Spin State - Chris Moriarty [197]
Li glanced at Voyt and Korchow. They had backed off a little, following Sharifi’s preparations. Haas’s man and the Syndicates’ man. One of them after the synthetic crystal the Syndicates needed so desperately. The other after . . . what? Who did Voyt answer to, Haas or the UN? And which one of them was going to kill Sharifi?
Suddenly Li knew that she didn’t want to be watching—let alone watching from inside Sharifi’s skin—when it happened. She didn’t need to see who had battered Sharifi’s head, mangled her hand. She didn’t need to watch them break her. She owed Sharifi at least that privacy.
Something shifted in the shadowed air. Something vast, slow, ancient. There was no breeze, no sound, no outer evidence of the change, but it was as clear as a door opening. The data shooting between Li and Cohen over the intraface spiked. Li felt the same waiting-for-the-flood feeling that had overpowered them when they first stepped into the glory hole. Then it was on top of them.
It flowed through her like blood coursing through arteries. It filled her lungs, filled her mind, filled every hollow space of her. And when it had taken all of her there was to take, it made new spaces to fill, new universes inside her. Her skin stretched across oceans and continents. Her nerves were the petrified, planet-spanning rivers of carbon beds, her veins fault lines and ore seams, her eyes dusky stars burning in the dark heart of the earth.
She saw the change of seasons, and the slow seasonless passage of time in the Earth’s deep places. She watched the welling up of mountains, the shift of continents. She saw life rise and struggle and fall and pass into darkness without looking back. She looked out through the eyes of every creature that had lived in the depths, that had crawled on the planet’s skin or swum in its long dry oceans. And then, in what seemed but a moment, the water was gone and the wind swept across the steppes with nothing but the soft fur of algae and lichen to feel it.
She watched humans come. Saw the explorers and surveyors, the brief flickering lights of miners. She felt the stirring and pricking of a world waking to the thought that it had children again—even if they were strange, murdering, voracious children.
Sharifi had seen only a pale echo of this, filtered through the uncomprehending field AI. But it had been enough. She had known. And once she knew, there would be no room for deals or compromises or secrecy.
It was that simple. It was that impossible. Of course they had to kill her.
Something snapped, and Li was blind, cut loose in the void.
But not alone. This was a shared darkness. Someone waited in the many-trunked forest of crystals. A man, thin, dark-haired, his face lost in shadow. A man who slipped in and out of sight as she walked toward him, like stars flickering behind blowing cloud cover.
“Not him,” she whispered to whoever or whatever was listening. “Please, not him.”
But it was him. It was the father Li remembered from his worst sickness. So thin, so pale, so collapsed in on himself that he was barely bigger than she was. He raised a wasted hand to wipe away tears she hadn’t known she was crying. She collapsed into his arms and buried her face in the cloth of his shirt that smelled of rain and of coal dust and of him.
We are so glad. The thought swept through her more fiercely and intimately than even Cohen’s thoughts. So glad it was you.
We, Li said.
Shall I show you?
He pulled away from her, his hands lingering on hers. He took a step backward. He reached up to unbutton his shirt.
Li flinched, hands jerking up to cover her eyes. It was the gesture of a terrified child, the child whose growing up had been wiped out of her jump by jump, leaving no bridge from past to present, no path from her old fears to the understanding