Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

They spent most of the night in another flooded-out crater.

“Know much about cannibalism?” Li asked him sometime well after darkness had fallen.

Even she was lying down by then, though she was still smoking another in her endless succession of cigarettes. How she managed to smoke lying down like that and not end up buried in a mountain of cigarette ash was a mystery to Arkady.

“Uh…no.”

“Some bright bulb did a statistical study of space wrecks. You know, the classic scenario: twenty people stranded in a life pod, food and air for thirty days, going to take ninety for the SOS to ping to the nearest BE relay and back. So who are the eaters, and who are the eatees? No pun intended. Turns out that you can predict who’s going to eat and who’s going to get eaten pretty reliably. Even when they draw straws, believe it or not. Able-bodied human males come last. They don’t generally start eating each other until they’ve run out of everyone else. Before that they go through the human women and children. And before they start on the lesser humans, they eat the posthumans. And before they eat the posthumans, they eat the constructs.”

“That’s sick.”

“Don’t be a cynic, Arkady. It used to be worse. Used to be they’d eat all the blacks and Asians before the first white woman got cooked. Now it’s ladies first regardless of incidentals like skin color. That’s what we in the UN call progress, Arkady. Anyway, here’s the real question: The guy who did the study only assumed one kind of construct. He didn’t take the Syndicates into account. So my question, Arkady, is: When the food runs out which one of us do you think these clowns’ll eat first?”

Morning found the squad on the banks of the river looking up the long slope of Mount Herzl past the IDF military cemetery.

They had penetrated into the Line’s dead heart: a no-man’s-land that no army was willing to defend, a place of ghosts where last summer’s oranges lay uneaten beneath the trees and the grass around the graves grew waist high. They might have been on Novalis, the world lay so still and quiet around them.

Li and Osnat were hunched over a map-fiche with the Israeli captain. Arkady was sitting with Cohen, who didn’t seem to have any more interest in the proceedings than he did. When the women finally came away from the map, Osnat had a sullen look on her face and was fiddling with the trigger guard of her weapon in a way that made Arkady’s stomach curl.

“You asked for help,” the AI told Osnat.

“Not from a Palestinian traitor!”

“Half-Palestinian,” Cohen corrected blandly.

Osnat fingered her weapon again. None of the Israelis seemed to register the movement; but suddenly, and without ever seeming to have moved at all, Li was standing right next to Osnat, her hand on the other woman’s trigger hand. The touch looked light, almost casual. But in fact Osnat’s fingers were turning white with the pressure of the other woman’s grip. Slowly, as if everything were happening under running water, the rifle slipped from Osnat’s grasp and slithered down her side until it hit the end of its webbed sling.

“We’re fine,” Cohen assured the Israeli captain. And, ever so gently, he lifted the rifle away from Osnat’s side, removed the ammunition clip, and pocketed it.

Osnat turned to the captain for support, but he was studiously inspecting the slime that had accumulated on his boots during the river crossing.

“You know the road home,” Li said in the take-it-or-leave-it tone Arkady was beginning to think expressed some core component of her emotional architecture. “You want to turn around, this’d be the time to do it.”

“And Arkady?”

“What do you think?”

There was a lot more walking after that. It was all uphill, and most of it was through the tall grass and tangled weeds of the vast IDF cemetery. Arkady, his mind slack with exhaustion, only noticed that the others had stopped walking when they were face-to-face with the tall iron gates of Yad Vashem.

Li reached out and gave the latch a brisk shake. It held, and when Arkady looked closer he could see why: someone had wrapped a heavy chain through the bars and closed it with a thick-hasped padlock.

Li glanced at Cohen, and again Arkady had that eerie sense that some communication the others couldn’t hear was passing between them.

“Well, have you actually talked to him yet?” Li asked aloud.

Cohen seemed to gather himself to argue, but then the shunt’s shoulders dropped slightly. “No. But he’ll be here. Where else would he be?”

Li snorted. “It’s not whether he’s here I’m worried about. It’s whether he wants to come out and talk to us.”

“There’s no wall,” Osnat pointed out. “We can just go around the gate if we want.”

“Bad idea.” Li strolled back down the road, pried a loose piece up from the decaying asphalt, and tossed it into the trees to one side of the gate. It arced lazily through the air—and then vanished in a cloud of vapor as it passed some invisible boundary. “I’ve been wanting to lose weight,” she quipped. “But not that much.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For him to realize that we’re not going away until he comes down to talk to us.”

It took nearly an hour before a distant and wavering figure appeared at the top of the long tree-lined avenue leading down to the gates. At first Arkady thought he was watching a machine or a monster. The being seemed to have many legs, and it rippled and moved with a sideways motion that he could make no sense of. As the figure descended the hill toward them, the wavering shape resolved itself into two shapes: a man, tall and supple and graceful, with a dog following at his heels. The late-afternoon sun gilded the man’s head with fire and flickered around his feet in a way that only made sense when Arkady realized that the man was wearing shorts—and that his right leg below the knee wasn’t flesh at all, but a delicate architecture of ceramsteel and silvery neuromuscular thread.

Man and dog continued their unhurried progress down the hill until they finally reached the gate. The man looked out through the bars at them, but he made no move to open the padlock that hung from the iron latch. He was smaller than Arkady had thought he would be; not a big man at all, but built so straight and true that he seemed tall until you stood next to him. The expression on his face was calm, mildly interested, completely noncommittal. The face itself was one of those brown-skinned, strong-nosed, finely hewn faces that were equally common among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews. The man’s only really remarkable feature, Arkady decided, were his black eyes. And those were as deep as the dark between the stars.

The dog poked her sharp nose through the gate, growling anxiously. The man laid a calming hand on her. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“It’s me,” Cohen said. “Cohen. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Sorry. I’ve gotten rather bad about checking my mail lately.”

“Well, I’ll give you the executive summary: we’re here.”

“So I see.” The bottomless eyes touched on Cohen, then Osnat, then Li and Arkady, then returned to Osnat for a pensive moment.

“Hello, Osnat.”

Osnat nodded curtly.

“Are you going to let us in?” Cohen asked.

“The thing is…I don’t exactly have the key at the moment.”

“You lost it?”

“I never lose things.” A self-deprecating smile lit the thin face and warmed the dark eyes. It occurred to Arkady that people would lay their lives down for this man. “I just put them down. And then I put other things on top of them. I figured that when I remembered what I’d put on top of the key, that would be soon enough to open the gate again. But now here you are standing on my doorstep and accusing me of losing things! I ask you, is there no justice in the world?”

He pulled what looked like a tiny nail file out of his pocket, and bent over the heavy padlock securing the gate. In a matter of seconds the lock fell open and the chains rattled to the ground. The gate opened stiffly, then stuck. They had to slide through the narrow gap one by one, taking care not to get caught on the ornate iron thorns that sprang from the bars.

“I take it the key’s been under something for a while?” Cohen asked as he squeezed through.

The man smiled again, and Arkady finally put his finger on what it was that was so entrancing about the expression. It was the smile of a child, open and vulnerable. Or rather it was the smile of an adult who had somehow managed to remain childlike. It made you feel that you were looking at a person who had been wounded by the world but not diminished by it.

The dog, meanwhile, was sniffing at their knees and ankles, whining under her breath, glancing back at her master, putting her body between him and the as-yet-unknown arrivals. He quieted her with a murmured word. She brightened, and her frothy tail began to wave hopefully.

“What a beautiful girl!” Cohen exclaimed, kneeling to bring his face within licking range.

She wasbeautiful. Arkady knew theoretically that she must be no bigger than average size for a dog, but she was so much larger than the tiny, petted, cosseted canines that he’d seen in the Syndicates that he could barely believe they were the same species. And this was no pet either, he suspected. He didn’t know what job she’d been bred to do, but not even the most casual observer could miss the honed, streamlined, powerful purposefulness of her.

“What is she?” Cohen asked. He was now thumping energetically at her ribs, whipping her into a delighted frenzy. “She’s too big to be pure border collie.”

“I don’t think the breed has a name. The shepherds in the Line bred them from whatever was left after the die-offs. Tough on sheep, easy on the eye.” He cleared his throat and made a formal gesture. “Ah. I’ve been remiss. Cohen, meet Dibbuk. Dibbuk, meet Cohen.”

Cohen laughed and buried his face in the dog’s thick fur. Then he stood up, and after the briefest of hesitations, stepped forward and embraced the stranger. They kissed each other elaborately in the Arab manner. Then Cohen took the human’s face between his hands and held him out at arm’s length in a way that made Arkady realize suddenly that the AI must be very old, and that even the humans he called friends must seem like mere children to him.

“You didn’t have to roll in with the cavalry,” the human said. “You could have just asked me to meet you at your hotel. Uh…right…well, I guess I shouldtry to check my mail more often.”

“Oh Gavi,” the machine said, caressing the man with the same open, uncomplicated, unshadowed affection he’d shown to the dog just a few moments ago, “what on earth am I supposed to do with you?”

They followed Gavi between the tall trees to a building buried in the hillside like a knife blade. He stopped in front of a plate glass door sized to accommodate busloads of tourists and smiled his sweet, wounded, self-deprecating smile. “We all know what the spider said to the fly and how that ended up,” he told them. “But come in anyway.”

The vast lobby ran away on all sides into dust and shadows. Gavi struck off across the echoing expanse of marble and dove through a sagging fire door into an ill-lit warren of maintenance corridors and administrative offices.

Arkady felt as if he’d walked into a theater, stepped onto the stage, and slipped through the wings to the cramped back passages and dressing rooms where the actors really lived. This part of the building looked at once abandoned and cluttered. Gavi seemed to be camping in it as much as living in it, and the whiff of kerosene on the air hinted at more than occasional power outages.

At one point they passed an entire room full of dirty laundry. Gavi pulled the door closed, grinned sheepishly, and muttered something about the maid’s day off. “I would have put shoes on when I saw you coming,” he said in an apparent non sequitur, “but I forgot to buy socks last time I was in town. And I meant to wash the ones I have. But somehow the whole laundry thing just never quite got off the ground this month.”

Li snorted.

“I have Superhuman Powers of Procrastination,” Gavi announced. He could do the same capital letters trick that Osnat did, Arkady noticed. Maybe it was something about Hebrew. “But the problem with powers of procrastination,” he continued wistfully, “is that you can’t Use Them for Evil. You can only use them for Nothing.”

Osnat stared for a moment, perplexed, then burst out laughing.

“It’s nice to see you,” Gavi told her. “How are you? Well, I hope?”

She frowned and looked away. “So what are we here for, anyway? I don’t want to walk home after dark in this neighborhood.”

Gavi turned to Cohen, a look of alarm spreading across his mobile features. “You’re not thinking of going back tonight? That would be terribly dangerous. I don’t want to get my neighbors in trouble, but I happen to know that at least four EMET patrols have been rolled for their tech in the last six months.”

“You happento know?” Osnat asked in a voice as hard as her eyes.

“I have to live out here,” Gavi said simply.

Osnat turned away, her mouth twitching as if she wanted to spit.

Gavi looked after her for a moment before turning back to Cohen. “You arestaying, though? Aren’t you?”

“We’re staying,” Li broke in. “I just cleared it with EMET.”

“Good. Excellent. Then shall we get down to business? Um…what isbusiness, by the way?”

Cohen cleared his throat. “Would you kids mind terribly going off and playing on your own while I have a private word with Gavi?”

Gavi moved around the room, piling clothes, books, and data cubes on one surface; moving them to another; rearranging and consolidating and buttressing sedimentary layers of computer printouts in a comical attempt to free up space for Cohen’s cup, Cohen’s knees, Cohen himself.

Watching him, Cohen felt at once relieved and disoriented. He had expected to see a broken man, or at least a changed one. But this was Gavi as he’d always been. The body blessed with the spare, tendon-on-bone grace of the born long-distance runner. The face that had far too much of the intellectual in it to be what most people called handsome. The black, black eyes whose liquid brilliance you couldn’t imagine until you’d been subjected to one of Gavi’s tell-me-no-lies stares.

And a right leg that ended just below the knee and had been replaced by a prosthesis that, if Cohen knew Gavi, was one of the most obsessively babied, upgraded, optimized, and tinkered-with pieces of hardware on the planet.

“How’s your mother?” Cohen asked.

“Oh, you know, the usual. Finding fascists under the furniture. Predicting the fall of the free world before lunch every morning. For her, happy.”

Gavi’s mother had been an old kibbutznik and a prominent Labor Party politician known for her fierce intelligence and her ability to sniff out and stamp on even the subtlest manifestations of bullshit. His father had been her diametric opposite: a dreamer, an intellectual, a minor Palestinian poet whose elegantly crafted poems were turning out to be not nearly as minor as everyone had at first thought they were.

Gavi’s father had died of an early heart attack before the war started, which Cohen couldn’t help thinking had been a mercy. His mother had resigned from the Knesset and left Earth permanently the day the first appropriations bill for EMET went through. And since she’d been berating her only son over his “fascist” career for decades, neither Gavi’s dismissal from the Mossad nor the swirling rumors of treason had clouded their affectionate but extremely long-distance relationship.

In Cohen’s opinion, each of Gavi’s parents had represented the best their respective cultures had to offer. And Gavi in turn had gotten the best parts of both of them. But that was Cohen’s opinion. And at the moment his idea of the n-optimal human being didn’t seem to be very popular in either the new Israel or the new Palestine.

“I like your tough girl,” Gavi said when he’d finally consolidated things sufficiently to clear knee and elbow room for the two of them. “And you finally got her to marry you too, I hear. How’s happily ever after going?”

Cohen shrugged.

“I’m sorry. And here I’d been getting so much enjoyment out of staring up at the stars thinking of all the fun you were having.”

“Fun, my friend, is seriously overrated.”

“So what’s the problem exactly?”

“If I knew, I’d fix it and there wouldn’t be one.”

“The frightening thing is that you actually mean that!”

Gavi leaned forward and looked deep into Cohen’s eyes. The effect was hypnotic. Mother Nature really did know best, Cohen decided. Put next to Gavi, even Arkady looked like a second-rate knockoff of the real thing.

“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but did Li really do what they say she did on Gilead? I can’t see you with someone who’d do that.”

“She doesn’t know what she did. They wiped her memory. She only knows what they want her to know.”

“And even you can’t get the real files?”

“Even I can’t get the real files. I’m beginning to wonder if they still exist.”

“You could go crazy over a thing like that,” Gavi said earnestly.

“Yes, you could.” Cohen blinked and shook his head, suddenly bothered by the flickering of one of Gavi’s many monitors. “Can you turn that off? Thanks. No, that one. Yes.”

“Are you still having seizures?” Gavi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “I thought you’d solved that bug long ago.”

“So did I. But I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze Catherine or discuss coupled oscillators. How are you?”

“Great.”

“Mind wiping that shit-eating grin off your face and giving me an honest answer?”

The grin broadened. “Shitty.”

“Gavi! Come on.”

Gavi gave him a cool, smooth, faintly amused look.

“Why are you acting like this, Gavi?”

“Like what? Like a man talking to someone he hasn’t seen for two years?”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine.” The grin was back in place. “I was going to call you when I was done feeling sorry for myself and ready to come out and play again. Admit it, Cohen. You just don’t like people who don’t need you.”

“No. I lovepeople who don’t need me. That’s why I married Catherine. What I don’tlove are people who pretend not to need me because they’re too pigheadedly proud to ask for help when they need it. And will you kindly have the courtesy to stop laughing at me?”

“I’m laughing withyou, little AI. And has it occurred to you that you just might be seeing Hyacinthe these days when you look at me? I mean the man, not the interface program.”

“You’ll really do anything to make this about me instead of about you, won’t you?”

Gavi was shaking with repressed laughter now. “Come on, Cohen. If you traipse all the way out here to visit me and then spend the whole time crying on my shoulder about how I’m not crying on your shoulder, it’s just going to be too ridiculous for words.”

“There’s got to be somethingsomeone can do. Have you at least talked to Didi?”

“No. And I’m not going to.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Honestly, Cohen. What for? So he can tell me he thinks I got three of his boys killed and stashed the blood money in some Ring-side bank account, and the only reason I’m still alive is that I happened to be the dumb schmuck who pulled the future PM out of the way of a bullet once upon a time? You saw the way Osnat looked at me just now. I think we can take her feelings as representative.”

“I just—”

“Look.” Gavi let each word drop slowly and clearly into the silence. “ There is nothing you can do.So do me a favor and forget about it. I have. And by the way, you can stop trying not to stare at my leg.”

“Was I?” Cohen winced. “You’d think having spent the last several years of Hyacinthe’s life in a wheelchair would have cured me of that.”

“It’s not as big a deal as you obviously think it is. I mean, I’m not minimizing it. It’s pretty fucking unpleasant. But I got up this morning and took a nice 10K run before breakfast. I’d have to be even more self-absorbed than I am not to realize it could be a lot worse.” Gavi’s eyes narrowed and his voice took on a not-so-subtle edge. “Okay. Enough small talk. We both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a hall pass from Didi. So what does Didi want from me?”

Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.

When he was done, Gavi stared at him over crossed arms. “So Didi read you your orders and you picked up your friends and marched them all out here like little toy soldiers, no questions asked, ’cause you’re my ‘friend,’ huh?” The word friendwas framed in cruelly ironic quotation marks.

“That’s a shitty way to put it,” Cohen said.

“Oh, you think?” Gavi jerked his chin toward the jumble of hardware hulking in the shadows. “Does Didi know I’m an inscribed player? No, don’t bother, I’ll answer the question for you. He knows. He knows because I told him in the reports I filed when I was your case officer. And I told him so he could use it to control you. Which is exactly what he’s doing now. Or do you want to tell me I’m missing something?”

“No, Gavi. You never miss a trick.”

Hy Cohen had done a terrible thing when he wrote those innocent little lines of gamer code into Cohen’s core architecture. And then he’d slipped out during the intermission; gotten out dead before his prize creation found out how painfully confusing it was going to be to live in a world full of alien and beloved humans.

Cohen loved Gavi—or Gavi was an inscribed player, which amounted to about the same thing. He couldn’t bear to watch a friend tear himself apart—or he was programmed to reweight his fuzzy logic circuits on receipt of negative affective stimuli from inscribed players. He was more loyal than the most loyal human friend, more selfless than the most ardent lover. But if you went to the source code it was right there, staring you down in pretty print: not love, but a recursive algorithm that directed him to reformat gameplay in order to maximize positive emotive “hits.”

And it only made things worse to know that the code that compelled him wasn’t the chance result of evolution or natural selection or environmental pressures, but the personal choice of a combative little French Jew who had the chutzpahto hand you the keys to your soul and tell you to go ahead and rewrite it from the ground up if you thought you could make a better job of it than he had.

“I amyour friend,” Cohen protested, dogged by the humiliating feeling that he was arguing as much with Hyacinthe as with Gavi. “Why do you have to tear me down to my logic gates to find out what that means? I’m doing what any friend would do.”

“Well that’s the funny thing, Cohen.” All the feeling had leached out of Gavi’s voice, leaving it as coldly impersonal as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Because now that we’re on the subject of friends, maybe I should point out something that appears to have escaped your notice. I don’t have any.”

“They weren’t real friends,” Cohen whispered, aching to wipe the look of self-loathing off Gavi’s face. “You’re worth a hundred of them.”

“No one’s worth that!” Gavi snapped. And then the floodgates let loose. “Who are you, fucking Graham Greene puking and mewling about how Kim Philby was worth morethan the poor slobs he sent out to die for him? You think I’m worth morethan Osnat? Or Li? Or poor little Roland there? You must. You dragged them into a war zone because Didi told you I needed a shoulder to cry on.”

“It’s not that simple…”

“Isn’t it? Name one solid piece of evidence you’ve ever seen that I’m not Absalom. Name one real reason for believing I didn’t send those kids out to die in Tel Aviv.”

“Stop it, Gavi.”

But Gavi didn’t stop. “Delete me from your inscribed players’ list.”

Cohen gasped. What Gavi was suggesting would have been dauntingly complex back when Hyacinthe wrote the original code. Three centuries later it was inconceivable. It would mean wrenching out all the tangled threads that connected Gavi to Cohen’s past: every conversation they’d ever had; every job they’d ever done together; everything that had ever so much as reminded Cohen of him. And it would damage the virtual ecology of Cohen’s nested hierarchies of agents and networks in ways that he couldn’t begin to predict or guard against.

The only person Cohen knew of who had ever done such violence to her own memory was Li. She’d done it to escape from the corporate-run hell of the Bose-Einstein mines…and she was still trying to paper over the sucking hole she carried around where most people carried their family and friends and childhood.

“Do it,” Gavi told him.

“No.”

“I’m ordering you to.”

“I’m not a word processor. I don’t accept keyboard programming.”

“Then let me speak to router/decomposer. He’ll see reason even if you won’t.”

“He’ll see no such thing!” Suddenly all Cohen’s humiliation and distress coalesced into fury. “How dare you drag him into this? It’s not his decision to make!”

He could feel router/decomposer rattling the bars inside, saying that it was so his decision, or at least partially his decision. And there was something underneath his usual logic-chatter. Something that the DARPA programmers had squashed in Cohen when he was at about router/decomposer’s level of psychological development, and that he had sworn he would never squash in anyone.

He squashed it.

Then he throttled down router/decomposer’s bandwidth and slapped all his nonessential internal traffic out of circulation in order to drive the point home. It was for router/decomposer’s own good, after all. And why the hell did everyone have to reach their critical bifurcation points in the same fucking millisecond, anyway? Why couldn’t they all just slow down and let him breathefor a few cycles? Who did they think he was? God?“Don’t you ever do that again,” he told Gavi. “I don’t run my brain by committee. And I’m in no fucking mood to be tolerant.”

Resounding silence, inside and out.

Finally, Gavi’s shoulders slumped. The skin of his face looked bruised, and the tears he’d talked so mockingly about a few short minutes ago glittered along the edges of his eyes. Dibbuk roused herself from her blanket, whimpering, and pressed her nose between his knees until he sent her back to lie down again.

“Didi’s just doing what he has to do,” Cohen said. “So am I. Can’t you see that?”

“Of course I can.” Gavi’s voice dropped to a heartsick whisper. “And it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made a mistake. One stupid, trivial, miniscule mistake somewhere along the line. And I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life watching innocent people pay for it. Gur dead. Osnat, one of the best agents I ever trained, wasting her life playing corporate rent-a-cop because no one will trust anyone who came within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. And you’re worried about my leg? I’d laugh if it wasn’t all so awful!”

Cohen reached out a hand, but Gavi flinched away from him.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked when he thought Gavi was ready to speak again.

“Well, I guess I might as well do what Didi wants and talk to Arkady. If Didi’s pushing it this hard, then you can bet it’s because he’s scoped all the angles and knows he can turn even a betrayal from me to Israel’s advantage. That ought to be enough for you. It would be for me if I were in your shoes. After that…well, that depends on whether you trust me or not.”

“Should I trust you?”

They locked gazes long enough for Cohen to see fear, guilt, doubt, and anger chase each other through the black depths of Gavi’s eyes. Looking into them was like being hotwired to Gavi’s soul. How could there be a lie at the bottom of all that naked clarity?

“I can’t tell you,” Gavi said, looking away. “I can only answer for my intentions. And all my good intentions seem to be doing lately is getting people killed.”

“Well, I can’t kill the fatted calf,” Gavi told Arkady, “but I can offer a choice of goat or chicken. Have you ever meta goat? No? Then walk with me. You are about to have the pleasure of making first contact with a superior life-form.”

The little group strolled down the hill, basking in the last failing warmth of the evening sun. Arkady was having trouble squaring the living breathing fact of Gavi with the traitor Osnat had described to him. Indeed, Osnat herself seemed to be having a hard time making the edges match up.

Meanwhile, Gavi seemed naturally to gravitate toward Arkady, until what had begun as a group venture turned into a private tour of Gavi’s little kingdom. Arkady knew that the seeming casualness must be carefully scripted, but it didn’t lessen the flush of pleasure he felt when Gavi bowed his head to listen and turned those dark, burningly serious eyes on him.

It was that intensity rather than any physical resemblance that reminded Arkady so strongly of Arkasha. Gavi was far more controlled and subtle than Arkasha. The fires were banked and smoldering and masked behind a façade of self-deprecating humor. But looking at him, Arkady still had the same feeling he’d had about Arkasha: that he seemed more alive and less defended than it was safe for a person to be.

The goats had names. Gavi introduced them formally, one by one, as if he were presenting Arkady for the approval of a staid group of society matrons. Arkady had never seen a mammal close up other than humans, dogs, and cats. He looked at the geometric perfection of their hooves, met the measuring gaze of their golden eyes. “They’re perfect,” he said. “Just like ants are perfect.”

“Well, I think they are.” Gavi bent to scratch one of the more assertive goats behind her tricolor ears. “There used to be wild goats here, can you imagine? And ghizlaan. What’s ghazaalin English? Oh. Well, there you go. I guess they really did come from here.” He sounded wistful. “I would have liked to meet a gazelle.”

“Maybe we’re still learning to live without all the other species we used to share Earth with,” Arkady said. He paused, struggling to find words for an idea that, if not new, was at least new to him. “I some-times think that we—the Syndicates, I mean—evolved because humans have made themselves so alone in the universe that the only way to belong again was to belong to each other.”