Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“Stop it, Gavi.”

But Gavi didn’t stop. “Delete me from your inscribed players’ list.”

Cohen gasped. What Gavi was suggesting would have been dauntingly complex back when Hyacinthe wrote the original code. Three centuries later it was inconceivable. It would mean wrenching out all the tangled threads that connected Gavi to Cohen’s past: every conversation they’d ever had; every job they’d ever done together; everything that had ever so much as reminded Cohen of him. And it would damage the virtual ecology of Cohen’s nested hierarchies of agents and networks in ways that he couldn’t begin to predict or guard against.

The only person Cohen knew of who had ever done such violence to her own memory was Li. She’d done it to escape from the corporate-run hell of the Bose-Einstein mines…and she was still trying to paper over the sucking hole she carried around where most people carried their family and friends and childhood.

“Do it,” Gavi told him.

“No.”

“I’m ordering you to.”

“I’m not a word processor. I don’t accept keyboard programming.”

“Then let me speak to router/decomposer. He’ll see reason even if you won’t.”

“He’ll see no such thing!” Suddenly all Cohen’s humiliation and distress coalesced into fury. “How dare you drag him into this? It’s not his decision to make!”

He could feel router/decomposer rattling the bars inside, saying that it was so his decision, or at least partially his decision. And there was something underneath his usual logic-chatter. Something that the DARPA programmers had squashed in Cohen when he was at about router/decomposer’s level of psychological development, and that he had sworn he would never squash in anyone.

He squashed it.

Then he throttled down router/decomposer’s bandwidth and slapped all his nonessential internal traffic out of circulation in order to drive the point home. It was for router/decomposer’s own good, after all. And why the hell did everyone have to reach their critical bifurcation points in the same fucking millisecond, anyway? Why couldn’t they all just slow down and let him breathe for a few cycles? Who did they think he was? God? “Don’t you ever do that again,” he told Gavi. “I don’t run my brain by committee. And I’m in no fucking mood to be tolerant.”

Resounding silence, inside and out.

Finally, Gavi’s shoulders slumped. The skin of his face looked bruised, and the tears he’d talked so mockingly about a few short minutes ago glittered along the edges of his eyes. Dibbuk roused herself from her blanket, whimpering, and pressed her nose between his knees until he sent her back to lie down again.

“Didi’s just doing what he has to do,” Cohen said. “So am I. Can’t you see that?”

“Of course I can.” Gavi’s voice dropped to a heartsick whisper. “And it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I made a mistake. One stupid, trivial, miniscule mistake somewhere along the line. And I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life watching innocent people pay for it. Gur dead. Osnat, one of the best agents I ever trained, wasting her life playing corporate rent-a-cop because no one will trust anyone who came within spitting distance of Tel Aviv. And you’re worried about my leg ? I’d laugh if it wasn’t all so awful!”

Cohen reached out a hand, but Gavi flinched away from him.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked when he thought Gavi was ready to speak again.

“Well, I guess I might as well do what Didi wants and talk to Arkady. If Didi’s pushing it this hard, then you can bet it’s because he’s scoped all the angles and knows he can turn even a betrayal from me to Israel’s advantage. That ought to be enough for you. It would be for me if I were in your shoes. After that…well, that depends on whether you trust me or not.”

“Should I trust you?”

They locked gazes long enough for Cohen to see fear, guilt, doubt, and anger chase each other through the black depths of Gavi’s eyes. Looking into them was like being hotwired to Gavi’s soul. How could there be a lie at the bottom of all that naked clarity?

“I can’t tell you,” Gavi said, looking away. “I can only answer for my intentions. And all my good intentions seem to be doing lately is getting people killed.”

“Well, I can’t kill the fatted calf,” Gavi told Arkady, “but I can offer a choice of goat or chicken. Have you ever met a goat? No? Then walk with me. You are about to have the pleasure of making first contact with a superior life-form.”

The little group strolled down the hill, basking in the last failing warmth of the evening sun. Arkady was having trouble squaring the living breathing fact of Gavi with the traitor Osnat had described to him. Indeed, Osnat herself seemed to be having a hard time making the edges match up.

Meanwhile, Gavi seemed naturally to gravitate toward Arkady, until what had begun as a group venture turned into a private tour of Gavi’s little kingdom. Arkady knew that the seeming casualness must be carefully scripted, but it didn’t lessen the flush of pleasure he felt when Gavi bowed his head to listen and turned those dark, burningly serious eyes on him.

It was that intensity rather than any physical resemblance that reminded Arkady so strongly of Arkasha. Gavi was far more controlled and subtle than Arkasha. The fires were banked and smoldering and masked behind a façade of self-deprecating humor. But looking at him, Arkady still had the same feeling he’d had about Arkasha: that he seemed more alive and less defended than it was safe for a person to be.

The goats had names. Gavi introduced them formally, one by one, as if he were presenting Arkady for the approval of a staid group of society matrons. Arkady had never seen a mammal close up other than humans, dogs, and cats. He looked at the geometric perfection of their hooves, met the measuring gaze of their golden eyes. “They’re perfect,” he said. “Just like ants are perfect.”

“Well, I think they are.” Gavi bent to scratch one of the more assertive goats behind her tricolor ears. “There used to be wild goats here, can you imagine? And ghizlaan . What’s ghazaal in English? Oh. Well, there you go. I guess they really did come from here.” He sounded wistful. “I would have liked to meet a gazelle.”

“Maybe we’re still learning to live without all the other species we used to share Earth with,” Arkady said. He paused, struggling to find words for an idea that, if not new, was at least new to him. “I some-times think that we—the Syndicates, I mean—evolved because humans have made themselves so alone in the universe that the only way to belong again was to belong to each other.”

Gavi gave him a sharp, appreciative look that reminded him painfully of his first conversations with Arkasha. “I like that,” he said after considering it for a moment. “I never saw it that way. I’ll have to think about that a bit. Thank you.”

And so it went. By the time they’d fed the goats and the chickens (another marvel!) and walked the perimeter with Dibbuk dancing around them like an electron orbiting its atom’s nucleus, Arkady had fallen completely under Gavi’s spell.

Every now and then, he would surface—from listening to Gavi’s tales of the hidden lives of goats and chickens and sheepdogs, or from telling Gavi about ants—and think, Why am I telling these things to a perfect stranger?

But it was no good. Caution and suspicion rang hollow against Gavi’s questions, Gavi’s fascination, Gavi’s enthusiasm, Gavi’s knowing and determined innocence.

“So, Arkady. Cohen and some other people you don’t know have asked me to talk to you about Novalis. Especially about what happened to Bella. Do you understand why we’re so interested in her?”