their hiding place.

One of the men went into the Maracaibo, was gone for several minutes, then strolled out again. As he returned to his companion a third man joined them.

“Shalom.” His voice carried alarmingly through the dank air. “They’re there?”

“In the back room.”

Arkady felt Osnat’s body relax beside him. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “I know those guys. They’re straight from Didi. We’re safe, kiddo.”

She stood up and started to pull Arkady up after her.

Arkady never felt the blast. He saw its phosphorus-blue flash. He heard a sound like the tearing of a thousand sheets of paper. For a long frozen moment the street lay silent below them, with the few passersby either knocked off their feet or crouching in terror. Then sound returned to the world, and the building began to disgorge a bloody, screaming, weeping stream of people onto the street that suddenly seemed too narrow to begin to contain all of them.

Osnat pulled him back from the roof’s edge, and they were off, running down the moonlit tumble of rooftops toward the Green Line and the only refuge left to them.