Spin State - Chris Moriarty [140]
“So,” he purred. “Korchow. I almost didn’t recognize you behind that cheap shunt. You really should get the Syndicates to pay you better. You are still working for them, no? Or has your alleged idealism worn thin enough that you’re taking UN money too?”
“Cohen,” Li said. “You can go now.”
Cohen gave her a pained and innocent look.
“You can go, I said.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, glancing at Korchow.
“Yes I am. I can take care of this. And don’t eavesdrop!”
He cast a last look at Korchow, frowning. “You shouldn’t have anything to do with him, Catherine. He’s . . . well, he’s not nice.”
“Go home, Cohen.”
“Going,” he said. And then he did go, leaving a subtle whiff of hand-rolled cigars and extra-vielle behind him.
“Well,” Korchow said. “I think we understand each other.”
“What if I don’t show tonight?”
Korchow merely moved Bella’s fingers in answer, and the tattered yellow receipt reappeared, fluttering as if it had been caught by a stiff breeze. “That would be regrettable.”
Li looked at the thing in his hands and shivered. If that receipt ever ended up in front of the Service, they would check it out. They would have to. And when they checked, it would be over.
Fifteen years ago she’d had high confidence. The chop-shop geneticist hadn’t been much, but he’d been the best the meager payout on her father’s life insurance could buy; and his work, if not inspired, had at least been competent. Now, she knew its limits. Knew them in her gut with a wrenching certainty. She’d seen the gene work the best Ring-side labs could do, the work the Corps techs at Alba did. She’d slipped through the cracks this long only because there was no real proof—no proof damning enough to justify testing her. One fifteen-year-old scrap of paper could change that. And when it did, the whole crushing weight of the Security Council bureaucracy would fall on her like mine overload dropping into a collapsing tunnel. Losing her commission would be the least of it. She’d be lucky—or irretrievably indebted to Cohen’s high-priced lawyers—if she escaped without a prison sentence.
So what? She had other chances, other possibilities. It wasn’t all or nothing anymore. She had options.
But did she? What else was there for her, really? She loved her job. Was her job. Couldn’t imagine any other life. She thought about private security, about Cohen’s well-paid bodyguards. She remembered the high-tech muscle on the Calle Mexico.
No way. Not for her.
She sat on her rumpled bunk looking at the receipt, barely an arm’s length away from her, in the hands of a woman she had just made love to. And she knew she’d do anything, kill anyone, to get it.
UNCENSORED TOPOLOGY
All the worlds are there, even those in which everything goes wrong and all the statistical laws break down. The situation is no different from that which we face in ordinary statistical mechanics. If the initial conditions were right the universe-as-we-see-it could be a place in which heat sometimes flows from cold bodies to hot. We can perhaps argue that in those branches in which the universe makes a habit of misbehaving in this way, life fails to evolve; so no intelligent automata are around to be amazed by it.
—Bryce De Witt
Shantytown: 25.10.48.
Li made the meet early and scoped out the place—only sensible, since Korchow had chosen it.
She found it on the seedy outer fringe of what was euphemistically known as Shantytown’s entertainment district. This part of town looked right at night, somehow. It was less jarringly out of place when you couldn’t see the scrub hills and gypsum flats, or the bleak unterraformed wall of the Johannesburg Massif looming on the horizon.
It wasn’t raining in Shantytown, but it wasn’t not raining either. The water that dripped from the rooftops and doorways was part rain, part algae-laden condensation. It smelled sharp and fermented, and it wormed under Li’s collar and down her neck like prying fingers.
She was alone tonight. It hadn’t been easy to keep McCuen from coming, but it had been necessary. He could put things