“You tell me.”
He glanced doubtfully at her. “You’re not from AMC, then, like the last one?”
“What last one?”
“The guy they sent down to talk to me earlier today. He kept wanting to get me to say I’d slipped and hit my head and didn’t remember anything.”
“Did you? Hit your head, I mean.”
“Not according to the doctors.”
“And do you remember anything?”
The shadowy look drifted across his face again.
“Do you not want to talk about it?”
“No! No, I want to talk about it. I just… I’m not sure what it was, I guess.”
“What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, shaking his head on the pillow. “If I told you, you’d probably laugh at me.”
“Try me,” Li said.
And he did.
What he described sounded just like what Li had seen on her two hijackings. Strange sights, vague shadowy figures. Sounds that made no sense or were oddly distorted. Fractured twilight visions that could have been past or future or neither.
“Did you see anyone you knew?” Li asked when Dawes fell silent.
“Oh, yeah. I saw all of them.”
“What do you mean, all of them? All of who?”
“The dead.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and wide, the pupils expanded as if he were slipping into shock. “All of them. All my dead. Just like the pit priests say you see.”
Li swallowed. “Do you think it could have been a hallucination? Or, I don’t know, something else. Like a spinstream hijacking—” She remembered that Dawes was unwired and too poor to pay for stream time anyway, that he’d probably never even known anyone who had direct spinstream access. “I mean like someone trying to communicate. Someone not dead, I mean.”
He thought about it.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not a churchgoing man. But they were there. You know what I’m saying? They were… different.”
“Did you—” Li stopped to clear her throat. “Did you see Dr. Sharifi?”
“No.”
“You’d have recognized her if you had seen her?”
“Sure. I saw her a bunch of times. She looked… well, like they always look.”
He lay silent for a moment, looking up at the stained foam ceiling panels of the hospital module. A long moment passed with no sound to mark the time but the pounding of a trapped fly against the room’s dust-caked window. Dawes’s face softened, took on a puzzled, disappointed look.
“The thing is,” he said, “I felt like they took me for a reason. Like they were trying to tell me something specific, something they thought was important.”
“What do you think it was?” Li asked, her breath catching in her throat.
To her surprise he smiled. “Seems like that’s the question of the hour. AMC’s man kept trying to ask me that. Which wasn’t so easy given that he was also trying to get me to say I fell down and hit my head and never saw anything. Even Cartwright asked me that.”
Li’s stomach clenched. “Cartwright’s been here?”
“The old geezer was practically waiting outside my door when I woke up. He was nattering at me before the doctors even figured out I was back. Wanted to know where it happened. What level. What deposits it was near. I guess he has some theory or something.”
“I don’t suppose he shared it with you?”
“Not really. But I got the idea he thought I’d had some kind of religious experience. And that he disapproved. Strongly. He kept talking about unlikely vessels and looking like a man who just caught his wife sleeping with the plumber.”
“What do you think happened down there?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Dawes’s face darkened again. “A man could get scared thinking about it. Especially when he knows that once his sick pay runs out, he’ll have to go back downstairs again. I’ve seen what happens to miners when they take up with the pit priests. They still use the old words. Jesus, Mary, the saints. Sacrifice. But it’s like suddenly they mean something else. Something they don’t want you to see until you’re too far in to back out.” He passed a hand over his face, wincing as the movement tugged at his broken ribs. “And there’s another thing,” he said. “They never talk about God. It’s all Mary. The Virgin this, the Virgin that. Her saints. Her Heaven. But they’re not her saints, they’re God’s saints. The real ones, anyway.
“You know what Cartwright said to me today?” He propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes looked feverish, terrified. “He said God doesn’t know us. That God chose humans. Earth and humans. That only Mary loved us enough to come to Compson’s World. Why would he tell me that? What kind of place is it that God won’t come to? What happens when you die down there?”
“Hey!” One of the guards popped his head into the room, then stepped in, followed by two militiamen. “We got Haas on the line, and he says the isolation order goes for you too, Major.”
Li was too stunned to react at first, still wrapped in Dawes’s shadowy vision. “Let me talk to Haas,” she said finally.
“Fine. Talk to him somewhere else, though. It’s my ass if you’re not out of here pronto.”
Li glanced over at Dawes. He shrugged a little and gazed back at her wide-eyed, as if to say it was all a mystery to him. She tried Haas’s line quickly and got a message that he was out of the office. No surprise there. He would no doubt remain out of the office until he was good and ready for Li to talk to Dawes.
Out in the hall, a tall young man in coveralls was talking to the duty nurse. Li had actually walked past him when a familiar movement made her stop and look back. It was the IWW rep, Ramirez. And from what she could catch of the conversation, he was trying to talk his way into Dawes’s room.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, more abruptly than she’d meant to.
“Just visiting a friend,” Ramirez said smoothly.
“Isn’t that sweet.”
If Ramirez caught the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t give any sign of it. “Hey,” he told the nurse, smiling and touching her shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, okay?” He put a hand in the small of Li’s back and guided her down the hall toward a windowless door marked EXIT. “It’s actually really good you happened by just now,” he told her. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
They stepped through the door into the gold-green haze of a sunny fall afternoon. They stood on the honeycomb-grid landing of a fire escape with a clear view over Shantytown to the atmospheric processors and the gently flaming stacks of the power plant. A slight wind rattled the cheap siding of the hospital modules and tugged idly at the wind sock on the ER hopper pad.
“Hail, fellow traveler,” Li said. “Aren’t you supposed to be out demonstrating your solidarity with the workingman and getting ready to hold the barricades when the tanks roll in? Or were you planning to duck out at intermission and skip the last act? I believe that’s what all the best people are doing.”
“Hey, relax. I just thought this would be a good chance to touch base and… see if we could help each other out.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is this coming from Daahl or you?”
“Both.”
“And what do both of you plan to get out of it?”
“Well, that’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. It’ll take a minute, though.”
“You’ve got five,” Li said, leaning back against the railing and shaking out a cigarette. “Well, more like six, actually, depending on how fast you make me want to smoke. Cigarette?”
“No thanks,” Ramirez said. “They’re bad for your lungs.”
She looked hard at him.
“You know someone like you could do a lot of good, Major.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?” she asked quietly.
“Someone who grew up here. Who knows what it’s like. You could really open people’s eyes Ring-side.”
> “And what would that accomplish?”
“Everything. It would give the lie to the corporate propaganda about the Trusteeships, about what goes on in Bose-Einstein mines. It would let people in the inner planets know what their money’s really doing.”
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “They know, Ramirez. They know as much as they want to know. Or are you too young and idealistic to have figured that out yet?”
Ramirez flushed.
“Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time before. But I’ve seen way too many idealistic young things rip through this town. And they all believe the same thing. That if they just talk to the right media types, get on the right spins, publish the right book, all the injustices of the system will magically stop. Well, they won’t. The system is the way it is because people like it that way. Because it works most of the time for most people. Or at least for most people who have enough clout to do anything about it.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“Just realistic.”
“It’s also a good excuse for not taking action.”
“Don’t preach, Leo.” Li flicked the ash off her cigarette and watched it flutter in the breeze. “It’s not attractive. And besides, I gave at the office.”
“I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve worked hard for what you have. You don’t want to jeopardize it—”
“You don’t understand anything,” she snapped.
“But—”
“But nothing. I’ve seen rich kids just like you all my life. You come down from your university dorm, or Mommy’s house, or wherever. You rile everyone up, you get a few miners shot, then you buy yourself out of any real trouble and go home to a comfortable job in a nice office. Meanwhile, the miners who got shot in your little passion play are still dead. And their parents and kids and brothers and sisters are still wheeling oxygen tanks around by the time they’re fifty.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ramirez said. He shook his head as he said it, and something about the movement looked odd to Li. “Did you know work has started up again in the Trinidad?” he asked, switching gears abruptly.
“No,” Li said, really caught by surprise this time.
“That change your opinions any?”
“No. Is this all you had in mind when you dragged me out here, or is there something else you want?”
“There is.” He leaned back against the fire-escape railing and crossed his arms. “Listen. We were approached recently. I won’t say by whom. But the gist of it is that there are parties who want to know what Dr. Sharifi was working on before the fire. And these parties would be willing to support the… um, action we discussed recently. Financially as well as in other ways.”
“I assume you’re talking about Andrej Korchow,” Li said. “And, no, I’m not interested in discussing anything with him. Certainly not anything under TechComm jurisdiction.”
“Not even if—”
“Not even if.”
Ramirez shrugged his shoulders, then winced and put a hand to his neck. And suddenly Li saw what it was that had bothered her about his kinetics.
He was nursing a newly installed cranial jack. It was camouflaged by a self-adhesive skin patch, but the bump under the patch and the puffy irritated flesh around the new implant were unmistakable.
“That home-brew equipment?” she asked, waving her cigarette toward his neck.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Those FreeNet jacks are a good deal on the front end, but the side effects are hell. You ever seen anyone die of a wet bug?”
“What’s your point?”
“Just that I wouldn’t be screwing around with illicit tech if I were you.” She ground out her cigarette on the fire-escape railing and sent it arcing into the vacant lot next door. “And you can pass that advice along to Daahl too. Call it a freebie.”
“We wouldn’t have to home-brew if the Security Council didn’t have a stranglehold on streamspace, would we?”
“Hey, don’t look at me, I just work for the man.”
“Oh, right.” Ramirez spat the words out hard and fast. “Just a good little soldier. Just following orders, no matter what the orders are. But then I guess that’s what XenoGen built you for.”
Li lashed out at him without thinking. She stopped herself so quickly that he didn’t notice he’d almost been hit. But she knew she would have broken bones if she hadn’t pulled the blow.
She backed off, frightened by what had almost happened. “You racist son of a bitch,” she whispered. “Don’t you ever say that to me again. You don’t know me. You don’t know a thing about me.”
* * *
According to the old and tired joke, there were only three reasons to take a meeting in realspace: sex, blackmail, and pure whites-of-the-eyes intimidation.
Li didn’t think she had much hope of intimidating Haas, but if he was going to torpedo her investigation, she figured he could goddamn well tell her so himself. And since files could always be faked or distorted, he could tell her face-to-face, where she’d have a court-admissible record of it—the one locked and coded in her own datafiles.
As it turned out, she could have saved herself the effort; by the time she got back up to his office, he was gone.
“If you’d like him to call you…” his secretary said. Her expression said that she knew exactly why Li was there and that Haas wouldn’t be coming back until she was good and gone.
“Never mind,” she said. She was reaching for the door when someone spoke her name from the shadows.
Bella stood in the door of Haas’s office. Barefoot, in a tank silk dress that clung to the slim curves of her hips and stomach. She beckoned. Li followed her through a hidden door and down a shadowy corridor into what could only be Haas’s private quarters.
They were spacious by station standards, furnished in the same expensive, aggressively modern style as the office. Bella didn’t turn the lights on, just let the refracted light of Compson’s World shine up through the floorports, casting disorienting upside-down shadows.
“You live here?” Li asked, unable to stop herself.
Bella looked up at Li, her face so close that Li could read the flowing blue letters of the MotaiSyndicate logo that curved along the lower edge of each perfectly patterned iris. “Does that shock you?” she asked.
Li had never been this close to a Syndicate construct, except for D Series soldiers and the occasional field officer. No women. And never, never anything like Bella.
She was taller than Li remembered, and she had a sharp wild scent that made Li think of high-mountain forests. She wondered fleetingly if the smell was perfume or a high-priced option engineered into her geneset by the MotaiSyndicate designers. She cleared her throat. “Why would it shock me?” she said. “It’s none of my business who you live with.”
Bella leaned closer. Starlight shifted over her face, casting the sculpted angles of her face into sharp relief, and Li saw that one fragile cheekbone was swollen by a fading bruise. She took Bella’s chin in her hand, turned her face to the light. “Who did that to you?”
Bella bit her lip. It was an unconscious gesture, fearful and sensual at the same time, and it made Li want to protect her.
More than protect her.
She jerked her hand away. “You could file charges,” she said, but she felt the futility of it even before she spoke.
Bella smiled. “You don’t like to see people hurt,” she said. “You’re softhearted. Just like Hannah was.”
“How well did you know her?” Li asked.
“Only well enough to know she was kind.”
“There was an entry in her datebook a few days before she died, just an initial, B. Did you have an appointment with her that week? Did you meet? Talk about something?”
Bella turned away and wandered around the room, the starlight flickering up through her flowing skirts. As she walked, she ran her fingers lightly over the chairs, th
e bookshelves, the back of a sofa. Li shuddered, feeling as if it were her own flesh Bella was touching, not dead virusteel and vat-leather.
“Sit down,” Bella said.
Li sat.
Bella ended her wandering in front of the sleek black box of Haas’s streamspace terminal. She looked down at it, her black hair spilling over her shoulders like water running down a coal face. She sprang the catch and opened the terminal, revealing a dense tangle of spintronics wrapped around bright shards of communications-grade Bose-Einstein condensates.
She slipped a pale finger into the rat’s nest of wires and skimmed it along the condensates. “They’re cold,” she said. “They’re always cold once they’re formatted. Curious. In the mine, they speak to me and no one else. Up here, they speak to everyone… and to me they’re just dead stones.”
Li looked at the terminal’s guts and waited to hear whatever Bella was trying to tell her.
“Can you hear them?” Bella asked. “In the mine? Can you?”
“Not really,” Li answered. “They just fry my internals, that’s all.”
“To me they sing. It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life, hearing them. It’s what I was made for. In a way no human could understand.”
“Is that what you did for Sharifi? Find crystals?”
Instead of answering, Bella bent over the ansible and lifted out one of the clear slivers of condensate. It glittered in the faint light. Bella held it up between them and looked through it, and Li saw the blue-violet shimmer of her eyes refracted through the crystal.
“Do you actually know how they work?” Bella asked.
Li shrugged. “I learned what I needed to pass my commissioning test. Beyond that… well, who knows how they really work?”
Bella looked away, her eyes shadowed by the dark fall of hair. “Hannah knew. She knew everything about them.”
“Bella,” Li said, speaking quietly, “what was Sharifi doing in the mine the day she died?”
“Working.”
“No. She went down there to meet someone. Who was it?”
Bella reached into the tangle of chips and wires to replace the crystal. “If I remembered,” she said at last, “don’t you think I’d tell you?” But her face was turned away from Li, into darkness.
Spin State Page 24
