“It was as if there were two women in her body, Arkady. An outer woman who had the power of speech, who belonged to the state, to civilization, to what you might call the superorganism. And an inner woman, who belonged to no government, and who knew damn well that all those patriotic words were dust next to her son’s dead body.”
Safik stopped. He was slumped in his chair, and he looked gray and ill and terribly angry. Arkady had the impression that he’d stopped talking not because he had run out of words but because he had lost faith that Arkady would understand him.
“So…”
“So what’s my point? I am telling you who I am, Arkady. I serve what I saw in that woman’s eyes. That every time you sacrifice the individual in the name of order and stability you’re only throwing fresh meat to the dogs of war. That martyrdom—be it the martyrdom of the soldier or the martyrdom of the suicide bomber—is a poor substitute for decent government. That’s what I serve, Arkady. And I don’t give a damn about the fanatics who only see lines on the map.” He smiled briefly and made that chin-flicking skyward gesture that Earth dwellers always made when they wanted to talk about the larger world that had left their planet behind. “Or lines out in space for that matter.”
“And what about Absalom?”
“Absalom’s an idea, not a man. And he won’t die as long as there are people on both sides of the Line who think like I do.”
They locked eyes.
Safik sighed and glanced away.
“Fine,” he said. “You have no reason to believe me. But I’ll tell you one thing, Arkady. I’m not your enemy. I’m not sure I’m anyone’s enemy. Just think about it. That’s all I’m asking.”
But Arkady didn’t have to think about it. He trusted Safik. He knew he was playing the easy mark, just like he’d done with Gavi. He knew that any step he took might be the one that made a choice between protecting the Syndicates and saving Arkasha inevitable. But when he looked into Safik’s calm, decent, ordinary face and asked himself for some reason he shouldn’t trust him, he couldn’t find one.
So he told him everything, right up to that awful moment of revelation in front of Gavi’s flowchart.
“If that’s true,” Safik said when Arkady had finished, “then we’re all in the same boat, aren’t we, Earth and Syndicates alike?”
“No, we’re not!” Arkady burst out.
He never knew, then or later, whether Safik had planned it; but suddenly all the thoughts he’d kept to himself over the past weeks were spilling out of him, giving voice to his pent-up frustration at the intransigent human refusal to understand the Syndicates, to understand life beyond the Orbital Ring, to understandperiod.
“How can you people still be so ignorant?” he shouted. Then he realized he was shouting, caught his breath, and went on more quietly.
“How can you know so little even after centuries of sending ships and settlers out to die in space? How can you still understand nothingabout what it’s like out there?”
“So make me understand. I want to understand, Arkady. If you can’t make me understand, you’ll never make any human understand.”
“You can’t understand,” Arkady said bitterly. He remembered again the terrible fire of ZhangSyndicate’s death throes. For the first time he realized that there had been menin those attacking ships. Men bred and trained in the Ring, where Earth was always one short rescue launch away, and the universe was still friendly and forgiving and crowded enough that a man could take it upon himself to loose a missile and destroy an orbital station that was all the wide world to its little ark of souls. “You hear the words. You nod and smile…and then five minutes later you say something that proves you haven’t understood a syllable. Earth itself keeps you from understanding. Even the Ring-siders still have Earth to fall back on if things go really wrong. You can afford to be selfish, inefficient, individualistic because Earth is big and rich and forgiving. You can afford to act like spoiled children because Earth will always bail you out. And even then you managed to turn getting to space into a race against extinction. How many billions of lives were thrown away on the generation ships? Humans make their sacrifices too. Despite all their brave words about rights and individuals. The collected quotient of individual misery and wastage and suffering in human society makes the Syndicates look like the ultimate humanists.”
“So it’s all just politics?” Safik interjected. He sounded gently disappointed by the idea.
“Politics! Reality. A reality you humans can’t see because you’re too busy telling each other fairy tales. I never understood before I came here why the UN got so taken by surprise when so many people around the Periphery sided with the Syndicates in the war, but now I finally get it. You actually think they’re still human.You think if you just wipe the Syndicates, your problems will vanish and you’ll step into the future you always wanted to have. But that future died with Earth. The only future left now is the one you made when you put Earth’s poor on the generation ships and threw them overboard to live or die. Well, we lived.And now you’re trying to stop evolution in its tracks because we aren’t the future you wanted to have.”
Arkady finished his speech and wound down into depressed and embarrassed silence.
“You don’t sound like a traitor,” Safik said at last. “You sound to me like a man who wants to go home.”
“Home isn’t perfect either,” Arkady whispered.
“Neither is my wife, but I still go home every night. Don’t you think Korchow has figured this out?” Somehow Safik managed to sound matter-of-fact and sympathetic in the same instant. “Don’t you think he knows enough of…well, I suppose I shouldn’t call it human nature…to have predicted you might feel this way?”
“You don’t think I’ve asked myself that again and again?” Arkady said bitterly. “I feel like a lab rat!”
Safik smiled. His gaze left Arkady’s for just long enough to light another long-awaited cigarette. “You seem to be focusing only on the negative aspects of being a lab rat. The up side of having someone like Korchow use you is that there usually is a real piece of cheese at the end of the maze. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that Korchow might wantto send Arkasha to Earth? The Embargo’s going to go up in smoke the minute people begin to really see what the Novalis virus has done. We’re going to be playing a vicious game of catch-up. And we’re going to be in desperate need of people like Arkasha. Maybe Korchow’s preparing the ground for a little…er, intellectualterraforming?”
Arkady tried to look impassive and undecided, but his mind had already gone into a tailspin of calculations, hopes, dreams, anticipation.
“I don’t want to rush you into anything,” Safik said. “Least of all anything Korchow’s trying to rush me into rushing you into. Go back to Moshe. Think about it. I’m sure we’ll have another chance to talk. That is as long as you don’t say anything that would make your keepers wonder just who you’ve been talking to over here.”
And if that wasn’t a way of buying his silence, Arkady wondered, then what was?