Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

Arkady returned Korchow’s kiss. “May we do our part,” he said, taking refuge in formality and formula.

“Your part?” For a moment the diplomat’s mask gave way to a look of disdain and anger. Or was that merely another mask, just as calculated as the first? And if so, what audience was it intended for? “Is that what you think you’ve been doing?”

Before Arkady could answer, the door opened and the first bidders entered.

“Jesus wept,” someone said.

Arkady turned to see the man-machine from the airport and the woman soldier who had accompanied him. This time, however, they were staring at Korchow.

“I should have known you’d be at the bottom of this.” The machine sounded weary, as if the weight of unpleasant memories that Korchow suggested was too heavy for his shunt’s human shoulders.

“How can a mere collection of neural networks and Toffoli gates attain such heights of melodrama?” Korchow countered in a voice that gave away even less than his smile did. “I’m behind nothing. I didn’t even know that poor Arkady was leaving us until he turned up in Maris Station. At which point we regrettably”—he glanced at Osnat—“lost track of him. Naturally, we were deeply concerned for his safety, the political situation being what it is. But now we have found our lost lamb again.”

“Lucky little lamb,” the machine drawled, his eyes sliding sideways toward Arkady.

“You’re not one of the bidders ?” the woman asked Korchow incredulously.

“No, no, Major. You misapprehend the situation. My only interest is in ensuring that Arkady retain the ability to exercise his…what’s that phrase you humans are always tossing around…free will?”

The woman didn’t return Korchow’s smile. She leaned into his space, her jaw shoved forward pugnaciously, and tapped him on the chest firmly enough for Arkady to hear the thump of her index finger on his sternum. “I’m watching you,” she said. “I’m tracking you, Korchow, and don’t you fucking forget it.”

Korchow’s smile remained firmly in place, but he tugged at his collar and fingered his old war wound. It was the closest thing the man had to a nervous tic.

“My dear Major—”

“Just plain Li now, thanks to you.”

“Seeing you is always so…eventful. I sincerely hope we can avoid gunplay this time.”

“That’s up to you,” the woman said.

That was when Arkady finally put the stray clues together and realized who she was. Major Catherine Li, UNSec First Expeditionary Force, aka the renegade construct Caitlyn Perkins, aka the Butcher of Gilead.

You wouldn’t know she was a Zhang construct if you weren’t looking for the resemblance. But she’d had plastic surgery. They’d said that at the trial. And of course she was a corporate-tanked construct, so you had to allow for the changes the Zhangs had made to their geneset after the Breakaway in order to tailor their phenotype to their own needs as free beings instead of corporate property. Once you did that, the lines of the murdered Zhang constructs shone through her stolid face and muscular body as clearly as printed letters through a piece of paper held up to sunlight.

How could a child born into corporate slavery have grown up to fight a war for the very corporations who had enslaved her? How, being what she was, could she have done what she’d done? And how could she have done it for the same humans who had given the order to turn ZhangSyndicate, with all its crèches and its genebanks, into a firegutted ghost station? Suddenly Arkady found that he was having no trouble at all looking convincingly frightened.

While Arkady was coming to terms with Li’s presence, the AI drifted over to the side table beneath one of the tall windows and began inspecting the artfully scattered objets d’art on its polished wood surface. It glanced back toward its companion and cleared its throat delicately. Could such a being have the normal fears and worries and apprehensions of a real person? If so, Arkady would have sworn the machine was trying to head off a conversation that frightened it.

“So, Major—” Korchow began.

“Oh for God’s sake!” Li burst out. “I don’t give a damn if it’s an original Eames! Can we make it through one goddamn minute without you interrupting me?”

“I beg your pardon?” Korchow asked.

“Never mind,” she muttered savagely. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Of course. I forget that you’re not quite the woman you were when we last met. How is life in the future, Major? Is being the ghost in the machine everything you hoped it would be?”

“Better than life in the Syndicate chicken coop.”

“Are you so sure of that? My offer’s still open—”

“Catherine,” the machine interrupted, “why are you even talking to him?”

“—I could get you on a Long March Rocket out of Guangdong Province next week. You’d be on Gilead within a month.”

“The last person you made that offer to’s dead,” Li pointed out.

“Yes.” Korchow agreed placidly. “But she put her hand up the wrong skirt. And humans are so touchy about that sort of thing.”

“Just drop it,” the machine said, looking hard at Korchow. “She’s not interested.”

“My, things have changed.” Korchow looked back and forth between the two of them. “The Catherine Li I remember never needed anyone to tell people what she thought.”

“If you two are done socializing,” Ash said, striding in on the heels of two hard young men whose skin was marked by the subdermal filigree of Earth-illegal wetware, “perhaps this would be a convenient moment to make the introductions.”

“Assuming all the bidders have arrived?” Korchow asked, letting the question hang in the air unanswered for a moment before he retreated to the shadows of his wing chair.

It seemed that all the bidders had indeed arrived. And when Arkady had sorted out the bidders from the coteries of bodyguards that he was starting to suspect were a routine cost of doing business in Jerusalem, there seemed to be three of them.

First the machine and his companion.

Second an elderly Palestinian man whose suit looked like something from a pre-Evacuation history book, and whose immaculate cotton headdress gleamed like a pearl in the dusky light that threaded through the shutters. Arkady had no trouble recognizing this bidder either: Shaikh Yassin, spearhead of the Palestinian hard religious right…and not at all the man Korchow had hoped the Palestinians would send.

“At last,” Yassin said when Moshe introduced Arkady to him. “Abu Felastineh, blessed be his children, and his children’s children, sends his greetings.”

That wasn’t a name, Arkady remembered from Korchow’s briefings, but an honorific used to protect the anonymity and physical safety of the president of Palestine. Abu Felastineh. The Father of Palestine. And by now Arkady knew better than to begin to try to guess what any title that contained the word father really meant to humans.

The Palestinian bowed courteously and extended a hand to Arkady. Arkady stepped forward to shake it…and ran into a solid wall of muscle as the man’s grim-faced bodyguards surged around him.

“Forgive the boy.” Korchow had stepped up behind Arkady so smoothly that it was impossible to say when exactly he’d left his chair. Now he slipped a hand around Arkady’s arm and drew him back a few cautious steps. “We in the Syndicates lack the institution of political assassination. We are, as I like to say, a too-trusting people.”

“A too-trusting people,” Yassin repeated. He made it sound as if the words were his and not Korchow’s. He made it sound as if he were the man who had invented the very idea of words.