Sharifi’s equipment. Li raised her hand and saw the crescent of scar tissue between thumb and forefinger. Sharifi.
But she wasn’t just in Sharifi this time. She was her. She knew her thoughts, her memories, her emotions. And she knew that it was some unfathomable combination of Cohen and the mine itself who had made this possible. Even as she walked through Sharifi’s dreaming memory, the intelligence behind the crystals was using Cohen, reading him, threading itself through him as subtly and inextricably as ceramsteel twining through nerve and muscle. She felt the crystals’ exultation thrumming along the intraface just as clearly as she felt Cohen’s terror.
Sharifi knelt, reached for a gauge, tied off a loose wire. And with each little physical act she thought, considered, remembered. Li shuddered as she realized that Sharifi’s understanding didn’t end with her death, that it was tinged with the piercing regret of hindsight. Because what Sharifi had found in the glory hole was death. Her own death, in the place she least looked for it.
“Do you have to hang over me like that?” she asked Voyt.
He backed off. “So where’s Korchow? Off stealing the silverware?”
“I’m here.” A shape stepped out of the shadows. Bella. Of course. But Bella had never smiled that smile, never walked with that deliberate catlike stride. Where Bella crept—and Li realized only now that it was creeping—Korchow danced. “Ready?” he asked.
Sharifi frowned. “Just keep your end of the bargain.”
“How could I forget it?”
Sharifi linked with the field AI, and Li felt the blossoming thoughtline run bright as new wire between Sharifi’s wetware and the orbital field array high above them. Sharifi’s link was nothing, she realized. A mere echo of the bond between her and Cohen. What Sharifi had done they could do. And more, much more. She felt a wild elation rising inside her, her excitement and Cohen’s feeding off each other in this still-strange alchemical union of her one and his many.
We need more, Cohen thought. We need to know what she’s doing.
Li snapped back into focus. Sharifi was still fiddling with wires and monitors, testing the link, readying herself. Meanwhile the mind behind the crystals was probing, exploring. Li felt it run through her, coursing up the line to the field AI high above them, enveloping woman and AI alike.
But Sharifi just kept fussing. Stalling. Couldn’t she feel that the link was up? Her precious dataset was there for the taking. What the hell was she waiting for?
Li knew the answer as soon as she asked the question. She could hear Sharifi think, feel her pulse, her breath, the stray ache of a pulled muscle. She wasn’t waiting for anything. She’d already gotten everything she’d come for. The experiment was over, run off the rails by the crystals themselves. She had her answers—the same answers she’d hidden from Li, from Nguyen, from everyone. Now she was playing out a script, playing Nguyen and Haas and Korchow off against each other, hoping she could do what she had to do before the bill came due.
Nguyen had been right all along; Sharifi had betrayed them.
But not to Korchow. Not for the Syndicates, not for money, not even for Bella. She’d done it for this—this first tentative contact with the life swirling through the fan vaults and pillars of the glory hole.
This was the thing that had brought her to Compson’s World. The money, the fame, the dream of cheap cultured crystal had been not lies, exactly, but merely surface reasons. The real reason had been the same one that brought Compson here, and so many explorers and scholars after him: life, the only other life in the universe besides humans and the creatures humans made.
It had been in front of Li’s eyes all the time, clear as clear water, scribbled in Sharifi’s dog-eared copy of Xenograph.
We came into the country like saints going to the desert, Compson had written. We came to be changed. But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And Sharifi had answered, But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
This mine was Sharifi’s desert. She had come here to see, to understand, to be changed. And she wasn’t going to make the same mistake Compson had made. She wasn’t going to pass the maps up the food chain and trust TechComm to protect the crystals. She thought she had a better plan.
Li glanced at Voyt and Korchow. They had backed off a little, following Sharifi’s preparations. Haas’s man and the Syndicates’ man. One of them after the synthetic crystal the Syndicates needed so desperately. The other after… what? Who did Voyt answer to, Haas or the UN? And which one of them was going to kill Sharifi?
Suddenly Li knew that she didn’t want to be watching—let alone watching from inside Sharifi’s skin—when it happened. She didn’t need to see who had battered Sharifi’s head, mangled her hand. She didn’t need to watch them break her. She owed Sharifi at least that privacy.
Something shifted in the shadowed air. Something vast, slow, ancient. There was no breeze, no sound, no outer evidence of the change, but it was as clear as a door opening. The data shooting between Li and Cohen over the intraface spiked. Li felt the same waiting-for-the-flood feeling that had overpowered them when they first stepped into the glory hole. Then it was on top of them.
It flowed through her like blood coursing through arteries. It filled her lungs, filled her mind, filled every hollow space of her. And when it had taken all of her there was to take, it made new spaces to fill, new universes inside her. Her skin stretched across oceans and continents. Her nerves were the petrified, planet-spanning rivers of carbon beds, her veins fault lines and ore seams, her eyes dusky stars burning in the dark heart of the earth.
She saw the change of seasons, and the slow seasonless passage of time in the Earth’s deep places. She watched the welling up of mountains, the shift of continents. She saw life rise and struggle and fall and pass into darkness without looking back. She looked out through the eyes of every creature that had lived in the depths, that had crawled on the planet’s skin or swum in its long dry oceans. And then, in what seemed but a moment, the water was gone and the wind swept across the steppes with nothing but the soft fur of algae and lichen to feel it.
She watched humans come. Saw the explorers and surveyors, the brief flickering lights of miners. She felt the stirring and pricking of a world waking to the thought that it had children again—even if they were strange, murdering, voracious children.
Sharifi had seen only a pale echo of this, filtered through the uncomprehending field AI. But it had been enough. She had known. And once she knew, there would be no room for deals or compromises or secrecy.
It was that simple. It was that impossible. Of course they had to kill her.
Something snapped, and Li was blind, cut loose in the void.
But not alone. This was a shared darkness. Someone waited in the many-trunked forest of crystals. A man, thin, dark-haired, his face lost in shadow. A man who slipped in and out of sight as she walked toward him, like stars flickering behind blowing cloud cover.
“Not him,” she whispered to whoever or whatever was listening. “Please, not him.”
But it was him. It was the father Li remembered from his worst sickness. So thin, so pale, so collapsed in on himself that he was barely bigger than she was. He raised a wasted hand to wipe away tears she hadn’t known she was crying. She collapsed into his arms and buried her face in the cloth of his shirt that smelled of rain and of coal dust and of him.
We are so glad. The thought swept through her more fiercely and intimately than even Cohen’s thoughts. So glad it was you.