“What last one?”
“The guy they sent down to talk to me earlier today. He kept wanting to get me to say I’d slipped and hit my head and didn’t remember anything.”
“Did you? Hit your head, I mean.”
“Not according to the doctors.”
“And do you remember anything?”
The shadowy look drifted across his face again.
“Do you not want to talk about it?”
“No! No, I want to talk about it. I just… I’m not sure what it was, I guess.”
“What do you think it was?”
“I don’t know,” he said again, shaking his head on the pillow. “If I told you, you’d probably laugh at me.”
“Try me,” Li said.
And he did.
What he described sounded just like what Li had seen on her two hijackings. Strange sights, vague shadowy figures. Sounds that made no sense or were oddly distorted. Fractured twilight visions that could have been past or future or neither.
“Did you see anyone you knew?” Li asked when Dawes fell silent.
“Oh, yeah. I saw all of them.”
“What do you mean, all of them? All of who?”
“The dead.” He looked up at her, and his eyes were dark and wide, the pupils expanded as if he were slipping into shock. “All of them. All my dead. Just like the pit priests say you see.”
Li swallowed. “Do you think it could have been a hallucination? Or, I don’t know, something else. Like a spinstream hijacking—” She remembered that Dawes was unwired and too poor to pay for stream time anyway, that he’d probably never even known anyone who had direct spinstream access. “I mean like someone trying to communicate. Someone not dead, I mean.”
He thought about it.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m not a churchgoing man. But they were there. You know what I’m saying? They were… different.”
“Did you—” Li stopped to clear her throat. “Did you see Dr. Sharifi?”
“No.”
“You’d have recognized her if you had seen her?”
“Sure. I saw her a bunch of times. She looked… well, like they always look.”
He lay silent for a moment, looking up at the stained foam ceiling panels of the hospital module. A long moment passed with no sound to mark the time but the pounding of a trapped fly against the room’s dust-caked window. Dawes’s face softened, took on a puzzled, disappointed look.
“The thing is,” he said, “I felt like they took me for a reason. Like they were trying to tell me something specific, something they thought was important.”
“What do you think it was?” Li asked, her breath catching in her throat.
To her surprise he smiled. “Seems like that’s the question of the hour. AMC’s man kept trying to ask me that. Which wasn’t so easy given that he was also trying to get me to say I fell down and hit my head and never saw anything. Even Cartwright asked me that.”
Li’s stomach clenched. “Cartwright’s been here?”
“The old geezer was practically waiting outside my door when I woke up. He was nattering at me before the doctors even figured out I was back. Wanted to know where it happened. What level. What deposits it was near. I guess he has some theory or something.”
“I don’t suppose he shared it with you?”
“Not really. But I got the idea he thought I’d had some kind of religious experience. And that he disapproved. Strongly. He kept talking about unlikely vessels and looking like a man who just caught his wife sleeping with the plumber.”
“What do you think happened down there?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Dawes’s face darkened again. “A man could get scared thinking about it. Especially when he knows that once his sick pay runs out, he’ll have to go back downstairs again. I’ve seen what happens to miners when they take up with the pit priests. They still use the old words. Jesus, Mary, the saints. Sacrifice. But it’s like suddenly they mean something else. Something they don’t want you to see until you’re too far in to back out.” He passed a hand over his face, wincing as the movement tugged at his broken ribs. “And there’s another thing,” he said. “They never talk about God. It’s all Mary. The Virgin this, the Virgin that. Her saints. Her Heaven. But they’re not her saints, they’re God’s saints. The real ones, anyway.
“You know what Cartwright said to me today?” He propped himself up on his elbows. His eyes looked feverish, terrified. “He said God doesn’t know us. That God chose humans. Earth and humans. That only Mary loved us enough to come to Compson’s World. Why would he tell me that? What kind of place is it that God won’t come to? What happens when you die down there?”
“Hey!” One of the guards popped his head into the room, then stepped in, followed by two militiamen. “We got Haas on the line, and he says the isolation order goes for you too, Major.”
Li was too stunned to react at first, still wrapped in Dawes’s shadowy vision. “Let me talk to Haas,” she said finally.
“Fine. Talk to him somewhere else, though. It’s my ass if you’re not out of here pronto.”
Li glanced over at Dawes. He shrugged a little and gazed back at her wide-eyed, as if to say it was all a mystery to him. She tried Haas’s line quickly and got a message that he was out of the office. No surprise there. He would no doubt remain out of the office until he was good and ready for Li to talk to Dawes.
Out in the hall, a tall young man in coveralls was talking to the duty nurse. Li had actually walked past him when a familiar movement made her stop and look back. It was the IWW rep, Ramirez. And from what she could catch of the conversation, he was trying to talk his way into Dawes’s room.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, more abruptly than she’d meant to.
“Just visiting a friend,” Ramirez said smoothly.
“Isn’t that sweet.”
If Ramirez caught the sarcasm in her voice, he didn’t give any sign of it. “Hey,” he told the nurse, smiling and touching her shoulder. “I’ll catch you later, okay?” He put a hand in the small of Li’s back and guided her down the hall toward a windowless door marked EXIT. “It’s actually really good you happened by just now,” he told her. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
They stepped through the door into the gold-green haze of a sunny fall afternoon. They stood on the honeycomb-grid landing of a fire escape with a clear view over Shantytown to the atmospheric processors and the gently flaming stacks of the power plant. A slight wind rattled the cheap siding of the hospital modules and tugged idly at the wind sock on the ER hopper pad.
“Hail, fellow traveler,” Li said. “Aren’t you supposed to be out demonstrating your solidarity with the workingman and getting ready to hold the barricades when the tanks roll in? Or were you planning to duck out at intermission and skip the last act? I believe that’s what all the best people are doing.”
“Hey, relax. I just thought this would be a good chance to touch base and… see if we could help each other out.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is this coming from Daahl or you?”
“Both.”
“And what do both of you plan to get out of it?”
“Well, that’s what I was hoping to talk to you about. It’ll take a minute, though.”
“You’ve got five,” Li said, leaning back against the railing and shaking out a cigarette. “Well, more like six, actually, depending on how fast you make me want to smoke. Cigarette?”
“No thanks,” Ramirez said. “They’re bad for your lungs.”
She looked hard at him.
“You know someone like you could do a lot of good, Major.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?” she asked quietly.