Chris Moriarty: Spin Control

Arkady followed her glance and saw a gleaming rivulet of amber carapaces that he’d at first mistaken for a crack in the laminated viruflex flooring. “Pharaoh ants,” he said, intrigued by the unexpected discovery. “Is the ship infested?”

“If only it were just the ship. They’re taking over the fucking universe.”

“They’ve always owned it.” He corrected her without a second thought now that he was back on familiar territory. “Vertebrate biomass was negligible compared to ants, even before Earth’s ecological collapse. And as far as any biogeophysical cycles are concerned—”

He stopped, sensing Osnat’s stare.

“This isn’t one of those Syndicate suicide missions, is it?” she asked abruptly. “A…what do they call it…a gifting of biological property?”

“Right. I mean…yes, that’s the word. But no, I don’t think it is one.”

“You don’t think so? You mean they can order you to die without even telling you ahead of time?”

Who was this they she was talking about? And could humans still “order” each other to die the way they ordered meals at restaurants? But surely that was impossible, even on Earth. He must have misheard her.

“What about Novalis?” she pursued. “Was Novalis a suicide mission?”

He froze, forcing himself to wait a beat before looking into her eyes. This was the first time anyone had said the planet’s name. And hearing the familiar word on Osnat’s lips reminded him abruptly that she worked for Moshe.

“Fine,” Osnat said after a silence long enough to make his skin itch. “I was just asking.”

“How is Moshe going to get me through the UN’s Tech Embargo?” Arkady asked.

“I don’t know. The Americans are handling that part. We didn’t want to bring them into it, but no one else on Earth is still crazy enough to go head-to-head against UNSec.”

America! The mere name was enough to make Arkady catch his breath. The land where Audubon had seen the last legendary flights of the passenger pigeons. The land where de Tocqueville had walked through virgin forests so dense that uprooted oak trees hung in the surrounding branches and crumbled to dust without ever touching the earth. The land that had spawned the great twentieth-century myrmecologists, from Wheeler and Wilson to Schnierla and Pratt and Gordon. The country whose scientists had taken the first halting steps toward modern terraforming theory…even as the engines of their industry were shredding the fragile web that made man’s continued life on Earth possible.

“Don’t worry,” Osnat reassured him, misinterpreting his dazed expression. “We’re not actually going there. I can’t promise we won’t accidentally get you ripped limb from limb by a mob of religious fanatics, but it’s not Plan A.”

“Religious fanatics? In America?”

Osnat gave him a quizzical look. “How much do you actually know about Earth, Arkady?”

“Um…I know a lot about the ants.”

“Great. Well, just don’t talk to anyone. And by anyone, I mean particularly Americans and Interfaithers. Which should be easy since they’re usually the same people. And while I’m handing out free advice, you want to back off a bit with this Absalom business. Keep tossing that name around and you might just piss Moshe off so badly he decides no amount of intelligence value is worth the aggravation.”

“Why?”

Her good eye fixed him with an incredulous stare.

“You don’t even know who Absalom is,” she said finally. “It’s just a name to you. Korchow didn’t give you a clue what you were walking into. Un fucking believable.”

He didn’t answer, and after staring at him for another acutely uncomfortable moment she muttered, “Like a goddamn lamb to the slaughter,” and stalked out of the room.

The first thing Arkady did when Osnat left was walk across the room to examine the wool blanket. It was warm to the touch, as if it still remembered the heat of the animal it had come from. He ran his hand over the rough surface, feeling the hairs—or were they called furs?—prick the skin of his palm.

He went to the sink and poured himself a cup of water. It tasted stale, as if the tanker was limping to the end of a long slow time run and her tanks were overdue for scrubbing. It also had a salt-and-copper tang that turned out to be the taste of his own blood.

He washed his face and prodded at his teeth until he was sure nothing had been knocked loose. He wasn’t surprised. Moshe had worked him over so expertly that even in the midst of the pain Arkady had had a perversely comforting feeling of safety; if he just submitted and lay still, some instinct had whispered, no real harm would come to him. Maybe that had been the real purpose of the beating. If so, Moshe had pounded the point home pretty effectively.

Arkady leaned over the sink and inspected the face staring back at him from the mirror. He hadn’t shaved since he’d reached UN space, and the black shadow of a beard pooled in the angles and hollows of a face sucked thin by gravity. It made him look hungry and breakable…and disconcertingly like Arkasha.

He covered his broken nose and warped cheekbone with the palm of one hand and looked at the pieces of his face that were still recognizable after Korchow’s hammer job. There were the dark eyes, so like Arkasha’s eyes; the fine-featured Slavic face, so like Arkasha’s face; the pale skin, so like Arkasha’s skin.

And the soft doubtful uncertain mouth that had never been anything like Arkasha’s mouth, even before Novalis.

He curled his upper lip in the mocking half smile that had always been Arkasha’s first line of defense, and tried to summon the illusion that kept him going. The trick to making it work was not to ask for too much. He couldn’t imagine Arkasha in his arms. That was far too obviously impossible. But he could call up his hoarded memories of his pairmate: all the moments and movements that he’d never quite paid enough attention to as they slipped by. The intent curve of Arkasha’s back as he bent over his splicing scope. The fine-boned hands, nervous in idleness but precise and graceful when they turned the pages of a book, or mounted samples, or handled a splicing scope. The mercurial combination of strength and fragility that had called forth a devotion Arkady had never thought himself capable of feeling. Sometimes he could convince himself that the face looking back at him in the mirror was real and that Arkasha was safe. Far away—perhaps too far away for Arkady to ever hope to see him again—but alive and well and, most important, happy. That wasn’t too much to imagine. And it made sleep possible. It made everything possible.

Arkady sighed and dropped his hand. He crossed the room to the narrow bed, slipped under the unnerving blanket, and whispered the lights off.

Nothing happened.

He got up and circled the room looking for a manual switch, but there was none. He reached for the door, acting on reflex, intending to open it and find the switch in the corridor outside.

It wouldn’t open.

He rattled it, yanked at it, slammed his shoulder against it, feeling a thrumming panic start to build in his gut.

And then he understood.

They’d done something no one had ever done to him in his life. Something there wasn’t even a word for in Syndicate-standard English. Something he’d never heard of anyone doing except in the most ancient and appalling tales of human cruelty. They had locked him in.

He backed away from the door. His fingers stung from wringing at the unyielding metal latch. He was panting like an animal, and he made a conscious effort to slow his breath. Had Osnat done this? Did human beings do such things to each other and not just to constructs? And if so, then why hadn’t Korchow warned him?