Spin Control

SEX, WATER, GOD

They held the first bidding session on the dangerous but neutral ground of the International Zone.

Arkady and Osnat crossed through the Damascus Gate checkpoint at just past ten in the morning, elbow to armpit with a sweating crowd of religious pilgrims, under the hard watchful eyes of the Legionnaires. By the time they cleared the checkpoint and plunged into the Old City, Arkady had already realized that this was a different city from the one they’d walked through before reaching the great gate. Where the lines at the checkpoint had been dominated by pilgrims and commuters, the actual streets of the Old City were dominated—at least to Arkady’s Syndicate-bred eyes—by beggars. It took him a while to understand that they actually were beggars. They didn’t ask for money. They just sat slumped along the stone walls lining the narrow streets, looking like they’d been there so long they’d given up even hoping for money. Arkady’s instinctive response was impatience. Why didn’t they just go to collective supply, take out what they needed, and get on with life? But of course there was no collective supply here. And when he looked more closely at the beggars he saw that many of them were crippled or deformed or obviously crazy.

“It’s a euth ward,” he said wonderingly.

“They try to chase them away,” Osnat said with a fatalistic shrug, “but there are only so many cops around.”

“But there must be some kind of renormaliza—er, rehabilitation program.”

She gave him an incredulous look out of the corners of her eyes. “If someone in the Syndicates has figured out how to rehabilitate people from being poor, they ought to apply for the freaking Nobel Peace Prize.”

Arkady stared at the crumpled forms, trying to take the measure of the people inside the rags, but none of them would meet his eyes. And they weren’t the only ones.

There was a special quality to the gaze in the International Zone, a quality of nonlooking, nonseeing. The Legionnaires wore their mirrored sunglasses like body armor and did their level best to pretend not to speak any language but French when anyone had the effrontery to ask them questions. Hasidim hurried along under their dreary hats, assiduously shielding their eyes from any contact with the godless present. NorAmArc Christians lumbered through the stations of the cross, eyes glued to their spincorders, doing their best to turn a real living city into a theme park. Muslims glared into the near distance as if they thought some Sufist act of will could make the hordes of unbelievers vanish from their holy sites. Even the crazy people—and there seemed to be a great many of them—shouted through you instead of at you. The only people who actually looked at anyone were the Interfaithers…and the way they looked at you made you realize that being ignored was far from the worst thing that could happen to you.

“Why are there so many Interfaithers?” Arkady asked.

“Open your eyes. Why is right in front of your nose.”

He looked. He saw bored Legionnaires, sullen locals, dusty walls crumbling in the ozone haze of a warm fall afternoon, six thousand years of history surrounded by sandbags and reinforced concrete. “I don’t see it.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not pointing your nose the right way.”

He glanced at her in confusion, then followed her hiked thumb skyward and finally saw it.

The Ring. Strung out along the declination of the equatorial belt some 35,786 kilometers overhead, it was faintly visible today through one of those quirky contrapositions of star and satellite that physics teachers throughout UN and Syndicate space set their frustrated students to calculate. The Ring wasn’t an actual ring, of course; just the area of space that contained all of Earth’s stable geosynchronous orbits. But it had been packed so full of residential and manufacturing habitats and commsats and solar collectors and offshore tax shelters, that by now it was as visible and clearly defined as the rings of Saturn.

The Ring’s traffic control and dynamic stabilization requirements were so impossibly complex that they had been the primary driving force behind the evolution of Emergent AI over the course of the last three centuries. The Ring was also—because of the sheer volume of reflective metal whipping around up there—one of the thousands of complex mutually interacting causes of the artificial ice age. A little reduced insolation here; a little increased albedo there; a gentle nudge of the coupled water transport systems of ocean and atmosphere. Arkady, terraformer that he was, appreciated the subtlety of the system: controlling chaos by the flutter of the butterfly’s wing rather than the fall of the sledgehammer. And of course the Ring’s terraformers, prodded onward by the unmitigated disaster they’d inherited, had done what station designers on the thinly populated Syndicate planets had never had to think about doing: They had crafted an orbital Ring that was so perfectly integrated into the biome of the planet below it that Ring and planet could almost be thought of as a single organism.

Still…he didn’t think Osnat was suggesting that the ice age had caused the Interfaithers.

“We’re poor,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “And the Ring is rich. And we have to watch Ring-siders being rich every night on the evening spins. Knowing that we’ll never have what they have. Knowing that our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, won’t live nearly as long or as well as their children. Knowing that everything that counts in our lives is decided up there by people who think Earth is just a sponge they can squeeze the water out of. That kind of thing makes you hate, Arkady. And no one’s ever invented a better excuse for hate than God. The Americans figured that one out a few centuries ago, and now we’re all catching their new religion.”

“You speak as if the Interfaithers had taken control of America.”

“Not officially. Unofficially…well, just look at all those freaky Constitutional amendments they keep passing. And they haven’t had a president or even a member of Congress in living memory who wasn’t a member of the Interfaith.”

“But they can’t do anything, can they? They have no power. They’re not UN members. They have no modern technology…”

“They have oil. And they have an army. And they’re willing to burn both. That gives them power.”

“They’re not going to bid on the weapon, are they?”

“I’m sure they’d try to if they knew about it. And all they have to do to get a foot in the door is threaten to tattle to UNSec. That’s the game we’re all playing. We want your little bauble for ourselves, but if we can’t keep it to ourselves, then better our next-door neighbor should have it than the UN getting hold of it. After all, if the Palestinians or even the Americans get hold of a genetic weapon, they might use it, or they might just threaten to use it in order to get a bigger water allowance. But if the UN gets hold of it, you can bet your life they’ll use it sooner or later. They’re not afraid to fight dirty. Look what they did to ZhangSyndicate.” Arkady caught his breath at that name and had to force down a nauseating surge of panic. “In the end,” Osnat continued, either not noticing or misinterpreting his silence, “the only number the UN cares about is the one we all try not to talk about: Every person born on Earth represents an eleven-million-liter lifetime allowance of water that can’t go to the Ring. It’s all about water, Arkady. Everything on this planet comes down to sex and water.”

“And God,” he said, glancing at yet another passing Interfaither.

“Oh, you poor sap. Haven’t you figured it out yet? God’s just a way to pump up your ethnic group’s birth rate so you can demand a bigger share of the water.”

“You seem to have a lot of theories,” Arkady said politely. “Do you have an interest in sociobiology? Have you ever thought about studying it?”

She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she laughed. “Don’t tell me you had me pegged as the hooker with the heart of gold. Sorry to disappoint you. My brother’s a comp lit professor at Tel Aviv University. I’m practically considered a half-wit because I quit school after my master’s degree. In polysci. Which is the closest thing we have to what you call sociobiology in the Syndicates.”

“Then how…?”

“How did a nice girl like me go so terribly wrong? What, you thought only poor people joined the army? This is Israel. And I’m not an Enderbot. I’m a real soldier. Or haven’t you figured out the difference yet?”

The house hunched over Abulafia Street like one of the weathered old men who shuffled down the International Zone’s crooked streets and loitered in its shabby coffeehouses. All you could see of it from the street was a high windowless wall whose stone bones were covered with a tattered skin of plaster. The only opening in the wall was a monumental wooden door, its planks so broad and long that Arkady would have been sure they were composite if he hadn’t touched them with his own hands. In one corner of the door, so small it was almost lost in the shadow of the lintel, hung another smaller door. It opened to Osnat’s knock, and they stepped through it into a tall courtyard.

The courtyard had been built for a hotter climate. Its fountain was turned off for the winter already, its rusted pipes tilting forlornly over tiles streaked yellow with khamsin dust. Even the roses reminded Arkady less of plants than of construction site scaffolding: two stories of stem and thorn and leaf thrown up against the sagging balconies just to point a few anemic blossoms at what little sun trickled over the encircling roof tiles.

It was a house out of time. The flow and chatter of the street faded away as soon as the gate fell to on its hinges. Even Earth’s stupendous sky was reduced to a precise blue square, as completely submitted to the spare geometry of the building as if it were the roof of the house and not the roof of the whole world.

Osnat stopped, looked around the courtyard, and sneezed. She took a tissue out of her pocket and scrubbed at her nose with it while Arkady averted his eyes politely. “My God, I wish it would rain,” she muttered. “The fucking dust is killing me.”

They waited, though Arkady had no idea what they were waiting for. A water seller passed by in the street outside, calling his wares, but it might have been a voice from another planet. A single petal fell from one of the high rose blossoms and fluttered to the ground, the only moving thing in the visible universe. Then the gate opened behind them, and the most perfect human Arkady had ever seen stepped through it.

Her face possessed such flawless bilateral symmetry that Arkady had to look a second and third time before he decided she wasn’t a genetic construct. Only the subtle blend of race and ethnicity, so different from the distinct ethnic phenomes of the Syndicates, identified the woman as what she was: a member of the heavily genetically engineered Ring-side elite that biogeographers were beginning to describe as a new posthuman quasi-species in its own right. And thinking back to Korchow’s briefings, Arkady had no trouble putting a name to the woman:

Ashwarya Sofaer. Ash to her friends…not that she has any. She’s the closest thing to pure ambition you’ll ever see; a walking cost-benefit analysis of mammalian dominance drives. Ex-Mossad of course, like all the higher powers at GolaniTech. She shouldn’t even be allowed to live on Earth, but she’s grandfathered in under one of their endless loopholes. She spent three years in the Ring as the UN-Mossad liaison, then back to Israel and through the revolving door to GolaniTech. Now that Gavi Shehadeh’s out of the way, she’s probably Didi Halevy’s most likely replacement if and when his enemies succeed in toppling him. As they say on King Saul Boulevard, the revolving door spins both ways. And it’s not out of the question that the lovely Miss Sofaer might be interested in using you to give the proverbial door a good hard push…

Ash had the Ring-sider’s clothes to go with her Ring-sider’s body: a sleek white suit programmed to hug every curve of her lean body; high-heeled vat leather shoes that made her long legs seem even longer than they were; impeccably styled hair slicked back from an impeccably made-up face that gave away absolutely nothing of the person behind it.

Ash and Osnat shook hands. Osnat looked stubby and flyblown next to the other woman.

“Captain Hoffman,” Ash said.

“Colonel.” Osnat gave the word a parade ground lilt that suggested respect entirely unalloyed by personal affection.

“Moshe said you’d come over to us,” Ash said. “How did he convince you to make the jump?”

“He told me the grass might be greener on your side of the fence.”

“It is.” Ash eyed Osnat speculatively. “As green as you want it to be. We should talk sometime.”

“Sure,” Osnat said, obviously not meaning it.

A frown of irritation compressed Ash’s beautiful lips for a moment, then vanished before Arkady could even be sure it had been there.

Briefly, she explained to Osnat that the room was being readied, that the bidders were still arriving, that she would make the introductions.

“And then what?” Osnat asked.

“And then we’ll see.”

Ash shook hands with Osnat again and swept off into the house without having so much as glanced at Arkady. Osnat stared after her with a troubled expression, rubbing the palm of her right hand on her pant leg as if she were trying to rub off the smell of the other woman.

Arkady, child of a world born only two years before his own birth, had never seen any place like the room he was eventually ushered into. Even the smell…the smell of wood and wool and furniture wax and all the other priceless things that were rare and inconceivable luxuries to the space-born. He tried to focus on the other people in the room, to match their faces with Korchow’s descriptions. But his eyes kept floating to the whirling ceiling fans, the shivering ladders of light and shade cast by the slatted shutters, the cedar and sandalwood shadows under the high rafters, the complex patterns of rugs and drapery, the nuanced colors of walls and windowsills and floor tiles, the endless tumble of old and incomprehensible objects scattered over the polished tables and sideboards.

When he finally picked out Korchow, slouched in the shadowy depths of a leather wing chair, he saw that the KnowlesSyndicate A was laughing silently at him.

“Poor Arkady. You look even loster than you are.”

Arkady started toward him, stopped, looked at Osnat.

“Go ahead,” she said, lenient in Moshe’s absence.

Korchow put an arm around Arkady’s shoulders and gave him the traditional kiss of greeting. The sight of the Knowles A, after the weeks of isolation among humans, nearly unmanned Arkady. Back on Gilead, Korchow had seemed more than half human. Now he looked like home.

“I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to see you safe and sound, Arkady.” Korchow had affected the avuncular air of an older series speaking to a younger member of his own geneline, but his smile remained as bland and carefully rationed as ever. It was the same smile Korchow had worn during the tense weeks of interrogation, and Arkady still sensed that Korchow’s every move was part of an act played out not for its apparent audience but for the unseen watcher behind the camera.

Arkady returned Korchow’s kiss. “May we do our part,” he said, taking refuge in formality and formula.

“Your part?” For a moment the diplomat’s mask gave way to a look of disdain and anger. Or was that merely another mask, just as calculated as the first? And if so, what audience was it intended for? “Is that what you think you’ve been doing?”

Before Arkady could answer, the door opened and the first bidders entered.

“Jesus wept,” someone said.

Arkady turned to see the man-machine from the airport and the woman soldier who had accompanied him. This time, however, they were staring at Korchow.

“I should have known you’d be at the bottom of this.” The machine sounded weary, as if the weight of unpleasant memories that Korchow suggested was too heavy for his shunt’s human shoulders.

“How can a mere collection of neural networks and Toffoli gates attain such heights of melodrama?” Korchow countered in a voice that gave away even less than his smile did. “I’m behind nothing. I didn’t even know that poor Arkady was leaving us until he turned up in Maris Station. At which point we regrettably”—he glanced at Osnat—“lost track of him. Naturally, we were deeply concerned for his safety, the political situation being what it is. But now we have found our lost lamb again.”

“Lucky little lamb,” the machine drawled, his eyes sliding sideways toward Arkady.

“You’re not one of the bidders?” the woman asked Korchow incredulously.

“No, no, Major. You misapprehend the situation. My only interest is in ensuring that Arkady retain the ability to exercise his…what’s that phrase you humans are always tossing around…free will?”

The woman didn’t return Korchow’s smile. She leaned into his space, her jaw shoved forward pugnaciously, and tapped him on the chest firmly enough for Arkady to hear the thump of her index finger on his sternum. “I’m watching you,” she said. “I’m tracking you, Korchow, and don’t you fucking forget it.”

Korchow’s smile remained firmly in place, but he tugged at his collar and fingered his old war wound. It was the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic.

“My dear Major—”

“Just plain Li now, thanks to you.”

“Seeing you is always so…eventful. I sincerely hope we can avoid gunplay this time.”

“That’s up to you,” the woman said.

That was when Arkady finally put the stray clues together and realized who she was. Major Catherine Li, UNSec First Expeditionary Force, aka the renegade construct Caitlyn Perkins, aka the Butcher of Gilead.

You wouldn’t know she was a Zhang construct if you weren’t looking for the resemblance. But she’d had plastic surgery. They’d said that at the trial. And of course she was a corporate-tanked construct, so you had to allow for the changes the Zhangs had made to their geneset after the Breakaway in order to tailor their phenotype to their own needs as free beings instead of corporate property. Once you did that, the lines of the murdered Zhang constructs shone through her stolid face and muscular body as clearly as printed letters through a piece of paper held up to sunlight.

How could a child born into corporate slavery have grown up to fight a war for the very corporations who had enslaved her? How, being what she was, could she have done what she’d done? And how could she have done it for the same humans who had given the order to turn ZhangSyndicate, with all its crèches and its genebanks, into a firegutted ghost station? Suddenly Arkady found that he was having no trouble at all looking convincingly frightened.

While Arkady was coming to terms with Li’s presence, the AI drifted over to the side table beneath one of the tall windows and began inspecting the artfully scattered objets d’art on its polished wood surface. It glanced back toward its companion and cleared its throat delicately. Could such a being have the normal fears and worries and apprehensions of a real person? If so, Arkady would have sworn the machine was trying to head off a conversation that frightened it.

“So, Major—” Korchow began.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Li burst out. “I don’t give a damn if it’s an original Eames! Can we make it through one goddamn minute without you interrupting me?”

“I beg your pardon?” Korchow asked.

“Never mind,” she muttered savagely. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Of course. I forget that you’re not quite the woman you were when we last met. How is life in the future, Major? Is being the ghost in the machine everything you hoped it would be?”

“Better than life in the Syndicate chicken coop.”

“Are you so sure of that? My offer’s still open—”

“Catherine,” the machine interrupted, “why are you even talking to him?”

“—I could get you on a Long March Rocket out of Guangdong Province next week. You’d be on Gilead within a month.”

“The last person you made that offer to’s dead,” Li pointed out.

“Yes.” Korchow agreed placidly. “But she put her hand up the wrong skirt. And humans are so touchy about that sort of thing.”

“Just drop it,” the machine said, looking hard at Korchow. “She’s not interested.”

“My, things have changed.” Korchow looked back and forth between the two of them. “The Catherine Li I remember never needed anyone to tell people what she thought.”

“If you two are done socializing,” Ash said, striding in on the heels of two hard young men whose skin was marked by the subdermal filigree of Earth-illegal wetware, “perhaps this would be a convenient moment to make the introductions.”

“Assuming all the bidders have arrived?” Korchow asked, letting the question hang in the air unanswered for a moment before he retreated to the shadows of his wing chair.

It seemed that all the bidders had indeed arrived. And when Arkady had sorted out the bidders from the coteries of bodyguards that he was starting to suspect were a routine cost of doing business in Jerusalem, there seemed to be three of them.

First the machine and his companion.

Second an elderly Palestinian man whose suit looked like something from a pre-Evacuation history book, and whose immaculate cotton headdress gleamed like a pearl in the dusky light that threaded through the shutters. Arkady had no trouble recognizing this bidder either: Shaikh Yassin, spearhead of the Palestinian hard religious right…and not at all the man Korchow had hoped the Palestinians would send.

“At last,” Yassin said when Moshe introduced Arkady to him. “Abu Felastineh, blessed be his children, and his children’s children, sends his greetings.”

That wasn’t a name, Arkady remembered from Korchow’s briefings, but an honorific used to protect the anonymity and physical safety of the president of Palestine. Abu Felastineh. The Father of Palestine. And by now Arkady knew better than to begin to try to guess what any title that contained the word father really meant to humans.

The Palestinian bowed courteously and extended a hand to Arkady. Arkady stepped forward to shake it…and ran into a solid wall of muscle as the man’s grim-faced bodyguards surged around him.

“Forgive the boy.” Korchow had stepped up behind Arkady so smoothly that it was impossible to say when exactly he’d left his chair. Now he slipped a hand around Arkady’s arm and drew him back a few cautious steps. “We in the Syndicates lack the institution of political assassination. We are, as I like to say, a too-trusting people.”

“A too-trusting people,” Yassin repeated. He made it sound as if the words were his and not Korchow’s. He made it sound as if he were the man who had invented the very idea of words.

“Exactly so.” Korchow bowing yet again and drawing Arkady back to safety under the unblinking gaze of the bodyguards.

“So how’s the water business?” Catherine Li interrupted.

It took Arkady a moment to realize she was speaking to Yassin—largely because she spoke in a casual, almost confrontational tone that had nothing to do with the way every other person in the room had spoken to him.

The Palestinian turned slowly to face her. Then he looked past her at Cohen. “I am always delighted to see the ghost of my grandfather’s friend. Your young associate seems to have been sadly misinformed, however. My family has no ties to the water trade, and I should be most sorry to think that you should have overheard any unfounded and malicious rumors to the contrary.”

“My dear fellow,” the machine murmured, patting the air with both hands as if he were smoothing down the hackles of a possibly dangerous dog. “Not at all. Nothing of the sort. My, er, associate is a bit overemotional. Young people, you know.”

“He sells water?” Arkady whispered to Korchow.

“Absolutely not,” came the answer, whispered like his question from mouth to ear. “Shaikh Yassin is a perfectly respectable arms merchant.”

“Arkady,” Ash said. “Come here.”

Arkady wheeled around—and found himself face-to-face with the final bidder.

“This,” Ash announced, “is Turner.”

Arkady searched his mind for some memory of the exotic-sounding name and found none. What kind of a name was Turner anyway? And why hadn’t Korchow told him about this bidder?

He tried to take stock of the man, but all he could glean was a series of piecemeal impressions. A wrinkle-resistant button-down shirt stretched over an incipient potbelly and a weight lifter’s muscles; a soft-palmed hand that had never done the hard work of surviving on a Syndicate space station, but still had the strength nearly to crush Arkady’s fingers; freshly laundered hair combed precisely over a pink, smooth, wrinkle-free face and the coldest blue eyes Arkady had ever seen.

“Good to know you!” Turner said in a voice that took possession of the room just as aggressively as his big body did.

“Good to know you,” Arkady repeated, assuming this was some unknown human-style formal greeting.

Turner laughed loudly. He seemed to be a man who did everything loudly. “Hear you’re here to sell us something, Arkady. You got the goods, or are we gonna not be friends in the morning?”

“Um…”

“Just kidding!” He dealt Arkady a staggering blow on the shoulder.

“No hard feelings, hey?”

“Uh…sure.” Arkady rubbed at his shoulder.

Ash, meanwhile, had been watching this exchange with a vaguely amused expression on her smooth features. “Shall we begin?” she asked.

One of the guards dragged a heavy plush velvet armchair into the center of the room and positioned a standing lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly on the face of the unfortunate person sitting in it.

“Arkady?” Ash said pointedly.

Arkady hesitated, then walked obediently over to the chair and sat down.

As he did so the bidders sorted themselves onto the chairs and sofas which had already been placed around the edges of the room.

Their eyes turned to Arkady. He licked his lips and cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. He glanced around the circle of expectant faces and thought that they looked like wolves watching a hamstrung caribou. He glimpsed the flickering pinprick of a black box status light behind Catherine Li’s left pupil—another new thing in a day full of new things—and wondered what other watchers on what distant planets were hearing his tale. Then he looked down at his hands and kept his gaze there, knowing that he was going to have to lie and that he would lose the thread of the lie if his concentration faltered.

“My survey team was assigned to evaluate Novalis for terraforming and settlement—” he began.

“Hang on,” Li interrupted, leaning forward in her chair with an intent, predatory expression. “There’s no Novalis on any UN charts. What star does it belong to? What are the old Astronomical Survey coordinates? Where is it in relation to the treaty lines?”

Arkady began to glance at Korchow, then stopped the movement and looked instead toward Ash.

“That information will be provided in the stage-two bid package,” Ash answered. “After we’ve received your initial financial commitments.”

“Based on what, an initial blind bid?”

Ash nodded.

“What are the payment arrangements?”

“A hundred thousand. Twenty up front, eighty on the day.”

“Delivery on the day?”

“Naturally.”

Li shrugged. Arkady took it as permission to continue.

“There were ten of us,” he resumed. “Arkasha was the geneticist, and of course it’s his notebooks we’re talking about here. I was the biogeographer. Then there were the Ahmeds—”

“That’s AzizSyndicate’s biggest run A series,” Korchow interjected. “It’s a line whose main applications are military. They’d be familiar to Major Li from the last war”—he nodded politely in her direction—“but I doubt any of the rest of you would ever have seen one. Since the recent and, ahem, insufficiently anticipated outbreak of peace, the central joint steering committee has been trying to find alternative applications for them in the survey and terraforming missions. Sorry, Arkady. Go on.”

“Well, the Aziz A’s were the command team, pilot and navigator. They had the final word on all mission-critical decisions. Then we had the two Bellas, MotaiSyndicate B’s. One of them was an entomologist, like me, but a specialist in orbsilk worms. The other—”

“Hang on a minute.” Turner was taking notes, one muscular calf slung over the other knee to support his pad and pencil. “I’d like to get full names on these folks.”

“I’m sorry?” Arkady said.

“Those are their full names,” Korchow answered. “Arkady can’t give you anything else. Ahmed. Bella. Even Andrej”—Korchow smiled infinitesimally—“are merely geneline designations. Though Arkady here may know intuitively that one Ahmed isn’t the same as another, his language, his upbringing, and his convictions all tell him that the organism is nothing and the superorganism—the geneline—is everything.”

“But some of them have their own names. This Arkasha person—”

“Arkasha,” Korchow interrupted smoothly, “is the exception that proves the rule.”

“Are you saying he’s a political dissident?” Li interrupted.

“Let’s not indulge in morally loaded terminology, Major. Arkasha is merely…an atavism. Whether he is an atavism with some useful evolutionary role to play is a decision for the RostovSyndicate steering committee to make. Not for me. And certainly not for you.”

And so it went, just as he and Korchow had mapped it out back on Gilead, Arkady leading his audience down the twisting path—so close to the truth in almost every way—that Korchow had concocted for him.

“And what are we to make of this?” Shaikh Yassin said when Arkady finally reached the end of the story and fell silent. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began.

“What you make of it is your concern,” Ash answered. “Needless to say, your conclusions will largely determine the price you are willing to pay.”

“But what are we paying for?” Li again. She seemed to be the point man by consensus, and the others seemed content to hang back and see what game she managed to flush. “I mean, are we buying this so-called genetic weapon? Or Arkady? Or Arkasha’s notebooks? Is Arkasha himself for sale, for that matter?”

“That’s partly for you to determine,” Ash answered smoothly. “You have discretion to put together your own bid. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you’re willing to pay for it.”

“And what does it mean that we’re dealing with your charming self?” Yassin asked Ash. Beneath the courteous language, his voice sounded sharp as razors. “Can we infer from GolaniTech’s involvement that Arkady has already been interrogated by Israel, and we’re merely being offered their leavings?”

“You can infer whatever you like,” Ash said—and the room fell silent while each of them tried and failed to stare the other down.

“My problem is still with the story itself,” Li said, breaking the silence. “How do we know Arkady’s not just making it all up as he goes along?”

“You know because of what he is.” Ash gestured toward Arkady with one immaculately manicured hand. “An unaltered Syndicate construct, pure as a freshly detanked babe. No internal wetware. No stored spinfeed. No hard files. Nothing that can be edited, altered, or erased. What he remembers is what happened to him, pure and simple.”

Across the room, Yassin was nodding contemplatively. The two ALEF bidders sat utterly still, though something in their expressions convinced Arkady that they were speaking to each other in the nebulous parallel universe of streamspace. Turner merely sat, one thick ankle crossed over the knee of the other leg, his pale eyes flicking back and forth between Arkady and Korchow as if he were calculating the angles and momenta of a targeting problem.

“People can lie,” Li insisted.

“Not perfectly. Not under drugs. Not under…educated questioning. And once we work out the escrow arrangements, you’ll each have the chance to question Arkady in the time and place of your choosing.”

“But for how long? And with what limitations?”

Korchow started to answer, but Ash interrupted him. “I think discussing limitations as to duration and interrogation techniques in Arkady’s presence would be counterproductive at this point.”

“That’s pretty damn cold,” Li muttered.

“Yep,” Turner said. “But it works.”

Korchow cleared his throat and unfolded his slender stationer’s frame from the leather depths of the wing chair. “It seems to me that this would be the moment at which Arkady and I might most appropriately make our exit.”

As they left the room, Arkady glanced back and met Turner’s stare, as coldly blue as the cloudless sky over Novalis’s polar ice sheet.

It was unreal. an impossible, glorious, inconceivable violation of all the rules and restrictions that had pressed in on Arkady since that first fateful meeting with Osnat.

He and Korchow walked side by side across the courtyard and through the narrow door into Abulafia Street. No one stopped them. No one asked Korchow where he was taking Arkady. No one even followed them that Arkady could see. And ten minutes later they were in the thronging heart of the Arab Quarter.

“I have some errands to run,” Korchow told him. “You don’t mind tagging along, do you?”

Korchow’s “errands” stretched through the afternoon. He guided Arkady through the crowded streets, winding past beggars and water sellers, weaving through roving packs of pilgrims, and ducking into an endless series of antique stores and art galleries and rare book dealers.

At every store Korchow would go through the same incomprehensible ritual. He would introduce himself—under a different false name each time—and begin to look through the dealer’s collections. He seemed to have a taste for antiquities, and in particular portable ones. He would greet the first four or five or eight items the dealer presented with polite lack of interest. The dealer would respond accordingly, and the prices being bandied about would rise dizzyingly. Korchow, however, would remain placidly unmoved…both by the prices and by the objets d’art being presented for his inspection. The dealer would begin to hem and haw about export restrictions and end user certificates. Korchow would smile and nod and pronounce what Arkady assumed were the proper noises of reassurance…at which point they would stop even talking about prices.

The dealer would brew the sweet hot tea that everyone in the Old City seemed to live on and usher them out of the public showroom and into a discreet back room that Korchow referred to, with an amusement that Arkady found utterly incomprehensible, as “the high rollers’ room.”

The high rollers’ rooms were always soundproofed and spintronically deadwalled. And for good reason. For even Arkady could see that the objects presented for sale in these rooms had no business being anywhere outside of a museum, and certainly no business being shipped off-planet for private bidders.

Within the space of three hours Arkady watched Korchow conclude negotiations for a Saffavid Dynasty miniature of the assassination of some prince whose name Arkady forgot two minutes after Korchow told it to him; two David Grossman first editions (“Have you read The Smile of the Lamb? No? You really must. One of those human masterpieces in which one can feel the breath, the promise, of posthumanity.”); and a portion of the True Cross encased in an exceptionally gaudy twelfth-century Byzantine reliquary (“The real value is in the packaging, Arkady. There’s a lesson there. Remember it.”).

Each time they stepped through the sonic curtain into the next high rollers’ room and sat together, encased in a cocoon of artificial silence, while the dealer fetched the next illicit treasure for Korchow’s delectation, Arkady expected the KnowlesSyndicate A to broach the real subject of interest between them. And each time Arkady was disappointed yet again.

Only between the third and fourth stops on the shopping tour—by which time Korchow had dropped a sum of money that would have provided a year’s worth of air, food, and water for all of RostovSyndicate—did Arkady succeed in picking the two stolid-looking young Israelis out of the crowd.

“Are they following us?”

“Don’t stare, Arkady. It’s embarrassing.”

He glanced surreptitiously at the young men while Korchow threaded along the narrow stone street ahead of him. Was it only those two, or was there another team as well? And was he completely crazy for thinking that the buxom schoolgirl bouncing along the opposite sidewalk was the same person as the frumpily dressed housewife who’d trudged by not five minutes ago pulling a wheeled grocery cart?

“They don’t look embarrassed,” he told Korchow.

“Who said it was them you were embarrassing?”

“Sorry,” Arkady began—and then he rounded a corner in Korchow’s wake and ran smack into absolutely the last face he ever expected to see on Earth.

The face stared down at him from a billboard the size of a house. The eyes were shadowed with the sorrow of hard experience. The square jaw was set in a frown of heroic determination. The perfectly balanced musculature of the bare chest was a paean in flesh and blood to the technical mastery of its AzizSyndicate designers.

There was a caption below the picture, though Arkady didn’t need to read it to know what spin the image came from: see AHMED AZIZ in THE TIME OF CRUEL MIRACLES “Ahmed Aziz?” Arkady mouthed.

“Well,” Korchow said mildly, “humans watch art spins too. Though I’ve been told they recut the endings before they release Syndicate spins for UN audiences. Apparently humans don’t find lovers’ suicide pacts quite as romantic as we do.” He squinted up at the billboard, arms crossed thoughtfully. “Our Ahmed’s better-looking than the one who stars in the spins, don’t you think?”

The possessive was hard enough for Arkady to parse that it took him a moment to understand who Korchow was talking about and draw the obvious connection.

Korchow sighed patiently. “I handled his debriefing too. I would have told you, if you’d ever trusted me enough to ask.”

“Anyway, he’s not better-looking,” Arkady said. “He’s just nicer. It makes him seem better-looking.”

He looked over to find Korchow grinning indulgently at him.

“What?”

“You’re an idiot, Arkady. But you’re a sweet idiot. I’ll say that for you. How you survived four months in Arkasha’s back pocket I’ll never fathom.”

Only at the fifth stop did Korchow finally begin to show his cards. This store’s street front consisted of one windowless door tucked behind a sweating stone buttress in the angle of an alley so narrow that Arkady wondered if the sun ever shone on the place. The brass sign advertised “antiquities” in French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic; but the lettering was so small that Arkady had to stoop to read it.

Walking into the place was like walking into a cave. The windows were hermetically sealed and the closed shutters blocked out what little light might have trickled through the smeared glass. The shop’s single room seemed to fall away unevenly into the shadows, as if the cobweb-infested ceiling and the carpet-lined floor drew closer together the deeper you penetrated into the building’s entrails. The man behind the counter was as oddly built as his shop. Only when he stepped out from behind the counter to greet them could Arkady make sense of his unusual proportions; he was a dwarf, and he’d been standing on a pile of carpets half a dozen deep. Indeed, the farther back in the shop you went, the deeper the carpets got, until in the back of the place they were stacked up in slithering chest-high piles, fragrant with the perfume of mothballs and long-dead sheep.

But the carpets, however impressive they were, turned out to be a mere sideline. Once they were settled in the back room, slightly shabbier than the ones preceding it, and had suffered through the same tea and the same honeyed cakes and the same desultory small talk, the dwarf began to shuffle across the mounded carpets in a pair of frayed and faded bedroom slippers, extracting curious little flat boxes from corners whose very existence Arkady had not suspected. And from the boxes, handling the pages with infinite delicacy, he began to produce his miniatures.

“Yes, yes,” Korchow said to the first painting the dwarf presented, an ornate illustration of the Prophet—or at least Arkady assumed that was who it was; his face was completely obscured by a fluttering silken veil—riding to Heaven on a decidedly seductive-looking sphinx. Two more miniatures, also of religious themes, followed it, and Korchow showed little more interest in them than he had in the first piece.

The dealer cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might be more interested in more, er, secular themes?”

“Oh, assuredly,” Korchow said with a smile that Arkady felt himself to be quite incapable of interpreting.

The man shuffled to the back of the room, his slippers whispering on the wool nap of the carpets, and produced a slim portfolio of unbound pieces.

“Oh my,” Korchow murmured when he looked at the first one.

Arkady looked, blinked, and looked away.

“Poor Arkady. A great man once observed that politics was like sausage: a commodity best enjoyed without inquiring too closely into the manufacturing process. One might say the same thing of human reproduction in general.”

“Not to your taste?” the dealer asked in tones of careful neutrality.

“Not to my young friend’s taste, at any rate. I imagine he would prefer something a bit more…ahem…refined.”

The dwarf glanced between Korchow and Arkady, his face giving away nothing. He slid a second portfolio out from beneath the first, as if he’d had it ready all along, and opened it.

There was only one miniature inside, and it was clearly a picture of tremendous value. Arkady could see that even before he began to grasp the subject of the painting.

“By the Master of Tabriz,” the dealer said. “You are familiar with the story? It is said to represent the Shah with his lover the night before he was assassinated.”

Korchow’s eyes slid sideways toward Arkady. “Do you like it?”

The miniature depicted two young men of exceptional physical beauty. They were as identical as crèchemates, though Arkady couldn’t tell whether the resemblance was real or a mere product of the artist’s manner. They were so completely swathed in silk, from their spotless white turbans to their patterned robes and their pointed and filigreed and gold-leafed slippers, that the shapes they formed on the page bore no relation to the warm, breathing, living bodies within. All their life was in their black eyes, which the long-dead artist had limned in the finest wisp of sable. And all around them the painted garden, which should have been as flat and static as every other priceless painted garden Arkady had seen that afternoon, seemed to pulse and flow like water running under ice. Trees twined and twisted their dark limbs about each other. Flowers flamed in the grass and swept in bright torrents around the lovers’ feet.

For lovers they certainly were. There was no mistaking either the meaning of the image or the forbidden nature of the passion that suffused it.

And there was no doubt in Arkady’s mind about what would surely happen, what had to happen, in the next moment of that frozen eternity.

“Well,” Korchow pressed. “What do you think?”

“I think—” Arkady cleared his throat. “I think the man who painted this was a great artist.”

“One of the greatest,” Korchow agreed. “He was said to be the lover of the Shah for whom he painted it.”

“And was the Shah pleased by the painting?”

“It isn’t known. He died before it was finished.”

Arkady turned away, unable to look at the thing any longer.

“You still haven’t said if you like it or not,” Korchow pointed out. “I ask because I’m thinking of making a gift.”

It took a moment for Arkady to parse the unfamiliar phrase. The word gift existed in Syndicate Standard, but it applied, in the absence of personal or biological property, to a completely different concept.

“Unfortunately,” Korchow continued, “I’m not familiar with the taste of the young man in question. I thought you might advise me. After all, you know him so much better than I do.”

They looked at each other, the long-dead Shah and his doomed lover lying forgotten between them.

When Arkady was six he had witnessed the Peacekeeper attack on ZhangSyndicate. It had been over in seconds, and it had happened miles away across empty space, but it still dogged his nightmares. The great orbital station’s outer hull had held, staving off hard vac; but the fireball had ripped through the habitat modules and gutted them with all the crèchelings on board and unrescued. That attack had killed ZhangSyndicate. Its arks had been contaminated, their precious gene-sets rendered unusable. And where there were children there could be no Syndicate. Most of the surviving Zhangs had chosen suicide over the sterile prospect of life as walking ghosts. Sometimes it was hard to remember they’d ever existed. But Arkady remembered the terrible beauty of the burning. The white-hot fire lighting up one viewport after another as the inner bulwarks gave way. The condensation steaming off the hull and refreezing in the void. His body felt like that now: a dead shell dissolving into a glittering ice storm of hope, pain, terror.

“It’s understandable that you would still have feelings for him,” Korchow said in the bland, reasonable, sympathetic voice that still haunted Arkady’s nightmares. “Why be ashamed to admit to them? What you did, you did because you loved him. No one holds that against you. After all, what else did they intend to happen when they assigned you to each other?”

Arkady froze. Had Arkasha said something? Was Korchow still playing them off against each other? Would Arkady hurt his pairmate by acknowledging Korchow’s insinuations?

“Tell me,” Korchow asked before Arkady could decide how to answer. “Do you begin to understand what we’re doing here?”

Arkady shook his head. “Here…where?”

“Here on Earth.” Korchow pointed to the carpeted floor, the walls of the room, the city beyond the walls. “Think, Arkady. Use that handsome head of yours for something other than ants.”

But Arkady had thought. He’d lain awake thinking month after month, night after cold night. And he still knew nothing he hadn’t known back on Novalis. So he waited, schooling his face into impassive stillness, not wanting to say or do anything that might jeopardize the sudden and unexpected flow of information.

“What do you know about the colonization of the Americas?” Korchow asked, in an apparent change of subject.

Arkady stuttered something about sociogenesis and intersocietal competition and the perverse incentives of social systems based on sexual reproduction—

“Yes, yes. Forget all the tripe from your tenth-year sociobiology class. We teach you that because it’s good for you, not because it’s true. In any case, when the Europeans first arrived in the Americas—they actually called it the New World, if you can imagine such parochialism—they encountered a civilization as well established in many respects as their own. Mexico City had more residents than the largest cities of Europe, and they were a hell of a lot cleaner and better fed judging from the Conquistadors’ letters home. And even the Aztecs were practically savages compared to the Incas.

“Unfortunately for the Incas, the collision of the Old and the New World turned out not to be a clash of cultures, but a clash of diseases. A plague of plagues swept through the Americas in the wake of the first explorers. Black Death. Syphilis. Influenza. Smallpox. The first explorers discovered a continent of vibrant cities—and by the time the first colonists landed all that was left were graves and charnel houses. It was a classic case of an isolated population encountering a much larger one…and any competent evolutionary ecologist can tell you where that leads.

“At some point during this scourge, the Spanish developed a new and devilishly clever strategy of conquest: gifts. They gave the Incas blankets that had been used by smallpox victims. The blankets were warm and beautiful. They were passed from hand to hand, treasures from another world. And they ended up killing more people than European gunpowder ever did.”

Korchow looked at him expectantly—but whatever lesson he meant Arkady to draw from the tale, Arkady couldn’t make the connection.

“Never mind,” he said after a moment. “You’re a good boy, Arkady. And it’s not lack of intelligence that keeps you from understanding. It’s the same thing that kept you from seeing what was happening on Novalis: idealism. Rostov did a beautiful job when they detanked you. A really fine piece of work. No sense in trying to play country fiddle on a Stradivarius. Do you have any questions about the auction? If you want to ask me anything, now is your moment. It may be difficult to talk this privately again.”

Arkady hesitated, thinking. “There was someone missing,” he said at last. “Someone you told me to look for. Why wasn’t Walid Safik there?”

“I don’t know. The Palestine Security Services are…opaque. It can be very hard to tell what’s going on beneath the surface. People fall in and out of favor unpredictably. But don’t count Safik out. If he’s not invited to the party he’ll find a way to crash it sooner or later.”

“And what about the other party crasher? Turner?”

Korchow’s hand crept to his throat in the same nervous gesture the construct Catherine Li had provoked back at the auction meet. “I didn’t expect the Americans to take an interest. I don’t like it. Still…we may still be able to make use of him.”

“Will he be allowed to interrogate me?” Arkady asked, thinking of the cold eyes behind Turner’s easygoing smile.

“I assume so. But I’ll ask to have it done under GolaniTech supervision. The Americans have a bad habit of changing the rules when they don’t like them.”

“What should I tell him?”

“Whatever he asks you to tell him. I believe in sacrifice, Arkady, but not in pointless sacrifice.”

Korchow fingered the miniature that lay forgotten on the table between them. Arkady glanced at it and shivered.

“You never told the bidders about Bella,” Korchow said.

“You mean about her…” He couldn’t bring himself to say the word, so he settled for a more neutral term, “…illness? But you told me not to tell them.”

“Did I? Well, I suppose I might have at that.” Korchow was smiling at him. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. But when Turner has his little talk with you, why don’t you drop that in his ear and see what happens?”

Arkady blinked at Korchow, comprehension beginning to dawn on him. “This is all about Bella and Ahmed. You want the humans to know about them. Then why all the subterfuge? Why not just tell them?”

“Human nature, Arkady. A beast you must be getting to know rather well by now. Humans aren’t fundamentally selfless. They don’t give themselves, not in the way we do. And they don’t trust any gift”—again that unsettling use of the word—“that’s given too easily.”

Neither did Andrej Korchow. One more way in which the Knowles-Syndicate spy had become as much human as construct. But Arkady suspected that was a thought best kept to himself.

“Then this really is a gift?” he asked. “Not some kind of trap?”

“It’s both. Like everything in life worth having…or giving for that matter. In the short term it may throw Earth into chaos, which will hurt the Ring and therefore help us. Or at least that’s how Knowles sold our plan to the central steering committee. But in the long term it just might give the human race a chance to outrun extinction.”

“And how does that help us? Last time I saw humans anywhere near Gilead they were trying to kill me.”

“Those were UN colonists and genetic constructs, not humans. And even their Ring-side paymasters are as posthuman as you and I are, no matter what their Schengen implants say. The only wild humans left are here on Earth. And as for why we’d want to save them…well, you’re the ecophysicist, not me.”

Arkady knew the theory. It was politically unacceptable, especially in the newer Syndicates like Motai and Aziz. But in scientific circles people talked openly about the problem. The Syndicates were dogged by the question that lurked behind every population-wide genetic engineering project: What were the engineers splicing out of the genome that they wouldn’t know they needed until it was too late?

In a strictly genetic sense, the Syndicates, like any genetically modified posthuman population, were parasites. In order to survive permanently they needed to be embedded within a larger human population that they could draw genetic material from and fall back on if things ever went catastrophically wrong. No posthuman along the Periphery had the genetic diversity to maintain a viable population indefinitely. And though the Ring was huge, its population was so homogenized by commercial splicing that it had a worse diversity deficit than even the Syndicates.

The only piece of “wild” human genome left—and therefore the only safety net if things went wrong—was the rapidly vanishing human population of Earth. The Ring, the Periphery, and even the Syndicates might all be benefiting from Earth’s depopulation in the short term, but in the long term it was disastrous.

And Korchow, for his own devious and cynical motives, had decided to avert the disaster…or at least that was what he seemed to want to make Arkady think at this move in the game.

“Why couldn’t you have told me all this before?” Arkady asked.

“I’m sorry, Arkady. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get you past Moshe. I had to get you to Earth. I told you what I thought you needed to know to accomplish that. And the rest…well, I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”

“But are you telling me the truth, or just the next lie?”

Korchow grinned in genuine amusement. “So there is something behind the pretty face after all,” he said. “Arkasha always said there was.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“You will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“When?”

There was something fundamentally uncategorizable about Korchow. For weeks, even months, Arkady would think of him as a chimera who had become more human than construct by the constant stress and abrasion of living with humans. But then, just when he had decided that he knew what Korchow was, the spy’s artifices would slough away to reveal the rigid scaffolding of ideology that everything else hung upon.

“You will speak to Arkasha,” Korchow told him in a voice that wasn’t even remotely human, “when I believe it is in both of your best interests to speak to each other. Which is to say when it is in the best interest of the Syndicates. Unless you no longer believe that those two things are one and the same?”

“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean to…forgive me.”

“That Arkasha continues to defy me is one thing. I expect it of him. But you, Arkady. You disappoint me. Back on Gilead I decided you were ready to do your part and make the necessary sacrifices. Don’t make me wonder if I was wrong about you.”

“I just—”

Korchow held up a hand. “Don’t. If what you’ve already seen of humans—the misery right outside this window, for God’s sake—hasn’t convinced you of how important it is that the Syndicates survive and thrive, then we have nothing else to say to each other.”

Back at the house on Abulafia Street, Osnat took charge of Arkady as seamlessly as a relay runner taking the baton from a teammate. Twenty minutes later, Arkady was sitting in the helicopter, buffeted by wind and noise, while Osnat slept in the seat across from him as comfortably as if she were safe on the ground and tucked into her bed.

Arkady’s brain spun feverishly, turning over every word Korchow had spoken, inspecting every nuance and inflection as if he were reading tea leaves. Any way he looked at it he reached the same conclusion:

Arkasha was alive. Arkasha was alive and not cooperating, whatever Korchow meant by that. And if Arkasha wasn’t cooperating, then Arkasha was still himself.

And that single fact changed everything.

Could Osnat be trusted? He looked at her face, grimy with sweat and khamsin dust. Everything he knew of her said no…but he’d seen something in her face when she looked at him, something harder and more honest than pity, that whispered yes.

He would ask her. He would ask her the next time she brought his food. He’d beg if he had to.

Because if Arkasha really was alive and unbroken, then Arkady would run any risk and suffer any humiliation to save him.