But Arkady didn’t have to think about it. He trusted Safik. He knew he was playing the easy mark, just like he’d done with Gavi. He knew that any step he took might be the one that made a choice between protecting the Syndicates and saving Arkasha inevitable. But when he looked into Safik’s calm, decent, ordinary face and asked himself for some reason he shouldn’t trust him, he couldn’t find one.
So he told him everything, right up to that awful moment of revelation in front of Gavi’s flowchart.
“If that’s true,” Safik said when Arkady had finished, “then we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we, Earth and Syndicates alike?”
“No, we’re not!” Arkady burst out.
He never knew, then or later, whether Safik had planned it; but suddenly all the thoughts he’d kept to himself over the past weeks were spilling out of him, giving voice to his pent-up frustration at the intransigent human refusal to understand the Syndicates, to understand life beyond the Orbital Ring, to understand period.
“How can you people still be so ignorant?” he shouted. Then he realized he was shouting, caught his breath, and went on more quietly.
“How can you know so little even after centuries of sending ships and settlers out to die in space? How can you still understand nothing about what it’s like out there?”
“So make me understand. I want to understand, Arkady. If you can’t make me understand, you’ll never make any human understand.”
“You can’t understand,” Arkady said bitterly. He remembered again the terrible fire of ZhangSyndicate’s death throes. For the first time he realized that there had been men in those attacking ships. Men bred and trained in the Ring, where Earth was always one short rescue launch away, and the universe was still friendly and forgiving and crowded enough that a man could take it upon himself to loose a missile and destroy an orbital station that was all the wide world to its little ark of souls. “You hear the words. You nod and smile…and then five minutes later you say something that proves you haven’t understood a syllable. Earth itself keeps you from understanding. Even the Ring-siders still have Earth to fall back on if things go really wrong. You can afford to be selfish, inefficient, individualistic because Earth is big and rich and forgiving. You can afford to act like spoiled children because Earth will always bail you out. And even then you managed to turn getting to space into a race against extinction. How many billions of lives were thrown away on the generation ships? Humans make their sacrifices too. Despite all their brave words about rights and individuals. The collected quotient of individual misery and wastage and suffering in human society makes the Syndicates look like the ultimate humanists.”
“So it’s all just politics?” Safik interjected. He sounded gently disappointed by the idea.
“Politics! Reality. A reality you humans can’t see because you’re too busy telling each other fairy tales. I never understood before I came here why the UN got so taken by surprise when so many people around the Periphery sided with the Syndicates in the war, but now I finally get it. You actually think they’re still human. You think if you just wipe the Syndicates, your problems will vanish and you’ll step into the future you always wanted to have. But that future died with Earth. The only future left now is the one you made when you put Earth’s poor on the generation ships and threw them overboard to live or die. Well, we lived. And now you’re trying to stop evolution in its tracks because we aren’t the future you wanted to have.”
Arkady finished his speech and wound down into depressed and embarrassed silence.
“You don’t sound like a traitor,” Safik said at last. “You sound to me like a man who wants to go home.”
“Home isn’t perfect either,” Arkady whispered.
“Neither is my wife, but I still go home every night. Don’t you think Korchow has figured this out?” Somehow Safik managed to sound matter-of-fact and sympathetic in the same instant. “Don’t you think he knows enough of…well, I suppose I shouldn’t call it human nature…to have predicted you might feel this way?”
“You don’t think I’ve asked myself that again and again?” Arkady said bitterly. “I feel like a lab rat!”
Safik smiled. His gaze left Arkady’s for just long enough to light another long-awaited cigarette. “You seem to be focusing only on the negative aspects of being a lab rat. The up side of having someone like Korchow use you is that there usually is a real piece of cheese at the end of the maze. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that Korchow might want to send Arkasha to Earth? The Embargo’s going to go up in smoke the minute people begin to really see what the Novalis virus has done. We’re going to be playing a vicious game of catch-up. And we’re going to be in desperate need of people like Arkasha. Maybe Korchow’s preparing the ground for a little…er, intellectual terraforming?”
Arkady tried to look impassive and undecided, but his mind had already gone into a tailspin of calculations, hopes, dreams, anticipation.
“I don’t want to rush you into anything,” Safik said. “Least of all anything Korchow’s trying to rush me into rushing you into. Go back to Moshe. Think about it. I’m sure we’ll have another chance to talk. That is as long as you don’t say anything that would make your keepers wonder just who you’ve been talking to over here.”
And if that wasn’t a way of buying his silence, Arkady wondered, then what was?
MET AND EMET
All art is born of science, just as all science has its origins in magic. Though it is hard to say exactly when AI design made the leap from science to art, two names are inextricably linked to the event: Hyacinthe Cohen and Gavi Shehadeh. Whatever you think of Gavi’s golem, its status as a watershed moment in the history of AI—and the history of Israel—is incontestable.
Gavi Shehadeh was so universally hated by the time he lost his leg that at first no one on either side of the Line could bring themselves to believe it wasn’t a richly deserved assassination attempt. The facts—the Shabbas visit to the one faction of his Jewish family that was still speaking to him, the impromptu soccer game, the lost ball, and the bloody carnage in the weeds—came out with such excruciating slowness that Gavi was up and walking before most of his old friends and new enemies could bring themselves to admit that he’d been crippled by a perfectly ordinary land mine.
He was on administrative leave over the Absalom affair when it happened, and within a few months he found himself with a new ceramic compound leg courtesy of Hadassah Hospital’s special amputees unit and a growing realization that his career had died in Tel Aviv.
Yad Vashem had seemed like an escape when Didi first suggested it. Only when he reported to IDF headquarters for the mandatory sperm and blood samples did he realize he’d accepted what amounted, in most people’s minds, to a slow death sentence. No matter, he’d told himself. His exile would be over in a few months, a year at most.
But by now it had lasted almost four years.
He wasn’t sure just when Gavi the traitor had begun to feel more real to him than the man he’d always thought he was. But there were external signs by which he could measure the rate at which his new identity cannibalized his old one. Before his second summer in Yad Vashem he’d stopped writing letters and calling on his former colleagues in hope of a new position. Then his visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, always sporadic, had stopped entirely. And sometime in the third year of his live burial he’d admitted to himself that if his former enemies knew how he felt every time he had to leave the thickness of the Line, they would spirit him straight back to the eighth floor out of sheer spite.