“That’s ’cause you’re not pointing your nose the right way.”
He glanced at her in confusion, then followed her hiked thumb skyward and finally saw it.
The Ring. Strung out along the declination of the equatorial belt some 35,786 kilometers overhead, it was faintly visible today through one of those quirky contrapositions of star and satellite that physics teachers throughout UN and Syndicate space set their frustrated students to calculate. The Ring wasn’t an actual ring, of course; just the area of space that contained all of Earth’s stable geosynchronous orbits. But it had been packed so full of residential and manufacturing habitats and commsats and solar collectors and offshore tax shelters, that by now it was as visible and clearly defined as the rings of Saturn.
The Ring’s traffic control and dynamic stabilization requirements were so impossibly complex that they had been the primary driving force behind the evolution of Emergent AI over the course of the last three centuries. The Ring was also—because of the sheer volume of reflective metal whipping around up there—one of the thousands of complex mutually interacting causes of the artificial ice age. A little reduced insolation here; a little increased albedo there; a gentle nudge of the coupled water transport systems of ocean and atmosphere. Arkady, terraformer that he was, appreciated the subtlety of the system: controlling chaos by the flutter of the butterfly’s wing rather than the fall of the sledgehammer. And of course the Ring’s terraformers, prodded onward by the unmitigated disaster they’d inherited, had done what station designers on the thinly populated Syndicate planets had never had to think about doing: They had crafted an orbital Ring that was so perfectly integrated into the biome of the planet below it that Ring and planet could almost be thought of as a single organism.
Still…he didn’t think Osnat was suggesting that the ice age had caused the Interfaithers.
“We’re poor,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “And the Ring is rich. And we have to watch Ring-siders being rich every night on the evening spins. Knowing that we’ll never have what they have. Knowing that our children, if we’re lucky enough to have any, won’t live nearly as long or as well as their children. Knowing that everything that counts in our lives is decided up there by people who think Earth is just a sponge they can squeeze the water out of. That kind of thing makes you hate, Arkady. And no one’s ever invented a better excuse for hate than God. The Americans figured that one out a few centuries ago, and now we’re all catching their new religion.”
“You speak as if the Interfaithers had taken control of America.”
“Not officially. Unofficially…well, just look at all those freaky Constitutional amendments they keep passing. And they haven’t had a president or even a member of Congress in living memory who wasn’t a member of the Interfaith.”
“But they can’t doanything, can they? They have no power. They’re not UN members. They have no modern technology…”
“They have oil. And they have an army. And they’re willing to burn both. That gives them power.”
“They’re not going to bid on the weapon, are they?”
“I’m sure they’d try to if they knew about it. And all they have to do to get a foot in the door is threaten to tattle to UNSec. That’s the game we’re all playing. We want your little bauble for ourselves, but if we can’t keep it to ourselves, then better our next-door neighbor should have it than the UN getting hold of it. After all, if the Palestinians or even the Americans get hold of a genetic weapon, they mightuse it, or they might just threaten to use it in order to get a bigger water allowance. But if the UN gets hold of it, you can bet your life they’ll use it sooner or later. They’re not afraid to fight dirty. Look what they did to ZhangSyndicate.” Arkady caught his breath at that name and had to force down a nauseating surge of panic. “In the end,” Osnat continued, either not noticing or misinterpreting his silence, “the only number the UN cares about is the one we all try not to talk about: Every person born on Earth represents an eleven-million-liter lifetime allowance of water that can’t go to the Ring. It’s all about water, Arkady. Everything on this planet comes down to sex and water.”
“And God,” he said, glancing at yet another passing Interfaither.
“Oh, you poor sap. Haven’t you figured it out yet? God’s just a way to pump up your ethnic group’s birth rate so you can demand a bigger share of the water.”
“You seem to have a lot of theories,” Arkady said politely. “Do you have an interest in sociobiology? Have you ever thought about studying it?”
She stared at him for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she laughed. “Don’t tell me you had me pegged as the hooker with the heart of gold. Sorry to disappoint you. My brother’s a comp lit professor at Tel Aviv University. I’m practically considered a half-wit because I quit school after my master’s degree. In polysci. Which is the closest thing we have to what you call sociobiology in the Syndicates.”
“Then how…?”
“How did a nice girl like me go so terribly wrong? What, you thought only poor people joined the army? This is Israel. And I’m not an Enderbot. I’m a real soldier. Or haven’t you figured out the difference yet?”
The house hunched over Abulafia Street like one of the weathered old men who shuffled down the International Zone’s crooked streets and loitered in its shabby coffeehouses. All you could see of it from the street was a high windowless wall whose stone bones were covered with a tattered skin of plaster. The only opening in the wall was a monumental wooden door, its planks so broad and long that Arkady would have been sure they were composite if he hadn’t touched them with his own hands. In one corner of the door, so small it was almost lost in the shadow of the lintel, hung another smaller door. It opened to Osnat’s knock, and they stepped through it into a tall courtyard.
The courtyard had been built for a hotter climate. Its fountain was turned off for the winter already, its rusted pipes tilting forlornly over tiles streaked yellow with khamsindust. Even the roses reminded Arkady less of plants than of construction site scaffolding: two stories of stem and thorn and leaf thrown up against the sagging balconies just to point a few anemic blossoms at what little sun trickled over the encircling roof tiles.
It was a house out of time. The flow and chatter of the street faded away as soon as the gate fell to on its hinges. Even Earth’s stupendous sky was reduced to a precise blue square, as completely submitted to the spare geometry of the building as if it were the roof of the house and not the roof of the whole world.
Osnat stopped, looked around the courtyard, and sneezed. She took a tissue out of her pocket and scrubbed at her nose with it while Arkady averted his eyes politely. “My God, I wish it would rain,” she muttered. “The fucking dust is killing me.”
They waited, though Arkady had no idea what they were waiting for. A water seller passed by in the street outside, calling his wares, but it might have been a voice from another planet. A single petal fell from one of the high rose blossoms and fluttered to the ground, the only moving thing in the visible universe. Then the gate opened behind them, and the most perfect human Arkady had ever seen stepped through it.
Her face possessed such flawless bilateral symmetry that Arkady had to look a second and third time before he decided she wasn’t a genetic construct. Only the subtle blend of race and ethnicity, so different from the distinct ethnic phenomes of the Syndicates, identified the woman as what she was: a member of the heavily genetically engineered Ring-side elite that biogeographers were beginning to describe as a new posthuman quasi-species in its own right. And thinking back to Korchow’s briefings, Arkady had no trouble putting a name to the woman:
Ashwarya Sofaer. Ash to her friends…not that she has any. She’s the closest thing to pure ambition you’ll ever see; a walking cost-benefit analysis of mammalian dominance drives. Ex-Mossad of course, like all the higher powers at GolaniTech. She shouldn’t even be allowed to live on Earth, but she’s grandfathered in under one of their endless loopholes. She spent three years in the Ring as the UN-Mossad liaison, then back to Israel and through the revolving door to GolaniTech. Now that Gavi Shehadeh’s out of the way, she’s probably Didi Halevy’s most likely replacement if and when his enemies succeed in toppling him. As they say on King Saul Boulevard, the revolving door spins both ways. And it’s not out of the question that the lovely Miss Sofaer might be interested in using you to give the proverbial door a good hard push…