Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Just as Li was beginning to wonder how many blind corners and unlit side streets McCuen could lead her down, he ducked into a gap between two boarded storefronts, dropped down three steps, and slipped into an alley so narrow that the dank walls nearly met overhead.

Doors opened off the alley on either side, but they were all closed. The few windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting. The rank smell of vegetein flowed out of the houses like smoke and soaked into the packed hardpan. And underneath it, deep and musky, Li caught smells that had the power to throw her back twenty years into the dim memories of childhood. Sweat. Bad plumbing. Last night’s empty beer bottles. Poverty.

McCuen walked fast, eyeing the shadows like a man who is only mostly sure he isn’t about to be rolled for his palm implant. He ran his hand along the right wall, counting doors like a miner counting drift turnings. At the eighth door he stopped and tried the latch.

It swung open, and he ducked in without pausing on the threshold. Li followed.

They hurried down a dark corridor toward a faint blur of daylight. The corridor dumped them into an interior court with a rough, sloping floor. One side of the court was dark and quiet, stairs leading up toward darkened apartments. The other side opened onto the flying sparks and whining machinery of a welder’s shop. They mounted the single step into the shop just as the welder finished sawing through a sheet-metal panel and straightened up, pushing back his safety goggles.

McCuen stepped up to the man and pulled a bent door hinge out of his pocket. “My mother asked me to bring this by,” he said, his voice echoing under the shop’s high ceiling. “Can you fix it?”

“When does she need it by?”

“Good Friday, she said.”

Instead of answering, the welder put his torch down and walked off toward the front of the shop. As Li and McCuen watched, he put up a closed sign and cranked heavy storm shutters down over the shop window, shutting them into darkness.

“Sit down,” he said, and flicked the switch that lit the shop’s single dim bulb.

McCuen sat. Li didn’t.

“So,” the welder said. “This is her.”

“Yeah,” McCuen said.

“Time to put your mouth where your money is,” the welder said.

Li held out her left arm, sleeve rolled above the elbow. He snapped a tourniquet around it, produced a needle from his apron pocket, and pulled more blood than Li thought could possibly be necessary, even for the most incompetent doctor. “They want a tooth, too,” he said.

“Oh, Christ,” Li muttered. “For God’s sake.”

“You didn’t say that before,” McCuen said.

“Well, I’m saying it now. You can fake blood. Teeth tell the whole story.” He turned back to Li. “You want to talk to the man or not?”

Li shrugged and opened her mouth.

She spent the next half hour sitting on a work counter nursing a bloody gap where her bottom right premolar had been, while McCuen paced back and forth impatiently. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped it would; a little worse and her internals would have thrown enough endorphins at it to have her feeling comfortable. As it was, they ignored it and left her to handle it.

Finally the welder came back, accompanied by a second man who waved them back into the slanting courtyard and toward the stairs.

“Here?” Li asked.

But he opened a narrow door tucked beneath the stairs, ducked into another corridor, and led them into an alley even darker and narrower than the one she and McCuen had come in by. Five right turns, two left turns, and three interior courtyards later he turned into a broader alley, this one roofed with grimy, rain-streaked greenhouse sheeting. It ran level, but its walls curved like a snail’s shell, as if responding to some structural logic Li couldn’t fathom.

A few dozen meters down the spiraling alley, their guide stopped at a nondescript door, knocked, and entered.

The room inside smelled of old newspapers and boiled cabbage. A pea-coal fire smoldered in the grate, filling the room with greasy smoke. A woman sat at a chipped laminate table holding a child in her lap, reading to him in a low murmur. The woman and child both looked up momentarily, then dropped their heads to the book again, uninterested.

“Where is he?” their guide asked.

The woman jerked her chin toward an inner room. As Li passed by the table, she saw there was something wrong with the boy’s upper lip and his legs were withered.

McCuen started toward the door, but the guide barred his way. He looked hard at her, then shrugged and went over to sit at the table. Li stepped through alone and heard the door swing to behind her.

She stood in near darkness, cut by a single dusty beam of sunlight stabbing through a storm shutter. As she looked around Li understood the odd curvature of the alley outside. The house was built onto the outside skin of one of the old life-support pods; this room’s three newer walls were native mud brick, but the back wall, the only original one, was a curved gleaming expanse of ceramic compound. An airlock yawned in the center of the old wall, but its control panel had been ripped open and hot-wired long ago. The irising virusteel door panels were permanently stuck at a two-thirds-open position, and someone had hung a blanket over the gap, blocking off Li’s view of the geodesic dome that must lie behind.

In front of the dead airlock stood a swaybacked table piled with pads and datacubes. A wiry, weathered man sat behind the table: Daahl, the shift foreman Li had met on her first mine visit.

“Well,” Daahl said, looking straight at Li. “You get curiouser and curiouser.”

“You too.” Li sat down on the stool across from Daahl’s and leafed through the papers and fiches that littered the table. She saw pit regulations, UNMSC section headings, General Assembly minutes, court papers. “You some kind of pit lawyer, Daahl?”

“You could say that. Care for a beer?”

“Thanks.” She took out her cigarettes. “May I?”

Daahl called into the front room for the beer, then took the cigarette she offered. As she leaned across the table to light it, he grabbed her wrist and turned her hand palm up to look at the faint lines of the wires. “They say you’re a hero, Katie. Pretty good for a pit girl. Tell me, was it worth it?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

They smoked in silence. Someone opened the door, set three beers on the table, and came around the table to sit beside Daahl. As he sat down, the lamp on the table shone full in his face, and Li recognized the young labor rep from the news spin that Haas had gotten so hot under the collar about. “What is this?” she asked. “Interrogation by committee?”

“This is Leo Ramirez, the IWW rep in town. He’s just going to sit in on our talk. If you don’t object, that is.”

“Sure, what do I care? Invite the Trotskyites. Hang up a picture of Antonio fucking Gramsci.”

Ramirez grinned, dark eyes sparkling in his handsome face. “I didn’t think you people were allowed to know who Gramsci was.”

“‘You people’?” Li muttered under her breath and rolled her eyes.

Daahl just smiled and kept smoking.

When he had finished precisely half of the cigarette Li had given him, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, put out the half-smoked butt, wrapped it carefully in the handkerchief, and tucked it back into his pocket.

This operation took Daahl’s full attention for a good quarter of a minute, and when he finally spoke his voice was as steady as if they were discussing the weather. “Why did you make Haas drain the glory hole?”

Li shrugged. “I thought he was hiding something about the fire. I wanted to get to the bottom of it before he sent anyone else down.”