Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

PRINCIPLES OF THE SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEM

I am prepared to assert that there is not a single mental faculty ascribed to Man that is good in the absolute sense. If any particular faculty is usually good, this is solely because our terrestrial environment is so lacking in variety that its usual form makes that faculty usually good. But change the environment, go to really different conditions, and possession of that faculty may be harmful. And “bad,” by implication, is the brain organization that produces it.

—W. ROSS ASHBY (1962)

“So you mutinied,” li said when Gavi had gathered them all together and made Arkady repeat his story from beginning to end.

“You couldn’t even call it a mutiny, we were so incompetent. We never stood a chance against the tacticals. It’s a miracle we got out of there alive.”

“Oh,” Li murmured, “I doubt miracles had much to do with it.”

Osnat was staring at him, her expression intense but unreadable. Gavi, when Arkady dared to glance at him, was tracing the wood grain of the table with one long finger, up and down, over and over. The AI, in contrast, seemed so absent that if Arkady hadn’t known better he would have thought he was off-shunt.

Osnat was the first to break the silence. “What happened to Bella?” she asked.

Li stirred impatiently. “The more important question is why Arkady’s telling us this? What’s in it for him?”

“He’s doing it for Arkasha,” Gavi said. “Isn’t that clear enough?”

“Not to me it isn’t. It doesn’t explain why Arkady agreed to come here, why he lied about being sent by Korchow, and then changed his mind about lying. How do we know he isn’t still following Korchow’s orders, just like the two of them planned it back on Gilead?”

“We don’t actually need to know those things,” Gavi pointed out. “All we need to know now is what to do next. And it’s quite possible our next move will be the same regardless of whether or not you believe Arkady. In which case…”

“…in which case we’re wasting our breath arguing about it.”

“That’s how it seems to me.” Gavi’s dark eyes flickered toward Arkady for an instant, then turned away without quite making contact. “For now, at least. By the way, would anyone else find a flowchart useful?”

Cohen leapt to his feet and snatched at one of the scattered pencils. “I’ll be Vanna.”

“What?” Osnat and Gavi asked at the same moment.

“Never mind,” he said, looking crestfallen. “Obsolete joke.”

Li, already working on her second cigarette, raised an eyebrow and blew a shivering smoke ring.

“Rule three,” Gavi said. “When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been. Let me take a first stab at it, just to get my thoughts straight. Then we’ll see if the rest of you think I’m whistling into the wind. I think we’re all rude enough that we don’t have to worry about succumbing to groupthink just because we show each other our homework.

“So. We start with Novalis.” He drew a circle near the top of the page and wrote the word Novalisin it. “From Novalis news of the virus—one that most of Arkady’s crewmates assumed, rightly or wrongly, was a UN-designed genetic weapon—went to Korchow. And then it went to GolaniTech. And that’s when things get interesting…”

Quickly, he drew circles labeled KORCHOWand GOLANITECH.Then three sharp lines dropping down from GolaniTech to the names of the various bidders. Then, off by itself in the left margin, he drew a circle with the name DIDIin it.

“Didi has a copious flow of information from ALEF, at least judging from what Cohen’s told me.” He drew an arrow from ALEFto DIDI,wrote the name Cohenabove it—and below it, in parentheses, Li.

“Do you mind being parenthetical?” Gavi asked jokingly.

“I’m used to it,” Li said. But she didn’t look all that happy about it to Arkady.

“But Didi would never be content with only one source of information,” Gavi continued, his voice taking on a slight but unmistakable edge. “How could he cross-check it? How could he feed people his nasty little barium meals and test their loyalty and accuracy and reliability? How could he keep his beady little eyes on them? So I think we can safely assume that Didi has also established a source in GolaniTech itself. Knowing Didi, probably multiple sources.”

He drew three sideways arrows running from GOLANITECHto DIDI.Beside the uppermost arrow he wrote the name Ash? and underlined the question mark with a decisive little stroke of the pen. Beside the second arrow, he wrote Moshe? And beside the third arrow, after glancing pointedly at Osnat, he wrote Osnat? Osnat pursed her lips and said nothing.

“And that takes care of Didi for now,” Gavi concluded. “Except of course for the single most important piece of information Arkady brought with him when he defected: Absalom. That name is a love letter straight from Korchow to Didi, with GolaniTech playing postman. And not only to Didi.” He bit his lip for a moment, then drew a new circle, connected it to Korchow’s circle by its own arrow, and labeled it SAFIK. “The only question is whether Safik ever got the message.”

Cohen cleared his throat. “Uh, I might be able to shed some light on that.”

Gavi gave him a cool look.

“Sorry. It just hadn’t come up yet. It, ah, seems that one of Yassin’s bodyguards might possibly be Safik’s son.”

“The boy with the green eyes,” Osnat murmured. “I wondered about him.”

“Yusuf?” Arkady asked incredulously. “But he told me he came from Absalom!”

Gavi made short work of that. Within a few minutes, Arkady had told them everything he remembered or suspected about his brief conversation with Yusuf.

“Sounds like Absalom ought to have his own circle,” Osnat said bitterly when Arkady had fallen silent.

“I haven’t forgotten him,” Gavi said in a subdued voice. “My only question is whether it’s more useful to think of Absalom as a circle—a player, in other words—or as a connection between two players?”

He tapped the pencil on the table for a moment, biting his upper lip and staring at the page. Then he drew a line across the bottom of the page, connecting DIDIand SAFIK,and labeled it Absalom.

For the next hour the four other people in the room with Arkady talked over his head, drew lines between the various circles, drew more circles and more lines, erased everything and started over again, and generally ignored him. He had the feeling that he was an outsider in a conversation between people who shared a technical vocabulary and a way of looking at the world that had nothing to do with his own. Indeed as the chart took shape in front of him, he began to feel that the others—Cohen and Gavi especially—saw the world less as a real space inhabited by physical bodies than as a vast weaving of information streams.

“So where does this leave us?” Gavi asked at last, stepping back from the chart.

“Missing a circle if you ask me,” Li said. “The Interfaithers have their fingers in everything in this country. They can’t possibly not be involved in this.”

“Fair enough,” Gavi said. He drew a circle in the upper right-hand margin and wrote IFers?in it.

Gavi stepped back again, and they all contemplated the flowchart.

“I know Korchow,” Cohen said at last. The AI spoke slowly, as if he were voicing something that he was still in the process of thinking through for himself. But how could that be when he must think several million times faster than any human could? “He thinks through every angle, but he’d never make the amateur’s mistake of overchoreographing an operation. I’d say he even enjoys leaving things to chance a bit. He wouldn’t have sent Arkady without considering that Arkady might betray him. And Arkady wouldn’t be here if Korchow didn’t think he could turn even a betrayal to his advantage. Besides…” Cohen chewed absently at the pencil in his hand, then grimaced and wiped his mouth. “How do the Americans fit in? How did Turner find out about the auction in the first place?”

“For what it’s worth,” Arkady offered, “Korchow was very unhappy about that.”

“Or he wanted you to think he was.”

A wing of Foreign Legion chasseursswept overhead with a shuddering sonic boom. Arkady jumped at the noise. “But surely the Americans wouldn’t ally themselves with the Syndicates? Don’t they understand that the whole pointof the Syndicate society is to…well…”

Cohen cleared his throat delicately. “To create environmental conditions conducive to evolving beyond the inherently flawed genetic template that gave rise to the historical aberration of corporate oligarchy?”

Arkady grinned at the AI. “Yeah. What you said. Seriously, though…the Americans would have to be crazy to think that Korchow or anyone else in the Syndicates had their long-term interests at heart.”

“They’ve been known to take the short-term view before,” Li drawled. “After all, what can you expect from a country whose national anthem ends with the words Gentlemen, start your engines?”

“Enough with the America bashing!” Cohen burst out. “There has to be some redeeming feature to any country that can produce Papaya King and my second wife. And besides, America invented the only major world religion that hasn’t started a war yet.”

They all turned to stare incredulously at the AI.

The AI sketched a sinuous parody of the standard Israeli shrug. “Baseball.”

“Oh come on,” Arkady said, true to the sport that defined the Syndicates as much as baseball defined the Latino-dominated UN worlds.

“Soccer’s never started a war.”

“El Salvador-Honduras, 1969.”

“You’re joking.”

A look of wounded innocence infused the shunt’s smooth-skinned face. “Would I lie to you?”

“Are you people wasting my time on purpose,” Osnat interrupted, “or does it just come naturally?”

“Right,” Gavi said, sounding appropriately chastened. “Turner’s the wild card. It doesn’t seem to me we can do much about him except hand him enough rope to hang himself and wait for him to show his hand. And in the meantime perhaps we’d do better to focus on Arkasha.”

Arkady’s heart began to pound in his chest. Let them focus on Arkasha. Let them find him, speak to him, save him. That was all he wanted. And he was long past caring if what he wanted was just part of some larger plan of Korchow’s.

“But how do we ask to talk to Arkasha without showing our hand?” Osnat asked.

“Easy,” Gavi answered. “We get Safik to ask.”

A slow smile spread across Cohen’s face. “Help him crash the party, you mean? And how do we send him his invitation?”

“You still friends with Eric Fortuné?”

“I should look him up while I’m in town, shouldn’t I? It’s the friendly thing to do.”

Gavi turned back to Arkady. “You understand that in the meantime you and Osnat will have to go back to GolaniTech and act as if nothing’s changed.”

Arkady glanced at Osnat, but she was picking intently at a loose thread in the knee of her fatigues.

“Isn’t there any other way?” he asked forlornly. He hadn’t realized until that moment just how desperately he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to go back into Moshe’s ungentle custody. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’d been nursing the vague but fervent wish that once he’d told his story, Gavi—or Cohen or Li or anyone, for God’s sake—would shake his hand, tell him he’d done his part, and bundle him off to watch the rest of this deadly game from the sidelines.

“Not if you want to save Arkasha.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Arkady said. “I’ll have to do it.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Osnat sat picking at her torn fatigues, her head bent so low that her fair hair hid her face from them. “I don’t like it,” she muttered finally.

“Neither do I,” Gavi said, “but I don’t have a better idea.”

“Me neither,” Osnat admitted.

The two Israelis locked eyes for a moment. Gavi looked away first.

Without anyone formally drawing things to a close, the group began to break up into its component parts. Osnat stood up and stretched until her spine cracked audibly. Li began playing with Dibbuk. Gavi collared Cohen and began talking computer programming.

Arkady bent over the flowchart again, peering at the jumble of names and circles and trying to discern the ominous connection that Gavi had suggested to the others. Once again he had the feeling that the chart revealed a turn of mind utterly alien to him. And yet it reminded him of something…

He searched his memories of the Novalis mission, of the uneventful missions before Novalis, of his long-ago evolutionary ecophysics courses…and eventually landed on his vague memories of molecular biology and epidemiology.

Suddenly he found that the room had become too hot and too small for comfort. He knew exactly where he’d seen such a chart before.

On Novalis. In Aurelia’s bold scrawl.

Gavi’s flowchart wasn’t a simple picture of the flow of information, Arkady realized. Rather, it depicted the flow of a very special kind of information: a disease spreading through a susceptible population. It would already be spreading quickly indeed if the miniature epidemic on Novalis were any indication.

And this disease had only one possible vector…

Him.

NATIONAL ROBOTS

DOMIN: Henceforward, we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robotsanymore. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state. And do you know what those factories will make?

HELENA: No, what?

DOMIN: Nationalrobots!…Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other. They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of mutual misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe!

—KAREL CAPEK (1923)

“Every war has its hotel,” Cohen opined. “Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with. Some hotels, however, have more than their fair share of wars. Would it interest you to know that you’re sitting in the single most frequently bombed hotel lobby in human history?”

“Great,” Li said wanly.

Cohen sank into the sofa cushions, crossed his legs, and tilted one calf-skin-shod foot this way and that, as if reassuring himself that his shoes really were as nice as they ought to be.

“Are those new shoes?” Li asked.

He smiled sleekly.

The lobby was starting to fill up with the usual mix of tourists, pilgrims, and locals. A band of young transvestites bubbled through the revolving door and boarded the elevator in a clatter of heels and a cloud of perfume. A gaggle of Interfaithers arrived at the elevator at the same moment as the youngsters, saw what they were, and huddled together like hypochondriacs stranded in a leper colony. Li preferred to imagine that at least some of their shocked middle-aged stares were really gazes of covert longing…but then she’d always liked to think the best of people. “Am I crazy,” she asked Cohen, “or was one of those kids wearing a yarmulke?”

“Yeshiva boy chic. Totally passé. They’re probably just in for the night from the Tel Aviv suburbs.”

“Yeshiva boy chic, huh? They must just love you down here.”

“Ahem. Well, not everyone relishes the idea of a Lion of Judah floundering in the fleshpots. I try to be relatively discreet about it.”

Li raised her eyebrows in a silent comment on the notion of Cohen being “relatively discreet” about anything.

“It’s all legal,” he pointed out. “Despite the best attempts of the ultraorthodox and the Interfaithers. In fact, Israel has the ideal combination of prudishness and libertinism. You can do anything you want, get whatever you want, sleep with whomever you want. But since there’s always someone around to tell you you’re going to rot in hell for it, it all still has the tang of the forbidden. Everything’s taboo…but none of it’s taboo enough to land you in jail. What could be better?”

“Speaking of which,” she observed casually, “Gavi’s quite the package. You two never…”

“Never.” Cohen sounded decisive, even fervent about it. “Never even thought about it. First of all, he’s such a strange combination of prudish and romantic that I’m not at all sure he’s slept with anyone since Leila died. And second…Gavi needs.I’d get eaten up alive if I ever let myself start trying to give him what he needs.”

“So instead you find yourself a cold, cynical, self-sufficient bitch like me?”

Cohen made an ostentatious show of pondering the question. He was doing his blonde bombshell act tonight. The fact that he could pull it off in Roland’s body was a display of pure programmer’s bravura. Li had spent just enough time around Roland while Cohen wasn’t shunting through him to know that he was boringly straight in every sense of the word. But somehow Cohen managed to pull shades of Marilyn Monroe from the kid. “Well,” he purred eventually, “at least you’re not a prude.”

She leaned into him in what even she knew was an unusual display of public affection, and pressed her lips to Roland’s smooth young forehead just below the hairline. Cohen returned her kisses, moving under her hands like water, making her forget the stranger’s body that came between them.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Is that why you went sneaking off to see Ash last night?”

She jerked back to stare at him from the farthest end of the sofa. He was sitting, hands folded in his lap, in the state of unnatural stillness that she’d learned to recognize as a sign of the most violent emotion.

Her mind raced. How did he know? Had router/decomposer told him? Or was this just one more sign that his access to her internals went deeper than he was willing to admit to her?

She looked at him, forcing her pulse to stay even, her eyes to remain level. “So you’ve been spying on me again.”

“Apparently with good reason.”

“Cohen—”

“Don’t make excuses. It’s beneath you.”

The silence was suffocating, both instream and off. Cohen bent his head to light a cigarette, and Roland’s eyes vanished beneath the thick golden fall of forelock. Roland’s eyes closed as he took a first long drag on the cigarette. Li sat there feeling like a mouse caught between a cat’s paws. Finally the cigarette dropped and Roland’s eyes opened. His face was so blandly expressionless that for a surreal moment she wondered whether Cohen was still on shunt.

“I can live with an innocent flirtation,” he said in a voice that made her soul squirm. “Or even a not-so-innocent flirtation. But I willnot be lied to.”

His words hung in the air like one of the bright phosphorus flares that blossomed over the Green Line at night. Ash. Christ, it had never even occurred to her. Did Cohen really think she’d cheat on him for a pair of long legs and a pretty face? The idea was repellent. Infuriating. Humiliating.

But warring with her urge to set Cohen straight was the realization that he’d just handed her an unbreakable, uncheckable alibi for her meetings with Nguyen’s contact.

She’d be a fool not to take it.

Wouldn’t she?

“I was going to tell you,” she said, feeling her heart wrench with the lie.

“Of course you were.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” His voice was level and pleasant…but when she probed the intraface, none of his firewalls would so much as shake hands with her internals.

“Have a drink,” he told her, not even acknowledging the aborted contact.

Their eyes met. Li frowned. Cohen smiled.

Except it wasn’t his real smile. It was the bland, pleasant, impersonal smile that meant he’d decided to write someone off so completely he wasn’t even going to bother mentioning it to them. She’d seen that smile only twice before, and neither occasion had made for good memories. She’d never imagined she’d be on the receiving end of it.

“Right.” She picked up the cocktail menu and pretended to look at it. “What’s the plan then?”

“There is no plan. We’ll talk to Fortuné, then we’ll see.”

“And where do we go to talk to the man?”

“The International Zone. Fortuné’s got a favorite bar there, a little place called the Sauve Qui Peut.”

The Sauve Qui Peut was a Legionnaire’s bar: cheap beer, an abiding odor of steak and frites,and Brel and Bénabar chuttering out of speakers that had been blown long before the oldest of the place’s regulars had rotated into the Zone.

The bar back boasted a cluttered shrine of Legion paraphernalia. Flat photos and holos of soldiers fording swollen tropical rivers or jumping out of ancient airplanes, or marching with the medieval battle-axes and butcher’s aprons that the Fathers of the Legion (a few of them Mothers, at least technically) wore on parade days. The shrine’s centerpiece was an antique hand-colored photograph of Colonel Danjou’s famous hand, so immense that the screws where the metal hinges met the wooden fingers were visible at twenty paces. The place was packed but the floor around the back table was empty. And from the minute they walked in Cohen could see Fortuné waiting for them in the shadows.

“Bienvenues en l’Enfer,”Fortuné said, rising behind his table to greet them. His smile was friendly, but the eyes behind the smile were as sharp and precise as the creases in his dress shirt.

If the Sauve Qui Peut was the prototypical Legionnaire’s bar, then Colonel Jean-Louis Fortuné was the perfect Legionnaire. Five foot nine in thick socks and spit-shined jump boots, and not carrying an ounce of fat anywhere on his wiry frame except in the coffee-colored baby face that was the legacy of his Haitian ancestry. A fifth-degree judo black belt. An inveterate but eminently discreet womanizer…or so it was whispered around barracks. His hairline had already been receding when Cohen first met him, and now he was going bald in the no-nonsense manner that was synonymous, to French eyes, with being a man of intelligence, education, and virility.

Li took the hand Fortuné offered and delivered what Cohen suspected was her most bone-crushing handshake. Fortuné bore up well under it; but then he too was wired to the gills, though his dark skin hid the delicate subdermal filigree of ceramsteel filaments.

“I’m a great admirer,” Fortuné said when he’d retrieved his hand from Li’s grasp. “It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome the hero of Gilead.”

“Some people would say the Butcher of Gilead.”

Cohen had never been quite sure how closely Li followed the press coverage of her court-martial. Now he guessed he knew.

“Some people would not be me,” Fortuné said placidly. “They nailed you up for sins above your pay grade. That was the opinion on the chow line when it happened. It still is.”

Li blinked at that, but her internals were so tightly locked down that Cohen couldn’t get any sense of what was going on behind her eyes.

They sat down. Fortuné was drinking a Lorelei, and a wave to the bartender brought two more bottles over at double time. Cohen sipped the crisp, sweet Alsatian beer and smiled at the taste of Hyacinthe’s centuries-gone youth.

Li and Fortuné started talking war. Tours of duty. Planetside rotations. Combat drops. Cohen, who had never been a soldier nor wanted to be, let the talk flow past him like current lifting a swimmer. He came back to Earth with a thump when he heard the word employmentroll off Fortuné’s lips.

“I’m not looking to get hitched again,” Li said into the silence that followed. “And even if I were, what’s it to you? Last time I checked you work for UNSec, same as I did.”

“Only in the most limited sense, I assure you.”

“Then who do you answer to?”

Fortuné smiled urbanely. “La France, ma chère,defender of the civilized world.”

“Is that like the free world but with better food?”

Fortuné laughed, and Li unleashed her most dazzling smile on him. She had charisma in spades when she felt like putting out the effort. And for reasons that Cohen didn’t want to think too closely about, she’d decided it was worth her while to charm Fortuné.

“She’s quite a woman,” Fortuné said when she got up to hunt down fresh drinks.

Cohen turned on him. “Don’t even think about it.”

“My friend, I’m neither wealthy enough nor handsome enough to compete with you. I was speaking merely in a professional sense.”

“Well, don’t think about that either.”

Fortuné’s eyes flicked to the front of the bar, where Li was standing on her toes in order to give an attentive reading to the ornate copperplate inscription below the photograph of Colonel Danjou’s hand. Cohen saw her as Fortuné must see her: taut, wired, preternaturally alert, right hand poised habitually over the pistol that she’d had to leave with the hard-faced ex-noncom at what had to be the most explosive coat check in the Holy Land. She ought to be commanding a division,he thought guiltily, not baby-sitting me.He squashed the thought.

“She’s retired,” he told Fortuné.

“Pity.” Fortuné eyed Li’s ramrod-straight back. “Still, if she ever changes her mind…”

“She won’t.”

The buzzing speakers broke out into a rendition of a song that had become the de facto Legionnaire’s anthem in the Evacuation era, and a few of the drunker soldiers around the bar sang along to the famous chorus:

Je voulais quitter la terre, mais maintenent je la regrette J’ai plus le mal du pays, j’ai le mal de la planète

Suddenly the song struck Cohen as sadly telling. A crowd of colonials singing about being homesick for a planet they’d never called home in the language of a country that only existed as a romantic idea and a Ring-side embassy.

“This is all very enjoyable,” Fortuné said, “and I certainly hope you’ll both stay to dinner—not here, somewhere with good food. I know a little one star in Haifa where the cook is pretty and the foie grasis impeccable. But in the meantime I think there was another reason besides my charm and good looks for your visit? What can I do for you?”

Cohen explained briefly the message they needed passed across the Line.

Fortuné stared intently at him, nodding and frowning and muttering oui, oui, oui, oui,as the French often do to indicate agreement…or at least attention.

In this case, it turned out to be only attention. When Cohen was done, Fortuné leaned back in his chair, his dark skin blending with the shadows so that all Cohen could see of him was the blazing white pleats of his summer uniform and the battered stainless-steel wristband of his much-abused Rolex.

“Et pourquoi tu veux te compliquer la vie?”he asked. Why do you want to complicate your life?

Why indeed?

“For a friend.”

“I hope he is a good one.”

“The best.”

Or the worst.

Because the truth was that Cohen still hadn’t decided whether he was doing this for Didi or for Gavi. And he was betting his peace of mind on a single article of faith: that when all the twists and turns were over the two of them would turn out to be on the same side.

The first sign Arkady saw that Cohen’s message had gotten through was a marked uptick in Moshe’s already-healthy sense of paranoia.

Moshe interpreted the Palestinian request for a second session with Arkady as a symptom of some grave security breach. Osnat began to look increasingly harried. Ash Sofaer flew out from Tel Aviv, apparently for the sole purpose of staring coolly at Arkady, asking a few unconnected questions, whispering into Moshe’s ear for a few minutes, and flying back home again.

“You’re hearing grass grow,” Osnat told Moshe finally.

“If I’m hearing grass grow,” Moshe said, “maybe it’s because grass is growing.”

Meanwhile, Arkady asked himself constantly what he could do, what he shoulddo, about the revelation he’d experienced in the face of Gavi’s flowcharts.

He was by now absolutely certain that his first intuition had been right. Korchow’s “genetic weapon” had merely been the ball Korchow wanted the bidders to keep their eyes on. The real virus was already infecting the buyers every time they touched Arkady or talked to him or stood in the same room with him.

Arkady had seen the signs himself. He’d just read them wrong. For Arkady, used to the strong medicine of Syndicate immunoresponses, the slower maturing, more diffuse human immune response had looked like minor allergies, nothing more. Either that or the humans hadn’t really started getting sick yet.

His first reaction to the way Korchow had used him was outrage. He had never consented to be used as some sort of interstellar Typhoid Mary. And it was all very well to talk about throwing Earth into chaos in order to save humans in the long run…but Arkady had gotten to know some of those humans. And he didn’t relish the idea of handing out smallpox blankets to people like Osnat and Gavi.

Gradually, however, his outrage was eclipsed by fear. A second realization had come close on the heels of the first one and shaken him to his core like the aftershock of an earthquake flattens buildings still precariously standing after the first assault. He’d spent four months on Gilead while Korchow and his team interrogated him. During those months, Korchow and others had sat across tables from him, shared meals with him, passed hour after hour with him. Still others had prepared his food, washed his clothes and bedclothes, cleaned up the intimate entropy of daily life. There was no hope of maintaining anything like effective quarantine in the constantly recirculating air of an orbital station, so he could only assume the worst.

And if the worst had happened, then Korchow hadn’t launched Arkady toward Earth in an offensive attack. He’d sent him as a desperate last-ditch effort to buy the Syndicates some time and better their suddenly radically diminished chances of survival.

Arkady was still trying to decide how he felt about this—and what he should do about it—when the two humorless young men who’d flown in from Tel Aviv with Ash smuggled him across the Line and handed him over to the green-eyed boy, Yusuf.

There was a room.

There was a desk.

On the desk there was a single blank sheet of paper.

Behind the desk there was a man.

The man looked kind, slightly harried, moderately intelligent, and completely unremarkable. Average height, average coloring, average build running to sedentary flab in middle age. The bland gray buttoned-down look of conformity that Arkady was already learning to associate with midlevel bureaucrats and low-level career military officers.

A timeserver, Arkady decided. Short on initiative, originality, and imagination. Good at pushing the paperwork through on time. The kind of man who made it hard to believe humans had ever had the brains to bootstrap themselves out of the gravity well.