America resisted, of course. But economies can’t survive indefinite solitary confinement any more than people can. Doing business with America soon became bad business as well as bad politics. The American juggernaut sputtered to a slow crawl, crippled by climate change, economic isolation, and a massive multigenerational brain drain that was gleefully encouraged by Ring-side immigration policy.
Meanwhile the technological gap between Earth and the Ring got wider with every new advance in AI design or microgravity manufacturing. The generation ships lifted off from every overpopulated and impoverished corner of the globe. And the Embargo, ostensibly a simple moratorium on sale of space-based technology to Earth, began to achieve its true purpose: the reduction of Earth’s human biomass to a level that the crippled planet could sustain.
It worked. Suburbs were swallowed up by weedlot wilderness. Trees and plants—albeit only self-pollinating ones—replaced concrete. Frogs were gone. So were butterflies, non-genetically-modified honeybees, most large mammals, and the migratory songbirds whose flocks had blackened Earth’s skies in a time beyond the reach of even Cohen’s earliest stored memories. But their ecological niches had been filled in, more or less, by other species. The world might not be as complex or as beautiful as it had been before man’s Industrial Age, but it worked. In fact, it worked well enough that people were even starting to talk about loosening the Embargo.
People on Earth, that is.
No one Ring-side wanted to hear a word about it.
The humans who imposed the Embargo had meant it to be temporary. Industrial activity would be shut down until the planet’s biogeological functions righted themselves. And when the environmental remediation was complete, everyone would move back downstairs and get back to life as normal. After all, Earth was home.
But Earth wasn’t home to the 18 billion humans and posthumans who now inhabited the Orbital Ring. To them, Earth was just another moon. But a moon with a difference: a moon that had something they desperately needed.
Water.
Earth was dry and getting drier. The Ring was thirsty and getting thirstier. And every human who wasn’t born on Earth meant a few hundred thousand extra liters of drinkable water for the Orbital Ring. So the UN offered Earth’s few remaining humans a Solomonic choice, wrapped in the neutral language of the Tech Embargo: stay on Earth and accept the overwhelming odds against ever producing live offspring, or emigrate to the Ring and enjoy all the benefits of modern genetic engineering. And in the poisoned Holy Land, where one could go days on end without seeing a single child, that choice was as stark as the choice between life and death.
A pair of Legion fighter jets flashed overhead, wreathed in a virtual mist of encrypted spinstreams.
“Stop looking at your watch,” Li griped. “It’s always slow, then you get the wrong time in your head, and I catch it from you, and it screws with my wetware.”
“That sounds fun,” Cohen quipped. “Can we try it when we get back to the hotel?”
A squadron of Legionnaires walked by, their faces young and hard behind mirrored sunglasses, the creases in their uniforms sharp enough to threaten innocent passersby with paper cuts. As they passed the café one of the young men skipped a step, bringing himself into marching rhythm with his companions with the naturalness that only comes of long training.
“The real problem,” Cohen said, returning to the subject of the watch, “is that I can’t take it to Geneva for revision anymore. No one knows how to clean a real watch properly anymore. No one has the patience.”
“Just waiting for the barbarians, are we?” Li said in a voice of patently fake sympathy.
“Yes, darling,” Cohen drawled, “but who are the barbarians these days? There are so many people lining up for the job it’s getting hard to pick a winner.”
Li smiled, but her mind was only half on the banter. She was back at work again; Cohen could feel her on the other end of the intraface, scanning the approaches, converting the three-dimensional world into a relief map of lines of fire and points of cover and potential kill zones. “If I were this late,” she muttered, “it would only be because something was wrong. Or because I was planning to make something go wrong.”
A lone Israeli man settled at the table behind them, shalomed politely, ordered a cup of black coffee, and opened up the weekend section of the Ha’aretz. A moment later two camera-toting NorAmArc pilgrims sat down at the next table over and began a high-decibel argument about whether the cog railway ran to the Dome of the Rock overlook on Saturdays. Cohen goggled at them, only to realize that his friendly Ha’aretz reader was doing the same. Their gazes crossed, and the two men shared a moment of anonymous amusement.
“You watch,” Li muttered. “The contact’s not going to show up until after lunch. And meanwhile we’re goddamn sitting ducks.”
“Relax, Catherine.”
“If you wanted relaxed, you shouldn’t have brought me. Speaking of which, why the hell are we here anyway?”
“My country calls and I answer,” Cohen quipped.
“Your country called all right. But they don’t seem to give enough of a shit about you to provide bandwidth for the return call. Sometimes I could just strangle Hy Cohen for saddling you with this baggage.”
“He probably never thought twice about it. He could be a bit lacking in subtlety sometimes. And he never could get his brain around the idea that Israel wasn’t perfect.” Cohen grinned sheepishly. “Not all of my pig-stubborn loyalty is the Game’s fault. Some of it I come by honestly.”
Li stopped scanning the approaches and actually turned in her chair to stare at him. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you admit he wasn’t perfect?”
“He was anything but perfect. He slept around behind his wife’s back for one thing. I hated that. Not the adultery so much as the lying.” Cohen felt the familiar flutter of self-loathing stir somewhere near the pit of what would have been his stomach if he had one. “I despised the lying.”
“But you never told her.”
Cohen stared into the middle distance, seeing the face of the first woman he had ever loved…and who had slipped away from him just as Li was now slipping away. “She didn’t want to know,” he said at last.
“And you always give the players what they want, don’t you?”
He reached out for her instream, ran into a wall, and stared into her eyes only to find that they were equally unreadable. “Not you,” he whispered. “I love you.”
At that instant their contact stepped out of a narrow alley between two restaurants, glanced at them—so briefly that Cohen only caught the look when he replayed Li’s spinfeed—then looked quickly away.
Li settled in her chair, shifting her weight forward, sliding her feet farther apart. Her face was expressionless, but onstream she radiated a profound and wordless satisfaction that Cohen suspected was pretty close to what you’d get if you tapped the neural feed of a cat who’d just found a nice fat mouse to play with.
The contact turned out to be a woman, and a woman who had the history of Israel written on her face. She could have stepped straight out of a 1950s kibbutz harvest photo or a grainy black-and-white movie about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The rawboned farmer-turned-soldier body. The tousled fair hair and the hawklike face. The steel-blue eyes—one of them dark with the stain of an old injury.
‹Shrapnel?› Li asked. ‹Or did she have a rifle blow up in her face?›
‹Love tap from a grenade. Sayeret Golani training exercise.›
‹Ah. So you do know her.›
‹I told you, I don’t want you having any contact with people from the Office unless it’s absolutely necessary. I thought we agreed about that.›