Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“Don’t exaggerate, Cohen.”

“It’s no exaggeration. Trust me.” He shot her a resentful look from under dark eyelashes. “And it’s ridiculous. It’s not like you’re some fainting virgin, for Heaven’s sake.”

“Now you just want to sleep with me? You’ve lowered your sights. Last time I was supposed to be wife number seven. Or was it eight? Christ, Cohen, you get married like normal people buy puppies!”

“Normal humans, you mean.” He gave her a long naked defenseless look. “That’s what it’s all about for you, isn’t it? Trying to pass. Getting the signed, sealed, and delivered human stamp of approval.” He laughed bitterly. “I’d really like to get inside your head and know what you think when you look in the mirror every morning.”

“You’ve got me all wrong, Cohen.”

“Do I? Then what are you so afraid of?”

“Nothing,” she snapped. “I’m just not interested in being the next stop on your tourist trip through the human psyche.”

He looked away and muttered something she couldn’t quite hear.

“What did you say?”

“I said that’s exceptionally nasty, even for you.”

The room suddenly felt too small, too hot. Li turned away and began checking the walls, trying to find some chink in them.

“Look,” she said after a long, uncomfortable pause. “I didn’t mean—”

“Forget it. It was stupid of me.”

“So what’s with the kid?” Li asked when the white silence had become too thickly oppressive to stand any longer.

“Ah.” Cohen undid the laces of his sneakers and started putting them back on his sock-clad feet. “I thought you knew that. This is Hyacinthe.”

“I thought you were Hyacinthe.”

“He’s one of the things I am. He’s my original, bedrock interface program. And, of course, the man who invented me.”

Li had a sudden urge to laugh. “As a ten-year-old?”

“Actually he was fourteen when this was done. It’s old video footage. He used it to create the original VR interface. I guess you could say it was my first ’face. I tend to fall back on it when I’m pushing the limits of my processing capacity. As at present, unfortunately.”

“Can’t we get out?” Li paced the room’s perimeter again.

“No. And sit down before you drive me incurably mad. You’re safe as long as I’m here.”

But just as he said the words—as if someone were playing a nasty joke on them—he was gone again.

Li was back in the dark place.

This time she knew she was underground, in the mine. But that was all she knew. Water dripped from an unseen ceiling, splashed in an unseen pool. A damp, chill air current wafted up from some underground river too far off for her to hear.

She cut to infrared. No good. She was instream; she saw only what the person controlling the simulation wanted her to see.

“Light a lamp,” Cohen’s voice whispered from somewhere near her left ear.

Her hand reached out to where it knew the lamp was. Picked it up. Primed it. But her fingers fumbled with the wick, as if they had become sudden strangers to this familiar task. As she adjusted the flame, she brushed the inside of her hand against the hot barrel of the oil reservoir and heard the sizzle of burning skin.

“Shit!” she said, putting her hand to her mouth instinctively, sucking at the blistered crescent of flesh.

“Sssh,” Cohen said. “You’re fine. Tell me what you see.”

She held up the lamp and saw an uneven floor of hewn rock running away in all directions. Pillars of light marched in long ranks from one end of the space to the other, gleaming like ivory in the lamplight. The ceiling arched overhead, supported by undulating veins that fanned from one Bose-Einstein node to another in an infinitely repeating, fractally complex spider’s web.

“It’s the glory hole,” she told Cohen. “Sharifi’s glory hole.”

But it was the glory hole intact, unburnt and unflooded and full of softly whirring and clicking equipment. The glory hole before the fire. A generator hummed in one corner. Optical cables snaked across the floor between thickets of diagnostic machinery. Crooked teeth of crystal jutted from floor and ceiling.

The mouths of the earth , Li thought. Wasn’t that what Compson had called them?

“Is this where the hijacker took you?” Cohen asked.

She raised the lamp and turned in a slow circle. To her left a steepening upslope followed the line of the vein, echoing the mined-out chamber on the level above. To her right, the portable virusteel ladder led to the chamber and drift above, and to the long slippery stairs out of the Trinidad.

“Is this it?” Cohen whispered—and she realized for the first time that the whisper was not behind her but inside her. “Is it your memory or someone else’s?”

“Someone else’s.”

“Whose then? Think.”

Her hand moved reluctantly, as if she were keying instructions over a bad link. She squinted at it. It was hers, all right. Short nails. Strong, brown, blunt-ended fingers. Still. There was something not quite right about it. She turned it so the palm faced her.

No wires.

She looked at the hand again, more carefully. The nails were longer than hers, better cared for. She counted old scars that weren’t there, new ones that shouldn’t have been there. And the fresh burn, a slim crescent of raised scar tissue between thumb and forefinger.

“It’s Sharifi,” she said. “It’s Sharifi’s memory.”

Then Sharifi turned at the sound of approaching footsteps, and Li was helpless, along for the ride like any other ghost.

It was the same sequence she’d seen in the last hijacking. But this time she understood what she was seeing. The strange patterns chasing each other across the cavern were light from Sharifi’s lantern. The pinging sound was dripping water. The booming rifle reports were bootheels slapping on bedrock.

“What are you doing here?” Sharifi said, as Voyt climbed down the ladder.

He reached the bottom, turned, and grinned nastily. “Just keeping an eye on the merchandise.”

“Fine. Stay out of the way then.”

“Where’s our honored guest? Off stealing the silverware?”

“Right here,” Bella said, stepping into the lamplight.

Li watched through Sharifi’s eyes as Bella approached. This was not the subdued woman she had met on-station. This Bella met Voyt’s stare and returned it. This Bella moved with the arrogant loose-limbed grace of a fighter, smiled the cool smile of someone who knew she could outsmart you, humiliate you. No matter what the game was. “Are you ready to deliver?” she asked.

Sharifi looked hard at her, frowning a little. “Are you?”

Bella opened her mouth to answer, and the flickering, lamplit shadows of the glory hole gave way to a blast of white light.

Li was back in her quarters.

“Cohen?”

“Here.” Her livewall flickered on to reveal Cohen, shunting through Chiara again, sitting in his sun-filled Ring-side drawing room.

“Do you know what we just saw?” Li asked.

“I know what you think we saw.”

“It’s there, in Sharifi’s memory. Everything we need to know. We have to go back.”

“We have to do no such thing. We almost got trapped there. And you still don’t know if what we saw was real or not.”

“I’ll chance it.”

“No you won’t. And if you decide to be stupid about it, I’ll personally lock you offstream.”

A dark suspicion tugged at the back of Li’s brain. “Why are you so scared? What are you not telling me?”

“I’ve told you everything I know, Catherine.”

She laughed. “How can someone who’s had two hundred years to practice be such a shitty liar?”