Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“No. And believe me, we’ve tried. So you can see what you’re stepping into. Before you showed up everyone was willing to let Absalom be forgotten because we were all mostly sure that he was dead. Now, however, the Israelis want to find Absalom just to make goddamn sure he’s dead. And, uh, we want to find him to…well, honestly, probably in order to blackmail him into coming back to work for us.” Yusuf stretched and yawned, catlike. “So as you can see, it’s slightly more urgent than life or death for us to know whether you’re for real.”

Arkady waited, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming.

“That’s it,” Yusuf concluded cheerfully. “That’s Absalom. The whole only moderately censored story. My gift to you.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“You tell me why.”

“Because you know I’m going to talk to the Israelis at some point and you’re feeding me the story you want to feed them?”

“Pretty good for an amateur. I’m impressed. But sadly I’m neither that organized or that intelligent. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s a direct quote from my last personnel review. Any other possibilities come to mind? It’s not a trick question, trust me. You’re seriously overthinking it.”

“You want something from me.”

Yusuf pantomimed a silent round of applause.

“But we’ve already been through that,” Arkady said tiredly. “Like you said, whatever answer I would give you about Absalom would only be what I know.”

“What I want, for now at least, is more basic. I want your trust.”

“If you’re trying to convince me to trust you, then letting Yassin scare me half to death just now wasn’t the best way to go about it.”

“It’s nice,” Yusuf observed, “that you have this fairy godmother kind of impression of me. But my powers at present don’t actually extend to protecting you from Yassin’s steroid addicts.”

“If you can’t protect me,” Arkady pointed out, “then why should I believe you have the power to deliver whatever else you’re offering?”

Yusuf’s smile widened. “Who says we’re offering you anything?”

We?The pronoun had been no accident; Yusuf was watching him process it like a cat watching a bird land on its windowsill.

“Who sent you?” Arkady asked.

“I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Arkady, but just in case…has it escaped your notice that everyone else is pumping you for information and I’m giving it to you?”

“No.”

“Good. Think about it. And while you’re thinking, let me pass along two more of those rumors we were talking about earlier. Rumor number one: Turner has a man in Moshe’s camp. Rumor number two: UNSec has a highly placed agent somewhere among Didi’s people. Apparently they’re pissed as hell that Didi hasn’t told them about you, and they consider this the final chapter in a long line of Mossad fuckups starting with Tel Aviv. They seem to be playing it along to see where it goes, but they could step in and squash the deal anytime they want. And when UNSec squashes, they wield a big hammer and they don’t worry too much about whose toes happen to be in the slam zone.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I toldyou. Trust.” He smiled, all sparkling green eyes and honey-colored skin and dazzlingly white teeth. “Is it working? Do you trust me?”

“What difference does it make?” Arkady asked tiredly.

“None at the moment. But it might later on. And you might need to make the decision very quickly. So think about it while you’re sitting back in that nasty little cell Moshe has you in. And be careful what you say: you’ve already contradicted yourself a few times. That sort of thing could earn you the wrong kind of attention from people we really don’t want paying attention to you.”

“Who sent you?” Arkady asked again, more urgently. “Korchow?” He searched the boy’s eyes in growing desperation. “Safik?”

He could hear Yassin’s guards in the hall. In a moment it would be too late, and he would never have the chance to ask the questions he should have been asking from the beginning of this inexplicable conversation.

“Who?” he cried, just as the door opened and Shaikh Yassin appeared.

Yusuf stood up, his back still to Yassin and the bodyguards, and mouthed a single unmistakable word:

Absalom.

NOVALIS
Trapping Crows

Two broad generalizations have begun to emerge that will be reinforced in subsequent chapters: the ultimate dependence of particular cases of social evolution on one or a relatively few idiosyncratic environmental factors; and the existence of antisocial factors that also occur in a limited, unpredictable manner. If the antisocial pressures come to prevail at some time after social evolution has been initiated, it is theoretically possible for social species to be returned to a lower social state or even to the solitary condition.

—E. O. WILSON (1973)

It began quietly, a faint thrumming under the everyday whistle and chatter of the awakening forest.

Birds sang, but they were far off, hunting and nesting in the sunlit heights of the canopy. Only gradually did a louder, more urgent song alert Arkady that the great predator was on the hunt. A thrush appeared—no, an entire flock of thrushes, flying and dipping and warbling. A moment later Arkady caught sight of a pair of ocellated antbirds: no mere opportunistic swarm followers but professionals who would have flown their appointed rounds before sunrise, peering into the hidden bivouacs of the swarm raiders to determine which army was most likely to be on the march today. Arkady had seen spinfeed of ocellated antbirds literally knocking each other off tree branches in order to stake out the best positions from which to swoop down on the moveable feast that was about to come their way. The pair weren’t quite at that level of feeding frenzy, but they were obviously expecting action.

A moment later a chaotic flurry of ant butterflies—Arkady thought they were ithomiines but he couldn’t be sure—erupted into the clearing, a sure sign that the raiders were approaching. But by then Arkady could already hear the murmur and hiss of a vast insect throng, running, hopping, slithering, and flying in a desperate attempt to escape the raid front.

The raiders surged into the clearing like a glittering, granular, red tsunami. The raid front was fifteen meters wide: tens of thousands of reddish-black ants flowing through and around and under the debris of the forest floor, covering the ground with a deadly carpet of razor-sharp mandibles. Arkady and Bella retreated cautiously, skirting around to the side of the glittering tide until they could track its progress without being overrun themselves.

The swarm’s method of operation was deceptively simple: the front rank of the raiders simply seized every living thing in their path, grappling and stinging until by the simple expedient of piling ant upon ant upon ant, they could subdue spiders, scorpions, beetles, cockroaches, grasshoppers, entire ant colonies, small rodents, and even, according to the ancient rumors of Earth’s jungles, unwatched human infants. In the space of five minutes Arkady and Bella watched this raid front seize a spider, a cluster of caterpillars, and half a dozen foraging ponerines unlucky enough to be caught in the raiders’ path. A bright blue beetle was caught by the tide, succeeded in staying afloat for a few precarious moments, and then capsized and was sucked into the whirl of glistening bodies. As the swarm caught each new prey item, major workers grasped and immobilized it while their comrades dismembered it for easier transport back down the supply lines. And gradually, at more or less the pace of a walking human, the raid front flowed through the clearing and into the forest beyond, leaving a thinned-out but still-impressive braid of foraging paths behind it: forward-moving columns carrying reinforcements up to the raid front, while backward-flowing ones transported prey items back to the bivouac to feed the ravenous larvae.

Arkady leaned cautiously over the swarm, poised his soft-nosed tweezers above one of the foraging routes, and plucked out one of the powerful soldiers guarding the columns to hold up for Bella’s inspection.

“She’s beautiful,” she said.

“She’s also one of the most successful organisms Earth ever created. Without these ants there would be no humans. And I don’t mean only biologically. Army ants evolved in the same environments early humans did, and the words for them– siafu, soldier, soldado,and so forth—go back as far as any words in human speech. There’s even a theory that organized human hunting and warfare developed from prehistoric man’s observations of the African Driver Ant’s raiding fronts.

He turned the soldier to give Bella a better view of the armored head, with its massive jaw muscles and barbed mandibles. “In pre-Evacuation Africa people even used to use them as surgical staples. You hold the soldier up to the wound, like so.” He demonstrated, keeping a careful distance between the furiously grasping mandibles and his own arm. “You squeeze her body to make her bite down on the edges of the wound, and then you twist off the body, and the head stays locked in place until you’re ready to take it out. And of course then the ant’s own immune defenses make the method as sterile as anything short of viral surgery. Neat, huh?”

“And what are we hunting the hunters for?” Bella asked. Arkasha had been right; she did have a sense of humor under the shyness.

“Well, officially because they’re the planet’s top predator and Arkasha and I want to get as much data on them as we can. But honestly…I’ve always kind of wanted an army-ant swarm to play with. Wait till I show you Schnierla’s circular milling experiment.”

All fun stuff…but not quite fun enough to take Arkady’s mind off the unnerving suspicion that something wasn’t quite right about Novalis.

Things still looked good on the surface. Better than good. Miraculous.

But the pieces that all looked so good in isolation became slippery and intractable every time Arkady tried to piece them into some larger pattern. And with every sedimentary layer of data that accumulated in his logbooks, Arkady was becoming more and more convinced that it wasn’t ants he should be trapping, but (metaphorically speaking) crows.

Trapping crows had always been emblematic, among working field biologists, of the kind of thankless, impossible, frustrating fieldwork that could take years off your life without adding measurably to your store of reliable data. Arkady wasn’t quite sure when the term trapping crows had first been applied to terraforming…but it certainly fit.

In theory terraforming was simple. You did your DVI. You figured out whether your volatiles were within an acceptable range. If they weren’t, you moved on and found another planet. If they were, you went to work on the one you had. First, you initiated runaway greenhouse syndrome by seeding the atmosphere with CFCs. Once atmospheric CO ₂content hit the tipping point, the greenhouse effect would start cascading, and you could just monitor its progress via remote probe, until things reached the point where you could effectively create an ozone layer by photodissociation. Or if you had enough colonists willing to live in hell, you could just let surface dust storms block UV radiation in the place of an ozone layer. And even during these initial stages you could start seeding; classic terraforming practice dictated the seeding of the target planet with UV-resistant cryptoendolithic lichens, most of them artificially tweaked descendants of the few precious remaining samples of lichens from the Ross Desert of Antarctica. And once the lichens had done their work, you started in with a well-known succession of plant and insect life that built up toward…well, ideally toward just what they’d found on Novalis.

But that was the theory. And the one sure thing about theory in complex adaptive systems was that, while it could tell you a great deal about the characteristic dynamics of a given system, it could never deliver reliable predictions of what the system would do in practice.

Try to put the theory into practice on a real planet, and the neat schemata spun off into chaos. A biosphere was an emergent phenomenon, just like an AI or an ant swarm. You couldn’t “build” one the way you built a ship or an orbital station. You could only put the necessary conditions in place and hope it would find a way to build itself. Sometimes it did. And sometimes, for reasons that could never be established completely, the system never self-organized into anything recognizable as a functional biosphere. Or it organized into a form that was impossibly unfriendly to humans and their descendants. Or some complex positive feedback loop developed that crashed the biosphere so badly that all you could do was scrap it for parts.

In such cases, terraformers were left with the uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often futile task of biopsying a failing biosphere and trying to figure out how to tweak it back onto a sustainable trajectory. More often the biopsy was an autopsy: The niggling little problem that you’d set aside to work on when you had time turned out to be the beginning of a catastrophic crash that could only have been stopped by specific actions at a precise moment…usually a moment that slipped by while you were still getting around to worrying about that odd little anomaly you’d noticed in your last set of field data.

This nebulous and frustrating exercise in chaotic systems control was what terraformers called trapping crows. And Arkady had started to log datapoints that were making him wonder if trapping crows wasn’t about to become a full-time job in his very near future.

“What’s this bunch for, again?” Arkady asked as Aurelia pulled the next vial of blood. It was the sixth, if he’d counted right; well in excess of the amounts required for the normal monitoring he’d been accustomed to all his life.

“Immunodominance assay.”

“Because of the sneezies?” That was what they’d started calling the coldlike symptoms that were making the rounds since they’d landed, turning embarrassment into humor.

“Yes.” Aurelia frowned, concentrating intently on the task at hand despite its apparent simplicity. Arkady had already decided that the Aurelias’ (to his mind) excessively methodical nature was a central personality trait of their geneline. It was probably a highly adaptive trait for surgeons, but it made for somewhat lackluster conversation.

“Surely it’s just a reactivated virus? The long trip out? Cryo? Stress?”

“Well, obviously,” Aurelia snapped. It had been known since the earliest days of space travel that astronauts on long-duration missions passed around reactivated viruses, sometimes succumbing to childhood diseases to which they’d apparently already established immunity. “But we should have seen a matured immune response by now. I want to see if someone’s matured an unadaptive response and is passing it around to the rest of us.”

Looking at Aurelia’s fierce expression, Arkady had a sudden twinge of pity for whoever the unfortunate culprit turned out to be.

“Let’s just hope that’s all it is,” she said, half-speaking to herself.

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know. Not much of a track record on long-range multisyndicate expeditions. And I was never for having Motais on the mission. I don’t like their new immune system splice. And I don’t trust designers who offer glib promises about what untested splices will or won’t do in the real world.”

“You’re sure it’s something we brought?” Arkady asked, speaking before he really thought the question through. “You haven’t run into anything…I don’t know…odd?”

Aurelia had her steth on, checking his vitals while she had him on the table in the name of thoroughness. Now she pulled the steth off and looked sharply at him. “Odd how? Why do you ask?”

“No reason.”

“Okay, you’re done. Off the table. You’re healthy as an ox, whatever an ox is. You and Arkasha both. Pretty as anything Motai ever turned out and a lot tougher than the Ahmeds as soon as you look past the muscles. They did some fine work when they spliced you boys. Classic. No gimmicks. I approve.”

Arkady stood, rolling down his shirtsleeve. “What about your sib? Her work going okay?”

“You’d have to ask her. I’ve been too busy virus hunting to do anything but work, sleep, and piss. Plus, she’s just getting over this piece of shit virus. Hundred and four fever. Unbelievable.”

“Does that mean she’s immune now?”

“It means jack for all I know. I’m over my head. And unlike some people around here I’m not too chicken-shit to admit it. I’m going to ask Arkasha to take a look at it as soon as he’s done putting out his own fires.”

“ Hisfires? He’s run into trouble too?”

“You’re his sib. What the hell are you asking me for? Listen, Arkady, no offense but I hope you’re not going to call another formal consult over this. Life’s too short for me ever to spend another hour in the same room with that idiot Ahmed.”

“Hey, cowlick,” Arkasha said when Arkady walked into the lab.

“I hate that nickname.”

“Why else do you think I keep using it?”

Since their late-night talk, he had taken to speaking to Arkady in a cool, bantering tone and gently mocking him about everything from his cowlicks to his bad housekeeping habits. It was better than being ignored…sort of. But it was part and parcel of the same frustrating pattern that had characterized their relationship from that first meeting. One step forward and a step and a half back. And somehow it was always Arkady taking the step forward and Arkasha retreating.

“What’s bothering you?”

“Who says anything’s bothering me?”

“You do.” Arkasha rubbed at his own cowlick-free forehead in a mocking through-the-looking-glass gesture. “Talk about futility. Nothing you can do now to make your hair lie down and grow the right way. That kind of defect’s almost impossible to fix, even in utero. A real throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater problem.”

“Well, in MotaiSyndicate they wouldthrow the baby out with the bathwater, wouldn’t they?”

Arkasha shrugged, apparently not all that interested in Motai-Syndicate’s cowlick policy. “The interesting thing to me is whenyou do it. At first I thought it was just social self-consciousness. A first meeting. An awkward conversation. A contentious consult. But then I noticed that you do it when you’re alone too.”

“If you’re there to see me do it, then I’m not alone, am I?”

“Very cute. You do it when you’re working is what I mean. And I think you do it when you’re thinking non-norm-conforming thoughts. Going after the outward physical deviation because it’s easier to smooth out than the one that really scares you.”

“And when exactly did you decide to become a renorming counselor?”

“Oh, so nothing’s bothering you? I’m glad to hear it.” Arkasha folded his arms and smiled.

“Okay,” Arkady admitted. “It’s the survey.”

He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward, and crouched down to pull his field notebook from his rucksack. He set it on the table, still not meeting his pairmate’s eyes. “I’m just…not a hundred percent comfortable with the results I’m getting in the field.” The understatement of the millennium. “Normally I’d talk to the DVI team about it but…well…the DVI situation being what it is…”

Arkasha grasped the essence of the problem with such astounding speed that Arkady caught himself thinking yet again that he was far too fine a tool for the scientific hackwork of a routine survey mission. “Have you worked up your climatic succession equations yet?” he asked.

“I tried. I came up with nonsense.”

“Can I see your work?”

“I checked it. And double-checked it. It’s not a calculating error.”

“I’m not saying it is,” Arkasha replied with unaccustomed mildness. “I just want to understand what you’ve done so I don’t waste time repeating it.”

He waited while Arkady leafed through the pages, written and scratched out and overwritten, on which he’d tried and failed to make sense of the facts on the ground.

“What’s dh? Disturbance history?”

“Yes. And Cis percentage of the sample in climax stage. And Pis…”

“Patch areas. Yes. Great. Perfect.”

Arkasha flipped back to the first page of calculations, walked around to the other side of the lab bench, grabbed a piece of scrap paper and a chewed pencil stub, dragged his stool back around to Arkady’s side of the table, and sat down—all without taking his eyes off the equations. “Go boil some coffee, would you? It’s going to take me a while to get through this. And Arkady?”

Arkady turned, his hand on the doorjamb.

“We’re not telling anyone about this until we’re sure, right?”

“Right.”

“Good boy.”

Arkady was so distracted that he boiled the water twice, and by the time he got back Arkasha’s scratch paper was thickly covered with his illegible pencil scratchings.

“Well,” Arkasha announced. “Your math’s fine.”

“I know my math’s fine. What I don’t know is where the problem is.”

“In the data, obviously.”

“What are you—?”

“Oh, get your hackles down. There’s nothing wrong with your data collection methods, or your samples or your recording or anything else you’ve done. There’s something wrong out there.” He gestured toward the skin of the hab ring and the vast black forest beyond. “There’s something wrong—or right—with the planet itself.”

Arkady stared wide-eyed at Arkasha. “What do you mean ‘wrong or right’?”

Arkasha rubbed at his head, his face screwed up into a mask of indecision. Then ran his fingers down the neatly aligned spines of his own intimidatingly orderly notebooks and plucked one out off the rack to spread before Arkady. “Have a look at this.”

Arkady couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was neatly written out in Arkasha’s minute, mathematically precise hand, and it betrayed none of the adjustments, revisions, recalculations, and smudged erasures that marred Arkady’s own efforts.

He leaned over the page, straining to decipher the tiny print. He was so close to Arkasha that he could see the pulse flicker in the soft hollow between his collarbones. Suddenly he desperately wanted not to be worrying about mutation rates or DVI numbers or anything else but Arkasha. You only love me because you don’t know me.What kind of crazy thing was that to say? And it was wrong, anyway. Dead wrong. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh…is rrate of mutation?”

Arkasha nodded.

“In mitochondrial DNA?”

Another nod.

“I’m sorry,” Arkady said after a long moment. “It looks fine to me. I guess I know enough to know what I’m looking at, but not to spot the problem.”

“Look at the answer I came up with.”

Arkady looked, assessing the number as a real-world fact for the first time, rather than as the abstract product of a series of mathematical operations. “Um…isn’t that kind of high?”

“It’s worse than high. It’s impossible. But it’s what’s out there.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I stayed up three nights in a row centrifuging fresh samples to make sure of it. It’s right. It’s all right. Except it’s all wrong.” Arkasha grabbed a second notebook and set it in front of Arkady. “Remember those hairy beetle things you were so excited about last week?”

“The ant lions?”

“Ant lions. Right. Well, thanks to your fascination with them, they’re the most thorough sampling we’ve got of a sexually reproducing species. So when my other models started going south, I figured I’d look at them.”

“And you came up with that?”

“Exactly. According to my calculations, your beloved ant lions shouldn’t exist. Just like every other living thing on this planet. In fact, Novalis should be a sterile hellhole. And every species on it—every bug, every bird, every tree, every blade of grass—should be walking ghosts.”

The two men stood looking at the page before them for another long moment.

“You’re sure?” Arkady asked finally.

“That’s what the numbers say.”

“But it’s not what the world outside the airlock says.”

“Isn’t it?”

“So what do we do now?”

“We punt,” Arkasha announced, as if it were the only logical solution. “We push the whole problem onto Ahmed’s desk and let him worry about it.”

No need to say which Ahmed; both men had long ago written off By-the-Book Ahmed as useless.

“But if we’re wrong…,” Arkady began.

“We’re not wrong.”

“Still,” Arkady said. “I’d feel a lot more comfortable if I knew whether or not the new DVI numbers were adding up.”

Arkasha made a disparaging noise. “What are you going to do? Walk down the hallway and ask Bella if her numbers add up, and if they don’t, then was she planning to cook the books again and would she mind terribly telling us which planet’s DVI she’s going to borrow this time so I don’t have to waste another day tracking the numbers down in the data banks? You can count me out of that conversation!”

“Well, we could be a little more tactful than that.”

Arkasha folded his arms across his chest and stared meaningfully at Arkady.

“Or, uh…we could always just punt and let Ahmed worry about it.”

In the end the Ahmeds called a general consult to discuss what they diplomatically described as “concerns” about the preliminary survey results.

“So where do we go from here?” one of the Aurelias asked when Arkady and Arkasha had taken turns laying out the problems in their work.

Arkasha shifted in his chair. “I say we shift base, see if we get better results in the other hemisphere. After all, the same arguments still apply. More biomass, higher species counts, better baselines…We need to rule out the possibility that we’re looking at some local—”

“Do you have the faintest idea how totally impractical that suggestion is?” By-the-Book Ahmed interrupted.

“It wouldn’t be if you’d followed my advice and picked a scientifically defensible landing site in the first place.”

“I refuse to let this consult become an excuse for revisiting closed issues. And even if—”

“And who the hell says that’s your decision?”

“—and even if we were going to reopen the question of base camp sites, I certainly wouldn’t do it on the advice of two alleged experts who can’t even figure out how to conduct routine survey work!”

“Why don’t you go around the room, Ahmed, and see how many other people are willing to say their data looks right. Really. I want to hear it.”

“Our work is solid!” Lazy Bella protested.

“No it’s not,” her sib countered. She really was getting more assertive, Arkady thought. “Well, I mean…at least mine isn’t. I’ve been staying up nights trying to figure out where I went wrong.” Shy Bella sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, flushing in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

“What about you?” Arkasha asked Aurelia the geophysicist.

Embarrassed silence.

“Well,” she admitted finally, “most of my stuff’s fine. I mean, the issue here isn’t rocks. But I do feel like…well, the planet just doesn’t look goodenough to me. Compared to what everyone else is seeing. Whenever I talk to any of the life-sciences people I keep getting the creepy feeling that Novalis is putting two and two together and getting five. Or five hundred million, more like.”

“We can’t make a decision of the magnitude of moving the base camp on our own anyway,” By-the-Book Ahmed broke in. “I say we launch a courier. Send samples back to Gilead for processing.”

“And do what exactly in the intervening four months?” one of the Banerjees snarked. “Drink ourselves into a stupor?”

“Go back into cold sleep. Set the shipboard comp to wake us up when it gets the return transmission.”

If this had been a single Syndicate mission, Ahmed’s decision would have been accepted without question; what could be more obvious, after all, than calling home for instructions?

As it was, however, the non-Aziz A’s bridled. Even the relatively docile Arkady could feel the urge toward rebellion. A learned response? A genetic reflex? A difference in the negotiation styles and customary behaviors that each of the team members had learned in his or her home Syndicate? Did it even matter? And was it any accident that all their rebellious feelings found a voice in Arkasha?

“I refuse to waste four months waiting for the same joint steering committee that got us into this mess!” the other Banerjee announced. “Life is too short. I have a job to do.” A pointed glare at By-the-Book Ahmed. “Even if some people don’t.”

Laid-back Ahmed opened his mouth to say something reassuring—and that was when all hell broke loose.

By-the-Book Ahmed accused Arkasha of being an egotistical humanist elitist.

The Aurelias came to Arkasha’s defense, and Bella accused them of siding with a fellow Rostov even when they knew he was a deviant who’d been skating on the edge of renorming for decades.

The other Aurelia leapt to her sib’s defense by calling Bella a lazy, self-centered, manipulative bitch.

“It’s not my fault we’re on the wrong side of this stupid planet!” Bella protested. “It wasn’t myidea to land here!”

“Like hell it wasn’t!” Oh no. Please, Arkasha, just keep your mouth shut for once.“You sat right here three weeks ago and sided with the Ahmeds on the landing site decision for no reason at all but sheer petty-minded spite. And now you have the hypocritical nerve to—”

“I did notside with the Ahmeds!”

“Well, you sure as hell didn’t side with me!”

“That’s not the same thing,” Bella said primly. “I have a right to express my opinion.”

“Anyone as stupid, lazy, ignorant, and selfish as you are doesn’t have a right to havean opinion!”

“Look,” Arkady pleaded. “Let’s just try to calm down and—”

But all he succeeded in doing was throwing himself into the middle of the flames.

“Stop apologizing for him!” Bella said.

“She’s right,” one of the Banerjees agreed. He pointed at Arkasha and began speaking of him in the third person and in that special tone that made every nerve in Arkady’s body cringe at the remembered misery of collective critiques gone by. “ He’s the real problem. He can’t bother to be friendly, or even polite. He picks fights. He disagrees with everything. He goes around jerking people’s chains until they’re so pissed off that even when he’s right they won’t agree with him. Which is why we’re in this hemisphere instead of the one he wanted to land in. Which if he’d bothered to build a consensus and work with people we probably wouldhave agreed to instead of having the Ahmeds, who—excuse me, Ahmed, but honestly—don’t know shit, make the decision by default—”