All hypocritical nonsense when they both knew that everyone took the fall eventually.
And the money.
It was amazing how no one ever, ever, ever turned down the money.
“Fine,” Li said. “How long do I have to think about it?”
“As long as you want,” Ash said.
She offered the lie so sweetly that it was almost believable.
As Li stepped into the wet street, she almost collided with an old man hurrying home or to synagogue or to wherever normal people went on the last night of the year in Jerusalem.
“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” he said, bowing and touching a withered hand to his hat brim.
He couldn’t see her face, she realized; the lobby was too bright behind her, the street too dark; and the fine drizzle scattered the electric lights into a misty halo around her head and shoulders.
She returned the gesture, instinctively turning her wrist to hide the fine gunmetal-gray tracery of her wire job.
“May you be inscribed in the Book of Life,” she repeated numbly.
THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS
I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. The Monkey’s Paw of skin and bone is quite as deadly as anything cast out of steel or iron…The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.
The only thing Arkady ever remembered about being interrogated by Turner was the vomiting.
“Tell me again?” he kept asking Osnat over the course of the next several days and nights.
And she kept repeating to him again and again, with a patience that seemed touchingly out of character, how they’d flown to Tel Aviv and landed on the roof of GolaniTech’s corporate headquarters in the research park over near the university’s science campus—surely he remembered all the grass? And the “little pipes coming out of the ground” (his words) which were called sprinklers and from which the Israelis actually threw water away every night.
Ash had come out to meet them herself. She’d been very nice, very polite. She’d apologized for the inconvenience, warned about possible side effects, which were supposed to be mild. And then she’d turned him over to Turner.
Arkady remembered none of it.
“Some of the talking drugs do mess with your memory. Supposedly the brain shuts down to protect itself, same as after a strong head blow. But nothing like this. Either you’re a lot more biochemically tweaked than the average UN construct, or it’s interfering with some prior conditioning.” She gave him a dark look. “That’s what Turner seemed to think. He got pretty steamed about it. Wanted to know what Korchow had done to you, and why.”
“Did I say?”
Osnat snorted. “You were a fucking zombie. If Korchow meant to rig you not to be able to talk under drugs, he did a pretty bang-up job of it. Maybe too bang-up. You don’t want to be drugproof, Arkady. Not in a world this fucking full of mean people.”
This sort of pronouncement was part and parcel of Osnat’s new attitude toward Arkady, which seemed to be best summed up by the proposition that he was in need of some seriously fierce mothering whether he wanted it or not.
He knew it didn’t mean anything. He knew that Osnat and Moshe were running a good cop bad cop act on him. But it still worked. And he couldn’t stop it from working. In the absence of any other alternative, even a friendship founded on lies is better than solitude.
And in the meantime Arkady’s sense of isolation was broadening and deepening. Raised in the close-knit world of the Syndicates, he had never truly had to come to terms with solitude. Days passed during which he felt no point of contact with the world of living, thinking, feeling beings outside his prison cell, as if his skin were tens of thousands of kilometers wide and he was gazing at them across a Green Line of the heart that no touch, no words, no feeling could penetrate.
“So. Arkady. Answer a personal question for me.”
They were sitting in Arkady’s little cell over the remains of the two dinner trays Osnat had brought in from wherever the food came from. Osnat had taken to eating at least one meal a day with him most days. Again, Arkady knew it was part of a calculated plan to win his trust. And, again, it didn’t matter; it worked anyway. He was too lonely for it not to work.
“Those Syndicate spins. I got dragged to one a few months ago, never mind how. The Time of Cruel Miracles.”
“You saw The Time of Cruel Miracles? Where—”
“At the Castro. They always show Syndicate flicks there. ’Cause you people are all…well, never mind, that’s not the point. My question is this: Is that spin considered art?”
“Uh…well, not the spin necessarily. But it was based on a famous novel by Rumi.”
Osnat’s brows knit in confusion. “Rumi with an R? I’ve never heard of R’s. How many series do you have, anyway?”
“No, no. It’s a pen name. Rumi was a KnowlesSyndicate A. From the same series as Andrej Korchow, actually. That whole series can be…um…odd. Anyway, he was mostly a poet, but he wrote one famous novel. And the spin you saw is a very sensationalistic and simplistic version of that novel.”
“Commercial, you mean.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know that term.”
“Popular.”
“Well, it certainly was popular.”
“So. At the end of the spin the hero and his lover kill themselves, right?”
“Right.”
“And the friend I went to see it with said that always happens in Syndicate spins. The heroes start out fighting with each other, and then they fall in love, and then they have a lovers’ suicide pact and kill themselves.”
That was selling Rumi’s novel a bit short, Arkady thought. But he had to admit that it sounded like a pretty fair rendering of the average run of Syndicate movies.
“So my question,” Osnat said, “is why? Why do they always kill themselves? Why do you people like watchingthat stuff?”
“Well, it sounds like some humans like watching it too,” he countered. “Why don’t you ask them why?”
She gave him an impatient glare. “They like it because you’d have to be either blind or dead not to enjoy watching that Ahmed Aziz fellow take his clothes off.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Arkady said wryly. “He’s not my type.”
Osnat forged on, missing the joke entirely. “My question is why do youwatch it? Do you people get off on watching snuff flicks? Or is it some kind of government propaganda designed to convince you that”—her voice dropped into a really quite respectable imitation of the Ahmeds’ masculine tones—“the collective good is a more beautiful ideal than the futile search for selfish individual happiness?”
“There are plenty of human love stories that end that way,” Arkady protested. “Just think of Romeo and Juliet.”
“Yeah, but the point of Romeo and Julietwas that their families’ vendetta was stupid and pointless and they should have just let the young people be happy.”
“Was it? I don’t recall Shakespeare ever saying that.”
“Don’t be a smartass. It doesn’t change the point that if you ever do get back to your precious Arkasha, the best you can hope for is another twenty years of separation before—assuming you’re good and neither of you pisses anyone off and you both get citizenship—your steering committee might maybe, just maybe, give you permission to be together.”