“I—I don’t think I know you,” he said, speaking both to the woman and the machine.
“But Korchow—”
The woman fell silent as abruptly as if someone had interrupted her. The AI cocked his head like a dog listening for its master’s voice, and Arkady had the sense that some shared thought had just passed between them in streamspace.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Of course.”
She turned on her heel. Her coat flew open, and the blaring orange of an El Al security seal winked at Arkady from the trigger guard of a holstered pistol. Then they were gone, swallowed by the swirling human tide as quickly as they’d emerged from it.
Osnat frowned nervously at him. “You okay, Arkady?”
“I think so.”
“Was that who I think it was?”
“I don’t know. Who do you think it was?”
“Well, it looked like—no, never mind. That’s crazy. He wouldn’t have the nerve to show his face here.
Any of his faces. You sure you’re okay? You look like shit.”
“I’m fine.”
But he wasn’t fine. They’d known him. They’d known his series name, even if they’d mistaken him, as humans so often did, for another Arkady. And they’d thought he was dead.
Dead how? Dead where? What had happened to that other Arkady before he died?
And what did Andrej Korchow have to do with it?
Cohen looked out the window of the Ben Gurion-Jerusalem bus and told himself he needed a new body.
It was impossible to go anywhere quietly in this one. That Hoffman girl had been on the edge of recognizing him. Even the nice boy at El Al Security had waved him to the front of the line far too obviously for discretion. It had been one thing when he’d still been able to travel under his French passport, but the Tel Aviv fiasco had put an end to that and left him with no claim to citizenship or humanity except the one his long-dead inventor’s religion gave him.
And then, of course, there was the irksome detail of being a ghost.
“Why do they keep calling you that?” Li had asked the first time someone did it in front of her. “It’s creepy. Like they actually think you’re him instead of you.”
“It’s just a formality. No one takes it seriously except the religious nuts.”
But Li had been less interested in theological niceties than in the soldierly virtue of loyalty. “Has it ever occurred to you that if they really were your friends, they’d have gotten the hell over it sometime in the last four centuries?”
“Well, they have a point. Technically, I’m only a Jew because Hy Cohen’s mother was one. And it isn’t like he was observant, trust me—”
“I’ll remind you of that self-righteous tone next time I catch you eating oysters.”
“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”
Never mind the absurdity of trying to argue that the vast virtual universe of coevolving neural networks, affective loops, and expert systems called “Hyacinthe” was even remotely the same person as the Hy Cohen who had uploaded the memories of his failing body into the long-junked original hardware.
And never mind that even Hyacinthe was only one of the thirty-four separate sentient and quasi-sentient synthetic entities (this week’s head count) currently enjoying the somewhat debatable benefits of Israeli citizenship under Cohen’s Toffoli number.
And never mind the problematic thirty-fifth wheeclass="underline" one very sentient and only partially synthetic Catherine Li, formerly of the UN Peacekeepers.
She was sleeping now, caught in the intense, lying web of dreams that still had the power to shock Cohen after half a dozen lifetimes among humans. She slept with her arms crossed over her chest and her boot soles braced on the seat in front of her. Looking at her clenched fists and frowning face, at the faint tracery of ceramsteel snaking under the brown skin, Cohen thought: Even in sleep she defends herself.
Meanwhile the dusty blue-and-white Egged bus rattled up onto the plateau of the Jordan floodplain, and half of Cohen’s associated selves looked out the window or worked on unrelated projects, while the rest eavesdropped on Li’s intermittent dreams and scrambled to keep his Ring-to-Earth connection ticking along at the massive bandwidth required to knit borrowed body and far-flung souls together.
He stretched, appreciating, as he always did, the elastic grace of Roland’s young and exquisitely well tended body. Humans took the pleasures of health and youth for granted—something that was a little harder to do once you’d survived dying of multiple sclerosis. But then taking things for granted seemed to be wired into the human gene pool.
Cohen looked around, taking stock of his fellow passengers in real-space. A smattering of Ring-side tourists and business travelers, conspicuous for the cranial jacks that revealed Earth-illegal wetware and psychware. Young aggressively secular Israelis, whose tanned good looks hinted at weekends spent windsurfing off Tel Aviv’s fashionable beaches—and whose skin-hugging outfits looked like the kind of goods that only slipped through the Embargo because Ring-side customs was too busy fighting real violations to worry about youth fashion. A rickety old Ashkenaz reading the Ha’aretz sports section— Maccabi Tel Aviv Smites Haopel Jerusalem 77-49. Well, at least someone at the Ha’aretz sports desk still had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for the Op-ed page. A large-eyed and unnaturally silent family of Hasidim huddled along the back bench where the ride was always roughest. The usual disturbingly large number of caps and chadors in the dusty green of the Interfaithers. And of course the impossibly young Israeli Defense Force soldiers whose rumpled uniforms made Cohen imagine mothers leaning over balcony railings all over Israel shouting, You’re-going-out-in-public-like-that?
The only thing missing was the Palestinians. Before the war they would have been here on the student passes that were a mere formality during the long peaceful generations of the open border. Laughing with their Israeli friends. Kissing their Israeli girlfriends to the abiding and roundly ignored horror of the ultraorthodox. Locked at the hip, like their two countries—and too young and idealistic to realize that the peace they took for granted was just a pause for station identification.
Li was waking up.
Cohen could feel her all around him, stirring, shifting, running the day’s events through her half-waking mind in a rapid-fire succession of half-formed dreams that cut in and out like the nightly newspin on fast forward. He tried to catch on to the tail of a few dreams as they passed, but he couldn’t make sense of them. And she was aware of him as a vague, alien presence in her mind, though she hadn’t yet awakened enough to identify the intruder.
Spying on her, she called it. And there’d be hell to pay if she caught him at it. He untangled himself from her, erasing his retreating footsteps and feeling hurt, as he always did, that she made him sneak and steal to get what he would have given her for the mere asking.
She twisted, murmuring, and brushed ineffectually at a lock of hair that had fallen over her forehead. He reached out cautiously and pushed it back.
She opened her eyes.
He took his hand away.
“You need a haircut,” he told her.
“I know.” She stretched, yawning and he felt a pang of desire so strong it made his jaw hurt. “Things were so crazy before we left, I forgot. How’s your connection?”
“Fine.”
Not a lie. Just a nonrandom sampling of the available data.