Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“Tell me true, Catherine. ’Cause there are some people up at UNSec HQ who really want an answer from you. Are you ready to come in from the cold?”

And there it was. The long drop. With no warning at all to let you steel your nerves and your stomach for it. One step you’re on solid flight deck, next one you’re free-falling into the gravity well of some godforsaken ball of dirt that looks like you could fall past it into open space if you twitch wrong.

Ash was a messenger from Helen Nguyen, as she had so subtly insinuated she might be the other night at Didi’s house. And Helen Nguyen had just handed Li her own personalized, customized dumb blonde in a red Ferrari.

She wanted it. She couldn’t deny that. She wanted the power. She wanted the independence. She wanted the sense of setting her own course in life rather than being dragged along in Cohen’s wake. She wanted the ego-gratifying feeling that she mattered: that she was one of the rough men who stood ready to wreak violence so the good people of the world could sleep peacefully in their beds at night. And, yes, she wanted the adrenaline and the danger. She wanted the life, when you really came down to it.

But she knew exactly what Cohen would have to say about all this, when she eventually got around to telling him. Which she would. Eventually.

What she didn’t know was where that left the two of them.

She met Ash’s eyes. The other woman was watching her as intently as a cat tracking a songbird’s erratic progress toward its claws.

“Very poetic.” Li’s voice was steadier than she’d thought it would be. “Is Helen offering a main course after the entrée of worn-out clichés?”

“She said to tell you that there’s a proposal on her desk to allow individually cleared genetic constructs to work for the Security Council on an independent contractor basis. It would be done quietly, administratively. Without a General Assembly vote. But the effect would be the same: You’d be a Peacekeeper again, without an official commission, of course, but with everything else. Everything. She’s ready to bring you all the way in. You just need to give the nod and let us know you’re ready to come back.”

“And Cohen?” Li asked. “Is Nguyen warming a pair of slippers by the fire for him too?”

Ash shrugged. “I find it hard to believe that you’re really that happy with him. If it is a him. I mean…what are you exactly? His mistress? His bodyguard? His pet ?”

But Li couldn’t answer that question, even though she’d been asking it of herself on and off for the last three years.

“Seriously,” Ash pursued. “What’s it like being part of …that ?”

Li shrugged. Inarticulate in the best of circumstances, she truly had no words to describe the twists and turns and myriad contradictions of life on the intraface. And whatever words she might have put together over the course of the last three years had long ago dried up in the face of the obsessive hunger that every spinfeed reader on the Ring and beyond seemed to have for the most minute details of Cohen’s life, sexual and otherwise.

“He’s not just one person.” Was she actually about to talk to Ash about something she’d never talked about to anyone, including Cohen himself? Maybe it was just the sheer relief of dealing with someone who couldn’t reach into your head and rip the thoughts out of it before you had time to decide if you even wanted to share them or not. “He’s a lot of people. And…you kind of agree to pretend that there’s this single, identifiable, permanent person there. Just like you agree to pretend that that person doesn’t change every time he associates another network or autonomous agent. And after a while you start to wonder about yourself. If you’re just one person or many. If you ever really knew who that person was, and whether it’s really that simple for anyone.”

“It sounds terrifying.”

“No. Well, not most of the time. But you wonder sometimes. Sometimes I think I’m becoming a new species. Like…there’s a line somewhere where posthuman gets so far away from human that it needs a new name.” And she wasn’t sure she wanted to be the first person to cross that line.

Night had fallen while they were talking, and the shofar was already blowing in some nearby synagogue. Christ, what a dismal noise! Ten days of it were going to be enough to drive Li well near crazy.

“Maybe the next ten days would be a good time to do a little Arithmetic of the Soul,” Ash suggested.

“According to the Interfaithers,” Li pointed out, “I don’t have a soul.”

Ash shrugged and began moving around the room, retrieving scattered toys and tossing them into a bin in the corner. “Don’t think the Interfaithers are that simple, Li.” Her voice sounded oddly muffled. “No one’s that simple.”

Ash turned to face her, the seriousness of her expression at odds with the purple plush stegosaurus clutched against her midriff. “Remember what you said about killing being personal? You were right. But this is personal too.”

Li waited.

“You were the general’s student. Her protegée. You hurt her deeply when you betrayed her. She’s giving you a chance to set things right now. To go back and remake past choices. Not many people get that kind of chance.”

“I’m grateful to her,” Li said. And in that moment, amazingly enough, she really was grateful. “But I did what I did on Compson’s World because I thought it was right.”

Ash twisted the stuffed toy in her hands in a gesture that was either unconscious or supremely skilled acting. For some unfathomable reason it reminded Li of that brief glimpse of the silver stretch marks on that otherwise flawlessly engineered body. “What about what you did on Gilead?”

Li’s shooting eye twitched, and she rubbed fiercely at it. It was intolerable, she thought angrily, to have her own body give her away like that.

“I don’t remember Gilead,” she told Ash. “Or are you the only person in UN space who didn’t tune in to the trial of the century?”

“Nguyen said to tell you she can get you the real feed. But only on the understanding that it’s for private consumption.”

In other words, it would be yet another in the long series of “real feeds,” none of which could be parity checked or authenticated. “Thanks, but I’ve already walked down that hall of mirrors.”

“She said you’d say that. But she said you’d still want it when you’d had a chance to cool down and think about it.”

Li was thinking all right.

She was thinking of a clear blue morning sky on Gilead, and the soft wet sound of wind in the trees after the night’s rain, and the way you could hear songbirds all the time there, twittering back and forth from treetop to treetop; but only once in a while would you suddenly catch a bright flash of feather in the corner of your eye, gone before you’d had a chance to know anything except that it was beautiful.

“Good shot,” said the voice that haunted her shredded memories.

It could have been her voice. But then so could the next one.

“Not good enough. Fuck. I must have missed his spine by a millimeter. What do we do with him?”

“Mecklin? You getting anything but static? How far back is battalion?”

“I still can’t raise them, Sarge…uh…sir. Far as I know, they still haven’t made it across the river.”

“Chaff?”

“No chaff, sir. They’re just not picking up the phone.”

“And we got, what…twenty-eight prisoners?”

“Twenty-nine if this one lives.” A fourth voice, whose name hovered annoyingly on the tip of Li’s tongue. “Six A’s. Twenty-two tacticals. All Aziz except for this one. Must be their SigInt officer. Jesus Christ, what a mess! How the fuck can he still be alive anyway?”