“Why are you telling me this?”
Safik shrugged. “You don’t get to be my age in this line of work without blood on your hands. If it doesn’t bother you, you’re a monster. If you’re not a monster, then you reach a point where the main thing you want in life is not to produce any more bloodshed on either side of an operation than is strictly necessary…which brings me right back to the problem of how to talk to you.”
“I thought you were already busy outcharming Gavi.”
Safik smiled. “You flatter me. But seriously, Arkady. What would be the point? You’ll serve whatever it is you love most. Money, if it’s money. In which case there’s no art at all in turning you; merely a matter of who has the larger departmental budget. Or, if it’s principle or love or loyalty, then you’ll serve that. And none of Korchow’s spy craft or Moshe’s intimidation or Gavi’s charisma or my plain talking is going to change that.” His cigarette spit and crackled as he took another drag on it. “So that’s all I can usefully ask of you, Arkady. What do you love? What do you serve? What makes you able to go to sleep at night and stand the sight of your face in the mirror when you wake up in the morning? You show me your soul, I’ll show you mine…and then we’ll see if we can profitably travel the next little bit of road together.”
“I don’t know what I believe in anymore,” Arkady said. And it was true. He didn’t belong to Earth, or believe in what humanity stood for. And yet all the truths he’d grown up honoring had been shattered under the terrible pressure of Novalis.
“Tell me about Novalis,” Safik said, as if he’d plucked the word out of Arkady’s mind. “Not the facts. Gavi already got the facts from you better than I ever could.” Safik had been fingering the blank sheet of paper on his desk for several minutes. Now he turned it over to show Gavi’s intricate flowchart on the other side. When Arkady gasped, he just smiled and gave him a conspiratorial wink. “I didn’t get it from Gavi, for what it’s worth. I wish the fools and bigots who think he works for me were right. When it comes to navigating the wilderness of mirrors, Gavi’s the best there ever was. On the other hand…sometimes Gavi trips over his own brains. And in your case I have a niggling feeling that things may actually be less complicated than he’s making them.”
“I told Gavi everything,” Arkady said, feeling suddenly tired and discouraged.
“Then tell me about Arkasha.”
“There’s nothing left to say.”
“Not even if I told you that we might be willing to give him political asylum?”
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because Korchow won’t give him up now.”
“You thought he might when you talked to Gavi last week. What’s changed?”
Arkady looked stubbornly at the floor.
“Talk to me, Arkady. Something’s eating at you. Something that wasn’t even on your horizon when Gavi talked to you. What do you know now that you wish you didn’t?”
Safik reached for his cigarettes, checked his watch, sighed deeply, and pushed them away again.
“I’m going to tell you something, Arkady.” Safik stood up and came around the desk to sit in the empty chair beside him. “Something I’ve never told anyone but my wife before. Not because it’s necessarily shameful—at least not any more shameful than a lot of other things I’ve done for my country. But if you get to be my age you’ll see that only a fool or a fanatic can spend much time in our line of work and not begin to…well…doubt. Worse, if you’re anything approaching a thinking person, you even begin to doubt your doubts. Are you really still working toward the great and good ends you used to believe in, or are your doubts merely a sort of mental washing of hands? A subtle kind of self-deception that lets you hold your nose and do dirty work while feeling all the while that what you do isn’t really you, that you’re better than that, more perceptive than that, more moral than that.”
When Arkady didn’t answer, Safik sighed and went on.
“This happened to me when I was around your age, Arkady. This was before the doubts. I was still thin back then, believe it or not, and at least reasonably good-looking. Or so my wife tells me. Anyway, I’m making jokes about it because it’s not a very happy story. What it comes down to is that a young settler attacked one of our patrols and I was put in charge of questioning his mother. The Israelis were quite cooperative, of course. It was before the war, and that sort of freelancing is in no one’s interest.”
Safik’s manner had changed subtly, Arkady realized. He was casting little glances at Arkady at the end of every sentence, as if it was terribly important to make sure that Arkady understood every word he spoke. And there was a banked, smoldering fire behind the ordinary face that made Arkady see this was a man who was not controllable. By anybody.
“So anyway,” Safik went on, “here was this woman who had just lost her only son. And I—some young idiot who’d never been married, never had a child, knew nothing about anything—was supposed to question her. Naturally it was all the most offensively officious kind of nonsense. Who were her son’s friends? Who had given him the weapon? What had he said before he died? Why would he have done such a thing if he hadn’t learned at his mother’s knee to hate us? And on and on. Hopeless, of course. She didn’t have any real information, and wouldn’t have given it to me if she had. But she was more than happy to talk to me. She knew the clichés by heart, Arkady, and I heard them all that morning. Her son was a hero. He was fulfilling God’s mandate for the Holy Land. She’d achieved the highest purpose of a woman’s life by giving birth to a soldier. And on and on and on. But all the while she was making her patriotic speeches she was weeping. She was wracked with sobs every time she paused for breath. I have never seen someone weep so violently and still be able to force intelligible words out of her mouth.
“It was as if there were two women in her body, Arkady. An outer woman who had the power of speech, who belonged to the state, to civilization, to what you might call the superorganism. And an inner woman, who belonged to no government, and who knew damn well that all those patriotic words were dust next to her son’s dead body.”
Safik stopped. He was slumped in his chair, and he looked gray and ill and terribly angry. Arkady had the impression that he’d stopped talking not because he had run out of words but because he had lost faith that Arkady would understand him.
“So…”
“So what’s my point? I am telling you who I am, Arkady. I serve what I saw in that woman’s eyes. That every time you sacrifice the individual in the name of order and stability you’re only throwing fresh meat to the dogs of war. That martyrdom—be it the martyrdom of the soldier or the martyrdom of the suicide bomber—is a poor substitute for decent government. That’s what I serve, Arkady. And I don’t give a damn about the fanatics who only see lines on the map.” He smiled briefly and made that chin-flicking skyward gesture that Earth dwellers always made when they wanted to talk about the larger world that had left their planet behind. “Or lines out in space for that matter.”
“And what about Absalom?”
“Absalom’s an idea, not a man. And he won’t die as long as there are people on both sides of the Line who think like I do.”
They locked eyes.
Safik sighed and glanced away.
“Fine,” he said. “You have no reason to believe me. But I’ll tell you one thing, Arkady. I’m not your enemy. I’m not sure I’m anyone’s enemy. Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”