“So, Major—” Korchow began.
“Oh for God’s sake!” Li burst out. “I don’t give a damn if it’s an original Eames! Can we make it through one goddamn minutewithout you interrupting me?”
“I beg your pardon?” Korchow asked.
“Never mind,” she muttered savagely. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Of course. I forget that you’re not quite the woman you were when we last met. How islife in the future, Major? Is being the ghost in the machine everything you hoped it would be?”
“Better than life in the Syndicate chicken coop.”
“Are you so sure of that? My offer’s still open—”
“Catherine,” the machine interrupted, “why are you even talking to him?”
“—I could get you on a Long March Rocket out of Guangdong Province next week. You’d be on Gilead within a month.”
“The last person you made that offer to’s dead,” Li pointed out.
“Yes.” Korchow agreed placidly. “But she put her hand up the wrong skirt. And humans are so touchy about that sort of thing.”
“Just drop it,” the machine said, looking hard at Korchow. “She’s not interested.”
“My, things havechanged.” Korchow looked back and forth between the two of them. “The Catherine Li I remember never needed anyone to tell people what she thought.”
“If you two are done socializing,” Ash said, striding in on the heels of two hard young men whose skin was marked by the subdermal filigree of Earth-illegal wetware, “perhaps this would be a convenient moment to make the introductions.”
“Assuming all the bidders have arrived?” Korchow asked, letting the question hang in the air unanswered for a moment before he retreated to the shadows of his wing chair.
It seemed that all the bidders had indeed arrived. And when Arkady had sorted out the bidders from the coteries of bodyguards that he was starting to suspect were a routine cost of doing business in Jerusalem, there seemed to be three of them.
First the machine and his companion.
Second an elderly Palestinian man whose suit looked like something from a pre-Evacuation history book, and whose immaculate cotton headdress gleamed like a pearl in the dusky light that threaded through the shutters. Arkady had no trouble recognizing this bidder either: Shaikh Yassin, spearhead of the Palestinian hard religious right…and not at all the man Korchow had hoped the Palestinians would send.
“At last,” Yassin said when Moshe introduced Arkady to him. “Abu Felastineh, blessed be his children, and his children’s children, sends his greetings.”
That wasn’t a name, Arkady remembered from Korchow’s briefings, but an honorific used to protect the anonymity and physical safety of the president of Palestine. Abu Felastineh.The Father of Palestine. And by now Arkady knew better than to begin to try to guess what any title that contained the word fatherreally meant to humans.
The Palestinian bowed courteously and extended a hand to Arkady. Arkady stepped forward to shake it…and ran into a solid wall of muscle as the man’s grim-faced bodyguards surged around him.
“Forgive the boy.” Korchow had stepped up behind Arkady so smoothly that it was impossible to say when exactly he’d left his chair. Now he slipped a hand around Arkady’s arm and drew him back a few cautious steps. “We in the Syndicates lack the institution of political assassination. We are, as I like to say, a too-trusting people.”
“A too-trusting people,” Yassin repeated. He made it sound as if the words were his and not Korchow’s. He made it sound as if he were the man who had invented the very idea of words.
“Exactly so.” Korchow bowing yet again and drawing Arkady back to safety under the unblinking gaze of the bodyguards.
“So how’s the water business?” Catherine Li interrupted.
It took Arkady a moment to realize she was speaking to Yassin—largely because she spoke in a casual, almost confrontational tone that had nothing to do with the way every other person in the room had spoken to him.
The Palestinian turned slowly to face her. Then he looked past her at Cohen. “I am always delighted to see the ghost of my grandfather’s friend. Your young associate seems to have been sadly misinformed, however. My family has no ties to the water trade, and I should be most sorry to think that you should have overheard any unfounded and malicious rumors to the contrary.”
“My dear fellow,” the machine murmured, patting the air with both hands as if he were smoothing down the hackles of a possibly dangerous dog. “Not at all. Nothing of the sort. My, er, associate is a bit overemotional. Young people, you know.”
“He sells water?” Arkady whispered to Korchow.
“Absolutely not,” came the answer, whispered like his question from mouth to ear. “Shaikh Yassin is a perfectly respectable arms merchant.”
“Arkady,” Ash said. “Come here.”
Arkady wheeled around—and found himself face-to-face with the final bidder.
“This,” Ash announced, “is Turner.”
Arkady searched his mind for some memory of the exotic-sounding name and found none. What kind of a name was Turner anyway? And why hadn’t Korchow told him about this bidder?
He tried to take stock of the man, but all he could glean was a series of piecemeal impressions. A wrinkle-resistant button-down shirt stretched over an incipient potbelly and a weight lifter’s muscles; a soft-palmed hand that had never done the hard work of surviving on a Syndicate space station, but still had the strength nearly to crush Arkady’s fingers; freshly laundered hair combed precisely over a pink, smooth, wrinkle-free face and the coldest blue eyes Arkady had ever seen.
“Good to know you!” Turner said in a voice that took possession of the room just as aggressively as his big body did.
“Good to know you,” Arkady repeated, assuming this was some unknown human-style formal greeting.
Turner laughed loudly. He seemed to be a man who did everything loudly. “Hear you’re here to sell us something, Arkady. You got the goods, or are we gonna not be friends in the morning?”
“Um…”
“Just kidding!” He dealt Arkady a staggering blow on the shoulder.
“No hard feelings, hey?”
“Uh…sure.” Arkady rubbed at his shoulder.
Ash, meanwhile, had been watching this exchange with a vaguely amused expression on her smooth features. “Shall we begin?” she asked.
One of the guards dragged a heavy plush velvet armchair into the center of the room and positioned a standing lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly on the face of the unfortunate person sitting in it.
“Arkady?” Ash said pointedly.
Arkady hesitated, then walked obediently over to the chair and sat down.
As he did so the bidders sorted themselves onto the chairs and sofas which had already been placed around the edges of the room.
Their eyes turned to Arkady. He licked his lips and cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. He glanced around the circle of expectant faces and thought that they looked like wolves watching a hamstrung caribou. He glimpsed the flickering pinprick of a black box status light behind Catherine Li’s left pupil—another new thing in a day full of new things—and wondered what other watchers on what distant planets were hearing his tale. Then he looked down at his hands and kept his gaze there, knowing that he was going to have to lie and that he would lose the thread of the lie if his concentration faltered.
“My survey team was assigned to evaluate Novalis for terraforming and settlement—” he began.
“Hang on,” Li interrupted, leaning forward in her chair with an intent, predatory expression. “There’s no Novalis on any UN charts. What star does it belong to? What are the old Astronomical Survey coordinates? Where is it in relation to the treaty lines?”
Arkady began to glance at Korchow, then stopped the movement and looked instead toward Ash.