Spin State - Chris Moriarty [63]
Li shifted, suddenly uncomfortable on the plush sofa. “That’s a suspicious-minded way of putting it.”
“Which is precisely why I know you’ve already thought of it.” He grinned. “Besides, I have great respect for Helen. She’s admirably ruthless, and it’s always edifying to watch a master at work. By the way, I wouldn’t recommend telling her you’ve been to see me. She’s a little sour on me just at the moment.”
Li resisted the urge to point out that Nguyen might have good reasons for being sour on him. Instead she said, “What can you tell me about Hannah Sharifi?”
Cohen smiled. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Did you know her personally?”
The smile broadened.
“Christ, Cohen, is there anyone you haven’t slept with?”
He sighed ostentatiously. “Oh, spare me your puritanical miner’s daughter morality. At least I’m still speaking to all my exes. Unlike some people I could name.”
“I’m still speaking to you, aren’t I?” Li said, deadpan.
They looked at each other—really looked—for the first time since she’d arrived.
Cohen looked away first and leaned forward to tap the ash off his cigarette. “I don’t think you get the credit for that.”
Li stood up and walked around the room.
Pictures of long-forgotten eighteenth-century contessas and marquises hung on the grass-papered walls. The Jaquet-Droz automaton on the card table could write messages of up to forty strokes in any alphabet, nod its head, and move its buckram-stuffed chest up and down under its frock coat in a gear-and-pulley imitation of real breathing. The bookshelves held snapshots of scientists clowning for the camera in front of ivy-covered buildings, including a first-generation print of the famous shot of the original Hyacinthe Cohen at some historic AI conference before the Evacuation. Beside it were newer photos of the Cohen she knew—or rather photos of handsome unfamiliar faces wearing his sly smile. At parties. Playing with his dogs. Talking to the Israeli prime minister. Sitting on the beach outside Tel Aviv. That one must be recent, she realized; there was Roland’s face eyeing her from inside the picture frame.
And there were novels, of course. Cohen and his novels. Stendhal. Balzac. The Brontës. Sometimes Li thought he knew more about book people than real people.
She pulled a book from the shelf. It crackled in her hand and breathed out a tickly but pleasant-smelling cloud of leather, glue, and paper particles. She let it fall open at random:
“Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?”
I could risk no sort of answer by this time: my heart was full.
“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you—you’d forget me.”
“Why do you keep this rubbish?” she asked Cohen, her nose still in the book. Her back was to him, but she couldn’t quite hide the smile in her voice. “It’s toxic. I’ve ingested eighteen kinds of mold just from opening the thing.”
“I’m obsessed by obsolete and troublesome technologies. Why else would I waste so much time on you?”
Li laughed and shut the book. “Speaking of obsolete technology, you knew Sharifi came out of the XenoGen birthlabs, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes. Same as you.”
Li stiffened, still not looking at him. “Same as my grandmother.”
“Of course.”
“Did Sharifi ever talk to you about that?”
“Not as such. But she talked about Compson’s World. She lived there until she was