She was breaking him. Slowly, pitilessly, irresistibly. She had locked him into the loop shunt somehow and was running the whole vast power of the worldmind through him, killing him.
Li looked at Haas, slumped over the glowing desk. She looked at Bella’s peaceful face, at the hair circling her head like the flaming corona of an eclipsed star.
She is coming down from the mountains, she thought. Singing. With stones in her hands.
She called Security.
“I’m in Haas’s office,” she said. “Don’t send anyone. Everything’s fine here.”
SLOW TIME
[There lies] the mountain called Atlas, very tapered and round; so lofty, moreover, that the top (it is said) cannot be seen, the clouds never quitting it either summer or winter… The natives are reported not to eat any living thing and never to have any dreams.
She didn’t try to see Bella again until the night before she left—and by that time the guards wouldn’t let her in.
They were planetary militia, whatever that meant now, and they weren’t taking orders from anyone in UN uniform.
“You’re not authorized anymore,” said a sergeant Li belatedly recognized as one of Ramirez’s fellow kidnappers. He squared his shoulders as if expecting her to fight and squirmed his feet deeper into the zero-g loops.
Behind him she could see the corridor leading to Haas’s office. It was shut down, life support ticking over at the bare minimum required to keep the air breathable and the water running.
A group of miners shoved past Li, smelling like they’d just come up from the pit, and pulled along the guide ropes toward the office.
“And they’re authorized?” she asked incredulously.
The sergeant shrugged. “They’re regulars. Cartwright cleared them. What do you want from me? No UN personnel past this point without specific authorization. That’s cleared all the way up the line to Helena. Which is as far as the line goes now.”
“Fine,” Li said. “Call Cartwright.”
When she finally got into Haas’s office, she barely recognized it.
Only the immense gleaming desk and the starlight seeping in through the floorport were the same. The rest of the room had become a shadowy chaos of charms, candles, statues, prayer plaques. Flames burned round and unearthly in zero g, hanging above the candlewicks like will-o’-the-wisps. Rosaries swayed like seaweed in unseen air currents. Wax from the candles floated around the room, dangerously hot, and accreted on every surface.
And then there were the people. The believers, the doubters, and the merely curious trooped through one after another. They whispered. They stared. They prayed. They asked questions.
Most of all, though, they asked for voices. Voices of lost friends. Voices of loved ones. Voices that Bella delivered to them.
She hung above the desk, just where Li had last seen her, a space-age sybil suspended in zero gravity. She spoke in a hundred voices. She spoke the names of the dead and pulled their words from the darkness, pushing back—just for a moment—the shadows of loss and doubt and death.
Li stood in a dark corner and watched. The pilgrims must be feeding Bella, she realized. They must be clothing her, washing her. Someone must be brushing that coal black halo of hair. Did she care? Did she even notice them? What deathly twilight had she passed into?
Li watched long enough to learn the rhythms of the air currents that traveled through the chamber, the way they played along Bella’s skirt hem and turned her hair into a Medusa’s crown. She watched the sun set beneath her feet, and the room fade into the bleak blue and gray of starlight.
She thought Bella was asleep, but around sunset she opened her eyes and looked straight at Li as if she’d locked on to the sound of her breathing. “Is it you?” Li asked.
“It’s always me.”
The air crackled with static, setting Li’s hair on end and sucking the thin silk of Bella’s dress against her legs. Her skirt had hitched up above her knees. It bothered Li to think that the miners would be trooping in and out of the room staring at her, and that Bella was too far gone into the void of the worldmind to notice. She stepped forward, grabbed the thin cloth and pulled it down around Bella’s ankles, covering her.
Bella smiled. As if she knew what Li was thinking. As if she were laughing at her.
“Are you happy?” Li asked.
“I’m sorry about your mother. And Cohen.”
Li swallowed. “Are they all right?”
“Mirce is. The AI is… more complicated.”
“Is he—?”
“We’re all alive, Catherine. Can’t you feel us? We feel you. Every part of you, every voice, every network, no matter where you are in the station. We love you.”
Li closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands.
“Katie,” Bella said. It was her father’s voice.
“Don’t! I won’t listen!”
Bella shrugged, but when she spoke again it was in her own voice. “Most people find it gives them comfort.”
“I don’t want comfort.”
She did, though. She wanted it so much it terrified her. She wondered if Mirce’s voice would come out of Bella’s perfect lips. Or McCuen’s voice. She could ask, she supposed. What harm would it do? But she couldn’t ask for the one voice she wanted to hear. Because if she heard that voice, even once, she’d never have the strength to walk away from it.
“Are you sure?” Bella asked.
Li turned around and left and didn’t look back.
Nguyen’s call was waiting when she got back to her quarters. “Not answering the phone these days?” Nguyen said.
Li shrugged.
“I see. Playing the bereaved widow. Well, you made enough money off him that I guess you should at least go through the motions. Who would have thought he’d leave you everything?”
Li kept her mouth shut; it wasn’t even worth trying to find out how Nguyen had gotten hold of that piece of information.
“You won’t keep any of it, of course. The advocate general will challenge it. And win. Half of the hardware Cohen’s system ran on is covered by government patents and licenses. They’ll bankrupt you.”
Li looked down at her hands, took a breath. “Is that all you called about, or was there something else?”
Nguyen smiled coldly and reached outside the VR field to retrieve a dog-eared yellow piece of paper. “We know. We know everything. It’s over, Li.”
“If it was really over, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
“I’ve been authorized to offer you a way out. Under the circumstances, we decided… discretion was the best approach.”
Li waited.
“You’ll ship back to Alba with the rest of the station personnel for debriefing. When you arrive, you’ll request a leave of absence for health reasons. Once things have settled down a bit, you’ll resign. Quietly. A suitable job will be found for you in the private sector. And we’ll all forget about what happened or didn’t happen on Compson’s.”
“That’s clear enough.”
“Good, then. It’s agreed.”
“No.”
Nguyen caught her breath and leaned forward almost imperceptibly in her chair. “Do you actually think you can weather this scandal? Are you really that arrogant?”
“You have the right to drum me out of the Service. I’d probably do the same in your place.” Li laughed briefly. “Hell, in your place I’d probably put a bullet in my skull and call it even. But you don’t have the right to make me resign. You don’t have the right to make me slink off quietly.”