Spin 01 - Spin State (29 page)

“I don’t think I know you,” she said. Best to tread cautiously.

“Oh, but I know you,” the A Series answered. “I know quite a lot more about you than you might imagine.”

“Then you have the advantage.”

He smiled again. A diplomat’s smile. A spy’s smile. “I think there are few areas in which I’d have any advantage over a woman of your … what’s that word humans are so attached to? Talents?”

The crowd cheered, and Li’s eyes snapped back to the screen. The Cuban was up again. “Big game,” she said, hoping her new friend would take the hint and leave.

“Hmmm. I wouldn’t know. Not a fan. Actually, I came because I hoped I might get the chance to talk to you.”

Sure, Li thought. The chance to talk her straight into a full-scale internal affairs investigation. “Great,” she said. “Why don’t you come by the office in the morning?”

“Ah,” said the stranger. “Well. This isn’t official. I believe it’s something we might most profitably discuss in private.”

Li turned and looked straight at him, her recorder’s status light winking in her peripheral vision. “In private is not an option. You can either talk to me on the record here or on the record in the office tomorrow. Those are the rules.”

“The rules.” The man spoke musingly, drawing the single syllable out, considering it, interrogating it. “But there are rules and rules, aren’t there? Wasn’t that how it was on Gilead?”

Li’s stomach plunged as if a high-altitude chute had just snapped open and snatched her out of free fall. Then she forgot her stomach, forgot the game, forgot Gilead, because her head was throbbing and her eyes were watering and the room was spinning around her.

“Andrej Korchow at your service,” the man said. “Privately, anyway.”

Li shook her head, sniffed, sneezed. She felt like she had something up her nose, but she knew the feeling was an illusion. In fact Korchow had simply jammed her recorder, and her internals were spinning their computational wheels, desperately trying to fend off whatever he was throwing at them.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her coolness surprised her. She knew people who’d been approached. It was inevitable. If the Syndicates didn’t hit you up, internal security would. Or corporate agents. She’d expected to feel outrage, fear. But all she felt now was a cold, calculating conviction that she had to keep her head and pick a careful path through the minefield that stretched before her.

“I don’t want anything, Major. Other than a chance to introduce myself. You strike me as someone with whom I might have … common interests.”

“I doubt that.”

“Ah, but how can you be sure if we don’t discuss them?”

She looked back to the livewall, delaying. Hamdani was tightening up even under his thick turtleneck. He blew on his hands, got called for going to the mouth, stalked off the mound in a fury, came back, stalled. When he finally delivered, the pitch got away from him and drifted invitingly over the heart of the plate.

“Shit,” Li muttered, just as the crack of the bat sounded through the room. She sighed in relief as the ball died over the warning track.

“You’re a curious woman,” Korchow said smoothly. “An enigma, one might almost say. I confess to a powerful interest in you.”

Li kept silent.

“When I learned you’d been posted here, I was, quite frankly, astonished. Your service record shows … an impressive ability to get results. It seemed to me that you deserved more. Had a right to expect more.”

“I don’t see it that way,” Li said. “And even if I did, I have plenty to lose. And plenty to be grateful for.”

“Grateful. For what? For the chance to tend the colonial sheep and take orders from inferiors? Or is there some other explanation for the hero’s anticlimactic homecoming? Some people”—Korchow’s voice shifted subtly, got harder, colder—“idealistic people … gullible people … have surmised that your fall from grace shows the Security Council has repented of some of its … harsher attitudes. I am not one of those people.”

“If you have something to say, Korchow, say it.”

“I have nothing to say, Major. I’m merely curious. Call me a student of human nature. Or is
human
the right word here? By the way, has anyone ever told you how much you look like Hannah Sharifi? Amazing the strength of the XenoGen genesets. Their work was crude, of course. Human, after all. But some of the prebreakaway designers had real genius.”

“I doubt you’ll find many fans of their work around here.” Li shook her head again, not making any progress against Korchow’s jammer.

“No, alas. By the by, was Sharifi really murdered?” “That’s not established.”

“But I’d been told you have suspects.”

“You were told wrong, then.”

“Indeed. So hard to get accurate information. A thorny problem, that. It makes reliable information particularly valuable.”

Li started to lick her lips, then caught herself, realizing how it would look. Korchow was skirting the edge of deniability. Asking about Sharifi. Asking for information. Unmistakably offering … something. But so slyly that Li couldn’t explicitly reject the offer without appearing to have raised the subject herself.

Was this a UN internal affairs sting? A genuine approach by a Syndicate agent? Or just the corporate espionage department of some multiplanetary fishing for tidbits about Sharifi’s work? Whichever it was, they were surely being recorded. The only question was who the wire belonged to. “I can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation,” she said.

“I wouldn’t dream of prying into a Controlled Technology Committee investigation,” Korchow answered. “My interests are more properly described as … tangential to yours.”

On-screen, the Cuban was up again. The game was tied, the Yanks one out shy of a win. It was Hamdani’s to lose.

“I don’t know why you’d think TechComm has anything to do with my being here,” Li said.

“Really, Major. The problem with being as honest as you clearly are is that it doesn’t equip you to lie competently when necessary.”

“Hah!” Li said. Her defensive software had finally managed to outflank Korchow’s block. They were back on tape again.

“Well,” Korchow said, standing up. “It was a pleasure talking to you.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a narrow card, and set it on the table in front of her. “My card. I run a store in the capital. Antiques. Compson’s World is a treasure trove of remarkable artifacts. I’d be honored if you paid me a visit and allowed me to show you what the planet has to offer.”

“I doubt I’ll have time,” Li said. She plucked the card off the table and tried to hand it back to him.

“No, no,” he said. “It is one of my firm beliefs that one should never close any door in life until one is quite certain that one does not want to walk through it.”

Li watched him slip through the crowd and vanish. Then she looked down at the card in her hand. It was made of some matte fiber that looked like, but was not, paper. And instead of printed words and pictures it bore a precise geometric lacework of punch holes. A Hollerith card.

She’d seen Holleriths before, and she recognized the implicit status message. It was written in decimal code, and in a format that no machine for two centuries had been able to process. It embodied a technofetishist, antiquarian, nose-thumbing aesthetic. And it assumed that anyone you handed the card to could recognize and process the antique code without an external computer.

She was certain, looking back over their conversation, that Korchow was KnowlesSyndicate. Knowles was the diplomat’s syndicate, the spy’s syndicate. Their A Series were mavericks within the close-knit conformity of Syndicate society, artists of information and manipulation, as formidable as they were unpredictable.

The surface address punched into the Hollerith card put Korchow’s shop in Helena. Behind the punch holes the card’s surface bore an intricate engraved logo that reminded Li of the patterns in Cohen’s Persian carpets. Where had she seen that design before? On an advertisement? She searched her hard files for a match and found one in the top layer of her actives. Recent, then.

She accessed the file, saw the digital image of a leather-bound journal with a dozen business cards tucked into the front flap pocket. And there, peeping out from behind several slips of shiny fiche, was the corner of Korchow’s Hollerith card.

The notebook was leather. Brown leather as soft and expensive as butter. Sharifi’s.

On-screen, the Cuban had carried Hamdani deep into the count, fouling off pitch after pitch, though Hamdani was throwing everything he had at him. It was only a matter of time until he turned on one of those not-quite-fast-enough fastballs.

“Walk him, you idiot,” Li muttered. “Don’t throw the game away.”

But Hamdani wasn’t going to walk him. Couldn’t bring himself to walk him, though he must know in every cell of his aging body that he’d already been beaten. He wound up, looking stiffer and older than Li had ever seen him look. The ball left his hand a split second too early and floated across the plate square in the middle of the strike zone.

The Cuban saw it as soon as Li did. His eyes snapped around. His arms extended. His broad back turned toward the camera as he rounded on the ball. The bat cracked like rifle fire, and Li didn’t need to hear the roar of the crowd to know it was all over.

The windup. The pitch. It’s gone
.

She stood up and tucked Korchow’s card into her pocket, feeling the prickle of unseen eyes on the back of her neck. Then she walked—slowly, carefully, expressionlessly—back to her quarters.

* * *

The next morning, four hundred and seventy-six hours after the rescue crew found him in Trinidad South 12, James Reynold Dawes came out of his coma and started talking.

As soon as she found out, Li shuttled down to the Shantytown hospital to see him. When she got there, Sharpe and Dawes’s wife were standing in the corridor outside his room arguing with two AMC mine guards.

“We have orders,” one of the guards was saying. “No one’s supposed to see him, and that’s that.” Li flashed a smile and her ID. “I think we could let his wife in, don’t you?” she said.

“That’s not what I was told.”

“By who? Haas? Call him. In the meantime, this hospital is a public institution. AMC may run the mine and the town, but here you’re on planetary militia territory. Which means that, until someone with a militia commission shows up, I have jurisdiction.”

“Thanks,” Sharpe said as Dawes’s wife slipped into the room.

Li shrugged. “I have to talk to him too, actually.” She gave Dawes a few minutes with his wife, then knocked at the door.

“Come in,” called a young man’s voice.

She stepped into the room and saw Dawes lying in a raised bed between cheap viruflex curtains. “How’re you feeling?” she asked.

“Pretty good. Considering.”

“Up to a few questions?”

He shrugged.

“Should I go?” his wife asked.

“Not unless you have somewhere else to be.”

“Well …” A look passed between the couple. She slipped out of the room, and Li heard the sharp sound of her heels receding down the tiled corridor.

“So,” Li said when she and Dawes were alone. “I bet that was a shocker of a wake-up.” He grinned. “Just like sleeping fucking beauty.”

“I hope you at least got a kiss for your trouble. Sorry if I interrupted it.”

He laughed at that, then gasped and paled. “Three broken ribs,” he said. “The doc told me if I’d slept another week and a half I’d have woken up and not even known about them.”

“Well, you know what they say. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow someone’s house down.” “Ouch!”

“Sorry,” Li said. “So do you remember anything?”

His face clouded. “Like what?”

“You tell me.”

He glanced doubtfully at her. “You’re not from AMC, then, like the last one?” “What last one?”

“The guy they sent down to talk to me earlier today. He kept wanting to get me to say I’d slipped and hit my head and didn’t remember anything.”

“Did you? Hit your head, I mean.” “Not according to the doctors.” “And do you remember anything?”

The shadowy look drifted across his face again.

“Do you not want to talk about it?”

“No! No, I want to talk about it. I just … I’m not sure what it was, I guess.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know,” he said again, shaking his head on the pillow. “If I told you, you’d probably laugh at me.”

“Try me,” Li said.

And he did.

What he described sounded just like what Li had seen on her two hijackings. Strange sights, vague shadowy figures. Sounds that made no sense or were oddly distorted. Fractured twilight visions that could have been past or future or neither.

“Did you see anyone you knew?” Li asked when Dawes fell silent. “Oh, yeah. I saw all of them.”

“What do you mean, all of them? All of who?”

“The dead.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and wide, the pupils expanded as if he were slipping into shock. “All of them. All my dead. Just like the pit priests say you see.”

Li swallowed. “Do you think it could have been a hallucination? Or, I don’t know, something else. Like a spinstream hijacking—” She remembered that Dawes was unwired and too poor to pay for stream time anyway, that he’d probably never even known anyone who had direct spinstream access. “I mean like someone trying to communicate. Someone not dead, I mean.”

He thought about it.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not a churchgoing man. But they were there. You know what I’m saying? They were … different.”

“Did you—” Li stopped to clear her throat. “Did you see Dr. Sharifi?” “No.”

“You’d have recognized her if you had seen her?”

“Sure. I saw her a bunch of times. She looked … well, like they always look.”

He lay silent for a moment, looking up at the stained foam ceiling panels of the hospital module. A long moment passed with no sound to mark the time but the pounding of a trapped fly against the room’s dustcaked window. Dawes’s face softened, took on a puzzled, disappointed look.

“The thing is,” he said, “I felt like they took me for a reason. Like they were trying to tell me something specific, something they thought was important.”