Spin Control

NOVALIS The Spirit of the Hive

ARkady woke to the smell of curry.

No solid food for twelve hours before the coffin: that was the rule for all cold shipping on the Syndicate’s creaking fleet of Bussard-drive-powered interstellar ships. It was rumored that this precaution had been rendered obsolete by the newest generation of UN-built jumpships. But that kind of wishful rumor, fueled by privation, envy, and cryophobia, was always winging its way through the vacuum between the various Syndicate orbital stations. And given the fact that Arkady felt as if he’d fasted through every day of the long months of slow drift from Gilead to Novalis, the extra twelve hours hardly seemed significant.

He sat up, rubbing at skin raw with freezer burn and fighting his way out of the bruised haze of jump hangover. There was a thrumming, flickering whisper in the air, below and beyond the normal shipboard noises, as if quick fingers were tap tap tapping along the ship’s hull out there in the starless dark.

A dust field? Please let it only be a dust field.

They were running ahead of the charts now, flying half-blind on spectrometry that was years out of date before it ever reached them, with only the skill of their superbly spliced and trained pilots standing between them and hull breach. In its wake the ship shed a maelstrom of astronomical and navigational data that would guide later ships on the same journey. But up ahead there was only the razor-thin spin-stream from the unmanned probes. And though space was empty, it wasn’t so empty that you could jump off the edge of the map and be sure you weren’t going to hit something.

Arkady’s clothes lay in the hold-all beside his coffin, neatly folded in an airtight insectproof flatpack: orbsilk shirt and trousers that hung loose on his dehydrated body and still smelled faintly of the sweet clean air of KnowlesSyndicate; soft stationside shoes whose soles and uppers blended into each other with a seamlessness that went a long way toward explaining why hand-thrown orbsilk had become the Syndicate’s number one cash crop since the Trade Compact with the UN worlds; the little rucksack, neither indecently large nor puritanically small, that contained all the moveable property he held separately from RostovSyndicate’s communal stores.

Someone had left a sweater beside the rucksack: a thick rollneck with the soft hand and deep rippling color that only the most carefully spliced and cosseted worms could produce. It was a “think of me” if Arkady had ever seen one: the kind of beautiful luxury object that might be passed to a crèchemate setting off for a distant assignment with the ritual words: “think of me when you use it.” And it was just the thing for a body still in the shivering grip of cold sleep.

He stood up and felt the sharp tug of the ship’s .4 gs on muscles raised in microgravity. The retrofitted lab and ark modules of the ship would be in the old zero-g cargo bays—places that the human designers had never meant to be shirtsleeve working environments but that were the closest thing to home the retrofitted UN ship could provide for its new passengers. In contrast, the cryobay, bridge, and crew quarters had all been designed to provide humans with the rotational gravity their skeletons and immune systems required. The Syndicate crew, who needed fake gravity not at all, would just have to live with the sore muscles and broken equipment.

Arkady had to squeeze past the tacticals’ still-active coffins to reach the corridor. He slid past with a shudder, trying not to look too closely at what slumbered beneath the backlit viruflex. He hadn’t seen a tactical since the UN invasion…and he hoped never to see another.

The corridor hugged the outer hull of the ship, and sure enough the rustling whisper was louder there. He peered through the nearest viewport. White hull plunging away into blackness. And out on the edge of darkness something so strange that it took him several stunned moments to identify it.

They were flying through a forest.

Leaves pattered on the hull like raindrops. Twigs and branches rasped down its length like fingernails scrabbling for purchase. A mulberry leaf tumbled past, and the shipboard running lights flashed on the bright tracery of veins that had exploded into ice crystals when they hit hard vac. The leaf was followed by an orbsilk cocoon, its priceless golden worm dead inside it. Then a woman’s hairbrush, turning lazily end over end, its momentum so close to the ship’s own that it seemed to slide sternward at little more than strolling speed.

This was the ship they’d been sent to overtake, hurtling along their same trajectory, its hull open to the void, its silk gardens shredded by decompression, its little ark of living treasures cast upon the deep. Arkady tore his eyes away from the viewport. He had known, they had all known, that another ship had tried to reach Novalis before them and failed. But it was one thing to know it. It was another thing to hear the lost lives picking at the hull like hungry ghosts.

There are so very few of us, he whispered to the gods of the void, if there were any. I can stand dying. But not for nothing. Let Novalis be the home we need so badly. Who knows how many more chances we’ll have?

Arkady had spent only four hours on the ship before going into cryo, so the smell of the curry led him more surely than his vague memories of the hab module’s configuration. The ship seemed smaller and harder-used than he remembered it. A trick of perception; in point of fact, it had barely been used at all during the two years they’d spent in cold sleep. And it was just the right size for the ten members of the survey team, most of whom were already in the dayroom, nursing their cryo hangovers and watching Novalis slowly stealing real estate from the black void on the wall monitor.

They’d put the dayroom in one of the old UN-designed zero-g lab modules on the theory that if you were going to relax, you might as well be comfortable. But it still had the oddly cramped look that so many UN-built ships did; as if the humans who designed them had never quite grasped that there were no ceilings in free fall. And the survey team were all sitting at the table on the “floor” side of the room rather than lounging comfortably around its various corners the way they would naturally have done in a Syndicate-designed room.

Arkady scanned the faces around the table, but he didn’t see the one familiar face he most wanted to see. His pairmate had arrived, hadn’t he? Surely they wouldn’t have launched without the mission’s head geneticist?

“Hair of the dog?” someone asked, proffering a squeezeball of beer.

The entire ten-person survey team had agreed, in a deal brokered by the two Banerjees, to use half their personal weight allowances for brewing supplies. Arkady had taken the agreement as a good omen for the people who would be his only companions for the duration of the mission.

He took a sip and blinked in surprise. “Hey, that’s actually good!”

One of the Banerjee A’s grinned. “Pride of the Banerjees,” he said in the noble but slightly pompous tones that crèchelines learned young to associate with the Heroes of the Breakaway.

“Plates, food, forks,” one of the Ahmeds said, pointing.

Arkady crossed the room, aware of half a dozen pairs of eyes weighing and measuring him. He bent over the simmering pot. “Fantastic,” he said in his best fitting-in voice. “Three cheers for AzizSyndicate.”

“Actually, we didn’t cook it,” the other Ahmed admitted. “You can thank your sib for the feast.”

“That would make him the first Arkady I’ve ever met that could cook worth a damn.” Arkady looked at the curry with renewed suspicion, tasted it, and had to admit it was good. “And where is this marvel of culinary talent?”

He turned around just in time to see the two Ahmeds exchange a cryptic glance.

“Working?” one of them hazarded. And already there was that little something in his voice that should have been a warning.

Someone ruffled Arkady’s hair, and he turned around to the welcome sight of another Rostov face. “Aurelia, right?”

“Right.”

“And where were you when I woke up?”

“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m the rock doctor, not the people doctor.”

“I see.” Arkady took a closer look at her; as the team’s single geophysicist she might well be working closely with him, depending on what they found on Novalis. “I’ll make sure to bring you any sick rocks I stumble over.”

“I’m the people doctor,” said the other Aurelia from down at the far end of the table. “You met me an hour ago. You just don’t remember it. I’ve been sitting up with you since they popped your top, but I thought I’d let you do your last little bit of waking up in private.”

Functioning within Syndicate society required a good dose of what Keats had once famously called negative capability: the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand you had to learn to recognize individual constructs for the purposes of work and social interaction; the human brain, however profoundly reengineered, couldn’t be entirely freed from the individual consciousness that had powered the first four hundred millennia of its evolution. On the other hand, the structures and customs of Syndicate society were all geared toward eliminating distinctions between individuals in the same geneline. A Syndicate was a family, with the same consanguinity between its various genelines that welded together human families. But your sibs, the fellow members of your own geneline, were more than family. They were you. And the individual body you inhabited—the lone physical organism inside its prison of skin and skull—was no more a whole person than an ant was a whole swarm. Geneline names reflected this. Each individual construct had a dossier, compiled over the course of his or her life by docents, professors, crèchemates, steering committee representatives; but the dossier filing number was as unreal as paperwork. On a day-to-day basis, from the moment he or she was detanked, every one of the thousands of Arkadys was simply Arkady, every Bella, Bella; every Ahmed, Ahmed; every Aurelia, Aurelia.

If you wanted to single out one of your sibs in normal conversation, you were reduced to ad hoc nicknames or to complicated formulations like “the year seven who led the mission to Karal-20,” or “the year five who spent last year planetside working on the arctic core survey,” or “the one who told that awful joke about the dog,” or “the one who wrote the paper on cryogenesis in amphibians.”

Or, in the grammatical construction that had fueled more grief, joy, strife, and passion than any other in all of Syndicate history: “the one I love.”

Arkady instinctively thought of his new crewmates as geneline members first and individuals second. First—the phrase pari inter pares came somewhat sarcastically to mind—came the two AzizSyndicate Ahmeds. Their Syndicate name reflected its founder’s North Indian heritage, as did their tall soldierly frames and square-jawed faces. Arkady had met both Ahmeds briefly before launch, and had privately dubbed them “Laid-back Ahmed” and “By-the-Book Ahmed.” Laid-back Ahmed was a full centimeter taller than Aziz-8135 gene-norm, and had adopted a habitual slouch to disguise the deviation. Something about the combination of the slouch and his levelheaded self-deprecating manner promised to Arkady that he might be that rare treasure: a pilot who was tough enough to command a ship in the Deep, but modest enough to back off after planetfall and let the scientists do their jobs. By-the-Book Ahmed, on the other hand, was a cold fish and a bit of a martinet…the last kind of personality Arkady would have assigned to command a crew full of science track Rostovs and Banerjees.

But perhaps he was just stereotyping. One of the Ahmeds’ older cogenetics was a wildly popular spin star. His sex- and violence-laden adventures were one of the great guilty pleasures in a society that had been increasingly cold and austere and rationed since the UN invasion. No one could look at any Ahmed’s muscular frame and commanding features without thinking of their famous sib, and the manly virtues that AzizSyndicate embodied in the Syndicate collective consciousness. Or that it was supposed to embody, anyway. Arkady certainly hoped that this particular pair of A-8s would bring the strengths of their phenotype to the mission at hand, rather than its failings. Because if either of them acted with the kind of impetuous arrogance their spin star sib displayed on-screen, then the whole survey team was headed for heavy weather.

After the two Ahmeds came the two Bellas, also both present. And how typical of MotaiSyndicate to send two B series constructs. Had that really been a purely technical decision—the need to put together a work-pair with the right mix of skills for the mission—or was it a subtle transhuman dig at the older Syndicates’ resistance to caste-based series design?

Other than the fact that they were B’s, the most remarkable thing about the two Bellas was their eerily perfect resemblance to each other. Normal constructs differed from their sibs almost as much as natural twins did. They might look identical to human eyes, but they could always tell each other apart by little variations in features, height, coloring—even cowlicks, as Arkady had reason to know. But the MotaiSyndicate B’s weren’t twins; they were living, breathing mirrors. And the massive in vitro and postpartum culling that MotaiSyndicate used to achieve such perfection was almost as controversial among the older Syndicates as their caste-based genelines.

It was all ideologically impeccable, of course: a ruthlessly elegant expression of the highest and purest principles of sociobiology. But it still made Arkady’s stomach curl. What would it do to a person to know that his place in life had been preordained while he was still under the splicing scope in a hierarchy as inflexible as the most rigid human class system? What would it mean to have not one or two repressed memories of culled playmates, but dozens? And what would it mean to know that at every cull you were more likely than not to fail the cut yourself?

He saw no answer in the two Bellas’ faces—only a pale and polished beauty that didn’t even make the usual ritual nod to humanity. His first sight of those violet eyes, rimmed round with the delicate filigree of the MotaiSyndicate logo, was enough to make Arkady decide that transhumanism, for all its much-vaunted political purity, was an evolutionary step toward a future he didn’t want to live in.

The Aurelias, on the other hand, were balm to Arkady’s homesick soul. They were Rostovs, like Arkady and his pairmate. Lean and tall, with long-fingered surgeon’s hands, and long noses, and long narrow faces that would have been forbiddingly severe if not for their humorous, sensible, intelligent expressions. They loafed elegantly at the far end of the table like a matched set of wolfhounds, leaning against each other with a casualness that made Arkady suspect they were already old friends or lovers. One look at Aurelia the surgeon was enough to tell Arkady that she must have spent her schooldays sitting in the front row, hand permanently raised, eager to prove she knew the answer to everything. One look at her sib left him equally sure that she’d spent her time in the back row passing notes and throwing spitballs and looking forward to soccer practice. The geologist was particularly recognizable at the moment because she had a little more of a tan than her cogenetic. But even when the tan faded it would be easy enough to tell those two strong personalities apart.

They were from RostovSyndicate’s A-12 series, and as the numbering suggested they had a high rate of genetic overlap with Arkady’s own A-11 line. A higher rate than was normal, in fact; it was quite unusual for newly spliced genelines to be cleared for large-scale production two years running, and it had happened under the auspices of a now-legendary design team. Looking down the table at them, Arkady felt a swell of possessive pride at the phenomenal quality of his fellow Rostovs’ work—a pride that was enhanced, rather than reduced, by the fact that he would never know their names or be able in any way to distinguish them from their thousands of cogenetics.

The final workpair was represented by only one of its members—the other one presumably being on bridge duty at the moment. Both the Banerjees on the Novalis mission were astrophysicists with a secondary specialization in engineering that allowed them to cover for the Aziz pilots during the in-flight portions of the mission. Ranjipur…and Shrinivas, wasn’t it? Arkady found it very difficult to remember individual names. He couldn’t begin to imagine how humans managed the trick. But Banerjee was one of the original pre-Breakaway Syndicates, and it took pride in not using the post-Breakaway naming conventions. It also took pride, like RostovSyndicate, in resisting the newer Syndicates’ move toward caste-based genelines. So all the Banerjees, no matter what bizarre letters their names might start with, were A’s.

“All right,” said Laid-back Ahmed when the introductions had wound down and Arkady had begun to make some inroads into his curry. “On to important things. Like who’s going to make breakfast tomorrow?”

“I actually like cooking?” one of the Bellas said in a voice so hesitant it sounded like a question.

Arkady had already given up on telling the Bellas apart. Now he realized that the one speaking was standing holding a dish towel in her hands and apparently getting ready to do everyone’s dishes. The Motai Bs couldn’t be thinking that the others expected them to clean up after them, could they? That wasn’t just series specialization. It was rank humanism !

“On the other hand,” Bella went on, “Arkasha does seem to have started off very well…”

“Arkasha?” Laid-back Ahmed was grinning incredulously at her. “The rest of us haven’t even exchanged a full sentence with him and you’re already on a nickname basis?”

“He’s nice…”

“You think everyone’s nice,” her sib said, making a sour face. Suddenly Arkady realized that it wasn’t going to be at all hard to tell the two Bellas apart.

“Well, he is nice.” Shy Bella—as Arkady was already privately calling her—twisted the dishrag between her pale hands and appealed to Arkady for support. “Isn’t he?”

“Uh…I’ve never met him, actually.”

Six pairs of amazed eyes turned to stare at Arkady.

“Shit,” Laid-back Ahmed said. “On a three-year mission? That takes balls.”

“Well, we were supposed to meet first. But his last assignment ran over. And then there was something about a delayed surface-to-station flight. And then…well…”

“Sounds like the beginning of a bad romance novel,” scoffed Aurelia the surgeon.

“Don’t listen to her!” her sib cried. “There is no such thing as a bad romance novel. Besides, he’s cute, Arkady. A little skinny but really, really cute.” She winked conspiratorially. “Not that I’d know what boys think is cute, of course.”

“Oh, leave him alone, you two, he’s turning red as a beet!” Laid-back Ahmed gave Arkady a reassuring clap on the shoulder. It felt like being hit by a cargo hauler. “They’re just being silly women, Arkady. Arkasha’s a hard worker and a good pre-citizen in every way that counts. It’ll be fine. I’m sure it will.”

“You’re sure what will be fine?” said a voice Arkady knew like his own skin.

Arkasha—though it would be weeks before Arkady actually began to call him that—had paused in the doorway to take stock of the room before entering, just as Arkady himself had. But where Arkady had hovered hesitantly on the threshold, smiling and looking for answering smiles, his sib lounged against the door frame eyeing his crewmates with the cool detachment of a designer evaluating preculls for conformity to geneline norms.

“Uh, nothing,” Ahmed covered. “The curry’s fantastic, by the way. We were just talking about whether you might be willing to share cooking duty with Bella here.”

“I might. The sweater looks good on you, Arkady.”

Syndicate children learned very early not to say the words my or mine in polite company. Our was socially acceptable, as long as it was never applied to any group smaller than the whole geneline. But the singular possessive was beyond the pale. Still, there was a way of saying the that meant my. And that was the way Arkasha had just said it.

Arkady felt a hot flush creeping up his face. “Oh. Um. It’s very warm. Thank you.”

“Too warm for me.” Arkasha gave him a measuring look, squinting and tilting his head to one side. “And you fill it out better across the shoulders. You should keep it.”

Before Arkady could think to thank him, Arkasha slung his wiry frame onto the bench next to Laid-back Ahmed and started haggling over what scut work he and Bella could get out of in exchange for cooking. He adopted a sly, self-mocking tone that soon had Bella laughing and blushing and Ahmed threatening to take up cooking himself if it was that advantageous.

Meanwhile Arkady took advantage of the momentary distraction to covertly ogle his new pairmate.

He saw a slighter, slenderer, more refined version of himself. Arguably a little too refined; but beyond that quibble he was as perfectly norm-conforming as any A-11 Arkady had ever met. And of course he had the sleek, dark, classic Rostov hair instead of the chaotic whirl of cowlicks that greeted Arkady in the mirror every cycledawn. Aurelia had been right. Arkasha was very handsome. But he was also…unsettling.

Arkasha looked up and caught Arkady eyeing him. Then he glanced at Arkady’s heaping plate and raised an eyebrow. “The condemned man ate hearty.”

“I’ll probably throw it all up in half an hour,” Arkady answered. “But the body wants what the body wants.”

“It certainly does,” Arkasha acquiesced. “And speaking of the body, for what sins were you sent here?”

Arkady choked. “Uh…I do ants.”

“Well, that’s certainly grave. But I suppose we can forgive you.”

Shy Bella giggled again.

“What about you?” Arkasha asked her. “What obese, wrinkled, and importunate steering committee crone did you refuse to sleep with in order to achieve the dubious honor of this assignment?”

“I didn’t. None of them asked. Just grilled me on ideology so they wouldn’t have to admit they knew less about terraforming than a lowly B. Come to think of it I’ve never slept with an A.” She cocked her head prettily—a move that had a visible effect on her sib. “Should I be insulted, do you think?”

“Well,” Arkasha announced magnanimously, “I’m always available if you’d like to broaden your repertoire.”

And everyone laughed the nervous, keyed-up, self-conscious laughter that always accompanied the mention of the ultimate taboo.

“You should be more careful what you say,” Arkady told Arkasha when they were finally alone together in the relative privacy of their cabin.

That hadn’t come out the way he meant it to, he realized. He’d meant it to sound…well, how had he meant it to sound? What the hell had he been thinking, actually?

He cleared his throat nervously. “Top or bottom bunk?”

“I’d prefer the top if that’s all right with you.”

“Okay.”

But neither of them moved toward the bunks. Instead, Arkasha seemed to be taking cautious stock of his new pairmate; and Arkady took the opportunity to get another look at the man who was going to be the most important person in his life, for good or bad, for the next two years.

He saw him with a crèchemate’s well-trained eye. He passed over the things a stranger would have noticed first: the graceful proportion of hip and shoulder; the refined intellectual’s face that spoke so clearly of their geneline’s unique character and talents; the clean planes of jaw and cheekbone and temple; the slight Cupid’s bow of the upper lip that the Rostov designers had settled on as the perfect compromise between beauty and manliness.

Instead, he saw the little details that crèchemates learned early to take heed of. That his new pairmate carried a good five kilos less than their crècheyear average, a sure sign of a nervous disposition. That he had a habit of balancing on his toes as if he were perpetually expecting the unexpected, and had learned from experience that the unexpected was usually unpleasant. That his narrow face radiated intelligence and character, but also a wounded reserve that did not bode well for Arkady’s personal life over the course of the next two years.

The sardonic façade was just that, Arkady realized. A defensive weapon honed to a sharp edge in order to keep others off-balance and at a distance. Except that a Syndicate construct had no more reason to keep his crèchemates at a distance than a human child had to keep his own brothers and sisters at a distance.

Arkady’s first impression of the man had been right; he was about as safe and predictable as an unexploded bomb.

Arkasha grinned suddenly. “That’s some set of cowlicks you’ve got there. Classic fuzzy 18 defect. Some poor slob at the splicing scope must have caught an earful of misery over that screwup.”

“Gee, no one’s ever said that to me before.”

“Scarred for life, were you?” The grin broadened. “Children can be such monsters.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Arkady lied.

“Then your crèche must have been a kinder, gentler place than mine was.”

Arkady cleared his throat. “You’re from Crèche Seven?” he asked, trying to paper over the silence with small talk.

“That’s right.”

“I had a pairmate from Seven, uh, let’s see…the assignment before last? A glaciologist. Big guy, seventy kilos easy, played goalie for the Crèche Seven team. Ring any bells?”

“Not that I can hear.”

“Most of the Arkadys from Seven are above height norm,” Arkady babbled on. “At least in our year.”

The grin faded to a sardonic smirk. “They put in a special order for big and dumb our year.”

“Good footballers too.” He assessed the lean but well-muscled frame of the man in front of him. “You play?”

“Alas, I’m not temperamentally suited to team sports.”

“Me neither, actually. Not that I don’t like the company. But I suppose when it really comes down to it, I’d rather be poking around under dead logs looking for ants.”

This elicited a broader smile from Arkasha—but no answering confession.

“I read your articles on the Aenictus gracilis,” Arkasha said. He fixed Arkady with an intense stare, as if he were trying to send or decipher some vital secret message. “It’s extremely fine work. As good as anything I’ve seen in years. I particularly liked your paper on the adaptive value of dissent in collective decisionmaking. It was…thought-provoking.”

Arkady’s academic advisory committee had thought that paper was thought-provoking too. And a few other less complimentary things that had earned Arkady a friendly but still highly unnerving visit from a renormalization counselor. He hadn’t exactly abandoned his dissent research after that…but he’d certainly been more circumspect in the words he used to write about it. Ants had such overwhelming symbolic value in Syndicate society that people were apt to make overheated comparisons. Metaphor creep could twist even the most solid science into politics. Sometimes Arkady envied the pre-Evacuation human entomologists who had done the pioneering work on social insect societies. They’d been able to draw much bolder conclusions than he could…mainly because the moralists of their day and age had been too busy pestering the beleaguered primate researchers.

Now Arkasha was saying something about multivalent superstructure, whatever that was. “You were careful not to cite it, of course, but surely the reference to Kennedy on Althusser is implicit?”

“They’re just ants,” Arkady said, falling back on the same formula that had always gotten him out of trouble before.

“You don’t write about them as if you thought they were just ants.”

They stared at each other. Arkasha seemed to be searching for something in Arkady’s face and not finding it. Finally he sighed and settled back on his heels a little. When he turned away there was a sad little slump to his shoulders. “Oh well,” he murmured. “The work’s still good. That’s the main thing. And I certainly won’t give you anything to complain about in that department.”

“Listen,” Arkady stammered. “I didn’t mean to offend you earlier. What I said about Bella, about watching what you say…it came out all wrong. I just meant that…well, sometimes it’s better to be a little careful at the beginning of an assignment when you don’t know everyone yet. Some people can’t tell the difference between a joke and reality.”

Arkasha squared his shoulders and set his sardonic mask firmly back in place. “What makes you think you offended me?” he asked. “And for that matter what makes you think it was a joke?”

That was when Arkady really began to panic.

“Uh…top bunk you said? I’ll just leave this stuff here on the bottom then, and…er…uh…I really need to get down to the lab now and make sure everything got on board in one piece and—”

“Relax,” Arkasha said, with that same mocking little smile lingering on his lips. “My perversions aren’t nearly that simple.”

Later Arkady would hear the seed of Arkasha’s sickness in those words. He would parse them, shuffle them, turn them over like a fortune-teller’s cards, looking for the first misstep on the long slide toward exile.

But in that moment he saw only the face that was his and not his; the eyes that were his and not his; and the soul behind the eyes, as complex and intractable and miraculous as a living planet.