“No one.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call Andrej Korchow no one.”
Arkady’s eyes snapped to Moshe’s face, but all he could see in the glare of the bridge lights were the two flat reflective disks of his glasses.
“Of course it was Korchow who told you to ask for Absalom.” Moshe made it sound trivial. Not a lie. Just a practical joke between friends. “He wants us to think Absalom’s back in the game again. He wants us to be so busy worrying about whether Absalom is playing us for fools that we forget to worry about whether you’re doing the same.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The first blow knocked Arkady to his knees. As he tried to stand, Moshe hooked his feet out from under him and delivered a flurry of surgically precise kicks to his stomach and kidneys.
Osnat laughed. But it sounded like a laugh of shock and surprise, not amusement. Arkady even thought he sensed a recoiling in her, a flush of pity under the soldier’s hard loyalty. Or did he just want to sense that?
“Get up,” Moshe said in the bored tones of a man for whom violence was a job like any other.
Arkady tried to stand. He only managed to kneel, head spinning, hands splayed on the cold deck.
Moshe crouched beside Arkady, his face bent so close that his breath caressed the skin of Arkady’s cheek. “I can’t let you lie to me, Arkady. You can see that, can’t you?”
A waiting silence settled over the bridge. Arkady realized that Moshe expected an answer to this apparently rhetorical question.
“Yes,” he gasped. Just the effort of speaking made him feel like he was going to throw up.
“How many Arkadys do they detank a year?” Moshe asked. “Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand?”
The real number was probably on the high end of Moshe’s guess. But Arkady had never asked about the actual numbers. He’d never even thought of asking. And for the first time in his life he wondered why. “I don’t know,” he answered at last. “A lot, I guess.”
“A lot, you guess.” A cold edge crept into Moshe’s voice. “You’re a piece of equipment, Arkady, as mass-produced as sewer-pipe sections. And if we can’t get what we need from you, we’ll throw you away and order a replacement part. Just like your Syndicate’s already done. Or do you want to tell me I’ve got that wrong and you weren’t condemned meat from the second they shipped you out here?”
Osnat stirred restlessly. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Moshe. Give him a break. Can’t you see he doesn’t know anything?”
“He told you that, did he? And you believed him? Or did you just take a look into those big puppy-dog eyes and decide to trust him?”
Osnat flushed to the roots of her hair. Arkady felt the rest of the room freeze. What had Moshe done to make them so frightened of him? But perhaps a man like Moshe didn’t need to doanything to frighten people.
Moshe dropped back into Hebrew, speaking with quiet but unmistakable anger. Arkady struggled to understand, but the unfamiliar words spilled past too quickly. That it was a dressing-down was clear, though; Osnat absorbed the rebuke with the immovable stoicism of a soldier on parade ground.
Was she a soldier? Had he already been drawn so deep into the tangled web of Israeli Intelligence that he was dealing with government agents and not hired corporate muscle? If so, then which stray thread of the web had quivered in response to Arkady’s carefully choreographed offer of defection? And how much did the success of his mission—and with it Arkasha’s freedom—depend on his guessing correctly?
What if they’re Mossad?
The question spooled across his mind accompanied by old spinfeed of bombings and assassinations. He pushed the images aside. All Mossad agents couldn’t be vicious killers, he told himself, any more than their opposite Palestinian numbers could be the peace-loving posthuman sympathizers that Syndicate propagandists insisted they were. And as long as he kept Korchow happy, it didn’t much matter what the truth was.
Moshe turned back to Arkady, his voice cold and academic again. “Listen, Arkady. I have no personal grudge against you. I’m not some little boy pulling the wings off flies during recess. But the road to Absalom goes through me. And if you cross me, if you lie to me, if you so much as quiver in a direction that makes me nervous, I’ll kill you. The police won’t blink. My superiors won’t even give me a slap on the wrist. It’ll be like killing a dog as far as they’re concerned. Less than killing a dog; with a dog there’s always some schlemiel ready to call the animal protection society. And trust me, Arkady, there isno golem protection society.”
They stared at each other, Arkady sweating and panting, Moshe as calm as he’d been before the surreal outbreak of violence. “Do you remember my last question?” Moshe asked.
“Whether Korchow told me to ask for Absalom.”
“Good.”
“But I—”
“Don’t answer now. You’re leaving in the morning. I won’t see you until we’re both on the other side of the blockade. And meanwhile I’d like you to spend the trip thinking about the difference between what Korchow can do for you once you’re on Earth and what I can do for you.”
The freighter had been built in what Arkady thought of as the White Period of UN jumpship design.
For ten or twelve years, in one of those inexplicable emergent phenomena of fashion, white viruflex had come into style simultaneously on all the far-flung UN colonies that habitually sold their obsolete driveships to the Syndicate buyers. Everything that could be made of viruflex was made of viruflex, and every piece of viruflex that could be white was white. White deckplating. White walls. White ventilation grills, white water and power and spinstream conduits. And, hovering in the fading shadows above them, white ceilings with glimmering white recessed-lighting panels.
As Osnat led him through the ship, Arkady remembered with a twinge that he had used just this rather silly example of emergence to explain how ant swarms worked in his first real conversation with Arkasha. Arkasha hadn’t cared for the metaphor. And now, in the face of all this merciless whiteness, Arkady saw why.
The whole ship looked like a euth ward.
It looked like an empty euth ward whose patients had all shut themselves into their rooms and taken their terminal doses. He imagined cold white cells behind all the cold white doors, and cold white beds containing cold white bodies whose limbs and faces betrayed terrible deformities. Or, worse, bodies whose physical perfection hinted at even more horrifying deviations of mind and spirit.
Osnat stopped, tugging at his arm like an adult shepherding a crècheling through a pressure door, and led him into a room that was mercifully empty and ordinary. A battered viruflex chair stood beside a bed made up with square military corners. The blanket on the bed was wool, something Arkady had never seen outside of history spins. He could smell it all the way across the room: a faint animal smell, at once dry and oily.
“Bathroom.” Osnat pointed. “Washing water. Drinking water. Mix ’em up and you’ll be sorry. Recyclables disposal. Biohazards disposal. And biohazards include anything that touches your body until you clear your Syndicate-side flora. You need anything else, press the call button by the door. But only if you really need it. Moshe’s not a patient man.” Her eyes flicked to the corner of the tiny space and she frowned. “Sorry about the ants, by the way. I’ll bring some roach spray if I can find any.”
Arkady followed her glance and saw a gleaming rivulet of amber carapaces that he’d at first mistaken for a crack in the laminated viruflex flooring. “Pharaoh ants,” he said, intrigued by the unexpected discovery. “Is the ship infested?”
“If only it were just the ship. They’re taking over the fucking universe.”
“They’ve always owned it.” He corrected her without a second thought now that he was back on familiar territory. “Vertebrate biomass was negligible compared to ants, even before Earth’s ecological collapse. And as far as any biogeophysical cycles are concerned—”