Sporadic fire from further off. No more bodies. In the sudden quiet, the Steyr pinged insistently for more ammunition. The weapon’s previous owner had doubled magazines, taped two back to back and inverted. Carl unlocked the gun, swapped the ends and snicked the fresh magazine into place.
Somewhere on the floor, Onbekend groaned.
Carl peered out and saw crouched figures backing hastily off, slithering back to their cover by the path. He chased them with a quick burst from the Steyr, drew a deep breath, went back to the doorway, shoved the body on the threshold out of the way with his boot so he could get the door closed. Halfway through, he realised the man was still alive, breathing shallowly and rapidly, eyes closed. Carl shot him in the head with the Steyr, kicked him the rest of the way out and shut the door. Then he dragged an armchair across the floor and pushed it hard up against the handle. Vague realisation of pain as he worked - he stopped and looked down at the impact jacket, saw the shiny bulges where the gene-tweaked weblar had stopped the slugs and melted closed around them. But blood trickled down past the lower hem of the garment. He pulled it up and saw an ugly gouge in the flesh above his hip. Angled fire from someone as he jumped or twisted or fell some time in the last minute and a half. Could have been Onbekend or the guys in the door, maybe even a stray long shot from outside.
With the sight, the pain rolled in. He sagged onto the arm of the wedging chair
‘That’s fucking ironic,’ Onbekend coughed wetly from the floor. ‘I come that close to taking you down and one of Manco’s fucking goons takes me out instead.’
Carl shot him a tired look. ‘You were nowhere near.’
‘Yeah? Well, fuck you.’ Onbekend propped himself up. ‘Manco?’
No reply.
‘Manco?’
Carl watched the other thirteen’s face curiously from across the room. Onbekend’s features contorted with effort as he tried to get himself into a sitting position. His chest was drenched with blood from the shotgun blast. He growled through gritted teeth, pushed with both hands, couldn’t do it. He fell back.
‘I’ll go look,’ Carl told him.
Manco Bambaren was flat on his back in a pool of his own blood, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. It looked to have been instant - Onbekend’s shots must have nailed him across the chest as he was trying to get up. Carl looked down at the familia chief for a moment, then headed back.
‘He’s dead,’ Onbekend said. Blood in his throat turned his voice deep and muddy. ‘Right?’
‘Yeah, he’s dead. Nice shooting.’
A bubbling laugh. ‘I was trying for you.’
‘Yeah? Try harder next time.’ Carl felt spreading wet warmth, glanced down at his leg and saw blood soaking through the material of his trousers at the belt and thigh. Even through the painkillers, his chest ached as if he’d been crushed in a vice. He wondered if the weblar had failed, let something through somewhere else as well - it could happen with multiple impacts in the same region of the jacket, he’d seen it before. Or maybe someone out there, some fucking gun fetishist, had an armour-piercing load he liked to show off. Power enough to bring down a coked-up black man, just like in Rovayo’s history books, power enough to bring down the thirteen. Power to stop the beast in its tracks.
‘Ah. Not a complete waste, then.’
Onbekend had seen the blood as well.
Carl sank onto the floor, put his back against the armchair he had blocking the door and pulled his feet in so his knees went up. He propped the Steyr on his legs and checked the load. Filtering sunlight slanted in past him, missed his shoulder by a half metre, made him shiver unreasonably in the contrasting shade.
‘How many are there out there really?’ he asked Onbekend.
The other thirteen turned his head and grinned across the short expanse of stone-tiled floor that separated them. His teeth were bloody.
‘More than you’re in any state to deal with, I’d say.’ He swallowed liquidly. ‘Tell me something, Marsalis. Tell me the truth. You didn’t hurt Greta, did you?’
Carl looked at him for a while. ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.’
‘That’s good.’ A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. ‘Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.’
‘I’m not your fucking brother.’
Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.
Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.
So.
He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.
‘Fifteen.’
He looked across at Onbekend. ‘What?’
‘Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.’
‘Fifteen, huh?’
‘Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?’
‘Three.’ Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. ‘Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?’
Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. ‘Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips. No contest.’
Carl grimaced. ‘Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?’
‘Nah, stay a while. Gives us time to talk.’
Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. ‘We’ve got something to talk about?’
‘Sure we do.’ Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. ‘You still don’t get it, do you? Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.’
‘See what?’
‘What we are.’ The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. ‘Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.’
The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the grey matt surface of the weapon in his hands.
‘But not us, right?’
‘Fucking right, not us.’ Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. ‘Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the nineteen-hundreds. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?’
Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.
But le
t Onbekend talk his way out.
‘Tell you how you get that,’ the dying thirteen rasped. ‘How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis - we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.’ More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. ‘Modern humans are fucking infantilised adolescent cut-offs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?’
‘Yeah, so did we,’ Carl said sombrely. ‘Remember.’
‘They tried to contain us.’ Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desprately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like for ever. ‘But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.’
‘If you say so.’ Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving towards Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.
‘Yeah, I do fucking say so.’ The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the suntouched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead, the arm was limp behind it. ‘We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.’
‘You aren’t,’ Carl pointed out.
Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. ‘No, but you can.’
‘I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.’
‘Hey, you’re the lottery guy.’ Onbekend was gasping now. ‘Telling me you don’t feel lucky?’
‘I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.’
Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. ‘There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.’
He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.
‘You’ll show them,’ he bubbled.
The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.
Outside, Carl could hear Bambaren’s men talking. Nerving each other up.
I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.
It was almost as if she was there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.
He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.
I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.
We all will.
Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.
He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines and then slung it round his neck, adjusted the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.
A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.
You’ll show them.
‘Yeah, right,’ he muttered.
Drag the armchair aside, crack the door and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.
I’ll see you in the garden.
The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.
Deep breath.
Then he went out into the sun.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This has been a tough one, and I owe a great deal of thanks in a great many places. I have begged, borrowed and stolen from just about everywhere to get Black Man written.
It being a novel of science fiction, let’s start with the science.
The original idea for variant thirteen was inspired by the theorising of Richard Wrangham on the subject of diminishing human aggression, as described by Matt Ridley in his excellent book Nature Via Nurture. I have taken vast fictional liberties with these ideas and variant thirteen as it emerges in this book is in no way intended to represent either Mr Wrangham’s or Mr Ridley’s thoughts on the subject. These gentlemen simply provided me with a springboard - the rather ugly splash that follows is of my making alone.
The concept of artificial chromosome platforms is also borrowed, in this case from Gregory Stock’s fascinating and slightly scary book Redesigning Humans, which, along with Nature Via Nurture and Stephen Pinker’s brilliant The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works, has served as the bulk inspiration for most of the future genetic science I’ve dreamed up here. Once again, any mangling or misuse of the material I found in these outstanding works must be laid solely at my door.
Yaroshanko intuitive function, though my own invention, owes a large debt of inspiration to very real research done on social networks, as described in Mark Buchanan’s book Small World. And I’m personally indebted to Hannu Rajaniemi at the University of Edinburgh for taking the time to (try to) explain quantum game theory and its potential applications to me, thus giving me the basis for the New Maths and its subtle but far-reaching social impact. Thanks also must go to Simon Spanton, star editor, for patiently helping me wrangle the technical logistics of Mars-Earth cryocapping.
In the political sphere, I was heavily influenced by two very perceptive and rather depressing books about the United States, The Right Nation by John Micklethwaite and Adrian Wooldridge and What’s the Matter with America by Thomas Frank, as well as the brilliant and slightly less depressing Stiffed by Susan Faludi. While these books all fed into the concept of the Secession and the gender themes arising in Black Man, the Confederated Republic itself (aka Jesusland) was inspired by the now famous Jesusland map meme, created (according to Wikipedia) by one G. Webb on the message board yakyak.org. Way to go, G! Special personal thanks must also go to Alan Beatts of Borderlands books in San Francisco for listening to my meanderings over whisky and schwarma, and lending me a little informed American opinion with which to polish up what I had.
For insights into a possible future (and widely misunderstood past) Islam, I’m also indebted to Tariq Ali for A Clash of Fundamentalisms, Karen Armstrong for Islam; A Short History and the very courageous Irshad Manji for The Trouble With Islam Today. Here also, I have done my fair share of mangling, and the outcomes in Black Man do not necessarily bear any relation to anything these authors might endorse.
And finally, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to all those who waited with such immense patience, and still told me to take all the time I needed:
Simon Spanton - again! - and Jo Fletcher at Gollancz, Chris Schluep and Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, my agent Carolyn Whitaker, and last but not least, all those well-wishers who emailed me during 2006 with messages of condolence, reassurance and
support. This book would not exist without you.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Richard Morgan 2013
Altered Carbon Copyright © Richard Morgan 2002
Broken Angels Copyright © Richard Morgan 2003
Woken Furies Copyright © Richard Morgan 2005
Market Forces Copyright © Richard Morgan 2004
Black Man Copyright © Richard Morgan 2007
All rights reserved.
The right of Richard Morgan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 473 202979 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
www.gollancz.co.uk
The Complete SF Collection Page 271