“So you’re saying this is…what? AI in a virus?”

“God, no! Start letting your metaphors gallop around like that and you’ll never be able to sort out what it actually is.What Moshe showed us was…conceptually provocative. But it wasn’t artificial intelligence. At least not in any form that’s recognizable to thisparticular artificial intelligence. If you need a layman’s label to hang on it, let’s call it…a search engine in a virus?”

“And what’s the engine searching for?”

“That, my friend, I can’t begin to tell you.”

Didi pursed his lips, considering. “And you believe Arkady’s story that they found it out on—what was the place called?”

“Novalis. I’ve never heard of it either. It’s off the maps. No record of any survey. No BE buoy within light-years, probably because the spectrometry wasn’t promising enough. It’s one of those ‘you can’t get there from here’ planets. Anyway, the host genotype is descended from an old Monsanto patent. That tells us nothing; half the known universe is littered with that crap. But it certainly would make sense if they really did find it out there. And it fits in again with what I said about it not being Syndicate splice work. They won’t touch corporate genesets as a general rule; bad associations.”

“I take it the planet’s terraformed, then?”

“That’s what they went out there to find out. And given what they seem to have brought back with them, I’d say the answer is yes.”

“Is this something UNSec ought to know about?”

“Well, I’m sure UNSec would think it was.”

“But you don’t.”

“I’m a live-and-let-live kind of boy. And UNSec has a nasty habit of breaking planets so other people can’t use them. A good planet’s a terrible thing to waste.”

Didi smiled slightly. “Okay, we’ll let it ride for now.”

Which they both knew only meant that they would let it ride until either Didi or the PM decided it was time not to let it ride.

“All right then.” Didi leaned back in his chair, caught sight of a food stain on his tie, peered at it, scrubbed at it. And then abandoned the effort, having only succeeded in making the tie wrinkled as well as stained. “You’ve answered my first two questions—what the virus is and who put it there—with more questions. Now what about the one question we ought to be able to answer: Why the hell should we be interested in it?”

“Well,” Cohen said slowly, “I know why ALEF is interested. Immortality, if you want to stick a name on it.”

“But you’ve already got that.”

“Not strictly speaking. No more than an ant swarm or a beehive does. And AIs have life spans just like any other superorganism. Even the ones that don’t collapse prematurely under the weight of their own competing identities.”

“But how does an organic virus make a machine live longer?”

“Because the underlying dynamics are the same whether you’re dealing with organic or synthetic superorganisms. We’re interested in any mechanism that propagates beneficial mutations across a population while somehow repressing harmful ones.”

“Controlling evolution, essentially.”

“Well…tweaking it. I think this would fall into what Syndicate genetic designers call the ‘soft chaos control’ theory of directed evolution. It’s what makes the quality of their genetic engineering so superior to the UN version. And it’s exactly the kind of biocomputing concept that holds the most promise for resolving the problem of decoherence in Emergents. Along with all the other dysfunctions that, tellingly, have the same names in AI design as they do in ecophysics: brittleness, perturbation intolerance, maladaptive red queen regimes, and so forth…” Cohen cleared his throat and shifted in the hard-backed chair. “But none of that answers the question of why Israelwould be interested.”

“We’re not,” Didi said blandly, “or we wouldn’t be letting GolaniTech sell Arkady to the highest bidder.”

“That’s pure spin, and you know it,” Cohen objected. “You’re taking some heavy risks to do this. I don’t care how greedy GolaniTech is or how uninterested you are. They wouldn’t be running this thing if they didn’t have at least tacit approval at the highest level—”

“—which doesn’t necessarily mean from me—”

“Granted. Still. This is treaty-banned tech any way you slice it, and if you weren’t after something, you would have damn well made sure that Arkady never made it to Earth.”

At that instant a decorous knock at the door was followed by Arik’s sleek head—and by one hand, held wrist out to put the boy’s IDF-issue wristwatch on full display. The watch’s crystal was cracked, Cohen noticed. Personally he thought that was taking the look a little far.

“Time,” Arik murmured in tones that would have done an English butler proud.

“Oh, yes,” Didi said. “Thank you, Arik. Give us…shall we say five minutes?”

The boy retreated, closing the door as carefully and silently as he’d opened it.

“Well?” Didi looked around inquisitively. “I think we’ve about covered the things we need to cover. I’m just asking you two to go forward and keep your ears open and let me know what you hear. That’s all. And now let’s get home before I get in trouble for making Zillah overcook the lamb shanks.”

That was when Cohen finally figured out three things that hould have been obvious from the start:

1. Their hour-long wait by the elevators had been no accident, because;

2. Didi’s office was bugged, and;

3. Didi was cheerfully spoon-feeding his own specially mixed barium meal to whoever was on the other end of the bug.

The underground parking lot in the basement of Mossad headquarters was probably one of the most heavily secured pieces of real estate on the planet. So it was amusing to see Li and the four hard-jawed Mossad bodyguards fingering their weapons and peering into the shadows as if they were stepping into the OK Corral instead of a well-lit, thoroughly guarded, and obviously empty garage. Or it would have been humorous if he hadn’t known how deadly earnest they all were.

The Mossad’s motor pool wasn’t taking any chances either; Didi’s government-issue Peugeot sedan had blastproof windows and armor-plated coachwork. They got in—one of Didi’s young men in front with the driver, the other two flanking Didi on the forward-facing seat, and Li and Cohen facing them across the foot well—and the car pulled up the ramp into the late-afternoon traffic on King Saul Boulevard with the muffled clank of ceramic compound antimine flooring.

It was nothing all that new to Cohen; Hyacinthe had driven the autobahns back when private cars were still legal and seen Porsches and BMWs romping through their native habitat at upward of two hundred kilometers an hour. Li, however, was enthralled. She inspected the floor and the doors, predictably pleased to meet a new piece of semi-military hardware. “I’ve never been in an actual car,” she said. “Is this a Mercedes?”

One of Didi’s bodyguards gave a strangled-sounding cough.

“Oh,” Li said after a moment. She cleared her throat, started to mutter something about being sorry, and fell abruptly silent.

“Never mind.” Didi leaned forward to pat her knee. “History just has a longer half-life here. Now tell me about your home planet.”

“It looks a lot like Israel, actually. Rocks and sky. Desert and mountains.”

“But without people, yes?”

“Mostly. Most of it people can’t live on yet. And even where they can, I wouldn’t exactly call it healthy.”

“And its history?”

“There is none. It’s not much older than I am.”

“A planet with no history,” Didi said. He turned to the agent next to him. “The perfect place for a week on the beach, don’t you think? They could sell vacations there. Jerusalemites would snap them up like falafel.”

“Any Interfaithers there?” the other guard asked.

“Not as bad as here.”

The Israelis exchanged significant glances with each other.