“Jeff, for Christ’s sake.” No real anger; he was too travel-worn and weary for it. “Do you really have to act like such a throwback all the time?”
“What? Girl’s attractive, you don’t do the math, add up your chances?” Still standing, his brother knocked back a chunk of the arrack, grinned down at him. “Come on, I can see it in your eyes. This one, you want.”
Norton pressed thumb and forefinger to his eyelids. “You know what, Jeff, maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. But it isn’t my primary concern right now. You think we could talk about something that matters for a change?”
He didn’t see the way the expression on his brother’s face shifted, the way the grin faded out, gave way to a watchful tension. Jeff backed up and dropped into the opposing armchair, thrust his legs out in front of him. When Norton looked at him, he met his gaze and gestured. “Okay, Tom, you got it. Whatever I can do. But it’s a long time since I had much pull in New York. I mean, I can maybe make some calls if they’re on your back, but—”
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“It’s not?”
“No, we’ve pretty much got free rein on this one. Word down from on high, do what you want but clean up the mess.”
“And what mess would that be, exactly? Feeds say everyone aboard is dead.”
“Yeah. Since when did you trust what you see on the feeds? Truth is, we’ve got a live one, and he made it off the ship. This is confidential information I’m giving you, Jeff. Can’t go any farther than this room, this conversation. Not even Megan.”
Jeff spread his hands. Slow smile. “Hey, since when did I ever tell Megan everything? You know me, Tom.”
“Yeah, well.” He held down the anger, old and accustomed like the kick he got out of the Cadillac when he downshifted without the brake.
“So come on. What’s the big secret?”
“Big secret is that this guy is a variant thirteen.”
There was a small satisfaction in watching the way Jeff reacted. Eyes widened, mouth dropping to frame a response he didn’t have. Norton thought it came off a little phony, but he’d grown used to that aspect of Jeff over the years, the actorly, slightly-larger-than-life way he deployed himself for whatever audience there was. He’d always tried to see it, charitably, as the price of admission into the charmed power circle his brother had inhabited with such aplomb when they were both younger men—but now, now that his brother had apparently become charitable himself without losing any of that mannered polish, Norton was forced to consider that maybe Jeff had always been that way, always playing himself for the cheap seats.
“You deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, Jeff,” he said simply. “I need some advice here.”
“Did you call UNGLA?”
“Not yet. Way things are, it’s not likely we will.”
“You want my advice? Call ’em.”
“Come on, Jeff. COLIN wouldn’t even sign up to the Accords at Munich. You think they’re going to want the UN walking all over their stuff with big international treaty boots?”
Jeff Norton set his drink aside on a tall driftwood table, distant cousin to the cabinet. He rubbed hands over his face. “How much do you know about variant thirteen, Tom?”
Norton shrugged. “What everyone knows.”
“What everyone knows is bullshit hype and moral panic for the feeds. What do you actually know?”
“Uh, they’re sociopaths. Some kind of throwback to when we were all still hunter-gatherers, right?”
“Some kind of, yeah. Truth is, Tom, it’s like the bonobos and the hibernoids and every other misbegotten premature poke at reengineering that last century’s idiot optimist pioneers saddled us with. Guesswork and bad intentions. Nobody ever built a human variant because they thought they were giving it a better shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. They were products, all of them, agenda-targeted. Spaceflight programs wanted the hibernoids, the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream of womanhood—”
“Yours, too, huh?”
Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Are you ever going to let that go?”
“Would Megan?”
“Megan doesn’t know. It’s my problem, not hers.”
“That’s big of you.”
“No, it’s weak and masculine of me. I know that. Guess I’ll just never have your moral fucking rectitude, little brother. But telling Megan isn’t going to achieve anything except hurt her and the kids. And I won’t do that.”
He picked up his glass again and lifted it in Norton’s direction.
“So here’s to living with your mistakes, little brother. Either that, or fuck you very much.”
Norton shrugged and raised his own glass. “Living with your mistakes.”
And Megan flitted through his mind, sun-splashed hair and laughter amid the redwood trunks, and later, naked body sun-dappled and straining upward to press against him on the sweat-damp sheets of the motel bed.
“So,” he said, to drive out the vision, “if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?”
“Variant thirteen?” Jeff gave him the crooked grin again. “Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood.”
“Oh come on.”
“Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.”
“You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there, either.”
“So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-Secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and supervirility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which in the end is suicide, just slower and a bit more fucking fun.”
“I thought they criminalized that stuff.”
Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Oh yeah, and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.”
“I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk-show genetics, Jeff.”
“Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a single social biologist who doesn’t count alpha-male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood”—the grin again—“so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas wants to be a soldier, because hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid, ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes”—Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody—“they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep, and breathe hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with them. See, a feminized, open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.”
“I didn’t ask for a class on the Secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.”
“Yeah, getting there.” Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. “See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked, and shut down with a halfway decent black-market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on
a bighearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship program at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?”
“Vaguely.” He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high gray gloss that clashed with the rough matte finish of the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of stores on a sun-blasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as gray as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. “I was what, five or six?”
“If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toy set I had, but full-size, smashing into the house, flattening Mom and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.”
“Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.”
“They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.”
“I know.”
“Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?”
“Variant thirteen.”
“Yeah, variant thirteen. Precivilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.”
“Now you sound like the feeds.”
Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. “Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough, and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.”
“I fail to see,” said Norton acidly, “how that gives us back our manhood.”
“That’s because you live in New York.”
Norton snorted and drained his arrack.
His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done. “I’m serious, Tom. You think Secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?”
“Among other things, yeah, it was.”
Jeff shook his head. “That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Cooperation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table was pointing toward a future so feminized, it’s just downright un-American.”
Norton laughed despite himself. “You should be writing speeches, Jeff.”
“You forget,” his brother said unsmilingly, “I used to. Now, think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re winning. No one knows exactly where they’ve come from all of a sudden, there’s a lot of deniability going around, but who ever gave a shit about that? What counts is that these guys are American soldiers, they’re fighting for us, and for once they’re carrying the battle. You just sit there for a moment, Tom, and you think what effect that had, in all those little towns you just flew over to get here.”
Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had leveled on his brother, looked into his glass, and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.
“That’s the way I read it, anyway.”
The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the bar again. “Get you another?”
Norton shook his head. “Got to get back, get up early.”
“You’re not going to stay the night?”
“Well…”
“Jesus, Tom. Do we get along that badly?” Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. “Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way around the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?”
“Jeff, it’s not—”
“Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?”
“I don’t know,” Norton said quietly. “But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him.”
“You didn’t catch me. I fucking told you about it.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
“Tom, I’m your brother for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?”
Norton shot to his feet. “I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.”
“Tom, wait. Wait.” Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. “I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my brother, don’t you think that means something to me?”
“Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not—” He stopped, gestured helplessly. “It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for. Something. I don’t know, something fresh, something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.”
“That’s how you see Mom and Dad?”
“That’s how they are, Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.”
“Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.”
“Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean—” Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. “Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the emotions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart anymore, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s genetics, Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s just the way she’s wired.”
“And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?”
Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. “Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a
bonobo, that’s a bull’s-eye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.”
“So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.”
Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.
“Okay, Tom,” he said quietly “Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life, either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like…”
He shook his head.
“Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.”
“No.” Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. “I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just…it’s been a long day.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, none of us is a saint. We’ve all done things”—Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Toward the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting you motherfucker, oh you fucking motherfucker through gritted teeth. It will make him rock-hard just thinking about it for weeks afterward, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all—“things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?”
Jeff gave him a searching look.
“You’re missing a pretty major point here, Tom.” He raised his hands, palms open. There was something almost pleading in his face. “I don’t regret Nuying. Or the others, because God knows Nu hasn’t been the only one. I just never told you about the others after the way you reacted. Yeah, each time it’s emotional complication, Tom, stress I could do without. But I can’t make myself feel bad about it, and I can’t make myself wish it hadn’t happened. Can you understand that? Can you stand knowing that about your brother?”
Black Man / Thirteen Page 12