“Baby-sitting them for whom?”
“Oh, now that would be kissing and telling, wouldn’t it?” He flashed his let’s-be-friends grin again. “I will tell you something else, though. I might actually be the only human you’ll ever meet who’s been to the Syndicates. I spent four months on Knowles Station studying…well, you can probably guess what by now.”
“Did you like it there?”
“Hated it. Just hated it. Pretty girls everywhere and none of them interested in adorable little me. Seriously, though. Other than the total absence of sex it was great. I made some good friends. It’s refreshing to be around people who honestly don’t care about class or money or any of the usual bullshit. And Gilead’s beautiful. Ever gone hiking in the Lodi Range?”
“I did most of my dissertation research there.”
“Paradise, right? No other word for it.”
“No,” Arkady breathed.
Yusuf leaned forward, fixing those disconcerting eyes on Arkady. “Tell me true, one pre-citizen to another. Do you still want to stay here now that you’ve gotten to know Earth a little? Or would you rather go home?”
Yusuf was speaking English, Arkady realized suddenly. Not Hebrew. Not UN-standard Spanish. Not the bastardized English of the Trusteeships, but the pure, slightly archaic English of the Syndicates. And he had no accent that Arkady could hear.
“Is this the real interrogation?” he asked.
“What’s real? What’s an interrogation? I’m just passing time while the rich old farts are out of the room.”
“So when do they start asking me the real questions?”
“They already did. Or did you perhaps miss the part where they stuck the needle into you?”
“You knew about that?”
“I heard a rumor. There’s a proper epidemic of rumors making the rounds in this operation. Kind of makes you wonder if there isn’t someone managing the spin from behind the scenes.”
“If there is, it’s not me.”
Yusuf laughed. “That makes two for tea and tea for two of us.”
“So…Yassin isn’t going to question me at all?”
“He might beat you up some more. But that’d be pleasure, not business. And I’m not authorized to monitor his entertainment. Sorry. Only so far a guy can go to help a total stranger. And though I might seem young, I have my pension to worry about. Retirement can really creep up on you fast in my line of work.”
Arkady swallowed.
“Sorry.” Yusuf really did sound genuinely contrite. “I shouldn’t joke about it. I have an awful sense of humor. But the fact is I actually do have to turn into a pumpkin pretty soon. Decisions above my pay grade, et cetera, ad nauseam, et al., El Al, and so forth.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“An answer that unfortunately I doubt you’re in a position to give me. Because some of us on this side of the Line actually kind of desperately need to know, Arkady, if you’re really who you say you are. Or are you being used, with or without your knowledge, for some…excuse me if this sounds pretentious…deeper purpose?”
“If it’s without my knowledge, then what’s the point of asking?”
“Well. Right. Obviously that would be the problem. By the way, have you met Didi Halevy yet?”
“No,” Arkady said—and realized that the denial was itself an admission.
“But you know the name. Who told you about him? Korchow?”
Arkady pressed his lips closed, suddenly understanding the old phrase about locking the barn door after the horse has run off.
“And what about the cripple? Have you met Gavi Shehadeh yet? We’re laying bets back in the office about when Didi will decide to trot him out. And you can tell Didi that, too, when he gets around to questioning you in person. It’s good for his ego to be reminded that we don’t automatically scarf down every piece of garbage he tosses our way.”
Yusuf sighed, settled his chin more comfortably on his arms, and fixed Arkady with a gaze that was uncomfortably intense despite its obvious good humor.
Arkady inspected the scuffed toes of the desert boots that Osnat had given him. They were too wide. His feet, accustomed to soft spacer’s shoes, were developing blisters in places he’d never known feet could get blisters. He wondered where Osnat had gotten the boots. Actually, on second thought, he didn’t want to know.
“I hope this doesn’t sound rude,” Yusuf said at last, “but you’re really making a hash of this. I mean, forgive me for pointing out the obvious…but though you keep talking about how you want to talk to Absalom, what have you really done about it?”
Arkady couldn’t answer that.
“It doesn’t make sense, Arkady. You’ve got us and the Israelis all buzzing around like bees who’ve had their nest stomped on. But at some point someone’s going to wake up and start asking whether even a man who spends his adult life playing with ants can be as incompetent as you seem to be. You have no idea who Absalom is, or even which side he’s on. You’ve made no discernible effort to talk to him. And yet you keep babbling on about Absalom, Absalom, Absalom. Frankly, Arkady, I’m disappointed. I thought Korchow was smarter than that.”
Arkady shrugged.
“Do you actually know anything at all about Absalom?”
Arkady shrugged again.
“Well listen, pussycat. I’ll tell you about him. Just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.”
“You mean when the Israelis start torturing me?”
“Don’t be naive. The Israelis don’t actually torture people anymore. They just bore them into talking, same as we do.” His voice shifted into a different register, and he began to recite the story of Absalom as if it were a myth or a martyr’s life. “Absalom was a Jew and a hero of the last war. He was also, of course, a hero of Palestine.”
“Was. Is he dead, then?”
“We have no idea. In fact, we never knew who he was. He used unorthodox lines of communication. And one of the conditions of his assistance was that we were never to put his drop points under surveillance or attempt to tail the Mossad agents that serviced them.”
“Mossad agents?”
“Yeah. The cheeky bastard actually used the normal Mossad letterboxes to communicate with us. I think it would be fair to characterize that as what a Jewish ex-girlfriend of mine liked to call chutzpah.”
“So what happened to Absalom?”
“We have no idea. He fell off our radar screen after the fiasco in Tel Aviv.”
“And you never managed to reestablish contact?”
“No. And believe me, we’ve tried. So you can see what you’re stepping into. Before you showed up everyone was willing to let Absalom be forgotten because we were all mostly sure that he was dead. Now, however, the Israelis want to find Absalom just to make goddamn sure he’s dead. And, uh, we want to find him to…well, honestly, probably in order to blackmail him into coming back to work for us.” Yusuf stretched and yawned, catlike. “So as you can see, it’s slightly more urgent than life or death for us to know whether you’re for real.”
Arkady waited, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming.
“That’s it,” Yusuf concluded cheerfully. “That’s Absalom. The whole only moderately censored story. My gift to you.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“You tell me why.”
“Because you know I’m going to talk to the Israelis at some point and you’re feeding me the story you want to feed them?”
“Pretty good for an amateur. I’m impressed. But sadly I’m neither that organized or that intelligent. And that’s not just my opinion; it’s a direct quote from my last personnel review. Any other possibilities come to mind? It’s not a trick question, trust me. You’re seriously overthinking it.”
“You want something from me.”
Yusuf pantomimed a silent round of applause.
“But we’ve already been through that,” Arkady said tiredly. “Like you said, whatever answer I would
give you about Absalom would only be what I know.”
“What I want, for now at least, is more basic. I want your trust.”
“If you’re trying to convince me to trust you, then letting Yassin scare me half to death just now wasn’t the best way to go about it.”
“It’s nice,” Yusuf observed, “that you have this fairy godmother kind of impression of me. But my powers at present don’t actually extend to protecting you from Yassin’s steroid addicts.”
“If you can’t protect me,” Arkady pointed out, “then why should I believe you have the power to deliver whatever else you’re offering?”
Yusuf’s smile widened. “Who says we’re offering you anything?”
We? The pronoun had been no accident; Yusuf was watching him process it like a cat watching a bird land on its windowsill.
“Who sent you?” Arkady asked.
“I’m sure you’re way ahead of me on this, Arkady, but just in case…has it escaped your notice that everyone else is pumping you for information and I’m giving it to you?”
“No.”
“Good. Think about it. And while you’re thinking, let me pass along two more of those rumors we were talking about earlier. Rumor number one: Turner has a man in Moshe’s camp. Rumor number two: UNSec has a highly placed agent somewhere among Didi’s people. Apparently they’re pissed as hell that Didi hasn’t told them about you, and they consider this the final chapter in a long line of Mossad fuckups starting with Tel Aviv. They seem to be playing it along to see where it goes, but they could step in and squash the deal anytime they want. And when UNSec squashes, they wield a big hammer and they don’t worry too much about whose toes happen to be in the slam zone.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“I told you. Trust.” He smiled, all sparkling green eyes and honey-colored skin and dazzlingly white teeth. “Is it working? Do you trust me?”
“What difference does it make?” Arkady asked tiredly.
“None at the moment. But it might later on. And you might need to make the decision very quickly. So think about it while you’re sitting back in that nasty little cell Moshe has you in. And be careful what you say: you’ve already contradicted yourself a few times. That sort of thing could earn you the wrong kind of attention from people we really don’t want paying attention to you.”
“Who sent you?” Arkady asked again, more urgently. “Korchow?” He searched the boy’s eyes in growing desperation. “Safik?”
He could hear Yassin’s guards in the hall. In a moment it would be too late, and he would never have the chance to ask the questions he should have been asking from the beginning of this inexplicable conversation.
“Who?” he cried, just as the door opened and Shaikh Yassin appeared.
Yusuf stood up, his back still to Yassin and the bodyguards, and mouthed a single unmistakable word:
Absalom.
NOVALIS
Trapping Crows
Two broad generalizations have begun to emerge that will be reinforced in subsequent chapters: the ultimate dependence of particular cases of social evolution on one or a relatively few idiosyncratic environmental factors; and the existence of antisocial factors that also occur in a limited, unpredictable manner. If the antisocial pressures come to prevail at some time after social evolution has been initiated, it is theoretically possible for social species to be returned to a lower social state or even to the solitary condition.
—E. O. WILSON (1973)
It began quietly, a faint thrumming under the everyday whistle and chatter of the awakening forest.
Birds sang, but they were far off, hunting and nesting in the sunlit heights of the canopy. Only gradually did a louder, more urgent song alert Arkady that the great predator was on the hunt. A thrush appeared—no, an entire flock of thrushes, flying and dipping and warbling. A moment later Arkady caught sight of a pair of ocellated antbirds: no mere opportunistic swarm followers but professionals who would have flown their appointed rounds before sunrise, peering into the hidden bivouacs of the swarm raiders to determine which army was most likely to be on the march today. Arkady had seen spinfeed of ocellated antbirds literally knocking each other off tree branches in order to stake out the best positions from which to swoop down on the moveable feast that was about to come their way. The pair weren’t quite at that level of feeding frenzy, but they were obviously expecting action.
A moment later a chaotic flurry of ant butterflies—Arkady thought they were ithomiines but he couldn’t be sure—erupted into the clearing, a sure sign that the raiders were approaching. But by then Arkady could already hear the murmur and hiss of a vast insect throng, running, hopping, slithering, and flying in a desperate attempt to escape the raid front.
The raiders surged into the clearing like a glittering, granular, red tsunami. The raid front was fifteen meters wide: tens of thousands of reddish-black ants flowing through and around and under the debris of the forest floor, covering the ground with a deadly carpet of razor-sharp mandibles. Arkady and Bella retreated cautiously, skirting around to the side of the glittering tide until they could track its progress without being overrun themselves.
The swarm’s method of operation was deceptively simple: the front rank of the raiders simply seized every living thing in their path, grappling and stinging until by the simple expedient of piling ant upon ant upon ant, they could subdue spiders, scorpions, beetles, cockroaches, grasshoppers, entire ant colonies, small rodents, and even, according to the ancient rumors of Earth’s jungles, unwatched human infants. In the space of five minutes Arkady and Bella watched this raid front seize a spider, a cluster of caterpillars, and half a dozen foraging ponerines unlucky enough to be caught in the raiders’ path. A bright blue beetle was caught by the tide, succeeded in staying afloat for a few precarious moments, and then capsized and was sucked into the whirl of glistening bodies. As the swarm caught each new prey item, major workers grasped and immobilized it while their comrades dismembered it for easier transport back down the supply lines. And gradually, at more or less the pace of a walking human, the raid front flowed through the clearing and into the forest beyond, leaving a thinned-out but still-impressive braid of foraging paths behind it: forward-moving columns carrying reinforcements up to the raid front, while backward-flowing ones transported prey items back to the bivouac to feed the ravenous larvae.
Arkady leaned cautiously over the swarm, poised his soft-nosed tweezers above one of the foraging routes, and plucked out one of the powerful soldiers guarding the columns to hold up for Bella’s inspection.
“She’s beautiful,” she said.
“She’s also one of the most successful organisms Earth ever created. Without these ants there would be no humans. And I don’t mean only biologically. Army ants evolved in the same environments early humans did, and the words for them—siafu, soldier, soldado, and so forth—go back as far as any words in human speech. There’s even a theory that organized human hunting and warfare developed from prehistoric man’s observations of the African Driver Ant’s raiding fronts.
He turned the soldier to give Bella a better view of the armored head, with its massive jaw muscles and barbed mandibles. “In pre-Evacuation Africa people even used to use them as surgical staples. You hold the soldier up to the wound, like so.” He demonstrated, keeping a careful distance between the furiously grasping mandibles and his own arm. “You squeeze her body to make her bite down on the edges of the wound, and then you twist off the body, and the head stays locked in place until you’re ready to take it out. And of course then the ant’s own immune defenses make the method as sterile as anything short of viral surgery. Neat, huh?”
“And what are we hunting the hunters for?” Bella asked. Arkasha had been right; she did have a sense of humor under the shyness.
“Well, officially because they’re the planet’s top predator and Arkasha and I want to get as much data on them as we can. But honestly…I’ve always kind of wanted an army-ant swa
rm to play with. Wait till I show you Schnierla’s circular milling experiment.”
All fun stuff…but not quite fun enough to take Arkady’s mind off the unnerving suspicion that something wasn’t quite right about Novalis.
Things still looked good on the surface. Better than good. Miraculous.
But the pieces that all looked so good in isolation became slippery and intractable every time Arkady tried to piece them into some larger pattern. And with every sedimentary layer of data that accumulated in his logbooks, Arkady was becoming more and more convinced that it wasn’t ants he should be trapping, but (metaphorically speaking) crows.
Trapping crows had always been emblematic, among working field biologists, of the kind of thankless, impossible, frustrating fieldwork that could take years off your life without adding measurably to your store of reliable data. Arkady wasn’t quite sure when the term trapping crows had first been applied to terraforming…but it certainly fit.
In theory terraforming was simple. You did your DVI. You figured out whether your volatiles were within an acceptable range. If they weren’t, you moved on and found another planet. If they were, you went to work on the one you had. First, you initiated runaway greenhouse syndrome by seeding the atmosphere with CFCs. Once atmospheric CO2 content hit the tipping point, the greenhouse effect would start cascading, and you could just monitor its progress via remote probe, until things reached the point where you could effectively create an ozone layer by photodissociation. Or if you had enough colonists willing to live in hell, you could just let surface dust storms block UV radiation in the place of an ozone layer. And even during these initial stages you could start seeding; classic terraforming practice dictated the seeding of the target planet with UV-resistant cryptoendolithic lichens, most of them artificially tweaked descendants of the few precious remaining samples of lichens from the Ross Desert of Antarctica. And once the lichens had done their work, you started in with a well-known succession of plant and insect life that built up toward…well, ideally toward just what they’d found on Novalis.
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