Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“Exactly so.” Korchow bowing yet again and drawing Arkady back to safety under the unblinking gaze of the bodyguards.

“So how’s the water business?” Catherine Li interrupted.

It took Arkady a moment to realize she was speaking to Yassin—largely because she spoke in a casual, almost confrontational tone that had nothing to do with the way every other person in the room had spoken to him.

The Palestinian turned slowly to face her. Then he looked past her at Cohen. “I am always delighted to see the ghost of my grandfather’s friend. Your young associate seems to have been sadly misinformed, however. My family has no ties to the water trade, and I should be most sorry to think that you should have overheard any unfounded and malicious rumors to the contrary.”

“My dear fellow,” the machine murmured, patting the air with both hands as if he were smoothing down the hackles of a possibly dangerous dog. “Not at all. Nothing of the sort. My, er, associate is a bit overemotional. Young people, you know.”

“He sells water ?” Arkady whispered to Korchow.

“Absolutely not,” came the answer, whispered like his question from mouth to ear. “Shaikh Yassin is a perfectly respectable arms merchant.”

“Arkady,” Ash said. “Come here.”

Arkady wheeled around—and found himself face-to-face with the final bidder.

“This,” Ash announced, “is Turner.”

Arkady searched his mind for some memory of the exotic-sounding name and found none. What kind of a name was Turner anyway? And why hadn’t Korchow told him about this bidder?

He tried to take stock of the man, but all he could glean was a series of piecemeal impressions. A wrinkle-resistant button-down shirt stretched over an incipient potbelly and a weight lifter’s muscles; a soft-palmed hand that had never done the hard work of surviving on a Syndicate space station, but still had the strength nearly to crush Arkady’s fingers; freshly laundered hair combed precisely over a pink, smooth, wrinkle-free face and the coldest blue eyes Arkady had ever seen.

“Good to know you!” Turner said in a voice that took possession of the room just as aggressively as his big body did.

“Good to know you,” Arkady repeated, assuming this was some unknown human-style formal greeting.

Turner laughed loudly. He seemed to be a man who did everything loudly. “Hear you’re here to sell us something, Arkady. You got the goods, or are we gonna not be friends in the morning?”

“Um…”

“Just kidding!” He dealt Arkady a staggering blow on the shoulder.

“No hard feelings, hey?”

“Uh…sure.” Arkady rubbed at his shoulder.

Ash, meanwhile, had been watching this exchange with a vaguely amused expression on her smooth features. “Shall we begin?” she asked.

One of the guards dragged a heavy plush velvet armchair into the center of the room and positioned a standing lamp beside it so that the light would shine directly on the face of the unfortunate person sitting in it.

“Arkady?” Ash said pointedly.

Arkady hesitated, then walked obediently over to the chair and sat down.

As he did so the bidders sorted themselves onto the chairs and sofas which had already been placed around the edges of the room.

Their eyes turned to Arkady. He licked his lips and cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. He glanced around the circle of expectant faces and thought that they looked like wolves watching a hamstrung caribou. He glimpsed the flickering pinprick of a black box status light behind Catherine Li’s left pupil—another new thing in a day full of new things—and wondered what other watchers on what distant planets were hearing his tale. Then he looked down at his hands and kept his gaze there, knowing that he was going to have to lie and that he would lose the thread of the lie if his concentration faltered.

“My survey team was assigned to evaluate Novalis for terraforming and settlement—” he began.

“Hang on,” Li interrupted, leaning forward in her chair with an intent, predatory expression. “There’s no Novalis on any UN charts. What star does it belong to? What are the old Astronomical Survey coordinates? Where is it in relation to the treaty lines?”

Arkady began to glance at Korchow, then stopped the movement and looked instead toward Ash.

“That information will be provided in the stage-two bid package,” Ash answered. “After we’ve received your initial financial commitments.”

“Based on what, an initial blind bid?”

Ash nodded.

“What are the payment arrangements?”

“A hundred thousand. Twenty up front, eighty on the day.”

“Delivery on the day?”

“Naturally.”

Li shrugged. Arkady took it as permission to continue.

“There were ten of us,” he resumed. “Arkasha was the geneticist, and of course it’s his notebooks we’re talking about here. I was the biogeographer. Then there were the Ahmeds—”

“That’s AzizSyndicate’s biggest run A series,” Korchow interjected. “It’s a line whose main applications are military. They’d be familiar to Major Li from the last war”—he nodded politely in her direction—“but I doubt any of the rest of you would ever have seen one. Since the recent and, ahem, insufficiently anticipated outbreak of peace, the central joint steering committee has been trying to find alternative applications for them in the survey and terraforming missions. Sorry, Arkady. Go on.”

“Well, the Aziz A’s were the command team, pilot and navigator. They had the final word on all mission-critical decisions. Then we had the two Bellas, MotaiSyndicate B’s. One of them was an entomologist, like me, but a specialist in orbsilk worms. The other—”

“Hang on a minute.” Turner was taking notes, one muscular calf slung over the other knee to support his pad and pencil. “I’d like to get full names on these folks.”

“I’m sorry?” Arkady said.

“Those are their full names,” Korchow answered. “Arkady can’t give you anything else. Ahmed. Bella. Even Andrej”—Korchow smiled infinitesimally—“are merely geneline designations. Though Arkady here may know intuitively that one Ahmed isn’t the same as another, his language, his upbringing, and his convictions all tell him that the organism is nothing and the superorganism—the geneline—is everything.”

“But some of them have their own names. This Arkasha person—”

“Arkasha,” Korchow interrupted smoothly, “is the exception that proves the rule.”

“Are you saying he’s a political dissident?” Li interrupted.

“Let’s not indulge in morally loaded terminology, Major. Arkasha is merely…an atavism. Whether he is an atavism with some useful evolutionary role to play is a decision for the RostovSyndicate steering committee to make. Not for me. And certainly not for you.”

And so it went, just as he and Korchow had mapped it out back on Gilead, Arkady leading his audience down the twisting path—so close to the truth in almost every way—that Korchow had concocted for him.

“And what are we to make of this?” Shaikh Yassin said when Arkady finally reached the end of the story and fell silent. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began.

“What you make of it is your concern,” Ash answered. “Needless to say, your conclusions will largely determine the price you are willing to pay.”

“But what are we paying for ?” Li again. She seemed to be the point man by consensus, and the others seemed content to hang back and see what game she managed to flush. “I mean, are we buying this so-called genetic weapon? Or Arkady? Or Arkasha’s notebooks? Is Arkasha himself for sale, for that matter?”