Spin State - Chris Moriarty [55]
But there it was. Gil Perkins. And the dates, below the name. He’d been thirty-six when he died. Which meant that the old, worn-down, coal-scarred father of her childhood had been younger than she was now.
“Can I help you?” a man’s voice said behind her.
She spun around, chest heaving.
A priest. Young. Athletic-looking. Not local. He looked at her with bright-eyed interest. He had an intelligent, sensitive face, the face of a bright young man who believed that people were basically good. He was probably two or three years out of seminary, getting his first taste of poverty, feeling himself on the front lines here, fighting the good fight. Li knew the type. They did a lot of good, but they were in Compson’s World, not of it. They came for a year, or two, or ten, but eventually they always went back to the Helena spaceport and caught a jumpship home. A decision for which Li was in no position to blame them.
“I—was just taking a walk,” she said. “Just looking.”
“Someone you knew?”
“What? Oh . . . yes. A little.”
“Fifteen years, and he still gets visitors. He must have been the kind of man people remember.”
“There was nothing special about him,” Li said.
The priest smiled. “If you say so.”
She looked at his thin, clever, honest face. He was no one she remembered. No one who would know her or would even have heard of her. He was younger than her, for Christ’s sake. Why not take a chance?
“So who visits him?” she asked casually.
“A Mrs. . . . Oh, I can’t remember her name. She moved to another parish before I got here. Blond.” He grinned. “Irish as green grass and tinkers’ ponies. Tall. About my height.” Then he held up his right hand, and Li knew what he was going to say before he spoke. “Missing part of a finger.”
“Left it in Londonderry,” Li murmured. The words came out in an accent she’d spent the last decade weeding out of her speech. She felt as if someone else had spoken them. Someone whose face she should remember.
“Really? She was a Provo? No shit.” The priest shook his head. “Stubborn buggers. You’d think the UN would just give up and let them stay there.”
“You’d think.”
Li looked back at the headstone. It had started to drizzle, and the rain speckled the laminate face of the marker, spreading across the pale surface like ink stains. She shivered and pulled her collar closer in against her neck.
“I could give her your name,” the priest said. “If you want to talk to her.”
Li caught her breath. “No. No, I don’t think so.” She swallowed, her heart hammering. “I doubt she’d even remember me. And what’s the point of stirring up old memories? People have to get on with life sometime.”
McCuen met her at the shuttle gate looking white and stricken.
“Christ,” she said when she saw his face. “What’s happened?”
“It’s Gould. She’s gone.”
“When?”
“Two, three hours ago.”
Li stepped past McCuen and started walking toward HQ. “Three hours isn’t the end of the world, McCuen. She can’t have gotten far.”
“It might be longer. . . .”
She turned on him. “How much longer?” she asked, speaking slowly and very clearly.
“I’m sorry,” McCuen said miserably. “I—she went to bed last night, then in the morning, even though she didn’t go to work, she was using power, water, air. She was onstream. We monitored the calls. No one saw guests go in, and it never occurred to me until I saw them that she wasn’t making those calls. But she wasn’t. They just used her home system to make us think she was.”
Like Li had used Sharifi’s system to fool her way into Gould’s office. Was it a coincidence? A joke? And if not, then what the hell was Gould up to?
“Why didn’t you call me right away when she went missing, McCuen?”
“I did. I tried. You—you were off-grid.”
Of course. She’d gone to old Shantytown. She’d been walking down memory lane, leaving