“Solovyov is dead,” I said.
“He is. And he isn’t. Stay right there and you’ll see.”
Katerina took the folded linen and robe and walked back to the far door. She slowly pushed it open, calling out as she did so.
“I have your towel.”
A girl stepped out and took the cloth. She was Cavadora, no older than the boy in the portrait in the foyer. She didn’t take the robe, seemingly unconcerned with her nakedness. She turned to me as she dried her long black hair.
Her eyes had a weary, burdened look that belied her youthful features. “To answer your question,” she said, “I tell you these things because I want your help, Mr. Barrett.”
The evidence was there in front of me, and I’d seen it with my own eyes. Marcenn had warned us, in his own way. Huxley too, until Katerina shot him dead. Rationally, objectively, I knew the truth. Though my eyes saw a slender girl and my ears heard a light and airy voice, my mind understood that the person before me had eight centuries of memories behind those intense, dark eyes.
“Ivan Solovyov,” I said. Not a question, but a statement.
The girl shook her head. “New life, new name.”
“It’s not your life, is it? This girl, her life. Her family, her future. You stole that.”
“I assure you, Mr. Barrett, this is better than the life she had. This girl was taken from a brothel in the Flotilla. She may have died young, but it spared her many years of suffering.”
“You could have just as easily saved her from that life and given her something better.”
She shrugged. “Could I do that for every Cavadora? For every poor, starving girl across the solar system?”
I stepped around the pool and came closer. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, aware but unable to stop the anger creeping into my voice. “Whether you save one or a thousand, you do whatever you can.”
Katerina moved between us.
The girl dropped her towel and took the robe from Katerina. “Not yet, my dear,” she said. “He hasn’t decided. You know his temperament. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.”
Katerina stepped aside but never broke eye contact. I let her have her small victory and looked away first, turning to Solovyov.
“You wanted my help,” I said. “My help with what? I’m not betraying Section 9 for you.”
“That’s beside the point.” she replied, tying the robe closed. She tugged her hair from beneath the collar as she continued. “When you joined the Arbiters, you didn’t know that Section 9 existed. How could you? Yet the unit’s actions may have undermined or even run contrary to your own objectives as an Arbiter, as I’m sure you now understand.”
She was right about that. Andrea was prepared to let me run headlong into my death on Venus because warning any Arbiters on site of the real danger wasn’t part of her mission. One year later I’d done the same.
Solovyov continued. “Section 9 has access to information the Arbiters do not, and because of that the former can draw conclusions the latter would never reach. Actions the Arbiters would not, or could not, undertake. The gulf of contextual understanding between the two is staggering, wouldn’t you agree? Now consider an organization with an even greater reach, with access to even more data, such that the difference between Section 9 and the Arbiters is rendered inconsequential by comparison. That is what I represent. That is what I invite you to be a part of.”
“You keep hinting at it, but you still haven’t told me what that really is. What do the Eleven want?”
She knitted her brow and looked down as if lost in thought, then she nodded and walked to the stand in front of the windows. She looked out at the city as she replied. “Of all the agents with Section 9—of the billions of people in the solar system—you alone present a rare intersectionality. A former Arbiter, you are now part of an organization with nearly boundless authority and limited only by cursory oversight.”
She turned back to face me. “Mr. Barrett, I truly believe that your deepest values are more similar to my own than you realize. The only difference between us is vantage. You are limited by your own mortality, unable to see beyond the horizon of your lifetime. You have the perspective of a man tethered in history, able to see only so far into the past and future. But if you could live the lives I have, if you could see the universe as I do, I have no doubt we would be of the same mind.”
“Vague platitudes don’t tell me anything,” I said. “If you want me to join you, you need to speak plainly.”
The Cavadora girl walked to the shallow pool in the center of the room. She sat down on the floor and turned her former body’s head to stare up at the ceiling. She shook the water from her hands and gestured at the corpse.
“Death is what gives life structure and purpose. Because a life is finite, this gives meaning to each day. Yet this also gives rise to the eternal recurrence of human folly. Children repeat the mistakes of their elders. They grow and have children of their own, only for those children to repeat the cycle. Over and over, for eternity.”
She stood and slowly circled the shallow pool. “The Eleven are an escape from this madness; a group outside the host of mankind. Each of us sacrificing our personal desires for the Great Work. Despite what you may think, Mr. Barrett, we are not your enemy. The singular purpose of the Eleven has always been to prevent another self-imposed extinction-level event like the Eight Year War from ever happening again.”
That wasn’t what I expected her to say. I suppose I expected something about mankind fulfilling its destiny in the stars, creating a galaxy-spanning empire. The kind of grandiose vision the powerful tend to indulge in. Instead Solovyov was trying to convince me that the Eleven were peacekeepers, and everything they had done was solely to prevent another apocalyptic war from ending the human race.
If the Warwick node had been created by survivors of the Eight Year War, it was plausible that they could have made a pact and kept the technology for themselves, working in secret to prevent the horrors they’d witnessed from repeating.
They’d succeeded in a sense. In the centuries that followed, the human race had recovered from the 6th mass extinction, established agriculture and sustainable cities across a radically altered Earth, and settled the entire solar system. Could that have been the work of the Eleven?
“I see you’re thinking about it,” said Solovyov. “I admire that, Mr. Barrett. The ability to pause, to simply stop and consider before acting or speaking. An understated skill, indeed.” She’d walked all the way around the shallow pool and had returned to where she started. She stood there, hands clasped behind her back and watching me with her head tilted inquisitively.
I had to admit, it was a reasonable vision. If Solovyov was telling me the truth.
“August Marcenn’s Eleven,” I said.
“What of them,” asked Solovyov, with a faintly disdainful curl of her lip.
“They spoke of Insidious powers, old and dispassionate. Those were their exact words. They said their goal was the unification of all mankind. If that’s what they wanted, what are your Eleven working for?”
“His actions speak for themselves, do they not? I’m sure you understand that I can’t detail every nuance of our efforts, but rest assured, Mr. Barrett, August Marcenn was a madman—the consequence of misplaced trust in an unworthy ally. It would be an error to place any faith in his words.”