Spin State - Chris Moriarty [224]
She should care more about it than she did—should be able to muster curiosity, if nothing else, about whether she would return home to a new assignment or a court-martial or worse. But what was the point of thinking that way? You cared, or you didn’t care. The rest was mere survival.
She shook her head irritably, prodding malfunctioning wetware back into silence. <4280000pF> She sighed and rubbed her temples. A pair of skinny brown legs appeared in her peripheral vision. Dusty. Barefooted. Hyacinthe? She tried to focus on the vision. Lost it. Then something flashed pale on the edge of sight, and she looked, and she could just make him out, faintly, as if he weren’t quite there. But the eyes were there. And couldn’t she feel him hacking the ship’s net, pirating its VR programs. Or was she just fooling herself? For God’s sake, say something! The thought ripped out of her like flesh being torn away. Sorry. I’m a little shaky. But it’s me this time. Most of me, anyway. He climbed onto the platform, very carefully, holding on with both hands, and sat beside her. She felt something come alive in her chest, testing the wind, opening strong wings. She took a deep breath and realized it was the first time in days she hadn’t felt that weight on her chest. He filled up her eyes. She couldn’t bear to look at him. She turned without speaking and looked out the viewport toward the dying station. “Funny how it still looks more or less okay from the outside,” she said. “I wonder if they’ll be able to salvage anything when they come back.” “I don’t think they’re coming back. They may come back to fight, but even then . . . I don’t think they can face it.” “What about the AIs?” “We’ll be back. We have to come back. This is our future. Or one of our possible futures.” “What was it like down there?” “It’s what Sharifi said: a chance to look into the shuffle. Everything is possible, and everything that’s possible is. It was wonderful. Terrifying. I almost forgot to come back.” Li felt a flare of anger shoot through her. He could have come back anytime? Days ago? Hadn’t he even thought about what Nguyen would think? What Bella and the rest of them would think? What she would think? You know I came as soon as I could. The thought brushed along the edges of her mind, soft and tickling. Asking for forgiveness without quite asking. Butterfly kisses, she thought with a flash of child’s memory. But when she fished for the memory, she couldn’t get it back, couldn’t tell whether it was hers or Cohen’s. A shiver went through her at the thought that she could confuse the two. Then the fear drifted into . . . something. Something she could live with, even if she didn’t understand it yet. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “You promised to think about something. I wanted to know what you decided.” She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t read him the way she had during those hours in the mine. But he had to know. How could he touch her, how could he look at her without knowing? “I told you,” she said. “Feeling something doesn’t mean you can follow through on it.” “No,” she said. “It doesn’t, does it?” He had drawn back from her a little as they spoke. Now he reached out and touched her hand and looked into her eyes. “What do you want now, Catherine?” She looked back at him, feeling the warmth and the pull of him, the something in his smile that lived beyond and below words, that she no longer had to pin down or put a name to. The image of a rose took shape in her mind. A real rose, a little hurt in its spines, a little rot in its redness. A rose and its thorns. “Everything.” She smiled. “All of it.” FURTHER READING Readers who follow what Lee Smolin has called the spectator sport of quantum physics will recognize the long shadows cast in this story by the theories of John Stuart Bell, Charles Bennett, David