The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  ‘So, uh.’ The question rose to his lips, he tasted its idiocy but weariness let it through anyway, part challenge, part deflection from more talk about Jeff. ‘Where are you from?’

  She smiled again. ‘That’s almost a metaphysical question, isn’t it? I suppose I’d have to say I’m from Jakarta. Conceptually, anyway. Have you ever been there?’

  ‘Couple of times, wiring in. Not for real.’

  ‘You should go. It’s beautiful now the nano-build is finished. Best to try and see it in ...’

  And so on, effortlessly evading any conversational currents that might bring them up too hard against the fact of what she was. He guessed that this must be how high-class prostitution worked as well, but he was too tired to really care. He let go, let himself be lulled by the erudite flow of what she knew, the participative dynamic she ran the conversation on, the stocking-sheathed geometry of her elegantly crossed legs. There seemed to be a reactive sub-routine that measured how much he wanted to talk and adjusted the response output accordingly. He found, oddly enough, that he wanted to talk quite a lot.

  He wasn’t aware of Jeff approaching, until his brother stood almost over him, smiling wearily.

  ‘Okay.’ He fumbled to his feet, recovered himself. ‘At last.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry. Whole boat-load of wash-ups came in from Wenzhou a couple of days ago, it’s going to put us way over budget for the quarter. Been negotiating with the legislature all fucking day.’ He nodded at the still seated woman. ‘I see you’ve met Sharleen.’

  ‘Uh, yeah.’

  ‘Lovely, isn’t she. You know sometimes I’ll come out here and talk to her just for the fun of it.’

  Norton looked at the ’face. She smiled up at the two of them, head lifted, expression gone very slightly vacant, as if what they were saying was birdsong, or a played segment of some symphony she liked.

  ‘Need to talk to you,’ he said uncomfortably.

  ‘Sure.’ Jeff Norton gestured. ‘Come on through. Bye, Sharleen.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She smiled over her shoulder as they left, then swivelled and sat immobile and silent as they passed out of trigger range. Jeff led him past the reception island and down a truncated corridor with a water cooler at the end. A half-dozen steps along, the passageway greyed out around them and became Jeff’s office. It was pretty much as Norton remembered the actual suite from a visit a couple of years back, a few décor differences in the pastel shades of the walls and fittings, maybe one or two ornaments on shelves that he didn’t recall. A photo of Megan on the desk. He drew a compressed breath and seated himself on the right-angle sofa facing the window and the skyline view of Golden Gate park. His brother leaned across the desk and punched something out on the deck.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I need some more advice. You heard about Ortiz?’

  ‘No.’ Jeff leaned against the side of his desk. ‘What’s he up to, more UN hand-holding tours?’

  ‘He’s been shot, Jeff.’

  ‘Shot?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s all over the feeds. Where have you been? I thought you’d know. I gave a COLIN press conference all about it yesterday afternoon.’

  Jeff sighed. Shook his head as if it wasn’t working properly. He crossed to the adjacent angle of the sofa and collapsed into it.

  ‘Christ, I’m tired,’ he muttered. ‘Been on this Wenzhou thing for the last day and a half solid. I didn’t even go home from the office last night. Been in virtual most of this morning. Is he still alive?’

  ‘Yeah, holding up. They’ve got him wired into intensive-care life support over at Weill Cornell. Medical n-djinn says he’s going to be okay.’

  ‘Can he talk?’

  ‘Not yet. They’re going to patch him into a v-format once he regains consciousness, but that might be a while.’

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ Jeff gave him a haggard look. ‘So what’s this got to do with me? What do you need?’

  ‘For Ortiz, nothing. I don’t think you could help right now anyway. Like I said, he’s not even conscious. They’ve got family and close friends at the hospital but-’

  His brother gave him the corner of a smile. ‘Yeah, I know. Not my world any more. Blew my chance at the Union power game, didn’t I.’

  ‘That’s not what I-’

  ‘Ran west and ended up a bleeding-heart charity chump.’

  Norton gestured impatiently. ‘That’s not what this is about. I want to talk to you about Marsalis. You know, the thirteen we levered out of South Florida State?’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Jeff rubbed at his face. ‘So how’s that working out?’

  Norton hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You got problems with him?’

  ‘I don’t . . .’ He lifted his hands. ‘Look, the guy signed up okay. You were right about that much.’

  ‘What, that he’d bite your hand off for the chance to get out of a Jesusland jail ?’ Jeff shrugged. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘Yeah, well. I guess I owe you for the suggestion. And I’ve got to say, he lives up to the hype. He was there when they tried to hit Ortiz, and it looks like this guy’s the only reason Ortiz is still breathing. He took out two of the three shooters and chased the third one off. Unarmed. You believe that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeff shortly. ‘I do believe that. I told you, these guys are fucking terrifying. So what’s the problem?’

  Norton looked at his hands. He hesitated again, then shook his head irritably and raised his eyes to meet his brother’s curious gaze.

  ‘You remember I told you I’ve got a partner now? Ex-NYPD detective, a woman?’

  ‘Who you want to get horizontal with, but won’t admit it. Yeah, I remember.’

  ‘Yeah, well there’s something I didn’t tell you about her. She had a relationship with a renegade thirteen a few years back. Didn’t work out, and there were some, uh, complications.’

  Jeff raised his brows. ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘Yeah. I didn’t give it much thought, even when we hired this guy.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Norton sighed. ‘Okay, I gave it some thought. But you know, I figured, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s got a handle on the situation. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Sure.’ Jeff leaned forward. ‘So what are you worrying about?’

  Norton stared around the office miserably. ‘I don’t know.’ He threw up his arms. ‘I don’t know, I don’t fucking know.’

  His brother smiled, sighed.

  ‘You ever chew coca leaves, Tom?’

  Norton blinked. ‘Coca leaves?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What has that got-’

  ‘I’m trying to help here. Just answer the question. You ever chew coca leaves?’

  ‘Of course I have. Every time we have to go down to the prep camps for a Marstech swoop, they give us a big bag at the airport and recommend it for the altitude. Tastes like shit. So what has that got to do with-’

  ‘Do you get high when you chew coca?’

  ‘Oh, come on-’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  Norton set his jaw. ‘No. I don’t get high. Sometimes, your mouth goes numb, but that’s it. It’s just to give you energy, stop you feeling tired.’

  ‘Right. Now listen. That energising effect is part of an evolved working relationship between humans and the coca plant. Coca gives humans medicinal benefits, humans ensure that there’s plenty of coca being cultivated. Everybody wins. And human physiology copes very comfortably with the effects the leaf provides. It’s a benefit that doesn’t interfere with any of your other necessary survival dynamics. You’re not going to do anything stupid just because you’re chewing those leaves.’

  ‘Why is it,’ Norton asked heavily, ‘that every time I come to you for help, you have to lecture me?’

  Jeff grinned at him. ‘Because I’m your older brother, stupid. Now pay attention. If you extract the alkaloid from the coca leaf, if you take it through the artificial chemical proces
ses that give you cocaine, and then you slam that stuff into the human brain, well then you’re going to see a whole different story. You do a couple of lines of that shit, and you surely will get high. You also probably do some stupid things, things that might get you killed in a more unforgiving evolutionary environment than New York. You won’t pay attention to the social and emotional cues of the people around you, or you’ll misread them. Fail to remember useful personal detail. You’ll maybe hit on the wrong woman, pick a fight with the wrong guy. Misjudge speeds, angles and distances. And long term, of course, you’ll put your heart under too much strain as well. All good ways to get yourself killed. What it comes down to is that we’re not evolved to deal with the substance at the level our technology can give it to us. Age old story, same thing with sugar, salt, synadrive, you name it.’

  ‘And variant thirteen,’ Norton said drearily.

  ‘Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look - by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.’

  ‘Apart from the kleptocrats.’ Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorising. ‘I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?’

  Jeff shrugged. ‘Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profile for a kleptocrat and a thirteen doesn’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.’

  ‘Oh, come on. How are you going to measure something like that?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the wash-ups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well - apparently before Jacobsen and the round-up, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-sized backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘Well, what’s the pre-eminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?’

  ‘I don’t know. Networking skills?’

  Jeff laughed. ‘You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.’

  ‘So were you, once.’

  ‘Charisma!’ Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. ‘Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their force-fulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.’

  ‘What if they are women?’

  ‘Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.’

  ‘I thought you were talking about now.’

  ‘Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.’

  ‘Apart from wiping out the thirteens.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilisation getting an early start.’

  Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. ‘Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?’

  His brother sighed. ‘Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition towards charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us just quietly hate them, but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys stood for any elected post, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label winners every time. Why do you think Jacobsen wanted them interned and chemically castrated? The way he saw it, let them out into the general population and within a couple of decades they’d be running every democratic nation state on the planet. They’d demolish the democratic process, roll back everything feminised civil society’s achieved in the last couple of centuries. And they’d breed right back into base humanity like rabbits, because any woman who’s at all drawn to male sexuality is going to fall like a bomb for these guys.’ Jeff gave him another wry grin. ‘The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance. That what’s bothering you, little brother?’

  Norton gestured irritably ‘No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to co-operate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.’

  ‘Well, how’s she doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.’

  ‘Exotic Istanbul, huh?’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Jeff quelled his grin. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw-’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘-but wanting to fuck a guy’s brains out isn’t necessarily the same thing as switching your own brain off. I mean, look - the bonobo thing is similar. They’ve got an amped-up feminine appeal that’ll blast the average guy’s sexual systems like a cocaine hit everytime-’

  ‘Yeah, you’d know all about that.’

  Jeff stopped and looked at him reproachfully. ‘Tom, I said I was sorry about the Istanbul crack. Give me a fucking break will you. What I meant was, you don’t see me leaving Megan and the kids for Nuying, do you? Risking divorce, separation from Jack and Luisa, maybe a lawsuit for professional misconduct, all because I’m crazy for some modified pussy. Those things are important to me, and I manage to balance them against what Nu does for me. And I come out ahead, Tom. In control, the best of both worlds. Sure, I’ve got a drug problem, and the drug is bonobo tendency. But I’m handling it. That’s what you do, you deal with your weaknesses. You take up the strain. If this woman you’re talking about really is professionally focused, serious about her work, knows who she is and what she’s about, then there’s no reason she can’t do the same cost benefit analysis and play the game accordingl
y. If anything, the genetic evidence suggests women are better at that shit anyway, so she’s got a wired-in head-start right there. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want to have to hand-wash the sheets in whatever Istanbul hotel they’re in right now-’

  ‘Oh Christ, Jeff.’

  Jeff spread his hands. ‘Sorry, little brother. You want me to make you feel better, tell you the field’s clear for you to make your Manhattan urbanite move on this woman? I can’t. But if what you’re concerned about really is her professional grip on things - then I wouldn’t worry.’

  They sat quietly for a few moments. To Norton, letting Jeff have the last word felt like a kind of defeat.

  ‘Well, what about this Istanbul clue then? I mean, seriously, it doesn’t come close to any of our current investigations, it’s right out of left-field. Some other thirteen the Europeans have got interned in Turkey, who might have a connection to some Peruvian gangster who might have ties to the people who maybe had our renegade thirteen shipped back from Mars. I mean, am I supposed to trust that? It’s pretty thin.’

  Jeff stared out of the window.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ he said absently. ‘Thirteens don’t think the same way as us, they have a whole different set of synaptic wiring. Some of that, the more extreme end, we just go ahead and label paranoia or sociopathic tendency. But often it just comes out as a different way of looking at things. That’s why UNGLA employs guys like this Marsalis in the first place. In some ways, that’s why I suggested you dig him out of Florida and hire him. Give you access to those other angles.’ A sudden, hard look. ‘You didn’t tell anyone that was my suggestion, did you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Yeah? Not even this ex-cop you’ve got under the skin so badly?’

  ‘I made you a promise, Jeff. I keep my promises.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’ His brother pressed thumb and forefinger into tight closed eyes for a moment. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t get so harsh with you, just I’m stressed out of my fucking box right now. This job’s a political tightrope act at the best of times, and now isn’t the best of times. Someone gets to hear that the director of the Human Cost Foundation is giving informal advice to a COLIN officer on matters relating to the genetically enhanced, I’m going to be looking for another job. We’ll get the whole Rim-China-Mars super-conspiracy bullshit blowing up in our faces all over again, probably lose the bulk of our funding overnight. Bad enough that we’re taking in black-lab refugees and giving them Rim citizenship. Arranging for dangerous genetic variants to be released from jail, that’d be the final straw.’