Ash had the Ring-sider’s clothes to go with her Ring-sider’s body: a sleek white suit programmed to hug every curve of her lean body; high-heeled vat leather shoes that made her long legs seem even longer than they were; impeccably styled hair slicked back from an impeccably made-up face that gave away absolutely nothing of the person behind it.
Ash and Osnat shook hands. Osnat looked stubby and flyblown next to the other woman.
“Captain Hoffman,” Ash said.
“Colonel.” Osnat gave the word a parade ground lilt that suggested respect entirely unalloyed by personal affection.
“Moshe said you’d come over to us,” Ash said. “How did he convince you to make the jump?”
“He told me the grass might be greener on your side of the fence.”
“It is.” Ash eyed Osnat speculatively. “As green as you want it to be. We should talk sometime.”
“Sure,” Osnat said, obviously not meaning it.
A frown of irritation compressed Ash’s beautiful lips for a moment, then vanished before Arkady could even be sure it had been there.
Briefly, she explained to Osnat that the room was being readied, that the bidders were still arriving, that she would make the introductions.
“And then what?” Osnat asked.
“And then we’ll see.”
Ash shook hands with Osnat again and swept off into the house without having so much as glanced at Arkady. Osnat stared after her with a troubled expression, rubbing the palm of her right hand on her pant leg as if she were trying to rub off the smell of the other woman.
Arkady, child of a world born only two years before his own birth, had never seen any place like the room he was eventually ushered into. Even the smell…the smell of wood and wool and furniture wax and all the other priceless things that were rare and inconceivable luxuries to the space-born. He tried to focus on the other people in the room, to match their faces with Korchow’s descriptions. But his eyes kept floating to the whirling ceiling fans, the shivering ladders of light and shade cast by the slatted shutters, the cedar and sandalwood shadows under the high rafters, the complex patterns of rugs and drapery, the nuanced colors of walls and windowsills and floor tiles, the endless tumble of old and incomprehensible objects scattered over the polished tables and sideboards.
When he finally picked out Korchow, slouched in the shadowy depths of a leather wing chair, he saw that the KnowlesSyndicate A was laughing silently at him.
“Poor Arkady. You look even loster than you are.”
Arkady started toward him, stopped, looked at Osnat.
“Go ahead,” she said, lenient in Moshe’s absence.
Korchow put an arm around Arkady’s shoulders and gave him the traditional kiss of greeting. The sight of the Knowles A, after the weeks of isolation among humans, nearly unmanned Arkady. Back on Gilead, Korchow had seemed more than half human. Now he looked like home.
“I can’t begin to tell you how glad I am to see you safe and sound, Arkady.” Korchow had affected the avuncular air of an older series speaking to a younger member of his own geneline, but his smile remained as bland and carefully rationed as ever. It was the same smile Korchow had worn during the tense weeks of interrogation, and Arkady still sensed that Korchow’s every move was part of an act played out not for its apparent audience but for the unseen watcher behind the camera.
Arkady returned Korchow’s kiss. “May we do our part,” he said, taking refuge in formality and formula.
“Your part?” For a moment the diplomat’s mask gave way to a look of disdain and anger. Or was that merely another mask, just as calculated as the first? And if so, what audience was it intended for? “Is that what you think you’ve been doing?”
Before Arkady could answer, the door opened and the first bidders entered.
“Jesus wept,” someone said.
Arkady turned to see the man-machine from the airport and the woman soldier who had accompanied him. This time, however, they were staring at Korchow.
“I should have known you’d be at the bottom of this.” The machine sounded weary, as if the weight of unpleasant memories that Korchow suggested was too heavy for his shunt’s human shoulders.
“How can a mere collection of neural networks and Toffoli gates attain such heights of melodrama?” Korchow countered in a voice that gave away even less than his smile did. “I’m behind nothing. I didn’t even know that poor Arkady was leaving us until he turned up in Maris Station. At which point we regrettably”—he glanced at Osnat—“lost track of him. Naturally, we were deeply concerned for his safety, the political situation being what it is. But now we have found our lost lamb again.”
“Lucky little lamb,” the machine drawled, his eyes sliding sideways toward Arkady.
“You’re not one of the bidders?” the woman asked Korchow incredulously.
“No, no, Major. You misapprehend the situation. My only interest is in ensuring that Arkady retain the ability to exercise his…what’s that phrase you humans are always tossing around…free will?”
The woman didn’t return Korchow’s smile. She leaned into his space, her jaw shoved forward pugnaciously, and tapped him on the chest firmly enough for Arkady to hear the thump of her index finger on his sternum. “I’m watching you,” she said. “I’m tracking you, Korchow, and don’t you fucking forget it.”
Korchow’s smile remained firmly in place, but he tugged at his collar and fingered his old war wound. It was the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic.
“My dear Major—”
“Just plain Li now, thanks to you.”
“Seeing you is always so…eventful. I sincerely hope we can avoid gunplay this time.”
“That’s up to you,” the woman said.
That was when Arkady finally put the stray clues together and realized who she was. Major Catherine Li, UNSec First Expeditionary Force, aka the renegade construct Caitlyn Perkins, aka the Butcher of Gilead.
You wouldn’t know she was a Zhang construct if you weren’t looking for the resemblance. But she’d had plastic surgery. They’d said that at the trial. And of course she was a corporate-tanked construct, so you had to allow for the changes the Zhangs had made to their geneset after the Breakaway in order to tailor their phenotype to their own needs as free beings instead of corporate property. Once you did that, the lines of the murdered Zhang constructs shone through her stolid face and muscular body as clearly as printed letters through a piece of paper held up to sunlight.
How could a child born into corporate slavery have grown up to fight a war for the very corporations who had enslaved her? How, being what she was, could she have done what she’d done? And how could she have done it for the same humans who had given the order to turn ZhangSyndicate, with all its crèches and its genebanks, into a firegutted ghost station? Suddenly Arkady found that he was having no trouble at all looking convincingly frightened.
While Arkady was coming to terms with Li’s presence, the AI drifted over to the side table beneath one of the tall windows and began inspecting the artfully scattered objets d’arton its polished wood surface. It glanced back toward its companion and cleared its throat delicately. Could such a being have the normal fears and worries and apprehensions of a real person? If so, Arkady would have sworn the machine was trying to head off a conversation that frightened it.