Spin State - Chris Moriarty [195]
As Mirce talked, Li realized that it wasn’t a bridge she was building between them with her words, but a wall. Whatever common ground the two of them might once have traveled, Mirce seemed to be saying, Li’s life was now a foreign country from which no road led back to Compson’s World. They’d chosen, back in that past Li no longer remembered. A father’s life for a few doctor’s visits. Li’s old future for a new, better future. And Mirce lived in a world where there was no room for regrets or refunds.
By the time Mirce left them at the stairs down to the Trinidad, Li knew she was right. There was no going home. From the moment she’d stepped into that chop shop, there’d been no home to go back to.
She felt the glory hole long before they reached it. The condensates had been sleeping the last time she’d been there, she realized, dreaming fitfully. Now they were wide-awake.
Quantum currents licked through the dark mine, searching, scanning, questioning. You feel them too? Cohen asked.
She didn’t have to wonder why he asked; she could feel him, feel the havoc the crystals were wreaking on his all-too-fragile networks. As if whoever controlled them were looking for something. Or someone.
We won’t have to worry about setting up Korchow’s link, Cohen said before she could finish fitting words to the thought. They’ve already done it for us.
He had locked down all his systems in a last-ditch effort to hold off the condensates’ assault, and she was amazed for a moment that he could even speak over the intraface. But then he wasn’t speaking, was he? The link between them had gone beyond speaking. And when she answered him, she was just thinking to herself, thinking to the part of Cohen that was her.
What do we do? she thought, and the answer was there before she knew she had asked the question.
We let them in.
Then there was just light facing off against darkness and a confused sensation of Cohen pushing her behind him with the hopeless bravado of a child trying to protect another smaller child.
It was like waiting for a tsunami to hit. The wave loomed, crested, crashed down on them. Then they were inside it, and its boiling undertow was sucking at their knees and ankles, threatening to topple them, leaving them soaked to the skin and in danger of losing their footing on the shifting sands beneath them.
The crystals probed more gently after the first assault. They moved in probability sets, long spiraling quantum operations as incomprehensibly elegant as the sinuous columns that filled Sharifi’s notebooks. But there was something behind the equations. A single presence. A presence as much bigger than Cohen as Cohen had been bigger than the semisentient on Alba. Li felt it thinking, seeking, considering. And most of all she felt its ominous fascination with Cohen. With the intricate manyness of this strange new not-animal. With what he was. With what he could be used for.
It’s the mine, Cohen thought. It wants to know us. Taste us.
But it was more than knowing that it wanted. More than tasting.
“Do you hear it?” Bella cried, oblivious to the life-and-death battle being waged along the intraface. “Don’t you hear it? They’re singing!”
Heat. Darkness. A dizzying flash of leaving, of arriving. Then Li was standing just where she’d been standing before, looking around the glory hole.
But not the same glory hole she’d stood in with Bella and McCuen a moment ago. This one rose higher above her head. Its fan vaults were clean, unstained by smoke. Her feet stood on hard living rock, not the fire and flood’s detritus. And this glory hole was cluttered with equipment—equipment