Arkady glanced at the bar-back mirror, trying to reassure himself that he fit in well enough to pass safely. What he saw didn’t reassure him at all. Korchow’s team had broken his nose and one cheekbone, a precaution that had seemed barbaric back on Gilead. But it took decades at the bottom of a gravity well to get the lined and haggard look of the planet-born. And it would have taken a lifetime—someone else’s lifetime—to mold Arkady’s frank and open crèche-born face into the aggressive mask most humans wore in public.
Arkady gave the Interfaither another surreptitious glance, only to find the man still staring at him. Their eyes locked. The Interfaither turned away, still holding Arkady’s gaze, and spit on the floor.
“Creature of magicians,” the woman muttered, “return to your dust!”
“What?” Arkady asked, though he knew somehow that the words were a response to the Interfaither.
“It’s from the Talmud.” Again that black inward gaze as she tapped RAM or slipped into the spinstream. “Then Rabbah created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him but received no answer. Thereupon he said to him: ‘Creature of the magicians, return to your dust!’That’s how the first golem died.”
“What’s a golem?” Arkady asked.
“A man without a soul.” Her laugh was as hard-bitten as everything else about her. “You.”
Arkady heaved a shaky breath that ended in a bout of coughing. He was running a fever, his immune system kicking into overdrive to answer the insult of being stuck in a closed environment with thousands of unfamiliar human pathogens. He hoped it was just allergies. He couldn’t afford to get sick now. And he didn’t even want to think about what the UN’s human doctors would make of his decidedly-posthuman immune system.
He lifted his glass and sipped cautiously from it. Beer. And not as bad as it smelled. Still, he didn’t like the cold skin of condensation that had already formed on the glass. It was a sure sign that the station was underpowered and overpopulated, its life-support systems dangerously close to redlining. A Syndicate station whose air was this bad would have been shutting down nonessential operations and shipping its crèchelings to the neighbors just to be on the safe side. But people here were carrying on as usual. And on the way to the meet Arkady had passed a group of completely unsupervised children playing dangerously far from the nearest blowout shelter. You could spend years listening to people talk about the cheapness of life in human space, but it didn’t really come home to you until you saw something like this…
You were wrong, Arkasha. They’re another species. We’re divided by our history, by our ideology, by the very genes we hold in common. All we share is the memory of what Earth was before we killed it.
Her name was Osnat.
Hebrew? German? Ethiopian?
Arkasha would have known which half-dead language had spawned such a name. It was exactly the kind of thing Arkasha had always known. And exactly the kind of thing Arkady had never learned for himself because he’d always thought Arkasha, or someone like Arkasha, would be there to tell him.
Osnat guided him through the back passages of the station as sure-footedly as if she’d been born there. When she finally ducked into the shadowy alley of a private dock, the move was so unexpected that Arkady had to backtrack to follow her.
The gate’s monitor was either broken or disconnected. Outside the scratched porthole a dimly lit viruflex tether snaked into the void. At its far end, looking as if it had been cut out with scissors and pasted against a black construction paper sky, floated the impact-scarred hulk of an obsolete Bussard-drive-powered water tanker.
Osnat palmed the scanner. Status lights flickered into life as the gate began its purge and disinfect cycle.
“No one said anything about getting on a ship,” Arkady protested, though it was far too late to back out or demand answers.
“So your employers don’t seem to be keeping you too well informed. What do you want me to do about it?”
Arkady didn’t answer, partly because she was right…and partly because he was wracking his faded memories of pre-Breakaway history trying to figure out what employerswere.
The purge and disinfect cycle ended. The airlock irised open and a bitter breeze wafted over them, smelling of space and ice and viruflex. Arkady peered down the long tunnel of the tether, but all he could see were scuffed white walls curving away into darkness.
Osnat put a hard hand to the small of his back and pushed him into the dazzling spray of the gate’s antimicrobial cycle. By the time he blinked the stinging liquid from his eyes she was in the tether with him, riding its movements with the ease of an old space dog. It took Arkady a curiously long time to notice the gun in her hand.
“You’re a piss poor spy, pretty boy.”
“I’m not a—”
“Yeah yeah. Ants. You told me. Well cheer up. You’ll get plenty of ants where we’re going.”
“Where arewe going?”
“Just suit up. They didteach you how to use your NBC gear, didn’t they?”
The nuclear-biological-chemical suit was supposed to be just for allergies, according to Korchow. Which had seemed reassuring until Arkady actually stopped to think about it. He pulled the unit out of his pack and tried to activate it. His fingers fumbled on the unfamiliar controls. Osnat shifted from foot to foot impatiently, cursed under her breath, and finally grabbed it from him.
He thought briefly of grappling with her now that her hands were occupied. He imagined himself disarming her and slipping back through the airlock into the relative safety of the station. But one look at Osnat’s hard body and strong hands was enough to discourage him.
She slipped the mask over his face and demonstrated the filter’s workings with quick gestures of her ragged fingers. “This line connects to an auxiliary air tank if you need one. The tank clamps on here and here. You brought spare filters?”
He checked. “Yes.”
“You’ll need ’em. You’re not engineered to survive where we’re going.”
“Are you?”
She squinted at him, lips pressed together in a bloodless line. Somehow the question, as ordinary to him as asking about the weather, had offended her.
She shrugged it off. “Guess you could call it that. Few million years of the best engineering no money can buy. What about the shots we told you to get?”
There’d been dozens of shots, starting with a bewildering array of antiallergens and intestinal fauna, and ending with cholera, tuberculosis, polio, yellow fever, and avian influenza. Arkady had spent hours in his bare white room on Gilead Orbital—a prison cell for all intents and purposes, though there was no lock on the door and he would never have thought to call it a prison before Arkasha—trying to guess where he was going from the shots Korchow had given him. But no immigration authority anywhere in UN space required that battery of inoculations; if such a hellhole existed in the vast swathe of the galaxy that still belonged to humans, they were ashamed enough to keep it secret.
“Good,” Osnat was saying. “An allergic reaction doesn’t mean sniffles and a runny nose down there.”
“Down where? Where are we going? Please, Osnat.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” She sighted down the barrel of her gun at him, and the smile that drifted across her face was as thin as the clouds in a terraformed sky. “We’re going to run you through the blockade, golem. You’re going to Earth.”