Spin 01 - Spin State (23 page)

“And how much of the sell do you buy?” Li asked.

Cohen grinned. “Not a word of it.”

“You think there’s a sideline? Some other way she was making money off it?”

“Not money. It would never have been about money. You have to understand, Sharifi wasn’t an experimental physicist. She was all about theory, structure. Metaphysics for want of a better word. She wouldn’t have gone to Compson’s World, wouldn’t have raised money and jumped through hoops for anything that was merely technical. She hunted big game. And whatever she was after down there, it was about a hell of a lot more than just making space travel cheaper for the average monkey.”

“Which still leaves us with the question of what exactly she was after.”

“My guess?” Cohen crossed long legs and Li glanced away as his shorts rode up to bare a breathtaking stretch of thigh. “I think it had something to do with mapping interference patterns.”

“Meaning?”

“Ah!” He leaned forward, showing the kind of enthusiasm that usually meant he was about to talk math to her. “Interference patterns are the riddle that kicked off the whole enterprise of quantum physics. Basically, we’re talking about the two-slit experiment.”

“Oh,” Li said as her oracle summoned up a long-forgotten picture from an introductory physics textbook. “The thing where you put one photon through a screen and it interferes with itself, right? And then you get to watch the physicists jump up and down and argue about whether it’s a wave or a particle. Or both. Or neither. I never really saw what that had to do with Sharifi, though.”

“That’s where Coherence Theory comes in. How much do you know about it?”

Li shrugged. “You mean like the Everett-Sharifi Equations, the Coherent Worlds Theorem, that stuff?”

“Exactly. And like Sharifi said in her sales pitch, the answer was in our past, on Earth. It goes all the way back to the twentieth century in fact. To an American named Hugh Everett, who studied the wave theory of quantum mechanics and came up with this crazy idea that there was nothing theoretical about quantum mechanical wave functions at all. That they were actual manifestations of multiple worlds, multiple possible histories. In short, that the mathematical formalism of wave mechanics—and this is the part Hannah really loved, of course—that the mathematical form itself gave us the key to understanding the nature of the physical universe.

“According to Everett, each point on the Schrödinger wave function that you use to calculate the possible locations of an electron around the nucleus or the possible spin orientations of a photon has a real, physical existence. Just not in this world. In another world. One of an infinite number of worlds that branch off from each other every time a thermodynamically irreversible measurement event takes place.

“So—textbook example—you come to a crossroads, and you have to decide whether to turn left or right. Or so it seems. But actually you take
both
forks in the road. You just take them in different worlds. Or, depending on your terminology, in different constituent universes of the multiverse.”

“Then … what’s the point? I mean, everything happens no matter what you do, or what path you choose? It’s crazy.”

“Well, yes, that’s certainly the majority view of things. Or at least it was for several centuries. The Many-Worlds interpretation was one of those theories that was so absurd that Everett either had to be insane or right. And like a lot of crazy theories it took a long time to get off the ground. It got nowhere with most of Everett’s colleagues, in fact, and he left academia and eventually smoked himself to death, ignored and ridiculed.”

“What a surprise,” Li said caustically.

“Right. Well, Everett’s idea sat around gathering dust for the next few centuries while experimental physicists went on with their experiments. Experiments that over time, and without anyone really stopping to notice, gradually made the Many-Worlds theory look less and less crazy and more and more like it might just be a small but important piece of the truth.

“That’s where Hannah Sharifi comes into the story. Hannah was obsessed with Everett’s work. She basically spent two decades trying to prove that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics was right, and that Everett just hadn’t had the experimental data or the computational tools to prove it.”

“But she didn’t prove it, did she?” Li said. “She failed. The most famous failure in the history of physics, right? The biggest mistake since Columbus ran into America and called it India.”

“Yes. She failed. Which is to say that she didn’t prove the multiverse was physically real in the way she believed it was. But—and this is important—a theory doesn’t have to be experimentally verifiable to be valuable. And what she did with Coherence Theory was in some ways far more significant than pinning down an experimental result. She gave us a new theoretical framework for thinking about quantum-level events. In essence, she proved that even if the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics doesn’t actually describe the universe, it’s still the most effective way to
think
about the universe. Or at least the most effective way to think about the universe for now.”

“And what does interference have to do with it? Why do you think she was looking at interference patterns in the Anaconda?”

Cohen shook out a cigarette and lit it, smiling. “Interference is central. It’s the hat trick at the center of Coherence Theory. Basically what Sharifi saw—and this takes us into the realm of quantum information theory—is that interference is really the flip side of coherence. If you really take the concept of the multiverse seriously, then entanglement, decoherence, and interference all become interdependent. In essence, they emerge as the same phenomenon occurring in different dimensions of the multiverse.”

“This is giving me a headache, Cohen.”

“Quantum mechanics gives everyone a headache. That’s just how it is. But my point is you don’t have to believe Sharifi’s idea or even be able to visualize it, really. Because it works, like a lot of the watershed ideas in quantum mechanics, whether or not you believe in it. The Everett-Sharifi Equations accurately predict a whole range of quantum behavior that prior theories couldn’t make sense of. Which goes back to what I was saying about how theories don’t have to be true to be useful.

“And Coherence Theory is beautiful, of course.” His cigarette described a delicate arc in mid-air. “Sharifi’s early papers on it were some of the most elegant pieces of reasoning in the history of modern physics. And being beautiful is almost as important as being useful.” He grinned. “More important, Sharifi would have said.”

“So you think she was looking at live fields in the Bose-Einstein beds because there was something about the relationship between entanglement, interference, and decoherence in those fields that she thought would … what? Prove her theories?”

“Maybe. Or she might just have hoped she could refine some aspect of Coherence Theory. But whatever she was after, it would have been primarily theoretical. A fresh direction. A big answer. A new problem. Something that
meant
something.”

“Well she found something,” Li said. “We know that. But then she erased her data. So whatever she found, it was something she didn’t want people to know about.”

Cohen shook his head decisively. “I don’t think that can be right. I don’t think Sharifi would have destroyed data. I don’t think any committed scientist could bring herself to do that.”

“Even if she realized that the data would prove Coherence Theory was wrong? Even if she thought it would destroy her life’s work, make her a laughingstock like Everett?”

“Even then, Catherine. Sharifi believed in knowledge. In truth. It was about
being
right for her, not just having people think she was right.”

“Maybe,” Li said. “Or maybe you just didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

Cohen didn’t answer for a moment, and when he spoke he was looking past the Ring-side skyline at the vast glittering curve of Earth. “You’ve never been there, have you?” he asked.

“To Earth? No. Of course not.” No one could go back anymore unless they fell under one of the religious exemptions. And constructs couldn’t go back even then; they were controlled technology, banned by the Embargo.

“I’ve been there,” Cohen said. “I was born there.” “I know,” Li said, and shivered.

She had seen old noninteractive video footage of Cohen’s programming—or rather of the development of the affective loop cognitive program that eventually grew into the Emergent phenomenon that called itself Cohen. The programmers had described their work with a frankness that was shocking to modern ears. They had talked about calling behaviors, well-being-enhancement drives, emotive manipulation. Those words mocked Li every time she began to imagine that she knew anything about what happened on the other side of the interface.

“What was Earth like?” she asked, shaking off the memory of Chiara’s slender fingers brushing hers, of Roland standing alone in the middle of a crowded room, watching her.

“Beautiful,” Cohen said, and his voice trembled with something the human ear could only interpret as desire. “There will never be anything as beautiful in the universe again.”

“There’s Compson’s World,” Li said. “It’s beautiful. In its own way. What’s left of it.”

Cohen laughed softly, as if a pleasant memory had come back to haunt him. “You’re the second person who’s told me that.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t you guess who the first person was?” “Who?” she asked.

“Hannah Sharifi.”

“Christ!” Li burst out. “I’m starting to wish I’d never heard of the woman! Gould’s going to hit Freetown in twenty-three days to do who knows what. I have to be there before her. I have to know what Sharifi did, what she found. What she was hiding from us.”

And I have to know how far I can trust you, Cohen
. But she couldn’t ask him that.

She couldn’t ask because she knew, in some instinctive animal recess of her mind, that it was the one question he couldn’t answer.

* * *

Li’s quarters on-station looked even more bleak and squalid after her trip Ring-side.

She slipped offstream, lit a cigarette—her last of the day she hoped—and watched the late-night spins with the sound all the way down, her mind teeming with vague unsettled half memories.

Sharpe had forwarded Sharifi’s and Voyt’s draft autopsies to her, and she scanned them absentmindedly, thinking she’d give them a serious reading in the morning. He certified Sharifi’s cause of death as suffocation. The damage to Sharifi’s head and hand was premortem, as all the blood suggested. And she’d bitten through the tip of her tongue before she died as well.

Li’s stomach clenched when she read that, but she told herself it could have happened when Sharifi fell. It wouldn’t be the first time someone trying to get out of a burning mine panicked and stumbled. And no matter how odd that and the injuries to her hand were, she’d clearly died from suffocation, not trauma.

Voyt’s autopsy was more puzzling. The rescuers found his body near Sharifi’s, as if the two were trying to escape together, but Sharpe attributed his death to the same mysterious brain seizure that had afflicted so many other miners in the Trinidad.

Li fell asleep puzzling over it, reminding herself to put her cigarette out before she dropped it.

* * *

It hit her at four in the morning, barreling through her sleep-dazed mind like a runaway coal cart. “Idiot!” she muttered. She sat up, turned on the lights, pulled up Sharifi’s autopsy again.

How could she have missed it? Sharpe damn well hadn’t. He’d done everything short of write it on the wall for her. She accessed the rescue crew logs and cross-referenced them with the shift assignments for the day of the fire. Twelve people had been in the Trinidad. Most of them belonged to a work crew of engineers and electricians who were laying wire to a newly opened face deep in the south sections of the newly opened vein. The work crew was at the far end of the main south gangway—almost an eighth of a mile farther from the stairs than Sharifi had been.

She tapped in to the Shantytown hospital database and saw that two of the electricians who had gotten out were half genetics. The rest weren’t. And they’d all made it to pit bottom under their own steam. The only people who’d died in the Trinidad were Voyt and Sharifi.

Sharifi was a genetic. Voyt, whatever his genes might be, had been wired just like Li was. Both should have been able to resist gas and lack of oxygen long after the nongenetics.

So why had they died when the others had lived?

Li scanned Sharifi’s autopsy, cursing herself for missing what was right in front of her. Finally she found it, halfway through the report, buried in a wealth of camouflaging detail. Sharpe had put it where anyone who knew what they were looking for could see it.

If they wanted to see it.

On the side of Sharifi’s head, just below her temple, among all the other bruises and lacerations, Sharpe had noted two small oblong burn marks, spaced two centimeters apart.

Li leaned across the narrow space between her bunk and the facing closet. She fished her Viper out of its Corps-issue holster and extruded the fanglike anodes: oblong, tapered, sharp enough to cut through skin. And exactly two centimeters apart.

Someone had put a Viper—Voyt’s, probably—to Sharifi’s head and pulled the trigger at contact range. Li had seen people die that way. A point-blank shot to the head usually caused respiratory paralysis. Death by suffocation. A death that left scars only the most alert coroner would look closely enough to discover.

Sharifi had been murdered.

* * *

She linked through to the planet net and dialed the Shantytown hospital. “How did you find out already?” Sharpe asked when she got through to him. “What do you mean? I read the autopsies.”

He blinked, obviously confused. “You’re not calling about the wetware?” “No. What about it?”

“Haas took it. Or rather, he sent his Syndicate-designed girl Friday down for it.” “What? How did he even know about it?”

Sharpe rocked back in his chair and raised his eyebrows. “That, Major, is what I was hoping you’d tell me.”