Spin Control

“And how much does it cost to…what’s the right word…rent someone?”

Cohen gri

“And it’s legal, is it?”

“Well, mostly.” Cohen felt Li’s smirk tickling at the back of his mind. “As my associate has just pointed out, it’s easier to bend the rules when you’re filthy stinking rich.”

“Mmm.” Moshe’s expression sharpened. “Speaking of bending the rules, I understood that ALEF would send one representative to the bidding. And that it would be someone we could vet beforehand to make sure they didn’t pose any security risks.” His eyes touched briefly on Li, then skittered away again. “But now here you are with one of the, uh, least vettable individuals in UN space.”

‹He could talk to me about it,› Li said. ‹What the hell’s wrong with these people, anyway?›

“You could talk to her about it,” Cohen repeated, mimicking her a

Moshe turned to face Li. “I have no problem with talking to you. Or with your genetics. Or your enhancements. Or your status under UN law, Jewish law, or any other law. What I do have a problem with is trusting a former Peacekeeper with information that we most assuredly do not wish to share with the Controlled Technology Committee.”

“The operative word there is former,”Li said. “I lost my commission three years ago.”

Moshe’s eyes flicked to Li’s throat and wrists. “But you didn’t lose your wetware. What assurance can you give me that everything you see and hear isn’t feeding straight into UNSec data banks?”

A slow smile spread across Li’s face. “I’m not a very subtle person, Moshe. If you’ve got something to say, you’d better say it.”

“Just that I wonder why they didn’t reclaim your wetware. And how it could have taken your superiors eleven years to get around to prosecuting you for shooting those prisoners.”

“I bought my wetware by signing my pension back to the government. Any soldier’s entitled to do that, and most do, if only to avoid the surgery. As for the rest…you’re spi

“Spins can be faked. Anyone who’s worked on EMET knows that.”

Li stared across the table, her face calm, her eyes level. This must be costing her, Cohen realized, but he had no idea how much. Three years after the court-martial they’d still never talked about it. And even his most cautious attempts to cross that particular no-man’s-land had been violently rebuffed.

“Unfortunately,” Li said when he’d just about decided she wasn’t going to say anything, “those particular spins don’t seem to have been faked.”

She and Moshe stared at each other, locked in one of those testosterone-fueled battles of will that Cohen, three centuries removed from his only unmediated human memories, was begi

Finally Moshe leaned forward in his chair, the flimsy metal creaking under his weight. “The thing is, Major, I just don’t trust you.”

“You want ALEF as a bidder, you’ll have to trust me.”

Moshe pursed his lips.

“Do you need to talk to someone?” Li asked. The question came off of a collective work space shared by Li, Cohen, router/decomposer, and a gaggle of chattering semisentients, but it seemed politic to let Li ask it. Moshe had clearly slipped into the trap of treating the two bodies in front of him as separate entities…and you never knew when that sort of misconception might work to your advantage.

“No. I have discretion.” He hesitated for another instant. “All right then. We go forward. For now. But we may require additional bona fidesafter the next meeting.”

“You may not be the only one,” Li retorted. “We still have nothing more than your word that the seller’s genuine. What about his bona fides?”

“That’s between you and the seller.” Moshe got to his feet, left the paper on the table, and dropped a few shekels on top of it. “I just open the cage and crack the whip. Whether the bear decides to dance for you or eat you is your problem.”

SEX, WATER, GOD

The individual’s enhancement of his or her reproductive chances never happens in a void but only in relation to the reproductive chances of other members of the species. Just as corporations seek to externalize their costs of production, individuals inevitably seek to externalize their costs of reproduction, enhancing the value of their own genetic property by reducing the value of their neighbors’ genetic property. When twentieth-century existentialists sipped coffee in Parisian cafés, or twenty-first-century shoppers flocked to Wal-Mart for cheap consumer goods, they were both participants in a global economy whose ultimate evolutionary effect was to shift the means of reproduction (high protein diets, high standards of living, paid child care, etc.) to the Consuming Nations, while shifting the limiting factors on reproduction (war, poverty, pollution, etc.) to Producing Nations…

Viewed in this light, Earth’s ecological collapse can be seen as the logical, even inevitable conclusion of four mille

They held the first bidding session on the dangerous but neutral ground of the International Zone.

Arkady and Osnat crossed through the Damascus Gate checkpoint at just past ten in the morning, elbow to armpit with a sweating crowd of religious pilgrims, under the hard watchful eyes of the Legio

“It’s a euth ward,” he said wonderingly.

“They try to chase them away,” Osnat said with a fatalistic shrug, “but there are only so many cops around.”

“But there must be some kind of renormaliza—er, rehabilitation program.”

She gave him an incredulous look out of the corners of her eyes. “If someone in the Syndicates has figured out how to rehabilitate people from being poor, they ought to apply for the freaking Nobel Peace Prize.”

Arkady stared at the crumpled forms, trying to take the measure of the people inside the rags, but none of them would meet his eyes. And they weren’t the only ones.

There was a special quality to the gaze in the International Zone, a quality of nonlooking, nonseeing. The Legio