Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

‹So what should I know about her that you’re actually willing to tell me?› Li asked.

‹Let’s just say that Tel Aviv might not be the most tactful topic to raise.›

The woman stopped in front of their table, crossed her arms over her chest, and threw her head a little back and sideways in order to get her good eye on them. “Oh, so it wasyou back in the airport. You could have said so. Or don’t you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you, Osnat. I just didn’t know you’d gone private sector.”

“Lot of people’s careers went down in flames after Tel Aviv. Can’t complain. Could have been worse. Could have ended up with a bullet in the head.”

The fury radiated off her like a bomb blast. Well, Cohen couldn’t blame her. They’d known each other very slightly. As far as she was concerned he was Gavi’s friend, end of story. And Osnat had special, complicated, and intensely personal reasons for hating Gavi.

“I heard Gur died,” Cohen said. “I’m sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry.”

She pulled the empty chair free of the table and sat down in it. No one spoke for a long and extremely unpleasant moment.

“When do we get to talk to the sellers?” Li asked finally.

Osnat ignored her. “You were supposed to come alone,” she told Cohen flatly, “not bring a golem of your own.”

Li made her move so fast that even Cohen missed it. One moment she was on the far side of the table from Osnat. A blink later, she had her hand around the other woman’s wrist and was squeezing hard enough to drain the blood from her face.

“Being a golem has its uses,” she said in a companionable tone. “Also, the only way to ALEF is through Cohen, and the only way to Cohen is through me. So the next time I talk to you, you’ll look me in the eye when you answer.”

Osnat gave her a pale hostile stare. Then she did what every well-trained infantryman does when pinned down by enemy fire; she called for air support. And she called for it, of all places, from the next table.

Cohen followed Osnat’s glance just in time to see the Ha’aretzreader put down his newspaper and smile politely at them.

“May I join you?” he asked. He folded his newspaper into precise halves, picked up his drink, and walked over to sit next to Osnat. “Moshe Feldman,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you. Can I buy you coffee?”

A waiter they hadn’t seen before appeared before Moshe had even raised his hand, carrying a filigreed coffee service. He deposited it on their table, poured out two eggshell-sized cups of cardamom-flavored coffee, produced a bottle of mineral water and two glasses from his apron pocket, and left.

Cohen reached for the water.

Moshe reached for Cohen’s hand.

Li reached for her gun.

“Please,” Moshe said. “Drink your coffee first.”

Li picked hers up, drank, grimaced.

‹Are you all right?› Cohen asked anxiously.

‹God, that’s shitty coffee!›

‹Is that a yes or a no, Catherine?›

‹Yeah, I’m fine.› But as she set the cup back in the saucer he felt a chilly little quiver of pain and shock run across the intraface.

All her systems, biological and synthetic, natural and artificial, kicked into overdrive to identify the attack and tally up the damage. Cohen could feel the churning, chaotic, complicated process unfolding as clearly as if he were inside her skin and not sitting in his own chair with two feet of air between them. Eventually she identified the cold prick of pain as the point of a needle sliding into the web of skin between thumb and forefinger. ‹It’s fine,› she told him a moment later. ‹DNA sampler.›

‹He’s a suspicious bastard, isn’t he?›

‹Unless he has some reason to mistrust us that you’re not telling me about?›

As he picked up his own cup and felt the needle slide into Roland’s flesh, Cohen decided that the implied question in that statement was one he’d rather leave unanswered.

It took Moshe an hour to do the genetic work.

“Well,” Li asked when he finally returned, “are we who we say we are?”

“Apparently. Even Cohen’s…er…”

“Face,” Cohen prompted.

“Right. Even the, er, face is who you told us he would be.” Moshe paused uncomfortably. “How do you acquire your bodies, by the way? Do you grow them?”

“Good heavens, no! We’re not the Syndicates. He’s a real person. Parents, passport, bank accounts. Bank accounts that are substantially better funded since he started working for me.”

Cohen crossed his arms, realized the gesture looked defensive, and asked himself whether deep down inside he might not have something to feel just the tiniest bit guilty about. Hadn’t Roland been meaning to put himself through medical school back when they first met? When was the last time he’d heard anything about that? Was Li right, God forbid? Did he just sort of …swallowpeople? He pushed away that unwelcome thought, telling himself that he’d ask Roland how med school was going next time they saw each other.

“And how much does it cost to…what’s the right word…rent someone?”

Cohen grinned. “If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

“And it’s legal, is it?”

“Well, mostly.” Cohen felt Li’s smirk tickling at the back of his mind. “As my associate has just pointed out, it’s easier to bend the rules when you’re filthy stinking rich.”

“Mmm.” Moshe’s expression sharpened. “Speaking of bending the rules, I understood that ALEF would send one representative to the bidding. And that it would be someone we could vet beforehand to make sure they didn’t pose any security risks.” His eyes touched briefly on Li, then skittered away again. “But now here you are with one of the, uh, least vettable individuals in UN space.”

‹He could talk to me about it,› Li said. ‹What the hell’s wrong with these people, anyway?›

“You could talk to her about it,” Cohen repeated, mimicking her annoyed tone with such painstaking precision that only someone who hadn’t grown up surrounded by the twenty-four-hour hum of spinstream traffic could have mistaken the words for Cohen’s.

Moshe turned to face Li. “I have no problem with talking to you. Or with your genetics. Or your enhancements. Or your status under UN law, Jewish law, or any other law. What I do have a problem with is trusting a former Peacekeeper with information that we most assuredly do not wish to share with the Controlled Technology Committee.”

“The operative word there is former,”Li said. “I lost my commission three years ago.”

Moshe’s eyes flicked to Li’s throat and wrists. “But you didn’t lose your wetware. What assurance can you give me that everything you see and hear isn’t feeding straight into UNSec data banks?”

A slow smile spread across Li’s face. “I’m not a very subtle person, Moshe. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.”

“Just that I wonder why they didn’t reclaim your wetware. And how it could have taken your superiors eleven years to get around to prosecuting you for shooting those prisoners.”

“I bought my wetware by signing my pension back to the government. Any soldier’s entitled to do that, and most do, if only to avoid the surgery. As for the rest…you’re spinning fairy tales. The court-martial proceedings were public. Man on the street knows as much about it as I do. Just look at the spins.”

“Spins can be faked. Anyone who’s worked on EMET knows that.”

Li stared across the table, her face calm, her eyes level. This must be costing her, Cohen realized, but he had no idea how much. Three years after the court-martial they’d still never talked about it. And even his most cautious attempts to cross that particular no-man’s-land had been violently rebuffed.

“Unfortunately,” Li said when he’d just about decided she wasn’t going to say anything, “those particular spins don’t seem to have been faked.”

She and Moshe stared at each other, locked in one of those testosterone-fueled battles of will that Cohen, three centuries removed from his only unmediated human memories, was beginning to find increasingly incomprehensible.

Finally Moshe leaned forward in his chair, the flimsy metal creaking under his weight. “The thing is, Major, I just don’t trust you.”

“You want ALEF as a bidder, you’ll have to trust me.”

Moshe pursed his lips.

“Do you need to talk to someone?” Li asked. The question came off of a collective work space shared by Li, Cohen, router/decomposer, and a gaggle of chattering semisentients, but it seemed politic to let Li ask it. Moshe had clearly slipped into the trap of treating the two bodies in front of him as separate entities…and you never knew when that sort of misconception might work to your advantage.

“No. I have discretion.” He hesitated for another instant. “All right then. We go forward. For now. But we may require additional bona fidesafter the next meeting.”

“You may not be the only one,” Li retorted. “We still have nothing more than your word that the seller’s genuine. What about his bona fides?”

“That’s between you and the seller.” Moshe got to his feet, left the paper on the table, and dropped a few shekels on top of it. “I just open the cage and crack the whip. Whether the bear decides to dance for you or eat you is your problem.”

SEX, WATER, GOD

The individual’s enhancement of his or her reproductive chances never happens in a void but only in relation to the reproductive chances of other members of the species. Just as corporations seek to externalize their costs of production, individuals inevitably seek to externalize their costs of reproduction, enhancing the value of their own genetic property by reducing the value of their neighbors’ genetic property. When twentieth-century existentialists sipped coffee in Parisian cafés, or twenty-first-century shoppers flocked to Wal-Mart for cheap consumer goods, they were both participants in a global economy whose ultimate evolutionary effect was to shift the means of reproduction (high protein diets, high standards of living, paid child care, etc.) to the Consuming Nations, while shifting the limiting factors on reproduction (war, poverty, pollution, etc.) to Producing Nations…

Viewed in this light, Earth’s ecological collapse can be seen as the logical, even inevitable conclusion of four millennia of human evolution. Earth died not because humans strayed from the path of “nature” or “instinct,” but because individual humans obeyed their natural instincts far too well for their own collective good…

—INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOBIOLOGY(APPROVED FOR THE SIXTH-YEAR CURRICULUM BY KNOWLESSYNDICATE STEERING COMMITTEE, YEAR 11, ORBIT 227)

They held the first bidding session on the dangerous but neutral ground of the International Zone.

Arkady and Osnat crossed through the Damascus Gate checkpoint at just past ten in the morning, elbow to armpit with a sweating crowd of religious pilgrims, under the hard watchful eyes of the Legionnaires. By the time they cleared the checkpoint and plunged into the Old City, Arkady had already realized that this was a different city from the one they’d walked through before reaching the great gate. Where the lines at the checkpoint had been dominated by pilgrims and commuters, the actual streets of the Old City were dominated—at least to Arkady’s Syndicate-bred eyes—by beggars. It took him a while to understand that they actually were beggars. They didn’t ask for money. They just sat slumped along the stone walls lining the narrow streets, looking like they’d been there so long they’d given up even hoping for money. Arkady’s instinctive response was impatience. Why didn’t they just go to collective supply, take out what they needed, and get on with life? But of course there was no collective supply here. And when he looked more closely at the beggars he saw that many of them were crippled or deformed or obviously crazy.

“It’s a euth ward,” he said wonderingly.

“They try to chase them away,” Osnat said with a fatalistic shrug, “but there are only so many cops around.”

“But there must be some kind of renormaliza—er, rehabilitation program.”

She gave him an incredulous look out of the corners of her eyes. “If someone in the Syndicates has figured out how to rehabilitate people from being poor, they ought to apply for the freaking Nobel Peace Prize.”

Arkady stared at the crumpled forms, trying to take the measure of the people inside the rags, but none of them would meet his eyes. And they weren’t the only ones.

There was a special quality to the gaze in the International Zone, a quality of nonlooking, nonseeing. The Legionnaires wore their mirrored sunglasses like body armor and did their level best to pretend not to speak any language but French when anyone had the effrontery to ask them questions. Hasidim hurried along under their dreary hats, assiduously shielding their eyes from any contact with the godless present. NorAmArc Christians lumbered through the stations of the cross, eyes glued to their spincorders, doing their best to turn a real living city into a theme park. Muslims glared into the near distance as if they thought some Sufist act of will could make the hordes of unbelievers vanish from their holy sites. Even the crazy people—and there seemed to be a great many of them—shouted through you instead of at you. The only people who actually looked at anyone were the Interfaithers…and the way they looked at you made you realize that being ignored was far from the worst thing that could happen to you.

“Why are there so many Interfaithers?” Arkady asked.

“Open your eyes. Whyis right in front of your nose.”

He looked. He saw bored Legionnaires, sullen locals, dusty walls crumbling in the ozone haze of a warm fall afternoon, six thousand years of history surrounded by sandbags and reinforced concrete. “I don’t see it.”

“That’s ’cause you’re not pointing your nose the right way.”

He glanced at her in confusion, then followed her hiked thumb skyward and finally saw it.

The Ring. Strung out along the declination of the equatorial belt some 35,786 kilometers overhead, it was faintly visible today through one of those quirky contrapositions of star and satellite that physics teachers throughout UN and Syndicate space set their frustrated students to calculate. The Ring wasn’t an actual ring, of course; just the area of space that contained all of Earth’s stable geosynchronous orbits. But it had been packed so full of residential and manufacturing habitats and commsats and solar collectors and offshore tax shelters, that by now it was as visible and clearly defined as the rings of Saturn.

The Ring’s traffic control and dynamic stabilization requirements were so impossibly complex that they had been the primary driving force behind the evolution of Emergent AI over the course of the last three centuries. The Ring was also—because of the sheer volume of reflective metal whipping around up there—one of the thousands of complex mutually interacting causes of the artificial ice age. A little reduced insolation here; a little increased albedo there; a gentle nudge of the coupled water transport systems of ocean and atmosphere. Arkady, terraformer that he was, appreciated the subtlety of the system: controlling chaos by the flutter of the butterfly’s wing rather than the fall of the sledgehammer. And of course the Ring’s terraformers, prodded onward by the unmitigated disaster they’d inherited, had done what station designers on the thinly populated Syndicate planets had never had to think about doing: They had crafted an orbital Ring that was so perfectly integrated into the biome of the planet below it that Ring and planet could almost be thought of as a single organism.

Still…he didn’t think Osnat was suggesting that the ice age had caused the Interfaithers.

“We’re poor,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “And the Ring is rich. And we have to watch Ring-siders being rich every night on the evening spins. Knowing that we’ll never have what they have. Knowing that our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, won’t live nearly as long or as well as their children. Knowing that everything that counts in our lives is decided up there by people who think Earth is just a sponge they can squeeze the water out of. That kind of thing makes you hate, Arkady. And no one’s ever invented a better excuse for hate than God. The Americans figured that one out a few centuries ago, and now we’re all catching their new religion.”

“You speak as if the Interfaithers had taken control of America.”

“Not officially. Unofficially…well, just look at all those freaky Constitutional amendments they keep passing. And they haven’t had a president or even a member of Congress in living memory who wasn’t a member of the Interfaith.”

“But they can’t doanything, can they? They have no power. They’re not UN members. They have no modern technology…”

“They have oil. And they have an army. And they’re willing to burn both. That gives them power.”

“They’re not going to bid on the weapon, are they?”

“I’m sure they’d try to if they knew about it. And all they have to do to get a foot in the door is threaten to tattle to UNSec. That’s the game we’re all playing. We want your little bauble for ourselves, but if we can’t keep it to ourselves, then better our next-door neighbor should have it than the UN getting hold of it. After all, if the Palestinians or even the Americans get hold of a genetic weapon, they mightuse it, or they might just threaten to use it in order to get a bigger water allowance. But if the UN gets hold of it, you can bet your life they’ll use it sooner or later. They’re not afraid to fight dirty. Look what they did to ZhangSyndicate.” Arkady caught his breath at that name and had to force down a nauseating surge of panic. “In the end,” Osnat continued, either not noticing or misinterpreting his silence, “the only number the UN cares about is the one we all try not to talk about: Every person born on Earth represents an eleven-million-liter lifetime allowance of water that can’t go to the Ring. It’s all about water, Arkady. Everything on this planet comes down to sex and water.”

“And God,” he said, glancing at yet another passing Interfaither.

“Oh, you poor sap. Haven’t you figured it out yet? God’s just a way to pump up your ethnic group’s birth rate so you can demand a bigger share of the water.”

“You seem to have a lot of theories,” Arkady said politely. “Do you have an interest in sociobiology? Have you ever thought about studying it?”

She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she laughed. “Don’t tell me you had me pegged as the hooker with the heart of gold. Sorry to disappoint you. My brother’s a comp lit professor at Tel Aviv University. I’m practically considered a half-wit because I quit school after my master’s degree. In polysci. Which is the closest thing we have to what you call sociobiology in the Syndicates.”

“Then how…?”

“How did a nice girl like me go so terribly wrong? What, you thought only poor people joined the army? This is Israel. And I’m not an Enderbot. I’m a real soldier. Or haven’t you figured out the difference yet?”

The house hunched over Abulafia Street like one of the weathered old men who shuffled down the International Zone’s crooked streets and loitered in its shabby coffeehouses. All you could see of it from the street was a high windowless wall whose stone bones were covered with a tattered skin of plaster. The only opening in the wall was a monumental wooden door, its planks so broad and long that Arkady would have been sure they were composite if he hadn’t touched them with his own hands. In one corner of the door, so small it was almost lost in the shadow of the lintel, hung another smaller door. It opened to Osnat’s knock, and they stepped through it into a tall courtyard.

The courtyard had been built for a hotter climate. Its fountain was turned off for the winter already, its rusted pipes tilting forlornly over tiles streaked yellow with khamsindust. Even the roses reminded Arkady less of plants than of construction site scaffolding: two stories of stem and thorn and leaf thrown up against the sagging balconies just to point a few anemic blossoms at what little sun trickled over the encircling roof tiles.

It was a house out of time. The flow and chatter of the street faded away as soon as the gate fell to on its hinges. Even Earth’s stupendous sky was reduced to a precise blue square, as completely submitted to the spare geometry of the building as if it were the roof of the house and not the roof of the whole world.

Osnat stopped, looked around the courtyard, and sneezed. She took a tissue out of her pocket and scrubbed at her nose with it while Arkady averted his eyes politely. “My God, I wish it would rain,” she muttered. “The fucking dust is killing me.”

They waited, though Arkady had no idea what they were waiting for. A water seller passed by in the street outside, calling his wares, but it might have been a voice from another planet. A single petal fell from one of the high rose blossoms and fluttered to the ground, the only moving thing in the visible universe. Then the gate opened behind them, and the most perfect human Arkady had ever seen stepped through it.

Her face possessed such flawless bilateral symmetry that Arkady had to look a second and third time before he decided she wasn’t a genetic construct. Only the subtle blend of race and ethnicity, so different from the distinct ethnic phenomes of the Syndicates, identified the woman as what she was: a member of the heavily genetically engineered Ring-side elite that biogeographers were beginning to describe as a new posthuman quasi-species in its own right. And thinking back to Korchow’s briefings, Arkady had no trouble putting a name to the woman:

Ashwarya Sofaer. Ash to her friends…not that she has any. She’s the closest thing to pure ambition you’ll ever see; a walking cost-benefit analysis of mammalian dominance drives. Ex-Mossad of course, like all the higher powers at GolaniTech. She shouldn’t even be allowed to live on Earth, but she’s grandfathered in under one of their endless loopholes. She spent three years in the Ring as the UN-Mossad liaison, then back to Israel and through the revolving door to GolaniTech. Now that Gavi Shehadeh’s out of the way, she’s probably Didi Halevy’s most likely replacement if and when his enemies succeed in toppling him. As they say on King Saul Boulevard, the revolving door spins both ways. And it’s not out of the question that the lovely Miss Sofaer might be interested in using you to give the proverbial door a good hard push…

Ash had the Ring-sider’s clothes to go with her Ring-sider’s body: a sleek white suit programmed to hug every curve of her lean body; high-heeled vat leather shoes that made her long legs seem even longer than they were; impeccably styled hair slicked back from an impeccably made-up face that gave away absolutely nothing of the person behind it.

Ash and Osnat shook hands. Osnat looked stubby and flyblown next to the other woman.

“Captain Hoffman,” Ash said.

“Colonel.” Osnat gave the word a parade ground lilt that suggested respect entirely unalloyed by personal affection.

“Moshe said you’d come over to us,” Ash said. “How did he convince you to make the jump?”

“He told me the grass might be greener on your side of the fence.”

“It is.” Ash eyed Osnat speculatively. “As green as you want it to be. We should talk sometime.”

“Sure,” Osnat said, obviously not meaning it.

A frown of irritation compressed Ash’s beautiful lips for a moment, then vanished before Arkady could even be sure it had been there.

Briefly, she explained to Osnat that the room was being readied, that the bidders were still arriving, that she would make the introductions.

“And then what?” Osnat asked.

“And then we’ll see.”

Ash shook hands with Osnat again and swept off into the house without having so much as glanced at Arkady. Osnat stared after her with a troubled expression, rubbing the palm of her right hand on her pant leg as if she were trying to rub off the smell of the other woman.

Arkady, child of a world born only two years before his own birth, had never seen any place like the room he was eventually ushered into. Even the smell…the smell of wood and wool and furniture wax and all the other priceless things that were rare and inconceivable luxuries to the space-born. He tried to focus on the other people in the room, to match their faces with Korchow’s descriptions. But his eyes kept floating to the whirling ceiling fans, the shivering ladders of light and shade cast by the slatted shutters, the cedar and sandalwood shadows under the high rafters, the complex patterns of rugs and drapery, the nuanced colors of walls and windowsills and floor tiles, the endless tumble of old and incomprehensible objects scattered over the polished tables and sideboards.

When he finally picked out Korchow, slouched in the shadowy depths of a leather wing chair, he saw that the KnowlesSyndicate A was laughing silently at him.

“Poor Arkady. You look even loster than you are.”

Arkady started toward him, stopped, looked at Osnat.

“Go ahead,” she said, lenient in Moshe’s absence.

Korchow put an arm around Arkady’s shoulders and gave him the traditional kiss of greeting. The sight of the Knowles A, after the weeks of isolation among humans, nearly unmanned Arkady. Back on Gilead, Korchow had seemed more than half human. Now he looked like home.

“I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to see you safe and sound, Arkady.” Korchow had affected the avuncular air of an older series speaking to a younger member of his own geneline, but his smile remained as bland and carefully rationed as ever. It was the same smile Korchow had worn during the tense weeks of interrogation, and Arkady still sensed that Korchow’s every move was part of an act played out not for its apparent audience but for the unseen watcher behind the camera.

Arkady returned Korchow’s kiss. “May we do our part,” he said, taking refuge in formality and formula.

“Your part?” For a moment the diplomat’s mask gave way to a look of disdain and anger. Or was that merely another mask, just as calculated as the first? And if so, what audience was it intended for? “Is that what you think you’ve been doing?”

Before Arkady could answer, the door opened and the first bidders entered.

“Jesus wept,” someone said.

Arkady turned to see the man-machine from the airport and the woman soldier who had accompanied him. This time, however, they were staring at Korchow.

“I should have known you’d be at the bottom of this.” The machine sounded weary, as if the weight of unpleasant memories that Korchow suggested was too heavy for his shunt’s human shoulders.

“How can a mere collection of neural networks and Toffoli gates attain such heights of melodrama?” Korchow countered in a voice that gave away even less than his smile did. “I’m behind nothing. I didn’t even know that poor Arkady was leaving us until he turned up in Maris Station. At which point we regrettably”—he glanced at Osnat—“lost track of him. Naturally, we were deeply concerned for his safety, the political situation being what it is. But now we have found our lost lamb again.”

“Lucky little lamb,” the machine drawled, his eyes sliding sideways toward Arkady.

“You’re not one of the bidders?” the woman asked Korchow incredulously.

“No, no, Major. You misapprehend the situation. My only interest is in ensuring that Arkady retain the ability to exercise his…what’s that phrase you humans are always tossing around…free will?”

The woman didn’t return Korchow’s smile. She leaned into his space, her jaw shoved forward pugnaciously, and tapped him on the chest firmly enough for Arkady to hear the thump of her index finger on his sternum. “I’m watching you,” she said. “I’m tracking you, Korchow, and don’t you fucking forget it.”

Korchow’s smile remained firmly in place, but he tugged at his collar and fingered his old war wound. It was the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic.

“My dear Major—”

“Just plain Li now, thanks to you.”

“Seeing you is always so…eventful. I sincerely hope we can avoid gunplay this time.”

“That’s up to you,” the woman said.

That was when Arkady finally put the stray clues together and realized who she was. Major Catherine Li, UNSec First Expeditionary Force, aka the renegade construct Caitlyn Perkins, aka the Butcher of Gilead.

You wouldn’t know she was a Zhang construct if you weren’t looking for the resemblance. But she’d had plastic surgery. They’d said that at the trial. And of course she was a corporate-tanked construct, so you had to allow for the changes the Zhangs had made to their geneset after the Breakaway in order to tailor their phenotype to their own needs as free beings instead of corporate property. Once you did that, the lines of the murdered Zhang constructs shone through her stolid face and muscular body as clearly as printed letters through a piece of paper held up to sunlight.

How could a child born into corporate slavery have grown up to fight a war for the very corporations who had enslaved her? How, being what she was, could she have done what she’d done? And how could she have done it for the same humans who had given the order to turn ZhangSyndicate, with all its crèches and its genebanks, into a firegutted ghost station? Suddenly Arkady found that he was having no trouble at all looking convincingly frightened.

While Arkady was coming to terms with Li’s presence, the AI drifted over to the side table beneath one of the tall windows and began inspecting the artfully scattered objets d’arton its polished wood surface. It glanced back toward its companion and cleared its throat delicately. Could such a being have the normal fears and worries and apprehensions of a real person? If so, Arkady would have sworn the machine was trying to head off a conversation that frightened it.

“So, Major—” Korchow began.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Li burst out. “I don’t give a damn if it’s an original Eames! Can we make it through one goddamn minutewithout you interrupting me?”

“I beg your pardon?” Korchow asked.

“Never mind,” she muttered savagely. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Of course. I forget that you’re not quite the woman you were when we last met. How islife in the future, Major? Is being the ghost in the machine everything you hoped it would be?”