Spin State - Chris Moriarty [64]
“Sounds fun.”
“What I remember being most impressed by was why she ended up in the orphanage.”
“Oh?”
“She was blind.”
Li turned to stare at him.
“She was born blind. Something in the ocular nerve. Easily correctable. Her adoptive parents fixed it. But the birthlab made a cost-benefit analysis and decided to cull her instead of paying for the operation.”
“Merciful Christ,” Li whispered.
“I doubt mercy had much to do with it. What’s the saying? Pray to the Virgin; God took one look at Compson’s World and went back to Earth? Anyway, according to Hannah the orphanage she grew up in was full of constructs the labs dumped on the streets because of minor defects. Brings a whole new meaning to the externalization of operating costs. ‘The cheapest technology is human technology,’ she liked to say. And she was right, really. The Ring, the UN, interstellar commerce. It’s all running on the blood and sweat of a few hundred thousand miners who spend the first half of their lives underground and the last half dying of black-lung.” He laughed. “It’s positively Victorian. Or maybe it’s just human.”
Li felt a flash of anger at Cohen for . . . well, for what? For talking about it? For laughing at it? For knowing about it and still enjoying his elegant life? But he was right, just like Sharifi had been right. And hadn’t she gotten off Compson’s as fast as she could? Wasn’t she just as determined to take some of the good life and not think too hard about where the condensate that made it all possible was coming from?
She slid the book back onto the shelf and kept moving along the wall, toward Cohen’s desk. She picked up an open fiche, glanced at the screen:
The era of the unitary sentient organism is over. Both the Syndicates and the UN member nations are now scrambling to catch up with this metaevolutionary reality. In the Syndicates we have seen an evolutionary shift toward a hive mind mentality, viz., the cr`eche system, the thirty-year contract, the construction of a distinctively posthuman collective psychology, including generalized cultural acceptance of euthanasia for individuals who deviate from the gene-norm.
“Don’t you believe in privacy?” Cohen asked, sounding exasperated.
“Only my own. What is this, anyway?”
“A talk I’m giving. A draft. Meaning get your snout out of it.”
She shrugged and put the fiche down. “It doesn’t sound like Sharifi had happy memories of Compson’s. So why did she go back there? And what was she doing underground in the Anaconda?”
“I don’t know. We’d lost touch, rather. But I do have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was. And no matter what Helen claims to believe, Sharifi wouldn’t have sold information. She was a real crusader.” He smiled. “A little like you.”
Li brushed that aside. “I’m just pulling a paycheck.”
“Is that what they call it?” He snorted. “I’ve met better-paid bellhops. Speaking of which, why don’t you tell me exactly what you were looking for when the field AI latched on to you.”
“Do you really think it went rogue?” she asked.
“No. Or rather, I stopped thinking that when it went after you. Semisentients just aren’t that interested in humans. Most full sentients aren’t even that interested. No, someone sent it. Someone who is interested in you.”
“Who?”
“Dragons,” Cohen murmured, tracing an elegant figure in the air with the tip of his cigarette. “White Beauties.”
Li’s oracle dipped into the spinstream to figure out what White Beauties were, and what they had to do with imaginary lizards. All she got was a few obscure references to sixteenth-century mapmaking.
Cohen laughed, and she realized he had seen her instream query—and her failure to turn anything up.
“When mapmakers reached the edges of what they knew back on Earth,” he said, “they’d write ‘Here Be Dragons.’ Or if they were a little more prosaic they’d simply leave blank spots. Blank spots which were white, of course, on the old paper maps. Siberia. The Empty Quarter. Deepest Africa. The great explorers called those blank spots White Beauties. Silly