Chris Moriarty - Spin State

“I don’t suppose he shared it with you?”

“Not really. But I got the idea he thought I’d had some kind of religious experience. And that he disapproved. Strongly. He kept talking about unlikely vessels and looking like a man who just caught his wife sleeping with the plumber.”

“What do you think happened down there?”

“I don’t know what to think.” Dawes’s face darkened again. “A man could get scared thinking about it. Especially when he knows that once his sick pay runs out, he’ll have to go back downstairs again. I’ve seen what happens to miners when they take up with the pit priests. They still use the old words. Jesus , Mary , the saints . Sacrifice . But it’s like suddenly they mean something else. Something they don’t want you to see until you’re too far in to back out.” He passed a hand over his face, wincing as the movement tugged at his broken ribs. “And there’s another thing,” he said. “They never talk about God. It’s all Mary. The Virgin this, the Virgin that. Her saints. Her Heaven. But they’re not her saints, they’re God’s saints. The real ones, anyway.

“You know what Cartwright said to me today?” He propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes looked feverish, terrified. “He said God doesn’t know us. That God chose humans. Earth and humans. That only Mary loved us enough to come to Compson’s World. Why would he tell me that? What kind of place is it that God won’t come to? What happens when you die down there?”

“Hey!” One of the guards popped his head into the room, then stepped in, followed by two militiamen. “We got Haas on the line, and he says the isolation order goes for you too, Major.”

Li was too stunned to react at first, still wrapped in Dawes’s shadowy vision. “Let me talk to Haas,” she said finally.

“Fine. Talk to him somewhere else, though. It’s my ass if you’re not out of here pronto.”

Li glanced over at Dawes. He shrugged a little and gazed back at her wide-eyed, as if to say it was all a mystery to him. She tried Haas’s line quickly and got a message that he was out of the office. No surprise there. He would no doubt remain out of the office until he was good and ready for Li to talk to Dawes.

Out in the hall, a tall young man in coveralls was talking to the duty nurse. Li had actually walked past him when a familiar movement made her stop and look back. It was the IWW rep, Ramirez. And from what she could catch of the conversation, he was trying to talk his way into Dawes’s room.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, more abruptly than she’d meant to.

“Just visiting a friend,” Ramirez said smoothly.

“Isn’t that sweet.”

If Ramirez caught the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t give any sign of it. “Hey,” he told the nurse, smiling and touching her shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, okay?” He put a hand in the small of Li’s back and guided her down the hall toward a windowless door marked EXIT. “It’s actually really good you happened by just now,” he told her. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

They stepped through the door into the gold-green haze of a sunny fall afternoon. They stood on the honeycomb-grid landing of a fire escape with a clear view over Shantytown to the atmospheric processors and the gently flaming stacks of the power plant. A slight wind rattled the cheap siding of the hospital modules and tugged idly at the wind sock on the ER hopper pad.

“Hail, fellow traveler,” Li said. “Aren’t you supposed to be out demonstrating your solidarity with the workingman and getting ready to hold the barricades when the tanks roll in? Or were you planning to duck out at intermission and skip the last act? I believe that’s what all the best people are doing.”

“Hey, relax. I just thought this would be a good chance to touch base and… see if we could help each other out.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Is this coming from Daahl or you?”

“Both.”

“And what do both of you plan to get out of it?”

“Well, that’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. It’ll take a minute, though.”

“You’ve got five,” Li said, leaning back against the railing and shaking out a cigarette. “Well, more like six, actually, depending on how fast you make me want to smoke. Cigarette?”

“No thanks,” Ramirez said. “They’re bad for your lungs.”

She looked hard at him.

“You know someone like you could do a lot of good, Major.”

“What do you mean, someone like me?” she asked quietly.

“Someone who grew up here. Who knows what it’s like. You could really open people’s eyes Ring-side.”

“And what would that accomplish?”

“Everything. It would give the lie to the corporate propaganda about the Trusteeships, about what goes on in Bose-Einstein mines. It would let people in the inner planets know what their money’s really doing.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “They know, Ramirez. They know as much as they want to know. Or are you too young and idealistic to have figured that out yet?”

Ramirez flushed.

“Look,” she said. “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time before. But I’ve seen way too many idealistic young things rip through this town. And they all believe the same thing. That if they just talk to the right media types, get on the right spins, publish the right book, all the injustices of the system will magically stop. Well, they won’t. The system is the way it is because people like it that way. Because it works most of the time for most people. Or at least for most people who have enough clout to do anything about it.”

“That’s pretty cynical.”

“Just realistic.”

“It’s also a good excuse for not taking action.”

“Don’t preach, Leo.” Li flicked the ash off her cigarette and watched it flutter in the breeze. “It’s not attractive. And besides, I gave at the office.”

“I understand where you’re coming from. You’ve worked hard for what you have. You don’t want to jeopardize it—”

“You don’t understand anything,” she snapped.

“But—”

“But nothing. I’ve seen rich kids just like you all my life. You come down from your university dorm, or Mommy’s house, or wherever. You rile everyone up, you get a few miners shot, then you buy yourself out of any real trouble and go home to a comfortable job in a nice office. Meanwhile, the miners who got shot in your little passion play are still dead. And their parents and kids and brothers and sisters are still wheeling oxygen tanks around by the time they’re fifty.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Ramirez said. He shook his head as he said it, and something about the movement looked odd to Li. “Did you know work has started up again in the Trinidad?” he asked, switching gears abruptly.

“No,” Li said, really caught by surprise this time.

“That change your opinions any?”

“No. Is this all you had in mind when you dragged me out here, or is there something else you want?”

“There is.” He leaned back against the fire-escape railing and crossed his arms. “Listen. We were approached recently. I won’t say by whom. But the gist of it is that there are parties who want to know what Dr. Sharifi was working on before the fire. And these parties would be willing to support the… um, action we discussed recently. Financially as well as in other ways.”

“I assume you’re talking about Andrej Korchow,” Li said. “And, no, I’m not interested in discussing anything with him. Certainly not anything under TechComm jurisdiction.”

“Not even if—”

“Not even if.”

Ramirez shrugged his shoulders, then winced and put a hand to his neck. And suddenly Li saw what it was that had bothered her about his kinetics.