“You happento know?” Osnat asked in a voice as hard as her eyes.
“I have to live out here,” Gavi said simply.
Osnat turned away, her mouth twitching as if she wanted to spit.
Gavi looked after her for a moment before turning back to Cohen. “You arestaying, though? Aren’t you?”
“We’re staying,” Li broke in. “I just cleared it with EMET.”
“Good. Excellent. Then shall we get down to business? Um…what isbusiness, by the way?”
Cohen cleared his throat. “Would you kids mind terribly going off and playing on your own while I have a private word with Gavi?”
Gavi moved around the room, piling clothes, books, and data cubes on one surface; moving them to another; rearranging and consolidating and buttressing sedimentary layers of computer printouts in a comical attempt to free up space for Cohen’s cup, Cohen’s knees, Cohen himself.
Watching him, Cohen felt at once relieved and disoriented. He had expected to see a broken man, or at least a changed one. But this was Gavi as he’d always been. The body blessed with the spare, tendon-on-bone grace of the born long-distance runner. The face that had far too much of the intellectual in it to be what most people called handsome. The black, black eyes whose liquid brilliance you couldn’t imagine until you’d been subjected to one of Gavi’s tell-me-no-lies stares.
And a right leg that ended just below the knee and had been replaced by a prosthesis that, if Cohen knew Gavi, was one of the most obsessively babied, upgraded, optimized, and tinkered-with pieces of hardware on the planet.
“How’s your mother?” Cohen asked.
“Oh, you know, the usual. Finding fascists under the furniture. Predicting the fall of the free world before lunch every morning. For her, happy.”
Gavi’s mother had been an old kibbutznik and a prominent Labor Party politician known for her fierce intelligence and her ability to sniff out and stamp on even the subtlest manifestations of bullshit. His father had been her diametric opposite: a dreamer, an intellectual, a minor Palestinian poet whose elegantly crafted poems were turning out to be not nearly as minor as everyone had at first thought they were.
Gavi’s father had died of an early heart attack before the war started, which Cohen couldn’t help thinking had been a mercy. His mother had resigned from the Knesset and left Earth permanently the day the first appropriations bill for EMET went through. And since she’d been berating her only son over his “fascist” career for decades, neither Gavi’s dismissal from the Mossad nor the swirling rumors of treason had clouded their affectionate but extremely long-distance relationship.
In Cohen’s opinion, each of Gavi’s parents had represented the best their respective cultures had to offer. And Gavi in turn had gotten the best parts of both of them. But that was Cohen’s opinion. And at the moment his idea of the n-optimal human being didn’t seem to be very popular in either the new Israel or the new Palestine.
“I like your tough girl,” Gavi said when he’d finally consolidated things sufficiently to clear knee and elbow room for the two of them. “And you finally got her to marry you too, I hear. How’s happily ever after going?”
Cohen shrugged.
“I’m sorry. And here I’d been getting so much enjoyment out of staring up at the stars thinking of all the fun you were having.”
“Fun, my friend, is seriously overrated.”
“So what’s the problem exactly?”
“If I knew, I’d fix it and there wouldn’t be one.”
“The frightening thing is that you actually mean that!”
Gavi leaned forward and looked deep into Cohen’s eyes. The effect was hypnotic. Mother Nature really did know best, Cohen decided. Put next to Gavi, even Arkady looked like a second-rate knockoff of the real thing.
“Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but did Li really do what they say she did on Gilead? I can’t see you with someone who’d do that.”
“She doesn’t know what she did. They wiped her memory. She only knows what they want her to know.”
“And even you can’t get the real files?”
“Even I can’t get the real files. I’m beginning to wonder if they still exist.”
“You could go crazy over a thing like that,” Gavi said earnestly.
“Yes, you could.” Cohen blinked and shook his head, suddenly bothered by the flickering of one of Gavi’s many monitors. “Can you turn that off? Thanks. No, that one. Yes.”
“Are you still having seizures?” Gavi’s brow wrinkled in concern. “I thought you’d solved that bug long ago.”
“So did I. But I didn’t come here to psychoanalyze Catherine or discuss coupled oscillators. How are you?”
“Great.”
“Mind wiping that shit-eating grin off your face and giving me an honest answer?”
The grin broadened. “Shitty.”
“Gavi! Come on.”
Gavi gave him a cool, smooth, faintly amused look.
“Why are you acting like this, Gavi?”
“Like what? Like a man talking to someone he hasn’t seen for two years?”
“And whose fault is that?”
“Mine.” The grin was back in place. “I was going to call you when I was done feeling sorry for myself and ready to come out and play again. Admit it, Cohen. You just don’t like people who don’t need you.”
“No. I lovepeople who don’t need me. That’s why I married Catherine. What I don’tlove are people who pretend not to need me because they’re too pigheadedly proud to ask for help when they need it. And will you kindly have the courtesy to stop laughing at me?”
“I’m laughing withyou, little AI. And has it occurred to you that you just might be seeing Hyacinthe these days when you look at me? I mean the man, not the interface program.”
“You’ll really do anything to make this about me instead of about you, won’t you?”
Gavi was shaking with repressed laughter now. “Come on, Cohen. If you traipse all the way out here to visit me and then spend the whole time crying on my shoulder about how I’m not crying on your shoulder, it’s just going to be too ridiculous for words.”
“There’s got to be somethingsomeone can do. Have you at least talked to Didi?”
“No. And I’m not going to.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Honestly, Cohen. What for? So he can tell me he thinks I got three of his boys killed and stashed the blood money in some Ring-side bank account, and the only reason I’m still alive is that I happened to be the dumb schmuck who pulled the future PM out of the way of a bullet once upon a time? You saw the way Osnat looked at me just now. I think we can take her feelings as representative.”
“I just—”
“Look.” Gavi let each word drop slowly and clearly into the silence. “ There is nothing you can do.So do me a favor and forget about it. I have. And by the way, you can stop trying not to stare at my leg.”
“Was I?” Cohen winced. “You’d think having spent the last several years of Hyacinthe’s life in a wheelchair would have cured me of that.”
“It’s not as big a deal as you obviously think it is. I mean, I’m not minimizing it. It’s pretty fucking unpleasant. But I got up this morning and took a nice 10K run before breakfast. I’d have to be even more self-absorbed than I am not to realize it could be a lot worse.” Gavi’s eyes narrowed and his voice took on a not-so-subtle edge. “Okay. Enough small talk. We both know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a hall pass from Didi. So what does Didi want from me?”
Cohen gave a brief summing up of his talk with Didi: all the facts (more or less), but none of the doubts and insinuations and ominous warnings. And all the while he was seeing the swaying shadows of the cedars and wondering if Didi’s tree doctor had come round yet with the chain saw.