In place of a reply, he reached over her shoulder and plucked a cricket out of the greenery to sit chirping on his outstretched palm. “Disappointed?”
“No,” Li said.
“Beautiful, isn’t she?”
“It’s a she?”
“We’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.”
He put his hand against a sunflower stalk. The cricket marched onto the stalk with slow dignity, sat down, and went on singing as if its visit to Cohen had been just another walk under the warm sun.
“How did you do that?” Li asked.
“Oh, this is all me. It’s a place I used to have in Spain. Gone now, of course. We’re in one of my memory palaces. Whatever the crystals are doing to us, they’re using my networks to do it. They’ve just… locked us in a back room while they search the house, I guess you could say.”
“Christ!”
“Yes. Well. There’s not much we can do about it. And you don’t want to see what’s happening out there. It has a lot more to do with shooting magpies than catching crickets.”
She stared at him, stricken, but he was already bending over the cricket, talking about what crickets did and ate, how they used their legs to make that fantastic, improbable noise. “They always liked hot, dry places,” he said. “Spain. Texas. You couldn’t wake up in one of those places and not know just where you were in the world.”
“They’re extinct?”
“Long, long before you were born, my dear.”
“They’re going to turn Compson’s World into another Earth. Another Gilead. And we can’t stop it, can we?”
“We can change the battle lines.”
“Just buying a little time, Cohen. Is it worth it?”
“For me it is. If ALEF gets the intraface.”
“And what if the price of getting the intraface is losing the planet to the Syndicates?”
“I don’t have any grudge against the Syndicates. Maybe you do. Maybe you’re right to.” He sounded impatient. “I can’t choose for you.”
Li scuffed her feet in the dirt, kicking up red dust puffs from the furrow bottoms. She reached out to Cohen, felt the shape and breadth and complexity of him. He reached out just as she did, and they got tangled in each other and backed away again. They were dancing around each other, she realized, putting up a new wall for each one they dismantled, closing another door for each door they opened. Acting as if they had all the time in the world, instead of none at all.
“Cohen?” she asked.
“What?” He had gone on a little ahead, and now he drifted back and stood facing her.
“What you said back on Alba about… AIs. About the way they’re put together. Do you think a person can change something like that? Change their code? Change what they were made to be?”
“Are we still talking politics?” She felt the flurry of unspoken questions behind his words.
“No. Or… not only politics.”
He gave her one of those looks he’d gotten into the habit of throwing at her lately. A look that put everything in her hands, that laid everything he wanted right out in front of her and left her with no excuses, no evasions.
She met his eyes. The moment when she could have laughed, or glanced away, or turned aside passed.
“I think a person can try to change,” Cohen said. “I think trying means something, even if you fail. I think even wanting to try means something.”
Li screwed up her nerve as if she were forcing herself out of a high window. “I hope we get out of here in one piece,” she said. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him while she said it, but she had said it.
And she had said it knowing that he knew what she meant by it. It wasn’t much, maybe, but it was something.
“I hope so too,” Cohen said. A sly smile played around his lips. “Now what’s this nonsense with Bella?”
Li flushed. “Nothing. What you said. Nonsense.” She looked up to find the hazel eyes measuring her. “What?”
“Prove it.”
His voice was light, making a joke of it, but just for a moment Li caught a flash of the want behind the words. Her stretched out on top of him. Her mouth on his. Her knee pushing Chiara’s thighs apart.
“And just what the hell would that prove?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Sex isn’t a promise, Cohen.”
“Not even a promise to try to want to try?”
“Well. Maybe it’s that.” She stepped toward him. “Prove it, huh? Do you have any idea how childish that sounds? Who knew you were such a baby?”
Chiara was enough taller than Li that she had to stand a little on her toes to reach her lips. She thrust her hands into the honey-colored curls, smelling the clean, warm, safe smell that followed Cohen everywhere. Feeling the flush of desire that coursed through him at her touch.
That first kiss was slow, tentative. As if they had suddenly, after all the time and all the battles and secrets they shared, become shy with each other. Even on the link, Cohen was silent. He gave her Chiara’s lips, soft, open, yielding. But the rest of him—the things she had glimpsed among the wild roses, the feelings he had always spoken of even when she least wanted to hear him—all that was as ghostly and insubstantial as second-hand memories.
Li pulled back and looked up into the hazel eyes. “Are you going to help, or were you just planning to stand there?”
She felt Cohen’s brushfire laughter licking along the link between them. And something below the laughter. A doubting, trembling, questioning something. “I’ve been chasing you for a long time,” he said. “Maybe I need to be chased a little.”
She smiled—and she didn’t know whether she was smiling at him or at herself or at the whole hopeful ridiculous mess they’d made of things.
“I think I can manage that,” she said.
She was cold when she woke, cold to the point of pain. Her head ached. Her mouth felt as dry as if she were coming out of cryo. Someone was shaking her.
She opened her eyes and saw Bella.
No. Korchow. It had to be Korchow.
“I’m paying you to do a job,” he said, “not fuck in the fields. What exactly do you two think you’re doing?”
She opened her mouth to answer him, but all that came out was a weak croak.
McCuen’s face appeared above and behind Bella’s. “She’s going into shock,” he said.
Korchow brushed the words aside impatiently. “Where’s Cohen?” he asked.
She panicked. Where was he? What had he said when they first felt the worldmind? That it was tasting them? Using them? How much of Cohen could it use before what made him Cohen was gone? How much time did they have?
Korchow pulled her into a more or less sitting position and trickled some water into her mouth. Her thirst shocked her, and when she checked her internals she saw it had been almost two hours since they’d reached the glory hole. How much time was unfolding for every minute she spent in those visions? Were these the dreams Dawes had spoken of? The dreams the first settlers had warned Compson about?
Those who hear it stay and listen and sleep and die there.
She shuddered hard enough to knock her teeth against the rim of the bottle Korchow was holding to her lips.
“You need to make contact again,” Korchow said.
She laughed bitterly. “They contacted us,” she said. But that was Cohen speaking—speaking through her mouth in a way that had somehow come to seem normal, reasonable. “They’ve been doing it for days, weeks. From the first time Catherine came down here.”
The blood drained from Korchow’s face. “Sharifi said that.”