But it was him. It was the father Li remembered from his worst sickness. So thin, so pale, so collapsed in on himself that he was barely bigger than she was. He raised a wasted hand to wipe away tears she hadn’t known she was crying. She collapsed into his arms and buried her face in the cloth of his shirt that smelled of rain and of coal dust and of him.
We are so glad. The thought swept through her more fiercely and intimately than even Cohen’s thoughts. So glad it was you.
We, Li said.
Shall I show you?
He pulled away from her, his hands lingering on hers. He took a step backward. He reached up to unbutton his shirt.
Li flinched, hands jerking up to cover her eyes. It was the gesture of a terrified child, the child whose growing up had been wiped out of her jump by jump, leaving no bridge from past to present, no path from her old fears to the understanding she should have grown into in the years since her leaving.
There are no monsters, the thing that wore her father’s flesh said. Not down here. Not even you.
He unbuttoned his shirt with agonizing slowness. She watched, button by button, breath by breath, knowing that her heart would stop if she had to look at that black horror that haunted all her dreams.
But the dream had changed. Or she had.
His body was a map now. The life of the planet coursed through him—this planet that had given birth to both of them. His wasted muscles were mountain ranges. Oceans waxed and waned in the bone house of his ribs. The secrets of the Earth lived in him.
She dropped to her knees, dazed, ears ringing with the song of the rock around her. She laid her hands on him, learned him, studied him. She passed from not knowing to knowing in the space of a touch. The world reached out through him and changed her, and she let it. Just as Sharifi had.
Do you understand?he asked. Do you see what this world could be? What it wants to be?
Yes.
Do you believe in it?
Yes.
Do you?
She trembled. Because he wasn’t asking what she believed in. He was asking what she was willing to do about it.
“I can’t,” she said. “Don’t ask me to. I can’t do what Sharifi did.”
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
White light. Open spaces. The sweep of a hawk’s wing above her.
She stood on a dry plain. Silver-green sage covered the hills. Sunflowers marched across the valley like the squads and battalions of an army in parade-ground finery. The wall behind her was overrun with blooming jasmine, and the musky smell of the blossoms was as hot and exotic as the brilliant plain before her.
She jumped at the sound of a footfall behind her. A tall, long-limbed girl strode across a courtyard under the blazing sun, white skirts kicking up in front of her. Red dirt coated her bare feet, faded into the tawny gold of her ankles. Brown curls blew around her face and veiled the smiling mouth, the hazel eyes.
Cohen?
She felt him in her mind, restful and reassuring after the terrifying presence in the glory hole.
“The whole planet is alive,” she said, “isn’t it?”
“Alive,” he repeated. She felt him turning the idea over, pondering it, poking at it. “I guess that’s as good a word as any other.”
“What does it want?”
“To talk to us. Or to talk to our planets, I imagine. I doubt it understands that we’re not mere parts of a larger being.”
“So what do we do now?”
He gazed down at her, squinting a little in the bright sunlight. “That’s not quite the same question for me as it is for you.”
Her stomach wrenched as she remembered what she was here for. To hand the condensates over to Nguyen and TechComm. To do what Sharifi, in the end, had not been willing to do. Was she even now walking in Sharifi’s footsteps, stumbling through the same impossible choices that had led Sharifi to her death?
“What would you do?” she asked Cohen.
“What would I do? Or what would I do if I were you?”
She looked into Chiara’s eyes. She could see Cohen lurking behind them now, so close she could almost catch him, almost know what it was to be that shifting, kaleidoscopic many-in-one.
“Both,” she said.
“For me it’s simple. Or rather it’s a matter of choices I made so long ago that they don’t seem like choices anymore. I’d like to be able to say that it’s a matter of principle, that I don’t think TechComm or Korchow or anyone else has the right to control Compson’s World. But it’s not that. It’s just … curiosity, I suppose.” He paused, looking down at the rich dirt blowing past their feet. “You have more to lose than I do, of course.”
She took her hands from his, unable to bear the mingling of physical intimacy and this newer and more threatening intimacy. “Are we safe here?”
“It makes no difference; we couldn’t leave if we wanted to. The worldmind wants us here.” “The worldmind? Where’d you get that from?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
They walked under the hot sun of a world that had been dead for two centuries. The far fields had been cut already. Trout-colored horses grazed among the knee-high sunflower stalks, their silver tails swishing back and forth like pendulums. Birds stabbed for worms in the furrows, and the tall stalks harbored invisible singers that Li’s oracle told her were called crickets.
She’d never seen a cricket, and she kept stopping, searching through the tall green stalks for them until Cohen laughed and asked if she wanted him to catch her one.
“No!” she said, speaking too quickly, too sharply. A memory welled up in her, clear as running water across the stretch of more than twenty years.
Her twelfth birthday. Her father had bought her a small-gauge over-under Gunther. It was fake, a rimmanufactured knockoff, but it was still an outrageously extravagant present. They climbed into the hills at dawn, crossing creeks heavy with red spring runoff, too excited to stop and look for the stocked fish that lurked in the riffles. They penetrated far enough into the canyons to smell native air and feel their breath start to shorten. When her father started coughing, they dropped altitude and hiked sideways along the cut line of an old lake bed.
They found the magpies just as the sun began to silver their backs and flash blue fire off their long tail feathers.
The magpies made a game of it, just as they made a game of everything. They hopped from tree to tree flaunting themselves, cackling at the slow, stupid, earthbound humans. She loved them. She loved their defiant beauty, the strong curve of chest to wing to pinion, their gleefully unashamed thievery. She wanted one of them more than she could ever remember wanting anything.
She snugged the shotgun into her shoulder the way her father had shown her. She led the target, reveling in the dog-sharp reflexes that had been her construct’s birthright long before the first piece of Corps wetware burrowed into her spine. She squeezed the trigger softly, felt the give of it, the final burr of resistance as the slack of the uncocked mechanism gave way to the sharp, clean union of brain, trigger, firing pin. She fired, and the blue-black-and-white glory that had been a magpie burst into a tumbling whirl of blood and feathers.
It fell into a puddle. She remembered that very clearly. She remembered running, impatient to see the bird, to get it in her hands, to possess it. She remembered kneeling in the dirt, picking up a broken, bedraggled, limp thing with a shattered chest. She remembered crying. It was the last time she could remember that Caitlyn Perkins had cried. She certainly hadn’t cried when her father died.
She surfaced from the memory to feel Cohen beside her, inside her. Are you the hunter or the bird? he asked. A question only Cohen could ask.
She looked into Chiara’s gold-flecked eyes and thought that the world was the bird, and the miners were, and the crystals. Everything people used and used up. “I guess I’m both,” she said. And she felt Cohen accept both the spoken answer and the unspoken one.
In place of a reply, he reached over her
shoulder and plucked a cricket out of the greenery to sit chirping on his outstretched palm. “Disappointed?”
“No,” Li said.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“It’s a she?”
“We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
He put his hand against a sunflower stalk. The cricket marched onto the stalk with slow dignity, sat down, and went on singing as if its visit to Cohen had been just another walk under the warm sun.
“How did you do that?” Li asked.
“Oh, this is all me. It’s a place I used to have in Spain. Gone now, of course. We’re in one of my memory palaces. Whatever the crystals are doing to us, they’re using my networks to do it. They’ve just … locked us in a back room while they search the house, I guess you could say.”
“Christ!”
“Yes. Well. There’s not much we can do about it. And you don’t want to see what’s happening out there. It has a lot more to do with shooting magpies than catching crickets.”
She stared at him, stricken, but he was already bending over the cricket, talking about what crickets did and ate, how they used their legs to make that fantastic, improbable noise. “They always liked hot, dry places,” he said. “Spain. Texas. You couldn’t wake up in one of those places and not know just where you were in the world.”
“They’re extinct?”
“Long, long before you were born, my dear.”
“They’re going to turn Compson’s World into another Earth. Another Gilead. And we can’t stop it, can we?”
“We can change the battle lines.”
“Just buying a little time, Cohen. Is it worth it?”
“For me it is. If ALEF gets the intraface.”
“And what if the price of getting the intraface is losing the planet to the Syndicates?”
“I don’t have any grudge against the Syndicates. Maybe you do. Maybe you’re right to.” He sounded impatient. “I can’t choose for you.”
Li scuffed her feet in the dirt, kicking up red dust puffs from the furrow bottoms. She reached out to Cohen, felt the shape and breadth and complexity of him. He reached out just as she did, and they got tangled in each other and backed away again. They were dancing around each other, she realized, putting up a new wall for each one they dismantled, closing another door for each door they opened. Acting as if they had all the time in the world, instead of none at all.
“Cohen?” she asked.
“What?” He had gone on a little ahead, and now he drifted back and stood facing her.
“What you said back on Alba about … AIs. About the way they’re put together. Do you think a person can change something like that? Change their code? Change what they were made to be?”
“Are we still talking politics?” She felt the flurry of unspoken questions behind his words. “No. Or … not only politics.”
He gave her one of those looks he’d gotten into the habit of throwing at her lately. A look that put everything in her hands, that laid everything he wanted right out in front of her and left her with no excuses, no evasions.
She met his eyes. The moment when she could have laughed, or glanced away, or turned aside passed.
“I think a person can try to change,” Cohen said. “I think trying means something, even if you fail. I think even wanting to try means something.”
Li screwed up her nerve as if she were forcing herself out of a high window. “I hope we get out of here in one piece,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him while she said it, but she had said it.
And she had said it knowing that he knew what she meant by it. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it was something.
“I hope so too,” Cohen said. A sly smile played around his lips. “Now what’s this nonsense with Bella?”
Li flushed. “Nothing. What you said. Nonsense.” She looked up to find the hazel eyes measuring her. “What?”
“Prove it.”
His voice was light, making a joke of it, but just for a moment Li caught a flash of the want behind the words. Her stretched out on top of him. Her mouth on his. Her knee pushing Chiara’s thighs apart.
“And just what the hell would that prove?” she asked. He shrugged.
“Sex isn’t a promise, Cohen.”
“Not even a promise to try to want to try?”
“Well. Maybe it’s that.” She stepped toward him. “Prove it, huh? Do you have any idea how childish that sounds? Who knew you were such a baby?”
Chiara was enough taller than Li that she had to stand a little on her toes to reach her lips. She thrust her hands into the honey-colored curls, smelling the clean, warm, safe smell that followed Cohen everywhere. Feeling the flush of desire that coursed through him at her touch.
That first kiss was slow, tentative. As if they had suddenly, after all the time and all the battles and secrets they shared, become shy with each other. Even on the link, Cohen was silent. He gave her Chiara’s lips, soft, open, yielding. But the rest of him—the things she had glimpsed among the wild roses, the feelings he had always spoken of even when she least wanted to hear him—all that was as ghostly and insubstantial as second-hand memories.
Li pulled back and looked up into the hazel eyes. “Are you going to help, or were you just planning to stand there?”
She felt Cohen’s brushfire laughter licking along the link between them. And something below the laughter. A doubting, trembling, questioning something. “I’ve been chasing you for a long time,” he said. “Maybe I need to be chased a little.”
She smiled—and she didn’t know whether she was smiling at him or at herself or at the whole hopeful ridiculous mess they’d made of things.
“I think I can manage that,” she said.
* * *
She was cold when she woke, cold to the point of pain. Her head ached. Her mouth felt as dry as if she were coming out of cryo. Someone was shaking her.
She opened her eyes and saw Bella. No. Korchow. It had to be Korchow.
“I’m paying you to do a job,” he said, “not fuck in the fields. What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but all that came out was a weak croak. McCuen’s face appeared above and behind Bella’s. “She’s going into shock,” he said. Korchow brushed the words aside impatiently. “Where’s Cohen?” he asked.
She panicked. Where was he? What had he said when they first felt the worldmind? That it was tasting them? Using them? How much of Cohen could it use before what made him Cohen was gone? How much time did they have?
Korchow pulled her into a more or less sitting position and trickled some water into her mouth. Her thirst shocked her, and when she checked her internals she saw it had been almost two hours since they’d reached the glory hole. How much time was unfolding for every minute she spent in those visions? Were these the dreams Dawes had spoken of? The dreams the first settlers had warned Compson about?
Those who hear it stay and listen and sleep and die there.
She shuddered hard enough to knock her teeth against the rim of the bottle Korchow was holding to her lips.
“You need to make contact again,” Korchow said.
She laughed bitterly. “They contacted us,” she said. But that was Cohen speaking—speaking through her mouth in a way that had somehow come to seem normal, reasonable. “They’ve been doing it for days, weeks. From the first time Catherine came down here.”
The blood drained from Korchow’s face. “Sharifi said that.”
“So Sharifi woke them up,” Cohen said. “Or blasting that galley through the Trinidad did. And now that they’re awake they expect to be listened to.”
“Then God help us,” Korchow whispered.
Li’s heart skittered and locked in to a fast uneven rhythm. “What really happened down here?”
“One minute everything was fine,” he answered. “The next I was off the shunt. As if an immense arm had reached out and … pushed me. I never got back on.”<
br />
He’s telling the truth, Cohen whispered in her head. Don’t you see what happened? What must have happened?
Li caught the edge of the thought as it swirled through his mind. But all she saw was a confused image of Sharifi, betrayed and frightened. And whether the image sprang from Cohen’s mind or hers she couldn’t tell.
Then she was back in the glory hole.
* * *
“I’m on,” Sharifi said.
Bella started. Voyt turned away from the monitor he’d been watching, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two women. As if, Li realized, he too were waiting for something.
She heard Cohen echo the thought and knew that he was there with her. She reached out cautiously, touched him, was comforted.
Bella stepped forward. “You have the dataset?”
“Can you see what Bella sees, Korchow? Can you hear them?” “No.”
“Then you don’t know yet.” Sharifi smiled. “But you will.”
Voyt made a spitting noise.
“Remember,” Sharifi said. “You have two weeks to get it there. Miss that deadline and all deals are off.”
Korchow dipped his head in an almost courtly gesture. Then he was gone, and Bella was standing there, blinking, swaying a little as she took back her own posture and balance.
Sharifi reached out and smoothed Bella’s hair back from her face. It was a protective gesture, a gesture that could have been a mother’s as easily as a lover’s, and Bella moved her head like a cat to meet the caress. She stared into Sharifi’s eyes, devouring her, surrendering to her. She drank up Sharifi as if she were the only real thing in the universe.
Sharifi touched her temple and flipped a contact switch. She held out her left hand, palm open. Bella set her own palm against it, and Li saw subliminals flicker into life in Sharifi’s peripheral vision.
Sharifi’s internals announced. Numbers spun down, counting out the units of a massive data transfer.
Her eyes on the numbers, Sharifi didn’t see Voyt step toward her. But Li saw him. And she saw the charged and primed Viper in his hand.
The next thing she knew, Sharifi was picking herself up off the ground and pulling a gun out of her coverall pocket. “You’re too late, Voyt. It’s already done.”
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