Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“Not if you want to save Arkasha.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Arkady said. “I’ll have to do it.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Osnat sat picking at her torn fatigues, her head bent so low that her fair hair hid her face from them. “I don’t like it,” she muttered finally.

“Neither do I,” Gavi said, “but I don’t have a better idea.”

“Me neither,” Osnat admitted.

The two Israelis locked eyes for a moment. Gavi looked away first.

Without anyone formally drawing things to a close, the group began to break up into its component parts. Osnat stood up and stretched until her spine cracked audibly. Li began playing with Dibbuk. Gavi collared Cohen and began talking computer programming.

Arkady bent over the flowchart again, peering at the jumble of names and circles and trying to discern the ominous connection that Gavi had suggested to the others. Once again he had the feeling that the chart revealed a turn of mind utterly alien to him. And yet it reminded him of something…

He searched his memories of the Novalis mission, of the uneventful missions before Novalis, of his long-ago evolutionary ecophysics courses…and eventually landed on his vague memories of molecular biology and epidemiology.

Suddenly he found that the room had become too hot and too small for comfort. He knew exactly where he’d seen such a chart before.

On Novalis. In Aurelia’s bold scrawl.

Gavi’s flowchart wasn’t a simple picture of the flow of information, Arkady realized. Rather, it depicted the flow of a very special kind of information: a disease spreading through a susceptible population. It would already be spreading quickly indeed if the miniature epidemic on Novalis were any indication.

And this disease had only one possible vector…

Him.

“Every war has its hotel,” Cohen opined. “Tom Friedman said that, though I can’t say he ever said anything else I agreed with. Some hotels, however, have more than their fair share of wars. Would it interest you to know that you’re sitting in the single most frequently bombed hotel lobby in human history?”

“Great,” Li said wanly.

Cohen sank into the sofa cushions, crossed his legs, and tilted one calf-skin-shod foot this way and that, as if reassuring himself that his shoes really were as nice as they ought to be.

“Are those new shoes ?” Li asked.

He smiled sleekly.

The lobby was starting to fill up with the usual mix of tourists, pilgrims, and locals. A band of young transvestites bubbled through the revolving door and boarded the elevator in a clatter of heels and a cloud of perfume. A gaggle of Interfaithers arrived at the elevator at the same moment as the youngsters, saw what they were, and huddled together like hypochondriacs stranded in a leper colony. Li preferred to imagine that at least some of their shocked middle-aged stares were really gazes of covert longing…but then she’d always liked to think the best of people. “Am I crazy,” she asked Cohen, “or was one of those kids wearing a yarmulke?”

“Yeshiva boy chic. Totally passé. They’re probably just in for the night from the Tel Aviv suburbs.”

“Yeshiva boy chic, huh? They must just love you down here.”

“Ahem. Well, not everyone relishes the idea of a Lion of Judah floundering in the fleshpots. I try to be relatively discreet about it.”

Li raised her eyebrows in a silent comment on the notion of Cohen being “relatively discreet” about anything.

“It’s all legal,” he pointed out. “Despite the best attempts of the ultraorthodox and the Interfaithers. In fact, Israel has the ideal combination of prudishness and libertinism. You can do anything you want, get whatever you want, sleep with whomever you want. But since there’s always someone around to tell you you’re going to rot in hell for it, it all still has the tang of the forbidden. Everything’s taboo…but none of it’s taboo enough to land you in jail. What could be better?”

“Speaking of which,” she observed casually, “Gavi’s quite the package. You two never…”

“Never.” Cohen sounded decisive, even fervent about it. “Never even thought about it. First of all, he’s such a strange combination of prudish and romantic that I’m not at all sure he’s slept with anyone since Leila died. And second…Gavi needs. I’d get eaten up alive if I ever let myself start trying to give him what he needs.”

“So instead you find yourself a cold, cynical, self-sufficient bitch like me?”

Cohen made an ostentatious show of pondering the question. He was doing his blonde bombshell act tonight. The fact that he could pull it off in Roland’s body was a display of pure programmer’s bravura. Li had spent just enough time around Roland while Cohen wasn’t shunting through him to know that he was boringly straight in every sense of the word. But somehow Cohen managed to pull shades of Marilyn Monroe from the kid. “Well,” he purred eventually, “at least you’re not a prude. ”

She leaned into him in what even she knew was an unusual display of public affection, and pressed her lips to Roland’s smooth young forehead just below the hairline. Cohen returned her kisses, moving under her hands like water, making her forget the stranger’s body that came between them.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“Is that why you went sneaking off to see Ash last night?”

She jerked back to stare at him from the farthest end of the sofa. He was sitting, hands folded in his lap, in the state of unnatural stillness that she’d learned to recognize as a sign of the most violent emotion.

Her mind raced. How did he know? Had router/decomposer told him? Or was this just one more sign that his access to her internals went deeper than he was willing to admit to her?

She looked at him, forcing her pulse to stay even, her eyes to remain level. “So you’ve been spying on me again.”

“Apparently with good reason.”

“Cohen—”

“Don’t make excuses. It’s beneath you.”

The silence was suffocating, both instream and off. Cohen bent his head to light a cigarette, and Roland’s eyes vanished beneath the thick golden fall of forelock. Roland’s eyes closed as he took a first long drag on the cigarette. Li sat there feeling like a mouse caught between a cat’s paws. Finally the cigarette dropped and Roland’s eyes opened. His face was so blandly expressionless that for a surreal moment she wondered whether Cohen was still on shunt.

“I can live with an innocent flirtation,” he said in a voice that made her soul squirm. “Or even a not-so-innocent flirtation. But I will not be lied to. ”

His words hung in the air like one of the bright phosphorus flares that blossomed over the Green Line at night. Ash. Christ, it had never even occurred to her. Did Cohen really think she’d cheat on him for a pair of long legs and a pretty face? The idea was repellent. Infuriating. Humiliating.