“Human nature, Arkady. A beast you must be getting to know rather well by now. Humans aren’t fundamentally selfless. They don’t give themselves, not in the way we do. And they don’t trust any gift”—again that unsettling use of the word—“that’s given too easily.”
Neither did Andrej Korchow. One more way in which the Knowles-Syndicate spy had become as much human as construct. But Arkady suspected that was a thought best kept to himself.
“Then this really is a gift?” he asked. “Not some kind of trap?”
“It’s both. Like everything in life worth having…or giving for that matter. In the short term it may throw Earth into chaos, which will hurt the Ring and therefore help us. Or at least that’s how Knowles sold our plan to the central steering committee. But in the long term it just might give the human race a chance to outrun extinction.”
“And how does that help us? Last time I saw humans anywhere near Gilead they were trying to kill me.”
“Those were UN colonists and genetic constructs, not humans. And even their Ring-side paymasters are as posthuman as you and I are, no matter what their Schengen implants say. The only wild humans left are here on Earth. And as for why we’d want to save them…well, you’re the ecophysicist, not me.”
Arkady knew the theory. It was politically unacceptable, especially in the newer Syndicates like Motai and Aziz. But in scientific circles people talked openly about the problem. The Syndicates were dogged by the question that lurked behind every population-wide genetic engineering project: What were the engineers splicing out of the genome that they wouldn’t know they needed until it was too late?
In a strictly genetic sense, the Syndicates, like any genetically modified posthuman population, were parasites. In order to survive permanently they needed to be embedded within a larger human population that they could draw genetic material from and fall back on if things ever went catastrophically wrong. No posthuman along the Periphery had the genetic diversity to maintain a viable population indefinitely. And though the Ring was huge, its population was so homogenized by commercial splicing that it had a worse diversity deficit than even the Syndicates.
The only piece of “wild” human genome left—and therefore the only safety net if things went wrong—was the rapidly vanishing human population of Earth. The Ring, the Periphery, and even the Syndicates might all be benefiting from Earth’s depopulation in the short term, but in the long term it was disastrous.
And Korchow, for his own devious and cynical motives, had decided to avert the disaster…or at least that was what he seemed to want to make Arkady think at this move in the game.
“Why couldn’t you have told me all this before?” Arkady asked.
“I’m sorry, Arkady. I couldn’t risk it. I had to get you past Moshe. I had to get you to Earth. I told you what I thought you needed to know to accomplish that. And the rest…well, I’m telling you now, aren’t I?”
“But are you telling me the truth, or just the next lie?”
Korchow grinned in genuine amusement. “So there is something behind the pretty face after all,” he said. “Arkasha always said there was.”
“I want to talk to him.”
“You will.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“When?”
There was something fundamentally uncategorizable about Korchow. For weeks, even months, Arkady would think of him as a chimera who had become more human than construct by the constant stress and abrasion of living with humans. But then, just when he had decided that he knew what Korchow was, the spy’s artifices would slough away to reveal the rigid scaffolding of ideology that everything else hung upon.
“You will speak to Arkasha,” Korchow told him in a voice that wasn’t even remotely human, “when I believe it is in both of your best interests to speak to each other. Which is to say when it is in the best interest of the Syndicates. Unless you no longer believe that those two things are one and the same?”
“No. Of course not. I didn’t mean to…forgive me.”
“That Arkasha continues to defy me is one thing. I expect it of him. But you,Arkady. You disappoint me. Back on Gilead I decided you were ready to do your part and make the necessary sacrifices. Don’t make me wonder if I was wrong about you.”
“I just—”
Korchow held up a hand. “Don’t. If what you’ve already seen of humans—the misery right outside this window, for God’s sake—hasn’t convinced you of how important it is that the Syndicates survive and thrive, then we have nothing else to say to each other.”
Back at the house on Abulafia Street, Osnat took charge of Arkady as seamlessly as a relay runner taking the baton from a teammate. Twenty minutes later, Arkady was sitting in the helicopter, buffeted by wind and noise, while Osnat slept in the seat across from him as comfortably as if she were safe on the ground and tucked into her bed.
Arkady’s brain spun feverishly, turning over every word Korchow had spoken, inspecting every nuance and inflection as if he were reading tea leaves. Any way he looked at it he reached the same conclusion:
Arkasha was alive. Arkasha was alive and not cooperating, whatever Korchow meant by that. And if Arkasha wasn’t cooperating, then Arkasha was still himself.
And that single fact changed everything.
Could Osnat be trusted? He looked at her face, grimy with sweat and khamsindust. Everything he knew of her said no…but he’d seen something in her face when she looked at him, something harder and more honest than pity, that whispered yes.
He would ask her. He would ask her the next time she brought his food. He’d beg if he had to.
Because if Arkasha really was alive and unbroken, then Arkady would run any risk and suffer any humiliation to save him.
NOVALIS
The Six Percent Rule
Experience from prior missions has shown the vital importance of allowing for the impact of unpredictable small group dynamics; SGD has often been a determining factor in the success or failure of such missions. Failure to address SGD at the preplanning stage can rarely be remedied en route. Attempts to replace sensible SGD planning with artificial authority hierarchies have been farcically disastrous.Thus, a critical task of mission preplanning is to ensure that individual crew members enhance, rather than detract from, each other’s ability to complete the mission. Distasteful though such considerations may be to the ideologues among us, space is ruled by reality, not dogma. [1]
The Big Wood: 6:00 A.M., third day postlandfall.
Sunbeams sliced through the forest canopy a hundred meters overhead and slanted toward Arkady through the green haze of quivering leaf edges and fluttering insect wings. There was still a predawn, underwater cast to the forest light, but the night’s deep-sea shadows were fast giving way to the midmorning glow of shallow surf under sunlight.
Arkady had found a dacetine, one of the Beautiful Ants, and she was on the hunt.
She’d spied a springtail grazing on the waterlogged edge of a fallen leaf. Arkady watched her stalk her prey, her finely sculpted legs lifting and arcing with the graceful precision of the huntress she was. He knew what would happen, but, no matter how many times he watched it, the hunt retained its otherworldly magic.
The dacetine would approach the springtail, her movements growing slower and more deliberate with every step, until she stood so close that it was grazing literally between the razor-toothed prongs of her widespread mandibles. She would let the fine hairs between her mandibles, so delicate that they were invisible except under a microscope, brush across the oblivious springtail’s thorax. And then, twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, her mandibles would snap closed with enough force to cut the poor springtail in two.
1
The Subcommittee wishes to note that sentences three (3) and five (5) of this paragraph (emphasis added) were proposed for inclusion by the Member from KnowlesSyndicate. The remaining subcommittee members reached a consensus that the language of sentences three (3) and five (5) was inappropriately provocative, and that sentences three (3) and five (5) should consequently be expunged from the final text. The Member from KnowlesSyndicate categorically refused to join the afore-referenced consensus or agree to deletion of the sentence at issue, thus rendering a unanimous consensus impossible. In the interest of maintaining intersyndicate amity and proper decision-making procedures, the remaining Subcommittee Members concluded that the most appropriate action in the face of this unprecedented situation was to append some record of the committee’s deliberations. The Member from AzizSyndicate wishes formally to note that the wording of sentence one (1) also does not meet with his approval. The Member from MotaiSyndicate wishes formally to note that the wording of sentences one (1), two (2), and four (4) are counterrevolutionary. The Member from KnowlesSyndicate wishes formally to note that the Member from AzizSyndicate and the Member from MotaiSyndicate are blithering idiots…