“Wild,” Arkady said, picking up on the earlier word. “You mean naturally reproducing.”
“Yeah.” Her voice sank to near background noise as she craned her neck out the far window to keep the donkey in her line of vision.
“Those early genetic weapons were pretty unpredictable. Mostly they boiled down to dumping massive loads of pesticides and synthetic estrogens and heavy metals and hoping that the combined toxin load would do the job. The Temple Mount bomb scrambled horse, human, and songbird DNA beyond repair. Donkeys, on the other hand, are still breeding like rabbits. Actually, rabbits are still breeding like rabbits, come to think of it. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell youhow well the ants are doing.” She sighed—a sigh that was all out of proportion with the not-very-serious problem of too many ants. “On the other hand, the bombing didscare us into three centuries of peace. I guess that counts for something.”
“What started up the war again, Osnat?”
“Hell if I know. It was like everyone just woke up one morning and decided to flush it all down the toilet.”
She frowned down at the treetops while the silence (a relative notion in the ear-shattering roar of the helicopter) stretched to uncomfortable lengths.
“You must remember the open border,” Arkady ventured finally.
“I grew up with it. I was already in college when the war started.”
Arkady had read about the open border, a fact of life in Israel and Palestine during the centuries of shocked peace that followed the Left-Behind Bombing. The whole concept of the border—of any border—had seemed impossibly theoretical until now, as incomprehensible to Syndicate eyes as everything else about the human notions of countries and national loyalties. Now, watching the shadow of their chopper flicker over the hills and valleys, Arkady could finally match words to reality.
There were fences down there. And the only fences Arkady had ever seen in his life were the ones crèchelings put up at the back of playing fields during field trips to Gilead to stop stray balls from rolling away. They really meant it, he realized, looking at those fences. The idea of “owning” a piece of a planet might seem as quaint as witchcraft to him, but these people were willing to kill each other over it.
“Did you know any Palestinians before the war?” Arkady asked Osnat.
“My first boyfriend was Palestinian. My parents loved him. Thought he was a good influence on me.” She smirked. “I was nota well-behaved adolescent.”
Arkady blinked, taken aback by the sheer number of unthinkables in that reply. “And what’s he doing now?”
Her smile shut down like an airlock slamming closed. “He’s dead. All those nice boys I grew up with are dead. On both sides.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And for what? So we can listen to the bastards in the Knesset make patriotic speeches.”
She lit a cigarette and smoked it, hunched over the little flame like a dog trying to keep someone from stealing its bone.
“This used to be the most beautiful country,” she said finally. Arkady would hear those words, or some version of them, so many times over the coming weeks, and from so many people on both sides of the Line, that they would come to seem like an epitaph for the Jerusalem Osnat’s generation had grown up in. “I wish you could see what it was like before the war. They were even talking about opening up the cleaner parts of the Line and turning them into an international peace park.” She turned away and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette as if she’d lost the stomach for it. “Ah, fuck, I don’t know why I’m even telling you.”
Arkady made a helpful face but Osnat was staring out the window, seeing only the past and its long-buried dead.
“Oh well.” She sounded almost friendly for a moment. “Not your problem. Just dodge the mortars for a few weeks and you’re out of here.”
“And you?”
“And me what?”
“Why don’t you leave?”
She jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward him abruptly enough to make him flinch. “Bingo. Just the question I ask the bitch in the mirror every morning.”
“And?”
“And you’ll be the first to know if I ever get a straight answer out of her.”
Arkady must have fallen asleep after that. When he woke the city was gone and they were flying over empty desert.
Waves of sand ran away to the horizon under towering dust-brown thunderheads that the pilot seemed to be flying into at every moment. The sun shone feebly through the enveloping haze, though Osnat’s sunburned face testified to its destroying power.
Arkady shifted uncomfortably. He’d hoped that flying would relieve the constant ache of full gravity. But, flying or earthbound, he was still sucked onto this spinning rock like a bug in a wind tunnel, every joint popping and aching until it was hard to believe his ancestors had survived long enough to make it off the planet.
Night was falling, and suddenly he identified something that had been pricking at the edge of his mind for several minutes.
“There are lights down there!”
“What?” Osnat had dozed off too, judging by the soft, bleary-eyed face she turned toward him. “Sure. No big deal. Someone’s got a generator.”
“But…aren’t we still over the Line?”
She glanced at her bulky wristwatch. “Yep.”
“People livedown there?”
She cocked her head, turning her good eye on him. “What, you thought all that prime real estate was empty just because of a piddly few birth defects?”
“Who are they?”
“They’re called Ghareebeh.Arabic for stranger.”
“So they’re Arabs?”
“Some of them. Some of them are the children of Jewish settlers who refused to leave. Some of them are just poor schmucks born in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But how do they live?”
“Let’s just say they don’t drink the water if they can afford not to. Like I told you, those were the wild frontier days of genetic weaponry.” Her voice took on a more sarcastic edge than usual. “Now we’re more environmentally responsible.”
“Osnat?”
“What?”
“Can you answer a question?”
“Ask it and I’ll let you know.”
“Who’s Absalom?”
“It’s a code name.” She sounded as flatly objective as if she were summarizing the results of a peer-reviewed scientific study. “Most people on this side of the Line think the man behind the code name was Gavi Shehadeh.”
“A Palestinian.”
She wrapped her arms across her chest and huddled into the corner of her seat. “Half-Palestinian. His mother was Jewish. I don’t know the whole story. Just that he was some kind of war hero back in the days when the soldiers on the Line were real soldiers, not Enderbots. And then he went into AI work. Or maybe he was already doing it before the war started, I don’t know. Anyway, he was working on EMET when the Mossad tapped him for counterintelligence work. Just compsec at first, but he didn’t stay stuck there for long. Didi Halevy moved him into counterintelligence. And then…he climbed. And not just by riding Didi’s coattails. No one ever accused Gavi of not being good at his job.”
“And what did he do to make Moshe hate him so much?”
“He turned traitor.”
“So he’s in…prison?”
“No.” She looked like she wanted to spit. “Maybe he had a horse—that’s what we call it when someone has a friend in high places to protect him. Or maybe it was just too embarrassing for the people who promoted him and trusted him. All I know is he’s still alive.”
Arkady digested the staggering implications of that statement. “You mean you still executepeople?”
“Of course not. We’re not the Americans,for God’s sake. But you can always arrange a nice clean traffic accident.”