Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “No, still holding it. We could try to put it back in play, I guess. See if we can draw Ren in. But I don’t see it working, she’s too sharp for that. This much silence, she’ll know she’s been blown.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Norton asked.

  “It leaves us with Bambarén,” Carl said grimly. “We go down there and we stamp on him until he tells us what we want to know.”

  “And Onbekend?” Sevgi asked, with a strange light in her eye.

  Silence. Norton hurried in to fill it. “Checked that yesterday. I talked to Coyle. No record that fits with the descriptions you both gave. But Onbekend’s a name from the Netherlands, apparently it was Dutch bureaucracy’s get-out for anyone who didn’t have a fixed family name to go on their identity documents.” He grimaced. “It means ‘unknown.’”

  Sevgi coughed out a laugh. “Oh very good.”

  “Yeah, seems quite a few Indonesians ended up with it in the last century, because they didn’t have family names in the sense the Dutch understand the concept. It’s pretty common all over the Pacific Rim these—”

  He stopped, because Sevgi’s cough hadn’t died away. It picked up, intensified until it shook her, feedback from the stimulus in the format triggering the real thing back in her hospital bed. The force of it bent her almost double in the chair, and then she flickered in and out of existence as her mental focus slipped. Carl and Norton exchanged a silent glance.

  Sevgi’s presence flickered once more, then settled. She wheezed and seemed to get control.

  “Are you okay, Sev?”

  “No, Tom, I’m not fucking okay.” She drew a hard breath. “I’m fucking dying, all right? Sorry if it’s causing problems.”

  Carl looked at Norton again, surprising himself with the sudden jolt of sympathy he felt for the other man.

  “Maybe we’d better take a break,” he said quietly.

  “No, it’s…” Sevgi closed her eyes. “I’m sorry, Tom. That was unforgivable. I had no call to snap at you like that. I’m fine now. Let’s get back to Onbekend.”

  They did, after a fashion, but the incident sat among them like another presence. The conversation ran slow, grew diffident, finally fell apart. Sevgi wouldn’t meet Norton’s eyes, just sat and twisted her fingers in her lap until finally the COLIN exec cleared his throat and excused himself with the pretext of calling New York. He blinked out with obvious relief. Carl sat and waited.

  The twisted fingers again. Finally, she looked up at him.

  “Thanks for staying,” she said softly.

  He nodded at the surroundings. “It beats the garden they’ve got outside. Too arid, too stylized. This is very British, makes me feel at home.”

  It got a short laugh, but carefully deployed this time.

  “Has your father arrived?”

  “Yeah.” Jerky nod. “He came in to see me this morning, before you and Tom got here. For real, in the hospital. They’re giving him a suite over in the staff dorms. Professional courtesy.”

  “Or COLIN influence.”

  “Well, yeah. That, too.”

  “So how’d you get on with him?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. He, you know, he cried a lot. We both did. He apologized for all the fights about Ethan, the distance. A lot of other stuff. But—”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at him. “I’m really scared, Carl.”

  “I think you’re entitled to be.”

  “I, I mean, I keep having these dreams where it’s all been a mistake. It’s not really a Haag slug. Or it’s not as bad as they thought, they’ve got an antiviral that can keep up. Or the whole thing was just a dream and I’ve woken up back in New York, I can hear the market outside.” Tears leaked out of her eyes. Her voice took on a desperate, grinding edge. “And then I wake up for real, and I’m here, in that fucking bed with the drips and the monitors and all the fucking equipment around me like relatives I don’t want to fucking see. And I’m dying, I’m fucking dying, Carl.”

  “I know,” he said hollowly, voice stupid in his own ears. Numb for something to say, to meet her with.

  She gulped. “I always thought it’d be like a doorway, like standing in front of a door you’ve got to go through. But it isn’t. It isn’t. It’s like a fucking wall coming at me and I’m strapped in my seat, can’t fucking move, can’t touch the controls or get out. I’m just going to fucking lie there and die.”

  Her teeth clenched on the last word. She looked emptily out across the garden at the foliage on the fringes of the lawn. Her hands tightened to fists in her lap. Loosened, tightened again. He watched her and waited.

  “I don’t want you to go down there after Bambarén and Onbekend,” she said quietly. She was still staring away into the sun-splashed foliage. “I don’t want you to end up like me, like this.”

  “Sevgi, we all end up like this sooner or later. I’d just be catching you up.”

  “Yeah, well there are ways and ways of catching up. I don’t recommend the Haag shell method.”

  “I can handle Onbekend.”

  “Sure, you can.” Her gaze switched back to him. “Last time you went up against him, as I recall, I had to bust in and save your life for you.”

  “Well, I’ll be more careful this time.”

  She made a compressed sound that might have been another laugh. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m not scared that Onbekend might kill you down there. This is selfish, Carl. I’m scared that you won’t come back. I’m scared you’ll leave me here, dying by fucking increments with no one to help.”

  “I already told you’d I’d stay.”

  She wasn’t listening. Wasn’t looking at him anymore. “Saw my cousin die that way, back when I was still a kid. Sex virus, one of the hyperevolved ones, she caught it off a soldier in the East. Nothing they could do. I’m not going to go through that. Not the way she went.”

  “Okay, Sevgi. Okay. I won’t go anywhere. I’m right here. But I think it’s time you let me in to see you for real. In the ward.”

  She shivered. Shook her head. “No, not yet. I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “Staying in v-format is going to put a lot of strain on your nervous system. A lot of stress.”

  Sevgi snorted. “That’s all you fucking know. You want to know what the strain is? I’ll tell you. Strain is lying back there in that fucking bed, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the machines they’ve got me hooked up to, feeling my lungs clogging up and all the needles they’ve stuck in me, aching every fucking place I can feel and no way to move unless someone comes to do it for me. Compared with that”—she gestured weakly at the garden—“this is fucking paradise.”

  She looked at the hanging branches in silence for a while.

  “They say it is a garden,” she muttered. “Paradise, you know. Garden full of fruits and the sound of water.”

  “And virgins. Right? Seventy virgins each, or something?”

  “Not if you’re a woman. Anyway, that’s for martyrs.” She pulled a face. “Anyway, it’s a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-Qu’ranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit anymore. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking mannequin with its motion circuits shot up.”

  “Sounds like you’re talking from experience there.” He grabbed the change of subject, glad of the chance.

  It drew a crooked smile from her. “I’ve broken in one or two in my time. You?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “That’s not very public-spirited of you. Somebody’s got to do it.”

  He shrugged. “Well, you know, maybe I’ll still get out there and do my share, later on in life.”

  Her smile faded, shaded out at the mention of the future, like the passing of cloud cover across the sunlit lawn. She shivered and hunched her body a little in the chair. He cursed himself for the slip.

&nb
sp; “I was reading somewhere,” she said quietly. “They reckon in another thirty or forty years they’ll have v-formatting so powerful you’ll be able to live inside it. You know, the n-djinn just copies your whole mind-state into the construct and then runs you as part of the system. You just sedate the body and step through. They say you’ll even be able to go on living there after your body actually dies. Forty years away, they’re saying, maybe not even that long.” She grinned desperately. “Bit late for me, though, huh?”

  “Hey, you’re not going to need that shit.” Floundering for a response. “You’re going to heaven, right? Paradise, like you said.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don’t think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts I think we all know it’s a crock of shit. That’s why we’re all so fucking determined to spread the good news, to shove it down other people’s throats. Because if we can’t make other people believe it, how are we going to stamp out the doubt in ourselves. And it’s cold, that doubt.” She looked at him, shivered as she said it. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Like November in the park, you know. Like winter coming in.”

  He got up and went to where she sat, and tried as best he could to hold her. Blunt, glove-skinned sensation, like fistfuls of crushed velvet, like nothing real. No feeling of warmth, but as she shivered again he pulled her close anyway, and he held her head against his chest so she wouldn’t see how his jaw was clenched tight and his mouth had become a savage down-drawn line.

  Like winter coming in.

  CHAPTER 47

  S evgi lived four more days.

  They were the longest days he could remember since the week he waited for Marisol to come back, believing somehow against everything the uncles told him that she would. He’d sat blankly then, as he did now at the hospital, detached for hours at a time, staring into space in classes he’d previously excelled in. He took the punishment beatings from the uncles with a stoic lack of response that bordered on catatonic—fighting back would do no good, he knew, would only ensure that he took more damage. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training had come just in time.

  Many years later, he wondered if that particular course hadn’t been deliberately scheduled for the months leading up to the removal of the surrogate mothers. There wasn’t much that happened in Osprey Eighteen without carefully considered planning. And pain, after all, as Chitra began the series of classes by telling them, came in many forms. Pain is unavoidable, smiling gently at their group, shaking each of them formally by the hand. Something of an unknown quantity after their other teachers, this small, hawkish-featured woman with skin like some fire-scorched copper alloy, cropped black hair, a figure that sent vaguely understood signals out to their prepubescent hormones, and dry, callus-edged hands that told those same hormones exactly how they’d better behave around her. Her grip was firm, her eyes direct and appraising. Pain is all around us. It takes many forms. My job will be to teach you how to recognize all those forms, to understand them, and to not allow any of them to keep you from your purpose. Carl had learned the lessons well. He dealt with the careful brutality the uncles were applying exactly as if it were one of Chitra’s worked examples. He knew they would not damage him beyond repair because all the Osprey Eighteen children had been told, time and time again, how valuable they were. He also knew the uncles would have preferred not to use physical violence to this extent. It was never a preferred method of discipline at Osprey, was only ever used to punish serious breaches of respect and obedience, and only then as a last resort. But every other punishment task they set Carl that week, he simply refused to carry out. Worse, he spat back his refusal in their faces, savoring the tug of disobedience like the pain of pushing himself on a run or a cliff climb. And when the measured violence came, he embraced it, shrugged himself into Chitra’s training like a harness, and faced the uncles with a blank fury they could not match.

  In the end, it was Chitra who unlocked his efforts, just as she’d given him what he needed to shore them up. She came to him one gray afternoon as he sat, bruised and bleeding from the mouth, aching back propped against a storage shed near the helipad. She stood for a while without saying anything, then stepped into his direct field of vision, hands in her coverall pockets. He tried to look around her, shifted sideways, but it hurt too much to sustain the posture. She didn’t move.

  In the end he had to look up into her face.

  What’s your purpose, Carl? she asked him quietly. There was no judgment in either tone or expression, only genuine inquiry. I understand your pain, I see the ways in which you’ve tried to make it external. But what purpose do you have?

  He didn’t answer. Looking back he didn’t think she ever expected him to. But after she’d gone, he realized—allowed himself to realize—that Marisol really wasn’t coming back, that the uncles were telling the truth, and that he was wasting his own time as well as theirs.

  Waiting with Sevgi was different. He had her there with him. He had purpose.

  He was still going to fucking lose her.

  He met her father in the gardens, a big, gray-haired Turk with powerful shoulders and the same tigerish eyes as his daughter. He wore no mustache, but there was thick stubble rising high on his cheeks and bristling at his cleft chin, and he had lost none of his hair with age. He would have been a very handsome man in his youth, and even now—Carl estimated he must be in his early sixties—even seated on the beige stone bench and staring fixedly at the fountain, he exuded a quiet, charismatic authority. He wore a plain dark suit that matched the thick woolen shirt beneath it and the purplish smudges of tiredness under his eyes.

  “You’re Carl Marsalis,” he said as Carl reached the bench. There was no question mark in his voice. It was a little hoarse but iron-firm beneath. If he’d been crying, he hid it well.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “I am Murat Ertekin. Sevgi’s father. Please, join me.” He gestured at the empty space beside him on the bench, waited until Carl was seated. “My daughter has told me a lot about you.”

  “Care to give me specifics?”

  Ertekin glanced sideways at him. “She told me that your loyalty cannot be easily bought.”

  It brought him up short. The received wisdom about variant thirteen was that they had no loyalties at all beyond self-interest. He wondered if Ertekin was quoting Sevgi directly or putting his own spin on what she’d said.

  “Did she tell you what I am?”

  “Yes.” Another sidelong look. “Were you expecting disapproval from me? Hatred, perhaps, or fear? The standard-issue prejudices?”

  “I don’t know you,” Carl told him evenly. “Aside from the fact that the two of you don’t get on and that you left Turkey for political reasons, Sevgi hasn’t told me anything about you at all. I wouldn’t know what your attitude is to my kind. Though my impression is that you weren’t too happy about Sevgi’s last variant thirteen indiscretion.”

  Ertekin sat rigid. Then he slumped. He closed his eyes, hard, opened them again to face the world.

  “I am to blame,” he said quietly. “I failed her. All our lives together, I encouraged Sevgi to push the boundaries. And then, when she finally pushed them too far for my liking, I reacted like some village mullah who’s never seen the Bosphorus Bridge in his life and doesn’t plan to. I reacted exactly like my fucking brother.”

  “Your brother’s a mullah?”

  Murat Ertekin laughed bitterly. “A mullah, no. Though perhaps he did miss his vocation when he chose secular law for a career. I’m told he was never more than an indifferent lawyer. But a self-righteous, willfully ignorant male supremacist? Oh yes. Bulent always excelled at that.”

  “You talk about him in the past. Is he dead?”

  “He is to me.”

  The conversation jerked violently to a halt on the assertion. They both sat for a while staring into the space where it had been. Murat Ertekin sighed. He talked as if picking u
p the pieces of something broken, as if each bending down to retrieve a fragment of the past was an effort that forced him to breathe deeply.

  “You must understand, Mr. Marsalis, my marriage was not a successful one. I married young, and in haste, to a woman who took her faith very seriously indeed. When we were still both medical students in Istanbul, I mistook that faith for a general strength, but I was wrong. When we moved to America, as it still was then, Hatun could not cope. She was homesick, and New York frightened her. She never adjusted. We had Sevgi because at such times you are told that having a child will bring you together again.” A grimace. “It’s a strange article of faith—the belief that sleepless nights, no sex, less income, and the constant stress of caring for a helpless new life should somehow alleviate the pressures on a relationship already under strain.”

  Carl shrugged. “People believe some strange things.”

  “Well, in our case it didn’t work. My work suffered, we fought more, and Hatun’s fear of the city grew. She retreated into her faith. She already went head-scarfed in the streets; now she began to wear the full chador. She would not receive guests in the house unless she was covered, and of course she had already quit her job to have Sevgi. She isolated herself from her former friends and colleagues at the hospital, frustrated their attempts to stay in touch, eventually changed mosques to one preaching some antiquated Wahhabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defense. What was Sevgi to make of her mother? She was growing up a streetwise New York kid, bilingual and smart, and Hatun didn’t even want her to have swimming lessons with boys.”

  Ertekin stared down at his hands.

  “I encouraged the rebellion,” he said quietly. “I hated the way Hatun was changing, maybe by then I even hated Hatun herself. She’d begun to criticize the work I did, calling it un-Islamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or nonbelieving friends, growing more rigid in her attitudes every year. I was determined Sevgi would not end up the same way. It delighted me when she started asking her mother those simple child’s questions about God that no one can answer. I rejoiced when she was strong and determined and smart in the face of Hatun’s hollow, rote-learned dogma. I egged her on, pushed her to take chances and achieve, and I defended her to her mother whenever they clashed—even when she was wrong and Hatun was right. And when things finally grew unbearable and Hatun left us and went home—I think I was glad.”