Spin State - Chris Moriarty [87]
“Sit down,” he said, and flicked the switch that lit the shop’s single dim bulb.
McCuen sat. Li didn’t.
“So,” the welder said. “This is her.”
“Yeah,” McCuen said.
“Time to put your mouth where your money is,” the welder said.
Li held out her left arm, sleeve rolled above the elbow. He snapped a tourniquet around it, produced a needle from his apron pocket, and pulled more blood than Li thought could possibly be necessary, even for the most incompetent doctor. “They want a tooth, too,” he said.
“Oh, Christ,” Li muttered. “For God’s sake.”
“You didn’t say that before,” McCuen said.
“Well, I’m saying it now. You can fake blood. Teeth tell the whole story.” He turned back to Li. “You want to talk to the man or not?”
Li shrugged and opened her mouth.
She spent the next half hour sitting on a work counter nursing a bloody gap where her bottom right premolar had been, while McCuen paced back and forth impatiently. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as she’d hoped it would; a little worse and her internals would have thrown enough endorphins at it to have her feeling comfortable. As it was, they ignored it and left her to handle it.
Finally the welder came back, accompanied by a second man who waved them back into the slanting courtyard and toward the stairs.
“Here?” Li asked.
But he opened a narrow door tucked beneath the stairs, ducked into another corridor, and led them into an alley even darker and narrower than the one she and McCuen had come in by. Five right turns, two left turns, and three interior courtyards later he turned into a broader alley, this one roofed with grimy, rain-streaked greenhouse sheeting. It ran level, but its walls curved like a snail’s shell, as if responding to some structural logic Li couldn’t fathom.
A few dozen meters down the spiraling alley, their guide stopped at a nondescript door, knocked, and entered.
The room inside smelled of old newspapers and boiled cabbage. A pea-coal fire smoldered in the grate, filling the room with greasy smoke. A woman sat at a chipped laminate table holding a child in her lap, reading to him in a low murmur. The woman and child both looked up momentarily, then dropped their heads to the book again, uninterested.
“Where is he?” their guide asked.
The woman jerked her chin toward an inner room. As Li passed by the table, she saw there was something wrong with the boy’s upper lip and his legs were withered.
McCuen started toward the door, but the guide barred his way. He looked hard at her, then shrugged and went over to sit at the table. Li stepped through alone and heard the door swing to behind her.
She stood in near darkness, cut by a single dusty beam of sunlight stabbing through a storm shutter. As she looked around Li understood the odd curvature of the alley outside. The house was built onto the outside skin of one of the old life-support pods; this room’s three newer walls were native mud brick, but the back wall, the only original one, was a curved gleaming expanse of ceramic compound. An airlock yawned in the center of the old wall, but its control panel had been ripped open and hot-wired long ago. The irising virusteel door panels were permanently stuck at a two-thirds-open position, and someone had hung a blanket over the gap, blocking off Li’s view of the geodesic dome that must lie behind.
In front of the dead airlock stood a swaybacked table piled with pads and datacubes. A wiry, weathered man sat behind the table: Daahl, the shift foreman Li had met on her first mine visit.
“Well,” Daahl said, looking straight at Li. “You get curiouser and curiouser.”
“You too.” Li sat down on the stool across from Daahl’s and leafed through the papers and fiches that littered the table. She saw pit regulations, UNMSC section headings, General Assembly minutes, court papers. “You some kind of pit lawyer, Daahl?”
“You could say that. Care for a beer?”
“Thanks.” She took out her cigarettes. “May I?”
Daahl called into the front room for the beer, then took the cigarette she offered. As she leaned across the table to light it, he