“You make it sound so…bleak.”
“Do I?” She smirked. “I don’t recall my ever saying that.”
“Thirty-year contracts and temporary workpairings aren’t about some family squabble over the means of genetic production, Osnat. We’re not fighting for a bigger share of the genomic pie. We’re fighting for survival as a species. You people are always complaining about living in the ruins of a broken planet. Well, we don’t even have ruins. We’re out in space without a lifeboat. Every crèche run, every piece of genetic design, every terraforming mission—and yes, even culling and renormalization—is dictated by the cold equations of survival and extinction. And one moment of carelessness or selfishness could be all it takes to tip the balance toward extinction. You can make a face if you want to, but that’s the reality. And, frankly, what does humanity have to put against it? Chaos. Bickering, rutting, selfish, maladaptive cha—”
“Whoa, Arkady!” Osnat interrupted. At first he thought she was angry, but then he realized she was trying not to laugh. “I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.”
“Come on, Arkady. I got clearance to take you for a little walk. Told Moshe you were going to die of vitamin D deficiency if he didn’t let you out in the sun sooner or later.”
Arkady, spliced for survival in space, was perfectly capable of synthesizing his own vitamin D; but he thought about Osnat’s peculiarly human prudishness about genetic engineering and decided that an unnecessary walk would probably hurt him less than another argument with the only sentient being currently on speaking terms with him.
Osnat’s “little walk” turned out to be a bit more than he’d bargained for.
Arkady had always enjoyed being planetside until then—a notable, though highly adaptive, deviation from the stationer’s agoraphobia that was becoming increasingly widespread among the younger cohorts of most Syndicates’ crèches. But the deep, dense undergrowth of the temperate zones of Gilead and Novalis had done nothing to prepare him for the environment into which Osnat introduced him.
He was amazed by the cold, first of all. He’d known, of course, about the ice age; but somehow he’d still imagined that a desert would be hot. He certainly hadn’t expected the dusting of snow that chilled his feet and clotted in the treads of his boot soles.
Nor had he expected the inhabitedness of the landscape. Nothing on Earth was pristine, it turned out; what he took for granted on Gilead or any of the other new and still-empty planets he’d worked on was long gone even in this desolate place. At every dip and turn of the land they would stumble on some artifact of the desert’s former population. Junked cars. Rusting water tanks. Coils of barbed wire still draped between the leftover bones of old fences. An entire apartment complex, built of rebar-reinforced concrete and sheathed in now-peeling white stucco, abandoned so abruptly that there were still faded shreds of laundry hanging from the windows like flags put out to celebrate a victory that had never, in the end, come to pass.
“Is this Israeli or Palestinian?” Arkady asked.
“Could be either. They’ve changed the lines so often that settlements are always getting stranded on the wrong side.”
“And no one moves in after the settlers leave?”
Osnat shrugged. “Israelis don’t want to live in Arab houses. Palestinians don’t want to live in Jewish houses. And anyway, it’s cheaper to build new.”
“It always comes back to money with humans, doesn’t it?”
Osnat laughed bitterly. “If only it did! Money’s nice and clean and simple compared to most of what goes on down here.”
They saw only one sign among the wreckage of present human occupation: a vast dusty herd of sheep swirling in the bottom of a wadi like a spring flood. To Arkady, station-raised, the sight was inconceivable. How much biomass did these creatures consume? What kind of organic load did they place on the ecosystem that supported them? What king’s ransom of water did they consume every day? How many accumulated tons of grass, insects, and annelids were necessary to allow for the extravagance of a single sheep? And for what? A scrap of wool? A bit of meat that could be produced more quickly and cheaply in the most primitive viral manufacturing tanks? It was enough to make him long for the elegant economy of a worm.
Long after he’d stopped wondering if there was any purpose to the forced march Osnat was leading him on, they topped a steep mesa and looked out over a flat valley that contained what appeared, at first glance, to be a remote desert town. It was empty, however. And as they dropped off the ridge and moved down the single silent street, Arkady began to understand that it had never really been a town at all. The buildings were all made of whitewashed cement block, and their walls were massively scarred with bullet holes. But there were no shards of broken glass anywhere—because none of the buildings had ever had windows. And the yellow dust of the desert and the khamsinhad drifted through the open doors and windows to pile up in the corners of dark, warrenlike rooms that had clearly never been finished for human habitation.
The place was like the rough draft of a town. An idea of a town, in which a very real battle—or perhaps many of them—had been fought.
“What is this place?” he asked, shivering.
“Hell town.”
“What was it for?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Osnat?”
“What?”
“Could we…can we talk about what we talked about the other day? You know, about that friend of mine I was telling you about?”
“And why the hell should I do that?” she asked.
“I just thought—”
“You just thought nothing,” she snapped. “If you’ve got something to say, you can say it to Moshe. I’m not in the business of doling out charity or letting people cry on my shoulder.”
She pulled off her jacket, moving with rough irritable gestures, as if annoyance had pushed her body temperature above acceptable limits. And then she did something that set Arkady’s pulse racing with hope and terror. With her right hand, partially shielded by the camouflage swirl of her coat, she pointed skyward.
It was a momentary gesture, gone so quickly that if Arkady’s eyes hadn’t been sharpened by the fear and tension of the past weeks, he would have missed it entirely. But its meaning was unmistakable: they were being watched.
A shadow, no more than the shadow of a passing sparrow, flitted across the rocky ground. High in the sky something flashed silver in the morning sunlight. A surveillance drone. Had it been there on their prior walks? Yes, he realized; he’d noticed it but assumed it was just a passing shuttle or a satellite in low orbit. Who could possibly pay attention to all the scrap metal humans had chucked into orbit around their planet?
He dissembled, scrambling to pick up the conversation where it had faltered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean to imply that I was asking you for something. I just…wanted to thank you for what you’ve done so far.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“But you have. The books. The walks. I…I appreciate it. You’re a gracious person.”
The sunburned forehead wrinkled in bemusement, and she cocked her head again to get a better look at him. “Well! That’s sure as fuck the first time I’ve ever been called gracious!”
Carefully, trying not to be too obvious about it, Arkady looked in the direction he thought she’d been pointing.
A house—or rather, a nonhouse—just like the others along the street. He went into it. Osnat followed him.
Inside, in the dark, she prowled around him like a cat. She was in a hurry, he realized. And she was trembling with nerves or fear—a thing that scared him as much as anything in the past weeks had scared him.