Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“I love you,” she said, and meant it.

A human lover would have been happy.

But Cohen wasn’t human. And inside he could feel her letting go even as she held him. Drifting away, not with anger or resentment but with a kind of dull resignation.

She loved him more than she had ever imagined she could love anyone. But she was going to leave him anyway. And if there was anything he could do to stop it, she couldn’t tell him what it was because she didn’t even remember why she was leaving.

The left-behind bomb exploded at eight in the morning on Easter Sunday of 2049.

“Democracy of the bomb, twenty-first-century style,” Osnat told Arkady as their chopper thundered over the Line just high enough to be out of range of any locals crazy enough to take potshots at them. “Some maniac from Hoboken decided the Rapture wasn’t getting here fast enough, and he had to do his little bit to help Armageddon along. The cleanup stalled out after Phase One: the Old City and the Temple Mount. Now the UN keeps whining about funding and asking for new environmental impact reports. And meanwhile they’re offering state-subsidized tank babies to anyone who’ll emigrate.”

“But why would the UN want you to emigrate?” Arkady asked, bewildered by the welter of unfamiliar terminology.

Osnat looked at him as if he’d said something almost comically stupid. “Water,” she said, as if that was all the answer his question demanded.

Arkady nodded, less to indicate understanding—he understood almost nothing that came out of Osnat’s mouth—than in the hope that a nod might elicit some more information that would make sense of what came before.

It didn’t, but he was learning to live with being terminally confused.

The Left-Behind Bombing had been the last poisonous shot fired in the War on Terror. An angry young man had stolen a genetic weapon designed to lower Sunni birthrates in Iraq without affecting neighboring ethnic groups. The targeting hadn’t quite lived up to the defense contractor’s hype, and the explosion had single-handedly wiped the most holy sites of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism off the political map.

“It really is green,” Arkady breathed, staring down at the burgeoning wilderness of the Line. “It’s alive. ”

“Chernobyl Effect,” Osnat explained. “Contamination’s bad, but humans are worse. The Line’s just about the healthiest real estate in the Middle East these days as long as you don’t happen to be human.”

Arkady caught his breath at a fluid and briefly glimpsed dun-and-gray form passing under the scattered trees along the canal bank. “Is that a horse ?”

“Wild donkey,” Osnat answered. She was staring down at the Line too, her eyes gone so pale in the weak winter sunlight that from where Arkady sat they seemed to be transparent. “Horses are extinct now. Even on the Line.”

“Wild,” Arkady said, picking up on the earlier word. “You mean naturally reproducing.”

“Yeah.” Her voice sank to near background noise as she craned her neck out the far window to keep the donkey in her line of vision.

“Those early genetic weapons were pretty unpredictable. Mostly they boiled down to dumping massive loads of pesticides and synthetic estrogens and heavy metals and hoping that the combined toxin load would do the job. The Temple Mount bomb scrambled horse, human, and songbird DNA beyond repair. Donkeys, on the other hand, are still breeding like rabbits. Actually, rabbits are still breeding like rabbits, come to think of it. And I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how well the ants are doing.” She sighed—a sigh that was all out of proportion with the not-very-serious problem of too many ants. “On the other hand, the bombing did scare us into three centuries of peace. I guess that counts for something.”

“What started up the war again, Osnat?”

“Hell if I know. It was like everyone just woke up one morning and decided to flush it all down the toilet.”

She frowned down at the treetops while the silence (a relative notion in the ear-shattering roar of the helicopter) stretched to uncomfortable lengths.

“You must remember the open border,” Arkady ventured finally.

“I grew up with it. I was already in college when the war started.”

Arkady had read about the open border, a fact of life in Israel and Palestine during the centuries of shocked peace that followed the Left-Behind Bombing. The whole concept of the border—of any border—had seemed impossibly theoretical until now, as incomprehensible to Syndicate eyes as everything else about the human notions of countries and national loyalties. Now, watching the shadow of their chopper flicker over the hills and valleys, Arkady could finally match words to reality.

There were fences down there. And the only fences Arkady had ever seen in his life were the ones crèchelings put up at the back of playing fields during field trips to Gilead to stop stray balls from rolling away. They really meant it, he realized, looking at those fences. The idea of “owning” a piece of a planet might seem as quaint as witchcraft to him, but these people were willing to kill each other over it.

“Did you know any Palestinians before the war?” Arkady asked Osnat.

“My first boyfriend was Palestinian. My parents loved him. Thought he was a good influence on me.” She smirked. “I was not a well-behaved adolescent.”

Arkady blinked, taken aback by the sheer number of unthinkables in that reply. “And what’s he doing now?”

Her smile shut down like an airlock slamming closed. “He’s dead. All those nice boys I grew up with are dead. On both sides.” She gave a bitter laugh. “And for what? So we can listen to the bastards in the Knesset make patriotic speeches.”

She lit a cigarette and smoked it, hunched over the little flame like a dog trying to keep someone from stealing its bone.

“This used to be the most beautiful country,” she said finally. Arkady would hear those words, or some version of them, so many times over the coming weeks, and from so many people on both sides of the Line, that they would come to seem like an epitaph for the Jerusalem Osnat’s generation had grown up in. “I wish you could see what it was like before the war. They were even talking about opening up the cleaner parts of the Line and turning them into an international peace park.” She turned away and stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette as if she’d lost the stomach for it. “Ah, fuck, I don’t know why I’m even telling you.”

Arkady made a helpful face but Osnat was staring out the window, seeing only the past and its long-buried dead.

“Oh well.” She sounded almost friendly for a moment. “Not your problem. Just dodge the mortars for a few weeks and you’re out of here.”

“And you?”

“And me what?”

“Why don’t you leave?”

She jabbed a nicotine-stained finger toward him abruptly enough to make him flinch. “Bingo. Just the question I ask the bitch in the mirror every morning.”

“And?”

“And you’ll be the first to know if I ever get a straight answer out of her.”

Arkady must have fallen asleep after that. When he woke the city was gone and they were flying over empty desert.

Waves of sand ran away to the horizon under towering dust-brown thunderheads that the pilot seemed to be flying into at every moment. The sun shone feebly through the enveloping haze, though Osnat’s sunburned face testified to its destroying power.

Arkady shifted uncomfortably. He’d hoped that flying would relieve the constant ache of full gravity. But, flying or earthbound, he was still sucked onto this spinning rock like a bug in a wind tunnel, every joint popping and aching until it was hard to believe his ancestors had survived long enough to make it off the planet.