Spin Control

THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS

The only thing Arkady ever remembered about being interrogated by Turner was the vomiting.

“Tell me again?” he kept asking Osnat over the course of the next several days and nights.

And she kept repeating to him again and again, with a patience that seemed touchingly out of character, how they’d flown to Tel Aviv and landed on the roof of GolaniTech’s corporate headquarters in the research park over near the university’s science campus—surely he remembered all the grass? And the “little pipes coming out of the ground” (his words) which were called sprinklers and from which the Israelis actually threw water away every night.

Ash had come out to meet them herself. She’d been very nice, very polite. She’d apologized for the inconvenience, warned about possible side effects, which were supposed to be mild. And then she’d turned him over to Turner.

Arkady remembered none of it.

“Some of the talking drugs do mess with your memory. Supposedly the brain shuts down to protect itself, same as after a strong head blow. But nothing like this. Either you’re a lot more biochemically tweaked than the average UN construct, or it’s interfering with some prior conditioning.” She gave him a dark look. “That’s what Turner seemed to think. He got pretty steamed about it. Wanted to know what Korchow had done to you, and why.”

“Did I say?”

Osnat snorted. “You were a fucking zombie. If Korchow meant to rig you not to be able to talk under drugs, he did a pretty bang-up job of it. Maybe too bang-up. You don’t want to be drugproof, Arkady. Not in a world this fucking full of mean people.”

This sort of pronouncement was part and parcel of Osnat’s new attitude toward Arkady, which seemed to be best summed up by the proposition that he was in need of some seriously fierce mothering whether he wanted it or not.

He knew it didn’t mean anything. He knew that Osnat and Moshe were running a good cop bad cop act on him. But it still worked. And he couldn’t stop it from working. In the absence of any other alternative, even a friendship founded on lies is better than solitude.

And in the meantime Arkady’s sense of isolation was broadening and deepening. Raised in the close-knit world of the Syndicates, he had never truly had to come to terms with solitude. Days passed during which he felt no point of contact with the world of living, thinking, feeling beings outside his prison cell, as if his skin were tens of thousands of kilometers wide and he was gazing at them across a Green Line of the heart that no touch, no words, no feeling could penetrate.

“So. Arkady. Answer a personal question for me.”

They were sitting in Arkady’s little cell over the remains of the two dinner trays Osnat had brought in from wherever the food came from. Osnat had taken to eating at least one meal a day with him most days. Again, Arkady knew it was part of a calculated plan to win his trust. And, again, it didn’t matter; it worked anyway. He was too lonely for it not to work.

“Those Syndicate spins. I got dragged to one a few months ago, never mind how. The Time of Cruel Miracles.”

“You saw The Time of Cruel Miracles? Where—”

“At the Castro. They always show Syndicate flicks there. ’Cause you people are all…well, never mind, that’s not the point. My question is this: Is that spin considered art?”

“Uh…well, not the spin necessarily. But it was based on a famous novel by Rumi.”

Osnat’s brows knit in confusion. “Rumi with an R? I’ve never heard of R’s. How many series do you have, anyway?”

“No, no. It’s a pen name. Rumi was a KnowlesSyndicate A. From the same series as Andrej Korchow, actually. That whole series can be…um…odd. Anyway, he was mostly a poet, but he wrote one famous novel. And the spin you saw is a very sensationalistic and simplistic version of that novel.”

“Commercial, you mean.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know that term.”

“Popular.”

“Well, it certainly was popular.”

“So. At the end of the spin the hero and his lover kill themselves, right?”

“Right.”

“And the friend I went to see it with said that always happens in Syndicate spins. The heroes start out fighting with each other, and then they fall in love, and then they have a lovers’ suicide pact and kill themselves.”

That was selling Rumi’s novel a bit short, Arkady thought. But he had to admit that it sounded like a pretty fair rendering of the average run of Syndicate movies.

“So my question,” Osnat said, “is why? Why do they always kill themselves? Why do you people like watching that stuff?”

“Well, it sounds like some humans like watching it too,” he countered. “Why don’t you ask them why?”

She gave him an impatient glare. “They like it because you’d have to be either blind or dead not to enjoy watching that Ahmed Aziz fellow take his clothes off.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Arkady said wryly. “He’s not my type.”

Osnat forged on, missing the joke entirely. “My question is why do you watch it? Do you people get off on watching snuff flicks? Or is it some kind of government propaganda designed to convince you that”—her voice dropped into a really quite respectable imitation of the Ahmeds’ masculine tones—“the collective good is a more beautiful ideal than the futile search for selfish individual happiness?”

“There are plenty of human love stories that end that way,” Arkady protested. “Just think of Romeo and Juliet.”

“Yeah, but the point of Romeo and Juliet was that their families’ vendetta was stupid and pointless and they should have just let the young people be happy.”

“Was it? I don’t recall Shakespeare ever saying that.”

“Don’t be a smartass. It doesn’t change the point that if you ever do get back to your precious Arkasha, the best you can hope for is another twenty years of separation before—assuming you’re good and neither of you pisses anyone off and you both get citizenship—your steering committee might maybe, just maybe, give you permission to be together.”

“You make it sound so…bleak.”

“Do I?” She smirked. “I don’t recall my ever saying that.”

“Thirty-year contracts and temporary workpairings aren’t about some family squabble over the means of genetic production, Osnat. We’re not fighting for a bigger share of the genomic pie. We’re fighting for survival as a species. You people are always complaining about living in the ruins of a broken planet. Well, we don’t even have ruins. We’re out in space without a lifeboat. Every crèche run, every piece of genetic design, every terraforming mission—and yes, even culling and renormalization—is dictated by the cold equations of survival and extinction. And one moment of carelessness or selfishness could be all it takes to tip the balance toward extinction. You can make a face if you want to, but that’s the reality. And, frankly, what does humanity have to put against it? Chaos. Bickering, rutting, selfish, maladaptive cha—”

“Whoa, Arkady!” Osnat interrupted. At first he thought she was angry, but then he realized she was trying not to laugh. “I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.”

“Come on, Arkady. I got clearance to take you for a little walk. Told Moshe you were going to die of vitamin D deficiency if he didn’t let you out in the sun sooner or later.”

Arkady, spliced for survival in space, was perfectly capable of synthesizing his own vitamin D; but he thought about Osnat’s peculiarly human prudishness about genetic engineering and decided that an unnecessary walk would probably hurt him less than another argument with the only sentient being currently on speaking terms with him.

Osnat’s “little walk” turned out to be a bit more than he’d bargained for.

Arkady had always enjoyed being planetside until then—a notable, though highly adaptive, deviation from the stationer’s agoraphobia that was becoming increasingly widespread among the younger cohorts of most Syndicates’ crèches. But the deep, dense undergrowth of the temperate zones of Gilead and Novalis had done nothing to prepare him for the environment into which Osnat introduced him.

He was amazed by the cold, first of all. He’d known, of course, about the ice age; but somehow he’d still imagined that a desert would be hot. He certainly hadn’t expected the dusting of snow that chilled his feet and clotted in the treads of his boot soles.

Nor had he expected the inhabitedness of the landscape. Nothing on Earth was pristine, it turned out; what he took for granted on Gilead or any of the other new and still-empty planets he’d worked on was long gone even in this desolate place. At every dip and turn of the land they would stumble on some artifact of the desert’s former population. Junked cars. Rusting water tanks. Coils of barbed wire still draped between the leftover bones of old fences. An entire apartment complex, built of rebar-reinforced concrete and sheathed in now-peeling white stucco, abandoned so abruptly that there were still faded shreds of laundry hanging from the windows like flags put out to celebrate a victory that had never, in the end, come to pass.

“Is this Israeli or Palestinian?” Arkady asked.

“Could be either. They’ve changed the lines so often that settlements are always getting stranded on the wrong side.”

“And no one moves in after the settlers leave?”

Osnat shrugged. “Israelis don’t want to live in Arab houses. Palestinians don’t want to live in Jewish houses. And anyway, it’s cheaper to build new.”

“It always comes back to money with humans, doesn’t it?”

Osnat laughed bitterly. “If only it did! Money’s nice and clean and simple compared to most of what goes on down here.”

They saw only one sign among the wreckage of present human occupation: a vast dusty herd of sheep swirling in the bottom of a wadi like a spring flood. To Arkady, station-raised, the sight was inconceivable. How much biomass did these creatures consume? What kind of organic load did they place on the ecosystem that supported them? What king’s ransom of water did they consume every day? How many accumulated tons of grass, insects, and annelids were necessary to allow for the extravagance of a single sheep? And for what? A scrap of wool? A bit of meat that could be produced more quickly and cheaply in the most primitive viral manufacturing tanks? It was enough to make him long for the elegant economy of a worm.

Long after he’d stopped wondering if there was any purpose to the forced march Osnat was leading him on, they topped a steep mesa and looked out over a flat valley that contained what appeared, at first glance, to be a remote desert town. It was empty, however. And as they dropped off the ridge and moved down the single silent street, Arkady began to understand that it had never really been a town at all. The buildings were all made of whitewashed cement block, and their walls were massively scarred with bullet holes. But there were no shards of broken glass anywhere—because none of the buildings had ever had windows. And the yellow dust of the desert and the khamsin had drifted through the open doors and windows to pile up in the corners of dark, warrenlike rooms that had clearly never been finished for human habitation.

The place was like the rough draft of a town. An idea of a town, in which a very real battle—or perhaps many of them—had been fought.

“What is this place?” he asked, shivering.

“Hell town.”

“What was it for?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Osnat?”

“What?”

“Could we…can we talk about what we talked about the other day? You know, about that friend of mine I was telling you about?”

“And why the hell should I do that?” she asked.

“I just thought—”

“You just thought nothing,” she snapped. “If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to Moshe. I’m not in the business of doling out charity or letting people cry on my shoulder.”

She pulled off her jacket, moving with rough irritable gestures, as if annoyance had pushed her body temperature above acceptable limits. And then she did something that set Arkady’s pulse racing with hope and terror. With her right hand, partially shielded by the camouflage swirl of her coat, she pointed skyward.

It was a momentary gesture, gone so quickly that if Arkady’s eyes hadn’t been sharpened by the fear and tension of the past weeks, he would have missed it entirely. But its meaning was unmistakable: they were being watched.

A shadow, no more than the shadow of a passing sparrow, flitted across the rocky ground. High in the sky something flashed silver in the morning sunlight. A surveillance drone. Had it been there on their prior walks? Yes, he realized; he’d noticed it but assumed it was just a passing shuttle or a satellite in low orbit. Who could possibly pay attention to all the scrap metal humans had chucked into orbit around their planet?

He dissembled, scrambling to pick up the conversation where it had faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to imply that I was asking you for something. I just…wanted to thank you for what you’ve done so far.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“But you have. The books. The walks. I…I appreciate it. You’re a gracious person.”

The sunburned forehead wrinkled in bemusement, and she cocked her head again to get a better look at him. “Well! That’s sure as fuck the first time I’ve ever been called gracious!”

Carefully, trying not to be too obvious about it, Arkady looked in the direction he thought she’d been pointing.

A house—or rather, a nonhouse—just like the others along the street. He went into it. Osnat followed him.

Inside, in the dark, she prowled around him like a cat. She was in a hurry, he realized. And she was trembling with nerves or fear—a thing that scared him as much as anything in the past weeks had scared him.

“Did you mean what you said the other day about being willing to stick your neck out to save this friend of yours?”

“Yes.” Arkady had to crane his neck to keep track of her.

She prowled back toward the door, and reached a hand up to twitch away the curtain. “Are you sure? You’d better be sure. Because I’m about to throw out a lifeline. And if I throw it to the wrong person, we’re both going to get our teeth kicked in.”

Why did Arkady suddenly have the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just, for the first time in his life, heard the phrase “get our teeth kicked in” used as a euphemism?

“What—who are you going to go to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I’m just going to send up a flare and whoever shows up shows up. But you’d better be damned sure, Arkady. You can’t put the bullet back in the gun once you’ve pulled the trigger.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’d better be able to keep your mouth shut until I tell you not to. I know you can do it. I watched you do it at GolaniTech. You willing to do it for me if I help you?”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Okay. Good enough.” The whisper of cloth on stone. Scuff of her boots in the dust. “You ever heard of the Mossad, Arkady?”

“Of course.”

“Moshe and I used to work for them.”

“But I thought—”

“They recruit out of the IDF. First pick of the litter, so to speak. We were both Sayeret Golani. Commandos. What you’d call tacticals. Didi Halevy tapped us after officers’ school.

“We went through training together. There were a hundred and thirty in our incoming class.” Pride sharpened her normally husky voice. “A hundred and thirty chosen out of over two thousand. And Didi Halevy told us”—her voice shifted into a schoolmasterish tone that Arkady assumed must be an imitation of Halevy’s voice—“We have no quotas. We take only those who we think can do the job. And if the best of you can’t do the job, then we won’t take any of you.” She looked at Arkady, dropping back into her own, rougher voice. “They took three out of our class, and even after that we had two years of training, living in one room, eating reheated garbage, only getting to visit our families twice a year. Me, Moshe…and a boy named Gur who you never met and never will because Gavi Shehadeh got him killed.”

“Is that why you’re so loyal to Moshe?”

“You think it’s a bad reason?” She coughed, took a step toward the door, turned around again, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I went back to my home unit after Tel Aviv. And then when it was time to re-up, I signed on with GolaniTech instead. Which hasn’t exactly been…well, never mind what it has or hasn’t been. I chose it, and I’m not going to whine about it. The point is, someone I know from King Saul Boulevard came to me a few months ago and asked me to keep my eyes open and, uh…let him know if I saw anything fishy going on at GolaniTech. I thought it was crazy. Reamed the guy out, actually. Told him Moshe wouldn’t be messed up in anything like that and he’d better tell the eighth floor to mind their own fucking business and clean up their own house.” She licked her lips. “Then you showed up.”

“Why are you telling me this, Osnat?”

“Remember what you told me about wanting to help your friend? I’m putting it to the test. Basically I’m handing you a loaded gun. If you want to pull the trigger on it, I’m dead. If you don’t pull the trigger…then I’ll do my best to help you. And your friend.”

“What changed your mind?” Arkady asked. “Was it something I said to Turner?”

Osnat turned back to face him, a stark silhouette against the backdrop of silver clouds, dust-gray desert. “You know damn well what it was.”

He shook his head no.

“Bella. Bella and her so-called sickness. That’s not a genetic weapon, Arkady. That’s Armageddon. And if Moshe were really working in Israel’s best interests, he would have sent you back to Korchow in a body bag the second he figured out what you were selling.”