Chris Moriarty - Spin State

She was certain, looking back over their conversation, that Korchow was KnowlesSyndicate. Knowles was the diplomat’s syndicate, the spy’s syndicate. Their A Series were mavericks within the close-knit conformity of Syndicate society, artists of information and manipulation, as formidable as they were unpredictable.

The surface address punched into the Hollerith card put Korchow’s shop in Helena. Behind the punch holes the card’s surface bore an intricate engraved logo that reminded Li of the patterns in Cohen’s Persian carpets. Where had she seen that design before? On an advertisement? She searched her hard files for a match and found one in the top layer of her actives. Recent, then.

She accessed the file, saw the digital image of a leather-bound journal with a dozen business cards tucked into the front flap pocket. And there, peeping out from behind several slips of shiny fiche, was the corner of Korchow’s Hollerith card.

The notebook was leather. Brown leather as soft and expensive as butter. Sharifi’s.

On-screen, the Cuban had carried Hamdani deep into the count, fouling off pitch after pitch, though Hamdani was throwing everything he had at him. It was only a matter of time until he turned on one of those not-quite-fast-enough fastballs.

“Walk him, you idiot,” Li muttered. “Don’t throw the game away.”

But Hamdani wasn’t going to walk him. Couldn’t bring himself to walk him, though he must know in every cell of his aging body that he’d already been beaten. He wound up, looking stiffer and older than Li had ever seen him look. The ball left his hand a split second too early and floated across the plate square in the middle of the strike zone.

The Cuban saw it as soon as Li did. His eyes snapped around. His arms extended. His broad back turned toward the camera as he rounded on the ball. The bat cracked like rifle fire, and Li didn’t need to hear the roar of the crowd to know it was all over.

The windup. The pitch. It’s gone .

She stood up and tucked Korchow’s card into her pocket, feeling the prickle of unseen eyes on the back of her neck. Then she walked—slowly, carefully, expressionlessly—back to her quarters.

The next morning, four hundred and seventy-six hours after the rescue crew found him in Trinidad South 12, James Reynold Dawes came out of his coma and started talking.

As soon as she found out, Li shuttled down to the Shantytown hospital to see him. When she got there, Sharpe and Dawes’s wife were standing in the corridor outside his room arguing with two AMC mine guards.

“We have orders,” one of the guards was saying. “No one’s supposed to see him, and that’s that.”

Li flashed a smile and her ID. “I think we could let his wife in, don’t you?” she said.

“That’s not what I was told.”

“By who? Haas? Call him. In the meantime, this hospital is a public institution. AMC may run the mine and the town, but here you’re on planetary militia territory. Which means that, until someone with a militia commission shows up, I have jurisdiction.”

“Thanks,” Sharpe said as Dawes’s wife slipped into the room.

Li shrugged. “I have to talk to him too, actually.” She gave Dawes a few minutes with his wife, then knocked at the door.

“Come in,” called a young man’s voice.

She stepped into the room and saw Dawes lying in a raised bed between cheap viruflex curtains. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Pretty good. Considering.”

“Up to a few questions?”

He shrugged.

“Should I go?” his wife asked.

“Not unless you have somewhere else to be.”

“Well…” A look passed between the couple. She slipped out of the room, and Li heard the sharp sound of her heels receding down the tiled corridor.

“So,” Li said when she and Dawes were alone. “I bet that was a shocker of a wake-up.”

He grinned. “Just like sleeping fucking beauty.”

“I hope you at least got a kiss for your trouble. Sorry if I interrupted it.”

He laughed at that, then gasped and paled. “Three broken ribs,” he said. “The doc told me if I’d slept another week and a half I’d have woken up and not even known about them.”

“Well, you know what they say. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone’s house down.”

“Ouch!”

“Sorry,” Li said. “So do you remember anything?”

His face clouded. “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

He glanced doubtfully at her. “You’re not from AMC, then, like the last one?”

“What last one?”

“The guy they sent down to talk to me earlier today. He kept wanting to get me to say I’d slipped and hit my head and didn’t remember anything.”

“Did you? Hit your head, I mean.”

“Not according to the doctors.”

“And do you remember anything?”

The shadowy look drifted across his face again.

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

“No! No, I want to talk about it. I just… I’m not sure what it was, I guess.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, shaking his head on the pillow. “If I told you, you’d probably laugh at me.”

“Try me,” Li said.

And he did.

What he described sounded just like what Li had seen on her two hijackings. Strange sights, vague shadowy figures. Sounds that made no sense or were oddly distorted. Fractured twilight visions that could have been past or future or neither.

“Did you see anyone you knew?” Li asked when Dawes fell silent.

“Oh, yeah. I saw all of them.”

“What do you mean, all of them? All of who?”

“The dead.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and wide, the pupils expanded as if he were slipping into shock. “All of them. All my dead. Just like the pit priests say you see.”

Li swallowed. “Do you think it could have been a hallucination? Or, I don’t know, something else. Like a spinstream hijacking—” She remembered that Dawes was unwired and too poor to pay for stream time anyway, that he’d probably never even known anyone who had direct spinstream access. “I mean like someone trying to communicate. Someone not dead, I mean.”

He thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not a churchgoing man. But they were there. You know what I’m saying? They were… different.”

“Did you—” Li stopped to clear her throat. “Did you see Dr. Sharifi?”

“No.”

“You’d have recognized her if you had seen her?”

“Sure. I saw her a bunch of times. She looked… well, like they always look.”

He lay silent for a moment, looking up at the stained foam ceiling panels of the hospital module. A long moment passed with no sound to mark the time but the pounding of a trapped fly against the room’s dust-caked window. Dawes’s face softened, took on a puzzled, disappointed look.

“The thing is,” he said, “I felt like they took me for a reason. Like they were trying to tell me something specific, something they thought was important.”

“What do you think it was?” Li asked, her breath catching in her throat.

To her surprise he smiled. “Seems like that’s the question of the hour. AMC’s man kept trying to ask me that. Which wasn’t so easy given that he was also trying to get me to say I fell down and hit my head and never saw anything. Even Cartwright asked me that.”

Li’s stomach clenched. “Cartwright’s been here?”

“The old geezer was practically waiting outside my door when I woke up. He was nattering at me before the doctors even figured out I was back. Wanted to know where it happened. What level. What deposits it was near. I guess he has some theory or something.”