Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“That’s sick.”

“Don’t be a cynic, Arkady. It used to be worse. Used to be they’d eat all the blacks and Asians before the first white woman got cooked. Now it’s ladies first regardless of incidentals like skin color. That’s what we in the UN call progress, Arkady. Anyway, here’s the real question: The guy who did the study only assumed one kind of construct. He didn’t take the Syndicates into account. So my question, Arkady, is: When the food runs out which one of us do you think these clowns’ll eat first?”

Morning found the squad on the banks of the river looking up the long slope of Mount Herzl past the IDF military cemetery.

They had penetrated into the Line’s dead heart: a no-man’s-land that no army was willing to defend, a place of ghosts where last summer’s oranges lay uneaten beneath the trees and the grass around the graves grew waist high. They might have been on Novalis, the world lay so still and quiet around them.

Li and Osnat were hunched over a map-fiche with the Israeli captain. Arkady was sitting with Cohen, who didn’t seem to have any more interest in the proceedings than he did. When the women finally came away from the map, Osnat had a sullen look on her face and was fiddling with the trigger guard of her weapon in a way that made Arkady’s stomach curl.

“You asked for help,” the AI told Osnat.

“Not from a Palestinian traitor!”

“Half-Palestinian,” Cohen corrected blandly.

Osnat fingered her weapon again. None of the Israelis seemed to register the movement; but suddenly, and without ever seeming to have moved at all, Li was standing right next to Osnat, her hand on the other woman’s trigger hand. The touch looked light, almost casual. But in fact Osnat’s fingers were turning white with the pressure of the other woman’s grip. Slowly, as if everything were happening under running water, the rifle slipped from Osnat’s grasp and slithered down her side until it hit the end of its webbed sling.

“We’re fine,” Cohen assured the Israeli captain. And, ever so gently, he lifted the rifle away from Osnat’s side, removed the ammunition clip, and pocketed it.

Osnat turned to the captain for support, but he was studiously inspecting the slime that had accumulated on his boots during the river crossing.

“You know the road home,” Li said in the take-it-or-leave-it tone Arkady was beginning to think expressed some core component of her emotional architecture. “You want to turn around, this’d be the time to do it.”

“And Arkady?”

“What do you think?”

There was a lot more walking after that. It was all uphill, and most of it was through the tall grass and tangled weeds of the vast IDF cemetery. Arkady, his mind slack with exhaustion, only noticed that the others had stopped walking when they were face-to-face with the tall iron gates of Yad Vashem.

Li reached out and gave the latch a brisk shake. It held, and when Arkady looked closer he could see why: someone had wrapped a heavy chain through the bars and closed it with a thick-hasped padlock.

Li glanced at Cohen, and again Arkady had that eerie sense that some communication the others couldn’t hear was passing between them.

“Well, have you actually talked to him yet?” Li asked aloud.

Cohen seemed to gather himself to argue, but then the shunt’s shoulders dropped slightly. “No. But he’ll be here. Where else would he be?”

Li snorted. “It’s not whether he’s here I’m worried about. It’s whether he wants to come out and talk to us.”

“There’s no wall,” Osnat pointed out. “We can just go around the gate if we want.”

“Bad idea.” Li strolled back down the road, pried a loose piece up from the decaying asphalt, and tossed it into the trees to one side of the gate. It arced lazily through the air—and then vanished in a cloud of vapor as it passed some invisible boundary. “I’ve been wanting to lose weight,” she quipped. “But not that much.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait.”

“For what?”

“For him to realize that we’re not going away until he comes down to talk to us.”

It took nearly an hour before a distant and wavering figure appeared at the top of the long tree-lined avenue leading down to the gates. At first Arkady thought he was watching a machine or a monster. The being seemed to have many legs, and it rippled and moved with a sideways motion that he could make no sense of. As the figure descended the hill toward them, the wavering shape resolved itself into two shapes: a man, tall and supple and graceful, with a dog following at his heels. The late-afternoon sun gilded the man’s head with fire and flickered around his feet in a way that only made sense when Arkady realized that the man was wearing shorts—and that his right leg below the knee wasn’t flesh at all, but a delicate architecture of ceramsteel and silvery neuromuscular thread.

Man and dog continued their unhurried progress down the hill until they finally reached the gate. The man looked out through the bars at them, but he made no move to open the padlock that hung from the iron latch. He was smaller than Arkady had thought he would be; not a big man at all, but built so straight and true that he seemed tall until you stood next to him. The expression on his face was calm, mildly interested, completely noncommittal. The face itself was one of those brown-skinned, strong-nosed, finely hewn faces that were equally common among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews. The man’s only really remarkable feature, Arkady decided, were his black eyes. And those were as deep as the dark between the stars.

The dog poked her sharp nose through the gate, growling anxiously. The man laid a calming hand on her. “Can I help you?” he asked.

“It’s me,” Cohen said. “Cohen. Didn’t you get my message?”

“Sorry. I’ve gotten rather bad about checking my mail lately.”

“Well, I’ll give you the executive summary: we’re here.”

“So I see.” The bottomless eyes touched on Cohen, then Osnat, then Li and Arkady, then returned to Osnat for a pensive moment.

“Hello, Osnat.”

Osnat nodded curtly.

“Are you going to let us in?” Cohen asked.

“The thing is…I don’t exactly have the key at the moment.”

“You lost it?”

“I never lose things.” A self-deprecating smile lit the thin face and warmed the dark eyes. It occurred to Arkady that people would lay their lives down for this man. “I just put them down. And then I put other things on top of them. I figured that when I remembered what I’d put on top of the key, that would be soon enough to open the gate again. But now here you are standing on my doorstep and accusing me of losing things! I ask you, is there no justice in the world?”

He pulled what looked like a tiny nail file out of his pocket, and bent over the heavy padlock securing the gate. In a matter of seconds the lock fell open and the chains rattled to the ground. The gate opened stiffly, then stuck. They had to slide through the narrow gap one by one, taking care not to get caught on the ornate iron thorns that sprang from the bars.

“I take it the key’s been under something for a while?” Cohen asked as he squeezed through.

The man smiled again, and Arkady finally put his finger on what it was that was so entrancing about the expression. It was the smile of a child, open and vulnerable. Or rather it was the smile of an adult who had somehow managed to remain childlike. It made you feel that you were looking at a person who had been wounded by the world but not diminished by it.

The dog, meanwhile, was sniffing at their knees and ankles, whining under her breath, glancing back at her master, putting her body between him and the as-yet-unknown arrivals. He quieted her with a murmured word. She brightened, and her frothy tail began to wave hopefully.