“I like you,” Arkady said.

“I like you too. But I’m still going to do my job. So don’t get to liking me too much. Just in case…”

“Now you sound like Osnat.”

“Do I? Well, don’t tell her. I doubt she’d find the comparison flattering. All right. Back to Novalis. Where were we again?”

NOVALIS

The Time of Cruel Miracles

From the moment the rest of the survey team began to wrap their brains around the idea of Bella’s pregnancy, something happened that surprised Arkady as much as it frightened him.

It became an assumption, held with a certainty bordering on religious faith, that the ultimate cause of Bella’s pregnancy was not terraforming fallout but a genetic weapon specifically targeted at Syndicate bodies, Syndicate ideology, the Syndicate Way of Life.

Novalis’s prior settlers, until now objects of pity and admiration, were suddenly assumed to be the advance troops of an unseen enemy. And the identity of that enemy was another article of quasi-religious faith, uncontested by any loyal Syndicate construct: the United Nations.

“But why would they assume it’s a genetic weapon?” Arkady asked Arkasha, who also secretly doubted. “I mean it’s not like it’s killing us…the opposite, you might even say.”

“You can’t mean that seriously.”

They were lying on Arkady’s bunk, snatching a rare moment of rest amidst the chaos. “Well, actually,”

Arkady said, “I do mean it.”

“Then I’d say that for once By-the-Book Ahmed is actually showing more brains than you.”

“But what threat to us is it if—”

“Not us, Arkady. We believe in the system. We have too much at stake not to believe. And RostovSyndicate may not be perfect, but at least it would be recognizable to the Zhangs and Parks and Banerjees who started the Breakaway. But Aziz and Motai Syndicates have started down the road of specialized series. B’s. C’s. Motai’s even introduced Ds, though they only use them for UN-based contract work. So far. The Motais and Aziz A’s don’t want the kind of world we all grew up believing in. They want a class system without money, a police state without prisons. Do you really think their C’s and D’s are going to go along with that when there’s a chance of getting immortality the old-fashioned way?”

“Maybe it’s a gift in disguise, then. Maybe it’ll make us live up to our ideals and get out of the specialized series business.”

“There’ll be civil war before that happens, Arkady. Or revolution. And a society can’t survive two revolutions in one generation.”

“I have to believe people are more reasonable than that—”

“If there’s one thing people can be depended on notto be in a crisis, it’s reasonable!”

“—take someone like Laid-back Ahmed, for instance. He’s certainly not prejudiced.”

“As you once pointed out to me, love and politics are two very different things.”

“You knewabout Bella and Ahmed?”

“Of course. It’s obvious. Just look at the way they look at each other.”

“If it’s so obvious to you, then how come their home Syndicates didn’t figure out what they are?”

“What makes you think they haven’t?”

“But how could they be crazy enough to put the whole mission, or half of it anyway, in the hands of a man who’s been through renorming? What’s wrong, Arkasha? Why are you looking at me like that? Oh Arkasha. No. Not you.How couldthey have?”

Arkasha had rolled onto his stomach. Arkady couldn’t see his face, only the dark hair feathering the pillow. He rubbed at the back of Arkasha’s neck, the way he would have done to soothe a frightened puppy.

“When did it happen?”

“Five…no, six years ago.”

“Tell me about it?”

Nothing.

“Please?”

“The worst thing,” Arkasha began, his voice muffled less by the pillow than by the same wrenching humiliation Arkady had heard in Ahmed’s voice, “the worst thing is how horribly niceeveryone is about it. It’s not the Bellas of the world who work in the renorming centers. They’re dedicated, well-intentioned, idealistic professionals. They want to help you. They want to make you better.” He spat the last word out as if it tasted bad.

“And did they?”

“They made me learn to keep my stupid mouth shut. Is that better?”

Arkady leaned down to kiss his hair.

“There’s nothing like a stint on the euth ward to make you realize that you’re expendable,” Arkasha went on. “And the thing is, I didn’t really think I wasexpendable. I was the best, after all. At everything. Didn’t that mean I set the norm? Didn’t it mean I wasthe new norm? And I’m not egotistical or selfish. If I complained, it was because I wanted things to be better for everyone, not just for me.”

“So what happened in the end?”

“Nothing. I shut my mouth and worked my ass off and published my first paper out of the renorming center. And that was the end of that. They called me in for an evaluation, and I pretended to be cured, and they pretended to believe I was cured, and I packed my bag and went home and got back to work. Because it turned out that even if I was expendable, my work wasn’t.”

“But it must have changed you.”

“It made me work a hell of a lot harder, I can tell you that.”

“Be serious, Arkasha!”

Arkasha rolled over on his back and finally met Arkady’s eyes. His expression was intent, searching. “Would you believe me if I told you that you were the first person I’d slept with since then?”

He pulled Arkady down to him and kissed his eyes, his forehead, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth. Arkady wanted to return the kisses, but there was still a last question he had to ask. “Why did they send you?”

“That’s the craziest thing of all. No one ever told me. I still don’t know. I don’t have the faintest clue.” He held Arkady tight and buried his face in his hair so that his last words were muffled to near inaudibility. “All I know is if I ever get sent back again, I’ll kill myself.”

“Wake up the tacticals?” Arkasha burst out, not two minutes into the consult that followed on the news of what they’d all started calling Bella’s situation.“Are you insane?”

“You’ve been saying yourself since before we even landed that Novalis is all wrong,” By-the-Book Ahmed countered. “Now we know why. And we know what to do about it too!”

“But you can’t turn the tacticals loose on Novalis!” Arkasha was pale with anger and frustration, knowing that he wasn’t carrying the room with him but unable to give up and acquiesce to the emerging consensus. If you could call it a consensus, Arkady thought bitterly, when half the team had plainly made up their minds before they ever sat down at the table. “This planet is irreplaceable, unprecedented! Priceless genetic material!”

“Priceless genetic material for you to exploit for your own egotistical and selfish reasons.”

“That’s unfair!”

“Is it? Really? Who are you reallythinking about, Arkasha?”

“Look,” Laid-back Ahmed said, still faithfully trying to keep the peace. “Let’s at least hear what Aurelia and Arkasha have to say before we start shouting at each other. The least we can do is make up our minds based on facts, not opinions.”