Spin State - Chris Moriarty [123]
He caught her eye and held it. The hand on her neck felt warm as Ring-side sunlight, and it reminded her how long it had been since anyone but a medtech had touched her. A dark tide of desire tugged at her. Desire and a reckless loneliness and a hunger to believe in the person and the feelings that seemed so real sometimes.
Uh-oh, she thought.
She looked away and cleared her throat.
Cohen drew back, held up his index finger, her eyelash still on it. “Make a wish,” he said.
“I don’t believe in wishes. You make one.”
He closed his eyes and blew the lash up into the smoky air.
“That was quick,” Li said and smiled—or at least tried to. “I guess you know what you want.”
But he wasn’t looking at her. He had his watch off and was listening to it, his face turned away from her. He twisted the golden knob, put the watch to his ear, wound it again, shook it.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with the thing,” he said. “It’s been running slow for weeks. Damned annoying.”
“Cohen,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere above their heads. A slender brown pair of legs had stopped by their table, and Li looked up them into an amused smile and horn-rimmed glasses—and her own face behind them.
It wasn’t her face, though. It was the nameless teenager’s face she remembered looking at fifteen years ago in a Shantytown mirror. A XenoGen face on a thin young woman who would have stood exactly Li’s height if she hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels and a red slip of a dress that looked far more revealing now that she wasn’t onstage.
The singer gave Li a brief measuring look, then sat down and put a possessive arm around Cohen’s shoulders. “I thought I was going to have you all to myself tonight,” she said in a voice that left no doubt in Li’s mind about what Cohen had been doing eating uncharacteristically alone in this place.
Cohen flinched ever so slightly. “Sorry,” he said, looking at Li.
“Not at all.” Li stood up, straightening her uniform with numb fingers. “I was leaving anyway.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“No need.”
“Well, tomorrow then.”
“Whatever.”
“No,” she heard Cohen saying as she walked off, in answer to some whispered question. “Just business.”
INTERFERENCE PATTERNS
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves, through time . . . We exist in multiple versions, in universes called “moments” . . . It is tempting to suppose that the moment of which we are aware is the only real one, or is at least a little more real than the others. But this is just solipsism. All moments are physically real. The whole of the multiverse is physically real. Nothing else is.
—David Deutsch
AMC Station: 20.10.48.
Li decided not to go, then changed her mind again at least eight times.
She told herself she was getting too old to follow her hormones everywhere they led her, and that her excuse for accepting the invitation—asking about Sharifi—was nothing short of pathetic. If she really wanted to blow off some steam, she’d be better off picking up some stranger in a bar than chasing after a woman that any sane person in her position would know enough to steer clear of.
In the end she arrived two minutes early and dithered on the doorstep wondering if she should buzz or just walk around until it was time. Just as she was telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn around and leave, Bella opened the door.
She wore white: a long fall of silk that flared around her ankles in the station’s low gravity. Somehow, Li was quite sure Haas had bought the dress for her.
“Are you sure he’s off-station?” she said, and cursed herself for asking.
Bella just smiled serenely, took the flowers Li had brought, and led her through a narrow door into the kitchen.
“He’s in Helena,” she said as she poured water into a vase for the