“Well, that’s certainly grave. But I suppose we can forgive you.”

Shy Bella giggled again.

“What about you?” Arkasha asked her. “What obese, wrinkled, and importunate steering committee crone did you refuse to sleep with in order to achieve the dubious honor of this assignment?”

“I didn’t. None of them asked. Just grilled me on ideology so they wouldn’t have to admit they knew less about terraforming than a lowly B. Come to think of it I’ve never slept with an A.” She cocked her head prettily—a move that had a visible effect on her sib. “Should I be insulted, do you think?”

“Well,” Arkasha announced magnanimously, “I’m always available if you’d like to broaden your repertoire.”

And everyone laughed the nervous, keyed-up, self-conscious laughter that always accompanied the mention of the ultimate taboo.

“You should be more careful what you say,” Arkady told Arkasha when they were finally alone together in the relative privacy of their cabin.

That hadn’t come out the way he meant it to, he realized. He’d meant it to sound…well, how had he meant it to sound? What the hell had he been thinking, actually?

He cleared his throat nervously. “Top or bottom bunk?”

“I’d prefer the top if that’s all right with you.”

“Okay.”

But neither of them moved toward the bunks. Instead, Arkasha seemed to be taking cautious stock of his new pairmate; and Arkady took the opportunity to get another look at the man who was going to be the most important person in his life, for good or bad, for the next two years.

He saw him with a crèchemate’s well-trained eye. He passed over the things a stranger would have noticed first: the graceful proportion of hip and shoulder; the refined intellectual’s face that spoke so clearly of their geneline’s unique character and talents; the clean planes of jaw and cheekbone and temple; the slight Cupid’s bow of the upper lip that the Rostov designers had settled on as the perfect compromise between beauty and manliness.

Instead, he saw the little details that crèchemates learned early to take heed of. That his new pairmate carried a good five kilos less than their crècheyear average, a sure sign of a nervous disposition. That he had a habit of balancing on his toes as if he were perpetually expecting the unexpected, and had learned from experience that the unexpected was usually unpleasant. That his narrow face radiated intelligence and character, but also a wounded reserve that did not bode well for Arkady’s personal life over the course of the next two years.

The sardonic façade was just that, Arkady realized. A defensive weapon honed to a sharp edge in order to keep others off-balance and at a distance. Except that a Syndicate construct had no more reason to keep his crèchemates at a distance than a human child had to keep his own brothers and sisters at a distance.

Arkady’s first impression of the man had been right; he was about as safe and predictable as an unexploded bomb.

Arkasha grinned suddenly. “That’s some set of cowlicks you’ve got there. Classic fuzzy 18 defect. Some poor slob at the splicing scope must have caught an earful of misery over that screwup.”

“Gee, no one’s ever said thatto me before.”

“Scarred for life, were you?” The grin broadened. “Children can be such monsters.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Arkady lied.

“Then your crèche must have been a kinder, gentler place than mine was.”

Arkady cleared his throat. “You’re from Crèche Seven?” he asked, trying to paper over the silence with small talk.

“That’s right.”

“I had a pairmate from Seven, uh, let’s see…the assignment before last? A glaciologist. Big guy, seventy kilos easy, played goalie for the Crèche Seven team. Ring any bells?”

“Not that I can hear.”

“Most of the Arkadys from Seven are above height norm,” Arkady babbled on. “At least in our year.”

The grin faded to a sardonic smirk. “They put in a special order for big and dumb our year.”

“Good footballers too.” He assessed the lean but well-muscled frame of the man in front of him. “You play?”

“Alas, I’m not temperamentally suited to team sports.”

“Me neither, actually. Not that I don’t like the company. But I suppose when it really comes down to it, I’d rather be poking around under dead logs looking for ants.”

This elicited a broader smile from Arkasha—but no answering confession.

“I read your articles on the Aenictus gracilis,”Arkasha said. He fixed Arkady with an intense stare, as if he were trying to send or decipher some vital secret message. “It’s extremely fine work. As good as anything I’ve seen in years. I particularly liked your paper on the adaptive value of dissent in collective decisionmaking. It was…thought-provoking.”

Arkady’s academic advisory committee had thought that paper was thought-provoking too. And a few other less complimentary things that had earned Arkady a friendly but still highly unnerving visit from a renormalization counselor. He hadn’t exactly abandoned his dissent research after that…but he’d certainly been more circumspect in the words he used to write about it. Ants had such overwhelming symbolic value in Syndicate society that people were apt to make overheated comparisons. Metaphor creep could twist even the most solid science into politics. Sometimes Arkady envied the pre-Evacuation human entomologists who had done the pioneering work on social insect societies. They’d been able to draw much bolder conclusions than he could…mainly because the moralists of their day and age had been too busy pestering the beleaguered primate researchers.

Now Arkasha was saying something about multivalent superstructure, whatever that was. “You were careful not to cite it, of course, but surely the reference to Kennedy on Althusser is implicit?”

“They’re just ants,” Arkady said, falling back on the same formula that had always gotten him out of trouble before.

“You don’t write about them as if you thought they were just ants.”

They stared at each other. Arkasha seemed to be searching for something in Arkady’s face and not finding it. Finally he sighed and settled back on his heels a little. When he turned away there was a sad little slump to his shoulders. “Oh well,” he murmured. “The work’s still good. That’s the main thing. And I certainly won’t give you anything to complain about in that department.”

“Listen,” Arkady stammered. “I didn’t mean to offend you earlier. What I said about Bella, about watching what you say…it came out all wrong. I just meant that…well, sometimes it’s better to be a little careful at the beginning of an assignment when you don’t know everyone yet. Some people can’t tell the difference between a joke and reality.”

Arkasha squared his shoulders and set his sardonic mask firmly back in place. “What makes you think you offended me?” he asked. “And for that matter what makes you think it was a joke?”

That was when Arkady really began to panic.

“Uh…top bunk you said? I’ll just leave this stuff here on the bottom then, and…er…uh…I really need to get down to the lab now and make sure everything got on board in one piece and—”

“Relax,” Arkasha said, with that same mocking little smile lingering on his lips. “My perversions aren’t nearly that simple.”

Later Arkady would hear the seed of Arkasha’s sickness in those words. He would parse them, shuffle them, turn them over like a fortune-teller’s cards, looking for the first misstep on the long slide toward exile.

But in that moment he saw only the face that was his and not his; the eyes that were his and not his; and the soul behind the eyes, as complex and intractable and miraculous as a living planet.

A POLITICALLY USEFUL TOOL