It’s the mine, Cohen thought. It wants to know us. Taste us.
But it was more than knowing that it wanted. More than tasting.
“Do you hear it?” Bella cried, oblivious to the life-and-death battle being waged along the intraface. “Don’t you hear it? They’re singing!”
* * *
Heat. Darkness. A dizzying flash of leaving, of arriving. Then Li was standing just where she’d been standing before, looking around the glory hole.
But not the same glory hole she’d stood in with Bella and McCuen a moment ago. This one rose higher above her head. Its fan vaults were clean, unstained by smoke. Her feet stood on hard living rock, not the fire and flood’s detritus. And this glory hole was cluttered with equipment—equipment Li herself had only seen in twisted ruins.
Sharifi’s equipment. Li raised her hand and saw the crescent of scar tissue between thumb and forefinger. Sharifi.
But she wasn’t just in Sharifi this time. She was her. She knew her thoughts, her memories, her emotions. And she knew that it was some unfathomable combination of Cohen and the mine itself who had made this possible. Even as she walked through Sharifi’s dreaming memory, the intelligence behind the crystals was using Cohen, reading him, threading itself through him as subtly and inextricably as ceramsteel twining through nerve and muscle. She felt the crystals’ exultation thrumming along the intraface just as clearly as she felt Cohen’s terror.
Sharifi knelt, reached for a gauge, tied off a loose wire. And with each little physical act she thought, considered, remembered. Li shuddered as she realized that Sharifi’s understanding didn’t end with her death, that it was tinged with the piercing regret of hindsight. Because what Sharifi had found in the glory hole was death. Her own death, in the place she least looked for it.
“Do you have to hang over me like that?” she asked Voyt.
He backed off. “So where’s Korchow? Off stealing the silverware?”
“I’m here.” A shape stepped out of the shadows. Bella. Of course. But Bella had never smiled that smile, never walked with that deliberate catlike stride. Where Bella crept—and Li realized only now that it was creeping—Korchow danced. “Ready?” he asked.
Sharifi frowned. “Just keep your end of the bargain.”
“How could I forget it?”
Sharifi linked with the field AI, and Li felt the blossoming thoughtline run bright as new wire between Sharifi’s wetware and the orbital field array high above them. Sharifi’s link was nothing, she realized. A mere echo of the bond between her and Cohen. What Sharifi had done they could do. And more, much more. She felt a wild elation rising inside her, her excitement and Cohen’s feeding off each other in this still-strange alchemical union of her one and his many.
We need more, Cohen thought. We need to know what she’s doing.
Li snapped back into focus. Sharifi was still fiddling with wires and monitors, testing the link, readying herself. Meanwhile the mind behind the crystals was probing, exploring. Li felt it run through her, coursing up the line to the field AI high above them, enveloping woman and AI alike.
But Sharifi just kept fussing. Stalling. Couldn’t she feel that the link was up? Her precious dataset was there for the taking. What the hell was she waiting for?
Li knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. She could hear Sharifi think, feel her pulse, her breath, the stray ache of a pulled muscle. She wasn’t waiting for anything. She’d already gotten everything she’d come for. The experiment was over, run off the rails by the crystals themselves. She had her answers—the same answers she’d hidden from Li, from Nguyen, from everyone. Now she was playing out a script, playing Nguyen and Haas and Korchow off against each other, hoping she could do what she had to do before the bill came due.
Nguyen had been right all along; Sharifi had betrayed them.
But not to Korchow. Not for the Syndicates, not for money, not even for Bella. She’d done it for this—this first tentative contact with the life swirling through the fan vaults and pillars of the glory hole.
This was the thing that had brought her to Compson’s World. The money, the fame, the dream of cheap cultured crystal had been not lies, exactly, but merely surface reasons. The real reason had been the same one that brought Compson here, and so many explorers and scholars after him: life, the only other life in the universe besides humans and the creatures humans made.
It had been in front of Li’s eyes all the time, clear as clear water, scribbled in Sharifi’s dog-eared copy of Xenograph.
We came into the country like saints going to the desert, Compson had written. We came to be changed. But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And Sharifi had answered, But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
This mine was Sharifi’s desert. She had come here to see, to understand, to be changed. And she wasn’t going to make the same mistake Compson had made. She wasn’t going to pass the maps up the food chain and trust TechComm to protect the crystals. She thought she had a better plan.
Li glanced at Voyt and Korchow. They had backed off a little, following Sharifi’s preparations. Haas’s man and the Syndicates’ man. One of them after the synthetic crystal the Syndicates needed so desperately. The other after… what? Who did Voyt answer to, Haas or the UN? And which one of them was going to kill Sharifi?
Suddenly Li knew that she didn’t want to be watching—let alone watching from inside Sharifi’s skin—when it happened. She didn’t need to see who had battered Sharifi’s head, mangled her hand. She didn’t need to watch them break her. She owed Sharifi at least that privacy.
Something shifted in the shadowed air. Something vast, slow, ancient. There was no breeze, no sound, no outer evidence of the change, but it was as clear as a door opening. The data shooting between Li and Cohen over the intraface spiked. Li felt the same waiting-for-the-flood feeling that had overpowered them when they first stepped into the glory hole. Then it was on top of them.
It flowed through her like blood coursing through arteries. It filled her lungs, filled her mind, filled every hollow space of her. And when it had taken all of her there was to take, it made new spaces to fill, new universes inside her. Her skin stretched across oceans and continents. Her nerves were the petrified, planet-spanning rivers of carbon beds, her veins fault lines and ore seams, her eyes dusky stars burning in the dark heart of the earth.
She saw the change of seasons, and the slow seasonless passage of time in the Earth’s deep places. She watched the welling up of mountains, the shift of continents. She saw life rise and struggle and fall and pass into darkness without looking back. She looked out through the eyes of every creature that had lived in the depths, that had crawled on the planet’s skin or swum in its long dry oceans. And then, in what seemed but a moment, the water was gone and the wind swept across the steppes with nothing but the soft fur of algae and lichen to feel it.
She watched humans come. Saw the explorers and surveyors, the brief flickering lights of miners. She felt the stirring and pricking of a world waking to the thought that it had children again—even if they were strange, murdering, voracious children.
Sharifi had seen only a pale echo of this, filtered through the uncomprehending field AI. But it had been enough. She had known. And once she knew, there would be no room for deals or compromises or secrecy.
It was that simple. It was that impossible. Of course they had to kill her.
* * *
Something snapped, and Li was blind, cut loose in the void.
But not alone. This was a shared darkness. Someone waited in the many-trunked forest of crystals. A man, thin, dark-haired, his face lost in shadow. A man who slipped in and out of sight as she walked toward him, like stars flickering behind blowing cloud cover.
“Not him,” she whispered to whoever or whatever was listening. “Please, not him.”
But it was him. It was the father Li remembered from his worst sickness. So thin, so pale, so collapsed in on
himself that he was barely bigger than she was. He raised a wasted hand to wipe away tears she hadn’t known she was crying. She collapsed into his arms and buried her face in the cloth of his shirt that smelled of rain and of coal dust and of him.
We are so glad. The thought swept through her more fiercely and intimately than even Cohen’s thoughts. So glad it was you.
We, Li said.
Shall I show you?
He pulled away from her, his hands lingering on hers. He took a step backward. He reached up to unbutton his shirt.
Li flinched, hands jerking up to cover her eyes. It was the gesture of a terrified child, the child whose growing up had been wiped out of her jump by jump, leaving no bridge from past to present, no path from her old fears to the understanding she should have grown into in the years since her leaving.
There are no monsters, the thing that wore her father’s flesh said. Not down here. Not even you.
He unbuttoned his shirt with agonizing slowness. She watched, button by button, breath by breath, knowing that her heart would stop if she had to look at that black horror that haunted all her dreams.
But the dream had changed. Or she had.
His body was a map now. The life of the planet coursed through him—this planet that had given birth to both of them. His wasted muscles were mountain ranges. Oceans waxed and waned in the bone house of his ribs. The secrets of the Earth lived in him.
She dropped to her knees, dazed, ears ringing with the song of the rock around her. She laid her hands on him, learned him, studied him. She passed from not knowing to knowing in the space of a touch. The world reached out through him and changed her, and she let it. Just as Sharifi had.
Do you understand?he asked. Do you see what this world could be? What it wants to be?
Yes.
Do you believe in it?
Yes.
Do you?
She trembled. Because he wasn’t asking what she believed in. He was asking what she was willing to do about it.
“I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I can’t do what Sharifi did.”
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
White light. Open spaces. The sweep of a hawk’s wing above her.
She stood on a dry plain. Silver-green sage covered the hills. Sunflowers marched across the valley like the squads and battalions of an army in parade-ground finery. The wall behind her was overrun with blooming jasmine, and the musky smell of the blossoms was as hot and exotic as the brilliant plain before her.
She jumped at the sound of a footfall behind her. A tall, long-limbed girl strode across a courtyard under the blazing sun, white skirts kicking up in front of her. Red dirt coated her bare feet, faded into the tawny gold of her ankles. Brown curls blew around her face and veiled the smiling mouth, the hazel eyes.
Cohen?
She felt him in her mind, restful and reassuring after the terrifying presence in the glory hole.
“The whole planet is alive,” she said, “isn’t it?”
“Alive,” he repeated. She felt him turning the idea over, pondering it, poking at it. “I guess that’s as good a word as any other.”
“What does it want?”
“To talk to us. Or to talk to our planets, I imagine. I doubt it understands that we’re not mere parts of a larger being.”
“So what do we do now?”
He gazed down at her, squinting a little in the bright sunlight. “That’s not quite the same question for me as it is for you.”
Her stomach wrenched as she remembered what she was here for. To hand the condensates over to Nguyen and TechComm. To do what Sharifi, in the end, had not been willing to do. Was she even now walking in Sharifi’s footsteps, stumbling through the same impossible choices that had led Sharifi to her death?
“What would you do?” she asked Cohen.
“What would I do? Or what would I do if I were you?”
She looked into Chiara’s eyes. She could see Cohen lurking behind them now, so close she could almost catch him, almost know what it was to be that shifting, kaleidoscopic many-in-one.
“Both,” she said.
“For me it’s simple. Or rather it’s a matter of choices I made so long ago that they don’t seem like choices anymore. I’d like to be able to say that it’s a matter of principle, that I don’t think TechComm or Korchow or anyone else has the right to control Compson’s World. But it’s not that. It’s just… curiosity, I suppose.” He paused, looking down at the rich dirt blowing past their feet. “You have more to lose than I do, of course.”
She took her hands from his, unable to bear the mingling of physical intimacy and this newer and more threatening intimacy. “Are we safe here?”
“It makes no difference; we couldn’t leave if we wanted to. The worldmind wants us here.”
“The worldmind? Where’d you get that from?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
They walked under the hot sun of a world that had been dead for two centuries. The far fields had been cut already. Trout-colored horses grazed among the knee-high sunflower stalks, their silver tails swishing back and forth like pendulums. Birds stabbed for worms in the furrows, and the tall stalks harbored invisible singers that Li’s oracle told her were called crickets.
She’d never seen a cricket, and she kept stopping, searching through the tall green stalks for them until Cohen laughed and asked if she wanted him to catch her one.
“No!” she said, speaking too quickly, too sharply. A memory welled up in her, clear as running water across the stretch of more than twenty years.
Her twelfth birthday. Her father had bought her a small-gauge over-under Gunther. It was fake, a rim-manufactured knockoff, but it was still an outrageously extravagant present. They climbed into the hills at dawn, crossing creeks heavy with red spring runoff, too excited to stop and look for the stocked fish that lurked in the riffles. They penetrated far enough into the canyons to smell native air and feel their breath start to shorten. When her father started coughing, they dropped altitude and hiked sideways along the cut line of an old lake bed.
They found the magpies just as the sun began to silver their backs and flash blue fire off their long tail feathers.
The magpies made a game of it, just as they made a game of everything. They hopped from tree to tree flaunting themselves, cackling at the slow, stupid, earthbound humans. She loved them. She loved their defiant beauty, the strong curve of chest to wing to pinion, their gleefully unashamed thievery. She wanted one of them more than she could ever remember wanting anything.
She snugged the shotgun into her shoulder the way her father had shown her. She led the target, reveling in the dog-sharp reflexes that had been her construct’s birthright long before the first piece of Corps wetware burrowed into her spine. She squeezed the trigger softly, felt the give of it, the final burr of resistance as the slack of the uncocked mechanism gave way to the sharp, clean union of brain, trigger, firing pin. She fired, and the blue-black-and-white glory that had been a magpie burst into a tumbling whirl of blood and feathers.
It fell into a puddle. She remembered that very clearly. She remembered running, impatient to see the bird, to get it in her hands, to possess it. She remembered kneeling in the dirt, picking up a broken, bedraggled, limp thing with a shattered chest. She remembered crying. It was the last time she could remember that Caitlyn Perkins had cried. She certainly hadn’t cried when her father died.
She surfaced from the memory to feel Cohen beside her, inside her. Are you the hunter or the bird? he asked. A question only Cohen could ask.
She looked into Chiara’s gold-flecked eyes and thought that the world was the bird, and the miners were, and the crystals. Everything people used and used up. “I guess I’m both,” she said. And she felt Cohen accept both the spoken answer and the unspoken one.
In place of a reply, he reached over her shoulder and plucked a cricket out of the greenery to sit chirping on his outstretched palm. “Disappointed?�
�
“No,” Li said.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“It’s a she?”
“We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
He put his hand against a sunflower stalk. The cricket marched onto the stalk with slow dignity, sat down, and went on singing as if its visit to Cohen had been just another walk under the warm sun.
“How did you do that?” Li asked.
“Oh, this is all me. It’s a place I used to have in Spain. Gone now, of course. We’re in one of my memory palaces. Whatever the crystals are doing to us, they’re using my networks to do it. They’ve just… locked us in a back room while they search the house, I guess you could say.”
“Christ!”
“Yes. Well. There’s not much we can do about it. And you don’t want to see what’s happening out there. It has a lot more to do with shooting magpies than catching crickets.”
She stared at him, stricken, but he was already bending over the cricket, talking about what crickets did and ate, how they used their legs to make that fantastic, improbable noise. “They always liked hot, dry places,” he said. “Spain. Texas. You couldn’t wake up in one of those places and not know just where you were in the world.”
“They’re extinct?”
“Long, long before you were born, my dear.”
“They’re going to turn Compson’s World into another Earth. Another Gilead. And we can’t stop it, can we?”
“We can change the battle lines.”
“Just buying a little time, Cohen. Is it worth it?”
“For me it is. If ALEF gets the intraface.”
“And what if the price of getting the intraface is losing the planet to the Syndicates?”
“I don’t have any grudge against the Syndicates. Maybe you do. Maybe you’re right to.” He sounded impatient. “I can’t choose for you.”
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