Spin Control

ARITHMETIC OF THE SOUL

It was evening again when arkady and Osnat came to Yad Vashem’s iron gate.

Arkady felt an exhausted sense of déjà vu as he watched Gavi descend the hill—still with the dog playing around his legs, still with the sinking sun behind him.

“We need help,” Osnat said when Gavi was finally standing in front of them. She sounded like her gut was twisting with the effort of asking for it.

“Well, okay. I’m glad you think you can trust me.”

Osnat glared into the middle distance with a look of profound disgust on her face. “I should probably bat my eyelashes at you, and tell you I was all wrong about Tel Aviv, and do my best to play the dumb blonde in the red Ferrari.”

A smile stole across Gavi’s lips. “You would never do that, Osnat.”

“Don’t be so fucking sure. But anyway…the truth is we have nowhere else left to go.”

Gavi led them up the hill, and scrounged up clean clothes and clean sheets and clean towels, and gave them bread and soup and chicken, all washed down with cold clear well water. He might have been any lonely homesteader on any colony planet welcoming the rare guests who wandered by. Only when they had finished eating did he begin to ask the real questions.

“Go ahead, Arkady,” Osnat said. “Tell him what you told me.”

Arkady told him.

“Do you want more chicken?” Gavi said when Arkady’s explanations and excuses finally petered out. “There’s more if you want it.” And then he meandered off into the shadowy depths of the kitchen and all Arkady and Osnat heard for a few minutes were pots rattling and spoons scraping.

When Gavi came back he was frowning. “Explain this Turing Soup thing again?”

Arkady tried to walk him through Arkasha’s explanation of Turing Soup, neutral networks, gateway mutations, and search engines and only got hopelessly tangled.

“So fertility’s almost a side effect,” Gavi said when he was done. “Except that whereas it offers you in the Syndicates something that you don’t want—or at least that most of you don’t want—it offers us exactly what everyone wants. So however slim your chances of putting it back in the box might be, our chances are even slimmer.”

“How long do you think it’ll take before it turns into war between Earth and the Ring?” Osnat asked. “Ten years? Twenty?”

“Actually,” Gavi said, “I was thinking months not years.”

“We need to get to Didi,” Osnat said. She seemed to be watching Gavi while she spoke, as if she were looking for an answer that she expected to be written on his face.

“Getting to Didi is easier said than done,” Gavi answered. He hesitated as if he were playing out possible counterarguments in his mind, one after another, and rejecting them.

“You talked to Li,” he said finally, “not Cohen. Do you have any reason to believe your message actually reached Cohen?”

“Well, no, but I thought they were the same person.”

“They are. But I’m not sure that means what you think it means. I think our next step should be to go back to Cohen. Directly.”

Osnat shook her head violently.

“I don’t argue that we should trust Cohen blindly,” Gavi said. “But I still think he’s the best person to feel out if we want to get a firmer grip on what’s actually happening in the Office without sticking our necks out too far.”

“I don’t know.” Osnat sighed. She wiped a hand across her face. “I’m so tired I’m about to pass out sitting up.”

“We don’t need to decide anything tonight,” Arkady suggested. “We can always sleep on it and see what we think in the morning.”

But in the morning Osnat was too sick to talk, and Arkady and Gavi were too busy trying to keep her alive to remember the conversation they were supposed to have had.

Her fever was worse than anything that the survey team members had suffered from. For three days Gavi and Arkady nursed her through it, spelling each other, falling back on aspirin and cold-water-soaked cloths when none of the normal remedies seemed to work.

“Is this the same sickness?” Gavi asked at one point. He was sitting with Osnat, mopping her brow with a cold cloth while Arkady looked on in an agony of guilt.

“How should I know?” Arkady said desperately. “I’m not a doctor, and even the doctors on the survey didn’t know what they were dealing with.”

“I’m not asking you for a diagnosis,” Gavi said coolly, “just an opinion.”

“You’re the human!” Arkady protested. “For all I know it could be the flu.”

Gavi gave Arkady a long level look over Osnat’s unconscious body.

“Okay. I don’t think it is either. But…what do you want me to tell you?”

“I don’t know. Is there anything else you should tell me?”

“Can I speak with you, Gavi?”

“Of course, Arkady. But come outside. I need to get dinner ready.”

They walked through the visitors’ center, pausing in the gloomy industrial-sized kitchen long enough for Gavi to pick up a hard-used metal bowl and a vicious-looking knife. They stepped outside—that shocking moment of transition that Arkady would never get used to no matter how many brief planetside stays he made over the course of his mostly stationbound life. Gavi set off down the hill toward the shantytown jumble of the chicken coops. When they reached the little flock, Gavi slipped in among them, gesturing to Arkady to wait on the edge. He spoke companionably to the birds, and they clustered around him looking for handouts and caresses.

Gavi took one of his hens in his arms and murmured to her in Hebrew too soft and quick for Arkady to make any sense of it. He ambled back over to Arkady and sat down. The hen rested in his lap chuttering quietly to herself, her eyes all but closed. Gavi smoothed down her feathers and caressed her until she hunkered down into her feathers and closed her eyes in pleasure. Then he gripped her with firm, expert hands and drew the blade across her throat so smoothly and quickly that Arkady only understood what had happened when he saw the blood coursing into the bowl Gavi had nudged into place with his good foot.

“Is that for keeping kosher?” Arkady asked when he had recovered his voice enough to speak.

“No.” Gavi turned the hen’s limp little body in his hand and began plucking the feathers with sharp, practiced turns of his wrist. “It’s for Dibbuk.”

“You don’t keep kosher then?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if God actually exists, I can think of a long list of things He ought to be more worried about than the contents of my intestines. What did you want to talk to me about, Arkady?”

“I…I wanted to apologize.”

“What for?”

“For, well…everything. I thought I was doing the right thing. Or at least one right thing. I didn’t know Korchow had turned me into a weapon. I wish I could make you believe that.”

“I can see that you’re well-intentioned. This is a very complicated situation. You really don’t owe me anything.”

Gavi was still plucking away at the chicken so that it was impossible for Arkady to meet his dark eyes. His voice, however, struck a chill down Arkady’s spine: cool, smooth, gently distant. The voice of a man who had gone through anger and come out the other side. Arkady could imagine going to great lengths to avoid hearing it again.

“I never hid anything from you intentionally. I didn’t understand what Korchow had done myself until after we’d talked. And then, with Safik…well…”

“Safik could wring secrets out of stones. I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am if I thought you wouldn’t tell him everything.”

Arkady looked doubtfully at him. “You’re not angry, then?”

“Being angry would imply that I expected you not to tell him. Or that I felt you had some kind of obligation not to. Why would I think either of those things?” Gavi stood up, the chicken hanging limp and bedraggled and naked in his hand. “Angry’s silly, Arkady. It makes people feel better in the short term, but in the long term it just makes them not think straight. And what possible good can it do anyone if we let ourselves be seduced into not thinking straight?”

“None, I guess.”

“I’m glad you agree with me. Let’s go have dinner.”

“So how come Gavi didn’t get sick?” was the first thing Osnat wanted to know when she was back in the land of the living.

“What do you mean?” Gavi asked, looking sharply at her. “Has someone else gotten sick?”

“Moshe. Well, I think so. The first week. But that’s twenty-twenty hindsight talking. At the time I thought it was just allergies. Same with the guards.” She frowned. “Ash Sofaer didn’t get sick either come to think of it.”

Gavi looked down at his plate. “Maybe Ash and I don’t have what the virus fixes.”

Osnat stared. A charged silence crept around the table and spread to the corners of the room.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Osnat asked.

“Well…Ash has a son. So do I.”

“You what?” Osnat asked. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

Osnat grew rigid in her chair. She looked at her plate, her cup, the wall behind Gavi’s head. Everything but Gavi.

“You have a natural child?” she said finally, in an accusatory whisper. “And you just…abandoned him?”

“I like you, Osnat,” Gavi said in his blandest, most noncommittal voice, “but you’re a very judgmental person. And you seem to have the oddest idea that people are required to justify themselves to you when really it’s none of your business. It’s not attractive.”

“It’s a hell of a lot more attractive than thinking you have a right to float through life and break all the rules without ever explaining yourself to anyone!”

Arkady looked back and forth between the two of them, feeling the emotional undercurrent in the fight but completely unable to make sense of it.

“You want explanations?” Gavi said. “Here’s one. My wife was a doctor at a hospital on the Palestinian side of the Line. We lived over there so Joseph could go to Palestinian school. And don’t give me that look, little Miss Ashkenaz. You don’t know what it was like to be an Arab child in Israeli schools, even before the war. When the border crossing started getting sticky, we kept telling ourselves it would blow over. But it didn’t blow over. One day I went to work…and I couldn’t get back across. At first I could talk to them on the phone. Then the satlink was cut. Then I stopped getting any news of them at all. The last thing I heard was that Leila’s hospital had been bombed. Accidentally, of course. It’s amazing how often hospitals seem to get in the way of bombs. They found her body in what was left of the pediatric ward. The children were much harder to identify. But one of the survivors said she’d taken Joseph to work with her that morning because she thought it was safer than leaving him home.” He stood up, moving as clumsily as Arkady had ever seen him move. “So that’s how I deserted my son. Hope you enjoyed our little session of show-and-tell as much as I did.”

“Osnat—” Arkady began when Gavi had stalked out.

“Oh shut up, Arkady! What the hell do you know about anything, anyway?”

It took most of a day for Osnat and Gavi to start talking to each other again; and when they did it was with the quiet caution of a bomb squad tiptoeing around a possibly live piece of ordnance.

“I think we ought to at least put out a feeler,” Gavi said, talking mostly to Arkady. “There’s no reason I can’t drop by to see Cohen and feel him out a bit.”

Osnat raised one eyebrow. “You think you can find out more about him than he’ll find out about you in the first five seconds?”

Gavi got a funny look on his face. “Well…yes, actually. You know the old saying about AIs. It’s not that they’re smarter than us…”

“It’s just that they can be dumb so much faster. But that doesn’t mean you can lie to him and get away with it.”

“I’m not going to lie. I’m just going to offer what Cohen would call a selective sampling of the available data.”

“Are you sure that’s safe?” Arkady asked, thinking of Safik’s warnings about the AI.

Gavi gave him a quizzical look. “What’s he going to do, steal my lunch money?”

They kept Li awake until she’d never been so tired, even in combat. Exhaustion smeared thought and twisted perception. Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was the monster of all her childhood nightmares, hunting her through a distorted landscape while she ran and ran, unable to stop though she knew she would fall sooner or later.

And through the long fight with exhaustion, in the brief lulls between those nightmare flights, came the interrogations.

She was hooded of course. But she didn’t need to see her torturers to know them. Their attentions to her were invasive and intimate, and by the end of the second day she knew the three men better than their own wives did.

There was the one who laughed and joked and obviously enjoyed his work. There was the one who handled her with the brusque impersonalness of a butcher slinging meat. And there was the one who apologized. He was the worst by far because he reminded Li of the last thing she wanted to remember: that there were people on the other end of those cruel hands.

What they wanted was easy enough: her passwords.

They wanted the keys to her hard memory, her procedural backups, her archived spinfeeds, her accumulated knowledge base of past UNSec operations.

But she couldn’t give them the passwords because she no longer had them. They’d been changed by a deeply embedded Peacekeeper security loop the moment her internals processed the fact of her kidnapping. She’d heard rumors that UNSec built such things into Peacekeeper psychware, but until now she hadn’t entirely believed in them. Unfortunately, her captors didn’t seem to believe in them either.

And all the while, they kept hammering at her about some meeting with Turner that she couldn’t remember—any more than she could remember how she’d gotten here. Li, a connoisseur of memory loss, could feel the gap as clearly as she would have felt a missing tooth. And she could locate what was missing, more or less. Not that she really needed to, because her captors questioned her about it almost as incessantly as they questioned her about her passwords and security programs.

Where had she gone before she went to meet Turner?

Who had she spoken to before she spoke to Turner?

Who knew she had gone to see Turner?

Where had the woman and the clone gone to after she’d passed their location on to Turner?

It was no use. She remembered the call from Osnat and Arkady. Then nothing. And the more they asked about Turner, and Turner, and Turner, the harder it got to believe that she could have agreed to meet with him in the first place.

She couldn’t say just when she began to realize that there were other people attending the interrogation sessions. The watchers were silent and invisible—at least to Li, whose whole universe had narrowed down to a few centimeters of burlap darkness. But they exerted a tidal pull on the interrogators, as unmistakably as an eclipsed planet tugging at its neighbors in the dark. Li’s torturers were playing to their audience, like the miners of Li’s all-but-forgotten childhood picking up the pace at the cutting face when the straw boss was watching.

It was the watchers who made them start in on her hands.

They didn’t need to do much. Ceramsteel filament was as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel and much harder. When a filament snapped and its severed ends started floating free against fragile flesh and bone, you’d better pray to whatever gods you believed in that you were within tossing distance of the surgical tanks. And no part of your body outside your relatively protected spinal column was as impregnated with monofilament-thin virally embedded ceramsteel filament as your hands. So when they strapped her hands down, she’d known immediately where the game was headed. The only question in her mind was how far the unseen watcher would allow it to go.

Answer: pretty damn far.

Far enough to make her glad she was blindfolded and couldn’t see what was happening at the far ends of her arms.

Far enough to trigger the memory that had somehow become intimately and inextricably associated with what they were doing to her.

Far enough to send her mind spinning back to Gilead.

The whole operation on Gilead had been fractally fubard. Fucked up beyond all recall in every spatial scale and at every hierarchical level of complexity.

The UNSec spin doctors had made it out to be a positive orgy of heroism, and the war correspondents had bought their spin hook, line, and sinker. But in Li’s opinion Gilead had been just like almost every other episode of storied heroism in every other war she’d ever read about: a bloody mess that would never have been necessary if the deskbound lords of war had done their jobs right.

Most of Li’s colleagues had seen it differently—or at least pretended to. They’d started loudly celebrating the heroic dead of Gilead before the bodies were even buried. And if there were whispers behind closed doors about broken supply lines, endemic communications failures, and blue-on-blue orbit-to-surface strikes, then they only made the public celebration louder and the medal inflation higher.

Monday morning quarterbacking was bad for morale. That was the consensus. Better to celebrate what went right (most of it at the noncom level and below) than to dwell on what went wrong (most of it still alive and wearing stars and striped trousers). And if Li thought that this meant buying morale at a pretty high rate of interest, she’d soon learned that saying so didn’t earn her much love.

Of course, as one of the few Gilead veterans who was in the enviable position of being both a hero and alive, Li was one of the main beneficiaries of the hurricane of spin swirling around the bloody campaign. Not that she was even sure it was spin. All she had to set against the UNSec-washed spinstreams was a nagging feeling of déjà vu and a conviction that her mind had once held a different version than the one UNSec called reality.

It was impossible to explain to civilians what jump amnesia did to you. The jagged holes it punched into your past and your identity. The reflexes, violent ones included, that came at you from nowhere, then sucked back into some subterranean place you couldn’t remember your way down to. The sickening vertigo of having a second set of memories superimposed on the real ones. The gut certainty that what your own brain remembered and the history books and the newspins and the politicians and your next-door neighbors said was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

That must have been how Turner had drawn her into his web. He must have dangled in front of her the one thing she couldn’t refuse: proof. Proof that she hadn’t done those things on Gilead. Proof that she wasn’t the kind of person who could do such things.

She saw now that she had been chasing an illusion. She would never know the Catherine Li who had dropped into Gilead’s gravity well half a lifetime ago. Even if Andrej Korchow descended from the sky in glory to tell her she hadn’t shot those prisoners, he still couldn’t tell her what else she’d done…or been capable of doing.

She would never know her past self even in the illusory, self-justifying, half-fictional way that unaltered humans knew their past selves. All she could know—all she ever would know—was the person she was now.

And the really rotten piece of luck was that just as she was finally beginning to see a way to live with that, it was starting to look less and less like she was going to get a chance to live, period.

It was her own damn fault, of course.

She had known it was a bad idea to try to escape. But what was she supposed to do? Nothing?

And when her tormentors finally slipped up, she was waiting for them. With a scalpel that she’d managed to pilfer with the hand whose fingers still more or less worked.

The first guard’s neck broke with a crunch that made even Li’s stomach churn. She dropped him and drove forward to the next target, still hooded, moving on sound and feel. Her hands were useless, so she used her legs, her feet, her training, her hate.

She had her hood off almost before the second guard hit the ground. The room was dark, thank God, not too difficult to adjust to. But she still made the mistake of thinking she was alone.

The fact that the other person in the room with her was standing very still was only part of her confusion. The real problem was that the woman was covered from head to toe in dusty green cloth.

Was she a woman? Was she even an Interfaither? Or merely someone taking advantage of a disguise that blended all too conveniently into Jerusalem’s thronging streets these days?

Li seized the veiled figure. And then she did something she would never, not in a million years, have done if she’d been anywhere within spitting distance of thinking straight.

She grabbed the green cloth and yanked.

“That was unwise,” Ashwarya Sofaer said.

Li just stood there, swaying slightly, poleaxed by memory.

“It was you,” she whispered. “It was you I went to, not Turner.”

Ash shrugged. “I was a bit surprised at how well that took. Your brains really are scrambled, aren’t they?”

“Then it was all a false flag operation? You were never talking to UNSec at all?”

“Oh I was talking to UNSec.” Ash smiled her lovely masklike smile. It occurred to Li, in some relatively lucid segment of her brain, that Ash wasn’t as scared as she should be. “They just weren’t the only people I was talking to.”

“Turner—”

“Does it really matter? It’s not like you’re going anywhere. Before there was a chance. Now…” She shrugged.

“Oh, we’re going somewhere,” Li said…

…and the next thing she knew she was on the ground, her head throbbing with the aftereffects of some nerve agent, and Turner was standing there big as real life looking down at her.

“Well now,” he said, shaking his head like a country bumpkin getting his first eyeful of the bright lights and the big city. “You really are a lady who likes to do things the hard way.”

Ash stood just behind Turner. And she had her veil on again. “Why don’t you take that ridiculous thing off your head?” Li told her.

Ash’s hand emerged from the shadows, rose, hesitated. The veil came away with little more than a light twitch of her long fingers. But instead of removing it entirely she merely settled it around her head and shoulders so that only her face was showing.

That was when Li understood. The veil was no disguise. The veil was Ash’s true face: the face of an Interfaither who had turned her mind over to the men of God and violence.

That was the reality Li had glimpsed behind the beautiful but impersonal mask that Ash presented to the world. The white suits and the perfect makeup and the self-serving careerism were all nothing but the subtlest kind of protective camouflage.

Li had seen the real Ash just once: in the stretch marks that said she’d gone through natural birth and pregnancy, something only a vanishingly small number of Ring-siders still did. But she’d written that off as meaningless trivia. How could she have been so blind? And what better proof could there be that she herself wasn’t human, had never been human, would never understand humans no matter how long she lived among them?

“How long have you been working for the Interfaithers?” she asked Ash. “And when did you and Turner decide you wanted the Novalis virus?”

But instead of an answer, Ash had another question for her:

“Left hand or right hand?”

Cohen looked very much the worse for wear when he finally answered to Gavi’s knock. Rumpled and unshaven. Dark circles under his eyes. And around his left hand an immaculate white bandage.

Gavi stepped into the luxurious living room of Cohen’s hotel suite. “What happened?” he asked, pointing at the bandage.

“I stuck Roland’s hand through a window,” Cohen said in a voice that distinctly did not invite further questions. “What do you want, Gavi?”

Gavi raised his eyebrows. “Bad time? Should I come back later?”

Cohen slumped into a chair and rubbed his hands across his face. “No. Sorry. Things just…aren’t so good at the moment.”

Gavi looked around. No sign of Li. How to broach the unbroachable question? Well, blunt was always an option. “Is Li around?”

“No. So show me this new source code you’ve cooked up.”

Gavi sat down, repressing the guilty sinking feeling that lying to Cohen gave him. It wasn’t a lie. It was self-protection. No, better than self-protection: the protection of two people who were in deadly desperate need of protecting.

They talked around the subject for a few minutes, skimming over Gavi’s programming ideas, the false starts he’d made, what he’d learned from them, the current state of his work on and thought about his so-called golem…all the while edging cautiously toward the dangerous topic of the other golem, the one of flesh and blood that was sitting in Gavi’s living room.

He should have been enjoying the conversation. He wasn’t.

At some point he realized that he’d dropped the conversational ball, and that Cohen had fallen oddly silent. He looked up to find the AI staring intently at him.

“So, Gavi. How are Arkady and Osnat doing?”

“How should I know?”

“That’s funny. I wouldn’t have thought Yad Vashem was crowded enough these days that you wouldn’t notice you were sharing the place with them.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since they arrived.”

“Then you know they went to you first. Why the hell didn’t you help them?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Li! Osnat went to her for help before she brought Arkady to me. And she almost ended up on the police blotter because of it.”

Cohen blinked. “Li’s been MIA for two days now. So I think we can assume that whoever came after your little lost lambs bagged her too.”

“Or,” Gavi pointed out in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “we can assume that they want us to think so.”

“You’re off the mark there. Li wouldn’t do that.”

“You know her well enough to be sure of that?”

“I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t sell me out.”

“Everyone has their dumb blonde and their red Ferrari, Cohen.”

“Don’t spoon-feed me Didi’s proverbs!”

“Okay, maybe I spoke out of turn there. Maybe it’s not like that. But…people are who they are. You can’t imagine how angry I was at Leila after she died. I kept telling myself that if she’d really loved me, she would have come across the Line when we still had the chance. But it isn’t that simple, is it? I mean, you can love someone completely and still be bound by who you are, by what you believe in, by the other things and people you care about…by life, I suppose.”

“I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Cohen said. “You want to see UNSec behind this. You think Li’s gone back to working for Nguyen, and that Nguyen either ordered the bombing or pressured Didi into ordering it. Well, you’re talking out of turn. You don’t know Catherine. You don’t know what they did to her. You don’t know anything about her.”

But his eyes fell away from Gavi’s as he said the words.

The package arrived just as Gavi was about to leave.

“What do you mean you don’t know who it’s from?” Cohen asked the desperately nervous kid who showed up at the door of his suite to tell him about it. “Has security checked it?”

“Yes. Er. I really…perhaps you’d better come see for yourself.”

Gavi noticed with a first shiver of foreboding that the scared youngster was no mere bellhop. Someone had seen fit to draft management to deliver this particular package.

“Should I come with you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said.

They both knew he would have argued in normal circumstances.

The package—a gift box, actually, wrapped in rather tasteful gold foil and bound up with a red satin ribbon—was sitting on the head security officer’s desk in the middle of a sea of nervous uniforms.

Cohen went over to the desk, peered at it for a moment, standing completely still, and slumped limply into the nearest chair.

Gavi realized no one was taking the slightest notice of him, and stepped close enough to see over the top of the wrapping paper and into the box’s interior.

The box was lined with more gold foil, as if whoever packed it had considered its contents fragile and in need of extra padding. It took Gavi some time to see what the object carefully nested in the golden foil actually was. Part of the trouble was the normal difficulty of recognizing even the most familiar objects seen out of context. But mostly it was the glistening, razor-sharp halo of ceramsteel filament that veiled the object. It was only the smell that finally roused his old battlefield memories and made him retch reflexively.

“Is it Li’s?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cohen said dully. He was jackknifed over in the chair, his face buried in his hands, but he spoke with the same crisp, elegant precision Gavi had heard from the lips of a dozen different faces.

“You’re sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. It’s the left hand, the one with the Schengen implant. Now do you trust her?”

When he left Cohen, Gavi walked halfway across town, then doubled back toward the Old City. He passed through the Damascus Gate into the International Zone at eight minutes to two, carefully avoiding the telltale times of the hour, and the half hour and the quarter hour.

Then he began to wander aimlessly, trying to mimic an idling, strolling interest in his surroundings that he was very far from feeling.

He kept clear of passersby and kept a sharp eye on his pockets. More than one courier had ducked into the crowded alleys of the Old City to shake a tail, only to find that he’d lost his package to a stray pickpocket. And though Gavi wasn’t nearly foolish enough to be carrying anything incriminating, he didn’t need the aggravation of a lost wallet and a futile attempt to explain to the Foreign Legion gatekeepers that he was an Israeli citizen and not simply one more in the endless flood of paperless anonymous Arab males caught up in the International Zone’s endlessly repeating bureaucratic feedback loops.

It took a lot of practice to make a convincing show of just stumbling on a place. In this case, the rendezvous was located in a run-down café in the Arab Quarter. Gavi walked in, looked around, took a seat at a back table, and downed three cups of strong black coffee, ordering a new one every time the waiter started to look impatient with him.

He was making a hash of it, of course. He should have done his business and left after the first cup. He knew he was attracting attention. He knew that attracting attention, any kind of attention at all, was a major failing in tradecraft. But still he sat there, sipping the execrable coffee, gripped by an indecision more savage than any he could remember in a long career fraught with life-and-death decisions.

Cohen’s certainty about Li shook him. The whole conversation had shaken him. Every minute of every day since Osnat and Arkady had fetched up on his doorstep four days ago had shaken him.

The waiter was staring at him, he realized, examining him surreptitiously. His field instincts began to sound the old alerts, but then he saw the sickened and fascinated look on the man’s face and realized that it wasn’t his presence that the man was concerned with but his leg’s absence.

Pretty is as pretty does, my friend.

How many millions of times had his mother told him that when he was growing up? She’d been terrified, old kibbutznik that she was, that her too-pretty boy would grow up to be one of the frivolous and useless people she so despised. And he’d internalized the message, just as he’d internalized her ardently idealistic Zionism. He’d fallen in love with and married a woman who was intelligent and cultured but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful. And he’d always faintly despised the people who would glance back and forth between them on the first meeting, toting up the all-too-obvious aesthetic calculus and wondering: Why him? Why her?

Arithmetic of the body, he’d called it. Implying (God, how egotistical he’d been!) that he cared only for the arithmetic of the soul.

But now he was doing that same arithmetic in reverse. Hanging on Osnat’s faintest nod or smile. Watching the eyes that were so wary when she spoke to him, and the strong hands that were so carefully impersonal when she so much as passed a plate to him. Inventorying his broken body and his broken reputation, and wondering what he could possibly offer to a woman whose body and honor were so vibrantly whole.

He had to get her out of his home and out of this operation. If there’d been any question about that, his demeaning little tantrum of the other night had answered it. He was acting like an idiot. And he was too old and shopworn for the young-pup-in-love routine to be anything but ridiculous.

He got up, paid, and asked for the bathroom in Arabic.

“The toilet’s plugged,” he said when he came back. “Can I make a local call before you call the plumber, though?”

The waiter was gray, middle-aged, nondescript. But when their eyes met for a moment across the counter Gavi had a sudden uncomfortable intuition that this was a man who was far too smart to be waiting tables.

“I’m not supposed to…” But the man was already setting the terminal on the scratched bartop.

Gavi rang up the number, waited for two rings, then hung up. “No one home,” he said before leaving. “But thanks anyway.”

Two hours later he was climbing the steps of a grimy, narrow-fronted apartment building on Ibn Batuta Street.

He rang the bell, waited while unseen eyes inspected him and unseen fingers buzzed him in.

A young man waited for him in the shadows behind the door. He looked like a Yeshiva student, except for the aura of cold-blooded confidence that even the thick glasses couldn’t completely camouflage. Gavi raised his arms and leaned against the wall and submitted to the search that was never quite perfunctory enough to be a mere formality. Then he climbed the steep stairs to the third floor and stepped into the familiar room and closed the door behind him and leaned back against it.

“Hello, Gavi,” said the man in the armchair.

Gavi looked into the sad eyes of the man he loved and hated more than he’d ever loved or hated his own gently distant father.

“Hello, Didi.”

Short and sweet and rare. That was how Didi liked to keep their meetings.

“It’s difficult to live a double life,” he’d said the first time they’d sat together in this room. “It’s terribly tempting to begin to rely on your control for emotional support, even for simple relief from the loneliness. But every meeting is a fresh chance to buy yourself a bullet in the head. So when you walk out of here, this room must no longer exist for you. I must no longer exist for you. The less we disturb the unity of the life we wish you to lead, the less we risk revealing ourselves.”

Now Didi just looked at him, smiling.

“How are you, Gavi?”

Gavi stood, knowing he should sit down but too nervous to do it. “How are the girls?” he asked, forcing himself to take a genuine interest, repressing the surge of resentment that flooded through him whenever he was faced with the offensive and depressing fact of other people’s children.

“They’re fine, Gavi. You look tired.”

“I am tired.”

Didi’s eyes rested gently on him, but was it the concern of an old friend or just the cool professionalism of a katsa assessing the condition of a valuable resource? And why, after two years of this, was Gavi still asking himself that question?

“You know about Li?”

“I just heard.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“Not yet.”

“Your mole hunt’s getting ugly, Didi. Has it occurred to you that Li’s…wherever she is because someone took one of your barium meals too much to heart?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“That’s all? It just crossed your mind? Like the weather report?”

“I have a job to do.”

“That’s pretty cold, Didi. Even for you.”

“If it makes you feel better to make me the heavy, go ahead.”

Gavi dropped his head into his hands and rubbed at his temples. “Sorry. What about this Maracaibo bar bombing, then? Any news on that?”

“The boys are working on it.”

“Osnat said there were people from the Office there. She brought Arkady to me because she decided she couldn’t trust anyone else. You included. She brought him through the Line on nothing but guts and shoe leather. Crazy. Only a lunatic would try it.”

“She’s a little hotheaded,” Didi agreed, “but she’s a good girl.”

“Can I trust her?”

“It’s not like you to ask that. The Gavi I used to know wouldn’t have trusted her no matter what I told him.”

“I’m not the Gavi you used to know.”

“You are looking a little frayed around the edges.” Didi acknowledged this as simple fact, in the same disinterested voice with which he would have acknowledged that the weather was warmer than usual.

“I’ve had it, Didi. If I were in your position, I’d cash me out before I brought the whole case down on top of our heads.”

“Your slang is out-of-date,” Didi said on a smile as gentle as snow falling on the desert. “These days the youngsters call it ‘better worlding.’ Or, in the case of death by apparently accidental causes, ‘giving someone the measles.’ And in any case I know you far too well to believe that you would do any such thing. You always took care of your people to a fault.”

“Not Gur.”

“No. Poor kid. I guess I don’t have to ask what’s got you thinking of him.”

There was a sofa along the wall facing Didi’s chair. Gavi subsided into it and turned sideways so he could put his bad leg up. The skin under the normally comfortable cuff was raw and bruised from the long day of pounding over concrete and cobblestones, and it stung atrociously as the feeling came back into it. Why was it that trudging on concrete was so much worse than running on any natural surface?

“What I still don’t get,” he said, “is how Osnat got mixed up with GolaniTech. Moshe, I can buy. But what idiot decided to push Osnat off the Office payroll?”

He looked over to find Didi watching him with an intensity that would have been infuriating in anyone else. He took in the shapeless figure slouched in the armchair, looked past the stained and wrinkled suit to meet Didi’s eyes for the first time since he’d entered the room.

“Oh,” he breathed. “She never left. She’s still yours. You sent her.”

“Let’s just say I may have pointed her in your direction and given her a gentle push.”

“I’ve been on the receiving end of your gentle pushes. And how could you even think about sending her through the Line without someone to cover her back?”

“Osnat can cover her own back, I imagine.”

And then, for the first time, Gavi stopped thinking of the risks Osnat was running—and started thinking of the risks he was running. “My God. She’s kidon. And I’m still on the prime minister’s list. You sent a Mossad assassin into my house, with only his initials to stand between me and the knife!”

“Actually, the PM initialed your name last month.” Didi spread his hands in a gesture that was half excuse half apology. “Old friends aren’t what they used to be.”

“I saved that son of a bitch’s life!” Gavi said—and even as the words left his mouth he realized that he sounded ridiculously like Dibbuk when someone stepped on her tail.

“He told me. Twice. If it makes you feel any better, I had to spend half the night at his house letting him cry on my shoulder before he’d sign the order.”

“What’s going on, Didi? You taking out insurance on me?”

“Gavi, please believe me when I say that I want you to come out of this alive and well more than I want anything except the safety of Israel. But my grip on things is slipping. The IDF is rattling their cage. There are two more Interfaithers on the Knesset Intelligence Committee. We could run out of turf before we catch Absalom. And if there’s going to be a hit order out on you, I’d rather it was my hand on the trigger than my enemy’s hands.”

Gavi looked out the window. His leg was spasming from the long walk. He rubbed at the cramp, but it didn’t seem to improve things much. “Does Osnat know about this?”

“About the PM’s order? No. She really is there to help, not hurt. She’s the best I could send you without everyone on the eighth floor knowing I’d sent someone.”

“You still shouldn’t have picked Osnat. I can’t work with her. I don’t want her there.”

“Don’t you like her? That’s funny. I always thought you had a bit of a crush on her.”

“I was her commanding officer,” Gavi said, doubly outraged by the accusation because of the little grain of truth in it. “I would never have thought about that. And just because I have a thing for the heroic kibbutznik types doesn’t mean I’m easy picking for any—”

And then he finally put that puzzle together too. One step too late, as always.

“No dumb blondes and rented Ferraris for you,” Didi murmured.

“For you I only send the real thing.”

Gavi held his hands away from his body and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. They were trembling.

“You’re going to push too hard,” he told Didi. “And then I’m going to break, and you’ll have nothing. I’m not complaining or threatening. I’m just reporting as objectively as I can on the status of an agent in place.”

“I can’t back off now, Gavi. I’m sorry it’s been so hard, and I’m sorry it took so long. But we’ve reached the crossroads. If we do it right, then we can all go home. If not…”

Gavi sighed deeply and stretched out on the sofa with one arm over his eyes. He thought of the horror he’d seen in the King David Hotel security chief’s office, then forced his mind away from the thought.

“Can’t you take Osnat back and send in Yoni?” he asked. “Or anyone, for that matter. Please?”

“I’m going to write that off as kvetching. Unless you actually want to make it official. In which case the answer is no.”

Hard to argue with that; it was the answer Gavi himself would have given in Didi’s place.

“I can’t tell you how desperately I regret these years.” Didi spoke softly. “But they have not been wasted. Only a little longer, Gavi. Only one last night out in the cold. Then we bring you home.”

Down in the street a bus pulled up to the intersection with a whine of brakes, and a moment later Gavi heard the chuttering roar of its acceleration. He was sticky with sweat, and the light that seeped through his eyelids was as red as lung blood.

“Meanwhile,” Didi continued, “a curious piece of news has been leaked across the Line to us. It seems the Palestinians have managed to get Korchow to send Arkasha to Earth.”

Gavi’s eyes flew open. “My God. And the Palestinians have him? What are they going to do with him?”

“Give him to Turner, apparently.”

“Why the hell would they want to do that?”

“Not all of them do. Safik’s office seems to have been responsible for getting Arkasha here. Then Sheik Yassin horned in and brokered the deal with Turner over Safik’s protests.”

“So you think the leak comes from Safik? You think he’s trying to sabotage the exchange?”

Didi shrugged.

“I still don’t get it. What could Turner have that Yassin wants enough to get and trade Arkasha for?”

“I was wondering when you were going to stumble around to that question. Turner’s promised to give Yassin Arkady.”

Gavi rolled over on his side to look at Didi, the sofa’s springs protesting at the movement. “But Turner doesn’t have Arkady.”

“Not yet.”

“What the hell is he up to?”

“I don’t know. But I’d watch my back if I were you. And Arkady’s back.”

“Didi.”

“What?”

“Please tell me you’re not getting ready to burn Li and Arkady in order to catch Absalom. I don’t want to be part of another operation like that. I’ve lost the stomach for it.”

“I’m sorry, Gavi. I’ve completely forgotten to make you tea. And I always make you tea. What a brute I am.”

“Water’s fine. And you haven’t answered my question.”

“Really just water? How about I make you a little tea, and you can see if you want it?”

“Didi—”

“Jasmine or Ceylon, which do you prefer?”

When Didi came back he brought not only tea but also a slim file folder with the familiar black band across its front.

A testing, questioning silence filtered through the room. Gavi sat up. He could feel the old reflexes kicking in. His breath slowing. Time itself slowing. His eyes cataloging details that would have utterly eluded him in normal life. His muscles taking the measure of the room’s distances with a precision that still scared him just as much as it had all those years ago at Midrash when he first discovered that he had these horrible talents…he who had always thought of himself as an intellectual, an idealist, a bit of a peacenik even.

“Are you going to show me what’s in there,” he asked Didi, “or are you going to make me guess?”

Instead of answering, Didi opened the file and scanned it, as if refreshing his memory of its contents. Then he removed a paper clip, set it neatly aside for subsequent retrieval, and handed Gavi the photograph that had been pinned beneath it.

A young man, slim, graceful even in freeze-frame, handsome in a way that made one wonder if he wouldn’t perhaps be a bit too pretty in person. Something about the curve of his mouth and jaw that Gavi knew from his own bathroom mirror. And those vivid green crusader’s eyes.

Leila’s eyes.

“And just who is this supposed to be?” he asked icily.

“That’s beneath you, Gavi.”

The two men looked at each other. Gavi’s heart was pounding so loudly in his ears that he thought Didi must be able to hear it on the other side of the room.

“Yusuf Safik,” Didi said in the dull tone of a bureaucrat reading a routine report. “Only son—only child, actually—of Brigadier General Walid Safik. There’s no official record of the adoption. Yusuf attended private school in Bethlehem, and then in the SaudiArc Ring-side, then—this is interesting, Gavi, listen up—a stint on KnowlesSyndicate. Then back to Palestine for security service training. He graduated fourth in his class.” Didi pursed his lips, a taster evaluating a fine wine. “I like that fourth. It’s subtle. Your sort of instinct, I’d almost say.”

“You’re assuming the fourth was by choice, not merit.”

“I’m assuming nothing. One of our agents had a fling with a classmate of Yusuf’s who was posted to the Palestinian Authority’s HQ in the International Zone. It seems that the consensus among their fellow students was that Yusuf purposely fluffed the finals. Now why would he do that, I wonder?”

Gavi felt dizzy. The world had rearranged itself while he wasn’t looking, and now it was barreling on toward God knew what kind of damage without even giving him time to figure out where he stood or what he ought to do about it.

“And now he turns up smack in the middle of my hunt for Absalom.”

“Coincidence,” Gavi said. But he was hanging on by his fingernails and they both knew it.

He had laid the photograph across his knees, and not only to hide his shaking hands. Now he looked down at it and wondered how the photographer had stolen the unguarded shot. He touched the image of the familiar stranger’s face, knowing that Didi was watching him and not giving a damn what it looked like, and then felt a searing pang of regret when he realized he’d smudged the photograph.

“You’re surprised.” Didi sounded like a man probing at a sore tooth and wondering how long he could afford to wait before he called the dentist.

Gavi looked up at him, doing his best to keep his eyes steady and level. “You expected me not to be?”

“Oh, I expected surprise. I just wasn’t sure if you’d be surprised by the news, or surprised that I knew about it.”

A child’s voice rang out somewhere in the sun beyond the windows, and both men instinctively looked toward it. The glass, Gavi noticed, was caked with yellow khamsin dust. He thought idly that you could probably make a decent map of Tel Aviv’s safe houses by just looking for unwashed windows and unswept doorsteps. He told himself that he was sick, sick to death of streaked windows and grimy walkup flats with garage sale furnishings. That all the other times he’d sat in identical rooms and thought identical thoughts had just been leading up to this time. And that this time it was well and truly over.

He knew better.

More to the point, Didi knew better.

“So why are you showing me this now? The file’s not exactly empty. You must have been holding this ace for a while now.”

“I wasn’t, actually. We had the file, yes, but I only figured out last week that he wasn’t Safik’s natural child. And I’m telling you now because I want you to have time to think about it in cold blood. Here. With me to talk to. I trust your second thoughts, and your third and fourth thoughts. It’s that first passionate impulse that terrifies me.”

“Joseph might recognize me too, Didi. Have you thought about that?”

“I doubt he will. If he remembers you at all, it’s as a young man not much older than he is now. And he doesn’t look that much like you. Only a little bit around the mouth, really. I didn’t see it myself at first.”

Gavi looked down at the photograph. He’d allowed himself to be distracted from it, and he realized this was a mistake as it was extremely unlikely that Didi would allow him to keep the photograph or ever see it again. His mind was doing a strange thing to him, filling his nose with the remembered scent of Joseph’s infant skin, goading him into an animal certainty that the young stranger in the photograph was his child.

Like the goats, he thought nonsensically, who knew their kids in the dark by smell alone. But it had never occurred to him that they might remember the smell for years or decades after he’d taken their kids to slaughter. What was the purpose of allowing their senses to torment them like that when it was too late to do anything or save anybody?

“Can I read his file?” he asked.

“Oh, Gavi.”

“Don’t ‘Oh, Gavi’ me. Why shouldn’t I read it?”

“Why should you?” Didi held the slim sheaf of papers up and shook it until the pages rattled like dead leaves. “You want to know what’s in here, Gavi? The life of another man’s son. Walid Safik’s son. Everything in this file says that Safik has pampered and adored and doted on the boy since the day he adopted him. Everything in here says that Yusuf Safik returns his father’s love. For God’s sake, Gavi, we’ve got phone records showing the kid calls home every night, and, let me tell you, I’m grateful if my daughters call me once a month! The boy’s Palestinian, Gavi. Just as Leila intended him to be. And his father is Walid Safik. You’re just a stranger who happens to look like him.”

“I know,” Gavi whispered.

And he did know.

He really did.

But that didn’t make it any easier to let go of the photograph.

Cohen materialized in a shimmer of security protocols. Or perhaps the shimmer was in the air, Arkady told himself, and not in Cohen. He still couldn’t get used to the instream version of Yad Vashem that Gavi had decided to hold this meeting in.

“How come it’s all different?” Arkady asked. “Where are Gavi’s goats? And…nothing’s falling down. They’d have to have an army of gardeners and groundskeepers to keep the place looking this way.”

“You don’t have to shout,” Osnat said. “Gardeners are expensive. And if you want them to work on the Line, they’re more than expensive. Eighty percent of Israelis may be infertile, but no one wants their neighbors to know they’re not in the lucky twenty percent. It’s all about keeping up appearances.”

“But it’s not real.”

“What’s real? This is the Yad Vashem that millions of tourists all over UN space know and believe exists. The illusion beats the reality any day on the numbers.”

“What’s the news on Li?” Gavi asked Cohen when he had settled into phase with their own surroundings.

Cohen looked sick. “It’s the Americans.”

“Turner?”

“Turner.”

Gavi swallowed convulsively, as if the news were a dry pill that had gotten stuck in his throat. “Has he told you what he wants?”

“That’s the funny part.” Cohen sank onto a bench so smoothly that it took Arkady a moment to realize that Cohen had somehow changed the standard tour on the fly and now they were all standing still in one of the rambling compound’s many gardens.

“He wants Arkady. And he wants Gavi to bring him. He was very insistent on that point. He’s arranged a three-way swap with Yassin. I walk away with Li. Turner gets Arkasha. And Arkady goes back to Syndicate space with Korchow.”

“But what do the Palestinians get out of it?”

“I suspect a better question would be what does Yassin get out of it. Arkady’s defection seems to have dovetailed neatly with the power struggle between him and Safik.”

“So Turner wants us to help Yassin take Safik down,” Gavi said. “Nice to know we’re on the side of the angels. I assume you’ve talked to Didi about this?”

“Yes.” Cohen paused and glanced at Arkady. “Didi thinks there ought to be a way to play along with Turner but still come out the other side holding the bag with Arkasha in it. He also authorized me to tell Arkady that if we can pull this off, he’ll guarantee Arkasha full political asylum.”

“What about Arkady?” Osnat asked.

“Arkady has to go back or Didi won’t help us. Frankly Didi wasn’t even happy about leaving Arkasha on-planet in light of…well…the obvious.”

“Can I trust Didi to protect Arkasha?” Arkady asked Gavi.

“I don’t know,” Gavi said. He looked sick to his stomach. “But I can’t think of anyone you can trust more.”

“Okay, then. I’ll do it.”

“And just what is Didi actually offering in the way of help?” Gavi asked Cohen.

“The Office won’t get directly involved in the swap.” The AI’s voice was tight with apprehension. “But Didi will provide backup…or cleanup if things get messy. The story for public consumption will be that the Office got an anonymous tip about where Li was being held and organized a rescue. Ash is going to handle the operation so it doesn’t go through official channels.”

Another pause followed this news. Gavi sat down, bowed his head, crossed his arms over his chest, chewed on his lower lip. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said finally, glancing up at Cohen. “On the one hand it stinks. On the other hand, Didi’s doing about as much as he can realistically do for you. Israeli policy’s ironclad. We don’t negotiate with terrorists. Interfaithers are terrorists and the Americans are Interfaithers. Ergo the Americans are terrorists. Ergo, we don’t negotiate with them. We don’t even have the channels of communication we’d need to figure out if Turner’s following his government’s orders or freelancing.”

“So what do we do?” Osnat asked.

“Agree to Turner’s terms,” Gavi said, “then figure out how to control the ground so no one gets shot before Ash shows up with the cavalry.”

“We’d need an army,” Osnat muttered gloomily.

Gavi looked up, solemn-eyed and bristling with nervous tension. “We have an army,” he said. He jerked his head toward the outer walls of the compound and the Green Line beyond the walls. “EMET.”

The plan was simple. It was a classic exchange of prisoners. Except that in this trade there were three prisoners instead of two. And the exchange would take place not across some lonely field or border checkpoint, but in the claustrophobic shooting gallery of the house on Abulafia Street. The only thing keeping the parties honest would be the Enders, Palestinian and Israeli, that Turner finally agreed to let supervise the exchange. The Enders, of course, would be kept honest by their source code.

Which meant that anyone who could hack EMET would be halfway to controlling the battlefield.

They needed to hack a squad for, say, ten minutes. And all they had to do to hack a squad was hack the EMET squad leader that controlled the shunt-driven bodies of the squad’s Enderbots.

“But the beauty of a true Emergent,” Gavi said, “is that you don’t have to change its source code to change its behavior. Here’s what we’re up against.” He did something with his hand and a translucent flat screen took shape under his fingers. The screen glowed with a long list of cryptically named categories—terms like advance, cluster, combat, pursuit, retreat, support, enemy_flag, injured_ally, fear_index—all with numerical values attached to them.

“This is a typical set of squad-level agent behavior parameters. Notice particularly the two obey indices and the fear index. The global obey index determines how likely the agent is to obey global EMET orders. The local obey is the same thing but in regard to local orders—mainly squad-level orders in most situations. The fear index…well, I guess that’s pretty self-evident.

“Now look at the real-time run-files. I’ve superimposed run-files for the last eight squad leaders to be selected for preemptive termination—or, in less diplomatic terms, the last eight squad leaders that the IDF killed before they could self-terminate.”

“What’s that spike in the fear index?” Cohen asked, having absorbed the chart, and who knew what else, in the time it took Arkady to realize there was a chart.

“That,” Gavi said, “is truth.”

“Aah,” Cohen said. And then he didn’t say anything else for a minute while the rest of them watched him. He seemed to have more or less forgotten them; if he had been human, Arkady would have called his state distracted, but he wasn’t sure that distraction applied to an entity for whom their conversation—any conversation—was a mere drop in an ocean of simultaneously unspooling threads of data.

“Should I go on?” Gavi asked.

“Yes. Sorry. Excuse me.”

“In each of the last eight EMET agents to be selected for preemptive termination the emergence of real-time situational awareness was preceded by atypical fluctuations of the fear index and the obey indices. See?” He looked expectantly at them. “Because the agent figured out that the pushpins it was moving around on the board were live people.”

“So it got spooked,” Osnat said, “and started playing it safe even if it meant not following orders.”

“Right. And that’s where you get the odd fluctuations. Because it also deduces that the other squads are also made up of live soldiers. If it sets too high a priority on protecting its squad members, it could get more soldiers in other squads killed. Or worse, it could accidentally kill civilians.”

“Welcome to Military Ethics from hell,” Osnat said. “No wonder they go crazy.”

Cohen stared silently at the display with a look on his face that Arkady could only describe as one of existential horror. “How long would we have to wait for a squad to wake up?” he finally asked. “What says one wakes up in time for us to use it?”

“You don’t want the answer to that question,” Gavi said.

Cohen grew very still. “How often are they waking up, Gavi?”

“Often enough that we don’t have anything to worry about on that score.”

Cohen stared unblinkingly at the screen. “I think,” he finally said, “that I’ve lived too long.”

Gavi eyed Cohen cautiously, then cleared his throat and continued. “I’ve looked over the last few years of run-capture files, and I think IDF HQ is using a standard profile to spot potential sentients. In essence, it doesn’t actively monitor the run-capture files of individual squad leaders until they develop a suspicious profile. If we can catch a squad leader after the fear and obey indices have started to fluctuate but before they hit the IDF thresholds, then I think I’ve worked out a way to pull the wool over the IDF’s eyes. All we’d need to do is insert a wild card trigger that yanks the fear and obey indices out of the Emergent’s hands as soon as the fluctuations begin and lets us set them to fluctuate within bounds that won’t alert the IDF minders.”

“Okay,” Osnat said. “So that gets you your squad. But with all due respect, I’m not sure I see how it helps us. You’re still left with the same problem the hard reboot was geared to solve. And what’s the good of going into an operation backed up by Enderbots that are on the verge of going catatonic or self-terminating? Unreliable backup is worse than no backup.”

“The EMET agents go catatonic because there’s no way out,” Gavi said. “We just need to offer them one.”

At that point the conversation shifted into what sounded to Arkady’s ears like a foreign language. Gavi and Cohen began to pour over flickering data displays and bandy about words like run capture, multiparameter fitness landscape, lethality contours, and penalty functions. Osnat, while not exactly an active participant, at least had a firm enough grasp on the matter at hand to produce a volley of intelligent-sounding questions that centered around something she called Cavalho-Rodriques combat entropy.

Once again Arkady had that odd feeling of having stepped into an alternate universe in which the old story he’d always been taught of an obsolete and ossified humanity giving way to the Syndicates in a clean neo-Marxist ballet of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis had been replaced by something that rang much truer to his entomologist’s instincts: a coevolving cloud of quasi-species in which Homo sapiens had not been replaced so much as exploded out into a bewildering fractal of coevolving posthumanities.

“I still don’t see how you expect to make it work,” Osnat said finally. “You talk about providing a new platform for the rogue EMET squad, but how can you fold an emerging sentient into a nonsentient database and not crash both of them? You can bootstrap yourself into sentience on memory alone. I don’t think GOLEM’s going to do the job for you.”

Gavi didn’t appear to have heard the question. He was staring at Cohen. The AI was staring into empty space, or into whatever incomprehensible visions drifted and pulsed across his networks.

“GOLEM doesn’t have to do it,” he said at last. “I do.”