“Bad idea.” Li strolled back down the road, pried a loose piece up from the decaying asphalt, and tossed it into the trees to one side of the gate. It arced lazily through the air—and then vanished in a cloud of vapor as it passed some invisible boundary. “I’ve been wanting to lose weight,” she quipped. “But not that much.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait.”
“For what?”
“For him to realize that we’re not going away until he comes down to talk to us.”
It took nearly an hour before a distant and wavering figure appeared at the top of the long tree-lined avenue leading down to the gates. At first Arkady thought he was watching a machine or a monster. The being seemed to have many legs, and it rippled and moved with a sideways motion that he could make no sense of. As the figure descended the hill toward them, the wavering shape resolved itself into two shapes: a man, tall and supple and graceful, with a dog following at his heels. The late-afternoon sun gilded the man’s head with fire and flickered around his feet in a way that only made sense when Arkady realized that the man was wearing shorts—and that his right leg below the knee wasn’t flesh at all, but a delicate architecture of ceramsteel and silvery neuromuscular thread.
Man and dog continued their unhurried progress down the hill until they finally reached the gate. The man looked out through the bars at them, but he made no move to open the padlock that hung from the iron latch. He was smaller than Arkady had thought he would be; not a big man at all, but built so straight and true that he seemed tall until you stood next to him. The expression on his face was calm, mildly interested, completely noncommittal. The face itself was one of those brown-skinned, strong-nosed, finely hewn faces that were equally common among Palestinians and Sephardic Jews. The man’s only really remarkable feature, Arkady decided, were his black eyes. And those were as deep as the dark between the stars.
The dog poked her sharp nose through the gate, growling anxiously. The man laid a calming hand on her. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“It’s me,” Cohen said. “Cohen. Didn’t you get my message?”
“Sorry. I’ve gotten rather bad about checking my mail lately.”
“Well, I’ll give you the executive summary: we’re here.”
“So I see.” The bottomless eyes touched on Cohen, then Osnat, then Li and Arkady, then returned to Osnat for a pensive moment.
“Hello, Osnat.”
Osnat nodded curtly.
“Are you going to let us in?” Cohen asked.
“The thing is…I don’t exactly have the key at the moment.”
“You lost it?”
“I never lose things.” A self-deprecating smile lit the thin face and warmed the dark eyes. It occurred to Arkady that people would lay their lives down for this man. “I just put them down. And then I put other things on top of them. I figured that when I remembered what I’d put on top of the key, that would be soon enough to open the gate again. But now here you are standing on my doorstep and accusing me of losing things! I ask you, is there no justice in the world?”
He pulled what looked like a tiny nail file out of his pocket, and bent over the heavy padlock securing the gate. In a matter of seconds the lock fell open and the chains rattled to the ground. The gate opened stiffly, then stuck. They had to slide through the narrow gap one by one, taking care not to get caught on the ornate iron thorns that sprang from the bars.
“I take it the key’s been under something for a while?” Cohen asked as he squeezed through.
The man smiled again, and Arkady finally put his finger on what it was that was so entrancing about the expression. It was the smile of a child, open and vulnerable. Or rather it was the smile of an adult who had somehow managed to remain childlike. It made you feel that you were looking at a person who had been wounded by the world but not diminished by it.
The dog, meanwhile, was sniffing at their knees and ankles, whining under her breath, glancing back at her master, putting her body between him and the as-yet-unknown arrivals. He quieted her with a murmured word. She brightened, and her frothy tail began to wave hopefully.
“What a beautiful girl!” Cohen exclaimed, kneeling to bring his face within licking range.
She wasbeautiful. Arkady knew theoretically that she must be no bigger than average size for a dog, but she was so much larger than the tiny, petted, cosseted canines that he’d seen in the Syndicates that he could barely believe they were the same species. And this was no pet either, he suspected. He didn’t know what job she’d been bred to do, but not even the most casual observer could miss the honed, streamlined, powerful purposefulness of her.
“What is she?” Cohen asked. He was now thumping energetically at her ribs, whipping her into a delighted frenzy. “She’s too big to be pure border collie.”
“I don’t think the breed has a name. The shepherds in the Line bred them from whatever was left after the die-offs. Tough on sheep, easy on the eye.” He cleared his throat and made a formal gesture. “Ah. I’ve been remiss. Cohen, meet Dibbuk. Dibbuk, meet Cohen.”
Cohen laughed and buried his face in the dog’s thick fur. Then he stood up, and after the briefest of hesitations, stepped forward and embraced the stranger. They kissed each other elaborately in the Arab manner. Then Cohen took the human’s face between his hands and held him out at arm’s length in a way that made Arkady realize suddenly that the AI must be very old, and that even the humans he called friends must seem like mere children to him.
“You didn’t have to roll in with the cavalry,” the human said. “You could have just asked me to meet you at your hotel. Uh…right…well, I guess I shouldtry to check my mail more often.”
“Oh Gavi,” the machine said, caressing the man with the same open, uncomplicated, unshadowed affection he’d shown to the dog just a few moments ago, “what on earth am I supposed to do with you?”
They followed Gavi between the tall trees to a building buried in the hillside like a knife blade. He stopped in front of a plate glass door sized to accommodate busloads of tourists and smiled his sweet, wounded, self-deprecating smile. “We all know what the spider said to the fly and how that ended up,” he told them. “But come in anyway.”
The vast lobby ran away on all sides into dust and shadows. Gavi struck off across the echoing expanse of marble and dove through a sagging fire door into an ill-lit warren of maintenance corridors and administrative offices.
Arkady felt as if he’d walked into a theater, stepped onto the stage, and slipped through the wings to the cramped back passages and dressing rooms where the actors really lived. This part of the building looked at once abandoned and cluttered. Gavi seemed to be camping in it as much as living in it, and the whiff of kerosene on the air hinted at more than occasional power outages.
At one point they passed an entire room full of dirty laundry. Gavi pulled the door closed, grinned sheepishly, and muttered something about the maid’s day off. “I would have put shoes on when I saw you coming,” he said in an apparent non sequitur, “but I forgot to buy socks last time I was in town. And I meant to wash the ones I have. But somehow the whole laundry thing just never quite got off the ground this month.”
Li snorted.
“I have Superhuman Powers of Procrastination,” Gavi announced. He could do the same capital letters trick that Osnat did, Arkady noticed. Maybe it was something about Hebrew. “But the problem with powers of procrastination,” he continued wistfully, “is that you can’t Use Them for Evil. You can only use them for Nothing.”
Osnat stared for a moment, perplexed, then burst out laughing.
“It’s nice to see you,” Gavi told her. “How are you? Well, I hope?”