Spin 01 - Spin State (13 page)

She cross-checked NowNet’s office directory against Sharifi’s on-station user files and found what she was looking for within seconds: a call on the day before Sharifi’s death to one Gillian Gould, Senior Science Editor. A long call. She read Gould’s address out loud, told the wall to put her through, and stood tapping her foot impatiently while the underpowered station net struggled through the Ring-side server’s handshakes and VR resets.

Finally the NowNet logo blossomed on-screen, followed a half beat later by a 2D view of an attractive young man sitting at a suspiciously neat desk. He wore the inevitable Ring-side business blue suit, and his neck was encased in the stiff bead-and-bone latticework of a tribal collar.

The collar had to be fake; no mere salary puller could afford genuine Earth imports. But even the good fakes were expensive. And this was a good fake. All in all, the living, breathing image of the up-andcoming junior editor.

“Gillian-Gould’s-office-may-I-ask-who’s-calling?” he said in a tone that told Li precious few people talked to Gillian Gould without appointments.

Then he looked into his monitor and nearly jumped out of his ergonomically correct chair. “Dr. Sharifi! Sorry. If you’ll just give me a minute, I’ll get her out of her meeting for you.”

Li blinked in surprise, but he was gone before she could say anything. She accessed the wall settings and saw that Sharifi had activated an extrapolated presentation program—a streamspace interface that put a business-appropriate talking head on the line so you could hold business meetings in your shorts, or while you were eating breakfast, or whatever. Li hesitated, then deactivated the presentation program just as Gould came on-screen.

Gould had perfect posture and the sort of washed-out Anglo-Saxon face that Li had never been able to read worth a damn. Like her assistant, she wore a tribal collar. Unlike her assistant’s collar, Gould’s was genuine. It nestled against her throat, half-hidden by a smoke gray linen blouse. But the bone was real bone; the beads antique bottle glass; the knots actually hand-tied by some shirtless old woman in the Sub-Saharan Cultural Preserve. And all shipped into orbit at a cost Li couldn’t begin to imagine.

Nobody was better at looking rich than rich liberals. “Hannah!” Gould said, smiling. Then she saw Li.

The smile shut down like someone had shot the lights out. “What is this?” Gould asked, her blue eyes cold enough to freeze running water.

Li swiped the scan plate at the bottom of the screen and let her ID do the talking. “Just a few routine questions.”

“Fine,” Gould said. “But I’m recording this.”

Li blinked and put on her boring face. “The official Fuhrman-locked recording will be available to you immediately, Ms., ah”—she paused and pretended to look down at the book in her hand—“Gould. After all, this isn’t a criminal investigation.”

“Of course not,” Gould said, backpedaling.

“What’s your relationship to Hannah Sharifi?” Li asked. “Cousin.”

“But—”

“Her adoptive mother was my father’s sister.”

“I see. When did you last speak with her?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

Lie number one
, Li thought, her eyes nailed to Gould’s carotid artery where it emerged from the intricate beadwork of the tribal collar. “Approximately?”

“Within the last few weeks probably. We talk a lot.”

Li considered asking Gould about Sharifi’s “life insurance” but decided not to. Information was power, and it rarely paid to show a suspect your cards when you were still shuffling them. “Did she send you anything by surface mail since then?” she asked instead.

“She might have.”

“I see,” Li said again. She wasn’t quite able to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

A line appeared between Gould’s pale eyebrows. “I have nothing to hide. She often sent me drafts of her work.”

“What? You’re a physicist too?”

“I’m her editor. She had two books in the works with me.” “Had?”

The line deepened. “One book’s gone into final production.” “Did she usually ship her manuscripts solid mail?”

“She dislikes working on electronic galleys.”

“She must dislike it a lot. Real mail’s slow. And pricey.” “She has poor eyesight.”

“Bad eyesight,” Li said. “A construct?”

She gave Gould a blank, eyebrows-raised look—a look that had squashed trench mutinies and broken strong men in interrogation.

It slid off Gould like water. Which just went to show that nasty looks worked better when there was a real possibility of backing them up with something a little more solid than harsh language.

“Are we done?” Gould said. “I really am busy, so unless you have any more questions about my cousin’s reading habits … ?”

A minute later the conversation was over.

It was true what people said, Li thought as the screen shut down. Ring-siders really were a different species.

Well, she’d gotten something out of the call. Gould had lied about when she had last seen Sharifi, and probably about the package and Sharifi’s eyesight as well. Most important, she’d never asked the one question any friend or relative should have asked: where was Sharifi?

She checked the time—8A .M ., local. High time for good little security officers to be in the office. “McCuen?” she said, toggling her comm.

“Here,” said his disembodied voice in her ear, so quickly that he must have been hanging over his terminal waiting for her call.

She didn’t initiate a VR link. If she’d thought about it, she could have put a name to her reluctance to have McCuen see her standing in Sharifi’s quarters. But she didn’t let herself think about it.

“Gillian Gould,” she said, relaying the realspace address and streamspace coordinates. “I want a watch on her. Twenty-four hours a day. I want to know who she talks to, where she goes, what she buys, what she reads. Everything.”

“What’s up?”

“She’s Sharifi’s cousin.”

“We’re putting Sharifi’s cousin under surveillance? Why?”

Li hesitated, torn between the knowledge that she would need help—help McCuen was better qualified to give than anyone else on-station—and the fear that sooner or later anything she told him would work its way back to Haas.

Or would it? And when had she gotten so suspicious, anyway?

“Gould knows Sharifi’s dead,” she said cautiously, telling herself that McCuen was smart and capable and it wouldn’t hurt to play him out a little line and see what he did with it. “She knew it before I called her.”

An eerie quavering floated over the line, making Li’s mind run to banshees and Becky circles. It took her a long moment to realize it was McCuen whistling.

“Fuck,” he said, sounding very young and very impressed. “Yep,” she told him, grinning. Fuck indeed.

She signed off, cut the link, and looked at Sharifi’s desk again, thinking. She bent down and started pulling its flimsy drawers open. The top two drawers gave up nothing, but when she opened the bottom drawer, she saw a long slim black case tucked in behind some datacubes.

Status lights blinked soothingly on its upper surface, but aside from the lights, the case was plain matte black without labels or corporate logos. Li had seen similar cases before. They tended to be wrapped around expensive experimental wetware.

This one was no exception. Its interior was lined with a thick layer of viral jelly, warm and moist as the inside of a mouth, maintaining its precious cargo at 99.7 percent humidity and a nice sterile four degrees above body temperature. And couched in the jelly like a pearl necklace was a finger-thick braid of silicon-coated ceramsteel.

It was a wet/dry interface. One end terminated in a standard-sized plug designed to fit an external siliconbased dataport. The other end—the one that necessitated the fancy storage system—was wetware, tankgrown nerve tissue shaped for a high-capacity cranial socket. The whole device had the sleek, understated look of top-of-the-line custom work. Hacker’s gear.

Li turned the interface over, looking for a maker’s mark or serial number. She felt a slight roughness under her fingers on the underside of the dry socket. She turned the wire over and saw a stylized sunburst —the same one she had last seen on the floor of the Metz laboratory.

“Kolodny,” she breathed, as a choking panic boiled up inside her.

Her internals fought it. Cognitive programs lurched into action, vetting meat memory, sorting out immediate threats from remembered ones, shunting the images that had triggered her panic into firewalled compartments where they could be hormonally adjusted—or, in the worst case, purged. Endorphins pumped through her system to combat the sudden rush of adrenaline. Once again, she wondered just how crazy she would be when the psychtechs were finally done with her.

Half a minute later her breathing was back to normal. Two minutes later her psych program flashed Kolodny’s face across her internals.

Li expected this, had prepared for it. She sorted stubbornly through one of Sharifi’s fiche piles, breathing and pulse even, until the diagnostic program finished its prying and Kolodny’s picture faded behind her eyes.

Mother of Christ
, she thought in the dark corner of her mind she’d always managed to keep from the psychtechs. Were the panics and flashbacks just normal long-term jump effects? Or were they malfunctions spawned by the kinks she’d put in her own systems to hide her damning preenlistment memories? She didn’t know, and there was no one she could ask.

Except Cohen, maybe. But Metz had killed that.

She leaned forward, putting her head between her knees to dispel the spinning nausea of the flashback. That was when she saw it: a yellow-white rectangle wedged against the wall between the bed and the desk. She fished around until she got hold of the thing and lifted it up.

A book.

She inhaled its dust, its smell, fingered the acid-gnawed paper. It was a cheap paperback, the kind still printed in the poorer Trusteeships. And this one was from Compson’s now-defunct university press. She turned it over and grinned as she saw the author and title: Zach Compson’s
Xenograph
.

It was a classic, of course—a book that had seized on people’s imaginations so strongly that they still called Compson’s World by the flamboyant New Zealander’s name, while the anonymous long-distance survey team that actually discovered the planet had been consigned to oblivion.

She let the book fall open at random, and read a passage that Sharifi or some prior owner had underlined:

There was a man who had a stone that sang, they told me. Everywhere I went they talked about this stone. Where it came from. What it meant. How he came to find it.

They told me there were cathedrals in the earth’s dark places. Rooms where the glass bones of the world hold silence like a river, where stones whisper the secrets of the earth to each other. And those who hear them stay and listen and sleep and die there.

But a few come back. They walk out of the mountains singing. With stones in their hands. This is what they told me, but I never found the man.

“Glory holes,” Li muttered. “He’s talking about glory holes.” She flipped through the book. It was dogeared, tattered. Someone had read it again and again, starred and underlined favorite passages.

Had Sharifi known about the glory hole before she came? Had she seen something in Compson’s halfmystical ramblings about glass bones and singing stones that no one else had seen? Was that what had brought her back to Compson’s World?

Li set the book on Sharifi’s desk. She stood up, put the wet/dry interface back in its case and tucked it into her uniform’s kangaroo pocket, along with Sharifi’s datebook. She started toward the door. Then she turned around, picked up Sharifi’s battered copy of
Xenograph
, and put that in her pocket too.

She set the security seal to notify her if anyone else entered, walked back to her own quarters, pulled on clean shorts and a T-shirt, and collapsed on her narrow bunk without even managing to get herself under the covers.

* * *

She couldn’t have been asleep ten minutes when the icon for the peepers in Haas’s office toggled, waking her.

She maximized the feed from her skinbugs, and there was Haas, in shirtsleeves, standing behind the luminous desk.

He was talking to someone: a slight figure, whose face was half–turned away from Li. Even in the dim light, Li could make out the pale skin, the dark hair falling over shoulders as tense and frail as bird’s wings.

“I didn’t tell her,” the witch murmured. “I swear it. I haven’t told anyone.” The tension in her voice was unmistakable.

“You’d better hope you haven’t,” Haas answered.

He raised his hand, and the woman flinched as if he’d hit her. Even Li, lying in bed three spokes away, tensed for the blow she thought was coming.

Haas turned away and shrugged. “Christ,” he said. He walked out of the field of the peepers, and Li heard the clink of ice against glass as he poured a drink. “What a day. I need to relax.” A pause, Haas still out of sight. “Come here.”

The witch turned, but she moved so slowly that Haas was back at the desk before she could take more than a step toward him.

“Take that off,” he said.

She undid her robe and let it slide to the floor. “Lie down.”

She lay back across his desk, passive as a child. “No,” he said. “Not that way.”

He reached across her, into a desk drawer, and pulled out a wetware case. He bent the witch’s head sideways, inserted a jack into an unseen socket, then attached the contact derms at the other end of the wire to his own forehead and ran the wire through his desktop VR rig.

What happened next was something Li had heard about but never actually seen: a loop shunt, a perversion of the technology every company in UN space used for training spins. Loop shunts were illegal; they’d been banned after that girl bled to death in Freetown. But the psych wards in every spaceport were still full of prostitutes who’d burned their neurons out or cut themselves up or just plain gone crazy using them.

Li shut the feed off, but she couldn’t rid herself of the image burning behind her eyelids. Haas’s hands on that white skin. The witch lying across the desk, her long hair spilling over the gleaming condensate, her body moving but her eyes as empty as the black void beyond the viewports.