They were on the top floor; broad picture window vantage opening out over the rooftops of Kadikoy with a couple of storeys’ advantage. With the lounge lighting dimmed back, they had a clear view right the way to the Sea of Marmara and the minaret-spiked skyline of Sultanahmet back on the European side. Staring at it, Carl had the sudden, hallucinatory sensation of leaving something behind, as if the two shores were somehow drifting apart. They sat in squashy mock-leather armchairs facing the window, not each other, and they drank. Out on the Sea of Marmara, big ships sat at anchor, queuing for entry to the Bosphorus straits. Their riding lights winked and shifted.
They’d killed well over half the bottle by the time she started talking again.
‘It wasn’t fucking planned, I can tell you that much.’
‘You knew what he was?’
‘By then, yes.’ She sighed, but it got caught somewhere in her throat. There was no real relief in the noise it made. ‘You’d think we’d have terminated it, right? Knowing the risks. Looking back, I’m still not really sure why we didn’t. I guess . . . I guess we’d both started thinking we were invulnerable. Ethan had that from the start, that whole thirteen thing. He always acted like bullets would have bounced off him. You could see it in him across a crowded room.’
Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.
‘And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is good, this is right, this is what’s supposed to be. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling you it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the airlock. You tell yourself the genetic privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails on you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD. You’re the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on your door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.’
‘You met Ethan through the force?’
It got him a sour smile. ‘How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialise much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.’ She shrugged. ‘I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cosy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.’
‘Not quite. You can always leave the police force.’
She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. ‘You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself. The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.’
‘And did you? Tear it all down?’
‘You mean, did we fuck?’
‘Actually, no. But-’
‘Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.’ She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again. Snac. ‘Like that. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blonde bitch worked datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organise a move across the river when I made midtown homicide. Just an old neighbourhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.’ Another frown. ‘Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.’
‘Had he told you what he was?’
‘Not then, no. I mean,’ she gestured again, more carefully this time. ‘Not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?’
‘Not generally, no.’
‘No.’ She nursed her drink for a while. ‘I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.’
‘What did he want?’
Her lip curled. ‘He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still above ground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while ’til he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.’
‘He recognised him? I’d have thought-’
‘Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim States, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.’ She clenched a fist in the low light. ‘He wouldn’t believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way. That’s not the way we do things, he kept saying. You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip.’
A darted look. ‘That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.’
‘It’s been known.’
‘Yeah, well, this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case - ’ She shrugged. ‘Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right? Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.’
Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out to sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.
‘So what happened?’ he asked finally.
She looked away. ‘I think you know.’
‘Ethan solved the problem.’
‘Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.’ Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. ‘Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned me, when Ethan wasn’t around.’
‘Did you tell Ethan about it?’
‘I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.’
She paused. Picking words.
‘But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth. There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?’
He shrugged. ‘So the psychomonster flicks woul
d have us believe.’
‘Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, internal affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.’
‘Until.’
She nodded. ‘Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Skinned knuckles, finger gouges in his throat.’ A faint, weary smile. ‘And the house was cleaner than I’d seen it in months. Washed floors everywhere, bathroom like a screen ad, everything nanodusted. You could still hear the stuff working if you put your ear up close to the tub. He never cleaned up like that again in the whole time we were together.’
More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the raki bottle. Offered it to him.
‘You want?’
‘Thanks, I’ll pass.’
He watched as, a little unsteadily, she built herself a new drink. When she was done, she held the glass without drinking from it and stared out at the ships.
‘It seemed like we held our breath all summer,’ she said quietly. ‘Waiting to see. I knew a lot of cops in Queens from before I moved to midtown, I started hanging out with them again, on and off, to see if there was a missing persons filed, or if a body had turned up. We checked the NYPD links to UNGLA’s most wanted all the time for news. Keegan never made it onto the list. Ethan reckoned you guys had him down as such a fuck-up he wasn’t worth chasing, he’d dig his own grave soon enough if you’d just give him some time.’
Carl shook his head. ‘No, we like the stupid ones. They’re easy to track down, and that makes the Agency look good. If your guy wasn’t listed, the most likely thing is whoever helped him over the wire at Cimarron found some way to keep it quiet. Or whoever had the contract to run the place at the time just hushed the whole thing up to keep the statistics sweet. Oversight provision for Cimarron is pretty fucking weak, even by Jesusland standards, and if the contract was up for a renewal bid, well.’ He spread his hands. ‘Every lag on that reservation knows the best time to plan an escape is just before tender. They know the operating corporation is going to try like crazy to squeeze maximum efficiency out of badly paid staff and end up with riot-level tension instead, and they know that if they do make it over the wire, there’s going to be no public nationwide manhunt, because the contract holders can’t afford the publicity. It’s how half these guys keep getting away so easily.’
‘Fucking Jesusland,’ she slurred.
He gestured lazily. ‘Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s the sort of thing keeps me in work. Come to that, Jesusland isn’t the only place I’ve seen weak oversight.’
‘No. Only place they’re fucking proud of it, though.’ She peered morosely into her drink. ‘Still can’t fucking believe it sometimes, you know?’
‘Believe what?’
‘Secession. What America did to itself. I mean - ’ She made an upward groping gesture with her free hand. ‘We fucking invented the modern world, Marsalis. We modelled it, on a continental scale, got it working, sold it to the rest of the world. Credit cards, popular air travel, global dataflow. Spaceflight. Nanotech. We put all that in place, you know? And then we let a bunch of fucking Neanderthal bible-thumping lunatics tear it all to pieces? What the fuck is that, Marsalis?’
‘Don’t ask me. Little before my time.’
‘I mean.’ She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. ‘If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had come and just chased us out of the driving seat, you know I could maybe handle that. Every culture has to give way to something in the end. Someone fresher and sharper always comes along. But we fucking did this to ourselves. We let the grasping, hating, fearing idiot dregs of our own society tip us right over the fucking precipice.’
‘You live in the Union, Sevgi. That’s hardly the abyss, is it?’
‘But that’s just the fucking point. That’s what they always wanted, Marsalis. Separation from the north. Secession. Their own fucking mud puddle of ignorance to wallow in. It took them two hundred fucking years to do it, but in the end they got exactly what they wanted.’
‘Come off it. They lost the Rim States. That’s what, a third of American GDP?’ He couldn’t work out why he was arguing so hard with her. He knew the ground because anyone working for UNGLA had to, but it wasn’t like he was an expert. It wasn’t like he cared. ‘And look, from what I hear out of Chicago these days, they might not be able to hang onto the Lakes much longer either. Then you’ve got Arizona-’
‘Yeah, right.’ She snorted, and sank deeper into her chair. ‘Fucking Arizona.’
‘They’re talking about admission to the Rim.’
‘Marsalis, it’s Arizona. They’re more likely to declare an independent republic of their own than anything else. And anyway, if you think Jesusland is going to let either them or any of the Lake states secede the way the northeast did, you’re crazy. They’ll put the national guard in there faster than you can say Praise the Lord.’
Because he didn’t care one way or the other - right? - he said nothing, and the conversation closed up on her final words with a snap. There was a long pause. They both looked out at the ships.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered after a while.
‘Skip it. You were telling me about Keegan. Waiting to hear if his body turned up.’
‘Yeah, well.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the beginning. That was when we started getting confident. Started not worrying about the situation, just living as if there was no danger, as if Ethan was just some regular guy. Year or so of that and, bang, oops.’ She smiled bleakly. ‘Biology in action.’
‘And they took it away from you.’
The smile dropped off her face. ‘Yeah. Union law’s pretty progressive, but they won’t buck the consensus that far. No siring of offspring from variant thirteen stock, any and all incubated genetic material to be destroyed. I’ve got lawyers fighting it, claiming moral precedent from pre-secessional cases on late-stage abortion, right to life, all that shit. Been nearly five years now, and we’re still fighting. Appeal, block, object, counter appeal. But we’re losing. UNGLA have got all the money in the world to fight this one, and their lawyers are better than mine.’
‘Sort of thing that makes a COLIN salary very attractive, I imagine.’
‘Yeah.’ Her expression hardened. ‘Sort of thing that makes working for an organisation that doesn’t give a fuck about UNGLA very attractive too.’
‘Don’t look at me. I’m freelance.’
‘Yes. But it was someone like you in UNGLA liaison at city hall that came looking for Ethan, that put the SWATs onto him. It was someone like you that authorised inducing my fucking baby at six and a half months and sticking it in a cryocap until UNGLA’s legal team can get a ruling to have it fucking murdered.’
Her voice caught on the last word. She buried herself in her drink. Wouldn’t look at him any more.
He didn’t try to disabuse her of the jagged anger she’d fenced herself in with, because it looked like she needed it. He didn’t point out the obvious flaws.
In fact, Sevgi, he didn’t say, it probably wasn’t someone like me, because in the first place there aren’t that many like me around. Four other licensed thirteens working UNGLA that I know of, and none of them in a liaison capacity.
And more to the point, Sevgi Ertekin, if it had been someone like me hunting Ethan Conrad, that someone would have shown up in person. He wouldn’t have handed it to a mob of SWAT cudlips and stood on the sidelines like some fucking sheep hierarch s
upervising.
Someone like me would have done his killing himself.
Instead, he sat quietly and watched as Ertekin slid from brooding silence into a raki-sodden doze. Awareness of where he was made its way back into his consciousness, the darkened apartment in the cloven city, the distant lights, the sleeping woman at barely arm’s length but curled away from him now, the quiet-
Hey, Marsalis. How you been?
-the tidal fucking quiet, like swells of black water, the seeping silence and Elena Aguirre, back again, talking softly to him-
Remember Felipe Souza? Stars and silent, empty corridors and safely dreaming faces behind glass that locked you out in the alone. That little whining I made in the pits of your ears, the way I’d come up behind you and whisper up out of it. Thought I’d gone away, did you? No chance. I found you out there, Marsalis, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. You and me, Marsalis. You and me.
-and the ships out at anchor on the silent swell, waiting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
They kept him waiting at reception. Not entirely an unpleasant experience; like a lot of Rim States v-formats, the Human Cost Foundation’s site was subtly peopled with short-loop secondary ’faces, hardwired into the system to provide the environs with what product brochure enthusiasm liked to call a more authentic feel. Sitting across from him in the waiting area, a svelte young woman in a short business skirt crossed one long thigh over the other and gave him a friendly smile.
‘Do you work for the Foundation?’ she asked.
‘Uh, no. My brother does.’
‘You’re here to see him?’
‘Yes.’ The format sculpters had done their work well. He felt positively rude stopping on the dry monosyllable. ‘We don’t see each other that much these days.’
‘You’re not local then?’
‘No. Wiring in from New York.’
‘Oh, that is a long way. So how do you like it out there?’
‘It isn’t out there for me, it’s home. We both grew up in the city. My brother’s the one who moved.’ Tiny flicker of sibling rivalry riding a base of Manhattan exceptionalism, and the tiny adrenal shock as he recognised both. He began to see how the interface psychiatry he’d always sneered at might work quite well after all.
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