Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

The possessive was hard enough for Arkady to parse that it took him a moment to understand who Korchow was talking about and draw the obvious connection.

Korchow sighed patiently. “I handled his debriefing too. I would have told you, if you’d ever trusted me enough to ask.”

“Anyway, he’s not better-looking,” Arkady said. “He’s just nicer. It makes him seem better-looking.”

He looked over to find Korchow grinning indulgently at him.

“What?”

“You’re an idiot, Arkady. But you’re a sweet idiot. I’ll say that for you. How you survived four months in Arkasha’s back pocket I’ll never fathom.”

Only at the fifth stop did Korchow finally begin to show his cards. This store’s street front consisted of one windowless door tucked behind a sweating stone buttress in the angle of an alley so narrow that Arkady wondered if the sun ever shone on the place. The brass sign advertised “antiquities” in French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic; but the lettering was so small that Arkady had to stoop to read it.

Walking into the place was like walking into a cave. The windows were hermetically sealed and the closed shutters blocked out what little light might have trickled through the smeared glass. The shop’s single room seemed to fall away unevenly into the shadows, as if the cobweb-infested ceiling and the carpet-lined floor drew closer together the deeper you penetrated into the building’s entrails. The man behind the counter was as oddly built as his shop. Only when he stepped out from behind the counter to greet them could Arkady make sense of his unusual proportions; he was a dwarf, and he’d been standing on a pile of carpets half a dozen deep. Indeed, the farther back in the shop you went, the deeper the carpets got, until in the back of the place they were stacked up in slithering chest-high piles, fragrant with the perfume of mothballs and long-dead sheep.

But the carpets, however impressive they were, turned out to be a mere sideline. Once they were settled in the back room, slightly shabbier than the ones preceding it, and had suffered through the same tea and the same honeyed cakes and the same desultory small talk, the dwarf began to shuffle across the mounded carpets in a pair of frayed and faded bedroom slippers, extracting curious little flat boxes from corners whose very existence Arkady had not suspected. And from the boxes, handling the pages with infinite delicacy, he began to produce his miniatures.

“Yes, yes,” Korchow said to the first painting the dwarf presented, an ornate illustration of the Prophet—or at least Arkady assumed that was who it was; his face was completely obscured by a fluttering silken veil—riding to Heaven on a decidedly seductive-looking sphinx. Two more miniatures, also of religious themes, followed it, and Korchow showed little more interest in them than he had in the first piece.

The dealer cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might be more interested in more, er, secular themes?”

“Oh, assuredly,” Korchow said with a smile that Arkady felt himself to be quite incapable of interpreting.

The man shuffled to the back of the room, his slippers whispering on the wool nap of the carpets, and produced a slim portfolio of unbound pieces.

“Oh my,” Korchow murmured when he looked at the first one.

Arkady looked, blinked, and looked away.

“Poor Arkady. A great man once observed that politics was like sausage: a commodity best enjoyed without inquiring too closely into the manufacturing process. One might say the same thing of human reproduction in general.”

“Not to your taste?” the dealer asked in tones of careful neutrality.

“Not to my young friend’s taste, at any rate. I imagine he would prefer something a bit more…ahem…refined.”

The dwarf glanced between Korchow and Arkady, his face giving away nothing. He slid a second portfolio out from beneath the first, as if he’d had it ready all along, and opened it.

There was only one miniature inside, and it was clearly a picture of tremendous value. Arkady could see that even before he began to grasp the subject of the painting.

“By the Master of Tabriz,” the dealer said. “You are familiar with the story? It is said to represent the Shah with his lover the night before he was assassinated.”

Korchow’s eyes slid sideways toward Arkady. “Do you like it?”

The miniature depicted two young men of exceptional physical beauty. They were as identical as crèchemates, though Arkady couldn’t tell whether the resemblance was real or a mere product of the artist’s manner. They were so completely swathed in silk, from their spotless white turbans to their patterned robes and their pointed and filigreed and gold-leafed slippers, that the shapes they formed on the page bore no relation to the warm, breathing, living bodies within. All their life was in their black eyes, which the long-dead artist had limned in the finest wisp of sable. And all around them the painted garden, which should have been as flat and static as every other priceless painted garden Arkady had seen that afternoon, seemed to pulse and flow like water running under ice. Trees twined and twisted their dark limbs about each other. Flowers flamed in the grass and swept in bright torrents around the lovers’ feet.

For lovers they certainly were. There was no mistaking either the meaning of the image or the forbidden nature of the passion that suffused it.

And there was no doubt in Arkady’s mind about what would surely happen, what had to happen, in the next moment of that frozen eternity.

“Well,” Korchow pressed. “What do you think?”

“I think—” Arkady cleared his throat. “I think the man who painted this was a great artist.”

“One of the greatest,” Korchow agreed. “He was said to be the lover of the Shah for whom he painted it.”

“And was the Shah pleased by the painting?”

“It isn’t known. He died before it was finished.”

Arkady turned away, unable to look at the thing any longer.

“You still haven’t said if you like it or not,” Korchow pointed out. “I ask because I’m thinking of making a gift.”

It took a moment for Arkady to parse the unfamiliar phrase. The word gift existed in Syndicate Standard, but it applied, in the absence of personal or biological property, to a completely different concept.

“Unfortunately,” Korchow continued, “I’m not familiar with the taste of the young man in question. I thought you might advise me. After all, you know him so much better than I do.”

They looked at each other, the long-dead Shah and his doomed lover lying forgotten between them.

When Arkady was six he had witnessed the Peacekeeper attack on ZhangSyndicate. It had been over in seconds, and it had happened miles away across empty space, but it still dogged his nightmares. The great orbital station’s outer hull had held, staving off hard vac; but the fireball had ripped through the habitat modules and gutted them with all the crèchelings on board and unrescued. That attack had killed ZhangSyndicate. Its arks had been contaminated, their precious gene-sets rendered unusable. And where there were children there could be no Syndicate. Most of the surviving Zhangs had chosen suicide over the sterile prospect of life as walking ghosts. Sometimes it was hard to remember they’d ever existed. But Arkady remembered the terrible beauty of the burning. The white-hot fire lighting up one viewport after another as the inner bulwarks gave way. The condensation steaming off the hull and refreezing in the void. His body felt like that now: a dead shell dissolving into a glittering ice storm of hope, pain, terror.

“It’s understandable that you would still have feelings for him,” Korchow said in the bland, reasonable, sympathetic voice that still haunted Arkady’s nightmares. “Why be ashamed to admit to them? What you did, you did because you loved him. No one holds that against you. After all, what else did they intend to happen when they assigned you to each other?”