“You don’t have to confess to me, Cohen.”
“Well, I have this funny idea that you come closer to understanding me than anyone else does. And so far you haven’t made me do any rosaries.”
A sudden memory of bare knees on a cold church floor and a grown-up hand—her mother’s?—moving her child’s fingers over the glass beads. The smooth, dark Aves. The gleaming Paters. The cross dangling and tapping against the pew in front of her.
“And I understand you, I think,” Cohen was saying when she surfaced again. “Which is an accomplishment given that what you’ve actually told me about yourself would fit on the back of a matchbook. At first I thought you didn’t trust me. Then I decided you’re just secretive. Is it how you’re put together, or did someone teach you to push people off like that?”
Li shrugged, feeling awkward. “It’s jump fade as much as anything. I don’t remember much.” She paused. “And what I do remember usually makes me wish I’d forgotten more of it. What’s the point in dredging up old miseries?”
She looked up into the silence that followed to find Cohen watching her.
“Eyelash,” he said.
“What?”
“You have an eyelash.”
“Where?” Li dabbed at her eye, looking for it.
“Other eye. Here. Wait.”
He slid toward her along the curved bench and tilted her head back against the velvet cushions with one hand while the other feathered along her lower eyelid hunting for the stray lash. She smelled extra-vielle, felt Roland’s warm sweet breath on her cheek, saw the soft skin of his neck and the pulse beating beneath it.
“There,” Cohen said, and held the lash up on the end of a slender finger.
She opened her mouth to thank him, but the words died in her throat. The hand that had been on her chin brushed along her cheek and traced the faint line of the bundled filament that followed the muscle from the corner of her jaw down to the hollow between her clavicles.
“You look like you’ve lost weight, even in streamspace,” he said. “You look like you’re not sleeping enough.”
He caught her eye and held it. The hand on her neck felt warm as Ring-side sunlight, and it reminded her how long it had been since anyone but a medtech had touched her. A dark tide of desire tugged at her. Desire and a reckless loneliness and a hunger to believe in the person and the feelings that seemed so real sometimes.
Uh-oh, she thought.
She looked away and cleared her throat.
Cohen drew back, held up his index finger, her eyelash still on it. “Make a wish,” he said.
“I don’t believe in wishes. You make one.”
He closed his eyes and blew the lash up into the smoky air.
“That was quick,” Li said and smiled—or at least tried to. “I guess you know what you want.”
But he wasn’t looking at her. He had his watch off and was listening to it, his face turned away from her. He twisted the golden knob, put the watch to his ear, wound it again, shook it.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with the thing,” he said. “It’s been running slow for weeks. Damned annoying.”
“Cohen,” said a woman’s voice from somewhere above their heads. A slender brown pair of legs had stopped by their table, and Li looked up them into an amused smile and horn-rimmed glasses—and her own face behind them.
It wasn’t her face, though. It was the nameless teenager’s face she remembered looking at fifteen years ago in a Shantytown mirror. A XenoGen face on a thin young woman who would have stood exactly Li’s height if she hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels and a red slip of a dress that looked far more revealing now that she wasn’t onstage.
The singer gave Li a brief measuring look, then sat down and put a possessive arm around Cohen’s shoulders. “I thought I was going to have you all to myself tonight,” she said in a voice that left no doubt in Li’s mind about what Cohen had been doing eating uncharacteristically alone in this place.
Cohen flinched ever so slightly. “Sorry,” he said, looking at Li.
“Not at all.” Li stood up, straightening her uniform with numb fingers. “I was leaving anyway.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“No need.”
“Well, tomorrow then.”
“Whatever.”
“No,” she heard Cohen saying as she walked off, in answer to some whispered question. “Just business.”
INTERFERENCE PATTERNS
We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves, through time … We exist in multiple versions, in universes called “moments” … It is tempting to suppose that the moment of which we are aware is the only real one, or is at least a little more real than the others. But this is just solipsism. All moments are physically real. The whole of the multiverse is physically real. Nothing else is.
AMC Station: 20.10.48.
Li decided not to go, then changed her mind again at least eight times.
She told herself she was getting too old to follow her hormones everywhere they led her, and that her excuse for accepting the invitation—asking about Sharifi—was nothing short of pathetic. If she really wanted to blow off some steam, she’d be better off picking up some stranger in a bar than chasing after a woman that any sane person in her position would know enough to steer clear of.
In the end she arrived two minutes early and dithered on the doorstep wondering if she should buzz or just walk around until it was time. Just as she was telling herself it wasn’t too late to turn around and leave, Bella opened the door.
She wore white: a long fall of silk that flared around her ankles in the station’s low gravity. Somehow, Li was quite sure Haas had bought the dress for her.
“Are you sure he’s off-station?” she said, and cursed herself for asking.
Bella just smiled serenely, took the flowers Li had brought, and led her through a narrow door into the kitchen.
“He’s in Helena,” she said as she poured water into a vase for the flowers. “AMC managers’ meeting. It runs until the day after tomorrow. So…” She flicked her dark hair back and leaned over to cut the flower stems, baring the long pale line of her neck.
Li caught her breath. “So you’re a free woman,” she said, and bit her tongue again. She couldn’t put a foot right tonight.
“Free,” Bella repeated without a trace of a smile. “I have never understood what humans mean when they use that word.”
Dinner was good, though Li didn’t have much appetite. She felt like she was in a play, the stage already set, the lines already scripted. Eating Haas’s food on Haas’s china. And across the table, Haas’s… what? Mistress? Employee? Indentured servant? One thing was certain: this wasn’t headed for a happy ending.
Bella talked, mostly. She seemed desperate to talk, terrified of the charged silences that hung between them. She talked about her childhood, her schooling, her life before the contract. None of it was what Li had expected. She had expected one of those mythical constructs you heard about in OCS classes and mission briefings. Brilliant, single-minded, every speck of individuality trained and programmed and disciplined out of her from the instant her tank’s umbilical cords were severed. Instead, she heard a lonely young woman stranded a few hundred light-years from her home planet.