Spin Control

THE FEMALE GOLEM

Li snapped into wakefulness. A minute and a half before her internals were set to wake her. She opened her eyes and lay in absolute stillness, savoring the wired wide-awake feeling that always came to her before a mission.

But there was no mission today. No last-minute fixes to see to. No orders to follow, good or bad. That life was over. All she was following today was a name, whispered into her ear as she stepped into Didi’s armored car.

She hadn’t decided what to do about that name.

Or whether to tell Cohen about it.

It can’t hurt to talk, she told herself in the last dark corner of her mind that she’d managed to shelter from Cohen’s devouring presence. I’ll just see what she wants. And then I can tell him about it. What harm can that do?

She eased out of bed, though she knew her caution was pointless; Roland was sleeping the sleep of the dead, his body worn down by the relentless assault of Cohen’s presence. Still, there was something corpselike about the faces when Cohen had used them hard. And he was using Roland very hard indeed on this trip.

Outside, the city was mean and yellow with the khamsin. Cohen had said the winds had gotten worse when their seasons shifted. Li figured that had to be true; no people in their right minds would have settled here with this banshee spitting at them.

A quick dogtrot took her up King David Street and cutting over toward the neighborhood that showed up on the Legion maps as Mea Shearim. She passed the sign at the quarter’s entrance, which she vaguely remembered Cohen pointing out to her a few days ago. It was written in Hebrew and English, but not UN-standard Spanish, which was odd, she thought, if they wanted the tourists to understand it:

No problem there, Li joked to herself. The accused pleads guilty to the charge of being a golem instead of a woman.

Cohen claimed that the ultraorthodox neighborhoods had shifted—the hidden life of cities, he’d called it—and that the sign was maintained more for historic than for enforcement purposes. But it was awfully well maintained, Li thought. And she’d seen enough of the version of human history maintained Ring-side to know that people mostly maintained the pieces of history they agreed with.

She twitched her shirt cuffs over her wrists—Cohen, in one of his usual old-maidly excesses of caution had made her order a bunch of new shirts with particularly long sleeves before they left—and checked that her jacket collar was covering her neck reasonably well. Then she straightened her back and stepped out a little more soldierly…just in case anyone in those narrow little alleys happened to be looking her way and thinking about anything.

She felt she was seeing a new Jerusalem—and not the one she’d sung about in church when she was a kid, either.

Before, Jerusalem had always been mediated for her by Cohen. Now, alone, it took on a new and vaguely menacing aspect. The narrow streets seemed airless and claustrophobic. The men passed her by with averted eyes as if she were an abomination, and the few women on the street were so thoroughly wrapped up against the rain and cold that they hardly seemed human, let alone female.

All the conversations she overheard seemed to be arguments, and the one time she caught a sentence of English it came from an irate young woman who stood in a street-level window shouting, “What am I, a professor?” in answer to an unseen questioner.

Even the graffiti raged apocalyptically. A lurid poster informed all passersby that

and followed up with a helpful swastika in case anyone missed the point. A second poster proclaimed

Someone (a Zionist Hitlerite? There couldn’t actually be such a thing, even on Earth, could there?) had tried to tear that poster down, but, defeated by the apparent superiority of anti-Zionist Hitlerite glue technology, had settled for defacing it with the words

The more Li saw of Jerusalem, the more convinced she became that the people who thought Earth needed to be protected from the Ring had it all completely ass backwards. It was the rest of the universe that needed to be protected. And it needed to be protected from the maniacs that passed for human beings inside the Embargo line.

To her relief the neighborhood seemed to be getting less crazy as she got closer to the address Ash had given her. She passed a coffee shop called the Up/Spin. A streamspace access point? She’d been offstream since she left the King David; after all, you never knew who was watching. But now she reached out cautiously and felt the familiar comfort of the uplink.

‹Oh. There you are.›

Shit.

‹What are you doing, router/decomposer? Following me?›

‹No! No! I’m not here! He told me not to tell you I was here!›

Li froze in midstride, and an evening shopper slammed into her from behind and passed by, cursing her.

You’re not that incompetent, she started to say. And then she stopped herself.

Of course he wasn’t that incompetent. He was acting on instructions. Instructions that he was following to the letter…and completely violating in spirit. She looked back at the affective fuzzy set that had accompanied his confession. Sure enough, it was an almost vaudevillian parody of dismay, embarrassment, self-recrimination. And it was definitely canned; the syntax was far too polished not to have been prepared in advance.

‹Why don’t you go home before you get yourself into bigger trouble than you already have,› she told him.

‹I need to make sure you’re safe, and…›

‹Well, don’t worry. It’ll be the last time you need to spy on me. I’m going to have a little talk with our mutual friend when he climbs out of his pod tonight.›

‹Even though I personally loathe shunting, I have to tell you I find the bodysnatcher jokes demeaning. So where are you going? You can tell me. I can keep a secret.›

Li snorted, and was amused to see several nearby pedestrians dive sideways in an attempt to avoid the crazy woman. Talk about hicksville. ‹You actually expect me to believe that?›

‹Check my code if you don’t believe me.›

She checked. Unbelievable. He had more cutouts than a chain of paper dolls. He was squirreling all kinds of data away that Cohen had no idea about. Including data that Li had thought she was successfully hiding under her own steam.

‹Why are you doing this?› she asked warily.

‹I’m interested in you. Not like Cohen is. In a more theoretical way. I want to see what you turn into.›

‹Right now I’m afraid I’m turning into a bad person.›

He appeared to pause and consider this. The pause was faked, of course; designed to make the exchange feel natural at organic processing speeds. But it was the thought that counted. ‹You’re falling into the identity myth. That’s the problem with nonfunctional nomenclature. Names encourage people to harbor the illusion that there’s identity beyond interface. That you can be good or bad apart from the effect of your actions on the world.›

‹Good intentions have to count for something,› Li protested.

‹Good intentions are just a fairy tale humans tell themselves so they can sleep at night.›

‹But some actions have unpredictable effects.›

‹What do you expect? Life is an intervention in a complex adaptive system.›

‹So you’re saying you can’t know whether you’re a good or bad person?›

‹Not once you exceed the CAS’s Lyapunov time. At that point you have to wait until you can take a final measurement of the end state of the entire universe.› A note of impatience slipped into his affective sets. ‹What do you want from me, a physics lesson?›

It was half an hour shy of sunset, but the elevator in Ash’s building had already been switched over to its Sabbath rhythm. It would travel up and down its appointed route, one floor at a time, stopping long enough for even the slowest of the orthodox to board without breaking the Sabbath by operating a mechanical device.

When Li arrived, the light claimed that the car was on the sixth floor. After watching it sit there for a good minute and a half, she got tired of waiting, located the stairwell behind a door that looked like it led to a broom closet, and climbed five flights. She didn’t lose her breath, she was pleased to note, but behind the smooth push of the wires she could feel her almost middle-aged joints complaining under the relentless assault of Earth’s gravity.

“What?” she asked before Ash had even fully opened the door to her impatient knocking. “What’s so private and important you have to drag me halfway across the city to tell me about it?”

“Say hello to Auntie Li,” Ash crooned.

The child on Ash’s hip looked to be a little over a year old. Li guessed uncertainly that it was a boy; she hadn’t seen many babies in her life, and she’d been only minimally interested in the ones she’d seen.

“Yours?” she asked.

Ash smiled and gave a little shrug that looked like she’d practiced it in front of the mirror a hell of a lot more than once.

Li followed the mother and child into a living room full of just the kind of sleekly forbidding glass and steel surfaces Li would have expected to find in Ash’s home. The stark white and chrome of the decor made an incongruous backdrop to the trail of bright plush and plastic toys strewn across the carpet, into the tiled kitchen beyond the dining area, and across every flat surface the furniture offered.

“Sorry.” Ash pulled a wry face. “Can’t keep up with the little guy these days.”

She bent, the child still over her hip, to pluck a red-and-purple squishy cube off the one relatively free chair so Li could sit down. As her shirt rode up with the movement, Li saw the faint silver fishtails of stretch marks riding her hips like notches on a gun barrel.

“So why am I here?” Li asked.

Instead of answering, Ash crouched down between the vat leather couch and a lethal-looking glass coffee table and carefully settled the baby on a beach towel already spread out for that purpose. This took several minutes and involved the kinds of noises Li had last heard from Cohen’s Italian greyhound puppies.

Eventually, however, Ash finished stalling, settled herself on the sofa facing Li. “I have a message for you from an old friend.”

Oh shit.

Ash smiled.

Li didn’t.

Silence arrived.

Li, who had outgrown the urge to make nicey-nice long before her first day of interrogation training, let it stay.

For one thing it gave her a chance to reexamine the impressively contradictory woman sitting in front of her. Gone were the high heels and the high-tech now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t suits. Ash was still carefully made-up—and Li never could quite bring herself to trust a woman who wore makeup—but she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and thick wool socks, and her long hair was pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was more beautiful like this, Li decided. Certainly she was more approachable. But there was something slippery about her: a hard, unnatural self-assurance that repelled every attempt to access the person inside the beautiful package.

Basically, there was no there there. Unless you counted the toddler and the stretch marks. And that was the kind of “there” that could only make any sane person duck for cover.

“You haven’t asked who the old friend is,” Ash prompted. “Is that because you don’t want to know, or because you already do know?”

“Helen Nguyen and I have known each other since before you kissed your first boy. Or girl. Or whatever. We aren’t friends anymore, if we ever were. So why don’t you skip the dance of the seven veils and tell me what she wants from me?”

“Your help,” Ash said simply. “Your help to get the Interfaithers out of Israeli Intel.”

“And I should care about this because…?”

Ash’s perfectly made-up eyes widened. “I would think you’d be the last person to ask that question.”

“Are you about to become the next rich Ring-sider who takes one look at my DNA and thinks she knows what I should think and who my friends should be? It’s a long line. You’ll have to take a number.”

“You know I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Well, I’m not very bright, I’m afraid. You know how those Xenogen constructs are. Bet you’ve sat through any number of nice dinner parties where your mother complained about how hard it was to turn them into decent kitchen help.”

Ash’s lips tightened in anger.

Li—finally—allowed herself the faintest of smiles.

We have a decision, gentlemen. Bottom card fight to the lovely Miss Catherine Li on a technical knockout. And may it not come back to bite her in the ass when it really counts.

“Fine,” Ash said. “Here’s what Nguyen told me, and you can do whatever you want with it. I’m just the messenger. No need to shoot stray voltage my way.”

Stray voltage? Just the messenger? Had the woman watched so many action spins that she thought people actually talked like that?

The baby hiccuped twice and seemed about to cry. Ash leaned forward and patted absently at his diapered bottom. Amazingly, the gesture seemed to calm him.

“Mind if I smoke?” Li asked, taking out her cigarettes.

“Yes, actually. I never got used to it Ring-side.”

“Thought you were from the Ring.”

“Not exactly.” And there it was again: the momentary sensation that the real person behind the mask had appeared and just as quickly vanished. Like those times in hard-vac ops when a teammate cleared his visor to get an unmediated look at the field of battle. Mirroreyesmirror. All in such quick succession that you were left doubting you’d even seen the face inside the helmet. “It’s complicated.”

“Can’t see how that would be.”

The real person—or whatever it was in there—peeked out once more. “I’d say I was surprised to hear you say that if I didn’t think you’d jump down my throat again.”

“And I’d ask you what the hell that meant if I thought you’d tell me.”

“Right then.” Ash leaned forward, jeans hiking up over ankles that were, okay, yes, Li could admit it, fabulous. Even if the woman was sent straight from the treacherous hands of General Helen Nguyen.

Li sat up, blinking at a sudden and surprising thought. Was Ash Nguyen’s latest and greatest protegée? Had this lovely package filled the void left behind by Li’s defection? Well, Helen had always had eclectic taste.

“You heard Didi’s briefing. Everything he said was true. But there’s more. And that more is why I’m talking to you. Didi was surprised by Absalom’s resurrection. We weren’t. We’ve been tracking high-level leaks for a while now. Information has gotten out that was very, very tight band. So we took a page out of Gavi Shehadeh’s book—or should I say Didi Halevy’s book?—and cooked up a few barium meals of our own. We sent them through Didi’s office. And had them pop out in some of the last places anyone wants to see them.”

“The Interfaithers,” Li hazarded.

“Try KnowlesSyndicate.”

“The Interfaithers and the Syndicates aren’t exactly fellow travelers.”

“No, they aren’t.”

“But the Syndicates and the Palestinians are another matter. So we’re back to Absalom.” Li caught her breath. “Or are you suggesting that someone in Didi’s office is directly tied to Korchow?”

“Does it matter?” Ash let the question hang fire for a while. “You know about the prime minister’s list?”

“The kidon list?” Legend had it that there was a list, the single most classified document in Israel, containing the names of men and women with Jewish blood on their hands whom the Mossad’s kidon, or assassination teams, were cleared to kill as and when opportunity presented itself. “Sure. I’ve heard of it. So what?”

“Gavi Shehadeh’s name is on it. Naturally. But the prime minister hasn’t initialed it, so they can’t do the hit. Didi’s the one who’s keeping it from happening.”

“So they’re old friends.”

“Did I say different?”

No. Just walked me up to the brink and let me look over the edge all by my little self. Helen couldn’t have done it better.

“What are you saying? That Didi is Absalom and framed Gavi to keep from taking the fall himself? Or that Gavi really was Absalom and Didi’s in it with him? Or…I mean, what actually? You open up that can and you’ll find out it’s pretty hard to get the worms back inside.”

“Look, if Helen’s wrong, then no one will be happier than me. But if she’s right, we’ll be glad we played our hand close to the vest.”

“The problem with Helen—can I have a drink of water?”

Ash rose wordlessly and padded to the kitchen. Li heard the clink of glasses jostling each other in the cupboard, the burp of a bottle being uncapped, the rippling pour of water.

“The problem with Helen,” Li said loudly enough for Ash to hear her in the next room, “is that sometimes when she gets a hard-on for someone, it’s patriotism. And sometimes, at least in my experience, it’s just politics. And I really dislike being the hatchet man in a back-alley political brawl.”

“This isn’t political.” Ash came back to stand in front of Li, glass in hand, water dripping off her long and immaculately manicured fingernails. “I’ve seen it unfold firsthand. I’ve seen the spinfeeds and the office logs. This is the real deal. Your country calls. Rough men report for duty.”

“The last time Helen quoted Orwell at me, she ended up trying to kill me.”

“You just got between her and Cohen. It wasn’t personal.”

“Bullshit,” Li snapped, dangerously close to losing her temper. “Killing’s always personal. I know. I fucking do it for a living.”

“Not anymore, last time I heard.”

They stared at each other. This time Ash didn’t budge or blink or even smile.

“Tell me true, Catherine. ’Cause there are some people up at UNSec HQ who really want an answer from you. Are you ready to come in from the cold?”

And there it was. The long drop. With no warning at all to let you steel your nerves and your stomach for it. One step you’re on solid flight deck, next one you’re free-falling into the gravity well of some godforsaken ball of dirt that looks like you could fall past it into open space if you twitch wrong.

Ash was a messenger from Helen Nguyen, as she had so subtly insinuated she might be the other night at Didi’s house. And Helen Nguyen had just handed Li her own personalized, customized dumb blonde in a red Ferrari.

She wanted it. She couldn’t deny that. She wanted the power. She wanted the independence. She wanted the sense of setting her own course in life rather than being dragged along in Cohen’s wake. She wanted the ego-gratifying feeling that she mattered: that she was one of the rough men who stood ready to wreak violence so the good people of the world could sleep peacefully in their beds at night. And, yes, she wanted the adrenaline and the danger. She wanted the life, when you really came down to it.

But she knew exactly what Cohen would have to say about all this, when she eventually got around to telling him. Which she would. Eventually.

What she didn’t know was where that left the two of them.

She met Ash’s eyes. The other woman was watching her as intently as a cat tracking a songbird’s erratic progress toward its claws.

“Very poetic.” Li’s voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “Is Helen offering a main course after the entrée of worn-out clichés?”

“She said to tell you that there’s a proposal on her desk to allow individually cleared genetic constructs to work for the Security Council on an independent contractor basis. It would be done quietly, administratively. Without a General Assembly vote. But the effect would be the same: You’d be a Peacekeeper again, without an official commission, of course, but with everything else. Everything. She’s ready to bring you all the way in. You just need to give the nod and let us know you’re ready to come back.”

“And Cohen?” Li asked. “Is Nguyen warming a pair of slippers by the fire for him too?”

Ash shrugged. “I find it hard to believe that you’re really that happy with him. If it is a him. I mean…what are you exactly? His mistress? His bodyguard? His pet?”

But Li couldn’t answer that question, even though she’d been asking it of herself on and off for the last three years.

“Seriously,” Ash pursued. “What’s it like being part of…that?”

Li shrugged. Inarticulate in the best of circumstances, she truly had no words to describe the twists and turns and myriad contradictions of life on the intraface. And whatever words she might have put together over the course of the last three years had long ago dried up in the face of the obsessive hunger that every spinfeed reader on the Ring and beyond seemed to have for the most minute details of Cohen’s life, sexual and otherwise.

“He’s not just one person.” Was she actually about to talk to Ash about something she’d never talked about to anyone, including Cohen himself? Maybe it was just the sheer relief of dealing with someone who couldn’t reach into your head and rip the thoughts out of it before you had time to decide if you even wanted to share them or not. “He’s a lot of people. And…you kind of agree to pretend that there’s this single, identifiable, permanent person there. Just like you agree to pretend that that person doesn’t change every time he associates another network or autonomous agent. And after a while you start to wonder about yourself. If you’re just one person or many. If you ever really knew who that person was, and whether it’s really that simple for anyone.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“No. Well, not most of the time. But you wonder sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m becoming a new species. Like…there’s a line somewhere where posthuman gets so far away from human that it needs a new name.” And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the first person to cross that line.

Night had fallen while they were talking, and the shofar was already blowing in some nearby synagogue. Christ, what a dismal noise! Ten days of it were going to be enough to drive Li well near crazy.

“Maybe the next ten days would be a good time to do a little Arithmetic of the Soul,” Ash suggested.

“According to the Interfaithers,” Li pointed out, “I don’t have a soul.”

Ash shrugged and began moving around the room, retrieving scattered toys and tossing them into a bin in the corner. “Don’t think the Interfaithers are that simple, Li.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled. “No one’s that simple.”

Ash turned to face her, the seriousness of her expression at odds with the purple plush stegosaurus clutched against her midriff. “Remember what you said about killing being personal? You were right. But this is personal too.”

Li waited.

“You were the general’s student. Her protegée. You hurt her deeply when you betrayed her. She’s giving you a chance to set things right now. To go back and remake past choices. Not many people get that kind of chance.”

“I’m grateful to her,” Li said. And in that moment, amazingly enough, she really was grateful. “But I did what I did on Compson’s World because I thought it was right.”

Ash twisted the stuffed toy in her hands in a gesture that was either unconscious or supremely skilled acting. For some unfathomable reason it reminded Li of that brief glimpse of the silver stretch marks on that otherwise flawlessly engineered body. “What about what you did on Gilead?”

Li’s shooting eye twitched, and she rubbed fiercely at it. It was intolerable, she thought angrily, to have her own body give her away like that.

“I don’t remember Gilead,” she told Ash. “Or are you the only person in UN space who didn’t tune in to the trial of the century?”

“Nguyen said to tell you she can get you the real feed. But only on the understanding that it’s for private consumption.”

In other words, it would be yet another in the long series of “real feeds,” none of which could be parity checked or authenticated. “Thanks, but I’ve already walked down that hall of mirrors.”

“She said you’d say that. But she said you’d still want it when you’d had a chance to cool down and think about it.”

Li was thinking all right.

She was thinking of a clear blue morning sky on Gilead, and the soft wet sound of wind in the trees after the night’s rain, and the way you could hear songbirds all the time there, twittering back and forth from treetop to treetop; but only once in a while would you suddenly catch a bright flash of feather in the corner of your eye, gone before you’d had a chance to know anything except that it was beautiful.

“Good shot,” said the voice that haunted her shredded memories.

It could have been her voice. But then so could the next one.

“Not good enough. Fuck. I must have missed his spine by a millimeter. What do we do with him?”

“Mecklin? You getting anything but static? How far back is battalion?”

“I still can’t raise them, Sarge…uh…sir. Far as I know, they still haven’t made it across the river.”

“Chaff?”

“No chaff, sir. They’re just not picking up the phone.”

“And we got, what…twenty-eight prisoners?”

“Twenty-nine if this one lives.” A fourth voice, whose name hovered annoyingly on the tip of Li’s tongue. “Six A’s. Twenty-two tacticals. All Aziz except for this one. Must be their SigInt officer. Jesus Christ, what a mess! How the fuck can he still be alive anyway?”

“What do we do now, Sarge? Tag ’em for pickup?”

“Can’t. Orders. Prisoner pickup has to be cleared at the battalion level.”

Li remembered that particular order. Or thought she did. Good sharp solid block of soft memory of some blowhard bird colonel standing in the drop ship’s cavernous briefing room yakking on about crèche production schedules, and the impossibility of getting a draft resolution through the General Assembly in the current political climate, and how this was a war of attrition in which the key to victory was “draining the bathtub” faster than the Syndicates could fill it up again. Her lawyers, even the ones Cohen hired after she fired the idiot UNSec assigned her, hadn’t been able to dig up a shred of evidence that the guy had ever existed, let alone been deployed to Gilead. And when it came to he-said-she-said, machine memory beat meat memory every time.

“So what are we supposed to do if we can’t raise battalion? Take them with us? Gonna be like herding fucking cats. And there’s only eight of us.”

“Seven. Pradesh didn’t make it up the hill.”

Long pause there. Pradesh had been well liked.

“Has the medtech gone back to check on him?”

“Medtech didn’t make it up the hill either.”

Which feed was Li’s? The captain’s? The sniper’s? Had she been giving the orders that morning or just following them? If it had ever been possible to know, then the full-court press UNSec had put on for her court-martial had muddied her decohering memories beyond any hope of recovery.

She could just have been the sniper, she told herself for something like the eight thousandth time. She’d dropped into Gilead as a sniper. It was the best way to go to war if you had the skill and nerves for the job. You sat up above the carnage, too far away even to smell it if you were lucky. You did your breathing exercises, and you kept your trigger finger warm, and you let yourself float into the cool blue readout-flooded world behind your glareproof goggles. And if you were well and truly fucked up you could even convince yourself for pretty long stretches of time that you were just playing a bootleg beta release of a really kick-ass video game.

As long as the killing didn’t bother you.

Except that after a while the fact that the killing didn’t bother you started to bother you.

The shofar blew again. Li jumped as if someone had set off the air-raid sirens.

“You understand,” Ash said, “that this offer is off if you tell Cohen about it.”

“I guessed as much.”

Li knew what was supposed to happen next. Hell, she could have scripted the next scene single-handedly. She was supposed to protest that she couldn’t lie to Cohen. Ash was supposed to offer her justifications, excuses, and ultimately money. Li was supposed to say that the money didn’t matter, that it was a matter of principle. Then Ash was supposed to ask her to think about it, just think about it. Whereupon Li would agree. Reluctantly. Because of course she was almost completely entirely sure that she was going to have to say no…

All hypocritical nonsense when they both knew that everyone took the fall eventually.

And the money.

It was amazing how no one ever, ever, ever turned down the money.

“Fine,” Li said. “How long do I have to think about it?”

“As long as you want,” Ash said.

She offered the lie so sweetly that it was almost believable.

As Li stepped into the wet street, she almost collided with an old man hurrying home or to synagogue or to wherever normal people went on the last night of the year in Jerusalem.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” he said, bowing and touching a withered hand to his hat brim.

He couldn’t see her face, she realized; the lobby was too bright behind her, the street too dark; and the fine drizzle scattered the electric lights into a misty halo around her head and shoulders.

She returned the gesture, instinctively turning her wrist to hide the fine gunmetal-gray tracery of her wire job.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” she repeated numbly.