Spin 01 - Spin State

by Chris Moriarty

  FreeNet’s AIs had been the first to catch the transmission, just as Sharifi must have planned it. Once they realized what they had, they spun it to every channel, every terminal, every press pool in UN space. In a matter of minutes, reporters were calling the General Assembly and the mining companies for position statements.

  It wasn’t over yet, of course. There would be debates, compromises, and unholy alliances in the days to come. But they would happen onstream, in public. Compson’s fate wouldn’t be sealed in Nguyen’s office or other equally discreet offices. All of humanity, UN and Syndicate alike, would have a say in it. Sharifi had done that, at least. Her death, Mirce’s death, Cohen’s death had done that.

  Security was deserted; everyone was on the street, dealing with the changes, trying to figure out who was in charge now. Li collapsed in a chair, rubbing her eyes. She wanted a shower. And then she needed to see Sharpe, probably.

  She looked up. Bella stood over her.

  “What are you still doing here?” she asked.

  “Who killed her?” It was the first thing Bella had said to Li since they’d hit station. “What does it matter, Bella? It’s over.”

  “It’s not over for me.”

  Li stared. The room was so silent she could hear her own pulse drumming in her ears. Bella’s body was taut, every muscle rigidly contracted. Her hands were trembling, the nails dirty and broken. There was blood on her. Her own blood. Li’s blood. Kintz’s blood.

  “I have to know,” she said.

  Li thought back to the vision of Sharifi in the glory hole. To the lost, desperate, adoring way Bella had looked at Sharifi. Whatever else Bella had done, she’d loved her. And been loved in return. Li was sure of that much.

  “Voyt killed her,” she said. “I don’t believe you.”

  She looked Bella square in the face, unblinking. “It’s true.” “I have a right to know. I need to know.”

  Li sighed. “You know already, Bella. Think about it.”

  Li saw the knowledge unfold in her, blossoming like a night flower. She put a hand over her mouth, turned on her heel, and walked across the holding pen into the bathroom. Li heard her retch again and again until there couldn’t have been anything left to bring up.

  When she came back her face and arms were wet, and there was water on her clothes. But she looked clear-eyed, calm, reasonable. “Who was on-shunt?”

  Li started to answer, but Bella spoke before she could. “It was Haas, wasn’t it? You don’t have to say it, just nod.”

  Li nodded.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Li shifted in her chair. “What do you mean?” “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “You didn’t kill her, Bella. No one’s crazy enough to hold someone responsible for crimes committed when they’re under a shunt.”

  “A crime was committed.” Bella still sounded rational, but Li was beginning to hear an ominous edge in her voice. “I thought that was what you were doing here. Finding her murderer. Punishing him. Do I have to show you the way to his office? Or was all that talk about right and wrong and punishment just something you made up to get me to believe in you?”

  Li pushed her chair back and stood, swaying with exhaustion.

  “Sit down, Bella.” She put a hand on Bella’s shoulder, steered her to a chair and pushed her into it. “Listen to yourself. You want me to march over and arrest Haas? On whose authority? He killed Sharifi on what amounts to Security Council orders. No one’s going to punish him. He won’t spend a day in jail, no matter what you or I do.”

  “He killed her.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! She was as good as selling information to the Syndicates.”

  Neither of them breathed for a moment. Then Bella walked across the room, opened the door, stepped into the street. She turned and looked at Li, her eyes glistening. “So you won’t do it?”

  “What’s the point?”

  “What’s in it for you, you mean.”

  Li grabbed the chair Bella had been sitting in and slammed it down hard enough to set the pens and coffee cups rattling on the nearby desks.

  “Just leave, Bella. Leave and don’t come back and don’t ever talk to me again. Because if I have to look at your face for one more second, I swear I won’t be responsible for myself. I lost friends down there. And I killed four people to save your worthless carcass. What I do and why and what I get out of it is none of your fucking business!”

  Bella stared for a moment, then turned on her heel and left.

  Li stood gripping the chair, white-knuckled, while the big doors swung to and fro, regained their equilibrium, and came to a standstill. Then she borrowed someone’s forgotten uniform coat, curled up on the duty-room couch, and cried herself into a numb, dead, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  She woke up falling.

  She’d had enough stations shot out from under her in the war to know the feeling. AMC station had just lost rotational stability. And they were about to lose gravity.

  Even as she sat up, the emergency systems kicked in and she felt the lurching, shuddering deceleration of four thousand permanent residents and all the clutter that went with them. Her arms and legs lightened, her stomach lurched as the grav lines wavered. The lights dimmed and the ventilation ducts overhead fell silent. The systems picked up again, but the rush of air was fainter now, the overhead panels dimmer. Someone had just shut down the massive Stirling cycle engines buried in the station’s core; they were running on emergency power.

  There was still partial gravity, enough to make things easier than they would be in a very few minutes. She tapped in to the station net, trying to figure out what was going on; but the net was down, or she was locked out of it. She got carefully to her feet and began moving out into the main room of the HQ, where the duty officer hovered behind the counter looking bewildered by this sudden reversal of the laws of gravity as stationers knew them.

  “What’s going on?” Li asked.

  He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways. Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.

  “Christ. Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough. Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.

  It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.

  * * *

  She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely. It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the starfilled floorport.

  She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye. He sat in the chair behind the big desk. His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.

  Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.

  She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk. Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest. Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing. Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.

  Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.

  Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft. And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.

  She was breaking him. Slowly, pitilessly, irresistibly. She had locked him into the loop shunt somehow and was running the whole vast power of the worldmind through him, killing him.

  Li looked at Haas, slumped
over the glowing desk. She looked at Bella’s peaceful face, at the hair circling her head like the flaming corona of an eclipsed star.

  She is coming down from the mountains, she thought. Singing. With stones in her hands. She called Security.

  “I’m in Haas’s office,” she said. “Don’t send anyone. Everything’s fine here.”

  SLOW TIME

  [There lies] the mountain called Atlas, very tapered and round; so lofty, moreover, that the top (it is said) cannot be seen, the clouds never quitting it either summer or winter … The natives are reported not to eat any living thing and never to have any dreams.

  —Herodotus

  She didn’t try to see Bella again until the night before she left—and by that time the guards wouldn’t let her in.

  They were planetary militia, whatever that meant now, and they weren’t taking orders from anyone in UN uniform.

  “You’re not authorized anymore,” said a sergeant Li belatedly recognized as one of Ramirez’s fellow kidnappers. He squared his shoulders as if expecting her to fight and squirmed his feet deeper into the zero-g loops.

  Behind him she could see the corridor leading to Haas’s office. It was shut down, life support ticking over at the bare minimum required to keep the air breathable and the water running.

  A group of miners shoved past Li, smelling like they’d just come up from the pit, and pulled along the guide ropes toward the office.

  “And they’re authorized?” she asked incredulously.

  The sergeant shrugged. “They’re regulars. Cartwright cleared them. What do you want from me? No UN personnel past this point without specific authorization. That’s cleared all the way up the line to Helena. Which is as far as the line goes now.”

  “Fine,” Li said. “Call Cartwright.”

  * * *

  When she finally got into Haas’s office, she barely recognized it.

  Only the immense gleaming desk and the starlight seeping in through the floorport were the same. The rest of the room had become a shadowy chaos of charms, candles, statues, prayer plaques. Flames burned round and unearthly in zero g, hanging above the candlewicks like will-o’-the-wisps. Rosaries swayed like seaweed in unseen air currents. Wax from the candles floated around the room, dangerously hot, and accreted on every surface.

  And then there were the people. The believers, the doubters, and the merely curious trooped through one after another. They whispered. They stared. They prayed. They asked questions.

  Most of all, though, they asked for voices. Voices of lost friends. Voices of loved ones. Voices that Bella delivered to them.

  She hung above the desk, just where Li had last seen her, a space-age sybil suspended in zero gravity. She spoke in a hundred voices. She spoke the names of the dead and pulled their words from the darkness, pushing back—just for a moment—the shadows of loss and doubt and death.

  Li stood in a dark corner and watched. The pilgrims must be feeding Bella, she realized. They must be clothing her, washing her. Someone must be brushing that coal black halo of hair. Did she care? Did she even notice them? What deathly twilight had she passed into?

  Li watched long enough to learn the rhythms of the air currents that traveled through the chamber, the way they played along Bella’s skirt hem and turned her hair into a Medusa’s crown. She watched the sun set beneath her feet, and the room fade into the bleak blue and gray of starlight.

  She thought Bella was asleep, but around sunset she opened her eyes and looked straight at Li as if she’d locked on to the sound of her breathing. “Is it you?” Li asked.

  “It’s always me.”

  The air crackled with static, setting Li’s hair on end and sucking the thin silk of Bella’s dress against her legs. Her skirt had hitched up above her knees. It bothered Li to think that the miners would be trooping in and out of the room staring at her, and that Bella was too far gone into the void of the worldmind to notice. She stepped forward, grabbed the thin cloth and pulled it down around Bella’s ankles, covering her.

  Bella smiled. As if she knew what Li was thinking. As if she were laughing at her.

  “Are you happy?” Li asked.

  “I’m sorry about your mother. And Cohen.” Li swallowed. “Are they all right?”

  “Mirce is. The AI is … more complicated.” “Is he—?”

  “We’re all alive, Catherine. Can’t you feel us? We feel you. Every part of you, every voice, every network, no matter where you are in the station. We love you.”

  Li closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. “Katie,” Bella said. It was her father’s voice.

  “Don’t! I won’t listen!”

  Bella shrugged, but when she spoke again it was in her own voice. “Most people find it gives them comfort.”

  “I don’t want comfort.”

  She did, though. She wanted it so much it terrified her. She wondered if Mirce’s voice would come out of Bella’s perfect lips. Or McCuen’s voice. She could ask, she supposed. What harm would it do? But she couldn’t ask for the one voice she wanted to hear. Because if she heard that voice, even once, she’d never have the strength to walk away from it.

  “Are you sure?” Bella asked.

  Li turned around and left and didn’t look back.

  * * *

  Nguyen’s call was waiting when she got back to her quarters. “Not answering the phone these days?” Nguyen said.

  Li shrugged.

  “I see. Playing the bereaved widow. Well, you made enough money off him that I guess you should at least go through the motions. Who would have thought he’d leave you everything?”

  Li kept her mouth shut; it wasn’t even worth trying to find out how Nguyen had gotten hold of that piece of information.

  “You won’t keep any of it, of course. The advocate general will challenge it. And win. Half of the hardware Cohen’s system ran on is covered by government patents and licenses. They’ll bankrupt you.”

  Li looked down at her hands, took a breath. “Is that all you called about, or was there something else?”

  Nguyen smiled coldly and reached outside the VR field to retrieve a dog-eared yellow piece of paper. “We know. We know everything. It’s over, Li.”

  “If it was really over, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

  “I’ve been authorized to offer you a way out. Under the circumstances, we decided … discretion was the best approach.”

  Li waited.

  “You’ll ship back to Alba with the rest of the station personnel for debriefing. When you arrive, you’ll request a leave of absence for health reasons. Once things have settled down a bit, you’ll resign. Quietly. A suitable job will be found for you in the private sector. And we’ll all forget about what happened or didn’t happen on Compson’s.”

  “That’s clear enough.” “Good, then. It’s agreed.” “No.”

  Nguyen caught her breath and leaned forward almost imperceptibly in her chair. “Do you actually think you can weather this scandal? Are you really that arrogant?”

  “You have the right to drum me out of the Service. I’d probably do the same in your place.” Li laughed briefly. “Hell, in your place I’d probably put a bullet in my skull and call it even. But you don’t have the right to make me resign. You don’t have the right to make me slink off quietly.”

  “That’s pretty sanctimonious under the circumstances.”

  “Maybe.”

  Comprehension dawned on Nguyen’s face, only to be chased away by disdain. “You weren’t thinking of the money at all, were you?” she asked. “You actually talked yourself into thinking you were doing the right thing. Or you let Cohen talk you into it. Did you actually think it was your decision to make? Did you think you had the right to put billions of UN citizens at risk because of your moral scruples?”

  Li didn’t answer.

  “Amazing,” Nguyen said. “But then traitors never seem to feel the normal rules apply to them, do they?” Li didn’t have an answer for that either.<
br />
  “I’m going to pretend we didn’t have this talk,” Nguyen said after a moment. “You’ll have months of slow time on the evac ship to think about what you want to do when you dock at Alba. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t even get on that ship. Trust me, you won’t find much to come home to. I intend to spend the next little while making sure of that.”

  Li laughed, suddenly overcome by the ridiculousness of the situation. She shook her head and grinned into the VR field. “You’re fantastic, Helen.”

  Nguyen blinked, paled. “I always hated that look on Cohen’s face,” she said. “I hate it even more on yours.”

  * * *

  In the end they shut down the last working Bose-Einstein relay and quarantined the whole system. There was no other way to keep the worldmind off the spinstream, no other way to keep it from sweeping through every UN system and rifling through every network. And even before the last ship pulled out there were rumors coursing through streamspace that the AIs would defy the quarantine, that the Consortium had sent out sublight probes to reinitiate contact, that FreeNet, or at least part of it, would be opened to the worldmind.

  Li caught her ship in a daze, too numb to care where she was going, or what Nguyen would have waiting for her when she got there. She clung to the guy ropes of a half-ton flat of emergency rations as the ship lumbered out of port and watched Compson’s World slip away from her for the last time through the cargo bay’s narrow viewport.

  The ship cast off and drifted a little before its maneuvering engines stuttered into life. The station’s belly loomed above her, slipped sternward, and was replaced by stars and darkness. The solar arrays brushed by like wings, their frozen joints crusted with eight days’ worth of unthawed condensation ice. Then they were out in open space, and she could look back and see it all spread out below her.

  The station was crippled, dying. The Stirling engines had shut down in the first crisis, and once the massive interlocking rings stopped spinning against each other it was only a matter of time until the living and working spokes faded into flat, cold, weightless darkness. A third of the outer ring was still lit up and functioning. The rest was dark already, the shadowed side of a jeweled carnival mask.