Arkady felt a hot flush creeping up his face. “Oh. Um. It’s very warm. Thank you.”
“Too warm for me.” Arkasha gave him a measuring look, squinting and tilting his head to one side. “And you fill it out better across the shoulders. You should keep it.”
Before Arkady could think to thank him, Arkasha slung his wiry frame onto the bench next to Laid-back Ahmed and started haggling over what scut work he and Bella could get out of in exchange for cooking. He adopted a sly, self-mocking tone that soon had Bella laughing and blushing and Ahmed threatening to take up cooking himself if it was that advantageous.
Meanwhile Arkady took advantage of the momentary distraction to covertly ogle his new pairmate.
He saw a slighter, slenderer, more refined version of himself. Arguably a little too refined; but beyond that quibble he was as perfectly norm-conforming as any A-11 Arkady had ever met. And of course he had the sleek, dark, classic Rostov hair instead of the chaotic whirl of cowlicks that greeted Arkady in the mirror every cycledawn. Aurelia had been right. Arkasha was very handsome. But he was also…unsettling.
Arkasha looked up and caught Arkady eyeing him. Then he glanced at Arkady’s heaping plate and raised an eyebrow. “The condemned man ate hearty.”
“I’ll probably throw it all up in half an hour,” Arkady answered. “But the body wants what the body wants.”
“It certainly does,” Arkasha acquiesced. “And speaking of the body, for what sins were you sent here?”
Arkady choked. “Uh…I do ants.”
“Well, that’s certainly grave. But I suppose we can forgive you.”
Shy Bella giggled again.
“What about you?” Arkasha asked her. “What obese, wrinkled, and importunate steering committee crone did you refuse to sleep with in order to achieve the dubious honor of this assignment?”
“I didn’t. None of them asked. Just grilled me on ideology so they wouldn’t have to admit they knew less about terraforming than a lowly B. Come to think of it I’ve never slept with an A.” She cocked her head prettily—a move that had a visible effect on her sib. “Should I be insulted, do you think?”
“Well,” Arkasha announced magnanimously, “I’m always available if you’d like to broaden your repertoire.”
And everyone laughed the nervous, keyed-up, self-conscious laughter that always accompanied the mention of the ultimate taboo.
“You should be more careful what you say,” Arkady told Arkasha when they were finally alone together in the relative privacy of their cabin.
That hadn’t come out the way he meant it to, he realized. He’d meant it to sound…well, how had he meant it to sound? What the hell had he been thinking, actually?
He cleared his throat nervously. “Top or bottom bunk?”
“I’d prefer the top if that’s all right with you.”
“Okay.”
But neither of them moved toward the bunks. Instead, Arkasha seemed to be taking cautious stock of his new pairmate; and Arkady took the opportunity to get another look at the man who was going to be the most important person in his life, for good or bad, for the next two years.
He saw him with a crèchemate’s well-trained eye. He passed over the things a stranger would have noticed first: the graceful proportion of hip and shoulder; the refined intellectual’s face that spoke so clearly of their geneline’s unique character and talents; the clean planes of jaw and cheekbone and temple; the slight Cupid’s bow of the upper lip that the Rostov designers had settled on as the perfect compromise between beauty and manliness.
Instead, he saw the little details that crèchemates learned early to take heed of. That his new pairmate carried a good five kilos less than their crècheyear average, a sure sign of a nervous disposition. That he had a habit of balancing on his toes as if he were perpetually expecting the unexpected, and had learned from experience that the unexpected was usually unpleasant. That his narrow face radiated intelligence and character, but also a wounded reserve that did not bode well for Arkady’s personal life over the course of the next two years.
The sardonic façade was just that, Arkady realized. A defensive weapon honed to a sharp edge in order to keep others off-balance and at a distance. Except that a Syndicate construct had no more reason to keep his crèchemates at a distance than a human child had to keep his own brothers and sisters at a distance.
Arkady’s first impression of the man had been right; he was about as safe and predictable as an unexploded bomb.
Arkasha grinned suddenly. “That’s some set of cowlicks you’ve got there. Classic fuzzy 18 defect. Some poor slob at the splicing scope must have caught an earful of misery over that screwup.”
“Gee, no one’s ever said that to me before.”
“Scarred for life, were you?” The grin broadened. “Children can be such monsters.”
“It wasn’t that bad,” Arkady lied.
“Then your crèche must have been a kinder, gentler place than mine was.”
Arkady cleared his throat. “You’re from Crèche Seven?” he asked, trying to paper over the silence with small talk.
“That’s right.”
“I had a pairmate from Seven, uh, let’s see…the assignment before last? A glaciologist. Big guy, seventy kilos easy, played goalie for the Crèche Seven team. Ring any bells?”
“Not that I can hear.”
“Most of the Arkadys from Seven are above height norm,” Arkady babbled on. “At least in our year.”
The grin faded to a sardonic smirk. “They put in a special order for big and dumb our year.”
“Good footballers too.” He assessed the lean but well-muscled frame of the man in front of him. “You play?”
“Alas, I’m not temperamentally suited to team sports.”
“Me neither, actually. Not that I don’t like the company. But I suppose when it really comes down to it, I’d rather be poking around under dead logs looking for ants.”
This elicited a broader smile from Arkasha—but no answering confession.
“I read your articles on the Aenictus gracilis,” Arkasha said. He fixed Arkady with an intense stare, as if he were trying to send or decipher some vital secret message. “It’s extremely fine work. As good as anything I’ve seen in years. I particularly liked your paper on the adaptive value of dissent in collective decisionmaking. It was…thought-provoking.”
Arkady’s academic advisory committee had thought that paper was thought-provoking too. And a few other less complimentary things that had earned Arkady a friendly but still highly unnerving visit from a renormalization counselor. He hadn’t exactly abandoned his dissent research after that…but he’d certainly been more circumspect in the words he used to write about it. Ants had such overwhelming symbolic value in Syndicate society that people were apt to make overheated comparisons. Metaphor creep could twist even the most solid science into politics. Sometimes Arkady envied the pre-Evacuation human entomologists who had done the pioneering work on social insect societies. They’d been able to draw much bolder conclusions than he could…mainly because the moralists of their day and age had been too busy pestering the beleaguered primate researchers.
Now Arkasha was saying something about multivalent superstructure, whatever that was. “You were careful not to cite it, of course, but surely the reference to Kennedy on Althusser is implicit?”
“They’re just ants,” Arkady said, falling back on the same formula that had always gotten him out of trouble before.
“You don’t write about them as if you thought they were just ants.”