On Novalis. In Aurelia’s bold scrawl.
Gavi’s flowchart wasn’t a simple picture of the flow of information, Arkady realized. Rather, it depicted the flow of a very special kind of information: a disease spreading through a susceptible population. It would already be spreading quickly indeed if the miniature epidemic on Novalis were any indication.
And this disease had only one possible vector…
Him.
NATIONAL ROBOTS
DOMIN: Henceforward, we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robots anymore. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state. And do you know what those factories will make?
HELENA: No, what?
DOMIN: National robots!…Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other. They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of mutual misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe!
—KAREL CAPEK (1923)
“Every war has its hotel,” Cohen opined. “Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with. Some hotels, however, have more than their fair share of wars. Would it interest you to know that you’re sitting in the single most frequently bombed hotel lobby in human history?”
“Great,” Li said wanly.
Cohen sank into the sofa cushions, crossed his legs, and tilted one calf-skin-shod foot this way and that, as if reassuring himself that his shoes really were as nice as they ought to be.
“Are those new shoes?” Li asked.
He smiled sleekly.
The lobby was starting to fill up with the usual mix of tourists, pilgrims, and locals. A band of young transvestites bubbled through the revolving door and boarded the elevator in a clatter of heels and a cloud of perfume. A gaggle of Interfaithers arrived at the elevator at the same moment as the youngsters, saw what they were, and huddled together like hypochondriacs stranded in a leper colony. Li preferred to imagine that at least some of their shocked middle-aged stares were really gazes of covert longing…but then she’d always liked to think the best of people. “Am I crazy,” she asked Cohen, “or was one of those kids wearing a yarmulke?”
“Yeshiva boy chic. Totally passé. They’re probably just in for the night from the Tel Aviv suburbs.”
“Yeshiva boy chic, huh? They must just love you down here.”
“Ahem. Well, not everyone relishes the idea of a Lion of Judah floundering in the fleshpots. I try to be relatively discreet about it.”
Li raised her eyebrows in a silent comment on the notion of Cohen being “relatively discreet” about anything.
“It’s all legal,” he pointed out. “Despite the best attempts of the ultraorthodox and the Interfaithers. In fact, Israel has the ideal combination of prudishness and libertinism. You can do anything you want, get whatever you want, sleep with whomever you want. But since there’s always someone around to tell you you’re going to rot in hell for it, it all still has the tang of the forbidden. Everything’s taboo…but none of it’s taboo enough to land you in jail. What could be better?”
“Speaking of which,” she observed casually, “Gavi’s quite the package. You two never…”
“Never.” Cohen sounded decisive, even fervent about it. “Never even thought about it. First of all, he’s such a strange combination of prudish and romantic that I’m not at all sure he’s slept with anyone since Leila died. And second…Gavi needs. I’d get eaten up alive if I ever let myself start trying to give him what he needs.”
“So instead you find yourself a cold, cynical, self-sufficient bitch like me?”
Cohen made an ostentatious show of pondering the question. He was doing his blonde bombshell act tonight. The fact that he could pull it off in Roland’s body was a display of pure programmer’s bravura. Li had spent just enough time around Roland while Cohen wasn’t shunting through him to know that he was boringly straight in every sense of the word. But somehow Cohen managed to pull shades of Marilyn Monroe from the kid. “Well,” he purred eventually, “at least you’re not a prude.”
She leaned into him in what even she knew was an unusual display of public affection, and pressed her lips to Roland’s smooth young forehead just below the hairline. Cohen returned her kisses, moving under her hands like water, making her forget the stranger’s body that came between them.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Is that why you went sneaking off to see Ash last night?”
She jerked back to stare at him from the farthest end of the sofa. He was sitting, hands folded in his lap, in the state of unnatural stillness that she’d learned to recognize as a sign of the most violent emotion.
Her mind raced. How did he know? Had router/decomposer told him? Or was this just one more sign that his access to her internals went deeper than he was willing to admit to her?
She looked at him, forcing her pulse to stay even, her eyes to remain level. “So you’ve been spying on me again.”
“Apparently with good reason.”
“Cohen—”
“Don’t make excuses. It’s beneath you.”
The silence was suffocating, both instream and off. Cohen bent his head to light a cigarette, and Roland’s eyes vanished beneath the thick golden fall of forelock. Roland’s eyes closed as he took a first long drag on the cigarette. Li sat there feeling like a mouse caught between a cat’s paws. Finally the cigarette dropped and Roland’s eyes opened. His face was so blandly expressionless that for a surreal moment she wondered whether Cohen was still on shunt.
“I can live with an innocent flirtation,” he said in a voice that made her soul squirm. “Or even a not-so-innocent flirtation. But I will not be lied to.”
His words hung in the air like one of the bright phosphorus flares that blossomed over the Green Line at night. Ash. Christ, it had never even occurred to her. Did Cohen really think she’d cheat on him for a pair of long legs and a pretty face? The idea was repellent. Infuriating. Humiliating.
But warring with her urge to set Cohen straight was the realization that he’d just handed her an unbreakable, uncheckable alibi for her meetings with Nguyen’s contact.
She’d be a fool not to take it.
Wouldn’t she?
“I was going to tell you,” she said, feeling her heart wrench with the lie.
“Of course you were.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” His voice was level and pleasant…but when she probed the intraface, none of his firewalls would so much as shake hands with her internals.
“Have a drink,” he told her, not even acknowledging the aborted contact.
Their eyes met. Li frowned. Cohen smiled.
Except it wasn’t his real smile. It was the bland, pleasant, impersonal smile that meant he’d decided to write someone off so completely he wasn’t even going to bother mentioning it to them. She’d seen that smile only twice before, and neither occasion had made for good memories. She’d never imagined she’d be on the receiving end of it.
“Right.” She picked up the cocktail menu and pretended to look at it. “What’s the plan then?”
“There is no plan. We’ll talk to Fortuné, then we’ll see.”
“And where do we go to talk to the man?”
“The International Zone. Fortuné’s got a favorite bar there, a little place called the Sauve Qui Peut.”
The Sauve Qui Peut was a Legionnaire’s bar: cheap beer, an abiding odor of steak and frites, and Brel and Bénabar chuttering out of speakers that had been blown long before the oldest of the place’s regulars had rotated into the Zone.
The bar back boasted a cluttered shrine of Legion paraphernalia. Flat photos and holos of soldiers fording swollen tropical rivers or jumping out of ancient airplanes, or marching with the medieval battle-axes and butcher’s aprons that the Fathers
of the Legion (a few of them Mothers, at least technically) wore on parade days. The shrine’s centerpiece was an antique hand-colored photograph of Colonel Danjou’s famous hand, so immense that the screws where the metal hinges met the wooden fingers were visible at twenty paces. The place was packed but the floor around the back table was empty. And from the minute they walked in Cohen could see Fortuné waiting for them in the shadows.
“Bienvenues en l’Enfer,” Fortuné said, rising behind his table to greet them. His smile was friendly, but the eyes behind the smile were as sharp and precise as the creases in his dress shirt.
If the Sauve Qui Peut was the prototypical Legionnaire’s bar, then Colonel Jean-Louis Fortuné was the perfect Legionnaire. Five foot nine in thick socks and spit-shined jump boots, and not carrying an ounce of fat anywhere on his wiry frame except in the coffee-colored baby face that was the legacy of his Haitian ancestry. A fifth-degree judo black belt. An inveterate but eminently discreet womanizer…or so it was whispered around barracks. His hairline had already been receding when Cohen first met him, and now he was going bald in the no-nonsense manner that was synonymous, to French eyes, with being a man of intelligence, education, and virility.
Li took the hand Fortuné offered and delivered what Cohen suspected was her most bone-crushing handshake. Fortuné bore up well under it; but then he too was wired to the gills, though his dark skin hid the delicate subdermal filigree of ceramsteel filaments.
“I’m a great admirer,” Fortuné said when he’d retrieved his hand from Li’s grasp. “It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome the hero of Gilead.”
“Some people would say the Butcher of Gilead.”
Cohen had never been quite sure how closely Li followed the press coverage of her court-martial. Now he guessed he knew.
“Some people would not be me,” Fortuné said placidly. “They nailed you up for sins above your pay grade. That was the opinion on the chow line when it happened. It still is.”
Li blinked at that, but her internals were so tightly locked down that Cohen couldn’t get any sense of what was going on behind her eyes.
They sat down. Fortuné was drinking a Lorelei, and a wave to the bartender brought two more bottles over at double time. Cohen sipped the crisp, sweet Alsatian beer and smiled at the taste of Hyacinthe’s centuries-gone youth.
Li and Fortuné started talking war. Tours of duty. Planetside rotations. Combat drops. Cohen, who had never been a soldier nor wanted to be, let the talk flow past him like current lifting a swimmer. He came back to Earth with a thump when he heard the word employment roll off Fortuné’s lips.
“I’m not looking to get hitched again,” Li said into the silence that followed. “And even if I were, what’s it to you? Last time I checked you work for UNSec, same as I did.”
“Only in the most limited sense, I assure you.”
“Then who do you answer to?”
Fortuné smiled urbanely. “La France, ma chère, defender of the civilized world.”
“Is that like the free world but with better food?”
Fortuné laughed, and Li unleashed her most dazzling smile on him. She had charisma in spades when she felt like putting out the effort. And for reasons that Cohen didn’t want to think too closely about, she’d decided it was worth her while to charm Fortuné.
“She’s quite a woman,” Fortuné said when she got up to hunt down fresh drinks.
Cohen turned on him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“My friend, I’m neither wealthy enough nor handsome enough to compete with you. I was speaking merely in a professional sense.”
“Well, don’t think about that either.”
Fortuné’s eyes flicked to the front of the bar, where Li was standing on her toes in order to give an attentive reading to the ornate copperplate inscription below the photograph of Colonel Danjou’s hand. Cohen saw her as Fortuné must see her: taut, wired, preternaturally alert, right hand poised habitually over the pistol that she’d had to leave with the hard-faced ex-noncom at what had to be the most explosive coat check in the Holy Land. She ought to be commanding a division, he thought guiltily, not baby-sitting me. He squashed the thought.
“She’s retired,” he told Fortuné.
“Pity.” Fortuné eyed Li’s ramrod-straight back. “Still, if she ever changes her mind…”
“She won’t.”
The buzzing speakers broke out into a rendition of a song that had become the de facto Legionnaire’s anthem in the Evacuation era, and a few of the drunker soldiers around the bar sang along to the famous chorus:
Je voulais quitter la terre, mais maintenent je la regrette J’ai plus le mal du pays, j’ai le mal de la planète
Suddenly the song struck Cohen as sadly telling. A crowd of colonials singing about being homesick for a planet they’d never called home in the language of a country that only existed as a romantic idea and a Ring-side embassy.
“This is all very enjoyable,” Fortuné said, “and I certainly hope you’ll both stay to dinner—not here, somewhere with good food. I know a little one star in Haifa where the cook is pretty and the foie gras is impeccable. But in the meantime I think there was another reason besides my charm and good looks for your visit? What can I do for you?”
Cohen explained briefly the message they needed passed across the Line.
Fortuné stared intently at him, nodding and frowning and muttering oui, oui, oui, oui, as the French often do to indicate agreement…or at least attention.
In this case, it turned out to be only attention. When Cohen was done, Fortuné leaned back in his chair, his dark skin blending with the shadows so that all Cohen could see of him was the blazing white pleats of his summer uniform and the battered stainless-steel wristband of his much-abused Rolex.
“Et pourquoi tu veux te compliquer la vie?” he asked. Why do you want to complicate your life?
Why indeed?
“For a friend.”
“I hope he is a good one.”
“The best.”
Or the worst.
Because the truth was that Cohen still hadn’t decided whether he was doing this for Didi or for Gavi. And he was betting his peace of mind on a single article of faith: that when all the twists and turns were over the two of them would turn out to be on the same side.
The first sign Arkady saw that Cohen’s message had gotten through was a marked uptick in Moshe’s already-healthy sense of paranoia.
Moshe interpreted the Palestinian request for a second session with Arkady as a symptom of some grave security breach. Osnat began to look increasingly harried. Ash Sofaer flew out from Tel Aviv, apparently for the sole purpose of staring coolly at Arkady, asking a few unconnected questions, whispering into Moshe’s ear for a few minutes, and flying back home again.
“You’re hearing grass grow,” Osnat told Moshe finally.
“If I’m hearing grass grow,” Moshe said, “maybe it’s because grass is growing.”
Meanwhile, Arkady asked himself constantly what he could do, what he should do, about the revelation he’d experienced in the face of Gavi’s flowcharts.
He was by now absolutely certain that his first intuition had been right. Korchow’s “genetic weapon” had merely been the ball Korchow wanted the bidders to keep their eyes on. The real virus was already infecting the buyers every time they touched Arkady or talked to him or stood in the same room with him.
Arkady had seen the signs himself. He’d just read them wrong. For Arkady, used to the strong medicine of Syndicate immunoresponses, the slower maturing, more diffuse human immune response had looked like minor allergies, nothing more. Either that or the humans hadn’t really started getting sick yet.
His first reaction to the way Korchow had used him was outrage. He had never consented to be used as some sort of interstellar Typhoid Mary. And it was all very well to talk about throwing Earth into chaos in order to save humans in the long run…but Arkady had gotten to know some of those humans. And he
didn’t relish the idea of handing out smallpox blankets to people like Osnat and Gavi.
Gradually, however, his outrage was eclipsed by fear. A second realization had come close on the heels of the first one and shaken him to his core like the aftershock of an earthquake flattens buildings still precariously standing after the first assault. He’d spent four months on Gilead while Korchow and his team interrogated him. During those months, Korchow and others had sat across tables from him, shared meals with him, passed hour after hour with him. Still others had prepared his food, washed his clothes and bedclothes, cleaned up the intimate entropy of daily life. There was no hope of maintaining anything like effective quarantine in the constantly recirculating air of an orbital station, so he could only assume the worst.
And if the worst had happened, then Korchow hadn’t launched Arkady toward Earth in an offensive attack. He’d sent him as a desperate last-ditch effort to buy the Syndicates some time and better their suddenly radically diminished chances of survival.
Arkady was still trying to decide how he felt about this—and what he should do about it—when the two humorless young men who’d flown in from Tel Aviv with Ash smuggled him across the Line and handed him over to the green-eyed boy, Yusuf.
There was a room.
There was a desk.
On the desk there was a single blank sheet of paper.
Behind the desk there was a man.
The man looked kind, slightly harried, moderately intelligent, and completely unremarkable. Average height, average coloring, average build running to sedentary flab in middle age. The bland gray buttoned-down look of conformity that Arkady was already learning to associate with midlevel bureaucrats and low-level career military officers.
A timeserver, Arkady decided. Short on initiative, originality, and imagination. Good at pushing the paperwork through on time. The kind of man who made it hard to believe humans had ever had the brains to bootstrap themselves out of the gravity well.
“Hello, Arkady,” the man said in fluent, unaccented English instead of the UN-standard Spanish that was Earth’s lingua franca. That was the first surprise.
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