Spin Control

THE GOLEM

She was probably no more than thirty.

It was hard to tell with humans. They all looked old to Arkady, and they aged fast out here in the Trusteeships where people lost months and years just getting from one planet to the next.

This human looked like she’d lived harder than most. Her skin was ravaged by decades of unfiltered sunlight, her face lined by wind and worry, her features gaunt with the gravity of some heavy planet. Still, Arkady didn’t think she could be more than a few subjective years beyond his twenty-seven.

“Act like you’re picking me up,” she said in a low husky voice that would have been sensual had it not been ratcheted tight by fear. She spoke UN-standard Spanish, but her flat vowels and guttural consonants betrayed her native tongue as Hebrew.

She flagged down the barkeep and ordered two of something Arkady had never heard of. When she gripped his arm to draw him closer, he saw that her cuticles were rough and ragged and she’d bitten her nails to the quick.

He bent over her, smelling the acrid fungal smell of the planet-born, and recited the words Korchow had taught him back on Gilead. She fed him back the answers he’d been told to wait for. She was pulling them off hard memory; her pupils dilated, blossoming across the pale iris, every time she accessed her virally embedded RAM. He tried not to stare and failed.

This is your first monster, he told himself. Get used to them.

He studied the woman’s face, wondering if she was what other members of her species would call normal. It seemed unlikely. To Arkady’s crèche-born eyes her features looked as mismatched as if they’d been culled from a dozen disparate genelines. The predatory nose jutted over an incongruously delicate jawline. The forehead was high and intelligent…but too flat and scowling to get past any competent genetic designer. And even under the dim flicker of the strobe lights it was obvious that her eyes were mismatched. The right eye fixed Arkady with a steel blue stare, while the left one wandered across the open room behind him so that he had to fight the urge to turn around and see who she was really talking to.

“Why did you come here?” the woman asked when she was satisfied he was who he said he was.

“You know why.”

“I mean the real reason.”

You have to ask for money, Korchow had told him during the interminable briefing sessions. He could see Korchow’s face in his mind’s eye: a spy’s face, a diplomat’s face, a manifesto in flesh and blood of everything KnowlesSyndicate was supposed to stand for. You have no idea what money means to humans, Arkady. It’s how they reward each other, how they control each other. If you don’t ask for it, you won’t feel real to them.

“I came for the money,” he told Osnat, trying not to sound like an explorer trading beads with the natives.

“And you trust us to give it to you?”

“You know who I trust.” Still following Korchow’s script. “You know who I need to see.”

“At least you had the wits not to say his name.” She glanced at the shadowy maze of ventilation ducts and spinstream conduits overhead to indicate that they were under surveillance.

“Here?” Arkady asked incredulously.

“Everywhere. The AIs can tap any spin, anytime, anywhere. You’re in UN space now. Get used to it.”

Arkady glanced at the sullen and exhausted drinkers around him and wondered what they could possibly be doing that was worth the attention of the UN’s semisentients. These weren’t humans as he’d been raised to believe in them. Where were the fat cat profiteers and the spiritually bankrupt individualists of his sociobiology textbooks? Where were the gene traders? Where were the slave drivers and the brutally oppressed genetic constructs? All he saw here were algae skimmers and coltran miners. Posthumans whose genetic heritage was too haphazard for anyone to be able to guess whether they were human or construct or some unknown quasi-species between the two. People who scratched out a living from stones and mud and carried the dirt of planets under their fingernails. Throwaway people.

Arkasha would probably have said they were beautiful. He would have talked passionately about pre-Evacuation literature, about the slow sure currents of evolution, and the vast chaotic genetic river that was posthumanity. But all Arkady could see here was poverty, disease, and danger.

The bartender slapped their drinks down hard enough to send sour-smelling liquid cascading onto the countertop. The woman picked up hers and gulped thirstily. Arkady just stared at his. He could smell it from here, and it smelled bad. Like yeast and old skin and overloaded air filters: all the smells he was beginning to recognize as the smells of humans.

“So.” The woman used the word as if it were an entire sentence.

“Who really sent you?”

“I’m here on my own account. I thought you understood that.”

“We understood that was what you wanted us to understand.” She had a habit of hanging on a word that gave it a weight at odds with its apparent significance and left Arkady wondering if anything in her world meant what it seemed to mean. “It wouldn’t be the first time a professional came across the lines posing as an amateur.”

Arkady played with his drink, buying time. Don’t explain, don’t apologize, Korchow had told him. Right before he’d told him what would happen to Arkasha if he failed.

“I’m a myrmecologist,” he told her.

“Whatever the fuck that is.”

“I study ants. For terraforming.”

“Bullshit. Terraforming’s dangerous. And you’re an A Series. You reek of it. No one who counts ever gets handed that raw of a deal.”

“It was my Part,” he said reflexively before he could remember the word meant nothing to humans.

“You mean you volunteered ?”

“I’m sorry.” Arkady’s confusion was genuine. “What is volunteered?”

Her right eye narrowed, though the left one remained serenely focused on the middle distance. An old scar nicked the eyebrow above the lazy eye, and for the first time it occurred to Arkady that it might not be a birth defect at all, but the product of a home-brewed wetware installation gone wrong. What if it wasn’t internal RAM she was accessing but the spooky-action-at-a-distance virtual world of streamspace? What was she seeing there? And who was paying her uplink fees?

A movement caught Arkady’s eye, and he turned to find a lone drinker staring at him from the far end of the grease-smeared bartop. He watched the man take in his unlined stationer’s skin, his too-symmetrical features, the gleam of perfect health that bespoke generations of sociogenetic engineering. They locked eyes, and Arkady noticed what he should have noticed before: the dusty green flash of an Interfaither’s skullcap.

You were supposed to be able to tell which religion Interfaithers hailed from by the signs they wore. A Star of David for Jews; two signs Arkady couldn’t remember for Sunnis and Shi’ites; a multitude of cryptic symbols for the various schismatic Christian sects. He gave the Interfaither another covert glance, but the only sign he could see on him was a silver pendant whose two curving lines intersected to form the abstracted shape of a fish.

The Interfaithers scared Arkady more than any other danger in UN space. It had been Interfaithers who killed an entire contract group right here on Maris Station and mutilated their bodies so badly that all their home Syndicates ever got back were diplomatic apologies. The rest of the UN had made peace with the Syndicates—if you could call this simmering cold war a peace—but the Interfaithers hadn’t. And when anyone asked them why, they used words like Abomination and Jihad and Crusade—words that weren’t supposed to exist anymore in any civilized language.

Arkady glanced at the bar-back mirror, trying to reassure himself that he fit in well enough to pass safely. What he saw didn’t reassure him at all. Korchow’s team had broken his nose and one cheekbone, a precaution that had seemed barbaric back on Gilead. But it took decades at the bottom of a gravity well to get the lined and haggard look of the planet-born. And it would have taken a lifetime—someone else’s lifetime—to mold Arkady’s frank and open crèche-born face into the aggressive mask most humans wore in public.

Arkady gave the Interfaither another surreptitious glance, only to find the man still staring at him. Their eyes locked. The Interfaither turned away, still holding Arkady’s gaze, and spit on the floor.

“Creature of magicians,” the woman muttered, “return to your dust!”

“What?” Arkady asked, though he knew somehow that the words were a response to the Interfaither.

“It’s from the Talmud.” Again that black inward gaze as she tapped RAM or slipped into the spinstream. “Then Rabbah created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him but received no answer. Thereupon he said to him: ‘Creature of the magicians, return to your dust!’ That’s how the first golem died.”

“What’s a golem?” Arkady asked.

“A man without a soul.” Her laugh was as hard-bitten as everything else about her. “You.”

Arkady heaved a shaky breath that ended in a bout of coughing. He was running a fever, his immune system kicking into overdrive to answer the insult of being stuck in a closed environment with thousands of unfamiliar human pathogens. He hoped it was just allergies. He couldn’t afford to get sick now. And he didn’t even want to think about what the UN’s human doctors would make of his decidedly-posthuman immune system.

He lifted his glass and sipped cautiously from it. Beer. And not as bad as it smelled. Still, he didn’t like the cold skin of condensation that had already formed on the glass. It was a sure sign that the station was underpowered and overpopulated, its life-support systems dangerously close to redlining. A Syndicate station whose air was this bad would have been shutting down nonessential operations and shipping its crèchelings to the neighbors just to be on the safe side. But people here were carrying on as usual. And on the way to the meet Arkady had passed a group of completely unsupervised children playing dangerously far from the nearest blowout shelter. You could spend years listening to people talk about the cheapness of life in human space, but it didn’t really come home to you until you saw something like this…

You were wrong, Arkasha. They’re another species. We’re divided by our history, by our ideology, by the very genes we hold in common. All we share is the memory of what Earth was before we killed it.

Her name was Osnat.

Hebrew? German? Ethiopian?

Arkasha would have known which half-dead language had spawned such a name. It was exactly the kind of thing Arkasha had always known. And exactly the kind of thing Arkady had never learned for himself because he’d always thought Arkasha, or someone like Arkasha, would be there to tell him.

Osnat guided him through the back passages of the station as sure-footedly as if she’d been born there. When she finally ducked into the shadowy alley of a private dock, the move was so unexpected that Arkady had to backtrack to follow her.

The gate’s monitor was either broken or disconnected. Outside the scratched porthole a dimly lit viruflex tether snaked into the void. At its far end, looking as if it had been cut out with scissors and pasted against a black construction paper sky, floated the impact-scarred hulk of an obsolete Bussard-drive-powered water tanker.

Osnat palmed the scanner. Status lights flickered into life as the gate began its purge and disinfect cycle.

“No one said anything about getting on a ship,” Arkady protested, though it was far too late to back out or demand answers.

“So your employers don’t seem to be keeping you too well informed. What do you want me to do about it?”

Arkady didn’t answer, partly because she was right…and partly because he was wracking his faded memories of pre-Breakaway history trying to figure out what employers were.

The purge and disinfect cycle ended. The airlock irised open and a bitter breeze wafted over them, smelling of space and ice and viruflex. Arkady peered down the long tunnel of the tether, but all he could see were scuffed white walls curving away into darkness.

Osnat put a hard hand to the small of his back and pushed him into the dazzling spray of the gate’s antimicrobial cycle. By the time he blinked the stinging liquid from his eyes she was in the tether with him, riding its movements with the ease of an old space dog. It took Arkady a curiously long time to notice the gun in her hand.

“You’re a piss poor spy, pretty boy.”

“I’m not a—”

“Yeah yeah. Ants. You told me. Well cheer up. You’ll get plenty of ants where we’re going.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just suit up. They did teach you how to use your NBC gear, didn’t they?”

The nuclear-biological-chemical suit was supposed to be just for allergies, according to Korchow. Which had seemed reassuring until Arkady actually stopped to think about it. He pulled the unit out of his pack and tried to activate it. His fingers fumbled on the unfamiliar controls. Osnat shifted from foot to foot impatiently, cursed under her breath, and finally grabbed it from him.

He thought briefly of grappling with her now that her hands were occupied. He imagined himself disarming her and slipping back through the airlock into the relative safety of the station. But one look at Osnat’s hard body and strong hands was enough to discourage him.

She slipped the mask over his face and demonstrated the filter’s workings with quick gestures of her ragged fingers. “This line connects to an auxiliary air tank if you need one. The tank clamps on here and here. You brought spare filters?”

He checked. “Yes.”

“You’ll need ’em. You’re not engineered to survive where we’re going.”

“Are you?”

She squinted at him, lips pressed together in a bloodless line. Somehow the question, as ordinary to him as asking about the weather, had offended her.

She shrugged it off. “Guess you could call it that. Few million years of the best engineering no money can buy. What about the shots we told you to get?”

There’d been dozens of shots, starting with a bewildering array of antiallergens and intestinal fauna, and ending with cholera, tuberculosis, polio, yellow fever, and avian influenza. Arkady had spent hours in his bare white room on Gilead Orbital—a prison cell for all intents and purposes, though there was no lock on the door and he would never have thought to call it a prison before Arkasha—trying to guess where he was going from the shots Korchow had given him. But no immigration authority anywhere in UN space required that battery of inoculations; if such a hellhole existed in the vast swathe of the galaxy that still belonged to humans, they were ashamed enough to keep it secret.

“Good,” Osnat was saying. “An allergic reaction doesn’t mean sniffles and a runny nose down there.”

“Down where? Where are we going? Please, Osnat.”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” She sighted down the barrel of her gun at him, and the smile that drifted across her face was as thin as the clouds in a terraformed sky. “We’re going to run you through the blockade, golem. You’re going to Earth.”

Three men waited in the heavy rotational gravity of the freighter’s bridge. Two were just muscle. The third, however, was quite the other thing.

Slender, sharp-eyed, professorial in wire-rimmed glasses. The olive skin and the close-cropped black beard could have placed him in any number of ethnic or nationalist enclaves along the MedArc of Earth’s orbital ring. But the army surplus shorts, the wrinkled T-shirt, and the thick-soled sandals worn over white athletic socks were so perfectly Israeli—and so exactly what Korchow had told him to expect—that Arkady knew he could only be looking at Moshe Feldman.

Captain Feldman, Korchow had called him. But it had became clear in the course of what Korchow liked to call their “conversations” that the former Captain Feldman of the Israeli Defense Forces, was now Security Consultant Feldman of the very private and very profitable GolaniTech Group.

It had begun. The Israelis had snapped Arkady up like the raiding front of an army ant swarm snapping up a beetle. And once they had determined he was edible, they would pass him along from worker to worker and mandible to mandible, all the way back up the raiding column to the swarm’s soft stomach.

First, however, he would have to get past Moshe. And Moshe didn’t look like an easy man to get past.

“Well if it isn’t the clone who came in from the cold,” Moshe said in the deliberate cadence that hours of tape in the KnowlesSyndicate language labs had taught Arkady to recognize as the mark of Israel’s Ashkenazi intellectual elite. “Let’s see now. Arkady stands for A-18-11-1-4. Which makes you a RostovSyndicate A series, from the eleventh geneline approved by your home Syndicate’s steering committee. And tells us that the first run of your geneline was detanked in crèche one in Syndicate Year Four? Have I got that more or less right, Arkady?”

“Perfect.”

“No, Arkady.” Moshe smiled, showing pink gums and straight white teeth small enough to belong in a child’s mouth. “You’re the one who’s perfect. I’m only human.”

Arkady couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said nothing.

“So,” Moshe said, putting the same vast volumes of meaning into the syllable that Osnat had—and making Arkady marvel at how the dry patterns from the training tapes came alive in Israeli mouths. “What do I need to know?”

“What do you need to know about what?” Arkady asked.

Moshe crossed his arms over his chest. He was small, even by human standards; but his legs were hard and sunburned, and with every movement of his hands Arkady saw corded tendons slide under the skin of his forearms. “First, it would be reassuring to know that you are who you say you are.” Another flash of the childish teeth. “Or at least that you are what you say you are.”

A flick of Moshe’s fingers brought a lab tech scurrying over with a splicing scope and sample kit. The sampling was ungentle, and it required the removal of the mask and filter—a risk that Osnat muttered darkly about and Moshe shrugged off philosophically.

“He’s for real,” the tech finally announced in Hebrew.

“How sure are you?” Moshe asked.

The man spread his hands.

“And what would it take to be completely sure?”

“I’d have to run it by Tel Aviv.”

“Then do it. I’m not taking any chances this time.”

This time?

The tech retrieved his scope and sampling gear and retreated to the streamspace terminal. Then, to Arkady’s surprise and dismay, they waited.

It should have taken days of queuing and relaying for the sample to reach Earth’s Orbital Ring. And then it should have taken weeks for it to be cleared for import by the ossified bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the Controlled Technology Addendum to the Kyoto Protocols. Instead, Arkady watched with growing unease as the tech fed his samples into the terminal and keyed up a streamspace address that began with the fabled triple w.

The implications of those three letters made Arkady catch his breath. Earth was offstream under the Tech Addendum. If Moshe could talk directly to Earth—let alone teleport tissue samples for analysis—then he must have a portable Bose-Einstein terminal and a secure source of entanglement outside the UN’s network of entanglement banks and BE relays. Only a handful of private entities in UN space had the financial means to maintain private entanglement banks: the largest multiplanetaries; the UN bureaucracy itself; the richest AIs and transhumans. And of course the constant wild card in UN politics, a type of entity so archaic that its very existence provoked horrified amazement among Syndicate political philosophers: Earth’s nation-states.

They’re animals, Arkady had protested back on Gilead when he’d first understood he might be dealing with nationalists. Worse than animals. What can we possibly have in common with them?

There’s an old Arab saying, Korchow had answered from behind that unfathomable KnowlesSyndicate smile: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And a thousand idealistic General Assembly resolutions can’t change the fact that Earth has her hand on the Orbital Ring’s water tap.

But Moshe didn’t look much like the nationalists in Arkady’s old sociobiology textbooks. And he certainly didn’t look like he planned to turn the water off on anyone unless he was logically convinced that he was going to reap some benefit from their ensuing thirst.

Arkady blinked, feeling an ominous stinging sensation behind his eyes, and realized that his nose was filling. He sniffed surreptitiously and looked around hoping no one had noticed.

“Have a tissue,” Moshe said.

Arkady took the thing reluctantly, wondering how he was supposed to use it. Then, to his horror and humiliation, he sneezed.

“Go ahead. Blow your nose.”

“May I be excused for a moment?”

“Why? We’re savages, remember? No need for your fine Syndicate manners here.”

Then he saw it. Moshe had set the trap, and he’d walked into it without a backward glance and ended up just where Moshe wanted him: more worried about sneezing in public than about doing the job Korchow had sent him to do.

He blew his nose—something he hadn’t done in public since he was six or so—then stood there holding the used tissue and not knowing what to do with it.

Moshe smiled.

“He’s clean,” the tech announced from behind his terminal. Everyone in the room must have been holding their breath, Arkady realized; he heard a collective sigh of relief at the news.

“Right, then.” Moshe sounded like a professor leading his lecture group into difficult theoretical territory. “Now that we know you’re perfect, why don’t you tell us to what we owe the pleasure of your perfect company?”

“I told you,” Arkady said, still following the script Korchow had laid down for him. “The Syndicates—”

“Yes, yes, I know the spiel by heart. The Syndicates have developed some kind of mysterious genetic weapon and they’re planning to use it against us. But as an ethical evolutionary ecophysicist you can’t abide the thought of wiping out Earth’s wonderful genetic diversity. So you’ve defected in order to do your modest little bit toward making the universe safe for humans.” He gave Arkady a quizzical look. “You don’t look stupid. Did you really think we were going to swallow such bunk?”

Korchow’s last warning echoed in Arkady’s mind: Absalom is the sharpest blade you have. Far too sharp to unsheathe unless you’re quite sure you can put it away again without cutting off your own fingers.

Was he sure? No. But if he failed through an excess of caution, it would be Arkasha who paid the price. He took a quick, nervous breath. “There’s more,” he said, “but I’ll only tell the rest to Absalom.”

“Absalom, indeed.” Moshe’s voice was soft, almost pleasant. He could have been discussing the weather. “And who told you to dangle his name in front of me?”

“No one.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Andrej Korchow no one.”

Arkady’s eyes snapped to Moshe’s face, but all he could see in the glare of the bridge lights were the two flat reflective disks of his glasses.

“Of course it was Korchow who told you to ask for Absalom.” Moshe made it sound trivial. Not a lie. Just a practical joke between friends. “He wants us to think Absalom’s back in the game again. He wants us to be so busy worrying about whether Absalom is playing us for fools that we forget to worry about whether you’re doing the same.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The first blow knocked Arkady to his knees. As he tried to stand, Moshe hooked his feet out from under him and delivered a flurry of surgically precise kicks to his stomach and kidneys.

Osnat laughed. But it sounded like a laugh of shock and surprise, not amusement. Arkady even thought he sensed a recoiling in her, a flush of pity under the soldier’s hard loyalty. Or did he just want to sense that?

“Get up,” Moshe said in the bored tones of a man for whom violence was a job like any other.

Arkady tried to stand. He only managed to kneel, head spinning, hands splayed on the cold deck.

Moshe crouched beside Arkady, his face bent so close that his breath caressed the skin of Arkady’s cheek. “I can’t let you lie to me, Arkady. You can see that, can’t you?”

A waiting silence settled over the bridge. Arkady realized that Moshe expected an answer to this apparently rhetorical question.

“Yes,” he gasped. Just the effort of speaking made him feel like he was going to throw up.

“How many Arkadys do they detank a year?” Moshe asked. “Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand?”

The real number was probably on the high end of Moshe’s guess. But Arkady had never asked about the actual numbers. He’d never even thought of asking. And for the first time in his life he wondered why. “I don’t know,” he answered at last. “A lot, I guess.”

“A lot, you guess.” A cold edge crept into Moshe’s voice. “You’re a piece of equipment, Arkady, as mass-produced as sewer-pipe sections. And if we can’t get what we need from you, we’ll throw you away and order a replacement part. Just like your Syndicate’s already done. Or do you want to tell me I’ve got that wrong and you weren’t condemned meat from the second they shipped you out here?”

Osnat stirred restlessly. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Moshe. Give him a break. Can’t you see he doesn’t know anything?”

“He told you that, did he? And you believed him? Or did you just take a look into those big puppy-dog eyes and decide to trust him?”

Osnat flushed to the roots of her hair. Arkady felt the rest of the room freeze. What had Moshe done to make them so frightened of him? But perhaps a man like Moshe didn’t need to do anything to frighten people.

Moshe dropped back into Hebrew, speaking with quiet but unmistakable anger. Arkady struggled to understand, but the unfamiliar words spilled past too quickly. That it was a dressing-down was clear, though; Osnat absorbed the rebuke with the immovable stoicism of a soldier on parade ground.

Was she a soldier? Had he already been drawn so deep into the tangled web of Israeli Intelligence that he was dealing with government agents and not hired corporate muscle? If so, then which stray thread of the web had quivered in response to Arkady’s carefully choreographed offer of defection? And how much did the success of his mission—and with it Arkasha’s freedom—depend on his guessing correctly?

What if they’re Mossad?

The question spooled across his mind accompanied by old spinfeed of bombings and assassinations. He pushed the images aside. All Mossad agents couldn’t be vicious killers, he told himself, any more than their opposite Palestinian numbers could be the peace-loving posthuman sympathizers that Syndicate propagandists insisted they were. And as long as he kept Korchow happy, it didn’t much matter what the truth was.

Moshe turned back to Arkady, his voice cold and academic again. “Listen, Arkady. I have no personal grudge against you. I’m not some little boy pulling the wings off flies during recess. But the road to Absalom goes through me. And if you cross me, if you lie to me, if you so much as quiver in a direction that makes me nervous, I’ll kill you. The police won’t blink. My superiors won’t even give me a slap on the wrist. It’ll be like killing a dog as far as they’re concerned. Less than killing a dog; with a dog there’s always some schlemiel ready to call the animal protection society. And trust me, Arkady, there is no golem protection society.”

They stared at each other, Arkady sweating and panting, Moshe as calm as he’d been before the surreal outbreak of violence. “Do you remember my last question?” Moshe asked.

“Whether Korchow told me to ask for Absalom.”

“Good.”

“But I—”

“Don’t answer now. You’re leaving in the morning. I won’t see you until we’re both on the other side of the blockade. And meanwhile I’d like you to spend the trip thinking about the difference between what Korchow can do for you once you’re on Earth and what I can do for you.”

The freighter had been built in what Arkady thought of as the White Period of UN jumpship design.

For ten or twelve years, in one of those inexplicable emergent phenomena of fashion, white viruflex had come into style simultaneously on all the far-flung UN colonies that habitually sold their obsolete driveships to the Syndicate buyers. Everything that could be made of viruflex was made of viruflex, and every piece of viruflex that could be white was white. White deckplating. White walls. White ventilation grills, white water and power and spinstream conduits. And, hovering in the fading shadows above them, white ceilings with glimmering white recessed-lighting panels.

As Osnat led him through the ship, Arkady remembered with a twinge that he had used just this rather silly example of emergence to explain how ant swarms worked in his first real conversation with Arkasha. Arkasha hadn’t cared for the metaphor. And now, in the face of all this merciless whiteness, Arkady saw why.

The whole ship looked like a euth ward.

It looked like an empty euth ward whose patients had all shut themselves into their rooms and taken their terminal doses. He imagined cold white cells behind all the cold white doors, and cold white beds containing cold white bodies whose limbs and faces betrayed terrible deformities. Or, worse, bodies whose physical perfection hinted at even more horrifying deviations of mind and spirit.

Osnat stopped, tugging at his arm like an adult shepherding a crècheling through a pressure door, and led him into a room that was mercifully empty and ordinary. A battered viruflex chair stood beside a bed made up with square military corners. The blanket on the bed was wool, something Arkady had never seen outside of history spins. He could smell it all the way across the room: a faint animal smell, at once dry and oily.

“Bathroom.” Osnat pointed. “Washing water. Drinking water. Mix ’em up and you’ll be sorry. Recyclables disposal. Biohazards disposal. And biohazards include anything that touches your body until you clear your Syndicate-side flora. You need anything else, press the call button by the door. But only if you really need it. Moshe’s not a patient man.” Her eyes flicked to the corner of the tiny space and she frowned. “Sorry about the ants, by the way. I’ll bring some roach spray if I can find any.”

Arkady followed her glance and saw a gleaming rivulet of amber carapaces that he’d at first mistaken for a crack in the laminated viruflex flooring. “Pharaoh ants,” he said, intrigued by the unexpected discovery. “Is the ship infested?”

“If only it were just the ship. They’re taking over the fucking universe.”

“They’ve always owned it.” He corrected her without a second thought now that he was back on familiar territory. “Vertebrate biomass was negligible compared to ants, even before Earth’s ecological collapse. And as far as any biogeophysical cycles are concerned—”

He stopped, sensing Osnat’s stare.

“This isn’t one of those Syndicate suicide missions, is it?” she asked abruptly. “A…what do they call it…a gifting of biological property?”

“Right. I mean…yes, that’s the word. But no, I don’t think it is one.”

“You don’t think so? You mean they can order you to die without even telling you ahead of time?”

Who was this they she was talking about? And could humans still “order” each other to die the way they ordered meals at restaurants? But surely that was impossible, even on Earth. He must have misheard her.

“What about Novalis?” she pursued. “Was Novalis a suicide mission?”

He froze, forcing himself to wait a beat before looking into her eyes. This was the first time anyone had said the planet’s name. And hearing the familiar word on Osnat’s lips reminded him abruptly that she worked for Moshe.

“Fine,” Osnat said after a silence long enough to make his skin itch. “I was just asking.”

“How is Moshe going to get me through the UN’s Tech Embargo?” Arkady asked.

“I don’t know. The Americans are handling that part. We didn’t want to bring them into it, but no one else on Earth is still crazy enough to go head-to-head against UNSec.”

America! The mere name was enough to make Arkady catch his breath. The land where Audubon had seen the last legendary flights of the passenger pigeons. The land where de Tocqueville had walked through virgin forests so dense that uprooted oak trees hung in the surrounding branches and crumbled to dust without ever touching the earth. The land that had spawned the great twentieth-century myrmecologists, from Wheeler and Wilson to Schnierla and Pratt and Gordon. The country whose scientists had taken the first halting steps toward modern terraforming theory…even as the engines of their industry were shredding the fragile web that made man’s continued life on Earth possible.

“Don’t worry,” Osnat reassured him, misinterpreting his dazed expression. “We’re not actually going there. I can’t promise we won’t accidentally get you ripped limb from limb by a mob of religious fanatics, but it’s not Plan A.”

“Religious fanatics? In America?”

Osnat gave him a quizzical look. “How much do you actually know about Earth, Arkady?”

“Um…I know a lot about the ants.”

“Great. Well, just don’t talk to anyone. And by anyone, I mean particularly Americans and Interfaithers. Which should be easy since they’re usually the same people. And while I’m handing out free advice, you want to back off a bit with this Absalom business. Keep tossing that name around and you might just piss Moshe off so badly he decides no amount of intelligence value is worth the aggravation.”

“Why?”

Her good eye fixed him with an incredulous stare.

“You don’t even know who Absalom is,” she said finally. “It’s just a name to you. Korchow didn’t give you a clue what you were walking into. Unfuckingbelievable.”

He didn’t answer, and after staring at him for another acutely uncomfortable moment she muttered, “Like a goddamn lamb to the slaughter,” and stalked out of the room.

The first thing Arkady did when Osnat left was walk across the room to examine the wool blanket. It was warm to the touch, as if it still remembered the heat of the animal it had come from. He ran his hand over the rough surface, feeling the hairs—or were they called furs?—prick the skin of his palm.

He went to the sink and poured himself a cup of water. It tasted stale, as if the tanker was limping to the end of a long slow time run and her tanks were overdue for scrubbing. It also had a salt-and-copper tang that turned out to be the taste of his own blood.

He washed his face and prodded at his teeth until he was sure nothing had been knocked loose. He wasn’t surprised. Moshe had worked him over so expertly that even in the midst of the pain Arkady had had a perversely comforting feeling of safety; if he just submitted and lay still, some instinct had whispered, no real harm would come to him. Maybe that had been the real purpose of the beating. If so, Moshe had pounded the point home pretty effectively.

Arkady leaned over the sink and inspected the face staring back at him from the mirror. He hadn’t shaved since he’d reached UN space, and the black shadow of a beard pooled in the angles and hollows of a face sucked thin by gravity. It made him look hungry and breakable…and disconcertingly like Arkasha.

He covered his broken nose and warped cheekbone with the palm of one hand and looked at the pieces of his face that were still recognizable after Korchow’s hammer job. There were the dark eyes, so like Arkasha’s eyes; the fine-featured Slavic face, so like Arkasha’s face; the pale skin, so like Arkasha’s skin.

And the soft doubtful uncertain mouth that had never been anything like Arkasha’s mouth, even before Novalis.

He curled his upper lip in the mocking half smile that had always been Arkasha’s first line of defense, and tried to summon the illusion that kept him going. The trick to making it work was not to ask for too much. He couldn’t imagine Arkasha in his arms. That was far too obviously impossible. But he could call up his hoarded memories of his pairmate: all the moments and movements that he’d never quite paid enough attention to as they slipped by. The intent curve of Arkasha’s back as he bent over his splicing scope. The fine-boned hands, nervous in idleness but precise and graceful when they turned the pages of a book, or mounted samples, or handled a splicing scope. The mercurial combination of strength and fragility that had called forth a devotion Arkady had never thought himself capable of feeling. Sometimes he could convince himself that the face looking back at him in the mirror was real and that Arkasha was safe. Far away—perhaps too far away for Arkady to ever hope to see him again—but alive and well and, most important, happy. That wasn’t too much to imagine. And it made sleep possible. It made everything possible.

Arkady sighed and dropped his hand. He crossed the room to the narrow bed, slipped under the unnerving blanket, and whispered the lights off.

Nothing happened.

He got up and circled the room looking for a manual switch, but there was none. He reached for the door, acting on reflex, intending to open it and find the switch in the corridor outside.

It wouldn’t open.

He rattled it, yanked at it, slammed his shoulder against it, feeling a thrumming panic start to build in his gut.

And then he understood.

They’d done something no one had ever done to him in his life. Something there wasn’t even a word for in Syndicate-standard English. Something he’d never heard of anyone doing except in the most ancient and appalling tales of human cruelty. They had locked him in.

He backed away from the door. His fingers stung from wringing at the unyielding metal latch. He was panting like an animal, and he made a conscious effort to slow his breath. Had Osnat done this? Did human beings do such things to each other and not just to constructs? And if so, then why hadn’t Korchow warned him?

Arkasha would have known, he caught himself thinking for the thousandth time. Arkasha with his insatiable fascination with humans. Arkasha with his history books and his political philosophy and his ancient literature. Arkasha could probably even have come up with some explanation crazy enough to make sense of such a crime.

So why am I here instead of you, Arkasha? And what has Korchow done to you?

He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and paced back and forth trying to tire himself out, but the mere thought of the locked door made his guts churn. He tried the latch again, working at it systematically, hoping he’d just failed to understand the proper way to open it. But no. It was locked after all.

Finally, out of options, he did what he should have done in the first place and sat down on the floor to watch the ants.

There were perhaps three hundred of them. They emerged from the narrow crack between wall and deckplating, wound across the floor in the classic branching and puddling fractals of a colonizing swarm, and disappeared into a facing crevice just as lightless and impenetrable as the first. They were a river, a living stream of thoraxes that glittered like spilled oil under the sickly gleam of the shipboard lighting. They shouldn’t have been here. They were pests. No one had ever meant to bring them into space. And yet here they were, welling from the ship’s intestines like blood from an open wound: poor ravaged Earth wreaking her revenge through these, her smallest foot soldiers.

Arkady dipped a finger into the flood and let the tiny minor workers swarm onto his hand so he could get a closer look at them. He felt a mild sting as one of them took an experimental bite out of him. He blew the ants off his hand—brushing them off might have crushed delicate legs and antennae, and he’d never been able to bear hurting ants avoidably. He rubbed at the bite pensively and forced his mind back to the same question that had obsessed him since that first meeting with Andrej Korchow.

Why Arkady? What made him different from all the thousands of other Arkadys on the half dozen Syndicate orbital stations and surface settlements? Why had Korchow extended his miraculous offer of clemency to Arkady and Arkasha? Arkady had spent his whole life studying ecosystems and biospheres: mapping the complex web of interlocking energy cycles that drove the metabolism of a living planet. It was only natural for him to apply these skills to his current situation. But all his attempts to construct a coherent picture of Novalis and its aftermath had failed miserably. Whatever confidence he’d had in his ability to grasp the underlying structures of his own life, it had vanished into Novalis’s impenetrable jungle.

He shuffled back to the sink, poured a fresh glass of water, and entertained himself by sprinkling it in the swarm’s path. A few solitary foragers responded, dipping into the spilled water and marching back to their companions with miniscule droplets glittering between their raised pincers like diamonds set in amber. But the main body of the swarm flowed on, too firmly in the grip of the swarm-colonize pheromone to turn aside even for life’s ultimate necessity.

Arkady kept up the attempt for a while, wishing he had his collecting gear. He searched for the telltale elongated thorax of an ambulatory queen, trying to recall whether colonizing Pharaoh ants took their supernumerary queens with them or sequestered and assassinated them.

Then he just sat, numb with exhaustion, and watched the ants hurtle from one darkness to another in search of a moveable idea called home.

Arkady woke with a start, knowing, though he couldn’t have said why, that he wasn’t alone.

He rolled over and saw Moshe sitting in the chair beside his bed, bathed in the secondhand starlight refracted off the tanker’s solar collectors.

“We need to talk,” Moshe said.

Arkady sat up, pulling the rough blanket around his nakedness.

“What time is it?”

“Early. Or late, depending on how you want to look at it. But then I guess people who grow up in space don’t get station lag. You want to get dressed, go ahead.”

He got up and put his clothes on. Moshe’s eyes tracked him across the room.

“Can I use the toilet?”

“No one’s stopping you.”

He went into the bathroom, shut the door behind him, blew his nose, and went back out again.

Moshe was still in the chair, but now the lights were on. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing Arkady back to the bed.

The bed that had seemed so hard when he was trying to fall asleep now felt too soft. He couldn’t sit up straight in it. And there was some-thing ignominious about slumping in the ruins of his crumpled sheets while Moshe sat on his chair as neat and straight as a toy soldier.

“It seems my superiors have gotten cold feet, Arkady. They’ve decided to make me decide whether we should run you through the Embargo or just dump you back into the pond to be snapped up by the next fish that happens by. In other words they’ve figured out how to put my ass on the line for decisions they’re getting paid to make. Do they promote self-serving incompetents in the Syndicates too? Or have you people evolved beyond that sort of thing?”

“Uh…not quite yet.”

“Well, I guess that should make me feel better.” He cocked his head as if he were taking the measure of his feelings. “It doesn’t. By the way, Arkady, we’re on spin. Is that a problem for you?”

“Would it make any difference if I said it was?”

“No. But I thought I’d ask. My mother raised me to be polite. You do know what a mother is, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen dogs have puppies,” Arkady said doubtfully.

Moshe gave him a hard unfriendly look. “Novalis,” he said after a moment. “Start from the beginning. Tell me everything. Tell me about the survey mission. Tell me about this genius, Arkasha, and his brilliant discovery. That’s what you’re selling, isn’t it? Some genetic weapon this Arkasha person discovered?”

“Not a weapon. An antidote.”

Moshe snorted. “If you think there’s a difference between the two, then you’ve grossly misunderstood the last five hundred years of human history.”

Arkady blinked and cleared his throat. This line of conversation felt dangerous; technical knowledge was one thing, but Moshe could read him far too well when they strayed into broad-brush ideological debates. “Arkasha didn’t discover it. I told you. The UN spliced it and tried to use it against us in violation of the Treaty provisions. Arkasha just isolated a sample. I’m willing to trade it to you.”

“In exchange for what? And don’t give me some candyass speech about genetic diversity.”

“For Arkasha’s safety.”

“Keep talking.” Moshe’s face remained impassive. “I’m listening.”

Arkady collected himself and tried to pull the story together in his mind the way Korchow had told him to tell it. But it was like giving a shape to water. And Korchow wasn’t the one who was going to have to face Moshe’s fists and feet if he was caught out in a lie.

“Novalis wasn’t just a survey mission,” he began tentatively. “It was more of a survey and a terraforming mission all in one. Novalis was selected based on unmanned probe telemetry. We’re looking for the same thing everyone’s looking for: abandoned Evacuation-era terraforming starts. Bare branch colonies are the best, of course, but synthetic biospheres are tricky. If something killed off the original colonists, there’s always the chance it could still be around to kill you.”

“What do you mean, killed off?” Moshe interrupted. “Like…predators?”

“Uh…no.” Was that a joke? “More like mold. Anyway…what we do isn’t really all that different from what UN terraformers do. We just do it with a smaller team.”

And a smaller safety margin. But there was no reason to tell Moshe about that. God knew what he’d make of it. Probably file a report about how the Syndicates were so desperate they were throwing terraformers away like soldier ants.

“But you guys are a hell of a lot better at terraforming than humans are,” Moshe prompted.

“Well, half the planets on the Periphery were terraformed by corporate-owned constructs. And some of them came over in the Breakaway. We have a lot of expertise. And we don’t have the evolutionary baggage humans have. We don’t try to treat synthetic biospheres as if they were Earth before the ecological collapse. We’ve shaped our entire social organism to respond to the ecophysical realities of postterrestrial…”

Moshe shifted restlessly. “Okay. Let’s start with the team members. How many of you were there?”

“Ten.”

“Home Syndicates?”

“Two from Aziz. Two B’s from Motai. Then the two Banerjees and us four from Rostov.”

“Why four team members from Rostov? Was Rostov commanding the mission?”

“I’m not sure what…”

“I mean did Rostov have some kind of final say on mission-critical decisions?”

“No.” Arkady grimaced. “The Aziz A’s did.” That had been the first fatal error the joint steering committee had inflicted on them.

“And what’s the communications lag between Novalis and the nearest Bose-Einstein relay?”

Arkady looked at Moshe, thought about lying, and decided it wasn’t worth it. “Six hundred and twelve days if you hit the short trajectory launch window.”

“Which would mean the closest BE-relay has to be…let’s see, somewhere offshore of Kurzet’s star? Don’t worry,” Moshe said in reply to Arkady’s stricken look. “I’m sure UNSec would care, but we don’t tell them everything. Actually, we don’t tell them shit unless they really lean on us. Still, I would have thought the Syndicates were seeding thicker out there.”

“Bose-Einstein relays cost money. And the kind of people who are willing to sell to the Syndicates want cash.”

“Thought you clones were making money hand over fist since peace broke out.”

“Not BE-relay kind of money.”

Moshe acknowledged this truth with a rueful nod that made Arkady realize tech poverty must be a daily fact of life on Earth, just as it was in the Syndicates. “So you guys were real old-time explorers, huh? Alone in the Deep with no one on the other end of the comm but a two-year-gone ghost. What was supposed to happen if you ran into real-time trouble?”

“We had a tactical unit on ice we could wake up. If we had to.”

“And you were going to keep them under for three years plus travel time? Haven’t you people ever heard of fair labor practices?”

Arkady guessed this must be a joke, so he smiled.

“Seriously, though. Why didn’t you thaw them out as soon as things started to go sour?”

Arkady repressed a shudder. “You’ve never met tacticals.”

“Weren’t the Ahmeds tacticals?”

“The Ahmeds are A’s. Military, yes. But not tacticals.” Not by a long shot. And the fact that Moshe could confuse the two things suddenly seemed like a measure of the profound hopelessness of ever coming to an understanding with humans.

Moshe must have sensed Arkady’s dismay, because he backed off suddenly. When he spoke again his voice was casual, almost companionable.

“Do you mind if I ask a personal question? It’s silly, really. But let’s just say I’m curious.”

“Okay,” Arkady said cautiously, the memory of the last time he’d failed to answer one of Moshe’s little questions still throbbing in his gut.

“Why is Korchow so ugly? By Syndicate standards, I mean. By human standards he’s perfectly decent-looking.”

“Dishy,” Osnat drawled.

Arkady practically jumped out of his skin. When had she come in? And how in God’s name had she done it without his seeing her?

She looked like she’d just woken up. She’d swapped her civilian clothes for a faded but carefully ironed T-shirt, desert drab fatigues, and brown leather paratrooper’s boots. The boots were run-down at the heel, but they had that glassy sheen that can only be achieved by years of spit and parade wax. And the short sleeves of her T-shirt rode up over her biceps to reveal a tattoo on one arm that Arkady hadn’t seen before: a flying tiger, its bared fangs and unsheathed claws neatly framed by long-pinioned eagle’s wings.

“The Knowles A’s are meant to look human,” Arkady explained, speaking to both of them. “It makes their work easier.”

“But it must make life difficult for them back home.”

“No. They…they look the way they’re meant to look. A Knowles construct who looked any other way would be norm-deviant.”

Moshe laughed. “And what about you, Arkady? How do you norm out? You’re quite the pretty boy. Osnat’s been making calf eyes at you ever since she marched you through the airlock. Was Arkasha a pretty boy too? Or was he a deviant?”

“Arkasha’s not a deviant!”

“Then how come Korchow threw him in a euth ward? Because he tried to defect, like you? Let’s face it, Arkady, the only Syndicate constructs who defect to UN space are spies, perverts, and deviants. Which one was Arkasha? And which are you?”

But Arkady couldn’t answer. Moshe’s first sentence had raked through his mind and left it too raw and tattered to comprehend the rest.

“Who told you…how do you know that Arkasha’s in a renorming center?”

“Come on, Arkady. You know I can’t tell you that.”

“Then at least tell me how old the information is. You can tell me that, can’t you?”

“Our last news from your side of the Line is about a month old.”

“Then we have to hurry,” Arkady said urgently. “You have to make up your minds fast.”

“Why? It’s not like Arkasha has a date with the hangman. All he has to do is act normal and he’s out. And even if he can’t do that…well, what about that famous poet, what’s his name? People can sit on the euth wards for years.”

“Arkasha won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because he told me if he was ever sent for renorming again he’d kill himself.”

Moshe made a sceptical face. “Very convenient. I start to balk and you pull a potential suicide out of your hat to make sure I gulp down the bait without taking the time to look at it too closely. Nicely done…for an amateur.”

“I’m not making it up! And I wasn’t ordered here either, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“Don’t play word games with me, Arkady. You people don’t have to be ordered to throw away your lives. That’s why you’re the next step on the evolutionary ladder, isn’t that right? That’s why you’re going to wipe us out and usher in a brave new world without humans.”

“We don’t want to wipe you out,” Arkady whispered. “We just want to be left alone.”

Moshe stood up, circled the room, went to the porthole, and stared out at the sharp silver night. “Did you fight in the war, Arkady?”

No need to say which war. The struggle between the UN and the Syndicates had subsided to a lethal simmer, but it was still the axis along which every other conflict lined up. Even on lonely backward Earth.

“I was too young.”

“Too young to remember it, or just too young to fight in it?”

Visions of burnt-out crèches. Visions of the once-vibrant rings of ZhangSyndicate gutted to hard vac. Visions of shooting stars that were dying ships and pilots…but, hush, don’t tell the crèchelings. “Just too young to fight,” he said at last.

Arkady had been six when the shooting started. The official fighting between the UN and Syndicate armies had been bloody beyond the imagination of a spacefaring age, but the riots had been worse. Posthuman populations all along the Periphery had revolted, whether because they supported the Breakaway or merely because it thinned out the omnipresent UN Peacekeepers enough for them to make a bid for their own independence. The UN had met violence with violence, and Peacekeepers had fired on demonstrating crowds in eight of the fifteen trusteeships. The shootings touched off riots throughout the Periphery, forcing the UN to fight a war on two fronts…a war that many people had come to see not as a political conflict but as a struggle to the death between two species battling for possession of the same ecological niche.

Arkady eyed Moshe, taking in the clever resolute face, the thin yet strong body. “Did you fight in the War for Independence?”

“If you’re going to talk about it to humans, you might want to consider calling it something else. But no, I didn’t. Earthers aren’t required to make troop contributions for off-world Peacekeeping missions.” Moshe sat down again and leaned forward to stare at Arkady. “But I saw the war on the evening spins. You fought like ants. You died and died and died until the Peacekeepers had nervous breakdowns from having to shoot so many of you. What do your officers threaten you with to make you fight like that?”

“We have no officers.”

“Then what are you afraid of? People only fight like that when they’re faced with something that scares them worse than dying.”

Later Arkady would see this moment as a turning point. Before it, he had managed, just barely, to keep Moshe guessing. After it, Moshe and Osnat both knew in their guts what he really was…even if it took their brains a while to catch up with the knowledge.

“Some things are stronger than fear,” he whispered.

“Name one.”

He hesitated, acutely aware of Osnat’s gaze boring into his back. There were plenty of safe words he could have chosen. Duty. Honor. Gene loyalty. Genetic gifting. If he’d latched on to any of those abstract concepts he could have kept up the lie. He could have remained the empty vessel that Korchow wanted him to be: a vessel into which Moshe could pour his own beliefs and desires without ever touching on the real truth of what had happened on Novalis.

Instead, Arkady uttered what seemed to be the only word left inside his rattlingly empty skull:

“Love.”