He took a sip and blinked in surprise. “Hey, that’s actually good!”
One of the Banerjee A’s grinned. “Pride of the Banerjees,” he said in the noble but slightly pompous tones that crèchelines learned young to associate with the Heroes of the Breakaway.
“Plates, food, forks,” one of the Ahmeds said, pointing.
Arkady crossed the room, aware of half a dozen pairs of eyes weighing and measuring him. He bent over the simmering pot. “Fantastic,” he said in his best fitting-in voice. “Three cheers for AzizSyndicate.”
“Actually, we didn’t cook it,” the other Ahmed admitted. “You can thank your sib for the feast.”
“That would make him the first Arkady I’ve ever met that could cook worth a damn.” Arkady looked at the curry with renewed suspicion, tasted it, and had to admit it was good. “And where isthis marvel of culinary talent?”
He turned around just in time to see the two Ahmeds exchange a cryptic glance.
“Working?” one of them hazarded. And already there was that little something in his voice that should have been a warning.
Someone ruffled Arkady’s hair, and he turned around to the welcome sight of another Rostov face. “Aurelia, right?”
“Right.”
“And where were you when I woke up?”
“Hey, don’t look at me. I’m the rock doctor, not the people doctor.”
“I see.” Arkady took a closer look at her; as the team’s single geophysicist she might well be working closely with him, depending on what they found on Novalis. “I’ll make sure to bring you any sick rocks I stumble over.”
“I’m the people doctor,” said the other Aurelia from down at the far end of the table. “You met me an hour ago. You just don’t remember it. I’ve been sitting up with you since they popped your top, but I thought I’d let you do your last little bit of waking up in private.”
Functioning within Syndicate society required a good dose of what Keats had once famously called negative capability: the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in your head at the same time. On the one hand you had to learn to recognize individual constructs for the purposes of work and social interaction; the human brain, however profoundly reengineered, couldn’t be entirely freed from the individual consciousness that had powered the first four hundred millennia of its evolution. On the other hand, the structures and customs of Syndicate society were all geared toward eliminating distinctions between individuals in the same geneline. A Syndicate was a family, with the same consanguinity between its various genelines that welded together human families. But your sibs, the fellow members of your own geneline, were more than family. They were you.And the individual body you inhabited—the lone physical organism inside its prison of skin and skull—was no more a whole person than an ant was a whole swarm. Geneline names reflected this. Each individual construct had a dossier, compiled over the course of his or her life by docents, professors, crèchemates, steering committee representatives; but the dossier filing number was as unreal as paperwork. On a day-to-day basis, from the moment he or she was detanked, every one of the thousands of Arkadys was simply Arkady, every Bella, Bella; every Ahmed, Ahmed; every Aurelia, Aurelia.
If you wanted to single out one of your sibs in normal conversation, you were reduced to ad hoc nicknames or to complicated formulations like “the year seven who led the mission to Karal-20,” or “the year five who spent last year planetside working on the arctic core survey,” or “the one who told that awful joke about the dog,” or “the one who wrote the paper on cryogenesis in amphibians.”
Or, in the grammatical construction that had fueled more grief, joy, strife, and passion than any other in all of Syndicate history: “the one I love.”
Arkady instinctively thought of his new crewmates as geneline members first and individuals second. First—the phrase pari inter parescame somewhat sarcastically to mind—came the two AzizSyndicate Ahmeds. Their Syndicate name reflected its founder’s North Indian heritage, as did their tall soldierly frames and square-jawed faces. Arkady had met both Ahmeds briefly before launch, and had privately dubbed them “Laid-back Ahmed” and “By-the-Book Ahmed.” Laid-back Ahmed was a full centimeter taller than Aziz-8135 gene-norm, and had adopted a habitual slouch to disguise the deviation. Something about the combination of the slouch and his levelheaded self-deprecating manner promised to Arkady that he might be that rare treasure: a pilot who was tough enough to command a ship in the Deep, but modest enough to back off after planetfall and let the scientists do their jobs. By-the-Book Ahmed, on the other hand, was a cold fish and a bit of a martinet…the last kind of personality Arkady would have assigned to command a crew full of science track Rostovs and Banerjees.
But perhaps he was just stereotyping. One of the Ahmeds’ older cogenetics was a wildly popular spin star. His sex- and violence-laden adventures were one of the great guilty pleasures in a society that had been increasingly cold and austere and rationed since the UN invasion. No one could look at any Ahmed’s muscular frame and commanding features without thinking of their famous sib, and the manly virtues that AzizSyndicate embodied in the Syndicate collective consciousness. Or that it was supposed to embody, anyway. Arkady certainly hoped that this particular pair of A-8s would bring the strengths of their phenotype to the mission at hand, rather than its failings. Because if either of them acted with the kind of impetuous arrogance their spin star sib displayed on-screen, then the whole survey team was headed for heavy weather.
After the two Ahmeds came the two Bellas, also both present. And how typical of MotaiSyndicate to send two B series constructs. Had that really been a purely technical decision—the need to put together a work-pair with the right mix of skills for the mission—or was it a subtle transhuman dig at the older Syndicates’ resistance to caste-based series design?
Other than the fact that they were B’s, the most remarkable thing about the two Bellas was their eerily perfect resemblance to each other. Normal constructs differed from their sibs almost as much as natural twins did. They might look identical to human eyes, but they could always tell each other apart by little variations in features, height, coloring—even cowlicks, as Arkady had reason to know. But the MotaiSyndicate B’s weren’t twins; they were living, breathing mirrors. And the massive in vitro and postpartum culling that MotaiSyndicate used to achieve such perfection was almost as controversial among the older Syndicates as their caste-based genelines.
It was all ideologically impeccable, of course: a ruthlessly elegant expression of the highest and purest principles of sociobiology. But it still made Arkady’s stomach curl. What would it do to a person to know that his place in life had been preordained while he was still under the splicing scope in a hierarchy as inflexible as the most rigid human class system? What would it mean to have not one or two repressed memories of culled playmates, but dozens? And what would it mean to know that at every cull you were more likely than not to fail the cut yourself?
He saw no answer in the two Bellas’ faces—only a pale and polished beauty that didn’t even make the usual ritual nod to humanity. His first sight of those violet eyes, rimmed round with the delicate filigree of the MotaiSyndicate logo, was enough to make Arkady decide that transhumanism, for all its much-vaunted political purity, was an evolutionary step toward a future he didn’t want to live in.
The Aurelias, on the other hand, were balm to Arkady’s homesick soul. They were Rostovs, like Arkady and his pairmate. Lean and tall, with long-fingered surgeon’s hands, and long noses, and long narrow faces that would have been forbiddingly severe if not for their humorous, sensible, intelligent expressions. They loafed elegantly at the far end of the table like a matched set of wolfhounds, leaning against each other with a casualness that made Arkady suspect they were already old friends or lovers. One look at Aurelia the surgeon was enough to tell Arkady that she must have spent her schooldays sitting in the front row, hand permanently raised, eager to prove she knew the answer to everything. One look at her sib left him equally sure that she’d spent her time in the back row passing notes and throwing spitballs and looking forward to soccer practice. The geologist was particularly recognizable at the moment because she had a little more of a tan than her cogenetic. But even when the tan faded it would be easy enough to tell those two strong personalities apart.