“Spins can be faked. Anyone who’s worked on EMET knows that.”
Li stared across the table, her face calm, her eyes level. This must be costing her, Cohen realized, but he had no idea how much. Three years after the court-martial they’d still never talked about it. And even his most cautious attempts to cross that particular no-man’s-land had been violently rebuffed.
“Unfortunately,” Li said when he’d just about decided she wasn’t going to say anything, “those particular spins don’t seem to have been faked.”
She and Moshe stared at each other, locked in one of those testosterone-fueled battles of will that Cohen, three centuries removed from his only unmediated human memories, was beginning to find increasingly incomprehensible.
Finally Moshe leaned forward in his chair, the flimsy metal creaking under his weight. “The thing is, Major, I just don’t trust you.”
“You want ALEF as a bidder, you’ll have to trust me.”
Moshe pursed his lips.
“Do you need to talk to someone?” Li asked. The question came off of a collective work space shared by Li, Cohen, router/decomposer, and a gaggle of chattering semisentients, but it seemed politic to let Li ask it. Moshe had clearly slipped into the trap of treating the two bodies in front of him as separate entities…and you never knew when that sort of misconception might work to your advantage.
“No. I have discretion.” He hesitated for another instant. “All right then. We go forward. For now. But we may require additional bona fides after the next meeting.”
“You may not be the only one,” Li retorted. “We still have nothing more than your word that the seller’s genuine. What about his bona fides?”
“That’s between you and the seller.” Moshe got to his feet, left the paper on the table, and dropped a few shekels on top of it. “I just open the cage and crack the whip. Whether the bear decides to dance for you or eat you is your problem.”
SEX, WATER, GOD
The individual’s enhancement of his or her reproductive chances never happens in a void but only in relation to the reproductive chances of other members of the species. Just as corporations seek to externalize their costs of production, individuals inevitably seek to externalize their costs of reproduction, enhancing the value of their own genetic property by reducing the value of their neighbors’ genetic property. When twentieth-century existentialists sipped coffee in Parisian cafés, or twenty-first-century shoppers flocked to Wal-Mart for cheap consumer goods, they were both participants in a global economy whose ultimate evolutionary effect was to shift the means of reproduction (high protein diets, high standards of living, paid child care, etc.) to the Consuming Nations, while shifting the limiting factors on reproduction (war, poverty, pollution, etc.) to Producing Nations…
Viewed in this light, Earth’s ecological collapse can be seen as the logical, even inevitable conclusion of four millennia of human evolution. Earth died not because humans strayed from the path of “nature” or “instinct,” but because individual humans obeyed their natural instincts far too well for their own collective good…
They held the first bidding session on the dangerous but neutral ground of the International Zone.
Arkady and Osnat crossed through the Damascus Gate checkpoint at just past ten in the morning, elbow to armpit with a sweating crowd of religious pilgrims, under the hard watchful eyes of the Legionnaires. By the time they cleared the checkpoint and plunged into the Old City, Arkady had already realized that this was a different city from the one they’d walked through before reaching the great gate. Where the lines at the checkpoint had been dominated by pilgrims and commuters, the actual streets of the Old City were dominated—at least to Arkady’s Syndicate-bred eyes—by beggars. It took him a while to understand that they actually were beggars. They didn’t ask for money. They just sat slumped along the stone walls lining the narrow streets, looking like they’d been there so long they’d given up even hoping for money. Arkady’s instinctive response was impatience. Why didn’t they just go to collective supply, take out what they needed, and get on with life? But of course there was no collective supply here. And when he looked more closely at the beggars he saw that many of them were crippled or deformed or obviously crazy.
“It’s a euth ward,” he said wonderingly.
“They try to chase them away,” Osnat said with a fatalistic shrug, “but there are only so many cops around.”
“But there must be some kind of renormaliza—er, rehabilitation program.”
She gave him an incredulous look out of the corners of her eyes. “If someone in the Syndicates has figured out how to rehabilitate people from being poor, they ought to apply for the freaking Nobel Peace Prize.”
Arkady stared at the crumpled forms, trying to take the measure of the people inside the rags, but none of them would meet his eyes. And they weren’t the only ones.
There was a special quality to the gaze in the International Zone, a quality of nonlooking, nonseeing. The Legionnaires wore their mirrored sunglasses like body armor and did their level best to pretend not to speak any language but French when anyone had the effrontery to ask them questions. Hasidim hurried along under their dreary hats, assiduously shielding their eyes from any contact with the godless present. NorAmArc Christians lumbered through the stations of the cross, eyes glued to their spincorders, doing their best to turn a real living city into a theme park. Muslims glared into the near distance as if they thought some Sufist act of will could make the hordes of unbelievers vanish from their holy sites. Even the crazy people—and there seemed to be a great many of them—shouted through you instead of at you. The only people who actually looked at anyone were the Interfaithers…and the way they looked at you made you realize that being ignored was far from the worst thing that could happen to you.
“Why are there so many Interfaithers?” Arkady asked.
“Open your eyes. Why is right in front of your nose.”
He looked. He saw bored Legionnaires, sullen locals, dusty walls crumbling in the ozone haze of a warm fall afternoon, six thousand years of history surrounded by sandbags and reinforced concrete. “I don’t see it.”
“That’s ’cause you’re not pointing your nose the right way.”
He glanced at her in confusion, then followed her hiked thumb skyward and finally saw it.
The Ring. Strung out along the declination of the equatorial belt some 35,786 kilometers overhead, it was faintly visible today through one of those quirky contrapositions of star and satellite that physics teachers throughout UN and Syndicate space set their frustrated students to calculate. The Ring wasn’t an actual ring, of course; just the area of space that contained all of Earth’s stable geosynchronous orbits. But it had been packed so full of residential and manufacturing habitats and commsats and solar collectors and offshore tax shelters, that by now it was as visible and clearly defined as the rings of Saturn.
The Ring’s traffic control and dynamic stabilization requirements were so impossibly complex that they had been the primary driving force behind the evolution of Emergent AI over the course of the last three centuries. The Ring was also—because of the sheer volume of reflective metal whipping around up there—one of the thousands of complex mutually interacting causes of the artificial ice age. A little reduced insolation here; a little increased albedo there; a gentle nudge of the coupled water transport systems of ocean and atmosphere. Arkady, terraformer that he was, appreciated the subtlety of the system: controlling chaos by the flutter of the butterfly’s wing rather than the fall of the sledgehammer. And of course the Ring’s terraformers, prodded onward by the unmitigated disaster they’d inherited, had done what station designers on the thinly populated Syndicate planets had never had to think about doing: They had crafted an orbital Ring that was so perfectly integrated into the biome of the planet below it that Ring and planet could almost be thought of as a single organism.