Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  “That’s it,” he said. She saw his pulse spike on the words.

  “What about you?” she asked, turning to the safety officer.

  He delivered up the goods with a single glance toward the unlit depths of the chamber.

  Li walked back to the corner he’d glanced at and saw what she should have seen before: a large battered sheet of aluminum finished in safety-sign orange. It was the only spot of color in the chamber, the only thing that wasn’t caked black with coal smoke. Obviously, it had been put there since the fire.

  “Who put this here?” she asked, bending down to shove the heavy plate aside.

  “We did,” Haas answered. “So no one would fall down that.”

  Li looked at the place where the plate had been—and found herself staring down a well shaft.

  It was less than a meter wide. Ropy bundles of unmarked electrical cables curved over the lip and dropped into the darkness. The water started six meters below the lip of the hole, and it was as black as only mine water can be.

  “Anything else you’d like to tell me about this?”

  “No,” Haas said. “Sharifi dug it. I assume. She didn’t bother to get permission.” He sounded irritated that he hadn’t caught her at it while she was still alive.

  Li scrabbled around on the floor until she found a scorched length of wire long enough to reach the water table. Then she dipped it in, pulled it out, and wiped it along the bare skin of her arm. Her skinbots flared briefly, swirling around the droplets, then subsided. Nothing too nasty in there, apparently. “Okay then,” she said, and started unlacing her boots.

  The safety officer figured out what she was doing before Haas did. “You really don’t want to go down there, ma’am.”

  “Humor me.”

  “No fucking way!” Haas said.

  He reached out and jerked her back from the hole by one arm. Li wrapped her free hand around his and squeezed just hard enough to remind him she was wired.

  “I appreciate your concern for my safety,” she said. “But I really will be fine. Or was there another reason you didn’t want me to go down there?”

  He backed off fast at that.

  “Lend me your goggles,” she told the safety officer when she’d stripped to her shorts and T-shirt and tightened her rebreather’s harness. He handed her the goggles with a dazed expression on his face. She gave them a spit and a rub, put them on, and pressed them into her eye sockets to get good suction.

  “Okay,” she said around the mouthpiece. “Back in ten and counting. Unless I do something stupid. In which case you’ve got an hour and forty minutes to get a rescue team down here and fish me out.”

  “You assume a lot,” Haas said.

  “If I don’t come back,” she said, all sweet reasonableness, “they’ll just have to send someone else out. And you’ll have to wait to open the mine until they get here, won’t you?”

  Haas sat down, muttering something about people who thought they were funnier than they were. But he was smiling, Li noticed. He could take a joke, you had to give him that at least.

  The water was cold but clear, and as soon as she scanned the submerged cavern she knew this was the real experiment site. Whatever had been going on upstairs was peripheral, a mere prep room and antechamber. An underground river had flowed through this cavern in some earlier geologic age and stripped the coal off the condensate beds. The bare crystals formed an intricate lattice supporting the cavern’s ceiling. Curving pillars sprang from the floor like the ribs of one of Compson’s long-extinct sauropods. Pale tendrils of condensate spidered across the dome above like fan vaults. And Li didn’t have to feel these strata to know they were alive; they pulsed on her quantum scans like an aurora borealis. Whatever life there was in the planet’s Bose-Einstein strata—and whether there was any at all was a subject of intense debate among the UN’s xenographers—this was one of its centers.

  Sharifi had found herself a glory hole.

  Something brushed Li’s arm, and she whirled around just in time to glimpse a VR glove floating past her on a slow underground current, contact wires trailing. There was other equipment, some floating, some strewn across the cavern floor in a tangled skein of power lines and input/output wires. She recognized seismic meters, Geiger counters, quantum monitors. There was no way she could take all this in one shot, let alone underwater. She laid out a mental grid pattern and swam back and forth, recording everything as best she could. At least that way she’d know if someone moved something between now and her next visit—and she’d know what they’d been worried enough about to bother moving.

  “That’ll do,” she said as she hauled herself up the ladder. “You’ll need to keep this section closed until you get that drained out and I can take a closer look.”

  Haas’s eyes glinted where the lamp beam cut across them. “I’ve got a start-work order on this level waiting for the inspector’s signature. The electricians come through tomorrow, and we start cutting as soon as they lay clean line. Your authority stops at ground level, and you just hit the end of my cooperation.”

  “Oh,” Li said. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to log the safety violations down here.” She pointed at the corridor’s props and collars, groaning under the weight of the roof, but still standing. “Those props are three meters apart. UNMSC regs require 2.5. Also, there are ungrounded electrical wires at junctions South 2, South 8, and South 11. I’ll download a complete list of code violations for you when we get back. I’m sure you’ll want to get right on top of them.”

  It was pure bluff, of course; Haas knew as well as she did that no UN site team was ever going to give AMC more than a slap on the wrist for those violations. But Li was the only UN official on-site, and if she logged an official complaint all the paperwork he had to do to get the mine reopened would pass across her desk—or rather sit on her desk until she got around to signing it.

  Haas could go over her head, of course. But that took time. And it was an implicit admission that there really were safety violations. Li didn’t think he’d risk it. Not in the aftermath of a bloody and well-publicized mining disaster. Not with Sharifi’s body still lying in the Shantytown morgue a few miles away.

  “Fine,” Haas said, shrugging. “Sniff around all you want. You’re only going to find out Sharifi was a fool.”

  * * *

  When they got back up to the Wilkes-Barre vein, the second shift was in full swing. Most of the miners worked half-naked, bodies gleaming like marble in the sweltering heat two miles below the surface. They worked fast, taking few precautions. Coal-cutting time wasn’t quite dead time, but it was halfway there, and it didn’t pay to spend an unnecessary minute at it.

  Few of the men, women, and children underground wore rebreathers, and the ones who did only used them during their rare breaks. The rest of the time, the face masks with their tangle of oxygen lines dangled loosely around sweat-slicked necks. It took all the air a body could breathe to work at speed, hunched over in badly ventilated tunnels, and rebreathers were the first thing to go when time got short.

  Without thinking, Li started to unhook her own rebreather.

  “Don’t,” said the safety officer. “Mutagens.”

  She looked at the miners. The safety officer caught her questioning glance and shrugged. “Genetics.”

  A flash of soft memory set Li’s stomach churning. Her father, bending over the kitchen sink, coughing, complaining about the price of filters at the pithead supply house. Her mother boiling water on the stovetop and handing him a dish towel to put over his head so he could cough up a little more coal dust.

  “Are you all right?” asked the safety officer. “Sometimes even the filters won’t keep the dust out.”

  She nodded and put her head between her knees.

  When she looked up again the truck had stopped. Oddly shaped boxes and canisters littered the roadway. Workers bustled in front of them, men and women who moved across the rough ground with the assurance of habit but were too thin, too
clean to be miners. Li looked closer and recognized several of the geologists she’d shuttled down with.

  Only one person in the visible section of the drift remained seated. A slight, silent figure, curled into a rock outcropping just outside the action, eyes closed, face solemn and lovely as a statue’s.

  The witch.

  When the preparations were complete, she rose, approached the freshly cut face, closed her eyes, and put her hands to the stone. Li had seen crystals witched before, but mostly in poor bootleg deposits, not company claims. And the witches of her childhood had been Shantytown dwellers. They’d witched for food, or a share of the strikes they found, or a little winter fuel. Their talent had been the fruit of a genetic fluke, not a carefully manufactured commodity.

  The witch passed back and forth along the face, stopping now and then, head cocked as though she were listening for something. Her pale skin shone against the uncut coal. The light from her Davy lamp hung about her like a halo.

  The surveyors and geologists hovered tensely. Immense amounts of money were at stake. Turn away from a cut too soon and you lost millions without ever knowing it. Cut too boldly and you’d be left with cartloads of dead crystal, worthless as quartz. Miners had tried every technology there was: radio imaging, X rays, random core sampling. Witching was still the only real way to locate live, viable crystal. And the annual profit margins of entire multiplanetary corporations rose and fell on the choices a witch made at the cutting face.

  The witch stopped at a perfectly ordinary spot along the face and pressed both hands to the coal face. They came away wet, stained bloodred with sulfur water. “There,” she said.

  The surveyors surged past her as if drawn by an undertow. They attached sensors, hooked up feedback circuits, safety cutoffs. Li watched, fascinated, as the cutters bored into the coal face. When she glanced at Haas, the intent, hungry look on his face reminded her of the old songs miners sang after the whiskey had passed around a few too many times, songs about men whose blood ran with coal, who lusted for the mine like dope fiends.

  Everyone in the gangway fell silent as the first crystal came into sight, pale, gleaming, unmistakable. A geologist leaned into the face, holding his breath, and put his hand on it.

  “Well?” Haas said.

  The geologist removed his hand, wiped it on his coverall front, touched his forehead as if he were taking his own temperature, and put his hand back to the condensate again. He shook his head.

  “Dead,” someone muttered at the edge of the lamplight.

  The witch had retreated when the surveyors moved in, shrinking into herself like an actor slipping out of character. She barely reacted to the news of the dead crystal.

  “Come here,” Haas said to her.

  She turned obediently, but her gaze slipped past Haas and fixed on Li as unerringly as a compass needle locking on to magnetic north. The violet eyes looked dark underground, each iris shaved down to a narrow line around an immense pupil. And beyond the pupil nothing, as if you were staring straight into the black pit of the woman’s skull.

  Holes in the universe, Li thought, and the shiver that ran down her spine had nothing to do with cold.

  * * *

  By the time they surfaced, the storm had hit. The headframe whined and rattled under its assault. Scraps of viruflex and jagged sheets of aluminum siding skittered past as if all the contents of the valley were being stirred by an invisible hand.

  Li felt the taut, held-breath quality of the air as soon as she stepped out of the pit office. Fifty meters away, a ragged line of men and women ranged along the spine of a tailing pile. Some held homemade signs. A few carried primitive, home-brewed weapons. Strikers. Wildcats, technically, since there was no legal union in the Anaconda.

  She blinked wind tears out of her eyes and squinted through the blowing grit. In a brief slacking of the wind she read the signs they held:

  JUSTICE FOR CORPORATE BABY KILLERS!

  HOW MANY MUST DIE?

  SHUT THE TRINIDAD BEFORE IT KILLS AGAIN.

  She wondered why they didn’t come closer, get within shouting distance. Then she saw the row of blue uniform shirts facing the picket line. Company guards. With riot guns.

  “Think the spins have picked that up yet?” someone said.

  Haas was already jogging over to the guards. He leaned into the wind, cupping a hand around his mouth, and shouted something in the squad leader’s ear. He stepped back, and the line of guards advanced, firing their guns into the air.

  A few of the strikers backed off. The rest didn’t.

  The guards fired again, this time at the strikers’ feet. One woman cried out as if she’d been hit. Another shouted, “There are children here!”

  “No one needs to get hurt!” one of the guards called, his voice shaking with adrenaline. “Don’t do anything stupid!”

  And then, for no reason Li could put her finger on, the crisis passed.

  The strikers lowered their signs. The guards uncocked their rifles. The crowd broke up and straggled back along the rutted track to Shantytown. Li felt a spasm of relief. No one was going to die. Not today, anyway.

  AMC Station: 13.10.48.

  Three hours later, the smell of the mine still on her hair and skin, Li stood in front of the security seal on the door of Sharifi’s quarters. The tape read her palm implant, dissolved, re-formed behind her as she stepped through.

  Sharifi’s quarters were cramped, utilitarian, not much different from Li’s own room a few spokes away. The whole room was no wider than the corridor outside. Five steps took Li from the entrance to the door of the cramped bathroom. A shallow closet ran the length of the left wall. The right wall held a narrow bunk and a drop-down desk cluttered with datacubes and loose stacks of microfiche.

  The closet held a few changes of practical-looking clothes, some of them still folded neatly in an Italian-made leather bag that must have cost more than Li made in a month. No family pictures. No personal items. No makeup. Except for the single dress suit hanging in the closet, it was hard to identify even the sex of the room’s last occupant. Whoever Sharifi had been, there was little trace of her here.

  On an impulse, Li slipped the suit jacket on and looked curiously at herself in the mirror. It bound around the armpits; she carried a lot more muscle than Sharifi had. It was a little long. But then, Sharifi had been a good two centimeters taller than her—better nutrition and fewer cigarettes. Other than that, it fit. And the color looked good on her. No surprise there.

  The smell was a surprise, though. Foreign. A touch of the other woman’s perfume, perhaps. And yet, beneath it, something unnervingly familiar. A memory surfaced, rolled over and sank again. A dog lunging and snarling at a passing miner. The warm glow of hate on its master’s face as he said, You can smell them, can’t you?

  Next to the closet door were the light and livewall controls and the viewport dimmer. Li cleared the floorport, looked down at the planet between her toes, and thought about how the sweep of UN politics and her own life had intersected there. How could they all still be fighting the same battle that was hacked into the burnt-out shells of the birthlabs, the forty-year-old artillery scars fading on the hillsides above Shantytown?

  For decades the now-crumbling industrial park had turned out a continuous stream of constructs. Industrial-grade genesets specifically engineered for hard-rock mining, steel smelting, terraforming—all the hard, dangerous jobs that humans couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Sharifi was tanked in those labs. Li herself had been tanked in one of the last production runs before the Riots. It was only the rawest, quirkiest chance that either of them got off-planet; Sharifi adopted by rich Ring-side abolitionists, Li farmed out to a childless miner’s family in one of the last abortive attempts to assimilate constructs into the general population.

  The Riots hit eight months after Li was born—about the time Sharifi would have been in university. Shantytown became a battlefield, a maze of tunnels and barricaded cul-de-sacs in which a ragtag band of con
structs held off the UN and the planetary militia… for a while, anyway.

  A good number of posthumans had joined the rebels. Idealistic students from the university in Helena, back when there still was one. Miners who didn’t care who they shared Compson’s World with as long as it wasn’t the multiplanetaries. The Real IRA, though word on the street in Shantytown had always been that that was purely a money deal. When the dust cleared, Compson’s World was under martial law and the rebel constructs had escaped to a remote system that they renamed Gilead.

  For the rest of Li’s life, the fight against the Syndicates dominated human politics. The breakaway constructs created the first fully syndicated genelines. KnowlesSyndicate was born, and then Motai and Bartov and the half dozen others whose names soon became words of fear throughout UN space. The Syndicates annexed one restless colony after another, until they held the whole long arc of the Periphery between Metz and Gilead. Antigenetic sentiment gained ground in the Assembly and on the streets of every UN planet. The word construct took on a new and sinister meaning, while the corporations that built the original constructs either closed up shop and abandoned them or went bankrupt in the spate of scandals that followed the breakaway. And every time another ex-colony went over to the Syndicates the UN’s antigenetic faction gained a few seats in the Assembly.

  The Assembly passed the Zahn Act when Li was fourteen, placing all full genetics in UN space under direct Security Council supervision, barring them from the civil service and the military, revoking passports and imposing mandatory registration.

  Li’s adoptive parents delayed, hoping the massive destruction of records during the Riots might mean she’d been forgotten. The delay paid off. By the time the registration bureaucracy caught up with them, Li’s mother had a signed and stamped death certificate that said her only daughter had died of vitamin A deficiency—and Li was already making a name for herself in the trenches of Gilead.