Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“And Cohen?” Li asked. “Is Nguyen warming a pair of slippers by the fire for him too?”

Ash shrugged. “I find it hard to believe that you’re really that happy with him. If it is a him. I mean…what are you exactly? His mistress? His bodyguard? His pet?”

But Li couldn’t answer that question, even though she’d been asking it of herself on and off for the last three years.

“Seriously,” Ash pursued. “What’s it like being part of …that?”

Li shrugged. Inarticulate in the best of circumstances, she truly had no words to describe the twists and turns and myriad contradictions of life on the intraface. And whatever words she might have put together over the course of the last three years had long ago dried up in the face of the obsessive hunger that every spinfeed reader on the Ring and beyond seemed to have for the most minute details of Cohen’s life, sexual and otherwise.

“He’s not just one person.” Was she actually about to talk to Ash about something she’d never talked about to anyone, including Cohen himself? Maybe it was just the sheer relief of dealing with someone who couldn’t reach into your head and rip the thoughts out of it before you had time to decide if you even wanted to share them or not. “He’s a lot of people. And…you kind of agree to pretend that there’s this single, identifiable, permanent person there. Just like you agree to pretend that that person doesn’t change every time he associates another network or autonomous agent. And after a while you start to wonder about yourself. If you’re just one person or many. If you ever really knew who that person was, and whether it’s really that simple for anyone.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“No. Well, not most of the time. But you wonder sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m becoming a new species. Like…there’s a line somewhere where posthuman gets so far away from human that it needs a new name.” And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the first person to cross that line.

Night had fallen while they were talking, and the shofarwas already blowing in some nearby synagogue. Christ, what a dismal noise! Ten days of it were going to be enough to drive Li well near crazy.

“Maybe the next ten days would be a good time to do a little Arithmetic of the Soul,” Ash suggested.

“According to the Interfaithers,” Li pointed out, “I don’t have a soul.”

Ash shrugged and began moving around the room, retrieving scattered toys and tossing them into a bin in the corner. “Don’t think the Interfaithers are that simple, Li.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled. “No one’s that simple.”

Ash turned to face her, the seriousness of her expression at odds with the purple plush stegosaurus clutched against her midriff. “Remember what you said about killing being personal? You were right. But this is personal too.”

Li waited.

“You were the general’s student. Her protegée. You hurt her deeply when you betrayed her. She’s giving you a chance to set things right now. To go back and remake past choices. Not many people get that kind of chance.”

“I’m grateful to her,” Li said. And in that moment, amazingly enough, she really was grateful. “But I did what I did on Compson’s World because I thought it wasright.”

Ash twisted the stuffed toy in her hands in a gesture that was either unconscious or supremely skilled acting. For some unfathomable reason it reminded Li of that brief glimpse of the silver stretch marks on that otherwise flawlessly engineered body. “What about what you did on Gilead?”

Li’s shooting eye twitched, and she rubbed fiercely at it. It was intolerable, she thought angrily, to have her own body give her away like that.

“I don’t remember Gilead,” she told Ash. “Or are you the only person in UN space who didn’t tune in to the trial of the century?”

“Nguyen said to tell you she can get you the real feed. But only on the understanding that it’s for private consumption.”

In other words, it would be yet another in the long series of “real feeds,” none of which could be parity checked or authenticated. “Thanks, but I’ve already walked down that hall of mirrors.”

“She said you’d say that. But she said you’d still want it when you’d had a chance to cool down and think about it.”

Li was thinking all right.

She was thinking of a clear blue morning sky on Gilead, and the soft wet sound of wind in the trees after the night’s rain, and the way you could hear songbirds all the time there, twittering back and forth from treetop to treetop; but only once in a while would you suddenly catch a bright flash of feather in the corner of your eye, gone before you’d had a chance to know anything except that it was beautiful.

“Good shot,” said the voice that haunted her shredded memories.

It could have been her voice. But then so could the next one.

“Not good enough. Fuck. I must have missed his spine by a millimeter. What do we do with him?”

“Mecklin? You getting anything but static? How far back is battalion?”

“I still can’t raise them, Sarge…uh…sir. Far as I know, they still haven’t made it across the river.”

“Chaff?”

“No chaff, sir. They’re just not picking up the phone.”

“And we got, what…twenty-eight prisoners?”

“Twenty-nine if this one lives.” A fourth voice, whose name hovered annoyingly on the tip of Li’s tongue. “Six A’s. Twenty-two tacticals. All Aziz except for this one. Must be their SigInt officer. Jesus Christ, what a mess! How the fuck can he still be alive anyway?”

“What do we do now, Sarge? Tag ’em for pickup?”

“Can’t. Orders. Prisoner pickup has to be cleared at the battalion level.”

Li remembered that particular order. Or thought she did. Good sharp solid block of soft memory of some blowhard bird colonel standing in the drop ship’s cavernous briefing room yakking on about crèche production schedules, and the impossibility of getting a draft resolution through the General Assembly in the current political climate, and how this was a war of attrition in which the key to victory was “draining the bathtub” faster than the Syndicates could fill it up again. Her lawyers, even the ones Cohen hired after she fired the idiot UNSec assigned her, hadn’t been able to dig up a shred of evidence that the guy had ever existed, let alone been deployed to Gilead. And when it came to he-said-she-said, machine memory beat meat memory every time.

“So what are we supposed to do if we can’t raise battalion? Take them with us? Gonna be like herding fucking cats. And there’s only eight of us.”

“Seven. Pradesh didn’t make it up the hill.”

Long pause there. Pradesh had been well liked.

“Has the medtech gone back to check on him?”

“Medtech didn’t make it up the hill either.”

Which feed was Li’s? The captain’s? The sniper’s? Had she been giving the orders that morning or just following them? If it had ever been possible to know, then the full-court press UNSec had put on for her court-martial had muddied her decohering memories beyond any hope of recovery.

She could just have been the sniper, she told herself for something like the eight thousandth time. She’d dropped into Gilead as a sniper. It was the best way to go to war if you had the skill and nerves for the job. You sat up above the carnage, too far away even to smell it if you were lucky. You did your breathing exercises, and you kept your trigger finger warm, and you let yourself float into the cool blue readout-flooded world behind your glareproof goggles. And if you were well and truly fucked up you could even convince yourself for pretty long stretches of time that you were just playing a bootleg beta release of a really kick-ass video game.

As long as the killing didn’t bother you.

Except that after a while the fact that the killing didn’t bother you started to bother you.

The shofarblew again. Li jumped as if someone had set off the air-raid sirens.

“You understand,” Ash said, “that this offer is off if you tell Cohen about it.”

“I guessed as much.”

Li knew what was supposed to happen next. Hell, she could have scripted the next scene single-handedly. She was supposed to protest that she couldn’t lie to Cohen. Ash was supposed to offer her justifications, excuses, and ultimately money. Li was supposed to say that the money didn’t matter, that it was a matter of principle. Then Ash was supposed to ask her to think about it, just think about it. Whereupon Li would agree. Reluctantly. Because of course she was almost completely entirely sure that she was going to have to say no…

All hypocritical nonsense when they both knew that everyone took the fall eventually.

And the money.

It was amazing how no one ever, ever, ever turned down the money.

“Fine,” Li said. “How long do I have to think about it?”

“As long as you want,” Ash said.

She offered the lie so sweetly that it was almost believable.

As Li stepped into the wet street, she almost collided with an old man hurrying home or to synagogue or to wherever normal people went on the last night of the year in Jerusalem.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” he said, bowing and touching a withered hand to his hat brim.

He couldn’t see her face, she realized; the lobby was too bright behind her, the street too dark; and the fine drizzle scattered the electric lights into a misty halo around her head and shoulders.

She returned the gesture, instinctively turning her wrist to hide the fine gunmetal-gray tracery of her wire job.

“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” she repeated numbly.

THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS

I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. The Monkey’s Paw of skin and bone is quite as deadly as anything cast out of steel or iron…The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.

—NORBERT WIENER (1964)

The only thing Arkady ever remembered about being interrogated by Turner was the vomiting.

“Tell me again?” he kept asking Osnat over the course of the next several days and nights.

And she kept repeating to him again and again, with a patience that seemed touchingly out of character, how they’d flown to Tel Aviv and landed on the roof of GolaniTech’s corporate headquarters in the research park over near the university’s science campus—surely he remembered all the grass? And the “little pipes coming out of the ground” (his words) which were called sprinklers and from which the Israelis actually threw water away every night.

Ash had come out to meet them herself. She’d been very nice, very polite. She’d apologized for the inconvenience, warned about possible side effects, which were supposed to be mild. And then she’d turned him over to Turner.

Arkady remembered none of it.

“Some of the talking drugs do mess with your memory. Supposedly the brain shuts down to protect itself, same as after a strong head blow. But nothing like this. Either you’re a lot more biochemically tweaked than the average UN construct, or it’s interfering with some prior conditioning.” She gave him a dark look. “That’s what Turner seemed to think. He got pretty steamed about it. Wanted to know what Korchow had done to you, and why.”

“Did I say?”

Osnat snorted. “You were a fucking zombie. If Korchow meant to rig you not to be able to talk under drugs, he did a pretty bang-up job of it. Maybe too bang-up. You don’t want to be drugproof, Arkady. Not in a world this fucking full of mean people.”

This sort of pronouncement was part and parcel of Osnat’s new attitude toward Arkady, which seemed to be best summed up by the proposition that he was in need of some seriously fierce mothering whether he wanted it or not.

He knew it didn’t mean anything. He knew that Osnat and Moshe were running a good cop bad cop act on him. But it still worked. And he couldn’t stop it from working. In the absence of any other alternative, even a friendship founded on lies is better than solitude.

And in the meantime Arkady’s sense of isolation was broadening and deepening. Raised in the close-knit world of the Syndicates, he had never truly had to come to terms with solitude. Days passed during which he felt no point of contact with the world of living, thinking, feeling beings outside his prison cell, as if his skin were tens of thousands of kilometers wide and he was gazing at them across a Green Line of the heart that no touch, no words, no feeling could penetrate.

“So. Arkady. Answer a personal question for me.”

They were sitting in Arkady’s little cell over the remains of the two dinner trays Osnat had brought in from wherever the food came from. Osnat had taken to eating at least one meal a day with him most days. Again, Arkady knew it was part of a calculated plan to win his trust. And, again, it didn’t matter; it worked anyway. He was too lonely for it not to work.

“Those Syndicate spins. I got dragged to one a few months ago, never mind how. The Time of Cruel Miracles.”

“You saw The Time of Cruel Miracles? Where—”

“At the Castro. They always show Syndicate flicks there. ’Cause you people are all…well, never mind, that’s not the point. My question is this: Is that spin considered art?”

“Uh…well, not the spin necessarily. But it was based on a famous novel by Rumi.”

Osnat’s brows knit in confusion. “Rumi with an R? I’ve never heard of R’s. How many series do you have, anyway?”

“No, no. It’s a pen name. Rumi was a KnowlesSyndicate A. From the same series as Andrej Korchow, actually. That whole series can be…um…odd. Anyway, he was mostly a poet, but he wrote one famous novel. And the spin you saw is a very sensationalistic and simplistic version of that novel.”

“Commercial, you mean.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know that term.”

“Popular.”

“Well, it certainly was popular.”

“So. At the end of the spin the hero and his lover kill themselves, right?”

“Right.”

“And the friend I went to see it with said that always happens in Syndicate spins. The heroes start out fighting with each other, and then they fall in love, and then they have a lovers’ suicide pact and kill themselves.”

That was selling Rumi’s novel a bit short, Arkady thought. But he had to admit that it sounded like a pretty fair rendering of the average run of Syndicate movies.

“So my question,” Osnat said, “is why? Why do they always kill themselves? Why do you people like watchingthat stuff?”

“Well, it sounds like some humans like watching it too,” he countered. “Why don’t you ask them why?”

She gave him an impatient glare. “They like it because you’d have to be either blind or dead not to enjoy watching that Ahmed Aziz fellow take his clothes off.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Arkady said wryly. “He’s not my type.”

Osnat forged on, missing the joke entirely. “My question is why do youwatch it? Do you people get off on watching snuff flicks? Or is it some kind of government propaganda designed to convince you that”—her voice dropped into a really quite respectable imitation of the Ahmeds’ masculine tones—“the collective good is a more beautiful ideal than the futile search for selfish individual happiness?”

“There are plenty of human love stories that end that way,” Arkady protested. “Just think of Romeo and Juliet.”

“Yeah, but the point of Romeo and Julietwas that their families’ vendetta was stupid and pointless and they should have just let the young people be happy.”

“Was it? I don’t recall Shakespeare ever saying that.”

“Don’t be a smartass. It doesn’t change the point that if you ever do get back to your precious Arkasha, the best you can hope for is another twenty years of separation before—assuming you’re good and neither of you pisses anyone off and you both get citizenship—your steering committee might maybe, just maybe, give you permission to be together.”

“You make it sound so…bleak.”

“Do I?” She smirked. “I don’t recall my ever saying that.”

“Thirty-year contracts and temporary workpairings aren’t about some family squabble over the means of genetic production, Osnat. We’re not fighting for a bigger share of the genomic pie. We’re fighting for survival as a species. You people are always complaining about living in the ruins of a broken planet. Well, we don’t even have ruins. We’re out in space without a lifeboat. Every crèche run, every piece of genetic design, every terraforming mission—and yes, even culling and renormalization—is dictated by the cold equations of survival and extinction. And one moment of carelessness or selfishness could be all it takes to tip the balance toward extinction. You can make a face if you want to, but that’s the reality. And, frankly, what does humanity have to put against it? Chaos. Bickering, rutting, selfish, maladaptive cha—”

“Whoa, Arkady!” Osnat interrupted. At first he thought she was angry, but then he realized she was trying not to laugh. “I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.”

“Come on, Arkady. I got clearance to take you for a little walk. Told Moshe you were going to die of vitamin D deficiency if he didn’t let you out in the sun sooner or later.”

Arkady, spliced for survival in space, was perfectly capable of synthesizing his own vitamin D; but he thought about Osnat’s peculiarly human prudishness about genetic engineering and decided that an unnecessary walk would probably hurt him less than another argument with the only sentient being currently on speaking terms with him.

Osnat’s “little walk” turned out to be a bit more than he’d bargained for.

Arkady had always enjoyed being planetside until then—a notable, though highly adaptive, deviation from the stationer’s agoraphobia that was becoming increasingly widespread among the younger cohorts of most Syndicates’ crèches. But the deep, dense undergrowth of the temperate zones of Gilead and Novalis had done nothing to prepare him for the environment into which Osnat introduced him.

He was amazed by the cold, first of all. He’d known, of course, about the ice age; but somehow he’d still imagined that a desert would be hot. He certainly hadn’t expected the dusting of snow that chilled his feet and clotted in the treads of his boot soles.

Nor had he expected the inhabitedness of the landscape. Nothing on Earth was pristine, it turned out; what he took for granted on Gilead or any of the other new and still-empty planets he’d worked on was long gone even in this desolate place. At every dip and turn of the land they would stumble on some artifact of the desert’s former population. Junked cars. Rusting water tanks. Coils of barbed wire still draped between the leftover bones of old fences. An entire apartment complex, built of rebar-reinforced concrete and sheathed in now-peeling white stucco, abandoned so abruptly that there were still faded shreds of laundry hanging from the windows like flags put out to celebrate a victory that had never, in the end, come to pass.

“Is this Israeli or Palestinian?” Arkady asked.

“Could be either. They’ve changed the lines so often that settlements are always getting stranded on the wrong side.”

“And no one moves in after the settlers leave?”

Osnat shrugged. “Israelis don’t want to live in Arab houses. Palestinians don’t want to live in Jewish houses. And anyway, it’s cheaper to build new.”

“It always comes back to money with humans, doesn’t it?”

Osnat laughed bitterly. “If only it did! Money’s nice and clean and simple compared to most of what goes on down here.”

They saw only one sign among the wreckage of present human occupation: a vast dusty herd of sheep swirling in the bottom of a wadi like a spring flood. To Arkady, station-raised, the sight was inconceivable. How much biomass did these creatures consume? What kind of organic load did they place on the ecosystem that supported them? What king’s ransom of water did they consume every day? How many accumulated tons of grass, insects, and annelids were necessary to allow for the extravagance of a single sheep? And for what? A scrap of wool? A bit of meat that could be produced more quickly and cheaply in the most primitive viral manufacturing tanks? It was enough to make him long for the elegant economy of a worm.

Long after he’d stopped wondering if there was any purpose to the forced march Osnat was leading him on, they topped a steep mesa and looked out over a flat valley that contained what appeared, at first glance, to be a remote desert town. It was empty, however. And as they dropped off the ridge and moved down the single silent street, Arkady began to understand that it had never really been a town at all. The buildings were all made of whitewashed cement block, and their walls were massively scarred with bullet holes. But there were no shards of broken glass anywhere—because none of the buildings had ever had windows. And the yellow dust of the desert and the khamsinhad drifted through the open doors and windows to pile up in the corners of dark, warrenlike rooms that had clearly never been finished for human habitation.

The place was like the rough draft of a town. An idea of a town, in which a very real battle—or perhaps many of them—had been fought.

“What is this place?” he asked, shivering.

“Hell town.”

“What was it for?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Osnat?”

“What?”

“Could we…can we talk about what we talked about the other day? You know, about that friend of mine I was telling you about?”

“And why the hell should I do that?” she asked.

“I just thought—”

“You just thought nothing,” she snapped. “If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to Moshe. I’m not in the business of doling out charity or letting people cry on my shoulder.”

She pulled off her jacket, moving with rough irritable gestures, as if annoyance had pushed her body temperature above acceptable limits. And then she did something that set Arkady’s pulse racing with hope and terror. With her right hand, partially shielded by the camouflage swirl of her coat, she pointed skyward.

It was a momentary gesture, gone so quickly that if Arkady’s eyes hadn’t been sharpened by the fear and tension of the past weeks, he would have missed it entirely. But its meaning was unmistakable: they were being watched.

A shadow, no more than the shadow of a passing sparrow, flitted across the rocky ground. High in the sky something flashed silver in the morning sunlight. A surveillance drone. Had it been there on their prior walks? Yes, he realized; he’d noticed it but assumed it was just a passing shuttle or a satellite in low orbit. Who could possibly pay attention to all the scrap metal humans had chucked into orbit around their planet?

He dissembled, scrambling to pick up the conversation where it had faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to imply that I was asking you for something. I just…wanted to thank you for what you’ve done so far.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“But you have. The books. The walks. I…I appreciate it. You’re a gracious person.”

The sunburned forehead wrinkled in bemusement, and she cocked her head again to get a better look at him. “Well! That’s sure as fuck the first time I’ve ever been called gracious!”

Carefully, trying not to be too obvious about it, Arkady looked in the direction he thought she’d been pointing.

A house—or rather, a nonhouse—just like the others along the street. He went into it. Osnat followed him.

Inside, in the dark, she prowled around him like a cat. She was in a hurry, he realized. And she was trembling with nerves or fear—a thing that scared him as much as anything in the past weeks had scared him.

“Did you mean what you said the other day about being willing to stick your neck out to save this friend of yours?”

“Yes.” Arkady had to crane his neck to keep track of her.

She prowled back toward the door, and reached a hand up to twitch away the curtain. “Are you sure? You’d better be sure. Because I’m about to throw out a lifeline. And if I throw it to the wrong person, we’re both going to get our teeth kicked in.”

Why did Arkady suddenly have the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just, for the first time in his life, heard the phrase “get our teeth kicked in” used as a euphemism?

“What—who are you going to go to?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know. I’m just going to send up a flare and whoever shows up shows up. But you’d better be damned sure, Arkady. You can’t put the bullet back in the gun once you’ve pulled the trigger.”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’d better be able to keep your mouth shut until I tell you not to. I know you can do it. I watched you do it at GolaniTech. You willing to do it for me if I help you?”

“I’m willing to try.”

“Okay. Good enough.” The whisper of cloth on stone. Scuff of her boots in the dust. “You ever heard of the Mossad, Arkady?”

“Of course.”

“Moshe and I used to work for them.”

“But I thought—”

“They recruit out of the IDF. First pick of the litter, so to speak. We were both Sayeret Golani. Commandos. What you’d call tacticals. Didi Halevy tapped us after officers’ school.

“We went through training together. There were a hundred and thirty in our incoming class.” Pride sharpened her normally husky voice. “A hundred and thirty chosen out of over two thousand. And Didi Halevy told us”—her voice shifted into a schoolmasterish tone that Arkady assumed must be an imitation of Halevy’s voice—“We have no quotas. We take only those who we think can do the job. And if the best of you can’t do the job, then we won’t take any of you.” She looked at Arkady, dropping back into her own, rougher voice. “They took three out of our class, and even after that we had two years of training, living in one room, eating reheated garbage, only getting to visit our families twice a year. Me, Moshe…and a boy named Gur who you never met and never will because Gavi Shehadeh got him killed.”

“Is that why you’re so loyal to Moshe?”

“You think it’s a bad reason?” She coughed, took a step toward the door, turned around again, cleared her throat. “Anyway. I went back to my home unit after Tel Aviv. And then when it was time to re-up, I signed on with GolaniTech instead. Which hasn’t exactly been…well, never mind what it has or hasn’t been. I chose it, and I’m not going to whine about it. The point is, someone I know from King Saul Boulevard came to me a few months ago and asked me to keep my eyes open and, uh…let him know if I saw anything fishy going on at GolaniTech. I thought it was crazy. Reamed the guy out, actually. Told him Moshe wouldn’t be messed up in anything like that and he’d better tell the eighth floor to mind their own fucking business and clean up their own house.” She licked her lips. “Then you showed up.”

“Why are you telling me this, Osnat?”

“Remember what you told me about wanting to help your friend? I’m putting it to the test. Basically I’m handing you a loaded gun. If you want to pull the trigger on it, I’m dead. If you don’t pull the trigger…then I’ll do my best to help you. And your friend.”

“What changed your mind?” Arkady asked. “Was it something I said to Turner?”

Osnat turned back to face him, a stark silhouette against the backdrop of silver clouds, dust-gray desert. “You know damn well what it was.”

He shook his head no.

“Bella. Bella and her so-called sickness. That’s not a genetic weapon, Arkady. That’s Armageddon. And if Moshe were really working in Israel’s best interests, he would have sent you back to Korchow in a body bag the second he figured out what you were selling.”