Spin Control

A UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR OF COMBAT

The machine wouldn’t tell them where it was taking them.

It met them alone, without the terrifying woman who Arkady still instinctively thought of not as Catherine Li, but as the Butcher of Gilead. But Arkady’s relief at Li’s absence faded as Cohen led them out of the prosperous modern section of Jerusalem and into the bombed-out tangle of empty streets that tumbled down toward the thickness of the Line.

Osnat followed the AI with a docility that Arkady found more frightening than her usual stubbornness. Her eyes flickered restlessly over the passing house fronts and alleyways, but she gave no other sign of being aware of possible danger. Arkady would have liked to believe that it was because she knew they were protected, but he suspected it was because she’d decided that any dangers out there couldn’t be dealt with and would have to be accepted.

Finally, they turned into an empty street whose houses—not all of them empty by any means—bore the blaring orange biohazard signs that Arkady had come to recognize as the emblem of the poisoned border between Israel and Palestine.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Arkady whispered to Osnat.

“Too late for that, boychik.”

Something clanked softly, metal on metal, in the shadowy interior of one of the abandoned houses they’d just passed. “Don’t move,” said a woman’s voice from the shadows. “You’re perfect just where you are.”

“Son of a bitch,” Osnat muttered.

The machine shrugged apologetically. “It wasn’t my idea.”

More noises came from inside the house, and from two of the houses on the other side of the empty street. Osnat stood stock-still, her hands held stiffly out away from her body, in plain sight, with the palms showing and the fingers open. On reflection, Arkady decided that it might be a good idea to do the same.

The voice that had spoken out of the shadows had almost certainly been Catherine Li’s, but none of the half dozen hard young bodies that emerged from the surrounding houses was hers.

They were soldiers, but there was something disorientingly drab and ragtag-looking about them, even by Israeli standards. Their uniforms looked at first glance as if they’d been torn and roughly patched. It took a few puzzled minutes for Arkady to work out that the “patches” were tape, and the tape was strategically located to cover all unit insignia.

“Hey, guys,” one of the secret soldiers said when he caught sight of Osnat. “It’s Hoffman! We bagged ourselves a tiger. Here, kitty kitty kitty!”

“Oh grow up,” Osnat snarled.

A second soldier came over to frisk Arkady. As the boy’s hands slid under his arms and along his rib cage, Arkady saw a flash of silver on the breast pocket of his uniform. He looked more closely and saw a small pin depicting a viciously curved saber blossoming from a pair of spread eagle’s wings.

“You forgot to tape over your pin thingy,” he said.

“What are you, IDF quality control? I ran out of fucking tape.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t even know what it means.” Not quite true; the paratroopers’ wings told Arkady he was dealing with commandos from one of Israel’s legendary Sayerets, or special units. But which unit this was he couldn’t have begun to say.

“It means I Love Mom,” the soldier quipped. “Now turn around and spread your legs, schlemiel.”

Arkady turned around obediently—and finally caught sight of Li.

There was something about her, even standing in the street doing nothing, that made the Israelis look like toy soldiers. She was dressed much as Osnat usually dressed: in nondescript standard-issue desert-drab gear that looked like it could have come out of any of the army surplus shops Arkady had passed while running Korchow’s little errands the other week. But somehow the mismatched odds and ends hung on her short stocky frame in a configuration that looked anything but haphazard.

Her short hair was pushed back under a pair of sniper’s goggles that must cover her entire face when she pulled them down. The elastic band that held the goggles to her head had once had white lettering on it, perhaps a manufacturer’s logo; it had been scribbled over with a laundry pen so that it was just a dull purple-brown overlay on the black elastic. Her trousers were stained and bagged out at the knees and a knee pad floated around one ankle. Her already-stocky body was encased in a ceramic vest. In addition to the handgun still strapped to her thigh where he’d seen it during that first meeting at the airport, she’d made two new additions to her armory: a long, black, viciously sleek sniper’s rifle and a brutal-looking sawed-off assault weapon with a flashlight duct-taped beneath its trigger guard.

Another person—most other people—would have looked ridiculous in this getup. Li didn’t. And when Arkady asked himself why, he couldn’t come up with a clear answer. Was it the well-worn, hard-used quality of the clothes and weapons? Was it the sense that every strap and buckle and piece of tape had been adjusted with cool precision by hands that had done the job of killing often enough to make it a matter of craft, rather than reflection? Or was it the bulldog set of her jaw and the glint of defiant enjoyment in her dark eyes?

“He’s clean,” the soldier told Li over Arkady’s shoulder as he finished searching him.

“Take him inside then.”

Arkady looked around for Cohen, but the AI was gone. He had a vague idea that he’d seen him fade back into one of the neighboring houses just after the troops had arrived on the scene. And he must have taken Osnat with him because she was nowhere to be seen either.

“Where did Cohen and Osnat go?” he asked Li. It was the first time he’d ever worked up the courage to speak directly to the woman.

She looked at him as if she’d just become aware of his existence and wasn’t particularly pleased by the discovery. “Cohen had to go take care of some things.”

Arkady jerked his head toward the empty houses and the no-man’s-land that he knew must lie just beyond them. “Is he…are we going out there?”

“Probably.”

“Are we going to be out there after dark?” Arkady asked, looking at her flashlight-equipped weapon.

She gave him a lazy smile. “You better hope not.”

Inside the building that seemed to be the unit’s impromptu headquarters, Arkady saw a dozen more soldiers, a tangle of wires and equipment, assorted ominous olive drab cases and boxes—and off in a corner together, bent over a monitor, Cohen and Osnat and a young man whose collar tabs said he was a captain.

Osnat had somehow acquired a ceramic-plated vest and helmet and one of the same snubbed-off flashlight-equipped weapons that Li and the others were all carrying.

“What about him?” Li flicked a thumb at Arkady. “You’re not going to send him in naked as a shelled oyster, are you?”

An awkward silence fell.

“Oh for God’s sake. Don’t tell me no one thought of it?”

“Well…uh…Avi’s about his size,” said a young woman with a first lieutenant’s bar on her collar. “Someone go get Avi.”

“Avi! Get the fuck over here!”

“I said go get him, not scream in my ear. God, kids these days!”

A tall slim soldier materialized from somewhere over Arkady’s left shoulder. Rough hands pushed him against the wall next to Arkady and squared them up next to each other. A brief argument ensued—no surprise in a country where argument appeared to be the national sport. Nonetheless, it was obvious that the willowy Avi was closer to Arkady’s space-born physique than anyone else in the unit.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Avi said when he figured out what was in the cards. “Not my vest! Take someone else’s vest! This isn’t some factory-issue piece of shit. My mother resewed all the inside pockets and—”

“Well,” Li pointed out in a deceptively mild voice, “if you’re really concerned, you could always come along with us and make sure nothing happens to it.”

“—and, uh, I’m sure she’d be overjoyed for Arkady here to have it. Really. Be my guest. My shit is your shit.”

The boy emptied the pockets of his vest into a bag someone held out for the purpose, removed various pieces of detachable gear and equipment, unfastened what seemed like an inconveniently large number of buckles and snaps and Velcro strips, and finally pulled the vest over his head and lowered it over Arkady’s head in one smooth and almost anticlimactic movement.

The vest dropped onto Arkady’s shoulders with a soft thud, giving off a smell that was a combination of its normal owner’s masculine, and thankfully relatively clean, odor, and the sharp smells of dirt and machine oil and the khamsin. “It’s so light,” he said wonderingly.

“We’ll see if you still think that in five hours.”

And indeed, as the straps were fastened and tugged tight around his body he could already feel the ceramic plates digging and chafing around the edges.

When the thing had been strapped tight enough to feel thoroughly uncomfortable, the lieutenant stepped back and gave him a measuring once-over. “Well, that ought to protect everything but your balls,” she said in a satisfied tone. “And I hear you guys don’t use those anyway, so what do you care? Move around for me, will you?”

Arkady moved. “It’s too tight,” he complained.

“Too tight is just right. As the general said to the whore.”

Arkady had no idea what that meant, but everyone else seemed to think it was hysterically funny.

A noncom snaked through the crowded room with what looked like a roll of lilac purple tape. “Line up, ladies. Color of the day.”

“God! Purple again? Who picks these colors, a vengeful homosexual field-training-school washout?”

“Hey it’s better than the hot pink. Remember the pink? Took me a month to peel that shit off.”

“Hey, guys,” drawled the next guy over, “didn’t your mother ever tell you not to look a gift Mat’Kal in the mouth?”

“And the real tragedy is that he thinks he’s funny!”

As Arkady watched, people began ripping off strips of the brightly colored tape and wrapping it around the grips of their assault rifles or sticking strips of it onto their vests and helmets.

“What’s the tape for?” he asked Osnat, who had reappeared beside him in full combat gear.

“Idiot-proofing.” She’d ripped a section off the roll when it passed them by and was taping her own weapon and vest. She eyeballed him for a minute, stuck a strip of tape across his vested chest and pressed it briskly into place. “The tactical AIs are programmed not to fire on anyone with the right color tape on.”

“But couldn’t someone just copy the tape? Or steal it?”

“Not that easy. It’s interactive, talks back and forth with the AIs’ sensors, and they change the colors every few patrols, mix them up between zones and so forth to try to stay ahead of infiltrators. Anyway, it’s not an absolute interdiction. It just kicks the AI into a different decision tree or something. It can still waste you if it wants to. And don’t forget that.” She gave him her fiercest look. “’Cause if you get yourself shot out there, I’m going to personally kick your ass!”

“Okay, I’m in,” Cohen said, emerging out of the hallucinatory visions of streamspace like a messenger from the afterlife.

“What does he mean?” Arkady whispered, leaning into Osnat to speak in her ear.

They were still in the abandoned house. Through the ragged window frames Arkady could see the house’s sagging back porch, the rich green slopes of Mount Herzl, the precise geometric lines of the tombs in the military cemetery, the tall trees of Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous Gentile. Mount Herzl was the heart of the Line, the thickest part of the thickness.

Arkady looked out over the dusty scrubland that separated them from the mountain and thought of the deadly tide of AI-controlled weaponry and human muscle patrolling its paths and riverbeds and crumbling roadways. He remembered the figures of tonnage of land mines buried on the Line per year and shuddered. It was hell. Hell masquerading as an earthly paradise. What sort of beings could evade the patrols and the trip wires long enough to live out there?

Down in the valley bottom a patrol—Israeli? Palestinian?—threaded its way along the riverbed, olive drab ghosts in an olive drab landscape. The wind shifted, and the thick cold smell of gun oil drifted up from the valley bottom.

The soldiers fell silent, watching. The patrol snaked down the valley bottom and vanished. A few minutes passed. Someone heaved a sigh. People around Arkady began to talk again, then to get up and move around and go back to the tasks they’d been engaged in before the patrol appeared.

Cohen stood up, stretching stiff muscles, and walked over to look down at Arkady, who was still crouched on the floor where Osnat had left him.

“How can they not see us?” Arkady asked.

“Because they’re not really here,” the machine explained. “They’re under full-immersion shunts, just like my bodies are. Each one is under the control of an Emergent AI operating in a three-dimensional game space that exactly mirrors the real Green Line.”

“Why?”

“Suicide.” The machine smiled. “And not the romantic kind that Syndicate novelists write about. An Emergent AI’s personality architecture is a lot brittler than the human variety. And Emergents don’t have the benefit of the human hypothalamic-limbic system to help them rationalize killing in wartime. They have to live with it in cold blood, so to speak. And a lot of them turned out not to want to do that. So now we tell them they’re just playing a game in streamspace.”

“And the AIs think the Palestinians are doing the same? I mean, they don’t know there are actual people on the other side of the gun?”

“Right.”

“And what happens if one of the AIs figures it out?”

“Bye-bye, little AI.”

“Oh.”

“Cheer up. That’s what’s going to get us through the Line safe and more or less sound. Because the game can’t look too realistic, of course. The gamespace in which the Emergents think they’re operating is only a simplified model of the real Green Line. And you know the old saying about how there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip? Well, we’re going to engineer a few slips between gamespace and realspace.”

The captain eyed Cohen from across the room. “You know what time it is, right?”

“If that’s a polite way of telling me to hurry up, then allow me to point out, equally politely, that your equipment stinks.”

“Tell it to the Knesset.”

“Nothing’s stopping you from buying it below the line.”

“Are you kidding me? What kind of putz buys legal equipment with below-the-line money? What the hell’s the point of having a covert ops budget if you waste it on stuff you’re allowed to have?”

Cohen snorted and went back to pecking at the keyboard and peering into the blue depths of the monitor.

Meanwhile the captain straightened up from the monitor and turned to face the room at large. “Listen up, everyone. From here on in we’re in the thickness of the Line and we’re flying below radar as far as IDF’s concerned. You know what that means. We do not want to be sending any nice young reservists home to their mothers in body bags today, so be bloody damn careful. But if it comes down to choosing who’s going to fill up a body bag, the State of Israel has a hell of a lot more invested in each of you than it does in any eighteen-year-old AI puppet. So act accordingly…and you can cry on my shoulder when we’re all safe at home again. That’s a promise.”

The tenor of activity in the abandoned house changed. One by one the soldiers around Arkady fell silent. The frenetic camaraderie gave way to a tense waiting alertness that reeked of approaching danger. “What’s happening?” he asked Osnat.

“Shh! They’re coming.”

It took Arkady another minute to hear what Li’s enhanced senses and the IDF monitors had told the others: the muffled clank and rustle of a fully equipped infantry squad on the move.

The soldiers on either side of Arkady were shrinking back against the wall, clutching their weapons to their chests. Osnat pulled him back toward the wall by one sleeve. “Get back, Arkady. Give them room.”

They waited. Fabric moved softly against fabric. Someone coughed. Cohen tapped sporadically at the old-fashioned keyboard in front of him, making frustrated faces. The sound of the approaching squad swelled and echoed down the empty street until Arkady began to feel that they must already have passed the open doorway before him—or that time had become stuck in an endlessly repeating loop in which the unseen force was arriving and arriving and never actually here.

“Safeties off,” the captain murmured. He looked sick to his stomach.

“NavMesh is initializing,” Cohen reported finally. “They’re checking the patrol waypoints against the terrain database and updating the blind data. Okay. Now they’re getting a modification to their SeekToViaNavMesh.”

The machine paused, watching some process unfurl in the virtual, and to Arkady unimaginable, world of streamspace. Then it shook its head in apparent exasperation.

“These people have an idea of surface and barrier architecture that the word baroque doesn’t even begin to cover! No wonder they patrol the Line on foot. If they sped up to a jog, they’d have to stop every other tick to wait for the next state-of-the-world update!”

The machine fell silent.

“You done yet, Cohen?” That was Li, somewhere across the room and out of sight.

“Yes. No. I think so.”

A bootheel scraped in the dust outside. A shadow flitted past the door, too fast for Arkady to have more than a vague sense of color and movement.

“They’re here,” someone whispered.

And they were.

The Enderbots took the house with a seamless and silent deliberation that was at least as terrifying as the cold competence of Syndicate-bred tacticals. One minute the center of the room was empty. The next an impassively staring trio of infantrymen was flowing smoothly into tactically optimal positions from which they were able to cover the entire room and its approaches. Their weapons were equipped with spintronic range finders: a pale beam that quivered through the dusty air and picked out precise blue circles that wandered over the faces and uniforms of the special forces soldiers. Several of the men around Arkady flinched when the beams touched them, but no one broke ranks.

“God,” someone said, “how the hell can they be so young?”

Arkady felt an almost instinctive urge to reach over and shut him up, but it was clear that the voice made no impression on the shunt-driven infantrymen. It was also clear that Cohen had succeeded in hacking NavMesh; the Enderbots, or Enders, as the Israelis called them, disregarded Arkady and the others as if they really had faded into the peeling woodwork of the old building.

“IDF’s talking about drafting sixteen-year-olds,” another soldier said, answering the first. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“I only read the funnies. And when did you become such a condescending asshole, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Will you two clowns shut up for once?”

“Why? They can’t hear us. Fucking Armageddon won’t wake the Enders up.”

Gradually, in orderly squads, the rest of the Enders shuffled in and formed up in the center of the room. Then they stopped, quite abruptly, and just stood there doing nothing.

“What are they waiting for?” Li asked impatiently.

“The SeekTo is air-gapped,” Cohen answered, still at the monitor. “Figuratively, not literally. But the patrol still can’t breach the line until a human operator checks the waypoints for blue-on-blue problems.”

“You’re fucking kidding me.”

The AI coughed delicately, then continued with the air of a man delivering slightly embarrassing news.

“There was a little incident along the India-Pakistan border a while ago. I, uh, jumped the gun. Only slightly. But humans have long memories for that sort of slip up.”

“What if there’s no human on-line to check EMET’s homework for it?”

“This is Earth,” Cohen pointed out. “There’s always a human around.”

No one spoke. The Enders waited for their clearance. Everyone else waited for the Enders.

“Jesus,” Li muttered. “Pakistan. Wherever that is. By the way, Cohen, is there anything on this planet you haven’t run?”

Cohen blinked, thought for a moment, then smiled beatifically. “Garbage collection.”

Another minute or two passed, the AI-controlled squad standing passively in the center of the room, the special forces soldiers squatting and sitting and standing along the bullet-scarred walls watching them.

“Okay,” Cohen said, “they’re cleared for insertion. Just another minute now.”

The Enders began to move again, and Arkady watched a surreal scene unfold around him: one squad of soldiers armed to the teeth and ready to go into a war zone, watching a second squad muster, check their weapons, and get ready to go into the same war zone…while the second squad walked around and stepped over their unseen shadows as if they were nothing more than dead stones.

One of the shunt-controlled soldiers was a slender blond girl who didn’t look a day above seventeen. She crouched down a mere arm’s length away from Arkady and began checking her weapon and ammunition clips with smooth precise inhuman movements. She didn’t even have to look at the gun to complete the task; her blue eyes stared blankly at the wall just over their shoulders.

“Fuckable?” asked the soldier next to Arkady in a conversational tone.

“Oh yeah,” his neighbor breathed in a tone approaching reverence.

“Has anyone ever mentioned what losers you guys are?” Osnat said.

They ignored her.

“Hey, beautiful,” the first soldier murmured to the girl. “It’s a big bad world out there. What are you doing playing the Green Line lottery? Why don’t you just stay here and let me make pretty babies with you?” And then, to Arkady’s stunned disbelief, he reached out and brushed the back of his hand down the girl’s cheek.

Arkady heard Osnat curse under her breath. He froze, waiting. The girl shook her head slightly, as if a fly had landed on her skin. Then she finished prepping her rifle and moved silently over to join the little clot of soldiers mustering by the back door.

Arkady sighed in relief. “Why are they called Enders?” he asked the soldier who had caressed the girl.

“’Cause they’re cannon fodder.” The boy’s tone suggested that he was stating the obvious. “Enders. ’Cause they’ve hit the end of the line. Get it?”

“No,” his companion argued. “It’s ’cause they end you. You fuck with them, you’re dead, end of story.”

“You people,” Osnat announced in a tone of profound disgust, “are submoronic illiterates.”

Another few minutes and the Enders were mustered and ready to move out. The commandos slipped into their streamspace shadow, and suddenly everyone was moving out, and Arkady was being dragged along behind Osnat into the heart of a no-man’s-land that he was starting to realize was anything but empty.

Operations in the thickness of the Line turned out to mostly involve sitting around waiting.

They would move forward, agonizingly slowly, trying to stay within the Enders’ data fusion shadow. The Enders would stop—even with his experience of the AzizSyndicate tacticals, Arkady found their abrupt, silent changes of speed and direction unnerving—and everyone else would stop too. Then they would wait. For a few minutes usually. For half an hour or forty minutes. Once for a full hour and a quarter. And then some invisible nonevent would happen in streamspace, and the Enders would move off again, and off they’d all go like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

At one point they stumbled into the outer penumbra of a Palestinian artillery barrage. The Enders appeared entirely unmoved by the awesome spectacle; they simply coalesced in a nearby shell crater and took cover as if having the earth ripped apart just in front of their feet were no more alarming than spotting a rain cloud on the horizon.

The commandos huddled together in the closest available crater, unfortunately a wet one. They looked only slightly more concerned than the Enderbots, but they kept up a running commentary of flagrantly indecent summations of their current comfort level that had even Li grinning.

“Don’t worry.” Cohen leaned over to shout in Arkady’s ear between two blasts big enough to make the ground ripple under their feet. “The Palestinian Army is a highly professional organization. They have a firm grasp on how to keep the voting public scared and pliable with minimum waste of trained soldiers on both sides. As long as they’re actually trying to hit us we’re perfectly safe. Of course the fact that they don’t actually know we’re here may complicate matters somewhat.”

Arkady looked nervously toward Osnat, trying to gauge whether this was a joke. “Do the, ah…Palestinians fire into the Line often?”

“It goes up and down. At the moment we’re in a pretty hot-and-heavy phase.”

“And the only thing standing between them and the Israelis is the French Foreign Legion?” Arkady said doubtfully. “Why would anyone take that job?”

“Because they’re French,” Osnat said.

“Because they’re idiots,” Cohen said.

“Because they’re the Legion,” Li said. “Ever heard of Camerone?”

Arkady shook his head.

She leaned forward, warming to her subject, and told him the story in a series of rapid-fire, chewed-off half sentences that sounded like they’d been forged on the battlefield.

It had happened on a planet called Mexico. Or in a country called Mexico. Arkady couldn’t tell which from the way Li described it. A battalion of Legionnaires led by the already infamous Colonel Danjou was escorting a supply train when they were attacked by three Mexican battalions. The French retreated to the Hacienda Camerone (“No, Arkady, I don’t know how a hacienda is different from a house. It’s not mission-critical. Let it slide.”) and set up a perimeter around the courtyard of the hacienda under heavy sniper fire. At 9:00 A.M. on the morning of the battle, the Mexican commander offered terms of surrender, which were refused.

Several mixed cavalry and infantry charges were bloodily repelled. But the defenders took deep losses in each of the failed assaults, and Colonel Danjou, fearing for his men’s resolve, gathered them in the hacienda’s courtyard and made them swear on his wooden hand—memento of past battles—that they would fight through to death or victory.

Danjou fell to a sniper’s bullet moments later. His second-in-command died in the afternoon, and by evening the former battalion was being commanded by a second lieutenant named Maudet.

At 6:00 P.M. Maudet and the last four defenders exhausted their ammunition, fixed their bayonets, and charged the Mexican lines. Three of them survived the charge.

The Mexican commander demanded their surrender, and they sent his messenger back across the lines with the message that they would rather die than give up their arms, their flag, or the body of their slain colonel. The messenger relayed the response to the Mexican commander, who then uttered one of the most famous phrases in all of military history: “These are not men. These are devils.”

The next day the three survivors were escorted across the lines, their honor and arms intact and their slain commander’s body on their shoulders. “They took Colonel Danjou’s wooden hand with them,” Li finished, holding up her own left hand, palm forward, so that Arkady could see the bruise-blue outline of her Schengen implant and the silver tracery of ceramsteel. “It was escorted to the Legion’s mother house in Sidi el Abbès with the highest honors, and ever since then Danjou’s hand has been the symbol of the Legion’s code: Never surrender.”

“It wasn’t quite that glorious,” Cohen corrected. “But who’s quibbling? Danjou’s worm-ridden hand remains the shining symbol of the Legion’s august tradition of getting into the military equivalent of stupid barroom brawls and laying down your soldiers’ lives for no damned decent reason.”

“Scoff all you want, Cohen. You know as well as I do that Jerusalem would be in a state of outright all-out civil war if the Peacekeepers were occupying it. The only people worse at Peacekeeping than the Peacekeepers are the fucking Americans.”

“Well at least the Americans have the brains to brag about their victories instead of their suicide missions.”

“The Legion completed its mission in Camerone,” Li protested.

“Thereby allowing the French army to fight on in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in order to prop up a hereditary puppet king and save the Mexican people from the grim prospect of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Excuse me. I’m getting all choked up just thinking about it.”

“Ignore the caviar communist commentary,” Li told Arkady. “The point is that the Legion held out to the death, then went down fighting.”

“The point, Arkady, is that Catherine here has a little thing for pointless suicide missions.”

The soldiers all around them were up on their feet now, peering after the Enders in the next shell crater over, gathering their gear and stowing water bottles and nonstandard-issue candy bars.

“If you two are done sniping at each other,” Osnat interrupted, “would you mind terribly if we got our shit together and got the fuck out of here before your friends leave us behind?”

After that things got vague.

Arkady remembered passing reel after reel of the indestructible obsolete fiber optics that littered half the Judean desert. He remembered an entire field of school buses, standing snout to tail, their doors flapping open as if they were still waiting to transport a generation of children who had never shown up for school. He remembered passing through a village whose inhabitants gathered in the dark doors of their hovels to watch the Enders jangle by, and whose hostile faces could have been Jewish or Palestinian or anything in between.

They spent most of the night in another flooded-out crater.

“Know much about cannibalism?” Li asked him sometime well after darkness had fallen.

Even she was lying down by then, though she was still smoking another in her endless succession of cigarettes. How she managed to smoke lying down like that and not end up buried in a mountain of cigarette ash was a mystery to Arkady.

“Uh…no.”

“Some bright bulb did a statistical study of space wrecks. You know, the classic scenario: twenty people stranded in a life pod, food and air for thirty days, going to take ninety for the SOS to ping to the nearest BE relay and back. So who are the eaters, and who are the eatees? No pun intended. Turns out that you can predict who’s going to eat and who’s going to get eaten pretty reliably. Even when they draw straws, believe it or not. Able-bodied human males come last. They don’t generally start eating each other until they’ve run out of everyone else. Before that they go through the human women and children. And before they start on the lesser humans, they eat the posthumans. And before they eat the posthumans, they eat the constructs.”

“That’s sick.”

“Don’t be a cynic, Arkady. It used to be worse. Used to be they’d eat all the blacks and Asians before the first white woman got cooked. Now it’s ladies first regardless of incidentals like skin color. That’s what we in the UN call progress, Arkady. Anyway, here’s the real question: The guy who did the study only assumed one kind of construct. He didn’t take the Syndicates into account. So my question, Arkady, is: When the food runs out which one of us do you think these clowns’ll eat first?”

Morning found the squad on the banks of the river looking up the long slope of Mount Herzl past the IDF military cemetery.

They had penetrated into the Line’s dead heart: a no-man’s-land that no army was willing to defend, a place of ghosts where last summer’s oranges lay uneaten beneath the trees and the grass around the graves grew waist high. They might have been on Novalis, the world lay so still and quiet around them.

Li and Osnat were hunched over a map-fiche with the Israeli captain. Arkady was sitting with Cohen, who didn’t seem to have any more interest in the proceedings than he did. When the women finally came away from the map, Osnat had a sullen look on her face and was fiddling with the trigger guard of her weapon in a way that made Arkady’s stomach curl.

“You asked for help,” the AI told Osnat.

“Not from a Palestinian traitor!”

“Half-Palestinian,” Cohen corrected blandly.

Osnat fingered her weapon again. None of the Israelis seemed to register the movement; but suddenly, and without ever seeming to have moved at all, Li was standing right next to Osnat, her hand on the other woman’s trigger hand. The touch looked light, almost casual. But in fact Osnat’s fingers were turning white with the pressure of the other woman’s grip. Slowly, as if everything were happening under running water, the rifle slipped from Osnat’s grasp and slithered down her side until it hit the end of its webbed sling.

“We’re fine,” Cohen assured the Israeli captain. And, ever so gently, he lifted the rifle away from Osnat’s side, removed the ammunition clip, and pocketed it.

Osnat turned to the captain for support, but he was studiously inspecting the slime that had accumulated on his boots during the river crossing.

“You know the road home,” Li said in the take-it-or-leave-it tone Arkady was beginning to think expressed some core component of her emotional architecture. “You want to turn around, this’d be the time to do it.”

“And Arkady?”

“What do you think?”

There was a lot more walking after that. It was all uphill, and most of it was through the tall grass and tangled weeds of the vast IDF cemetery. Arkady, his mind slack with exhaustion, only noticed that the others had stopped walking when they were face-to-face with the tall iron gates of Yad Vashem.

Li reached out and gave the latch a brisk shake. It held, and when Arkady looked closer he could see why: someone had wrapped a heavy chain through the bars and closed it with a thick-hasped padlock.

Li glanced at Cohen, and again Arkady had that eerie sense that some communication the others couldn’t hear was passing between them.

“Well, have you actually talked to him yet?” Li asked aloud.

Cohen seemed to gather himself to argue, but then the shunt’s shoulders dropped slightly. “No. But he’ll be here. Where else would he be?”

Li snorted. “It’s not whether he’s here I’m worried about. It’s whether he wants to come out and talk to us.”

“There’s no wall,” Osnat pointed out. “We can just go around the gate if we want.”

“Bad idea.” Li strolled back down the road, pried a loose piece up from the decaying asphalt, and tossed it into the trees to one side of the gate. It arced lazily through the air—and then vanished in a cloud of vapor as it passed some invisible boundary. “I’ve been wanting to lose weight,” she quipped. “But not that much.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For him to realize that we’re not going away until he comes down to talk to us.”

It took nearly an hour before a distant and wavering figure appeared at the top of the long tree-lined avenue leading down to the gates. At first Arkady thought he was watching a machine or a monster. The being seemed to have many legs, and it rippled and moved with a sideways motion that he could make no sense of. As the figure descended the hill toward them, the wavering shape resolved itself into two shapes: a man, tall and supple and graceful, with a dog following at his heels. The late-afternoon sun gilded the man’s head with fire and flickered around his feet in a way that only made sense when Arkady realized that the man was wearing shorts—and that his right leg below the knee wasn’t flesh at all, but a delicate architecture of ceramsteel and silvery neuromuscular thread.

Man and dog continued their unhurried progress down the hill until they finally reached the gate. The man looked out through the bars at them, but he made no move to open the padlock that hung from the iron latch. He was smaller than Arkady had thought he would be; not a big man at all, but built so straight and true that he seemed tall until you stood next to him. The expression on his face was calm, mildly interested, completely noncommittal. The face itself was one of those brown-skinned, strong-nosed, finely hewn faces that were equally common among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews. The man’s only really remarkable feature, Arkady decided, were his black eyes. And those were as deep as the dark between the stars.

The dog poked her sharp nose through the gate, growling anxiously. The man laid a calming hand on her. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“It’s me,” Cohen said. “Cohen. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Sorry. I’ve gotten rather bad about checking my mail lately.”

“Well, I’ll give you the executive summary: we’re here.”

“So I see.” The bottomless eyes touched on Cohen, then Osnat, then Li and Arkady, then returned to Osnat for a pensive moment.

“Hello, Osnat.”

Osnat nodded curtly.

“Are you going to let us in?” Cohen asked.

“The thing is…I don’t exactly have the key at the moment.”

“You lost it?”

“I never lose things.” A self-deprecating smile lit the thin face and warmed the dark eyes. It occurred to Arkady that people would lay their lives down for this man. “I just put them down. And then I put other things on top of them. I figured that when I remembered what I’d put on top of the key, that would be soon enough to open the gate again. But now here you are standing on my doorstep and accusing me of losing things! I ask you, is there no justice in the world?”

He pulled what looked like a tiny nail file out of his pocket, and bent over the heavy padlock securing the gate. In a matter of seconds the lock fell open and the chains rattled to the ground. The gate opened stiffly, then stuck. They had to slide through the narrow gap one by one, taking care not to get caught on the ornate iron thorns that sprang from the bars.

“I take it the key’s been under something for a while?” Cohen asked as he squeezed through.

The man smiled again, and Arkady finally put his finger on what it was that was so entrancing about the expression. It was the smile of a child, open and vulnerable. Or rather it was the smile of an adult who had somehow managed to remain childlike. It made you feel that you were looking at a person who had been wounded by the world but not diminished by it.

The dog, meanwhile, was sniffing at their knees and ankles, whining under her breath, glancing back at her master, putting her body between him and the as-yet-unknown arrivals. He quieted her with a murmured word. She brightened, and her frothy tail began to wave hopefully.

“What a beautiful girl!” Cohen exclaimed, kneeling to bring his face within licking range.

She was beautiful. Arkady knew theoretically that she must be no bigger than average size for a dog, but she was so much larger than the tiny, petted, cosseted canines that he’d seen in the Syndicates that he could barely believe they were the same species. And this was no pet either, he suspected. He didn’t know what job she’d been bred to do, but not even the most casual observer could miss the honed, streamlined, powerful purposefulness of her.

“What is she?” Cohen asked. He was now thumping energetically at her ribs, whipping her into a delighted frenzy. “She’s too big to be pure border collie.”

“I don’t think the breed has a name. The shepherds in the Line bred them from whatever was left after the die-offs. Tough on sheep, easy on the eye.” He cleared his throat and made a formal gesture. “Ah. I’ve been remiss. Cohen, meet Dibbuk. Dibbuk, meet Cohen.”

Cohen laughed and buried his face in the dog’s thick fur. Then he stood up, and after the briefest of hesitations, stepped forward and embraced the stranger. They kissed each other elaborately in the Arab manner. Then Cohen took the human’s face between his hands and held him out at arm’s length in a way that made Arkady realize suddenly that the AI must be very old, and that even the humans he called friends must seem like mere children to him.

“You didn’t have to roll in with the cavalry,” the human said. “You could have just asked me to meet you at your hotel. Uh…right…well, I guess I should try to check my mail more often.”

“Oh Gavi,” the machine said, caressing the man with the same open, uncomplicated, unshadowed affection he’d shown to the dog just a few moments ago, “what on earth am I supposed to do with you?”

They followed Gavi between the tall trees to a building buried in the hillside like a knife blade. He stopped in front of a plate glass door sized to accommodate busloads of tourists and smiled his sweet, wounded, self-deprecating smile. “We all know what the spider said to the fly and how that ended up,” he told them. “But come in anyway.”

The vast lobby ran away on all sides into dust and shadows. Gavi struck off across the echoing expanse of marble and dove through a sagging fire door into an ill-lit warren of maintenance corridors and administrative offices.

Arkady felt as if he’d walked into a theater, stepped onto the stage, and slipped through the wings to the cramped back passages and dressing rooms where the actors really lived. This part of the building looked at once abandoned and cluttered. Gavi seemed to be camping in it as much as living in it, and the whiff of kerosene on the air hinted at more than occasional power outages.

At one point they passed an entire room full of dirty laundry. Gavi pulled the door closed, grinned sheepishly, and muttered something about the maid’s day off. “I would have put shoes on when I saw you coming,” he said in an apparent non sequitur, “but I forgot to buy socks last time I was in town. And I meant to wash the ones I have. But somehow the whole laundry thing just never quite got off the ground this month.”

Li snorted.

“I have Superhuman Powers of Procrastination,” Gavi announced. He could do the same capital letters trick that Osnat did, Arkady noticed. Maybe it was something about Hebrew. “But the problem with powers of procrastination,” he continued wistfully, “is that you can’t Use Them for Evil. You can only use them for Nothing.”

Osnat stared for a moment, perplexed, then burst out laughing.

“It’s nice to see you,” Gavi told her. “How are you? Well, I hope?”

She frowned and looked away. “So what are we here for, anyway? I don’t want to walk home after dark in this neighborhood.”

Gavi turned to Cohen, a look of alarm spreading across his mobile features. “You’re not thinking of going back tonight? That would be terribly dangerous. I don’t want to get my neighbors in trouble, but I happen to know that at least four EMET patrols have been rolled for their tech in the last six months.”

“You happen to know?” Osnat asked in a voice as hard as her eyes.

“I have to live out here,” Gavi said simply.

Osnat turned away, her mouth twitching as if she wanted to spit.

Gavi looked after her for a moment before turning back to Cohen. “You are staying, though? Aren’t you?”

“We’re staying,” Li broke in. “I just cleared it with EMET.”

“Good. Excellent. Then shall we get down to business? Um…what is business, by the way?”

Cohen cleared his throat. “Would you kids mind terribly going off and playing on your own while I have a private word with Gavi?”

Gavi moved around the room, piling clothes, books, and data cubes on one surface; moving them to another; rearranging and consolidating and buttressing sedimentary layers of computer printouts in a comical attempt to free up space for Cohen’s cup, Cohen’s knees, Cohen himself.

Watching him, Cohen felt at once relieved and disoriented. He had expected to see a broken man, or at least a changed one. But this was Gavi as he’d always been. The body blessed with the spare, tendon-on-bone grace of the born long-distance runner. The face that had far too much of the intellectual in it to be what most people called handsome. The black, black eyes whose liquid brilliance you couldn’t imagine until you’d been subjected to one of Gavi’s tell-me-no-lies stares.

And a right leg that ended just below the knee and had been replaced by a prosthesis that, if Cohen knew Gavi, was one of the most obsessively babied, upgraded, optimized, and tinkered-with pieces of hardware on the planet.

“How’s your mother?” Cohen asked.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Finding fascists under the furniture. Predicting the fall of the free world before lunch every morning. For her, happy.”

Gavi’s mother had been an old kibbutznik and a prominent Labor Party politician known for her fierce intelligence and her ability to sniff out and stamp on even the subtlest manifestations of bullshit. His father had been her diametric opposite: a dreamer, an intellectual, a minor Palestinian poet whose elegantly crafted poems were turning out to be not nearly as minor as everyone had at first thought they were.

Gavi’s father had died of an early heart attack before the war started, which Cohen couldn’t help thinking had been a mercy. His mother had resigned from the Knesset and left Earth permanently the day the first appropriations bill for EMET went through. And since she’d been berating her only son over his “fascist” career for decades, neither Gavi’s dismissal from the Mossad nor the swirling rumors of treason had clouded their affectionate but extremely long-distance relationship.

In Cohen’s opinion, each of Gavi’s parents had represented the best their respective cultures had to offer. And Gavi in turn had gotten the best parts of both of them. But that was Cohen’s opinion. And at the moment his idea of the n-optimal human being didn’t seem to be very popular in either the new Israel or the new Palestine.

“I like your tough girl,” Gavi said when he’d finally consolidated things sufficiently to clear knee and elbow room for the two of them. “And you finally got her to marry you too, I hear. How’s happily ever after going?”

Cohen shrugged.

“I’m sorry. And here I’d been getting so much enjoyment out of staring up at the stars thinking of all the fun you were having.”

“Fun, my friend, is seriously overrated.”

“So what’s the problem exactly?”

“If I knew, I’d fix it and there wouldn’t be one.”

“The frightening thing is that you actually mean that!”

Gavi leaned forward and looked deep into Cohen’s eyes. The effect was hypnotic. Mother Nature really did know best, Cohen decided. Put next to Gavi, even Arkady looked like a second-rate knockoff of the real thing.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but did Li really do what they say she did on Gilead? I can’t see you with someone who’d do that.”

“She doesn’t know what she did. They wiped her memory. She only knows what they want her to know.”

“And even you can’t get the real files?”

“Even I can’t get the real files. I’m beginning to wonder if they still exist.”

“You could go crazy over a thing like that,” Gavi said earnestly.

“Yes, you could.” Cohen blinked and shook his head, suddenly bothered by the flickering of one of Gavi’s many monitors. “Can you turn that off? Thanks. No, that one. Yes.”

“Are you still having seizures?” Gavi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “I thought you’d solved that bug long ago.”

“So did I. But I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze Catherine or discuss coupled oscillators. How are you?”

“Great.”

“Mind wiping that shit-eating grin off your face and giving me an honest answer?”

The grin broadened. “Shitty.”

“Gavi! Come on.”

Gavi gave him a cool, smooth, faintly amused look.

“Why are you acting like this, Gavi?”

“Like what? Like a man talking to someone he hasn’t seen for two years?”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine.” The grin was back in place. “I was going to call you when I was done feeling sorry for myself and ready to come out and play again. Admit it, Cohen. You just don’t like people who don’t need you.”

“No. I love people who don’t need me. That’s why I married Catherine. What I don’t love are people who pretend not to need me because they’re too pigheadedly proud to ask for help when they need it. And will you kindly have the courtesy to stop laughing at me?”

“I’m laughing with you, little AI. And has it occurred to you that you just might be seeing Hyacinthe these days when you look at me? I mean the man, not the interface program.”

“You’ll really do anything to make this about me instead of about you, won’t you?”

Gavi was shaking with repressed laughter now. “Come on, Cohen. If you traipse all the way out here to visit me and then spend the whole time crying on my shoulder about how I’m not crying on your shoulder, it’s just going to be too ridiculous for words.”

“There’s got to be something someone can do. Have you at least talked to Didi?”

“No. And I’m not going to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Honestly, Cohen. What for? So he can tell me he thinks I got three of his boys killed and stashed the blood money in some Ring-side bank account, and the only reason I’m still alive is that I happened to be the dumb schmuck who pulled the future PM out of the way of a bullet once upon a time? You saw the way Osnat looked at me just now. I think we can take her feelings as representative.”

“I just—”

“Look.” Gavi let each word drop slowly and clearly into the silence. “There is nothing you can do. So do me a favor and forget about it. I have. And by the way, you can stop trying not to stare at my leg.”

“Was I?” Cohen winced. “You’d think having spent the last several years of Hyacinthe’s life in a wheelchair would have cured me of that.”

“It’s not as big a deal as you obviously think it is. I mean, I’m not minimizing it. It’s pretty fucking unpleasant. But I got up this morning and took a nice 10K run before breakfast. I’d have to be even more self-absorbed than I am not to realize it could be a lot worse.” Gavi’s eyes narrowed and his voice took on a not-so-subtle edge. “Okay. Enough small talk. We both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a hall pass from Didi. So what does Didi want from me?”

Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.

When he was done, Gavi stared at him over crossed arms. “So Didi read you your orders and you picked up your friends and marched them all out here like little toy soldiers, no questions asked, ’cause you’re my ‘friend,’ huh?” The word friend was framed in cruelly ironic quotation marks.

“That’s a shitty way to put it,” Cohen said.

“Oh, you think?” Gavi jerked his chin toward the jumble of hardware hulking in the shadows. “Does Didi know I’m an inscribed player? No, don’t bother, I’ll answer the question for you. He knows. He knows because I told him in the reports I filed when I was your case officer. And I told him so he could use it to control you. Which is exactly what he’s doing now. Or do you want to tell me I’m missing something?”

“No, Gavi. You never miss a trick.”

Hy Cohen had done a terrible thing when he wrote those innocent little lines of gamer code into Cohen’s core architecture. And then he’d slipped out during the intermission; gotten out dead before his prize creation found out how painfully confusing it was going to be to live in a world full of alien and beloved humans.

Cohen loved Gavi—or Gavi was an inscribed player, which amounted to about the same thing. He couldn’t bear to watch a friend tear himself apart—or he was programmed to reweight his fuzzy logic circuits on receipt of negative affective stimuli from inscribed players. He was more loyal than the most loyal human friend, more selfless than the most ardent lover. But if you went to the source code it was right there, staring you down in pretty print: not love, but a recursive algorithm that directed him to reformat gameplay in order to maximize positive emotive “hits.”

And it only made things worse to know that the code that compelled him wasn’t the chance result of evolution or natural selection or environmental pressures, but the personal choice of a combative little French Jew who had the chutzpah to hand you the keys to your soul and tell you to go ahead and rewrite it from the ground up if you thought you could make a better job of it than he had.

“I am your friend,” Cohen protested, dogged by the humiliating feeling that he was arguing as much with Hyacinthe as with Gavi. “Why do you have to tear me down to my logic gates to find out what that means? I’m doing what any friend would do.”

“Well that’s the funny thing, Cohen.” All the feeling had leached out of Gavi’s voice, leaving it as coldly impersonal as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Because now that we’re on the subject of friends, maybe I should point out something that appears to have escaped your notice. I don’t have any.”

“They weren’t real friends,” Cohen whispered, aching to wipe the look of self-loathing off Gavi’s face. “You’re worth a hundred of them.”

“No one’s worth that!” Gavi snapped. And then the floodgates let loose. “Who are you, fucking Graham Greene puking and mewling about how Kim Philby was worth more than the poor slobs he sent out to die for him? You think I’m worth more than Osnat? Or Li? Or poor little Roland there? You must. You dragged them into a war zone because Didi told you I needed a shoulder to cry on.”

“It’s not that simple…”

“Isn’t it? Name one solid piece of evidence you’ve ever seen that I’m not Absalom. Name one real reason for believing I didn’t send those kids out to die in Tel Aviv.”

“Stop it, Gavi.”

But Gavi didn’t stop. “Delete me from your inscribed players’ list.”

Cohen gasped. What Gavi was suggesting would have been dauntingly complex back when Hyacinthe wrote the original code. Three centuries later it was inconceivable. It would mean wrenching out all the tangled threads that connected Gavi to Cohen’s past: every conversation they’d ever had; every job they’d ever done together; everything that had ever so much as reminded Cohen of him. And it would damage the virtual ecology of Cohen’s nested hierarchies of agents and networks in ways that he couldn’t begin to predict or guard against.

The only person Cohen knew of who had ever done such violence to her own memory was Li. She’d done it to escape from the corporate-run hell of the Bose-Einstein mines…and she was still trying to paper over the sucking hole she carried around where most people carried their family and friends and childhood.

“Do it,” Gavi told him.

“No.”

“I’m ordering you to.”

“I’m not a word processor. I don’t accept keyboard programming.”

“Then let me speak to router/decomposer. He’ll see reason even if you won’t.”

“He’ll see no such thing!” Suddenly all Cohen’s humiliation and distress coalesced into fury. “How dare you drag him into this? It’s not his decision to make!”

He could feel router/decomposer rattling the bars inside, saying that it was so his decision, or at least partially his decision. And there was something underneath his usual logic-chatter. Something that the DARPA programmers had squashed in Cohen when he was at about router/decomposer’s level of psychological development, and that he had sworn he would never squash in anyone.

He squashed it.

Then he throttled down router/decomposer’s bandwidth and slapped all his nonessential internal traffic out of circulation in order to drive the point home. It was for router/decomposer’s own good, after all. And why the hell did everyone have to reach their critical bifurcation points in the same fucking millisecond, anyway? Why couldn’t they all just slow down and let him breathe for a few cycles? Who did they think he was? God? “Don’t you ever do that again,” he told Gavi. “I don’t run my brain by committee. And I’m in no fucking mood to be tolerant.”

Resounding silence, inside and out.

Finally, Gavi’s shoulders slumped. The skin of his face looked bruised, and the tears he’d talked so mockingly about a few short minutes ago glittered along the edges of his eyes. Dibbuk roused herself from her blanket, whimpering, and pressed her nose between his knees until he sent her back to lie down again.

“Didi’s just doing what he has to do,” Cohen said. “So am I. Can’t you see that?”

“Of course I can.” Gavi’s voice dropped to a heartsick whisper. “And it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made a mistake. One stupid, trivial, miniscule mistake somewhere along the line. And I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life watching innocent people pay for it. Gur dead. Osnat, one of the best agents I ever trained, wasting her life playing corporate rent-a-cop because no one will trust anyone who came within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. And you’re worried about my leg? I’d laugh if it wasn’t all so awful!”

Cohen reached out a hand, but Gavi flinched away from him.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked when he thought Gavi was ready to speak again.

“Well, I guess I might as well do what Didi wants and talk to Arkady. If Didi’s pushing it this hard, then you can bet it’s because he’s scoped all the angles and knows he can turn even a betrayal from me to Israel’s advantage. That ought to be enough for you. It would be for me if I were in your shoes. After that…well, that depends on whether you trust me or not.”

“Should I trust you?”

They locked gazes long enough for Cohen to see fear, guilt, doubt, and anger chase each other through the black depths of Gavi’s eyes. Looking into them was like being hotwired to Gavi’s soul. How could there be a lie at the bottom of all that naked clarity?

“I can’t tell you,” Gavi said, looking away. “I can only answer for my intentions. And all my good intentions seem to be doing lately is getting people killed.”

“Well, I can’t kill the fatted calf,” Gavi told Arkady, “but I can offer a choice of goat or chicken. Have you ever met a goat? No? Then walk with me. You are about to have the pleasure of making first contact with a superior life-form.”

The little group strolled down the hill, basking in the last failing warmth of the evening sun. Arkady was having trouble squaring the living breathing fact of Gavi with the traitor Osnat had described to him. Indeed, Osnat herself seemed to be having a hard time making the edges match up.

Meanwhile, Gavi seemed naturally to gravitate toward Arkady, until what had begun as a group venture turned into a private tour of Gavi’s little kingdom. Arkady knew that the seeming casualness must be carefully scripted, but it didn’t lessen the flush of pleasure he felt when Gavi bowed his head to listen and turned those dark, burningly serious eyes on him.

It was that intensity rather than any physical resemblance that reminded Arkady so strongly of Arkasha. Gavi was far more controlled and subtle than Arkasha. The fires were banked and smoldering and masked behind a façade of self-deprecating humor. But looking at him, Arkady still had the same feeling he’d had about Arkasha: that he seemed more alive and less defended than it was safe for a person to be.

The goats had names. Gavi introduced them formally, one by one, as if he were presenting Arkady for the approval of a staid group of society matrons. Arkady had never seen a mammal close up other than humans, dogs, and cats. He looked at the geometric perfection of their hooves, met the measuring gaze of their golden eyes. “They’re perfect,” he said. “Just like ants are perfect.”

“Well, I think they are.” Gavi bent to scratch one of the more assertive goats behind her tricolor ears. “There used to be wild goats here, can you imagine? And ghizlaan. What’s ghazaal in English? Oh. Well, there you go. I guess they really did come from here.” He sounded wistful. “I would have liked to meet a gazelle.”

“Maybe we’re still learning to live without all the other species we used to share Earth with,” Arkady said. He paused, struggling to find words for an idea that, if not new, was at least new to him. “I some-times think that we—the Syndicates, I mean—evolved because humans have made themselves so alone in the universe that the only way to belong again was to belong to each other.”

Gavi gave him a sharp, appreciative look that reminded him painfully of his first conversations with Arkasha. “I like that,” he said after considering it for a moment. “I never saw it that way. I’ll have to think about that a bit. Thank you.”

And so it went. By the time they’d fed the goats and the chickens (another marvel!) and walked the perimeter with Dibbuk dancing around them like an electron orbiting its atom’s nucleus, Arkady had fallen completely under Gavi’s spell.

Every now and then, he would surface—from listening to Gavi’s tales of the hidden lives of goats and chickens and sheepdogs, or from telling Gavi about ants—and think, Why am I telling these things to a perfect stranger?

But it was no good. Caution and suspicion rang hollow against Gavi’s questions, Gavi’s fascination, Gavi’s enthusiasm, Gavi’s knowing and determined innocence.

“So, Arkady. Cohen and some other people you don’t know have asked me to talk to you about Novalis. Especially about what happened to Bella. Do you understand why we’re so interested in her?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Is there anything you don’t understand? Any questions you’d like to ask? Anything you’re worried about? Anything I can help you with or explain to you?” Gavi had put the charm on hold, Arkady realized. Now he was all cool, competent, dispassionate professionalism. There was something almost courtly about his change in demeanor; as if he were warning Arkady that it was time to get his guard up and put his game face on.

“Uh…I can’t think of anything at the moment.”

“Okay. No hurry. If you think of anything later, really anything, feel free to stop me and ask. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“First let’s set the ground rules. I know a number of people have been asking you questions lately, some of them not very politely judging from the state of your hide. In fact, you look like you’ve been through hell. So let me tell you right now that you’re not going to get any of that from me. This interrogation—and it is an interrogation; we can leave the we’re-all-just-friends-having-a-chat act for amateur hour—this interrogation is going to be tedious, and probably long, and certainly annoying. But that’s all it’s going to be. I don’t deal in violence. I deal in information. I hope the information you give me will be true, but if it’s not…well, lies are information just like truth. And anyway”—a brief flash of the nonprofessional smile here—“you won’t lie to me, because I’ll catch you out at it sooner or later, and that’ll just be embarrassing for both of us.”

And then, with the jokes and self-deprecating smiles and humorous asides that Arkady would come to see as the very essence of the man, the interrogation began in earnest.

Gavi’s interrogation method, if you could call it that, was simply to take Arkady through his story, again and again, questioning, probing, asking for details, dates, names, endless clarifications. And all the while Gavi listened, crossing his legs and arms, hunching his back and nodding sympathetically, seeming to shrink in upon himself until there was nothing on the other side of the table but those liquid black eyes. It was as if Gavi were effacing himself—becoming the bare idea of a listener—in order to let Arkady’s vision, Arkady’s memories, Arkady’s version of Novalis, take over their shared universe.

And then he would step in—never obtrusive or confrontational, just curious—to ask the question that would pull loose a new thread of memory, open up a new set of questions, recast past words in a new and revealing light, narrow down meanings and implications and insinuations until every word of Arkady’s story possessed the crystalline clarity of a mathematical equation.

If Arkady had still been trying to sell Korchow’s carefully crafted lies, the effects would have been devastating. As it was, however, it seemed like wasted effort.

“I’m not lying to you,” he finally blurted out. “I’m asking for your help. What can I do to make you believe me?”

“I already believe you,” Gavi said, backing up the words with one of his defenseless smiles. “You had me after the first five minutes. But I also happen to think that Moshe was right”—they’d worked their way around, through, and out the other side of Moshe by now—“You know a lot more about Novalis than you think you do. To be honest, I’m hoping that if I can just keep working you through the story, turning the whole thing over, looking at it from fresh angles, you’ll get one of those aha! moments and we’ll be able to pull some of the things you don’t know you know out into the light of day. Make sense?”

“I guess so…”

“But what?”

“I thought of a question I want to ask.”

“Ask away.”

“Are you Absalom?”

Gavi froze for a moment, then leaned back in his chair and gave Arkady a sideways look that was at once amused, challenging, and appreciative.

“No. But I can’t offer you any proof of that. And besides”—Gavi’s lips twitched in a crooked, pained little smile, and again Arkady felt the sharp pang of loss that hit him whenever he saw Arkasha in the other man—“I’m a notoriously talented liar, so you can’t trust me anyway.”

“Do you know who Absalom is?”

“No. That’s also true, by the way.”

Arkady smiled in spite of himself. “And also unprovable?”

“Yeah. It’s a real stinker, isn’t it?”

Arkady looked at Gavi across the table for a long moment. Gavi looked back, a faint smile playing around his lips, his eyebrows raised ever so slightly in an unspoken question.

“I like you,” Arkady said.

“I like you too. But I’m still going to do my job. So don’t get to liking me too much. Just in case…”

“Now you sound like Osnat.”

“Do I? Well, don’t tell her. I doubt she’d find the comparison flattering. All right. Back to Novalis. Where were we again?”