Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  Perfect front teeth bit a perfect lower lip. Perfect hands twisted each other’s fingers into nervous lovers’ knots. “Who killed her?” Bella whispered.

  “Who told you Sharifi was murdered?”

  “Does it matter?” Beautiful, jarringly unnatural violet eyes bored into Li’s eyes. “Everyone knows.”

  “What else does everyone know?”

  “I … I don’t speak to many people. Except Haas.”

  Bella’s voice was surprisingly low, and she spoke with an accent, a halting here and there to search for the proper word. When she said Haas’s name, her voice dropped even lower.

  “I don’t know who killed her,” Li said. “That’s what I’m here for. To find answers.”

  Bella leaned forward, and Li heard a little catch in her breath. “And when you find them? What then?” Li shrugged. “The bad guys get punished.”

  “No matter who they are?”

  “No matter who they are.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say after that. Bella sat like a stone. She looked ready to sit there forever. Certainly until Haas returned.

  “Do you have a last name?” Li finally asked, just to have something to say.

  “Just Bella,” the witch answered. She said the name as if it were a mere label, nothing to do with who she really was.

  “You’re on contract to AMC, right?”

  Bella’s mouth tightened. “To MotaiSyndicate. AMC is the subordinate contract-holder.”

  “I’m sorry,” Li said. “I don’t know anything about … how that works. I probably just said something stupid.” She looked up to find Bella staring at her. “What?” she asked.

  Bella pressed a hand to the pulse at the base of her own neck in a gesture that Li recognized with an eerie flash of déjà vu. It was the same biofeedback manipulation technique she’d seen Syndicate soldiers use. “Nothing,” Bella said, dropping her hand back into her lap. “You just … remind me of someone.”

  “Who?” Li asked, though of course she already knew the answer.

  Bella smiled.

  “How well did you know Sharifi?” Li asked. “Did she talk to you about her work?”

  “Not well.” Bella rubbed nervously at the rash behind her ear, then snatched her hand away like a child caught picking at a scab. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I really don’t know anything.”

  “I’m sure you know more than you think,” Li told her. “It’s just a question of putting the pieces together. Tell me what you remember about the fire. Maybe I can make the connections.”

  “I can’t tell you,” Bella said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Just start at the beginning and tell me whatever you do remember.” “But that’s just it. I don’t. I don’t remember anything.”

  And then she started to cry.

  She cried silently, tears sliding down her cheeks like rain running down the carved face of a statue. Li leaned her elbows on her knees and watched, feeling awkward and useless. She had never seen a grown woman cry like this. It was as if something had come unraveled inside her, as if she had lost whatever obscure sense of shame made people cover their faces when they cried. Lost it, or never had it in the first place.

  Li cleared her throat. “What about before you went down? Or on the way down. You must have taken a shuttle. Maybe talked about going? Something.”

  “No,” Bella said fiercely. “I told you. Nothing.”

  She stood up so abruptly as she spoke that she knocked her coffee cup off the table.

  Li reached for it without thinking. She got her hand under it just in time. The spoon fell to the floor. The saucer landed in her palm. The cup rattled but stayed upright. Nothing spilled. She set the cup back on the table and leaned down to pick up the teaspoon.

  When she looked up, Bella was staring at her, slack-jawed. “How did you catch that?” she whispered. Li held out her arm and showed Bella the network of filaments running just below the skin.

  Bella looked at it like she’d never seen a wire job before. Worse than that, her face was filled with the fascinated revulsion of someone looking at a circus freak. “What—how do they put it inside you?”

  “Viral surgery.”

  “Like Voyt,” she said, and a shudder twisted through her slender body as she spoke the dead man’s name. “In the Syndicates, you’d be a monster.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re not in the Syndicates.”

  Bella put her hand up to touch the cranial socket. “Even this is … a deviance.”

  “Well, you need to access the spinstream if you’re going to work in the UN worlds. It’s how business is done here. How we communicate.”

  “Communicate.” Clearly Bella had never thought of applying that word to what she did instream. “I grew up in a crèche of two thousand. I never looked in a mirror because my face—the crèche face—was all around. I never thought about who I was because I knew, every time I looked around me. I never thought about being alone because I knew I’d never have to be. And now I’m here. I don’t understand anything or anyone. I watch them talk at me, around me. I’m the deviant. And there’s no way out.”

  “There’s always a way out,” Li said.

  “Not for me. Not even the euth ward. I thought I was … all right. Before Hannah came. But when I meet someone like her, someone like you.” She wiped her face, pushed the heavy hair back from her forehead. “I can’t help wanting to talk to you. Wanting to feel that I’m not alone for a minute. And then you show me … that. And I don’t know what to think.”

  “Sharifi was raised by humans,” Li said. “So was I.” It was as close as she’d come in fifteen years to admitting she wasn’t human.

  “Does that make such a difference?” “I guess it does.”

  Bella wiped her eyes and spoke again. “I remember the day before the fire. I worked with Ha—with Sharifi. We talked about going down the next day, but we decided nothing. Not definitely. And the next thing I remember is waking up in the mine after the fire.”

  Her hand crept to her neck again, and Li could see the pulse fluttering under her fingers like a bird in a hunter’s snare.

  “It was dark. I—they were gone.”

  “What do you mean, they were gone? Was there someone else with you before that?”

  “No. Maybe.” She looked confused. “I don’t know.” “Where were you when you woke up?”

  “In the glory hole. It took me a long time to figure that out. The lights had gone out and I didn’t have a lamp. I … I crawled back and forth looking for the ladder. That’s what I was doing when I found Voyt.”

  “Voyt?” Li asked, surprised. He should have been on the level above, at the foot of the stairs up to the Wilkes-Barre. “Are you sure it was Voyt?”

  “I felt his mustache,” Bella said, and again Li saw that shudder of … what? Fear? Revulsion? “I never found a light though. And … there was another body.”

  “At the foot of the stairs.” That would have been Sharifi.

  “No. At the ladder. With Voyt. In the glory hole.” Bella put a hand to her mouth. “It was Hannah, wasn’t it?”

  Li nodded. It had to have been Sharifi; no one else had died down there. But assuming Bella was telling the truth, someone had moved both Voyt and Sharifi up to the level above and left them at the bottom of the main stairs into the Trinidad for the rescue crews to find. Why? And who had done it?

  “I stepped on her.” Bella looked sick. “I didn’t even stop.”

  “She’d been dead a long time by then,” Li lied. “There was nothing you could have done for her.” Bella started to speak, but as she opened her mouth Haas’s voice rang out in the front office.

  “I should go,” Li said.

  “No! Wait.”

  Li had stood up to leave, but now she crouched in front of the woman, looking up into those impossible eyes, searching the perfect oval of her face for a clue, an answer, anything.

  “They got away with it, didn’t they?”
Bella said, still speaking in a harsh whisper. “They killed her. And no one’s going to punish them.”

  Li was close enough to smell her now. Close enough to see the bitter lines around her lovely mouth, the bruised pallor of the flesh stretched across her cheekbones. Bella looked like a fighter who had taken a knockout punch and was waiting for gravity to catch up with her. And in the violet depths of her eyes Li saw the same black emptiness she’d seen down at the cutting face. Only this time she could put a name to it.

  It was hate. Hate that had been tended and fed and watered until it was big enough to burst through her skin and swallow universes.

  Shantytown: 19.10.48.

  Compson’s sun shed a smeary bottle green light on Shantytown and played halfheartedly over the awkward sprawl of mold-fuzzed rooftops. The miscalibrated atmospheric processors produced a sooty drizzle that made all of Shantytown look like it was underwater, and the mud that sucked at Li’s boots gave off a faint whiff of sewage.

  She followed McCuen past pawnshops, tattoo parlors, storefronts advertising bail bonds and cash loans on paychecks. They were off the grid here; the signs flashed with neon and halogen, not spinfeed.THE PIT , she read, andPAYDAY PAWN andMINER ’S EASE , andGIRLSGIRLSGIRLS .

  First shift was on; it showed in the waiting silence of the bars, the absence of able-bodied men on the streets. Still, as they left the commercial strip and dove into the back streets, they drew increasing notice. A clot of pale, ragged children stopped their stickball game and stared. A woman on her way home from picking pea coal off the tailings piles turned clear around to watch them pass. When Li looked back, she saw that the woman’s body was bent into a sharp letter L under her load.

  McCuen picked his way through the unmarked intersections as surely as if he had a map. Each turn took them farther from daylight and deeper into Shantytown’s poorest quarter. Modular housing units began to be replaced by the virusteel and decaying ceramic tiles of settlement-era habitat pods. Occasionally they passed a still-functional airlock, status lights blinking to indicate the operational status of long-idle life-support systems. More often, the remnants of the original colony were mere deadware, the bottom layer in a sedimentary accretion of obsolete technology and home-brewed or scavenged building materials.

  Just as Li was beginning to wonder how many blind corners and unlit side streets McCuen could lead her down, he ducked into a gap between two boarded storefronts, dropped down three steps, and slipped into an alley so narrow that the dank walls nearly met overhead.

  Doors opened off the alley on either side, but they were all closed. The few windows were boarded up or covered with plastic sheeting. The rank smell of vegetein flowed out of the houses like smoke and soaked into the packed hardpan. And underneath it, deep and musky, Li caught smells that had the power to throw her back twenty years into the dim memories of childhood. Sweat. Bad plumbing. Last night’s empty beer bottles. Poverty.

  McCuen walked fast, eyeing the shadows like a man who is only mostly sure he isn’t about to be rolled for his palm implant. He ran his hand along the right wall, counting doors like a miner counting drift turnings. At the eighth door he stopped and tried the latch.

  It swung open, and he ducked in without pausing on the threshold. Li followed.

  They hurried down a dark corridor toward a faint blur of daylight. The corridor dumped them into an interior court with a rough, sloping floor. One side of the court was dark and quiet, stairs leading up toward darkened apartments. The other side opened onto the flying sparks and whining machinery of a welder’s shop. They mounted the single step into the shop just as the welder finished sawing through a sheet-metal panel and straightened up, pushing back his safety goggles.

  McCuen stepped up to the man and pulled a bent door hinge out of his pocket. “My mother asked me to bring this by,” he said, his voice echoing under the shop’s high ceiling. “Can you fix it?”

  “When does she need it by?” “Good Friday, she said.”

  Instead of answering, the welder put his torch down and walked off toward the front of the shop. As Li and McCuen watched, he put up a closed sign and cranked heavy storm shutters down over the shop window, shutting them into darkness.

  “Sit down,” he said, and flicked the switch that lit the shop’s single dim bulb. McCuen sat. Li didn’t.

  “So,” the welder said. “This is her.”

  “Yeah,” McCuen said.

  “Time to put your mouth where your money is,” the welder said.

  Li held out her left arm, sleeve rolled above the elbow. He snapped a tourniquet around it, produced a needle from his apron pocket, and pulled more blood than Li thought could possibly be necessary, even for the most incompetent doctor. “They want a tooth, too,” he said.

  “Oh, Christ,” Li muttered. “For God’s sake.”

  “You didn’t say that before,” McCuen said.

  “Well, I’m saying it now. You can fake blood. Teeth tell the whole story.” He turned back to Li. “You want to talk to the man or not?”

  Li shrugged and opened her mouth.

  She spent the next half hour sitting on a work counter nursing a bloody gap where her bottom right premolar had been, while McCuen paced back and forth impatiently. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped it would; a little worse and her internals would have thrown enough endorphins at it to have her feeling comfortable. As it was, they ignored it and left her to handle it.

  Finally the welder came back, accompanied by a second man who waved them back into the slanting courtyard and toward the stairs.

  “Here?” Li asked.

  But he opened a narrow door tucked beneath the stairs, ducked into another corridor, and led them into an alley even darker and narrower than the one she and McCuen had come in by. Five right turns, two left turns, and three interior courtyards later he turned into a broader alley, this one roofed with grimy, rain-streaked greenhouse sheeting. It ran level, but its walls curved like a snail’s shell, as if responding to some structural logic Li couldn’t fathom.

  A few dozen meters down the spiraling alley, their guide stopped at a nondescript door, knocked, and entered.

  The room inside smelled of old newspapers and boiled cabbage. A pea-coal fire smoldered in the grate, filling the room with greasy smoke. A woman sat at a chipped laminate table holding a child in her lap, reading to him in a low murmur. The woman and child both looked up momentarily, then dropped their heads to the book again, uninterested.

  “Where is he?” their guide asked.

  The woman jerked her chin toward an inner room. As Li passed by the table, she saw there was something wrong with the boy’s upper lip and his legs were withered.

  McCuen started toward the door, but the guide barred his way. He looked hard at her, then shrugged and went over to sit at the table. Li stepped through alone and heard the door swing to behind her.

  She stood in near darkness, cut by a single dusty beam of sunlight stabbing through a storm shutter. As she looked around Li understood the odd curvature of the alley outside. The house was built onto the outside skin of one of the old life-support pods; this room’s three newer walls were native mud brick, but the back wall, the only original one, was a curved gleaming expanse of ceramic compound. An airlock yawned in the center of the old wall, but its control panel had been ripped open and hot-wired long ago. The irising virusteel door panels were permanently stuck at a two-thirds-open position, and someone had hung a blanket over the gap, blocking off Li’s view of the geodesic dome that must lie behind.

  In front of the dead airlock stood a swaybacked table piled with pads and datacubes. A wiry, weathered man sat behind the table: Daahl, the shift foreman Li had met on her first mine visit.

  “Well,” Daahl said, looking straight at Li. “You get curiouser and curiouser.”

  “You too.” Li sat down on the stool across from Daahl’s and leafed through the papers and fiches that littered the table. She saw pit regulations, UNMSC section headings, Ge
neral Assembly minutes, court papers. “You some kind of pit lawyer, Daahl?”

  “You could say that. Care for a beer?” “Thanks.” She took out her cigarettes. “May I?”

  Daahl called into the front room for the beer, then took the cigarette she offered. As she leaned across the table to light it, he grabbed her wrist and turned her hand palm up to look at the faint lines of the wires. “They say you’re a hero, Katie. Pretty good for a pit girl. Tell me, was it worth it?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  They smoked in silence. Someone opened the door, set three beers on the table, and came around the table to sit beside Daahl. As he sat down, the lamp on the table shone full in his face, and Li recognized the young labor rep from the news spin that Haas had gotten so hot under the collar about. “What is this?” she asked. “Interrogation by committee?”

  “This is Leo Ramirez, the IWW rep in town. He’s just going to sit in on our talk. If you don’t object, that is.”

  “Sure, what do I care? Invite the Trotskyites. Hang up a picture of Antonio fucking Gramsci.”

  Ramirez grinned, dark eyes sparkling in his handsome face. “I didn’t think you people were allowed to know who Gramsci was.”

  “‘You people’?” Li muttered under her breath and rolled her eyes.

  Daahl just smiled and kept smoking.

  When he had finished precisely half of the cigarette Li had given him, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, put out the half-smoked butt, wrapped it carefully in the handkerchief, and tucked it back into his pocket.

  This operation took Daahl’s full attention for a good quarter of a minute, and when he finally spoke his voice was as steady as if they were discussing the weather. “Why did you make Haas drain the glory hole?”

  Li shrugged. “I thought he was hiding something about the fire. I wanted to get to the bottom of it before he sent anyone else down.”