“Good to know you!” Turner said in a voice that took possession of the room just as aggressively as his big body did.
“Good to know you,” Arkady repeated, assuming this was some unknown human-style formal greeting.
Turner laughed loudly. He seemed to be a man who did everything loudly. “Hear you’re here to sell us something, Arkady. You got the goods, or are we gonna not be friends in the morning?”
“Um…”
“Just kidding!” He dealt Arkady a staggering blow on the shoulder.
“No hard feelings, hey?”
“Uh…sure.” Arkady rubbed at his shoulder.
Ash, meanwhile, had been watching this exchange with a vaguely amused expression on her smooth features. “Shall we begin?” she asked.
One of the guards dragged a heavy plush velvet armchair into the center of the room and positioned a standing lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly on the face of the unfortunate person sitting in it.
“Arkady?” Ash said pointedly.
Arkady hesitated, then walked obediently over to the chair and sat down.
As he did so the bidders sorted themselves onto the chairs and sofas which had already been placed around the edges of the room.
Their eyes turned to Arkady. He licked his lips and cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. He glanced around the circle of expectant faces and thought that they looked like wolves watching a hamstrung caribou. He glimpsed the flickering pinprick of a black box status light behind Catherine Li’s left pupil—another new thing in a day full of new things—and wondered what other watchers on what distant planets were hearing his tale. Then he looked down at his hands and kept his gaze there, knowing that he was going to have to lie and that he would lose the thread of the lie if his concentration faltered.
“My survey team was assigned to evaluate Novalis for terraforming and settlement—” he began.
“Hang on,” Li interrupted, leaning forward in her chair with an intent, predatory expression. “There’s no Novalis on any UN charts. What star does it belong to? What are the old Astronomical Survey coordinates? Where is it in relation to the treaty lines?”
Arkady began to glance at Korchow, then stopped the movement and looked instead toward Ash.
“That information will be provided in the stage-two bid package,” Ash answered. “After we’ve received your initial financial commitments.”
“Based on what, an initial blind bid?”
Ash nodded.
“What are the payment arrangements?”
“A hundred thousand. Twenty up front, eighty on the day.”
“Delivery on the day?”
“Naturally.”
Li shrugged. Arkady took it as permission to continue.
“There were ten of us,” he resumed. “Arkasha was the geneticist, and of course it’s his notebooks we’re talking about here. I was the biogeographer. Then there were the Ahmeds—”
“That’s AzizSyndicate’s biggest run A series,” Korchow interjected. “It’s a line whose main applications are military. They’d be familiar to Major Li from the last war”—he nodded politely in her direction—“but I doubt any of the rest of you would ever have seen one. Since the recent and, ahem, insufficiently anticipated outbreak of peace, the central joint steering committee has been trying to find alternative applications for them in the survey and terraforming missions. Sorry, Arkady. Go on.”
“Well, the Aziz A’s were the command team, pilot and navigator. They had the final word on all mission-critical decisions. Then we had the two Bellas, MotaiSyndicate B’s. One of them was an entomologist, like me, but a specialist in orbsilk worms. The other—”
“Hang on a minute.” Turner was taking notes, one muscular calf slung over the other knee to support his pad and pencil. “I’d like to get full names on these folks.”
“I’m sorry?” Arkady said.
“Those are their full names,” Korchow answered. “Arkady can’t give you anything else. Ahmed. Bella. Even Andrej”—Korchow smiled infinitesimally—“are merely geneline designations. Though Arkady here may know intuitively that one Ahmed isn’t the same as another, his language, his upbringing, and his convictions all tell him that the organism is nothing and the superorganism—the geneline—is everything.”
“But some of them have their own names. This Arkasha person—”
“Arkasha,” Korchow interrupted smoothly, “is the exception that proves the rule.”
“Are you saying he’s a political dissident?” Li interrupted.
“Let’s not indulge in morally loaded terminology, Major. Arkasha is merely…an atavism. Whether he is an atavism with some useful evolutionary role to play is a decision for the RostovSyndicate steering committee to make. Not for me. And certainly not for you.”
And so it went, just as he and Korchow had mapped it out back on Gilead, Arkady leading his audience down the twisting path—so close to the truth in almost every way—that Korchow had concocted for him.
“And what are we to make of this?” Shaikh Yassin said when Arkady finally reached the end of the story and fell silent. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began.
“What you make of it is your concern,” Ash answered. “Needless to say, your conclusions will largely determine the price you are willing to pay.”
“But what are we paying for?” Li again. She seemed to be the point man by consensus, and the others seemed content to hang back and see what game she managed to flush. “I mean, are we buying this so-called genetic weapon? Or Arkady? Or Arkasha’s notebooks? Is Arkasha himself for sale, for that matter?”
“That’s partly for you to determine,” Ash answered smoothly. “You have discretion to put together your own bid. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you’re willing to pay for it.”
“And what does it mean that we’re dealing with your charming self?” Yassin asked Ash. Beneath the courteous language, his voice sounded sharp as razors. “Can we infer from GolaniTech’s involvement that Arkady has already been interrogated by Israel, and we’re merely being offered their leavings?”
“You can infer whatever you like,” Ash said—and the room fell silent while each of them tried and failed to stare the other down.
“My problem is still with the story itself,” Li said, breaking the silence. “How do we know Arkady’s not just making it all up as he goes along?”
“You know because of what he is.” Ash gestured toward Arkady with one immaculately manicured hand. “An unaltered Syndicate construct, pure as a freshly detanked babe. No internal wetware. No stored spinfeed. No hard files. Nothing that can be edited, altered, or erased. What he remembers is what happened to him, pure and simple.”
Across the room, Yassin was nodding contemplatively. The two ALEF bidders sat utterly still, though something in their expressions convinced Arkady that they were speaking to each other in the nebulous parallel universe of streamspace. Turner merely sat, one thick ankle crossed over the knee of the other leg, his pale eyes flicking back and forth between Arkady and Korchow as if he were calculating the angles and momenta of a targeting problem.
“People can lie,” Li insisted.
“Not perfectly. Not under drugs. Not under…educated questioning. And once we work out the escrow arrangements, you’ll each have the chance to question Arkady in the time and place of your choosing.”
“But for how long? And with what limitations?”
Korchow started to answer, but Ash interrupted him. “I think discussing limitations as to duration and interrogation techniques in Arkady’s presence would be counterproductive at this point.”
“That’s pretty damn cold,” Li muttered.
“Yep,” Turner said. “But it works.”
Korchow cleared his throat and unfolded his slender stationer’s frame from the leather depths of the wing chair. “It seems to me that this would be the moment at which Arkady and I might most appropriately make our exit.”
As they left the room, Arkady glanced back and met Turner’s stare, as coldly blue as the cloudless sky over Novalis’s polar ice sheet.
It was unreal. an impossible, glorious, inconceivable violation of all the rules and restrictions that had pressed in on Arkady since that first fateful meeting with Osnat.
He and Korchow walked side by side across the courtyard and through the narrow door into Abulafia Street. No one stopped them. No one asked Korchow where he was taking Arkady. No one even followed them that Arkady could see. And ten minutes later they were in the thronging heart of the Arab Quarter.
“I have some errands to run,” Korchow told him. “You don’t mind tagging along, do you?”
Korchow’s “errands” stretched through the afternoon. He guided Arkady through the crowded streets, winding past beggars and water sellers, weaving through roving packs of pilgrims, and ducking into an endless series of antique stores and art galleries and rare book dealers.
At every store Korchow would go through the same incomprehensible ritual. He would introduce himself—under a different false name each time—and begin to look through the dealer’s collections. He seemed to have a taste for antiquities, and in particular portable ones. He would greet the first four or five or eight items the dealer presented with polite lack of interest. The dealer would respond accordingly, and the prices being bandied about would rise dizzyingly. Korchow, however, would remain placidly unmoved…both by the prices and by the objets d’art being presented for his inspection. The dealer would begin to hem and haw about export restrictions and end user certificates. Korchow would smile and nod and pronounce what Arkady assumed were the proper noises of reassurance…at which point they would stop even talking about prices.
The dealer would brew the sweet hot tea that everyone in the Old City seemed to live on and usher them out of the public showroom and into a discreet back room that Korchow referred to, with an amusement that Arkady found utterly incomprehensible, as “the high rollers’ room.”
The high rollers’ rooms were always soundproofed and spintronically deadwalled. And for good reason. For even Arkady could see that the objects presented for sale in these rooms had no business being anywhere outside of a museum, and certainly no business being shipped off-planet for private bidders.
Within the space of three hours Arkady watched Korchow conclude negotiations for a Saffavid Dynasty miniature of the assassination of some prince whose name Arkady forgot two minutes after Korchow told it to him; two David Grossman first editions (“Have you read The Smile of the Lamb? No? You really must. One of those human masterpieces in which one can feel the breath, the promise, of posthumanity.”); and a portion of the True Cross encased in an exceptionally gaudy twelfth-century Byzantine reliquary (“The real value is in the packaging, Arkady. There’s a lesson there. Remember it.”).
Each time they stepped through the sonic curtain into the next high rollers’ room and sat together, encased in a cocoon of artificial silence, while the dealer fetched the next illicit treasure for Korchow’s delectation, Arkady expected the KnowlesSyndicate A to broach the real subject of interest between them. And each time Arkady was disappointed yet again.
Only between the third and fourth stops on the shopping tour—by which time Korchow had dropped a sum of money that would have provided a year’s worth of air, food, and water for all of RostovSyndicate—did Arkady succeed in picking the two stolid-looking young Israelis out of the crowd.
“Are they following us?”
“Don’t stare, Arkady. It’s embarrassing.”
He glanced surreptitiously at the young men while Korchow threaded along the narrow stone street ahead of him. Was it only those two, or was there another team as well? And was he completely crazy for thinking that the buxom schoolgirl bouncing along the opposite sidewalk was the same person as the frumpily dressed housewife who’d trudged by not five minutes ago pulling a wheeled grocery cart?
“They don’t look embarrassed,” he told Korchow.
“Who said it was them you were embarrassing?”
“Sorry,” Arkady began—and then he rounded a corner in Korchow’s wake and ran smack into absolutely the last face he ever expected to see on Earth.
The face stared down at him from a billboard the size of a house. The eyes were shadowed with the sorrow of hard experience. The square jaw was set in a frown of heroic determination. The perfectly balanced musculature of the bare chest was a paean in flesh and blood to the technical mastery of its AzizSyndicate designers.
There was a caption below the picture, though Arkady didn’t need to read it to know what spin the image came from: see AHMED AZIZ in THE TIME OF CRUEL MIRACLES “Ahmed Aziz?” Arkady mouthed.
“Well,” Korchow said mildly, “humans watch art spins too. Though I’ve been told they recut the endings before they release Syndicate spins for UN audiences. Apparently humans don’t find lovers’ suicide pacts quite as romantic as we do.” He squinted up at the billboard, arms crossed thoughtfully. “Our Ahmed’s better-looking than the one who stars in the spins, don’t you think?”
The possessive was hard enough for Arkady to parse that it took him a moment to understand who Korchow was talking about and draw the obvious connection.
Korchow sighed patiently. “I handled his debriefing too. I would have told you, if you’d ever trusted me enough to ask.”
“Anyway, he’s not better-looking,” Arkady said. “He’s just nicer. It makes him seem better-looking.”
He looked over to find Korchow grinning indulgently at him.
“What?”
“You’re an idiot, Arkady. But you’re a sweet idiot. I’ll say that for you. How you survived four months in Arkasha’s back pocket I’ll never fathom.”
Only at the fifth stop did Korchow finally begin to show his cards. This store’s street front consisted of one windowless door tucked behind a sweating stone buttress in the angle of an alley so narrow that Arkady wondered if the sun ever shone on the place. The brass sign advertised “antiquities” in French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic; but the lettering was so small that Arkady had to stoop to read it.
Walking into the place was like walking into a cave. The windows were hermetically sealed and the closed shutters blocked out what little light might have trickled through the smeared glass. The shop’s single room seemed to fall away unevenly into the shadows, as if the cobweb-infested ceiling and the carpet-lined floor drew closer together the deeper you penetrated into the building’s entrails. The man behind the counter was as oddly built as his shop. Only when he stepped out from behind the counter to greet them could Arkady make sense of his unusual proportions; he was a dwarf, and he’d been standing on a pile of carpets half a dozen deep. Indeed, the farther back in the shop you went, the deeper the carpets got, until in the back of the place they were stacked up in slithering chest-high piles, fragrant with the perfume of mothballs and long-dead sheep.
But the carpets, however impressive they were, turned out to be a mere sideline. Once they were settled in the back room, slightly shabbier than the ones preceding it, and had suffered through the same tea and the same honeyed cakes and the same desultory small talk, the dwarf began to shuffle across the mounded carpets in a pair of frayed and faded bedroom slippers, extracting curious little flat boxes from corners whose very existence Arkady had not suspected. And from the boxes, handling the pages with infinite delicacy, he began to produce his miniatures.
“Yes, yes,” Korchow said to the first painting the dwarf presented, an ornate illustration of the Prophet—or at least Arkady assumed that was who it was; his face was completely obscured by a fluttering silken veil—riding to Heaven on a decidedly seductive-looking sphinx. Two more miniatures, also of religious themes, followed it, and Korchow showed little more interest in them than he had in the first piece.
The dealer cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might be more interested in more, er, secular themes?”
“Oh, assuredly,” Korchow said wit
h a smile that Arkady felt himself to be quite incapable of interpreting.
The man shuffled to the back of the room, his slippers whispering on the wool nap of the carpets, and produced a slim portfolio of unbound pieces.
“Oh my,” Korchow murmured when he looked at the first one.
Arkady looked, blinked, and looked away.
“Poor Arkady. A great man once observed that politics was like sausage: a commodity best enjoyed without inquiring too closely into the manufacturing process. One might say the same thing of human reproduction in general.”
“Not to your taste?” the dealer asked in tones of careful neutrality.
“Not to my young friend’s taste, at any rate. I imagine he would prefer something a bit more…ahem…refined.”
The dwarf glanced between Korchow and Arkady, his face giving away nothing. He slid a second portfolio out from beneath the first, as if he’d had it ready all along, and opened it.
There was only one miniature inside, and it was clearly a picture of tremendous value. Arkady could see that even before he began to grasp the subject of the painting.
“By the Master of Tabriz,” the dealer said. “You are familiar with the story? It is said to represent the Shah with his lover the night before he was assassinated.”
Korchow’s eyes slid sideways toward Arkady. “Do you like it?”
The miniature depicted two young men of exceptional physical beauty. They were as identical as crèchemates, though Arkady couldn’t tell whether the resemblance was real or a mere product of the artist’s manner. They were so completely swathed in silk, from their spotless white turbans to their patterned robes and their pointed and filigreed and gold-leafed slippers, that the shapes they formed on the page bore no relation to the warm, breathing, living bodies within. All their life was in their black eyes, which the long-dead artist had limned in the finest wisp of sable. And all around them the painted garden, which should have been as flat and static as every other priceless painted garden Arkady had seen that afternoon, seemed to pulse and flow like water running under ice. Trees twined and twisted their dark limbs about each other. Flowers flamed in the grass and swept in bright torrents around the lovers’ feet.
Spin Control ss-2 Page 14
