Spin State - Chris Moriarty [44]
A book.
She inhaled its dust, its smell, fingered the acid-gnawed paper. It was a cheap paperback, the kind still printed in the poorer Trusteeships. And this one was from Compson’s now-defunct university press. She turned it over and grinned as she saw the author and title: Zach Compson’s Xenograph.
It was a classic, of course—a book that had seized on people’s imaginations so strongly that they still called Compson’s World by the flamboyant New Zealander’s name, while the anonymous long-distance survey team that actually discovered the planet had been consigned to oblivion.
She let the book fall open at random, and read a passage that Sharifi or some prior owner had underlined:
There was a man who had a stone that sang, they told me. Everywhere I went they talked about this stone. Where it came from. What it meant. How he came to find it.
They told me there were cathedrals in the earth’s dark places. Rooms where the glass bones of the world hold silence like a river, where stones whisper the secrets of the earth to each other. And those who hear them stay and listen and sleep and die there.
But a few come back. They walk out of the mountains singing. With stones in their hands.
This is what they told me, but I never found the man.
“Glory holes,” Li muttered. “He’s talking about glory holes.” She flipped through the book. It was dog-eared, tattered. Someone had read it again and again, starred and underlined favorite passages.
Had Sharifi known about the glory hole before she came? Had she seen something in Compson’s half-mystical ramblings about glass bones and singing stones that no one else had seen? Was that what had brought her back to Compson’s World?
Li set the book on Sharifi’s desk. She stood up, put the wet/dry interface back in its case and tucked it into her uniform’s kangaroo pocket, along with Sharifi’s datebook. She started toward the door. Then she turned around, picked up Sharifi’s battered copy of Xenograph, and put that in her pocket too.
She set the security seal to notify her if anyone else entered, walked back to her own quarters, pulled on clean shorts and a T-shirt, and collapsed on her narrow bunk without even managing to get herself under the covers.
She couldn’t have been asleep ten minutes when the icon for the peepers in Haas’s office toggled, waking her.
She maximized the feed from her skinbugs, and there was Haas, in shirtsleeves, standing behind the luminous desk.
He was talking to someone: a slight figure, whose face was half–turned away from Li. Even in the dim light, Li could make out the pale skin, the dark hair falling over shoulders as tense and frail as bird’s wings.
“I didn’t tell her,” the witch murmured. “I swear it. I haven’t told anyone.” The tension in her voice was unmistakable.
“You’d better hope you haven’t,” Haas answered.
He raised his hand, and the woman flinched as if he’d hit her. Even Li, lying in bed three spokes away, tensed for the blow she thought was coming.
Haas turned away and shrugged. “Christ,” he said. He walked out of the field of the peepers, and Li heard the clink of ice against glass as he poured a drink. “What a day. I need to relax.” A pause, Haas still out of sight. “Come here.”
The witch turned, but she moved so slowly that Haas was back at the desk before she could take more than a step toward him.
“Take that off,” he said.
She undid her robe and let it slide to the floor.
“Lie down.”
She lay back across his desk, passive as a child.
“No,” he said. “Not that way.”
He reached across her, into a desk drawer, and pulled out a wetware case. He bent the witch’s head sideways, inserted a jack into an unseen socket, then attached the contact derms at the other end of the wire to his own forehead and ran the wire through his desktop VR rig.
What happened next was something Li had heard about but never actually seen: