Spin 01 - Spin State (17 page)

* * *

McCuen met her at the shuttle gate looking white and stricken.

“Christ,” she said when she saw his face. “What’s happened?”

“It’s Gould. She’s gone.”

“When?”

“Two, three hours ago.”

Li stepped past McCuen and started walking toward HQ. “Three hours isn’t the end of the world, McCuen. She can’t have gotten far.”

“It might be longer… .”

She turned on him. “How much longer?” she asked, speaking slowly and very clearly.

“I’m sorry,” McCuen said miserably. “I—she went to bed last night, then in the morning, even though she didn’t go to work, she was using power, water, air. She was onstream. We monitored the calls. No one saw guests go in, and it never occurred to me until I saw them that she wasn’t making those calls. But she wasn’t. They just used her home system to make us think she was.”

Like Li had used Sharifi’s system to fool her way into Gould’s office. Was it a coincidence? A joke? And if not, then what the hell was Gould up to?

“Why didn’t you call me right away when she went missing, McCuen?” “I did. I tried. You—you were off-grid.”

Of course. She’d gone to old Shantytown. She’d been walking down memory lane, leaving an inexperienced kid in charge while the investigation fell apart. And they were already paying for it.

“Maybe you should go onstream and see if you can find her?” McCuen said. “I—I’m so slow. Maybe you can turn something up. That’s why I came out to meet you.”

“Yes,” Li said. “But not here. In private.”

When they reached HQ the duty officer was waiting for her, wanting to tell her something. She swept past, ignoring him, and waved McCuen into her office.

“All right,” she told him, sitting down on the desk she still hoped she wouldn’t be here long enough to think of as anything but Voyt’s desk. “What kind of time frame are we looking at? When’s the last time someone actually saw her?”

“Last night, Ring-time. Twelve hours.”

“Jesus,” Li said, then saw the stricken look on McCuen’s face and bit the rest of her words back. It was an understandable mistake, even if it was potentially disastrous. They might as well skip the recriminations and just fix it. If they still could.

She closed her eyes briefly as she slipped on-line, then opened them to a disorienting double vision of streamspace superimposed on McCuen’s pale features. “You’ve checked credit access and so forth?” she asked.

“Yes. Nothing.”

She checked again, ticking over bank reports, food and water and air charges, spinstream access debits, looking for the tracks no person in the Ring could help laying down every minute of every day of their conscious lives. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “There can’t be nothing. Not unless she’s dead.”

“Dead or using cash.”

“You can’t use cash Ring-side, McCuen. No one takes it. Even the scatter dealers and chop artists want nice clean freshly laundered credit.”

“Maybe she’s not Ring-side,” McCuen said, looking as if he desperately wanted to be wrong.

“You can’t get off the Ring without credit,” Li snapped. Then she caught her breath as gut instinct made a connection that she knew at once had to be right, though she didn’t know how or why.

“Check the shipping records,” she told McCuen. “Get me the name of every ship that’s left on the Freetown run in the last twelve hours.”

Two hours later Li was bending over McCuen’s monitor watching wavering security-cam footage of passengers filing along the boarding gantry of a Freetown-bound cargo freighter.

“Are you sure?” McCuen said when she stopped the tape and pointed. “I’m sure.”

The silk blouse and expensive handmade jewelry were gone. Gould wore cheap clothes, cheap shoes, carried what little baggage she had in a cheap viruhide shoulder bag. She had chopped off her fair hair or shoved it under a hat, Li couldn’t tell which. And she was keeping her head down, moving fast, not letting the cameras get a clear view of her. But there was the straight, thin line of her mouth, the arrogant curve of cheekbone and nostril, the air of unbending, unquestioned superiority that made Li perversely glad this woman was running from her.

She pushed that thought away, feeling petty, and told herself she just wasn’t cut out to be a policeman. “Check the relay schedules,” she told McCuen. “See if we can intercept the ship before they jump.”

As Gould hefted her bag up the boarding ramp, something at her neck glittered. Li smiled. Gould was wearing a charm necklace: a vacuum-mounted sliver of low-grade Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in a cheap heart-shaped locket of translucent plastex. Pure trash. The kind of trinket street vendors sold to tourists along with the fake Rolexes and the Zone baseball caps. The kind of thing Gould wouldn’t be caught dead wearing in normal life. The woman was nothing if not thorough.

“I can’t find them on the relay queue,” McCuen said, sounding overwhelmed.

Li checked the carrier’s schedule herself, then dove onto the public server to access the flight plan that every carrier had to file with the en route relay stations. But there was no flight plan. They hadn’t filed anything.

Then it dawned on her.

“We’re too late,” she said. “It’s not a jumpship. She’s going to Freetown sublight. And they’re already in slow time. We won’t be able to catch her until they drop out of slow time and into orbit.”

McCuen sat down heavily on one of her battered office chairs. “Why would she do that? And why Freetown?”

“Why Freetown is the easy question. That’s where they’d take cash for a passage and keep your name off the shipping manifest. That’s where you’d cache information you didn’t trust to UN data banks. That’s where you go to fence illegal data. Why slow time is harder to figure. But she’ll be there on”—Li checked the orbits of Earth and Jupiter against the
Medusa
’s departure time, calculated the approach to Freetown’s circumlunars—“November 9. Twenty-six days.”

“Maybe she’s just running,” McCuen said. “People don’t always think straight when they’re scared. Maybe she panicked and it was the first flight out or something.”

Li thought of Gould’s cool white face, the pale eyes, the precise, disdainful wrinkle between her eyebrows. “I don’t think Gillian Gould ever panicked in her life, Brian. If she’s going to Freetown, she has a reason. And we have less than a month to find out what that reason is and make a countermove.”

McCuen dropped his face into his hands. “How could I have lost her? How could I?” “Worse mistakes have been made, Brian. Some of them by me.”

“I know, but … Christ, what a fuck-up!”

Li stretched out one foot and tapped the toe of McCuen’s boot. “Cheer up,” she said. “At least we’ve got a track to follow. And there’s nothing like a hard deadline to knock things loose.”

McCuen sighed and rubbed a freckled hand across his forehead.

“Forget it,” Li said. “Let’s start by following the Freetown lead. I want a record of every transmission from this station to Freetown in the last week before Sharifi’s death. Then let’s figure out what Sharifi was doing here. And not just the official version. I want to see every piece of spinfeed she produced from the time she made the first proposal to run this experiment. I want to know everything she did from the moment she hit station here. Who she talked to, ate with, slept with, fought with. Everything and everyone. Personal stuff, too. Especially the personal stuff.”

McCuen had grabbed a pad and was jotting down her rapid-fire instructions.

“This might help,” she said, pulling Sharifi’s journal from her pocket and tossing it onto the table in front of him.

“I know,” she said in response to the look he gave her. “I should have logged it in. But it’s in her own handwriting, for God’s sake. It’s probably got trace DNA all over it. It’s not like there’s any doubt who wrote it.” And she’d wanted to keep it to herself until she’d vetted it with Nguyen, of course.

“No,” McCuen said. “You don’t understand. It’s Haas. He’s been calling all day. He wanted to retrieve something from Sharifi’s effects. Something I told him we didn’t have. Because it wasn’t on the effects inventory.”

“Shit.” Li turned a chair around, straddled it, crossed her arms over the backrest. She started to connect through to Haas’s office line, then stopped.

“Call Haas,” she told McCuen. “Tell him we found it, but we have to refer it to TechComm before we can clear it for release to him. Tell him we’re doing our best to hurry things along. If he has any problem with that, send him back to me.”

“How long will it take TechComm to clear it?” McCuen asked.

“These things are complicated.” Li grinned. “Official channels are slow.”

McCuen grinned back at her, but his grin faded quickly. “So how the hell did he know you had that journal?”

“Funny,” Li said. “That’s just what I was wondering.”

* * *

By the time she left the field office it was long past closing time and the shops along the arcades were dark and silent. She walked back to her quarters, too tired to hunt down a place to eat and cravenly thankful for the station’s low rotational gravity. As she reached her door, though, she saw that the security field had been disturbed in her absence.

She backed off a step and scanned the floor and doorframe. She’d just begun to tell herself she was being paranoid when she saw the slip of fiche poking out from under the closed door.

She slid it out into the open with the toe of her boot and saw it wasn’t fiche at all, but a thick slip of butter yellow paper, bisected by a single horizontal fold.

A letter, addressed to
Major Catherine Li, Room 4820 spoke 12, Compson’s Station
in quick fluid script. She picked it up and opened it.

For a fraction of a second the paper remained blank. Then a blocky engraved monogram appeared above the fold with the words
130 Avenida Bosch Zona Angel
. Words took shape below it, written in the same flowing script:

Dearest C. Stop being stubborn and come to tea instead. Usual place and time. Tomorrow. C

As she read the words, they scattered, broke into syllables and letters, rose from the page and turned into bright flocking birds that wheeled and swooped down the empty corridor like swallows.

At this point the reader still should not feel altogether happy about building this house of cards. Although we have introduced corrective measures, what if they themselves are faulty, as they must be in any real system?

… the “realistic” quantum computer looks very different from the idealized noise-free one. The latter is a silent shadowy beast at which we must never look until it has finished its computations, whereas the former is a bulky thing at which we “stare” all the time, via our error-detecting devices, yet in such a way as to leave unshackled the shadowy logical machine lurking within it.

—Michele Mosca, Richard Jozsa, Andrew Steane, and Artur Ekert

She dialed into the Calle Mexico
just off the Zócalo. Mile-high needle buildings glittered in refracted sunlight, pointing the eye up toward the carefully calibrated atmospheric field—and far, far above it, to the blue seas and white ice fields of Earth.

This was the heart of the Ring, point zero of UN space, the richest few square miles of real estate in the universe. Its interface was the best money could build: a realspace-interactive multiuser quantum simulation that was, for almost any imaginable purpose, indistinguishable from the real thing. Originally coterminous with the central banking zone, the interface now extended the length and breadth of the Ring. Anyone with credit for the sky-high access fees could register a corporation, eat a three-star meal, rent a whore, run a skip trace, or shop for anything from Prada handbags to black-market psychware.

The crowd broke over her like surf, with all the stylish, hard-edged excitement of 18 billion people scoring and scheming and consuming at the absolute center of everything. She looked around, getting her bearings. A day trader leaned against an interactive Public Arts Commission sculpture, scanning virtual ticker tape, making quick bidders’ and sellers’ gestures on a trading floor that only he could see. Tourists and corporate concubines hurried by clutching designer shopping bags and talking into the elegant earbuds of external VR rigs.

Just for fun Li dropped into the numbers so she could see who was real and who wasn’t. Half the people around her faded into compressed code packets. Digital ghosts. Simulacra. She dipped idly into some of the codes as she walked—and as always was amazed at the number of people running cosmetic programs. Her own interface was about as stripped-down as they came. It scanned her, packaged and compressed the scan data, and relayed a running simulacrum into streamspace. She couldn’t imagine caring enough about how she looked to bother with anything more. And if she did care, she certainly couldn’t imagine admitting it. Obviously, people in the Zone felt differently.

She crossed the Zócalo, passing the war memorial and threading through the ever-present clumps of schoolchildren gathered around the EarthWatch Monument.

“And here,” a holo-docent was explaining as she passed, “we see a time-lapse image of the seeding and spread of the artificial glaciers. Notice how the weather patterns change over the course of the recording. In the first frames the Sub-Saharan and Great North American Deserts have almost no precipitation, while in the later frames, the precipitation moves north from the Amazonian snowfields and disperses on the jet stream. This produces a macroclimatic change that we anticipate will break the cycle of postindustrial desertification and eventually allow us to reseed the reconstructed genomes stored in the EarthWatch databases. Just think, in less than two thousand years, humans—not all of us, of course, but a lucky, adventurous few—will actually be able to live on Earth again.” She paused and smiled serenely at the children. “Have your teachers taught you about Earth?”

Why bother, Li wondered. It wasn’t their planet. These children had been born in space, like their parents and their parents’ parents. They hadn’t killed Earth, or seeded the glaciers, or negotiated the Evacuation and Embargo Treaties. Earth was just another moon to them: a pretty light in the night sky, an exotic travel destination. But when she looked around she saw them watching, rapt, as the glittering ice swirled across the equator. Except for a few boys in the back, of course, who were imitating the bow hunters in the aboriginal lifestyles hologram, aiming imaginary arrows at the scurrying pigeons, gleefully pondering mayhem. Li, who had been a back-of-the-class kind of kid herself, couldn’t help grinning at them.