Spin 01 - Spin State (36 page)

“So change it. Change your code. I would. I’d get shut of Nguyen and Sharifi and all this pathetic bullshit in a second if I could.”

“You just say that because you know you can’t. Now stop fussing and listen to this song. It’s a good one.”

The singer was still onstage, finishing out a set with a bittersweet country song. It was a good song, the kind of song that could have been written yesterday or three hundred years ago. “She write that?” Li asked, nodding across the room toward the spotlit figure.

“It was written before I was born.”

She listened closer, caught a stray word or two. “What’s a Pontchartrain?”

“The Pontchartrain. It’s a lake on the Mississippi, that used to flow through New Orleans.” “Before the floods, you mean.”

“Before that, even. The river—the whole Mississippi Delta actually—shifted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent, oh, a century dredging and channeling and building levees. Defiance of nature, on a megalomaniacal scale. People wrote books and printed articles and whole theses about it. The river finally had its way, of course. It jumped its banks right around the time the oceans really started rising. Shifted the delta halfway across the Gulf of Texas. I wish I could make you feel what it was to be in New Orleans, stranded in the middle of a man-made desert while the ice caps were melting and we were watching floods in New York and Paris on the news every night. It was … unforgettable.”

“I didn’t think Earth was ever wired for streamspace. They didn’t even have shunts back then, did they?”

“No. Just a kind of primitive version of VR. But it was enough. I have my own memories, and other people’s. Over time it becomes harder and harder to separate them. Which may not be all bad.” He smiled. “I’m probably the only person still alive who remembers driving across the Pontchartrain in a convertible.”

Li grinned. “With a beautiful blonde, no doubt.”

Cohen smiled back, but it was the sad-sweet smile of a man lost in an old memory. “With Hyacinthe’s widow. The first woman I ever fell in love with.”

Li waited, wanting to hear more but not comfortable pushing.

“I know,” he said, answering a question that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I suppose from a puritanical sort of perspective, you could say she was my mother.”

“Well, it’s not like you invented that particular complex.”

“It wasn’t like that, though. I
am
Hyacinthe, his very self, in ways that have nothing to do with being a child, or a student, or an invention. Besides.” Another sweet and solemn smile. “The heart is complicated, whether it’s made of flesh or circuitry. It doesn’t always love the way you think it should. Or the people you think it should.”

“You don’t have to confess to me, Cohen.”

“Well, I have this funny idea that you come closer to understanding me than anyone else does. And so far you haven’t made me do any rosaries.”

A sudden memory of bare knees on a cold church floor and a grown-up hand—her mother’s?—moving her child’s fingers over the glass beads. The smooth, dark
Aves
. The gleaming
Paters
. The cross dangling and tapping against the pew in front of her.

“And I understand you, I think,” Cohen was saying when she surfaced again. “Which is an accomplishment given that what you’ve actually told me about yourself would fit on the back of a matchbook. At first I thought you didn’t trust me. Then I decided you’re just secretive. Is it how you’re put together, or did someone teach you to push people off like that?”

Li shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s jump fade as much as anything. I don’t remember much.” She paused. “And what I do remember usually makes me wish I’d forgotten more of it. What’s the point in dredging up old miseries?”

She looked up into the silence that followed to find Cohen watching her. “Eyelash,” he said.

“What?”

“You have an eyelash.”

“Where?” Li dabbed at her eye, looking for it. “Other eye. Here. Wait.”

He slid toward her along the curved bench and tilted her head back against the velvet cushions with one hand while the other feathered along her lower eyelid hunting for the stray lash. She smelled
extravielle
, felt Roland’s warm sweet breath on her cheek, saw the soft skin of his neck and the pulse beating beneath it.

“There,” Cohen said, and held the lash up on the end of a slender finger.

She opened her mouth to thank him, but the words died in her throat. The hand that had been on her chin brushed along her cheek and traced the faint line of the bundled filament that followed the muscle from the corner of her jaw down to the hollow between her clavicles.

“You look like you’ve lost weight, even in streamspace,” he said. “You look like you’re not sleeping enough.”

He caught her eye and held it. The hand on her neck felt warm as Ring-side sunlight, and it reminded her how long it had been since anyone but a medtech had touched her. A dark tide of desire tugged at her. Desire and a reckless loneliness and a hunger to believe in the person and the feelings that seemed so real sometimes.

Uh-oh
, she thought.

She looked away and cleared her throat.

Cohen drew back, held up his index finger, her eyelash still on it. “Make a wish,” he said. “I don’t believe in wishes. You make one.”

He closed his eyes and blew the lash up into the smoky air.

“That was quick,” Li said and smiled—or at least tried to. “I guess you know what you want.”

But he wasn’t looking at her. He had his watch off and was listening to it, his face turned away from her. He twisted the golden knob, put the watch to his ear, wound it again, shook it.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with the thing,” he said. “It’s been running slow for weeks. Damned annoying.”

“Cohen,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere above their heads. A slender brown pair of legs had stopped by their table, and Li looked up them into an amused smile and horn-rimmed glasses—and her own face behind them.

It wasn’t her face, though. It was the nameless teenager’s face she remembered looking at fifteen years ago in a Shantytown mirror. A XenoGen face on a thin young woman who would have stood exactly Li’s height if she hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels and a red slip of a dress that looked far more revealing now that she wasn’t onstage.

The singer gave Li a brief measuring look, then sat down and put a possessive arm around Cohen’s shoulders. “I thought I was going to have you all to myself tonight,” she said in a voice that left no doubt in Li’s mind about what Cohen had been doing eating uncharacteristically alone in this place.

Cohen flinched ever so slightly. “Sorry,” he said, looking at Li.

“Not at all.” Li stood up, straightening her uniform with numb fingers. “I was leaving anyway.” “I’ll call you later.”

“No need.”

“Well, tomorrow then.”

“Whatever.”

“No,” she heard Cohen saying as she walked off, in answer to some whispered question. “Just business.”

We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves, through time … We exist in multiple versions, in universes called “moments” … It is tempting to suppose that the moment of which we are aware is the only real one, or is at least a little more real than the others. But this is just solipsism. All moments are physically real. The whole of the multiverse is physically real. Nothing else is.

—David Deutsch

Li decided not to go,
then changed her mind again at least eight times.

She told herself she was getting too old to follow her hormones everywhere they led her, and that her excuse for accepting the invitation—asking about Sharifi—was nothing short of pathetic. If she really wanted to blow off some steam, she’d be better off picking up some stranger in a bar than chasing after a woman that any sane person in her position would know enough to steer clear of.

In the end she arrived two minutes early and dithered on the doorstep wondering if she should buzz or just walk around until it was time. Just as she was telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn around and leave, Bella opened the door.

She wore white: a long fall of silk that flared around her ankles in the station’s low gravity. Somehow, Li was quite sure Haas had bought the dress for her.

“Are you sure he’s off-station?” she said, and cursed herself for asking.

Bella just smiled serenely, took the flowers Li had brought, and led her through a narrow door into the kitchen.

“He’s in Helena,” she said as she poured water into a vase for the flowers. “AMC managers’ meeting. It runs until the day after tomorrow. So …” She flicked her dark hair back and leaned over to cut the flower stems, baring the long pale line of her neck.

Li caught her breath. “So you’re a free woman,” she said, and bit her tongue again. She couldn’t put a foot right tonight.

“Free,” Bella repeated without a trace of a smile. “I have never understood what humans mean when they use that word.”

Dinner was good, though Li didn’t have much appetite. She felt like she was in a play, the stage already set, the lines already scripted. Eating Haas’s food on Haas’s china. And across the table, Haas’s … what? Mistress? Employee? Indentured servant? One thing was certain: this wasn’t headed for a happy ending.

Bella talked, mostly. She seemed desperate to talk, terrified of the charged silences that hung between them. She talked about her childhood, her schooling, her life before the contract. None of it was what Li had expected. She had expected one of those mythical constructs you heard about in OCS classes and mission briefings. Brilliant, single-minded, every speck of individuality trained and programmed and disciplined out of her from the instant her tank’s umbilical cords were severed. Instead, she heard a lonely young woman stranded a few hundred light-years from her home planet.

Bella described the same things Li had seen during the Syndicate Wars. Gestation tanks, crèches, study labs. But she described them as home, spoke in words that made Li wonder if she’d seen what was really there on Gilead, or just what she wanted to see.

“The night I came here was the first night I spent alone in my life,” Bella said. “I couldn’t shut my eyes. I heard voices, noises. I thought I’d gone mad.”

“Did it get easier?” “No.”

“Then why stay?” “It was my part.”

Li blinked, thrown back to the interrogation rooms on Gilead, to the D Series soldiers she had seen mouth those same words.
My part
, they always said, as if the phrase had been stamped into them.
My part to serve. My part to kill. My part to die
. She felt a sudden, unwilling kinship with Bella: a murky intuition that, war or no war, the Syndicate soldiers she’d spent nearly a decade killing were closer to her than the Ring citizens it was her duty to defend against them.

“How did you end up with Haas?” she asked, seizing on the first change of subject that came to mind. “With—? Oh.” Bella’s eyes dropped. “It just … happened.”

“You make it sound like a spilled drink.”

“It’s in my contract.”

“Your contract requires—?” Li couldn’t bring herself to voice any of the possible endings to that question.

“The contract doesn’t require anything. But … he told me he would be displeased if I didn’t. And that if he were displeased, he would terminate the contract and ask for a replacement. I … I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t be one of those. Terminated.”

“Having an affair with your boss seems a little above and beyond the call of duty, Bella.”

“It’s not an affair,” Bella said sharply. When Li glanced up her face was flushed, furious. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m not … I’m not abnormal.”

Abnormal. Li considered the word and the peculiarly ominous ring it had coming from a Syndicate construct’s mouth. She wondered what the source of Bella’s shame was. That Haas was foreign, unplanned, male? All three things? “You don’t have to justify yourself to me,” she told Bella. “You’re a long way from home here. You wouldn’t be the first person in history who adapted to survive.”

“No,” Bella said. “You don’t understand. You can’t understand, coming from … where you come from. It was a privilege to be sent here. All of us who were chosen knew the risks, the hardships. Even the Ds. They told us it was the most important thing we would ever do for our home Syndicates. I can’t fail after that. No matter how bad it is.”

“And how bad is it?” Li asked.

Bella’s fork lay forgotten on her plate rim. She picked it up, made a halfhearted attempt to eat something, then gave up entirely. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It was just now and then, at first. And Haas can be … very charming. Then I met Cory.”

She fell silent for the space of a few breaths, looking down at her plate. Li said nothing, reluctant to break the thread of the memory that gripped the woman. “He was a surveyor,” she continued. “Cory Dean. Is that Irish?”

Li nodded.

“I thought so. He was nice. He didn’t stare. And he talked to me. He’d tell me jokes while we worked, stories. Haas got it into his head that he was my lover. He never said anything, but he thought it. It was ridiculous, of course.” Her nose wrinkled in obvious distaste. “I didn’t want him. Not that way, at least. But I hadn’t lived with humans long enough to see how it looked.

“Cory was missing for days. They checked the whole station, the mine, Shantytown. Voyt found him.” Bella’s face twisted as if it hurt to say Voyt’s name. “Someone had beaten him. Stolen his credit chip and then just left him in the gutter. He drowned in his own blood. I didn’t know you could do that.”

Bella shifted in her chair. When she spoke again, her voice was as hard and unyielding as virusteel. “The Shantytown watch had him for days before they called the station; they thought he was just a drunk miner. They said he’d gotten in a fight, but Cory would never have done that. Still, they’d found witnesses somehow, people who were willing to say they’d seen him fighting. You don’t have to throw around much money in Shantytown to get people to say what you want.