Spin State - Chris Moriarty [122]
“The Pontchartrain. It’s a lake on the Mississippi, that used to flow through New Orleans.”
“Before the floods, you mean.”
“Before that, even. The river—the whole Mississippi Delta actually—shifted. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers spent, oh, a century dredging and channeling and building levees. Defiance of nature, on a megalomaniacal scale. People wrote books and printed articles and whole theses about it. The river finally had its way, of course. It jumped its banks right around the time the oceans really started rising. Shifted the delta halfway across the Gulf of Texas. I wish I could make you feel what it was to be in New Orleans, stranded in the middle of a man-made desert while the ice caps were melting and we were watching floods in New York and Paris on the news every night. It was . . . unforgettable.”
“I didn’t think Earth was ever wired for streamspace. They didn’t even have shunts back then, did they?”
“No. Just a kind of primitive version of VR. But it was enough. I have my own memories, and other people’s. Over time it becomes harder and harder to separate them. Which may not be all bad.” He smiled. “I’m probably the only person still alive who remembers driving across the Pontchartrain in a convertible.”
Li grinned. “With a beautiful blonde, no doubt.”
Cohen smiled back, but it was the sad-sweet smile of a man lost in an old memory. “With Hyacinthe’s widow. The first woman I ever fell in love with.”
Li waited, wanting to hear more but not comfortable pushing.
“I know,” he said, answering a question that hadn’t even occurred to her. “I suppose from a puritanical sort of perspective, you could say she was my mother.”
“Well, it’s not like you invented that particular complex.”
“It wasn’t like that, though. I am Hyacinthe, his very self, in ways that have nothing to do with being a child, or a student, or an invention. Besides.” Another sweet and solemn smile. “The heart is complicated, whether it’s made of flesh or circuitry. It doesn’t always love the way you think it should. Or the people you think it should.”
“You don’t have to confess to me, Cohen.”
“Well, I have this funny idea that you come closer to understanding me than anyone else does. And so far you haven’t made me do any rosaries.”
A sudden memory of bare knees on a cold church floor and a grown-up hand—her mother’s?—moving her child’s fingers over the glass beads. The smooth, dark Aves. The gleaming Paters. The cross dangling and tapping against the pew in front of her.
“And I understand you, I think,” Cohen was saying when she surfaced again. “Which is an accomplishment given that what you’ve actually told me about yourself would fit on the back of a matchbook. At first I thought you didn’t trust me. Then I decided you’re just secretive. Is it how you’re put together, or did someone teach you to push people off like that?”
Li shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s jump fade as much as anything. I don’t remember much.” She paused. “And what I do remember usually makes me wish I’d forgotten more of it. What’s the point in dredging up old miseries?”
She looked up into the silence that followed to find Cohen watching her.
“Eyelash,” he said.
“What?”
“You have an eyelash.”
“Where?” Li dabbed at her eye, looking for it.
“Other eye. Here. Wait.”
He slid toward her along the curved bench and tilted her head back against the velvet cushions with one hand while the other feathered along her lower eyelid hunting for the stray lash. She smelled extra-vielle, felt Roland’s warm sweet breath on her cheek, saw the soft skin of his neck and the pulse beating beneath it.
“There,” Cohen said, and held the lash up on the end of a slender finger.
She opened her mouth to thank him, but the words died in her throat. The hand that had been on her chin brushed along her cheek and traced the faint line of the bundled filament that followed the muscle from the corner of her jaw down to the hollow between her clavicles.
“You look like you’ve lost weight, even in streamspace,” he said. “You look like you’re not sleeping