“You’re drunk.” Arkady took the beaker Arkasha handed him and realized belatedly that there was nowhere on the narrow bunk to put it down—and that that was exactly what Arkasha had intended.
“True, too true,” Arkasha admitted, busy with the drawstring of Arkady’s pants. “I’m also a shirker, and a malingerer, and an unregenerate deviant. None of which detracts from the blinding moral import of the revelation I’m about to bestow upon you.”
“Which is?”
“That I love you—have I mentioned, by the way, that you entirely fail to appreciate my brilliance and originality?—that I love you because of their mistake.”
Arkady made a rude noise. “At least my cowlick is outside my skull, not inside it.”
“Yep,” Arkasha announced at about the same moment as he finally succeeded in making Arkady spill his drink all over the floor. “That’s me. A Cowlick on the Brain of a Perfect Society.”
The arena was perhaps a meter across. At the moment its perfectly white and featureless surface contained perhaps five hundred army ants, racing around in a swirling, slightly irregular circle that resembled nothing so much as a satellite’s eye view of a hurricane. It also resembled, to Arkady’s naturalist’s eye, a dozen or so other examples of self-organized criticality in action: the delicate spiral structures that so many leafy plants evolved to maximize sun exposure and minimize self-shading; the intricate whorls in the pelts of fur-bearing mammals, of which the single whorl on the crown of each human and posthuman head was a vestigial remnant; the complex interlocking networks formed by communities of people, ants, or songbirds.
But there was one difference of course: all those other patterns were adaptive, whereas the milling, panicked circle of ants was suicidally dysfunctional.
“Under unique circumstances in nature (and rather ordinary ones in the laboratory), army ants can be induced to form a tight circular column, a myrmecological merry-go-round, in which they ‘march themselves to death.’” Gotwald, of course, quoting Piels and Schnierla.
And the great Schnierla had established that the diameter of the circular column represented “the sum of the vector of the individual ant’s centrifugal impulse to resume the march and the centripetal force of trophallaxis which binds it to its group”…an equation that never failed to cross Arkady’s mind when he saw large groups of people all making the same stupid mistake at the same moment.
Trophallaxis—the following instinct—was so strong that if you dropped ants from two different swarms into the arena together, they would actually follow each other perfectly peacefully for ten or twenty minutes before they came to their senses and locked mandibles in a last mortal battle.
“You’d think that sometime, somewhere, some of them would just snap out of it and turn the other way,” Arkasha said beside him.
“You have to remember that the following instinct is perfectly adaptive in the environment it evolved in.” As usual Arkady felt an obscure need to defend his ants. “If these ants were on the forest floor instead of in the lab, they would circle around until they found their swarm’s scent and just follow it back to the main column. Or even if the scent trail was gone, washed away in a flood for example, they’d run into sticks and stones and leaves and be deflected little by little until they eventually worked their way back to the rest of the swarm. It’s just here, where there’s no external noise to counterbalance the circling instinct, that it becomes maladaptive. The ants and their environment are an integrated system, just like the brain and its environment. Change the environment and you’re left with half a system. You might as well rip half the wires out of a computer, then blame it for not working.”
“It’s really kind of awful when you put it that way,” Arkasha said. “Actually…why are you doing this to the poor ants?”
“I’m not going to follow through with it,” Arkady confessed. “I just wanted to see a circular mill in action. I’m going to aspirate them back into their nest before they get too tired. To tell you the truth, I never could do any really nasty experiments on ants. I can’t stand the sight of their little faces when they’re frightened.”
“Their little faces?” Arkasha sounded amused. “Do ants even have faces?”
“Sure. Well, mandibles. And they have this panic-stricken way of antennating that’s just heartbreakin—”
Ranjipur poked his head into the lab, looking thoroughly panic-stricken himself despite his lamentable absence of antennae. “Have you two seen Aurelia?” he asked. “Oh. Arkasha. Thank God. We need you. Bella’s had some kind of relapse.”
Bella was in the bathroom slumped over the toilet when they reached her. Her dark hair was plastered against her skull, and Arkady could see the pale skin of her scalp showing between the damp locks.
“How long has this been going on?” Arkasha asked.
It turned out that it had been going on for a week, and that Bella had somehow managed to hide it from everyone. Shocking. But not as shocking as the look on Aurelia’s face when she finally arrived and got a handle on the situation.
“Come down to the lab and help me run this?” she asked Arkasha after she’d pulled blood from the Motai B.
Arkady tagged along, following Aurelia’s glance at him rather than an explicit invitation.
“What the hell is going on down here?” Arkasha said as soon as the door closed behind them.
Aurelia still had that stunned, bloodless look on her face. “I don’t know. I have no data, no physiological baselines, no standard procedures to follow. I mean, for the ship cat, sure. But this…”
Arkasha flopped weakly onto the stool next to Arkady. He and Aurelia seemed to have reached some basic unspoken agreement about the nature of Bella’s changeling sickness that eluded Arkady.
“Is Bella in danger?” he asked hesitantly. “Can you cure her?”
“She’s in a lot of danger,” Aurelia said shortly. “And I can’t cure her because there’s nothing to cure. She’s not sick, Arkady. She’s pregnant.”
A UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR OF COMBAT
Military conflicts, particularly land combat, possess the key characteristics of complex adaptive systems (CASs): combat forces are composed of a large number of nonlinearly interacting parts…local action, which often appears disordered, induces long-range order (i.e., combat is self-organized); military conflicts, by their nature, proceed far from equilibrium; military forces, in order to survive, must continually adapt to a changing combat environment; there is no master “voice” that dictates the actions of each and every combatant… Finally, what lies at the heart of an artificial-life approach to simulating combat, is the hope of discovering…whether there exists—and, if so, what the properties are, of—a universal grammar of combat.
—ANDREW ILACHINSKI (2001)
The machine wouldn’t tell them where it was taking them.
It met them alone, without the terrifying woman who Arkady still instinctively thought of not as Catherine Li, but as the Butcher of Gilead. But Arkady’s relief at Li’s absence faded as Cohen led them out of the prosperous modern section of Jerusalem and into the bombed-out tangle of empty streets that tumbled down toward the thickness of the Line.
Osnat followed the AI with a docility that Arkady found more frightening than her usual stubbornness. Her eyes flickered restlessly over the passing house fronts and alleyways, but she gave no other sign of being aware of possible danger. Arkady would have liked to believe that it was because she knew they were protected, but he suspected it was because she’d decided that any dangers out there couldn’t be dealt with and would have to be accepted.
Finally, they turned into an empty street whose houses—not all of them empty by any means—bore the blaring orange biohazard signs that Arkady had come to recognize as the emblem of the poisoned border between Israel and Palestine.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Arkady whispered to Osnat.
“Too late for that, boychik.”
Something clanked softly, metal on
metal, in the shadowy interior of one of the abandoned houses they’d just passed. “Don’t move,” said a woman’s voice from the shadows. “You’re perfect just where you are.”
“Son of a bitch,” Osnat muttered.
The machine shrugged apologetically. “It wasn’t my idea.”
More noises came from inside the house, and from two of the houses on the other side of the empty street. Osnat stood stock-still, her hands held stiffly out away from her body, in plain sight, with the palms showing and the fingers open. On reflection, Arkady decided that it might be a good idea to do the same.
The voice that had spoken out of the shadows had almost certainly been Catherine Li’s, but none of the half dozen hard young bodies that emerged from the surrounding houses was hers.
They were soldiers, but there was something disorientingly drab and ragtag-looking about them, even by Israeli standards. Their uniforms looked at first glance as if they’d been torn and roughly patched. It took a few puzzled minutes for Arkady to work out that the “patches” were tape, and the tape was strategically located to cover all unit insignia.
“Hey, guys,” one of the secret soldiers said when he caught sight of Osnat. “It’s Hoffman! We bagged ourselves a tiger. Here, kitty kitty kitty!”
“Oh grow up,” Osnat snarled.
A second soldier came over to frisk Arkady. As the boy’s hands slid under his arms and along his rib cage, Arkady saw a flash of silver on the breast pocket of his uniform. He looked more closely and saw a small pin depicting a viciously curved saber blossoming from a pair of spread eagle’s wings.
“You forgot to tape over your pin thingy,” he said.
“What are you, IDF quality control? I ran out of fucking tape.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t even know what it means.” Not quite true; the paratroopers’ wings told Arkady he was dealing with commandos from one of Israel’s legendary Sayerets, or special units. But which unit this was he couldn’t have begun to say.
“It means I Love Mom,” the soldier quipped. “Now turn around and spread your legs, schlemiel.”
Arkady turned around obediently—and finally caught sight of Li.
There was something about her, even standing in the street doing nothing, that made the Israelis look like toy soldiers. She was dressed much as Osnat usually dressed: in nondescript standard-issue desert-drab gear that looked like it could have come out of any of the army surplus shops Arkady had passed while running Korchow’s little errands the other week. But somehow the mismatched odds and ends hung on her short stocky frame in a configuration that looked anything but haphazard.
Her short hair was pushed back under a pair of sniper’s goggles that must cover her entire face when she pulled them down. The elastic band that held the goggles to her head had once had white lettering on it, perhaps a manufacturer’s logo; it had been scribbled over with a laundry pen so that it was just a dull purple-brown overlay on the black elastic. Her trousers were stained and bagged out at the knees and a knee pad floated around one ankle. Her already-stocky body was encased in a ceramic vest. In addition to the handgun still strapped to her thigh where he’d seen it during that first meeting at the airport, she’d made two new additions to her armory: a long, black, viciously sleek sniper’s rifle and a brutal-looking sawed-off assault weapon with a flashlight duct-taped beneath its trigger guard.
Another person—most other people—would have looked ridiculous in this getup. Li didn’t. And when Arkady asked himself why, he couldn’t come up with a clear answer. Was it the well-worn, hard-used quality of the clothes and weapons? Was it the sense that every strap and buckle and piece of tape had been adjusted with cool precision by hands that had done the job of killing often enough to make it a matter of craft, rather than reflection? Or was it the bulldog set of her jaw and the glint of defiant enjoyment in her dark eyes?
“He’s clean,” the soldier told Li over Arkady’s shoulder as he finished searching him.
“Take him inside then.”
Arkady looked around for Cohen, but the AI was gone. He had a vague idea that he’d seen him fade back into one of the neighboring houses just after the troops had arrived on the scene. And he must have taken Osnat with him because she was nowhere to be seen either.
“Where did Cohen and Osnat go?” he asked Li. It was the first time he’d ever worked up the courage to speak directly to the woman.
She looked at him as if she’d just become aware of his existence and wasn’t particularly pleased by the discovery. “Cohen had to go take care of some things.”
Arkady jerked his head toward the empty houses and the no-man’s-land that he knew must lie just beyond them. “Is he…are we going out there?”
“Probably.”
“Are we going to be out there after dark?” Arkady asked, looking at her flashlight-equipped weapon.
She gave him a lazy smile. “You better hope not.”
Inside the building that seemed to be the unit’s impromptu headquarters, Arkady saw a dozen more soldiers, a tangle of wires and equipment, assorted ominous olive drab cases and boxes—and off in a corner together, bent over a monitor, Cohen and Osnat and a young man whose collar tabs said he was a captain.
Osnat had somehow acquired a ceramic-plated vest and helmet and one of the same snubbed-off flashlight-equipped weapons that Li and the others were all carrying.
“What about him?” Li flicked a thumb at Arkady. “You’re not going to send him in naked as a shelled oyster, are you?”
An awkward silence fell.
“Oh for God’s sake. Don’t tell me no one thought of it?”
“Well…uh…Avi’s about his size,” said a young woman with a first lieutenant’s bar on her collar. “Someone go get Avi.”
“Avi! Get the fuck over here!”
“I said go get him, not scream in my ear. God, kids these days!”
A tall slim soldier materialized from somewhere over Arkady’s left shoulder. Rough hands pushed him against the wall next to Arkady and squared them up next to each other. A brief argument ensued—no surprise in a country where argument appeared to be the national sport. Nonetheless, it was obvious that the willowy Avi was closer to Arkady’s space-born physique than anyone else in the unit.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Avi said when he figured out what was in the cards. “Not my vest! Take someone else’s vest! This isn’t some factory-issue piece of shit. My mother resewed all the inside pockets and—”
“Well,” Li pointed out in a deceptively mild voice, “if you’re really concerned, you could always come along with us and make sure nothing happens to it.”
“—and, uh, I’m sure she’d be overjoyed for Arkady here to have it. Really. Be my guest. My shit is your shit.”
The boy emptied the pockets of his vest into a bag someone held out for the purpose, removed various pieces of detachable gear and equipment, unfastened what seemed like an inconveniently large number of buckles and snaps and Velcro strips, and finally pulled the vest over his head and lowered it over Arkady’s head in one smooth and almost anticlimactic movement.
The vest dropped onto Arkady’s shoulders with a soft thud, giving off a smell that was a combination of its normal owner’s masculine, and thankfully relatively clean, odor, and the sharp smells of dirt and machine oil and the khamsin. “It’s so light,” he said wonderingly.
“We’ll see if you still think that in five hours.”
And indeed, as the straps were fastened and tugged tight around his body he could already feel the ceramic plates digging and chafing around the edges.
When the thing had been strapped tight enough to feel thoroughly uncomfortable, the lieutenant stepped back and gave him a measuring once-over. “Well, that ought to protect everything but your balls,” she said in a satisfied tone. “And I hear you guys don’t use those anyway, so what do you care? Move around for me, will you?”
Arkady moved. “It’s too tight,” he complained.
“Too tight is just right. As the general said to the whore.”
Arkady had no idea what that meant, but everyone else seemed to think it was hysterically funny.
A noncom snaked through the crowded room with what looked like a roll of lilac purple tape. “Line up, ladies. Color of the day.”
“God! Purple again? Who picks these colors, a vengeful homosexual field-training-school washout?”
“Hey it’s better than the hot pink. Remember the pink? Took me a month to peel that shit off.”
“Hey, guys,” drawled the next guy over, “didn’t your mother ever tell you not to look a gift Mat’Kal in the mouth?”
“And the real tragedy is that he thinks he’s funny!”
As Arkady watched, people began ripping off strips of the brightly colored tape and wrapping it around the grips of their assault rifles or sticking strips of it onto their vests and helmets.
“What’s the tape for?” he asked Osnat, who had reappeared beside him in full combat gear.
“Idiot-proofing.” She’d ripped a section off the roll when it passed them by and was taping her own weapon and vest. She eyeballed him for a minute, stuck a strip of tape across his vested chest and pressed it briskly into place. “The tactical AIs are programmed not to fire on anyone with the right color tape on.”
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