Chris Moriarty - Spin State

Li followed Roland’s glance and saw pale creamy butter over ice, bread rolls as crisp and brown as chickens’ eggs, an open wine bottle with a French label. Two waiters hovered expectantly in the wings, waiting for the sign to serve the next course.

Roland offered Li wine, though he himself drank nothing. He gamely made small talk with her, but Li got the distinct impression that he thought she was some kind of not very interesting old person. For her part, she watched Roland with bemused embarrassment. What had she seen in him? He was nothing, except for those golden eyes. A cookie-cutter college boy with pretty hair. Barely worth looking twice at.

She glanced around the big room, keeping half an ear on Roland’s chatter. The place wasn’t really a nightclub; more of a fancy restaurant with live music. All velvet and carefully pressed linen and carefully dressed customers. Everything plush, flash, top-shelf. The guests all laughed a little too often and talked a little too loud, as if they had come there in order to be seen and were determined to get their money’s worth. The women wore smart dresses, programmed to cling to the right curves and camouflage the wrong curves. A few people wore formal jumpsuits—Corps brass or officers off rich merchant ships who couldn’t quite get out of the habit of low-g clothing—but Li’s Security Council black fatigues were out-of-place enough to make people stare.

The stage lights came up. Someone tapped a glass for silence, and the crowd hushed reluctantly. A live band walked onto the stage, went through the usual tuning-up ritual, and launched into a song that everyone but Li seemed to have heard before.

The singer was a woman. Small, vaguely familiar-looking, with a headful of black cowlicks and heavy-framed glasses that could only, in these days of cheap genework, be vanity. She was good; good enough that several songs had gone by before Li remembered to check the time and wonder what the hell Cohen was doing.

She took out a cigarette, and Roland leapt to light it for her. He’d probably be helping her across the street next. She smoked the cigarette down slowly while the singer’s smoky voice wound around them, talking about failed love affairs, lonely roads, new beginnings.

“I thought that was you,” Cohen murmured just beside her.

When she turned around Roland was gone. His wide-open face had turned into a shadowy territory of shifting planes and angles, fleeting expressions. His long-fingered hands rested on the table with inhuman stillness. Even the golden eyes now seemed dark, dangerous, deeper than oceans.

“Christ,” Li said. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?” he asked, and smiled slyly. “Oh, you mean my animal magnetism and natural charisma?” The smile turned into a full-blown grin. “Don’t be too hard on Roland. After all, he’s all of twenty-three. When I was that age, I lived in a government-subsidized lab with bad lighting, couldn’t put two sentences together, and played chess twenty-four hours a day. A game which, I might add, you couldn’t get me to play now for anything—” He stopped and smiled up at the ceiling. “Well… almost anything.”

He unfolded Li’s napkin with a flourish and handed it to her. “So,” he said, refilling her wineglass, “to what do I owe this exceptional and unexpected happiness? Are you here for the pleasure of my company, or do you just need something?”

“What I need,” Li said, “is advice.”

“And you shall have it. After you’ve had dinner with me. Deal?”

“Deal,” Li said, but when the waiter handed her the menu, she quickly realized two things. First, there were no prices on it. Second, even though it was written in plain Spanish, she’d never heard of half the foods it listed.

“Huh,” she said, accessing her hard files, trying to figure out what horse’s feet were and whether a girolle was a bird or a mushroom.

“The oysters are excellent,” Cohen suggested.

“Fine.” She shut the menu. “Oysters.”

Cohen gave the order and leaned back, arms crossed. “Now then,” he said as calmly as if they were discussing the season’s gallery openings, “what’s so urgent that you have to hunt me down and interrupt a good meal to talk about it? Would it be foolish to imagine that it’s not unrelated to your little tête-à-tête with Korchow this morning?”

Li choked on her wine and coughed into her napkin. “Still spying on me, are we?” she asked when she could speak again.

“Don’t be snitty, darling. Technically, it’s Nguyen I’m spying on, not you. And anyway, it’s how I’m written. Naturally nosy. Neither of us can fight our code, can we?”

Li narrowed her eyes at that but said nothing.

“Oh dear,” Cohen said. “Here comes your thunderous, we’ll-deal-with-this-later look. Have some more wine. And tell me how you like it.”

Li took another sip of wine, still staring at Cohen unsmilingly over the rim of her glass.

“Well?” he asked, leaning forward.

“It’s good.”

“Good? That’s all you can say? I might as well pour it into the gutter.”

“You gave it to me,” Li pointed out.

“The more fool I.”

“Why were you spying on—”

“Madame’s oysters,” the waiter said, leaning over Li’s shoulder to set an immense plate before her. She looked down at it while the waiter served Cohen’s dish. Twelve fist-sized oysters glistened nakedly up at her under the spotlights.

“Are they dead yet?” she asked.

“They won’t feel a thing,” Cohen told her. “And do try to chew before you swallow. You’d be a much happier person if you just concentrated on your food properly.”

The oysters were fantastic, of course. Everything Cohen had ever fed her was fantastic. They tasted of salt and iodine and deep clear water. The taste of the sea, she supposed, though she had never seen a sea. She ate two plates of them, firmly repressing any thought of what they must be costing Cohen, and even in streamspace she felt stuffed.

“So,” she said when Cohen had finished his dessert and the waiters had brought coffee and pâte de fruits and elaborate petits fours . “Now can I ask why you’re spying on Nguyen?”

“You can ask,” he answered with a silken smile.

“It’s still about Metz, isn’t it?”

“If you know so much, why come to me?”

Li looked across the table at him, and he met her stare with bland equanimity.

“What happened to trusting each other?” she asked.

“I trust you completely. I always have. In this case, however, the question isn’t whether I trust you, but whether I trust everyone who has clearance to download your hard files.”

“Which brings us back to Nguyen. And Metz.”

“The thing about Helen,” Cohen said, carrying on as smoothly as if Li hadn’t spoken, “is that she uses people. It’s her job to use people. It’s what she is. You put yourself in mortal danger if you allow yourself to forget that.”

“Funny. She said the same thing about you.”

“Helen,” Cohen said firmly, “does not understand me nearly as well as she thinks she does.” He stopped and gave Li a shocked look. “You don’t believe her, do you?”

“I don’t know who to believe.”

Cohen looked down at his plate and smiled a tight little smile that was far too old to belong on Roland’s soft face. “Well,” he said, to no one in particular. “So.”

“Don’t guilt me,” Li said. “Nguyen’s earned my trust. You’ve earned… the opposite.”

“Helen does a very difficult job,” Cohen said after an uncomfortable pause. “And she does it very well. But she’s a technician, really. People are tools to her. You are one of her tools. I’m another—albeit a powerful tool that she knows can turn around and bite her if she doesn’t handle it carefully. But in the end, it’s the same. She has a job to do. She opens up her toolbox and pulls out the best tool for the job. If it breaks, that’s too bad, of course. But she can always get the Secretariat to buy her a new one.”