Spin 01 - Spin State (21 page)

Louie’s reply was so quiet Li barely heard it over the shovels of the cutter crew. She bent over him. “What?”

“I said talk to the priest. Just don’t tell him I sent you.”

* * *

The priest’s name was Cartwright, and it took them half the shift to find him. He’d scrawled his mark on the shift log when he came in that morning, but he hadn’t checked out a Davy lamp and they didn’t see his numbered tag on any of the gangway boards.

“Independents,” McCuen said. “They’re so damn sure the company’s going to steal their strikes, they’d rather die than tell the safety crews where to look for them. We’ll just have to go out and hunt him down. If you think it’s worth it.” He looked doubtful.

“You know him?” Li asked.

“Sure,” McCuen said. “Everyone does.” He made a circling gesture near his temple with one finger: crazy.

The rest of the shift ran together in a blur of dripping walls and flickering lamplight. They soon passed beyond the AMC-wired sections of the mine and into regions lit only by miners’ lamps and the occasional battery-powered emergency bulb. They poked their way up crooked drifts and adits, past brattices too rotten to push more than a whisper of fresh air through the dank tunnels. At each turning of the way they stopped and listened and followed the echoes of miners’ picks.

They relived the same ghostly scene ten, twelve, fifteen times. They caught the first faint tapping of rock hammers, glimpsed refracted lamplight glittering on the hewn and splintered walls. Then men emerged from the darkness, speared on the narrow beams of Davy lamps, their eyes glittering like coal under running water.

“The priest?” Li would ask. “Cartwright?”

And each little clot of men would send them on deeper, into smaller tunnels.

As the ventilation faltered, the air grew hotter. Soon Li was sweating, straining just to pull enough air through the mouthpiece of her rebreather. McCuen rolled his coveralls down, tied the arms around his waist, and took his shirt off. Li did the same, but left her T-shirt on; she still had a string of pearls from her underground days, and she’d just as soon not spark awkward questions about whether a certain Catherine Li had worked underground and who had known her back then.

She soon gave up even trying to check their progress against the AMC maps in her database. They were off company maps here, and besides, her reception was going. Late in the day a last team of miners pointed them into a steep, narrow drift that followed the Wilkes-Barre vein as it dipped along the broken strata at the mountains’ edge. Twenty meters up they hit a sharp kink in the drift. Just beyond the turning, they found a narrow little slit between two canted layers of bedrock, leaving just enough room for a thin person to squeak through into a dark tunnel beyond—a tunnel far too cramped to accommodate a miner in full safety gear. Someone had chalked a symbol at the mouth of the tunnel: a crescent moon with a cross under it.

“Cartwright’s sign,” McCuen said. “But no rebreather. I guess he doesn’t carry one.”

So Cartwright was a genetic. Of course he would be, Li realized. An unaltered miner might take off his rebreather in order to keep up with the pace of work at the face, but only a genetic would risk going into the more remote tunnels without a supply of clean air to breathe if he ran into a gas pocket. “How many of the bootleggers are genetics these days?” she asked McCuen.

“Most,” McCuen answered, confirming her half guess half memory. “Who else could get into this stuff? Plus they have an edge on the rest of us; they don’t have to buy air from the company.”

Li sat down, bracing herself against an outcropping of bedrock, and started to unstrap her rebreather. “Let’s go find him,” she said.

McCuen hesitated. “Maybe we should wait.” “What the hell for?”

When McCuen didn’t answer, she looked up into his face and saw something she’d seen in more young faces than she could remember: fear.

She smiled reassuringly. “This level’s clean, Brian. Just look at your Spohr badge. We’ll be up there, what … twenty minutes? Nothing you breathe in twenty minutes is going to kill you. You’d do yourself as much harm smoking a pack of cigarettes.”

“You’ve never seen anyone die of black-lung.” McCuen’s voice rang hollow on the last word.

Li shook her head, pushed away the memories McCuen’s words had shaken loose. “No one’s going to die of anything,” she said.

A moment later McCuen spat out his mouthpiece and she heard the quiet snick of the power switch on his rebreather.

They squeezed through the slit in the rock and started up the passage. It climbed steeply, following the bed of an underground stream. The water was fresh, without a trace of sulfur, and Li splashed some over her sweaty face and neck. Cartwright must have some strike up there to make this commute worthwhile.

Soon they were climbing what amounted to a ladder, moving from handhold to handhold across rocks slippery with water. Li’s breath came quicker and shorter as they climbed, though whether it was from exertion or bad air she couldn’t guess. After what seemed like forever, the passage leveled off, the stream now running in a shallow trench to one side of them.

Li twisted around in the narrow space, jammed her back against one wall, her feet against the other. McCuen did the same, though the passage was far more cramped for him. He was panting, quick and shallow as a hound dog, and the flame of his headlamp was tipped with a ghostly blue spark. Li sniffed, and smelled the telltale whiff of violets. Whitedamp.

McCuen had noticed it too. He checked his Spohr badge. When he looked up, his eyes were wide. “You okay?” Li asked.

He nodded, but his face was pale and sweat-slicked and his eyes burned feverishly. “Go back down,” she told him.

He shook his head.

“Just do it. Want to get yourself killed? I’ll meet you in ten.”

She watched him down the steep climb and onto flatter ground. Then she asked herself if what she was about to do was a good idea.

The passage ran steadily uphill, and whitedamp would collect at the top of the chamber. By the time she found Cartwright, the air would be bad enough to kill an unaltered human. Her very presence would advertise what she was as surely as if she’d written it across her coveralls. But if he was up there, he was the same. And why would another construct betray her?

She took off her badge and set it on the floor of the tunnel. She left her headlamp and helmet beside the badge, switched off her internal recorder, and shifted her optics to infrared. She couldn’t turn off her black box, but if and when they cracked it open she’d have more terminal things to worry about than whether some Corps tech knew she wasn’t just quarter-bred.

The smell of violets got stronger. Soon she was traveling through a lethal cocktail of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Her internals launched wave after wave of scrubbers into her bloodstream, fighting off suffocation. Finally she began to hear the steady clinking of a rock hammer. Cartwright was up there. Alone. Without ventilation or oxygen. Prospecting for condensates in a deadly haze of whitedamp. She shook herself like someone waking from a bad dream and crawled forward into the choking darkness.

She came on him unexpectedly—but then unexpectedly was how you always came on people in this bootlegger’s world of narrow passages and flickering lamp beams. He was undercutting the seam, carving out a space for the cut coal and crystal to drop into. He had undercut the vast hanging weight of the coal so deeply that only his legs were still out in the open chamber. Yellow I-profile virusteel chocks propped up the now-unsupported face, and as he worked he pushed the freshly cut coal back out past them so that it piled up like a monstrous black molehill. When he’d made his undercut, he’d pull out the chocks and wedge-drop the coal from the top. Dropping a coal face without explosives was hard slow dangerous work, but it was worth it if the strike was rich enough. And this one was rich; the exposed face of the Bose-Einstein bed flared white-hot on infrared, like half-buried diamonds.

Cartwright didn’t hear her arrive; his hammer must have covered any noise she’d made. She watched him, catching her breath. After a moment he stopped hammering, and she could hear him breathing, wheezing a little. When he spoke, she thought he was talking to himself.

“Hello, Caitlyn,” he said. “Or whatever you’re calling yourself now.” She froze, heart pounding.

She’d feared this moment, dreaded it. But she hadn’t expected it to come like this. Had he seen her? Heard her? How did he know her?

Cartwright slid out from under the face, coveralls rucking up over skinny shins. He’d stripped to the waist. Coal scars ran so thick over his back and shoulders that they looked like a contour map of the mountains whose roots he’d spent his life dismantling.

“How long has it been, Katie? Eighteen years? Twenty?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cartwright just tilted his head curiously, looking like a dog listening for his master’s whistle. “You still have your mother’s voice,” he said. “Though they say you’ve forgotten her. Are they right? Have you? Never mind. Let me get a look at you.”

He put his hands to her face, and Li realized at the touch of skin on skin what had been nagging her throughout this conversation: there was no light. Cartwright had been working in total darkness, without a lamp or infra goggles.

He was blind.

His fingers walked over her nose and lips, into her eye sockets. “You’ve changed your face,” he said. “But you’re Gil’s daughter. Mirce told them you’d died, but I knew. They would have told me. They keep their secrets, of course. But something like that they’d have told me.”

“Who would have told you?”

“The saints, Katie. Her saints. Don’t tell me you’ve stopped praying to Her. You mustn’t do that, Katie. She needs our prayers. She lives by them. And She answers them.”

Li glanced down, saw the cold fire of the silver crucifix hanging on the priest’s scarred chest. A strangled cry echoed against the rock, and she realized that it came from her own throat.

Cartwright kept talking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You’ve come to ask me about the fire, haven’t you?” Li swallowed, scraped her thoughts together. “What caused it, Cartwright?”

“Sharifi.”

“How? What was she after? What did she want you to do for her?”

“What witches always do; strike crystal.”

“But Sharifi had the company witch,” she said.

“Ah, but she didn’t trust the company witch, did she? Not at first. She only brought her in for the dirty work.”

“You mean the work in the Trinidad. But what was the witch doing there if they’d already found the condensa—the crystal?”

“She still needed someone to sing them for her, didn’t she? She still needed to talk to them. She still needed to run her damn tests. I wouldn’t do it for her. And she didn’t want a priest anyway.” His face twisted. “She wasn’t a believing woman.”

“I don’t understand. What wouldn’t you do for her?” “Haas’s work,” Cartwright answered. “Devil’s work.”

“But she changed her mind, didn’t she?” Li asked, seized by a trembling conviction that Cartwright knew, that he’d always known, that he was somehow at the center of it all. “Or someone changed it for her. What happened before the fire? Why did Sharifi destroy her data? What was she afraid of?”

“Of the fires of Hell,” Cartwright said, crossing himself. “Of Her just punishments.”

Li heard a noise in the darkness, closer than any noise should be, and realized that she was trembling violently, that it was the soft clink of the zipper tab at her throat she was hearing, the rustle of her own clothes against skin and rock.

“You should visit your mother,” Cartwright said. “It’s not good to neglect her.” “You’ve got me mixed up with someone else, Cartwright.”

“That’s not what your father says.”

A memory welled up from her gut like an underground river. She stopped it, corked it, slammed every door in her mind on it. “My father’s dead,” she said harshly. “And I came here for information, not church talk.”

“You came for the same reason we all come,” Cartwright said. “She called you.”

Li cleared her throat, choking on coal dust. “Did Sharifi’s project have union approval?” “I’m Her man,” Cartwright said. “Not the union’s man.”

“Don’t feed me that line.” She held up her right hand in the gesture of the faded, peeling Christ Triumphant that had reigned over the Saturday night masses of her half-remembered childhood. “You’re two fingers of the same hand. I remember that much.”

“Then you remember enough to answer your question yourself. Haven’t you been there? They told me you swam in it.”

“The glory hole,” Li whispered, remembering the gleaming walls and fractal vaults of Sharifi’s secret chamber. “It’s a chapel. You found her a chapel.”

“My mother took me to the last chapel in her arms, down a bootlegger’s shaft,” Cartwright said. “AMC dug that one up and sold it off-planet. Like they always do.” He smiled, and it seemed to Li that his blind eyes were staring through her at a bright light she couldn’t see. “But not this time. This time we were ready.”

“Did Sharifi know what she’d found, Cartwright?”
“She knew as much as a nonbeliever could know.”

“She knew as much as you decided to tell her, you mean. You used her. You used her to find it, to dig it, to keep the company from cutting. And you got her killed over it.”

“I didn’t do anything, Katie. Whatever Sharifi found, she came here looking for it. We all walk all Her paths. No choice can change that. Nothing that happens isn’t meant to happen.”

“Was it worth it, Cartwright? How long will it take Haas to get a nonunion crew down there? A week? Two? That’s all the time you have your precious glory hole for. And how many people died for it?”

“No one dies, Katie.” Cartwright was doing something to the condensates around them. Li felt them pressing in on her, shorting out her internals, smothering her. “The wave is more than the sum of its paths.”

“I remember.” She was trembling, her breath coming tight and angry. “I remember what you did to my father. I remember.”

“He’s here, Katie. Don’t you want to talk to him? All you have to do is believe in Her. She lost Her only Son. She knows your sorrow, even if you’ve forgotten it. She can forgive you.”