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.“What’s going on?” Li asked.He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways.Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.“Christ.Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough.Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.* * *She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely.It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the starfilled floorport.She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye.He sat in the chair behind the big desk.His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk.Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest.Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing.Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft.And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.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.—HerodotusShe 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.“What’s going on?” Li asked.He started so violently at the sight of her that he bounced off the counter and had to scrabble for traction to keep from drifting sideways.Only then did she look down at herself and realize she hadn’t washed or changed since reaching the station.“Christ.Sorry.” She rummaged through the lockers at the back of the room until she’d found something almost small enough.Meanwhile, others were starting to filter into HQ, all trying to figure out what had shut down the gravity and what they were supposed to do about it.It wasn’t until the chief engineer called saying he couldn’t find Haas that she finally put the pieces together.* * *She burst into Haas’s office just as the precession ring ground to a stop and gravity gave out completely.It caught her off guard, and she careened across the room, her feet stranded in midair above the starfilled floorport.She saw Haas out of the corner of her eye.He sat in the chair behind the big desk.His face looked peaceful, except for the mottled bruises spreading beneath his eyes.Bella stood, or rather floated, above him.She hung weightless over the tide-swept slab of the crystal desk.Her hair writhed like a vipers’ nest.Her eyes were closed, her face pale, her chest rising and falling in a sinister parody of a sleeper’s breathing.Her smile sent cold fingers brushing down Li’s spine.Something—her own subconscious or one of Cohen’s remnant systems—nudged at her, prompting her to run a network scan.Spitting, flaring lines of current shot out from Bella, splicing into each of the station’s embedded systems, running back and forth between station and planet, between surface and mine shaft.And all that immense power was being channeled into the single frail wire that connected Bella’s jack to the derms at Haas’s temples.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.—HerodotusShe 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]