“Down where? Where are we going? Please, Osnat.”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” She sighted down the barrel of her gun at him, and the smile that drifted across her face was as thin as the clouds in a terraformed sky. “We’re going to run you through the blockade, golem. You’re going to Earth.”

Three men waited in the heavy rotational gravity of the freighter’s bridge. Two were just muscle. The third, however, was quite the other thing.

Slender, sharp-eyed, professorial in wire-rimmed glasses. The olive skin and the close-cropped black beard could have placed him in any number of ethnic or nationalist enclaves along the MedArc of Earth’s orbital ring. But the army surplus shorts, the wrinkled T-shirt, and the thick-soled sandals worn over white athletic socks were so perfectly Israeli—and so exactly what Korchow had told him to expect—that Arkady knew he could only be looking at Moshe Feldman.

Captain Feldman, Korchow had called him. But it had became clear in the course of what Korchow liked to call their “conversations” that the former Captain Feldman of the Israeli Defense Forces, was now Security Consultant Feldman of the very private and very profitable GolaniTech Group.

It had begun. The Israelis had snapped Arkady up like the raiding front of an army ant swarm snapping up a beetle. And once they had determined he was edible, they would pass him along from worker to worker and mandible to mandible, all the way back up the raiding column to the swarm’s soft stomach.

First, however, he would have to get past Moshe. And Moshe didn’t look like an easy man to get past.

“Well if it isn’t the clone who came in from the cold,” Moshe said in the deliberate cadence that hours of tape in the KnowlesSyndicate language labs had taught Arkady to recognize as the mark of Israel’s Ashkenazi intellectual elite. “Let’s see now. Arkady stands for A-18-11-1-4. Which makes you a RostovSyndicate A series, from the eleventh geneline approved by your home Syndicate’s steering committee. And tells us that the first run of your geneline was detanked in crèche one in Syndicate Year Four? Have I got that more or less right, Arkady?”

“Perfect.”

“No, Arkady.” Moshe smiled, showing pink gums and straight white teeth small enough to belong in a child’s mouth. “You’re the one who’s perfect. I’m only human.”

Arkady couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so he said nothing.

“So,” Moshe said, putting the same vast volumes of meaning into the syllable that Osnat had—and making Arkady marvel at how the dry patterns from the training tapes came alive in Israeli mouths. “What do I need to know?”

“What do you need to know about what?” Arkady asked.

Moshe crossed his arms over his chest. He was small, even by human standards; but his legs were hard and sunburned, and with every movement of his hands Arkady saw corded tendons slide under the skin of his forearms. “First, it would be reassuring to know that you are who you say you are.” Another flash of the childish teeth. “Or at least that you are whatyou say you are.”

A flick of Moshe’s fingers brought a lab tech scurrying over with a splicing scope and sample kit. The sampling was ungentle, and it required the removal of the mask and filter—a risk that Osnat muttered darkly about and Moshe shrugged off philosophically.

“He’s for real,” the tech finally announced in Hebrew.

“How sure are you?” Moshe asked.

The man spread his hands.

“And what would it take to be completely sure?”

“I’d have to run it by Tel Aviv.”

“Then do it. I’m not taking any chances this time.”

This time?

The tech retrieved his scope and sampling gear and retreated to the streamspace terminal. Then, to Arkady’s surprise and dismay, they waited.

It should have taken days of queuing and relaying for the sample to reach Earth’s Orbital Ring. And then it should have taken weeks for it to be cleared for import by the ossified bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the Controlled Technology Addendum to the Kyoto Protocols. Instead, Arkady watched with growing unease as the tech fed his samples into the terminal and keyed up a streamspace address that began with the fabled triple w .

The implications of those three letters made Arkady catch his breath. Earth was offstream under the Tech Addendum. If Moshe could talk directly to Earth—let alone teleport tissue samples for analysis—then he must have a portable Bose-Einstein terminal and a secure source of entanglement outside the UN’s network of entanglement banks and BE relays. Only a handful of private entities in UN space had the financial means to maintain private entanglement banks: the largest multiplanetaries; the UN bureaucracy itself; the richest AIs and transhumans. And of course the constant wild card in UN politics, a type of entity so archaic that its very existence provoked horrified amazement among Syndicate political philosophers: Earth’s nation-states.

They’re animals,Arkady had protested back on Gilead when he’d first understood he might be dealing with nationalists. Worse than animals. What can we possibly have in common with them?

There’s an old Arab saying,Korchow had answered from behind that unfathomable KnowlesSyndicate smile: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. And a thousand idealistic General Assembly resolutions can’t change the fact that Earth has her hand on the Orbital Ring’s water tap.

But Moshe didn’t look much like the nationalists in Arkady’s old sociobiology textbooks. And he certainly didn’t look like he planned to turn the water off on anyone unless he was logically convinced that he was going to reap some benefit from their ensuing thirst.

Arkady blinked, feeling an ominous stinging sensation behind his eyes, and realized that his nose was filling. He sniffed surreptitiously and looked around hoping no one had noticed.

“Have a tissue,” Moshe said.

Arkady took the thing reluctantly, wondering how he was supposed to use it. Then, to his horror and humiliation, he sneezed.

“Go ahead. Blow your nose.”

“May I be excused for a moment?”

“Why? We’re savages, remember? No need for your fine Syndicate manners here.”

Then he saw it. Moshe had set the trap, and he’d walked into it without a backward glance and ended up just where Moshe wanted him: more worried about sneezing in public than about doing the job Korchow had sent him to do.

He blew his nose—something he hadn’t done in public since he was six or so—then stood there holding the used tissue and not knowing what to do with it.

Moshe smiled.

“He’s clean,” the tech announced from behind his terminal. Everyone in the room must have been holding their breath, Arkady realized; he heard a collective sigh of relief at the news.

“Right, then.” Moshe sounded like a professor leading his lecture group into difficult theoretical territory. “Now that we know you’re perfect, why don’t you tell us to what we owe the pleasure of your perfect company?”

“I told you,” Arkady said, still following the script Korchow had laid down for him. “The Syndicates—”

“Yes, yes, I know the spiel by heart. The Syndicates have developed some kind of mysterious genetic weapon and they’re planning to use it against us. But as an ethical evolutionary ecophysicist you can’t abide the thought of wiping out Earth’s wonderful genetic diversity. So you’ve defected in order to do your modest little bit toward making the universe safe for humans.” He gave Arkady a quizzical look. “You don’t lookstupid. Did you really think we were going to swallow such bunk?”

Korchow’s last warning echoed in Arkady’s mind: Absalom is the sharpest blade you have. Far too sharp to unsheathe unless you’re quite sure you can put it away again without cutting off your own fingers.