Spin Control

PRINCIPLES OF THE SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM

“So you mutinied,” li said when Gavi had gathered them all together and made Arkady repeat his story from beginning to end.

“You couldn’t even call it a mutiny, we were so incompetent. We never stood a chance against the tacticals. It’s a miracle we got out of there alive.”

“Oh,” Li murmured, “I doubt miracles had much to do with it.”

Osnat was staring at him, her expression intense but unreadable. Gavi, when Arkady dared to glance at him, was tracing the wood grain of the table with one long finger, up and down, over and over. The AI, in contrast, seemed so absent that if Arkady hadn’t known better he would have thought he was off-shunt.

Osnat was the first to break the silence. “What happened to Bella?” she asked.

Li stirred impatiently. “The more important question is why Arkady’s telling us this? What’s in it for him?”

“He’s doing it for Arkasha,” Gavi said. “Isn’t that clear enough?”

“Not to me it isn’t. It doesn’t explain why Arkady agreed to come here, why he lied about being sent by Korchow, and then changed his mind about lying. How do we know he isn’t still following Korchow’s orders, just like the two of them planned it back on Gilead?”

“We don’t actually need to know those things,” Gavi pointed out. “All we need to know now is what to do next. And it’s quite possible our next move will be the same regardless of whether or not you believe Arkady. In which case…”

“…in which case we’re wasting our breath arguing about it.”

“That’s how it seems to me.” Gavi’s dark eyes flickered toward Arkady for an instant, then turned away without quite making contact. “For now, at least. By the way, would anyone else find a flowchart useful?”

Cohen leapt to his feet and snatched at one of the scattered pencils. “I’ll be Vanna.”

“What?” Osnat and Gavi asked at the same moment.

“Never mind,” he said, looking crestfallen. “Obsolete joke.”

Li, already working on her second cigarette, raised an eyebrow and blew a shivering smoke ring.

“Rule three,” Gavi said. “When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been. Let me take a first stab at it, just to get my thoughts straight. Then we’ll see if the rest of you think I’m whistling into the wind. I think we’re all rude enough that we don’t have to worry about succumbing to groupthink just because we show each other our homework.

“So. We start with Novalis.” He drew a circle near the top of the page and wrote the word Novalis in it. “From Novalis news of the virus—one that most of Arkady’s crewmates assumed, rightly or wrongly, was a UN-designed genetic weapon—went to Korchow. And then it went to GolaniTech. And that’s when things get interesting…”

Quickly, he drew circles labeled KORCHOW and GOLANITECH. Then three sharp lines dropping down from GolaniTech to the names of the various bidders. Then, off by itself in the left margin, he drew a circle with the name DIDI in it.

“Didi has a copious flow of information from ALEF, at least judging from what Cohen’s told me.” He drew an arrow from ALEF to DIDI, wrote the name Cohen above it—and below it, in parentheses, Li.

“Do you mind being parenthetical?” Gavi asked jokingly.

“I’m used to it,” Li said. But she didn’t look all that happy about it to Arkady.

“But Didi would never be content with only one source of information,” Gavi continued, his voice taking on a slight but unmistakable edge. “How could he cross-check it? How could he feed people his nasty little barium meals and test their loyalty and accuracy and reliability? How could he keep his beady little eyes on them? So I think we can safely assume that Didi has also established a source in GolaniTech itself. Knowing Didi, probably multiple sources.”

He drew three sideways arrows running from GOLANITECH to DIDI. Beside the uppermost arrow he wrote the name Ash? and underlined the question mark with a decisive little stroke of the pen. Beside the second arrow, he wrote Moshe? And beside the third arrow, after glancing pointedly at Osnat, he wrote Osnat? Osnat pursed her lips and said nothing.

“And that takes care of Didi for now,” Gavi concluded. “Except of course for the single most important piece of information Arkady brought with him when he defected: Absalom. That name is a love letter straight from Korchow to Didi, with GolaniTech playing postman. And not only to Didi.” He bit his lip for a moment, then drew a new circle, connected it to Korchow’s circle by its own arrow, and labeled it SAFIK. “The only question is whether Safik ever got the message.”

Cohen cleared his throat. “Uh, I might be able to shed some light on that.”

Gavi gave him a cool look.

“Sorry. It just hadn’t come up yet. It, ah, seems that one of Yassin’s bodyguards might possibly be Safik’s son.”

“The boy with the green eyes,” Osnat murmured. “I wondered about him.”

“Yusuf?” Arkady asked incredulously. “But he told me he came from Absalom!”

Gavi made short work of that. Within a few minutes, Arkady had told them everything he remembered or suspected about his brief conversation with Yusuf.

“Sounds like Absalom ought to have his own circle,” Osnat said bitterly when Arkady had fallen silent.

“I haven’t forgotten him,” Gavi said in a subdued voice. “My only question is whether it’s more useful to think of Absalom as a circle—a player, in other words—or as a connection between two players?”

He tapped the pencil on the table for a moment, biting his upper lip and staring at the page. Then he drew a line across the bottom of the page, connecting DIDI and SAFIK, and labeled it Absalom.

For the next hour the four other people in the room with Arkady talked over his head, drew lines between the various circles, drew more circles and more lines, erased everything and started over again, and generally ignored him. He had the feeling that he was an outsider in a conversation between people who shared a technical vocabulary and a way of looking at the world that had nothing to do with his own. Indeed as the chart took shape in front of him, he began to feel that the others—Cohen and Gavi especially—saw the world less as a real space inhabited by physical bodies than as a vast weaving of information streams.

“So where does this leave us?” Gavi asked at last, stepping back from the chart.

“Missing a circle if you ask me,” Li said. “The Interfaithers have their fingers in everything in this country. They can’t possibly not be involved in this.”

“Fair enough,” Gavi said. He drew a circle in the upper right-hand margin and wrote IFers? in it.

Gavi stepped back again, and they all contemplated the flowchart.

“I know Korchow,” Cohen said at last. The AI spoke slowly, as if he were voicing something that he was still in the process of thinking through for himself. But how could that be when he must think several million times faster than any human could? “He thinks through every angle, but he’d never make the amateur’s mistake of overchoreographing an operation. I’d say he even enjoys leaving things to chance a bit. He wouldn’t have sent Arkady without considering that Arkady might betray him. And Arkady wouldn’t be here if Korchow didn’t think he could turn even a betrayal to his advantage. Besides…” Cohen chewed absently at the pencil in his hand, then grimaced and wiped his mouth. “How do the Americans fit in? How did Turner find out about the auction in the first place?”

“For what it’s worth,” Arkady offered, “Korchow was very unhappy about that.”

“Or he wanted you to think he was.”

A wing of Foreign Legion chasseurs swept overhead with a shuddering sonic boom. Arkady jumped at the noise. “But surely the Americans wouldn’t ally themselves with the Syndicates? Don’t they understand that the whole point of the Syndicate society is to…well…”

Cohen cleared his throat delicately. “To create environmental conditions conducive to evolving beyond the inherently flawed genetic template that gave rise to the historical aberration of corporate oligarchy?”

Arkady grinned at the AI. “Yeah. What you said. Seriously, though…the Americans would have to be crazy to think that Korchow or anyone else in the Syndicates had their long-term interests at heart.”

“They’ve been known to take the short-term view before,” Li drawled. “After all, what can you expect from a country whose national anthem ends with the words Gentlemen, start your engines?”

“Enough with the America bashing!” Cohen burst out. “There has to be some redeeming feature to any country that can produce Papaya King and my second wife. And besides, America invented the only major world religion that hasn’t started a war yet.”

They all turned to stare incredulously at the AI.

The AI sketched a sinuous parody of the standard Israeli shrug. “Baseball.”

“Oh come on,” Arkady said, true to the sport that defined the Syndicates as much as baseball defined the Latino-dominated UN worlds.

“Soccer’s never started a war.”

“El Salvador-Honduras, 1969.”

“You’re joking.”

A look of wounded innocence infused the shunt’s smooth-skinned face. “Would I lie to you?”

“Are you people wasting my time on purpose,” Osnat interrupted, “or does it just come naturally?”

“Right,” Gavi said, sounding appropriately chastened. “Turner’s the wild card. It doesn’t seem to me we can do much about him except hand him enough rope to hang himself and wait for him to show his hand. And in the meantime perhaps we’d do better to focus on Arkasha.”

Arkady’s heart began to pound in his chest. Let them focus on Arkasha. Let them find him, speak to him, save him. That was all he wanted. And he was long past caring if what he wanted was just part of some larger plan of Korchow’s.

“But how do we ask to talk to Arkasha without showing our hand?” Osnat asked.

“Easy,” Gavi answered. “We get Safik to ask.”

A slow smile spread across Cohen’s face. “Help him crash the party, you mean? And how do we send him his invitation?”

“You still friends with Eric Fortuné?”

“I should look him up while I’m in town, shouldn’t I? It’s the friendly thing to do.”

Gavi turned back to Arkady. “You understand that in the meantime you and Osnat will have to go back to GolaniTech and act as if nothing’s changed.”

Arkady glanced at Osnat, but she was picking intently at a loose thread in the knee of her fatigues.

“Isn’t there any other way?” he asked forlornly. He hadn’t realized until that moment just how desperately he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to go back into Moshe’s ungentle custody. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d been nursing the vague but fervent wish that once he’d told his story, Gavi—or Cohen or Li or anyone, for God’s sake—would shake his hand, tell him he’d done his part, and bundle him off to watch the rest of this deadly game from the sidelines.

“Not if you want to save Arkasha.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Arkady said. “I’ll have to do it.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Osnat sat picking at her torn fatigues, her head bent so low that her fair hair hid her face from them. “I don’t like it,” she muttered finally.

“Neither do I,” Gavi said, “but I don’t have a better idea.”

“Me neither,” Osnat admitted.

The two Israelis locked eyes for a moment. Gavi looked away first.

Without anyone formally drawing things to a close, the group began to break up into its component parts. Osnat stood up and stretched until her spine cracked audibly. Li began playing with Dibbuk. Gavi collared Cohen and began talking computer programming.

Arkady bent over the flowchart again, peering at the jumble of names and circles and trying to discern the ominous connection that Gavi had suggested to the others. Once again he had the feeling that the chart revealed a turn of mind utterly alien to him. And yet it reminded him of something…

He searched his memories of the Novalis mission, of the uneventful missions before Novalis, of his long-ago evolutionary ecophysics courses…and eventually landed on his vague memories of molecular biology and epidemiology.

Suddenly he found that the room had become too hot and too small for comfort. He knew exactly where he’d seen such a chart before.

On Novalis. In Aurelia’s bold scrawl.

Gavi’s flowchart wasn’t a simple picture of the flow of information, Arkady realized. Rather, it depicted the flow of a very special kind of information: a disease spreading through a susceptible population. It would already be spreading quickly indeed if the miniature epidemic on Novalis were any indication.

And this disease had only one possible vector…

Him.