“That information will be provided in the stage-two bid package,” Ash answered. “After we’ve received your initial financial commitments.”

“Based on what, an initial blind bid?”

Ash nodded.

“What are the payment arrangements?”

“A hundred thousand. Twenty up front, eighty on the day.”

“Delivery on the day?”

“Naturally.”

Li shrugged. Arkady took it as permission to continue.

“There were ten of us,” he resumed. “Arkasha was the geneticist, and of course it’s his notebooks we’re talking about here. I was the biogeographer. Then there were the Ahmeds—”

“That’s AzizSyndicate’s biggest run A series,” Korchow interjected. “It’s a line whose main applications are military. They’d be familiar to Major Li from the last war”—he nodded politely in her direction—“but I doubt any of the rest of you would ever have seen one. Since the recent and, ahem, insufficiently anticipated outbreak of peace, the central joint steering committee has been trying to find alternative applications for them in the survey and terraforming missions. Sorry, Arkady. Go on.”

“Well, the Aziz A’s were the command team, pilot and navigator. They had the final word on all mission-critical decisions. Then we had the two Bellas, MotaiSyndicate B’s. One of them was an entomologist, like me, but a specialist in orbsilk worms. The other—”

“Hang on a minute.” Turner was taking notes, one muscular calf slung over the other knee to support his pad and pencil. “I’d like to get full names on these folks.”

“I’m sorry?” Arkady said.

“Those are their full names,” Korchow answered. “Arkady can’t give you anything else. Ahmed. Bella. Even Andrej”—Korchow smiled infinitesimally—“are merely geneline designations. Though Arkady here may know intuitively that one Ahmed isn’t the same as another, his language, his upbringing, and his convictions all tell him that the organism is nothing and the superorganism—the geneline—is everything.”

“But some of them have their own names. This Arkasha person—”

“Arkasha,” Korchow interrupted smoothly, “is the exception that proves the rule.”

“Are you saying he’s a political dissident?” Li interrupted.

“Let’s not indulge in morally loaded terminology, Major. Arkasha is merely…an atavism. Whether he is an atavism with some useful evolutionary role to play is a decision for the RostovSyndicate steering committee to make. Not for me. And certainly not for you.”

And so it went, just as he and Korchow had mapped it out back on Gilead, Arkady leading his audience down the twisting path—so close to the truth in almost every way—that Korchow had concocted for him.

“And what are we to make of this?” Shaikh Yassin said when Arkady finally reached the end of the story and fell silent. It was the first time he had spoken since the meeting began.

“What you make of it is your concern,” Ash answered. “Needless to say, your conclusions will largely determine the price you are willing to pay.”

“But what are we paying for?” Li again. She seemed to be the point man by consensus, and the others seemed content to hang back and see what game she managed to flush. “I mean, are we buying this so-called genetic weapon? Or Arkady? Or Arkasha’s notebooks? Is Arkasha himself for sale, for that matter?”

“That’s partly for you to determine,” Ash answered smoothly. “You have discretion to put together your own bid. Tell us what you want. Tell us what you’re willing to pay for it.”

“And what does it mean that we’re dealing with your charming self?” Yassin asked Ash. Beneath the courteous language, his voice sounded sharp as razors. “Can we infer from GolaniTech’s involvement that Arkady has already been interrogated by Israel, and we’re merely being offered their leavings?”

“You can infer whatever you like,” Ash said—and the room fell silent while each of them tried and failed to stare the other down.

“My problem is still with the story itself,” Li said, breaking the silence. “How do we know Arkady’s not just making it all up as he goes along?”

“You know because of what he is.” Ash gestured toward Arkady with one immaculately manicured hand. “An unaltered Syndicate construct, pure as a freshly detanked babe. No internal wetware. No stored spinfeed. No hard files. Nothing that can be edited, altered, or erased. What he remembers is what happened to him, pure and simple.”

Across the room, Yassin was nodding contemplatively. The two ALEF bidders sat utterly still, though something in their expressions convinced Arkady that they were speaking to each other in the nebulous parallel universe of streamspace. Turner merely sat, one thick ankle crossed over the knee of the other leg, his pale eyes flicking back and forth between Arkady and Korchow as if he were calculating the angles and momenta of a targeting problem.

“People can lie,” Li insisted.

“Not perfectly. Not under drugs. Not under…educated questioning. And once we work out the escrow arrangements, you’ll each have the chance to question Arkady in the time and place of your choosing.”

“But for how long? And with what limitations?”

Korchow started to answer, but Ash interrupted him. “I think discussing limitations as to duration and interrogation techniques in Arkady’s presence would be counterproductive at this point.”

“That’s pretty damn cold,” Li muttered.

“Yep,” Turner said. “But it works.”

Korchow cleared his throat and unfolded his slender stationer’s frame from the leather depths of the wing chair. “It seems to me that this would be the moment at which Arkady and I might most appropriately make our exit.”

As they left the room, Arkady glanced back and met Turner’s stare, as coldly blue as the cloudless sky over Novalis’s polar ice sheet.

It was unreal. an impossible, glorious, inconceivable violation of all the rules and restrictions that had pressed in on Arkady since that first fateful meeting with Osnat.

He and Korchow walked side by side across the courtyard and through the narrow door into Abulafia Street. No one stopped them. No one asked Korchow where he was taking Arkady. No one even followed them that Arkady could see. And ten minutes later they were in the thronging heart of the Arab Quarter.

“I have some errands to run,” Korchow told him. “You don’t mind tagging along, do you?”

Korchow’s “errands” stretched through the afternoon. He guided Arkady through the crowded streets, winding past beggars and water sellers, weaving through roving packs of pilgrims, and ducking into an endless series of antique stores and art galleries and rare book dealers.

At every store Korchow would go through the same incomprehensible ritual. He would introduce himself—under a different false name each time—and begin to look through the dealer’s collections. He seemed to have a taste for antiquities, and in particular portable ones. He would greet the first four or five or eight items the dealer presented with polite lack of interest. The dealer would respond accordingly, and the prices being bandied about would rise dizzyingly. Korchow, however, would remain placidly unmoved…both by the prices and by the objets d’artbeing presented for his inspection. The dealer would begin to hem and haw about export restrictions and end user certificates. Korchow would smile and nod and pronounce what Arkady assumed were the proper noises of reassurance…at which point they would stop even talking about prices.

The dealer would brew the sweet hot tea that everyone in the Old City seemed to live on and usher them out of the public showroom and into a discreet back room that Korchow referred to, with an amusement that Arkady found utterly incomprehensible, as “the high rollers’ room.”

The high rollers’ rooms were always soundproofed and spintronically deadwalled. And for good reason. For even Arkady could see that the objects presented for sale in these rooms had no business being anywhere outside of a museum, and certainly no business being shipped off-planet for private bidders.