Spin State

SLOW TIME

She didn’t try to see Bella again until the night before she left—and by that time the guards wouldn’t let her in.

They were planetary militia, whatever that meant now, and they weren’t taking orders from anyone in UN uniform.

“You’re not authorized anymore,” said a sergeant Li belatedly recognized as one of Ramirez’s fellow kidnappers. He squared his shoulders as if expecting her to fight and squirmed his feet deeper into the zero-g loops.

Behind him she could see the corridor leading to Haas’s office. It was shut down, life support ticking over at the bare minimum required to keep the air breathable and the water running.

A group of miners shoved past Li, smelling like they’d just come up from the pit, and pulled along the guide ropes toward the office.

“And they’re authorized?” she asked incredulously.

The sergeant shrugged. “They’re regulars. Cartwright cleared them. What do you want from me? No UN personnel past this point without specific authorization. That’s cleared all the way up the line to Helena. Which is as far as the line goes now.”

“Fine,” Li said. “Call Cartwright.”

When she finally got into Haas’s office, she barely recognized it.

Only the immense gleaming desk and the starlight seeping in through the floorport were the same. The rest of the room had become a shadowy chaos of charms, candles, statues, prayer plaques. Flames burned round and unearthly in zero g, hanging above the candlewicks like will-o’-the-wisps. Rosaries swayed like seaweed in unseen air currents. Wax from the candles floated around the room, dangerously hot, and accreted on every surface.

And then there were the people. The believers, the doubters, and the merely curious trooped through one after another. They whispered. They stared. They prayed. They asked questions.

Most of all, though, they asked for voices. Voices of lost friends. Voices of loved ones. Voices that Bella delivered to them.

She hung above the desk, just where Li had last seen her, a space-age sybil suspended in zero gravity. She spoke in a hundred voices. She spoke the names of the dead and pulled their words from the darkness, pushing back—just for a moment—the shadows of loss and doubt and death.

Li stood in a dark corner and watched. The pilgrims must be feeding Bella, she realized. They must be clothing her, washing her. Someone must be brushing that coal black halo of hair. Did she care? Did she even notice them? What deathly twilight had she passed into?

Li watched long enough to learn the rhythms of the air currents that traveled through the chamber, the way they played along Bella’s skirt hem and turned her hair into a Medusa’s crown. She watched the sun set beneath her feet, and the room fade into the bleak blue and gray of starlight.

She thought Bella was asleep, but around sunset she opened her eyes and looked straight at Li as if she’d locked on to the sound of her breathing. “Is it you?” Li asked.

“It’s always me.”

The air crackled with static, setting Li’s hair on end and sucking the thin silk of Bella’s dress against her legs. Her skirt had hitched up above her knees. It bothered Li to think that the miners would be trooping in and out of the room staring at her, and that Bella was too far gone into the void of the worldmind to notice. She stepped forward, grabbed the thin cloth and pulled it down around Bella’s ankles, covering her.

Bella smiled. As if she knew what Li was thinking. As if she were laughing at her.

“Are you happy?” Li asked.

“I’m sorry about your mother. And Cohen.”

Li swallowed. “Are they all right?”

“Mirce is. The AI is… more complicated.”

“Is he—?”

“We’re all alive, Catherine. Can’t you feel us? We feel you. Every part of you, every voice, every network, no matter where you are in the station. We love you.”

Li closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands.

“Katie,” Bella said. It was her father’s voice.

“Don’t! I won’t listen!”

Bella shrugged, but when she spoke again it was in her own voice. “Most people find it gives them comfort.”

“I don’t want comfort.”

She did, though. She wanted it so much it terrified her. She wondered if Mirce’s voice would come out of Bella’s perfect lips. Or McCuen’s voice. She could ask, she supposed. What harm would it do? But she couldn’t ask for the one voice she wanted to hear. Because if she heard that voice, even once, she’d never have the strength to walk away from it.

“Are you sure?” Bella asked.

Li turned around and left and didn’t look back.

Nguyen’s call was waiting when she got back to her quarters. “Not answering the phone these days?” Nguyen said.

Li shrugged.

“I see. Playing the bereaved widow. Well, you made enough money off him that I guess you should at least go through the motions. Who would have thought he’d leave you everything?”

Li kept her mouth shut; it wasn’t even worth trying to find out how Nguyen had gotten hold of that piece of information.

“You won’t keep any of it, of course. The advocate general will challenge it. And win. Half of the hardware Cohen’s system ran on is covered by government patents and licenses. They’ll bankrupt you.”

Li looked down at her hands, took a breath. “Is that all you called about, or was there something else?”

Nguyen smiled coldly and reached outside the VR field to retrieve a dog-eared yellow piece of paper. “We know. We know everything. It’s over, Li.”

“If it was really over, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

“I’ve been authorized to offer you a way out. Under the circumstances, we decided… discretion was the best approach.”

Li waited.

“You’ll ship back to Alba with the rest of the station personnel for debriefing. When you arrive, you’ll request a leave of absence for health reasons. Once things have settled down a bit, you’ll resign. Quietly. A suitable job will be found for you in the private sector. And we’ll all forget about what happened or didn’t happen on Compson’s.”

“That’s clear enough.”

“Good, then. It’s agreed.”

“No.”

Nguyen caught her breath and leaned forward almost imperceptibly in her chair. “Do you actually think you can weather this scandal? Are you really that arrogant?”

“You have the right to drum me out of the Service. I’d probably do the same in your place.” Li laughed briefly. “Hell, in your place I’d probably put a bullet in my skull and call it even. But you don’t have the right to make me resign. You don’t have the right to make me slink off quietly.”

“That’s pretty sanctimonious under the circumstances.”

“Maybe.”

Comprehension dawned on Nguyen’s face, only to be chased away by disdain. “You weren’t thinking of the money at all, were you?” she asked. “You actually talked yourself into thinking you were doing the right thing. Or you let Cohen talk you into it. Did you actually think it was your decision to make? Did you think you had the right to put billions of UN citizens at risk because of your moral scruples?”

Li didn’t answer.

“Amazing,” Nguyen said. “But then traitors never seem to feel the normal rules apply to them, do they?”

Li didn’t have an answer for that either.

“I’m going to pretend we didn’t have this talk,” Nguyen said after a moment. “You’ll have months of slow time on the evac ship to think about what you want to do when you dock at Alba. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t even get on that ship. Trust me, you won’t find much to come home to. I intend to spend the next little while making sure of that.”

Li laughed, suddenly overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation. She shook her head and grinned into the VR field. “You’re fantastic, Helen.”

Nguyen blinked, paled. “I always hated that look on Cohen’s face,” she said. “I hate it even more on yours.”

In the end they shut down the last working Bose-Einstein relay and quarantined the whole system. There was no other way to keep the worldmind off the spinstream, no other way to keep it from sweeping through every UN system and rifling through every network. And even before the last ship pulled out there were rumors coursing through streamspace that the AIs would defy the quarantine, that the Consortium had sent out sublight probes to reinitiate contact, that FreeNet, or at least part of it, would be opened to the worldmind.

Li caught her ship in a daze, too numb to care where she was going, or what Nguyen would have waiting for her when she got there. She clung to the guy ropes of a half-ton flat of emergency rations as the ship lumbered out of port and watched Compson’s World slip away from her for the last time through the cargo bay’s narrow viewport.

The ship cast off and drifted a little before its maneuvering engines stuttered into life. The station’s belly loomed above her, slipped sternward, and was replaced by stars and darkness. The solar arrays brushed by like wings, their frozen joints crusted with eight days’ worth of unthawed condensation ice. Then they were out in open space, and she could look back and see it all spread out below her.

The station was crippled, dying. The Stirling engines had shut down in the first crisis, and once the massive interlocking rings stopped spinning against each other it was only a matter of time until the living and working spokes faded into flat, cold, weightless darkness. A third of the outer ring was still lit up and functioning. The rest was dark already, the shadowed side of a jeweled carnival mask.

They were being evicted, politely but firmly. Compson’s World and the skies above it no longer belonged to them.

Li blew on the cold viruflex until it frosted, then pressed her forehead against it. Her eyes felt hot and dry. She kept thinking she should do something, but there was nothing to do, nothing anyone needed her for. And there would be weeks, months of this nothing before they reached Alba and what was left of her life started up again.

She should care more about it than she did—should be able to muster curiosity, if nothing else, about whether she would return home to a new assignment or a court-martial or worse. But what was the point of thinking that way? You cared, or you didn’t care. The rest was mere survival.

‹Reset›

She shook her head irritably, prodding malfunctioning wetware back into silence.

‹4280000pF›

She sighed and rubbed her temples. A pair of skinny brown legs appeared in her peripheral vision. Dusty. Barefooted.

Hyacinthe?

She tried to focus on the vision. Lost it. Then something flashed pale on the edge of sight, and she looked, and she could just make him out, faintly, as if he weren’t quite there. But the eyes were there. And couldn’t she feel him hacking the ship’s net, pirating its VR programs. Or was she just fooling herself?

For God’s sake, say something!The thought ripped out of her like flesh being torn away.

Sorry. I’m a little shaky. But it’s me this time. Most of me, anyway. He climbed onto the platform, very carefully, holding on with both hands, and sat beside her.

She felt something come alive in her chest, testing the wind, opening strong wings. She took a deep breath and realized it was the first time in days she hadn’t felt that weight on her chest. He filled up her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She turned without speaking and looked out the viewport toward the dying station. “Funny how it still looks more or less okay from the outside,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll be able to salvage anything when they come back.”

“I don’t think they’re coming back. They may come back to fight, but even then… I don’t think they can face it.”

“What about the AIs?”

“We’ll be back. We have to come back. This is our future. Or one of our possible futures.”

“What was it like down there?”

“It’s what Sharifi said: a chance to look into the shuffle. Everything is possible, and everything that’s possible is. It was wonderful. Terrifying. I almost forgot to come back.”

Li felt a flare of anger shoot through her. He could have come back anytime? Days ago? Hadn’t he even thought about what Nguyen would think? What Bella and the rest of them would think? What she would think?

You know I came as soon as I could.

The thought brushed along the edges of her mind, soft and tickling. Asking for forgiveness without quite asking. Butterfly kisses, she thought with a flash of child’s memory. But when she fished for the memory, she couldn’t get it back, couldn’t tell whether it was hers or Cohen’s. A shiver went through her at the thought that she could confuse the two. Then the fear drifted into… something. Something she could live with, even if she didn’t understand it yet.

“Why did you come back?” she asked.

“You promised to think about something. I wanted to know what you decided.”

She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t read him the way she had during those hours in the mine. But he had to know. How could he touch her, how could he look at her without knowing?

“I told you,” she said.

“Feeling something doesn’t mean you can follow through on it.”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t, does it?”

He had drawn back from her a little as they spoke. Now he reached out and touched her hand and looked into her eyes. “What do you want now, Catherine?”

She looked back at him, feeling the warmth and the pull of him, the something in his smile that lived beyond and below words, that she no longer had to pin down or put a name to. The image of a rose took shape in her mind. A real rose, a little hurt in its spines, a little rot in its redness. A rose and its thorns.

“Everything.” She smiled. “All of it.”