Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“That’s partly for you to determine,” Ash answered smoothly. “You have discretion to put together your own bid. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you’re willing to pay for it.”

“And what does it mean that we’re dealing with your charming self?” Yassin asked Ash. Beneath the courteous language, his voice sounded sharp as razors. “Can we infer from GolaniTech’s involvement that Arkady has already been interrogated by Israel, and we’re merely being offered their leavings?”

“You can infer whatever you like,” Ash said—and the room fell silent while each of them tried and failed to stare the other down.

“My problem is still with the story itself,” Li said, breaking the silence. “How do we know Arkady’s not just making it all up as he goes along?”

“You know because of what he is.” Ash gestured toward Arkady with one immaculately manicured hand. “An unaltered Syndicate construct, pure as a freshly detanked babe. No internal wetware. No stored spinfeed. No hard files. Nothing that can be edited, altered, or erased. What he remembers is what happened to him, pure and simple.”

Across the room, Yassin was nodding contemplatively. The two ALEF bidders sat utterly still, though something in their expressions convinced Arkady that they were speaking to each other in the nebulous parallel universe of streamspace. Turner merely sat, one thick ankle crossed over the knee of the other leg, his pale eyes flicking back and forth between Arkady and Korchow as if he were calculating the angles and momenta of a targeting problem.

“People can lie,” Li insisted.

“Not perfectly. Not under drugs. Not under…educated questioning. And once we work out the escrow arrangements, you’ll each have the chance to question Arkady in the time and place of your choosing.”

“But for how long? And with what limitations?”

Korchow started to answer, but Ash interrupted him. “I think discussing limitations as to duration and interrogation techniques in Arkady’s presence would be counterproductive at this point.”

“That’s pretty damn cold,” Li muttered.

“Yep,” Turner said. “But it works.”

Korchow cleared his throat and unfolded his slender stationer’s frame from the leather depths of the wing chair. “It seems to me that this would be the moment at which Arkady and I might most appropriately make our exit.”

As they left the room, Arkady glanced back and met Turner’s stare, as coldly blue as the cloudless sky over Novalis’s polar ice sheet.

It was unreal. an impossible, glorious, inconceivable violation of all the rules and restrictions that had pressed in on Arkady since that first fateful meeting with Osnat.

He and Korchow walked side by side across the courtyard and through the narrow door into Abulafia Street. No one stopped them. No one asked Korchow where he was taking Arkady. No one even followed them that Arkady could see. And ten minutes later they were in the thronging heart of the Arab Quarter.

“I have some errands to run,” Korchow told him. “You don’t mind tagging along, do you?”

Korchow’s “errands” stretched through the afternoon. He guided Arkady through the crowded streets, winding past beggars and water sellers, weaving through roving packs of pilgrims, and ducking into an endless series of antique stores and art galleries and rare book dealers.

At every store Korchow would go through the same incomprehensible ritual. He would introduce himself—under a different false name each time—and begin to look through the dealer’s collections. He seemed to have a taste for antiquities, and in particular portable ones. He would greet the first four or five or eight items the dealer presented with polite lack of interest. The dealer would respond accordingly, and the prices being bandied about would rise dizzyingly. Korchow, however, would remain placidly unmoved…both by the prices and by the objets d’art being presented for his inspection. The dealer would begin to hem and haw about export restrictions and end user certificates. Korchow would smile and nod and pronounce what Arkady assumed were the proper noises of reassurance…at which point they would stop even talking about prices.

The dealer would brew the sweet hot tea that everyone in the Old City seemed to live on and usher them out of the public showroom and into a discreet back room that Korchow referred to, with an amusement that Arkady found utterly incomprehensible, as “the high rollers’ room.”

The high rollers’ rooms were always soundproofed and spintronically deadwalled. And for good reason. For even Arkady could see that the objects presented for sale in these rooms had no business being anywhere outside of a museum, and certainly no business being shipped off-planet for private bidders.

Within the space of three hours Arkady watched Korchow conclude negotiations for a Saffavid Dynasty miniature of the assassination of some prince whose name Arkady forgot two minutes after Korchow told it to him; two David Grossman first editions (“Have you read The Smile of the Lamb ? No? You really must. One of those human masterpieces in which one can feel the breath, the promise, of posthumanity.”); and a portion of the True Cross encased in an exceptionally gaudy twelfth-century Byzantine reliquary (“The real value is in the packaging, Arkady. There’s a lesson there. Remember it.”).

Each time they stepped through the sonic curtain into the next high rollers’ room and sat together, encased in a cocoon of artificial silence, while the dealer fetched the next illicit treasure for Korchow’s delectation, Arkady expected the KnowlesSyndicate A to broach the real subject of interest between them. And each time Arkady was disappointed yet again.

Only between the third and fourth stops on the shopping tour—by which time Korchow had dropped a sum of money that would have provided a year’s worth of air, food, and water for all of RostovSyndicate—did Arkady succeed in picking the two stolid-looking young Israelis out of the crowd.

“Are they following us?”

“Don’t stare, Arkady. It’s embarrassing.”

He glanced surreptitiously at the young men while Korchow threaded along the narrow stone street ahead of him. Was it only those two, or was there another team as well? And was he completely crazy for thinking that the buxom schoolgirl bouncing along the opposite sidewalk was the same person as the frumpily dressed housewife who’d trudged by not five minutes ago pulling a wheeled grocery cart?

“They don’t look embarrassed,” he told Korchow.

“Who said it was them you were embarrassing?”

“Sorry,” Arkady began—and then he rounded a corner in Korchow’s wake and ran smack into absolutely the last face he ever expected to see on Earth.

The face stared down at him from a billboard the size of a house. The eyes were shadowed with the sorrow of hard experience. The square jaw was set in a frown of heroic determination. The perfectly balanced musculature of the bare chest was a paean in flesh and blood to the technical mastery of its AzizSyndicate designers.

There was a caption below the picture, though Arkady didn’t need to read it to know what spin the image came from: see AHMED AZIZ in THE TIME OF CRUEL MIRACLES“Ahmed Aziz ?” Arkady mouthed.

“Well,” Korchow said mildly, “humans watch art spins too. Though I’ve been told they recut the endings before they release Syndicate spins for UN audiences. Apparently humans don’t find lovers’ suicide pacts quite as romantic as we do.” He squinted up at the billboard, arms crossed thoughtfully. “Our Ahmed’s better-looking than the one who stars in the spins, don’t you think?”