“Well, okay. I’m glad you think you can trust me.”
Osnat glared into the middle distance with a look of profound disgust on her face. “I should probably bat my eyelashes at you, and tell you I was all wrong about Tel Aviv, and do my best to play the dumb blonde in the red Ferrari.”
A smile stole across Gavi’s lips. “You would never do that, Osnat.”
“Don’t be so fucking sure. But anyway…the truth is we have nowhere else left to go.”
Gavi led them up the hill, and scrounged up clean clothes and clean sheets and clean towels, and gave them bread and soup and chicken, all washed down with cold clear well water. He might have been any lonely homesteader on any colony planet welcoming the rare guests who wandered by. Only when they had finished eating did he begin to ask the real questions.
“Go ahead, Arkady,” Osnat said. “Tell him what you told me.”
Arkady told him.
“Do you want more chicken?” Gavi said when Arkady’s explanations and excuses finally petered out. “There’s more if you want it.” And then he meandered off into the shadowy depths of the kitchen and all Arkady and Osnat heard for a few minutes were pots rattling and spoons scraping.
When Gavi came back he was frowning. “Explain this Turing Soup thing again?”
Arkady tried to walk him through Arkasha’s explanation of Turing Soup, neutral networks, gateway mutations, and search engines and only got hopelessly tangled.
“So fertility’s almost a side effect,” Gavi said when he was done. “Except that whereas it offers you in the Syndicates something that you don’t want—or at least that most of you don’t want—it offers us exactly what everyone wants. So however slim your chances of putting it back in the box might be, our chances are even slimmer.”
“How long do you think it’ll take before it turns into war between Earth and the Ring?” Osnat asked. “Ten years? Twenty?”
“Actually,” Gavi said, “I was thinking months not years.”
“We need to get to Didi,” Osnat said. She seemed to be watching Gavi while she spoke, as if she were looking for an answer that she expected to be written on his face.
“Getting to Didi is easier said than done,” Gavi answered. He hesitated as if he were playing out possible counterarguments in his mind, one after another, and rejecting them.
“You talked to Li,” he said finally, “not Cohen. Do you have any reason to believe your message actually reached Cohen?”
“Well, no, but I thought they were the same person.”
“They are. But I’m not sure that means what you think it means. I think our next step should be to go back to Cohen. Directly.”
Osnat shook her head violently.
“I don’t argue that we should trust Cohen blindly,” Gavi said. “But I still think he’s the best person to feel out if we want to get a firmer grip on what’s actually happening in the Office without sticking our necks out too far.”
“I don’t know.” Osnat sighed. She wiped a hand across her face. “I’m so tired I’m about to pass out sitting up.”
“We don’t need to decide anything tonight,” Arkady suggested. “We can always sleep on it and see what we think in the morning.”
But in the morning Osnat was too sick to talk, and Arkady and Gavi were too busy trying to keep her alive to remember the conversation they were supposed to have had.
Her fever was worse than anything that the survey team members had suffered from. For three days Gavi and Arkady nursed her through it, spelling each other, falling back on aspirin and cold-water-soaked cloths when none of the normal remedies seemed to work.
“Is this the same sickness?” Gavi asked at one point. He was sitting with Osnat, mopping her brow with a cold cloth while Arkady looked on in an agony of guilt.
“How should I know?” Arkady said desperately. “I’m not a doctor, and even the doctors on the survey didn’t know what they were dealing with.”
“I’m not asking you for a diagnosis,” Gavi said coolly, “just an opinion.”
“You’re the human!” Arkady protested. “For all I know it could be the flu.”
Gavi gave Arkady a long level look over Osnat’s unconscious body.
“Okay. I don’t think it is either. But…what do you want me to tell you?”
“I don’t know. Is there anything else you shouldtell me?”
“Can I speak with you, Gavi?”
“Of course, Arkady. But come outside. I need to get dinner ready.”
They walked through the visitors’ center, pausing in the gloomy industrial-sized kitchen long enough for Gavi to pick up a hard-used metal bowl and a vicious-looking knife. They stepped outside—that shocking moment of transition that Arkady would never get used to no matter how many brief planetside stays he made over the course of his mostly stationbound life. Gavi set off down the hill toward the shantytown jumble of the chicken coops. When they reached the little flock, Gavi slipped in among them, gesturing to Arkady to wait on the edge. He spoke companionably to the birds, and they clustered around him looking for handouts and caresses.
Gavi took one of his hens in his arms and murmured to her in Hebrew too soft and quick for Arkady to make any sense of it. He ambled back over to Arkady and sat down. The hen rested in his lap chuttering quietly to herself, her eyes all but closed. Gavi smoothed down her feathers and caressed her until she hunkered down into her feathers and closed her eyes in pleasure. Then he gripped her with firm, expert hands and drew the blade across her throat so smoothly and quickly that Arkady only understood what had happened when he saw the blood coursing into the bowl Gavi had nudged into place with his good foot.
“Is that for keeping kosher?” Arkady asked when he had recovered his voice enough to speak.
“No.” Gavi turned the hen’s limp little body in his hand and began plucking the feathers with sharp, practiced turns of his wrist. “It’s for Dibbuk.”
“You don’t keep kosher then?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because, if God actually exists, I can think of a long list of things He ought to be more worried about than the contents of my intestines. What did you want to talk to me about, Arkady?”
“I…I wanted to apologize.”
“What for?”
“For, well…everything. I thought I was doing the right thing. Or at least one right thing. I didn’t know Korchow had turned me into a weapon.I wish I could make you believe that.”
“I can see that you’re well-intentioned. This is a very complicated situation. You really don’t owe me anything.”
Gavi was still plucking away at the chicken so that it was impossible for Arkady to meet his dark eyes. His voice, however, struck a chill down Arkady’s spine: cool, smooth, gently distant. The voice of a man who had gone through anger and come out the other side. Arkady could imagine going to great lengths to avoid hearing it again.
“I never hid anything from you intentionally. I didn’t understand what Korchow had done myself until after we’d talked. And then, with Safik…well…”
“Safik could wring secrets out of stones. I’d have to be a bigger fool than I am if I thought you wouldn’t tell him everything.”
Arkady looked doubtfully at him. “You’re not angry, then?”
“Being angry would imply that I expected you not to tell him. Or that I felt you had some kind of obligation not to. Why would I think either of those things?” Gavi stood up, the chicken hanging limp and bedraggled and naked in his hand. “Angry’s silly, Arkady. It makes people feel better in the short term, but in the long term it just makes them not think straight. And what possible good can it do anyone if we let ourselves be seduced into not thinking straight?”
“None, I guess.”
“I’m glad you agree with me. Let’s go have dinner.”
“So how come Gavi didn’t get sick?” was the first thing Osnat wanted to know when she was back in the land of the living.