Spin State - Chris Moriarty [196]
Sharifi’s equipment. Li raised her hand and saw the crescent of scar tissue between thumb and forefinger. Sharifi.
But she wasn’t just in Sharifi this time. She was her. She knew her thoughts, her memories, her emotions. And she knew that it was some unfathomable combination of Cohen and the mine itself who had made this possible. Even as she walked through Sharifi’s dreaming memory, the intelligence behind the crystals was using Cohen, reading him, threading itself through him as subtly and inextricably as ceramsteel twining through nerve and muscle. She felt the crystals’ exultation thrumming along the intraface just as clearly as she felt Cohen’s terror.
Sharifi knelt, reached for a gauge, tied off a loose wire. And with each little physical act she thought, considered, remembered. Li shuddered as she realized that Sharifi’s understanding didn’t end with her death, that it was tinged with the piercing regret of hindsight. Because what Sharifi had found in the glory hole was death. Her own death, in the place she least looked for it.
“Do you have to hang over me like that?” she asked Voyt.
He backed off. “So where’s Korchow? Off stealing the silverware?”
“I’m here.” A shape stepped out of the shadows. Bella. Of course. But Bella had never smiled that smile, never walked with that deliberate catlike stride. Where Bella crept—and Li realized only now that it was creeping—Korchow danced. “Ready?” he asked.
Sharifi frowned. “Just keep your end of the bargain.”
“How could I forget it?”
Sharifi linked with the field AI, and Li felt the blossoming thoughtline run bright as new wire between Sharifi’s wetware and the orbital field array high above them. Sharifi’s link was nothing, she realized. A mere echo of the bond between her and Cohen. What Sharifi had done they could do. And more, much more. She felt a wild elation rising inside her, her excitement and Cohen’s feeding off each other in this still-strange alchemical union of her one and his many.
We need more, Cohen thought. We need to know what she’s doing.
Li snapped back into focus. Sharifi was still fiddling with wires and monitors, testing the link, readying herself. Meanwhile the mind behind the crystals was probing, exploring. Li felt it run through her, coursing up the line to the field AI high above them, enveloping woman and AI alike.
But Sharifi just kept fussing. Stalling. Couldn’t she feel that the link was up? Her precious dataset was there for the taking. What the hell was she waiting for?
Li knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. She could hear Sharifi think, feel her pulse, her breath, the stray ache of a pulled muscle. She wasn’t waiting for anything. She’d already gotten everything she’d come for. The experiment was over, run off the rails by the crystals themselves. She had her answers—the same answers she’d hidden from Li, from Nguyen, from everyone. Now she was playing out a script, playing Nguyen and Haas and Korchow off against each other, hoping she could do what she had to do before the bill came due.
Nguyen had been right all along; Sharifi had betrayed them.
But not to Korchow. Not for the Syndicates, not for money, not even for Bella. She’d done it for this—this first tentative contact with the life swirling through the fan vaults and pillars of the glory hole.
This was the thing that had brought her to Compson’s World. The money, the fame, the dream of cheap cultured crystal had been not lies, exactly, but merely surface reasons. The real reason had been the same one that brought Compson here, and so many explorers and scholars after him: life, the only other life in the universe besides humans and the creatures humans made.
It had been in front of Li’s eyes all the time, clear as clear water, scribbled in Sharifi’s dog-eared copy of Xenograph.
We came into the country like saints going to the desert, Compson had written. We came to be changed. But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And Sharifi had answered, But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
This