Chris Moriarty - Spin State

A thrill of apprehension ran down her spine as she made the connection. He was Syndicate. And he reminded her particularly of the diplomatic rep from… where? MotaiSyndicate? KnowlesSyndicate? Whichever Syndicate he was from, that must mean he was A Series. But what the hell was an A Series construct doing on Compson’s World? And how could his talking to her spell anything but trouble?

“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.

“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”

“Then you have the advantage.”

He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your… what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”

The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.

“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”

Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”

“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”

Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”

“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”

Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.

“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”

Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed. She felt like she had something up her nose, but she knew the feeling was an illusion. In fact Korchow had simply jammed her recorder, and her internals were spinning their computational wheels, desperately trying to fend off whatever he was throwing at them.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.

“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have… common interests.”

“I doubt that.”

“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”

She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.

“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.

“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”

Li kept silent.

“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows… an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”

“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people… gullible people… have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its… harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”

“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”

“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is human the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”

“I doubt you’ll find many fans of their work around here.” Li shook her head again, not making any progress against Korchow’s jammer.

“No, alas. By the by, was Sharifi really murdered?”

“That’s not established.”

“But I’d been told you have suspects.”

“You were told wrong, then.”

“Indeed. So hard to get accurate information. A thorny problem, that. It makes reliable information particularly valuable.”

Li started to lick her lips, then caught herself, realizing how it would look. Korchow was skirting the edge of deniability. Asking about Sharifi. Asking for information. Unmistakably offering… something. But so slyly that Li couldn’t explicitly reject the offer without appearing to have raised the subject herself.

Was this a UN internal affairs sting? A genuine approach by a Syndicate agent? Or just the corporate espionage department of some multiplanetary fishing for tidbits about Sharifi’s work? Whichever it was, they were surely being recorded. The only question was who the wire belonged to. “I can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of prying into a Controlled Technology Committee investigation,” Korchow answered. “My interests are more properly described as… tangential to yours.”

On-screen, the Cuban was up again. The game was tied, the Yanks one out shy of a win. It was Hamdani’s to lose.

“I don’t know why you’d think TechComm has anything to do with my being here,” Li said.

“Really, Major. The problem with being as honest as you clearly are is that it doesn’t equip you to lie competently when necessary.”

“Hah!” Li said. Her defensive software had finally managed to outflank Korchow’s block. They were back on tape again.

“Well,” Korchow said, standing up. “It was a pleasure talking to you.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a narrow card, and set it on the table in front of her. “My card. I run a store in the capital. Antiques. Compson’s World is a treasure trove of remarkable artifacts. I’d be honored if you paid me a visit and allowed me to show you what the planet has to offer.”

“I doubt I’ll have time,” Li said. She plucked the card off the table and tried to hand it back to him.

“No, no,” he said. “It is one of my firm beliefs that one should never close any door in life until one is quite certain that one does not want to walk through it.”

Li watched him slip through the crowd and vanish. Then she looked down at the card in her hand. It was made of some matte fiber that looked like, but was not, paper. And instead of printed words and pictures it bore a precise geometric lacework of punch holes. A Hollerith card.

She’d seen Holleriths before, and she recognized the implicit status message. It was written in decimal code, and in a format that no machine for two centuries had been able to process. It embodied a technofetishist, antiquarian, nose-thumbing aesthetic. And it assumed that anyone you handed the card to could recognize and process the antique code without an external computer.