Ghost Spin (20 page)

“Look,” she said, “we need to talk.”

God no!

“We can’t go on like this. You’re avoiding me.”

He looked up at her, meeting her eyes as best he could—which meant staring hard at a spot on the wall slightly above her left shoulder. “No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. I have to chase you around the ship just to file status reports. And people are noticing. It’s not good for the ship. It’s not good for the crew. And it’s not”—she stumbled a bit, gathered herself like a horse before a fence, and then rushed through the next bit—“well, frankly, it’s not fair to me.”

“You’re imagining it.”

“I’m not—oh for God’s sake! Come on, look me in the eye. No, really, I mean it, this is ridiculous! Can you do me a favor and not make this any fucking harder than it has to be?”

“I
am
looking you in the—”

She made a rude noise. “With all due respect, sir, you need to get your shit together. If you can’t work with me, you need to fucking deal with it or you need to request a new first officer.”

Now he really did look at her. “That would destroy your career.”

“Yeah, well, I think I did sort of just mention that this is slightly unfair to me among others.”

“I know,” he said.

She shifted impatiently, and he could tell she hadn’t really heard him—that she still thought he was arguing with her.

“It is completely unfair to you, and to everyone else. And you’re right. It’s my problem and I need to deal with it.”

“But—oh. Right. Thanks, then. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but I just … well … 
somebody
had to say something.”

“Yes. And it should have been me, not you. I’m sorry for that.”

That surprised her, and her surprise irked Llewellyn. Had she thought so little of him?

She laughed into the uncomfortable silence. “Maybe we just need to sleep together and get over it.”

Like that would work. “Um—well—yeah—not my style, really.”

Her lips quirked in amusement. “Are you telling me you’re a nice boy who doesn’t give out on the first date?”

He cleared his throat to speak—only to realize that he had nothing, absolutely nothing to say. There were words cycling through his head. But none of them were ones he could possibly say to her.

“It’s not really my style, either, to be honest.”

“Oh.” A leaping of the heart. A sudden, glorious, painful, piercing conviction that it was
him
that those deep eyes saw and not just the next in a long line of desperate, befuddled, offensively single-minded males.

“Mmmm,” she murmured, and the faint hint of warmth in her voice killed him. He quailed behind his desk. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t even look at the corner of the desk her hand was resting on.

“Because … I …” She went on in a voice that was suddenly full of uncharacteristic pauses and ellipses and hesitations. “This isn’t something that’s happened to me much. And … what I said just now about … it’s not like I go around sleeping with people so they can, you know, get over me.” Here she made ironic scare quotes with her long fingers. “Or, um, I can get over them.”

By then he
was
looking up at her. There was nowhere else he wanted to be looking except into those glorious eyes, nowhere else he wanted to be, nothing else he wanted to think about. She seemed to search his eyes for something, find it, and relax a little. Time passed. And suddenly Llewellyn realized he was gazing up at her with an expression of openmouthed, doglike adoration.

He cleared his throat and looked away. But it was too late, of course. It had been too late for a long time, and he was only now admitting it to himself.

“I just don’t know what to do about this,” Avery said. Her voice dropped. “It’s so … 
weird
.”

“No,” Llewellyn snapped, finally pushed into some place beyond tact or self-censoring. “It’s not weird. It’s perfectly normal. It’s the most normal thing there is. It just stinks.”

Suddenly he was laughing. And she was laughing, too. Because it was all so completely and utterly trite and ridiculous that what else could you do but laugh?

“So … um … what do we do?”

He had a sudden, blindingly intense vision: of himself, reaching out to take the hand that lay just within arm’s reach and pulling her to him.
“Nothing. That’s what we should do. Anything else would be incredibly stupid. People would be sure to find out about it, and
then
what would we do?”

“I know … I just … yeah, you’re right,” she said. But she didn’t leave.

The seconds ticked by and it became more and more patently ridiculous that he wasn’t looking at or speaking to her.

“So that’s taken care of then,” he forced himself to say.

And then he forced himself to move. To pick up a pen and pull the logbook back toward him and start laboriously writing the detailed account he was required to submit in handwritten facsimile every ship’s day. And force his cramped and protesting fingers to trace the archaic shapes of the letters that told every single thing that had happened that day except the one thing that mattered.

And still she stood there.

He cleared his throat again. “Was there something else you wanted, Lieutenant?”

“No, sir. Permission to be dismissed, sir.”

“Permission granted.”

“Boy, do you ever know how to
not
have fun,” the ghost drawled from his favorite chair in his favorite room of his favorite wing of his memory palace.

“Don’t worry,” Llewellyn told him. “Our good resolutions lasted all of two weeks, if that.”

“Oh thank God,” the ghost sighed. “I don’t think I could survive any more noble self-denial. I’m sure you’re sincere. And I know a lot of people have a sort of twisted aesthetic appreciation for carrying moral scruples to the extreme. Not that I entirely deny the aesthetic value of morality. Certainly I’d be as sorry as the next fellow to live in a world so comfortable in its own skin that no one could thrill to the moral and financial peccadilloes of an Emma Bovary. But still … in real life I prefer to keep my principles above the waist.”

I saw an aged aged man,

A-sitting on a gate.

“Who are you, aged man?” I said.

“And how is it you live?”

And his answer trickled through my head

Like water through a sieve.

—Lewis Carroll

NEW ALLEGHENY

Li’s resurrection on New Allegheny went so smoothly that it felt just like Router/​Decomposer had said it would: no worse than waking up from a long trip in cold sleep. She sat up, let the medtechs conduct the ritual fussing and bloodletting, and then signed the resurrection contract they put in front of her, without even bothering to read the fine print.

The name gave her a moment’s pause, however: Caitlyn Perkins. How deep had the Loyal Opposition had to dig to produce that piece of her past? Perhaps not deep at all if they shared any of Cohen’s memories. But the idea that her own carefully hidden secrets were floating around the cosmos with his ghosts presented a host of fresh problems for her.

She hadn’t been Caitlyn Perkins for almost three decades, not since the day she’d walked into an illegal clinic on Compson’s World and paid the chop shop doctor to give her a dead girl’s face and geneset. Catherine Li had been born that day. And ever since then—every time she made an FTL jump, every time she lied to the psychtechs, every time she uploaded the fake version of her childhood instead of the real one—Catherine Li had been killing Caitlyn Perkins one memory at a time.

Using her real name now was risky. Nguyen knew it, and so did Korchow, which meant it would give them an edge if they decided to track her down on New Allegheny. But the Loyal Opposition must have
looked at the alternatives and decided that the difficulties of concocting a new identity outweighed the risk of using her old one. And on the whole, she couldn’t disagree with them.

She felt a tense thrill when she signed her old name to the immigration forms. It was a shock just to see the name in black and white when she’d worked so hard for so long to forget she’d ever been that person. But the immigration officer gave it the same bored glance he would have given any other name, and a few forms and questions later Li was through immigration control and stepping into the harsh sunlight and thin atmosphere of the Monongahela Uplands.

The port authority doors opened straight onto a broad plaza that looked like it had been designed for pedestrians by some idealistic urban planner who’d never seen the Periphery outside of news spins. The plaza had long ago been invaded by taxis and commuter vans, and crossing it on foot now would amount to taking your life in your hands. That was a moot point, though, because there really was nowhere to go up here: Directly on the other side of the plaza yawned the chasm of Monongahela Pit.

Li could just get a hazy view of the far side of the Pit—at least the upper reaches of it. Some of the haze was air pollution, but the rest was sheer distance. The Pit was eighteen miles across and two thousand feet deep: the largest man-made surface feature on any planet in the Periphery. Above the smog line she could see trees clinging to rocky cliffs; houses clinging precariously to hills that were a few scant degrees short of being cliffs themselves; the girdered tracks of incline railroads plunging headlong into the Pit; the smokestacks of steel mills jutting up out of the smog like blackened brick sentries.

But below the smog line, nothing. It was as if some giant hand had thrown a blanket over the immense valley, completely obscuring the Pit bottom. Back in its own steel days, original Pittsburgh, ancestral home to most of New Allegheny’s original settlers, had once famously been called “Hell with the lid off.” But Monongahela Pit was Hell with the lid on it. And the thought of going underneath that impenetrable smog line filled Li with the same queasy dread she’d felt three decades ago at the idea of following her parents down to work in the Bose-Einstein mines.

There were fourteen other pits scattered across the breadth of New Allegheny’s main northern continent, though none was as large as Monongahela. They were the remnant of the largest known terraforming project in the history of humanity. If any other missions on this scale had been launched during the chaos of the Great Migration, they had yet to be rediscovered by post-humanity, and now they probably never would be. So New Allegheny was the big one.

And, in large part, it had been successful. The bombardment had established viable pothole ecosystems in twelve of the fifteen craters. By the time the human settlers had arrived in the mid-twenty-third century, the pothole biospheres were enough to support a good portion of the colonists. And by the time a few generations had passed, the larger potholes had begun to seep atmosphere up into the neighboring Uplands.

The result was an odd, but functional, world, divided between densely populated pothole biospheres and sparsely settled, barely terraformed uplands. It was a strange system, with somewhat peculiar political consequences, but it worked.

Or at least it had worked until the FTL boom. Until then, the economy had been divided more or less evenly between heavy manufacturing in the pits and subsistence farming in the Uplands. The upland farms had managed to feed the settlers—reasonably well in good years, and well enough even in bad years to stave off absolute starvation. And the steel mills—for it was New Allegheny’s abundant iron deposits that had brought the settlers there in the first place—had turned out highgrade rolled steel for the UN’s voracious ceramsteel industry. But then the Drift had opened up, sucking in a maelstrom of high-stakes investors and off-world money that disrupted the fragile balance. Now profits were sky-high, the Trusteeship was making fortunes for anyone who was willing and able to catch them, and full membership in the UN was even on the table.

New Allegheny’s future had been blown wide open, but the smart money was betting that it wouldn’t belong to the locals.

Monongahela Pit was really a pothole, just like the terraforming potholes on dozens of other Periphery planets. But in the rust-beltdescended
local dialect, incline-plane railroads were “planes” and the region’s booming coal mines—which Li, with her mostly Irish Compson’s World heritage, would have called pits—were “works”—pronounced in a roundheeled Yankee drawl that made the word rhyme with
cork
. And the Monongahela Pothole was simply the Pit.

The Pittsburgh Pit, twelve hundred kilometers northward, was the nominal capital and the pothole that the original settlers had designated their colony’s main city. But unexpectedly severe seasonal dust storms had crippled its off-planet commerce and Pittsburgh High had withered into a mere local stopover, while Monongahela Pit’s reliable weather had turned Monongahela High into the planet’s real spaceport.

Monongahela High was a typical rough-and-tumble Periphery spaceport—more rough-and-tumble than most, thanks to the massive orbital chain of the Navy shipyards and to a healthy local pirating tradition specializing in short-hop shipping.

But Monongahela Pit was something else—as intensely, peculiarly local as any of the isolated “lost colonies” strung out along the Periphery and still not incorporated into the UN’s system of member states and trusteeships.