Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:

  I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.

  But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.

  Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.

  We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.

  But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.

  And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella: But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?

  Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.

  “Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.

  “How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”

  “Just hold me.”

  So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.

  They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again. “How strong are you?” Bella asked.

  Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”

  “Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach. “A lot stronger,” Li said.

  The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

  Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.

  “What’s it like?”

  “Not nice.”

  “Do you ever feel guilty about it?”

  “Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”

  “But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore. “Kiss me,” she said.

  Li swallowed.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.

  “You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.

  “Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last rational part of her brain. But those were just words, and Bella knew it as well as she did.

  Instead of answering, she dropped to her knees in front of Li and kissed her stomach, her waist, the point of one hip.

  The book fell to the floor and lay there unnoticed. I can stop in a minute, Li told herself as she drew Bella to her. If I want to. I can stop anytime I want to.

  Then she pressed her mouth to Bella’s pale face and buried her hands in the dark torrent of hair and found the lips that were searching for hers.

  * * *

  Bella cried afterward and talked about Sharifi.

  Li asked herself what else she’d expected when Bella showed up on her doorstep, what she’d imagined Bella saw in her besides the echo of the other woman. Neither the questions nor their too-obvious answers made her feel any better.

  “Hannah was a construct herself,” Bella said. “Not part construct, like you. All construct.”

  Li nodded, wondering if Bella knew enough about UN politics to feel the weight of the difference between the two things, to know what mandatory registration meant and what went with the red slash across Sharifi’s passport cover.

  “She was the first person who talked to me, who understood what it was like to be here, alone. To have no one. She went through all that to get where she was. Gave up her sisters, her friends, her world. Everything. You can’t imagine how hard that is.”

  Li said nothing, just lay stroking Bella’s hair, trying to get over feeling ashamed of herself. As she listened to Bella’s memories of Sharifi, she saw that she’d been fooling herself all along. All Bella remembered were the small ordinary things that lovers always remember. And none of that mattered now. Not to Nguyen or Korchow. Not to Li herself. Bella was the only one of them for whom Sharifi was still alive—maybe the only one for whom Sharifi had ever been alive. And in that strangest of moments, Li thought of Cohen and felt even worse.

  “It’s not knowing that’s so hard,” Bella said in a voice that still threatened tears. “If I knew what happened to her. If I knew why. That it was politics. Or money. Or anything.”

  “What does it matter why?”

  “Because,” Bella said, suddenly wracked with sobs, “because I don’t want her to have died trying to help me.”

  After that, there was no more talking. Bella cried herself to sleep. Li lay awake far into the night, holding her frail shoulders, listening to her call out the dead woman’s name in her dreams.

  AMC Station: 25.10.48.

  Hello, Catherine.”

  Li jerked awake to find Bella sitting across the room in her only chair, fully dressed, legs crossed, smoke from one of Li’s cigarettes curling lazily around her head.

  “Forgive the familiarity, Major, but I feel I know you too well for titles. You don’t mind my calling you Catherine, do you? Or would you prefer Caitlyn?”

  The voice had none of Bella’s nervous edge, and the hand holding the cigarette moved with a slightly jerky quality, as if it were being pulled by strings. Bella was wired for a shunt, and someone was along for the ride. A bodysnatcher.

  Li shouldn’t have been as rattled by it as she was. Of course Bella was wired. Probably more subtly and pervasively than Li herself. Still, it wasn’t quite the morning-after breakfast-in-bed scene she’d imagined. She sat up and groped for her clothes, lost somewhere in the tangle at the foot of the bed. Whoever or whatever had gotten hold of Bella, Li wanted to be dressed before she talked to it.

  “Nice tattoo,” the snatcher said while she pulled her shirt over her head. “Fuck off.”

  But Bella’s voice kept talking to her. “You ought to be more careful. You can catch things in tattoo parlors.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “But then you don’t worry much about catching things, do you?” “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Only that it’s always nice to see a XenoGen construct. I feel a certain familial affection for you. Bella’s geneset, for instance”—Bella’s hand gestured at her own body—“is at least 40 percent prebreakaway. Without you she would never have been possible. So unfortunate that the UN lacked the vision to carry that work to its logical conclusion.”

  Li stared at Bella’s face, looked for some clue beneath it to confirm her sudden suspicion. “Korchow?” He smiled a cold smile that had nothing of Bella in it at all. “Clever girl.”

  “Leave Bella out of this, Korchow. She has nothing to do with it.”

  “She has everything to do with it. The choices you make here affect the patrimony of every construct in UN space and beyond it. If you honor what you are—and I very much hope you will—it all changes. If you turn aside and pass by, nothing changes.”

  “Stop talking in riddles, Korchow. What do y
ou want?”

  “Don’t you know?” Bella’s eyes widened in amusement. “Don’t you even suspect?”

  “I can’t give you Sharifi’s dataset,” Li said through clenched teeth. “I don’t even have the thing. As far as I know, she ripped it up and flushed it into orbit.”

  “It’s not about the dataset, Major. It’s gone beyond that.” Bella’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “Nguyen really doesn’t tell you anything, does she? Is it you she doubts? Or the AI? I wonder. Well. What I want is simple. I want to run Sharifi’s experiment again. Or rather, I want you to run it for me.”

  Li stared at him.

  “It’s not all that complicated. I need three things to pull it off.” He ticked the items off on Bella’s slender fingers as he named them. “Item one, a glory hole. Item two, the intraface. Item three, an AI-human team to run the intraface.” He looked up at Li as if he expected an answer, but she had nothing to say. “It took Sharifi years, and a lot of legally questionable maneuvering to put these three necessities together. However, a series of fortuitous coincidences have placed me in a position to, shall we say, stand on her shoulders? I already have half the intraface—the wetware, in fact, which you were so kind as to extract for me.”

  Li caught her breath.

  “Surely you suspected our pretty friend here,” Korchow said. “Bella has been so useful in so many ways. A credit to her Syndicate. In any case, I have the wetware. I also have the glory hole Sharifi found … at least until that idiot Haas starts tampering with it. And”—he smiled triumphantly—“I have you.”

  “So I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Far from it. You would see it yourself—would have seen it long ago—if you hadn’t been lying to the humans so long that you yourself have become confused about who you are. The hardware we have was grown for Sharifi. It would take months, years possibly, to redesign it for someone else. But we don’t have to do that, do we? Because we still have Sharifi.” He gestured toward Li. “She’s sitting right in front of me.”

  “I’m not Sharifi,” Li said.

  “To the intraface you are. None of the cosmetic surgery and camouflage splices, nothing that chop-shop hack did to you changed that.”

  Li’s insides turned over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’ll return to that later,” Korchow said evasively. “In the meantime, you will steal the intraface operating program—software you’ve already stolen once on Nguyen’s orders. Surprised? What did you think you were doing at Metz? Then we will do one final run of Sharifi’s live field experiment. Just to answer a few unresolved questions.”

  Bella’s fingers teased a cigarette out of the pack Li had left on the table and lit it. To Li’s adrenalinehoned senses, the crackling tobacco sounded loud as gunfire.

  “Of course, you will have to undergo a minor surgical procedure,” Korchow said. “But we needn’t worry over details.”

  “I won’t do it,” Li said.

  “Ah, but you will. And let me tell you something more, Major.” Korchow leaned forward confidingly. “I continue to have faith in you. I believe you will help us of your own free will. Because it is what history demands of you. And though you may resent me now, you’ll thank me for helping you to see it. I’m quite, quite sure of that.”

  “You crazy fuck.”

  He smiled. “Just idealistic. Have you read any syndicalist political philosophy? Alienation? The Declineand Fall of Species? ”

  “I saw the movie. And don’t waste your time feeding me some line about gene duty and gaps in the ranks and choosing my part. I’m not playing.”

  “Unfortunate. Though, I must confess, not entirely unexpected.”

  Korchow lifted Bella’s hand, and a pale ideogram appeared under the curve of her palm. It rotated, unfolded, blossomed into a dog-eared piece of yellow paper covered with close-set numbers.

  “What is that?” Li asked, and even she could hear the tremor in her voice. “I think you know,” he said as he handed it to her.

  It felt real in her fingers, so real that she imagined for a moment she could just rip it up, burn it, get rid of it somehow. But she knew that the rough nap of the paper under her hands, even the slightly musty smell of it, was illusion. The original was somewhere far away. Down on Compson’s where Korchow was. Maybe even back on Gilead.

  “I don’t know what you think this is,” she said, though of course she did know. “Read it,” Korchow suggested.

  Block letters ran across the top of the page:REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES ,S .A .,J .M .JOSS ,M .D .G . P .,B .S .,SPECIALIZING IN ARTIFICIAL REPRODUCTION TECHNOLOGIES AND REMEDIAL GENETIC ENGINEERING . Below the letters were a series of numbers: medical codes to the left, prices to the right. The prices were given in both UN currency and AMC scrip.

  Li didn’t have to check her oracle to know what the codes stood for; she already knew. And even if she hadn’t known, there was her own signature, or rather Caitlyn Perkins’s signature, scrawled below the tightly printed boilerplate of the medical release.

  “Where did you get this?” she whispered.

  “Where do you think, Major?”

  “I watched Joss burn my file. He burned it in the sink. I wouldn’t leave until he’d done it.” “Apparently,” Korchow said, “he didn’t burn everything. People are so untrusting in human space.” She sat, head down, staring at the paper. When Korchow reached out to take it back, she made no effort to stop him.

  “Well,” he said, folding the slip of paper and whisking it back out of realspace. “We all make mistakes. The thing now is to put regret behind you and go forward.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want this little venture to work out satisfactorily for all of us. But at the moment I just want you to make a choice. If you decide to help me, then you will go to Shantytown twelve hours from now and meet with a man who will give you the data you need for the first stage of the operation. And you will bring the AI with you. Or at least an assurance that he will participate.”

  It took Li several moments to realize he was talking about Cohen. “He’s not under contract to us,” she argued. “He’s a freelancer. I can’t make him do shit.”

  “I imagine you can make him do quite a lot, actually.”

  “You’d imagine wrong, then.”

  “Oh? Why don’t we ask him?”

  “Oh, sure,” Li said mockingly. “What do I do, draw a pentagram and say his name three times?”

  Korchow smiled. “What an amusing idea. I think a simple and sincere call for assistance will suffice, however. Try it.”

  She stared at Korchow. But then she did try it. And there Cohen was, real as a government paycheck.

  He wore a summer suit the color of pomegranates. Wherever he’d been when she called him, he was in the middle of getting dressed. He leaned forward, still peering into a mirror that was no longer there, knotting a mushroom brown silk tie around his throat.

  “Oh, my,” he said. He cocked his head in apparent confusion and turned slowly around until he caught sight of Li. “This is a nice surprise,” he said, blinking and smiling.

  Then he took in her state of undress, the rumpled bed, Bella sitting across the room. His smile vanished.

  “Korchow,” he said in a voice of terrifying gentleness. “I can’t say it’s a pleasure, so I won’t say anything.”

  “I thought we talked about this, Cohen,” Li said. “I thought you were going to stop spying on me.”

  He turned back to her. “What a nasty little word. Of course I would never spy on you. And if I do assign an autonomous agent or two to keep an eye on you, it’s only to prevent unpleasant people”—he glanced in Korchow’s direction—“from making trouble for you.”

  Bella cleared her throat meaningfully, and Cohen looked at her again.

  “So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still wor
king for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”

  “Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”

  Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.

  “You can go, I said.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow. “Yes I am. I can take care of this. And don’t eavesdrop!”

  He cast a last look at Korchow, frowning. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him, Catherine. He’s … well, he’s not nice.”

  “Go home, Cohen.”

  “Going,” he said. And then he did go, leaving a subtle whiff of hand-rolled cigars and extra-vielle behind him.

  “Well,” Korchow said. “I think we understand each other.” “What if I don’t show tonight?”

  Korchow merely moved Bella’s fingers in answer, and the tattered yellow receipt reappeared, fluttering as if it had been caught by a stiff breeze. “That would be regrettable.”

  Li looked at the thing in his hands and shivered. If that receipt ever ended up in front of the Service, they would check it out. They would have to. And when they checked, it would be over.

  Fifteen years ago she’d had high confidence. The chop-shop geneticist hadn’t been much, but he’d been the best the meager payout on her father’s life insurance could buy; and his work, if not inspired, had at least been competent. Now, she knew its limits. Knew them in her gut with a wrenching certainty. She’d seen the gene work the best Ring-side labs could do, the work the Corps techs at Alba did. She’d slipped through the cracks this long only because there was no real proof—no proof damning enough to justify testing her. One fifteen-year-old scrap of paper could change that. And when it did, the whole crushing weight of the Security Council bureaucracy would fall on her like mine overload dropping into a collapsing tunnel. Losing her commission would be the least of it. She’d be lucky—or irretrievably indebted to Cohen’s high-priced lawyers—if she escaped without a prison sentence.