They stared at each other. Arkasha seemed to be searching for something in Arkady’s face and not finding it. Finally he sighed and settled back on his heels a little. When he turned away there was a sad little slump to his shoulders. “Oh well,” he murmured. “The work’s still good. That’s the main thing. And I certainly won’t give you anything to complain about in that department.”
“Listen,” Arkady stammered. “I didn’t mean to offend you earlier. What I said about Bella, about watching what you say…it came out all wrong. I just meant that…well, sometimes it’s better to be a little careful at the beginning of an assignment when you don’t know everyone yet. Some people can’t tell the difference between a joke and reality.”
Arkasha squared his shoulders and set his sardonic mask firmly back in place. “What makes you think you offended me?” he asked. “And for that matter what makes you think it was a joke?”
That was when Arkady really began to panic.
“Uh…top bunk you said? I’ll just leave this stuff here on the bottom then, and…er…uh…I really need to get down to the lab now and make sure everything got on board in one piece and—”
“Relax,” Arkasha said, with that same mocking little smile lingering on his lips. “My perversions aren’t nearly that simple.”
Later Arkady would hear the seed of Arkasha’s sickness in those words. He would parse them, shuffle them, turn them over like a fortune-teller’s cards, looking for the first misstep on the long slide toward exile.
But in that moment he saw only the face that was his and not his; the eyes that were his and not his; and the soul behind the eyes, as complex and intractable and miraculous as a living planet.
A POLITICALLY USEFUL TOOL
Although it may take several decades for the process of transformation to unfold, in time, the art of warfare…will be vastly different than it is today…the distinction between military and commercial space systems—combatants and noncombatants—will become blurred…advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.
All Arkady ever knew for certain about running the blockade was that he was drugged into dazed half-consciousness for most of the trip.
He remembered the ship; the stretched, surreal claustrophobia of jump dreams; an interlude of bright refracted sunlight slicing through the mirrored canyons of Ring-side skyscrapers; the hard eyes and sunburned faces of the security guards at the El Al boarding gate. Then he was waking up and his fellow passengers were bursting into the chorus of “Heveinu Shalom Aleichem” and the shuttle was streaking over impossibly blue water toward the white rooftops and glittering solar panels of Tel Aviv.
Ben Gurion International Airport was a marvel of architectural design, but it had been built a century before the Evacuation and the artificial ice age. By the time they’d been on the ground for five minutes, Arkady’s fingers were aching with cold.
Osnat dove down the concourse, pulling Arkady along in her wake. People hurried past, jostling and pushing. There were so many faces, each one shockingly different from every other, and all hardened by the grim battle of all-against-all that seemed to constitute normal life for humans.
“Who’s that?” Arkady asked, pointing to a vast, grainy photograph that filled most of the wall above the Departures and Arrivals board.
“Theodor Herzl. And don’t point. People are jumpy here.”
Two girl soldiers strode by, automatic weapons held at the half-ready. A man with the reddest hair Arkady had ever seen elbowed between him and Osnat, practically tripping him. While Arkady was still flailing for balance, a raucous group of women barreled into him, several of them with screaming children in tow. They all had the same blond curls and freckled skin, and there was a faint but reassuring similarity to the shape of their faces. Not the clear, clean melody of a single geneset, but something at least approaching the harmonious chord of a Syndicate’s component genelines. The group enveloped Arkady, carrying him along in their wake. When Osnat backtracked to rescue him, he turned to stare over his shoulder, reduced to openmouthed amazement by his first sight of a “family.”
And then came the ads.
There were no visibly wired people in the crowd—ceramsteel filament was Earth-illegal because it had to be manufactured in microgravity—but the airport itself was still on-grid, and the air overhead crackled and glittered with publicity spins.
NORAM-ARC JEWS FOR PEACE NOW said one banner that popped alarmingly into midair just over Arkady’s head. A second ad plunged him into a sunlit grove of frost-resistant oranges populated by smiling kibbutzniks who urged him to “exercise your Right of Return right now” by buying from Kehillot Tehilla Realty. A third spin, which perplexed Arkady enough to bring him to a standstill, proclaimed j-cupid.com “the number one Jewish singles dating and matchmaking service” and advised him in a perky voice that fertility/virility stats on all registered singles were just one click away. “Don’t you deserve someone special?” the voice-over asked in a tone that seemed actually to imply that “special” was a good thing.
Then the thing he had been afraid of from the moment he set foot in UN space finally happened.
“Arkady!” a woman called out in a voice sharp enough to stop him in his tracks.
The woman was short, muscular, probably Korean. She was a soldier out of uniform; he read it in the cut of her hair, the set of her shoulders, the decisive moments of someone who actually knew how to hit people. She was also, quite unmistakably, a genetic construct. But no Syndicate design team would produce a face so functional and so unaesthetic. And no crèche-raised construct would speak so sharply or stare out at the world through such hard, uncompromising, self-sufficient eyes. This woman was a pre-Breakaway construct, spliced and tanked and raised to serve humans. And if she really was the soldier she appeared to be, then she’d chosen to kill for humans too.
The man with her, on the other hand, was anything but a soldier. He slouched elegantly behind his companion, as if he could barely be bothered to pay attention to Arkady. Yet there was a taut, poised, abstracted quality to the beautiful body that set Arkady’s teeth on edge. This wasn’t a person, whispered some atavistic instinct. It was a living doll operated by an unseen and supremely skilled puppetmaster.
Then Arkady remembered that the proper word for it was shunt. He’d just met his first Emergent AI. And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm.
“Arkady,” the woman repeated. “We thought you were dead.”
“Don’t let her frighten you,” the AI drawled with a smile that would have looked perfectly at home on Korchow’s face. “I’m sure she doesn’t mean dead dead.”
Arkady stared at the machine-man, torn between horror and fascination. The AI watched him through wide hazel eyes, a faint shadow of that mocking smile still hovering at the corner of its lips. Somehow Arkady was quite sure that the smile belonged to the machine, and not to the human into whose shunt-suppressed body it had poured some incomprehensible distillation of its component selves. It was a clever, changeable, humorous smile. A smile that would be easy to love but impossible to trust…even if there were anything but a teeming chaos of semiautonomous agents behind it.