Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  So he stepped out of the Guatemalan’s cell and went casually back down the B wing thoroughfare, right arm held slightly bent. Under his sleeve, the chill of the monofil strip warmed slowly against his skin. Gray nanocarb scaffolding rose on either side of him, holding up three levels of galleries and the tracks for the big surveillance cams. The wing was roofed in arched transparency, and late-afternoon light sifted down into the quiet of the hall. Most of general population were out on Partnership work projects, paying their debt to society into Sigma’s corporate coffers. The few who remained in B wing leaned off the galleries in ones or twos, or stood in small knots across the hall floor. Conversation evaporated as he passed, eyes swiveling to watch him. On the lower right-hand gallery, a grizzled longtimer called Andrews stared down at him and nodded in fractional acknowledgment. Suddenly, despite the sunlight, Carl felt cold.

  It wasn’t the coming fight. Equipped as he now was, Carl was reasonably sure he could take Dudeck without too much trouble. The Aryans either weren’t hooked up outside the prison or just hadn’t done their research; all they knew about Carl Marsalis was that he talked funny for a nigger, was up from Miami on some foreign-national retention loophole, and, at forty-one, was old. Possibly they thought he was some kind of terrorist, therefore foreign and a coward who had everything coming to him. Certainly they believed that lean-muscled tat-covered twenty-something Jack Dudeck was going to rip his shit apart, whoever he fucking was. That nigger had to learn some respect.

  It wasn’t the fight. It was the creeping sense of the trap that came with it.

  Three months in this corporate newbuilt shithole, before that five weeks in the Miami High Risk unit. No trial, no bail. Release assessment dates set back time and again, access to lawyers refused. Appeals and diplomatic pressure from UNGLA summarily thrown out, no end in sight. He could feel the time getting away from him like blood loss. There was an ongoing investigation that no one was prepared to talk about but Carl knew it had to do with Caracas and the death of Richard Willbrink. It had to be. Relations between the UN and the Republic had never been great, but there was no way the Florida state legislature would have held out against major diplomacy for the sake of a single low-grade vice bust that already screamed entrapment. No, somewhere in the processing when the fetal murder team took him downtown, his documentation had tripped a high-level wire. Connections had been made, whether in Langley or Washington or some covert operations base farther south, and the national security beast was awake. Ghost agencies were looking for payback, cold covert vengeance for one of their own; they were going to make an example of Carl Marsalis, and while they tried to assemble the necessary legal toys to do it, he was going to stay safely locked down in a Republic prison. And if he shanked Jack Dudeck today as he fully intended to, they might not be able to pin it on him, but it was still going to put him back into Close Management and provide the perfect pretext for another lengthy extension of holding time, maybe even a subsidiary sentence. More than a few times in the last month he’d awoken with a panicky shortness of breath and a dream-like certainty that he would never get out of this place. It was starting to look like premonition.

  He locked down the fear, siphoned it carefully into anger and stoked it up. He stopped at the B wing gate and raised his face for the laser. The blue light licked over his features, the machine consulted its real-time records, and the gate cracked open. He paced through. The chapel was left and halfway down a fifty-meter corridor that led to kitchen storage. Surveillance would have him for twenty-five meters along the passage, would see him turn in through the impressively sculpted genoteak double doors, and that was all they would know. Carl felt the mesh shudder online, jerky and grating with Louie’s substandard griego chlorides.

  All right, Jacky boy. Let’s fucking do this.

  The chapel doors gave smoothly as he pushed them, oozed backward on hydraulic hinges and showed him twin rows of pews, also in genoteak. The furniture sat like islands on the shine of the fused-glass floor. The interior architecture soared modestly in echo of a modern church. Angled spots made the altar rail and lectern gleam. In the space between the rail and the first row of pews, Jack Dudeck stood with another, bulkier Aryan at his side. Both wore their corporate prison blue coveralls peeled neatly to the waist and tied off. Sleeveless generic gray T-shirts showed beneath. A third shaven-headed weight-bench type, similarly dressed, hauled himself up from his slumped position between two pews halfway down on the right. He was chewing gum.

  “Hello nigger,” said Dudeck loudly.

  Marsalis nodded. “Needed help, did you?”

  “Don’t need me no fucking help to carve a slice off your ass, boy. Marty and Roy here just wanted to make sure we ain’t disturbed.”

  “That’s right, nigger.” The gum chewer squeezed out between the pew ends, eyes screwed up in a grin, voice leaning hard on the insult. Carl tamped down a flaring rage and thought about hooking out those eyes with his thumbnails.

  Lock it down, soak.

  It was depressing—the same timeslip sense of loss at his reactions. Over the last four months, he could track his own change in attitude toward the antique racial epithets still in wide use across the Republic. Nigger. The first couple of times, it was disconcerting and almost quaint, like having your face slapped with a dueling glove. With time, it came to feel more and more like the verbal spittle it was intended to be. That his fellow blacks in general population used it of themselves did nothing to stem the slowly awakening anger. It was a locally evolved defense, and he was not from there. Fuck these Republicans and their chimpanzee-level society.

  Lock it down.

  The gum chewer came ponderously up the aisle toward him. Carl moved to the right-hand bank of pews and waited, nailed the approaching Aryan’s gaze as he came level, watched the man’s eyes for the move if it was coming. He figured boot to shin and elbow uppercut to chin if he had to, left-side strikes. He didn’t want to show Dudeck the shank ahead of time.

  But the other man was as good as Dudeck’s word. He brushed past with a snort of contempt and stationed himself at the door. Carl moved down the aisle, feeling the mesh now like arousal, like the juddering of bad brakes. It wasn’t ideal, but the tidal power of it would do. He stepped out from between the two last pews and faced Dudeck across five meters of fused glass. He lifted his left hand in a casual gesture designed to lead the Aryan’s attention away from his right, rejoiced silently as Dudeck’s eyes flickered to follow the move.

  “So, birdshit. You want to run me your rap now?” Carl burlesqued a Jesusland comedy drawl. “The South will rise again.”

  “South already risen, nigger,” blurted the big Aryan next to Dudeck. “Confederated Republic is the white man’s America.”

  Carl let his gaze shift briefly to the speaker. “Yeah, that seems to have worked out well for you.”

  The big Aryan bristled, surged forward. Dudeck lifted a hand and pressed him back without looking away from Carl.

  “No call to get all riled up, Lee,” he said softly. “This here—”

  “Jack!” It was a hissed prison whisper from the door. The lookout, gesturing furiously. “Jack! COs coming.”

  The change was unreal, almost comical. In seconds flat, the two Aryans in front of Carl hit the front pew side by side, shaven heads bent in an attitude of prayer. Back by the door, the lookout moved two rows down and did the same. Carl stifled a snort and found a front seat of his own on the far side of the aisle from Dudeck and Roy. The mesh surged and pounded for release. He kept peripheral awareness of the two men and waited, head down, controlling his breathing. If the correctional officers passed by without stopping, the fight was going to kick off again right where it got paused, only by then Roy would have calmed down and the chances of goading him back up to interference levels would be lost. Carl had planned to fuck with the big Aryan’s head just enough to get him in Dudeck’s way, and then use the confusion to shank them both. Now—

  Footfalls at the back of the ch
apel.

  “Marsalis.”

  Fuck.

  He looked around. Three COs, two from the B wing day crew, Foltz and Garcia, both hefting stunwrap carbines and scanning the pews with seasoned calm. The other guy was a stranger, unarmed, and the phone clip he wore at ear and jaw looked shiny new with lack of use. White male, forties or older. Carl made him for admin-side, and probably senior. There was gray in his hair and the face was lined with middle-aged working weariness, but his eyes lacked the laconic watchfulness of the men who walked the galleries. The fact that Carl didn’t know him wasn’t in itself of note—South Florida State was a big prison—but the appeal-and-counter game had taken him across to admin close to a dozen times now and he was good with faces. Wherever this guy worked, wasn’t somewhere Carl had been or seen.

  “Chew doin’ here, Marsalis?” Foltz’s jaws worked a steady, tight-jaw rhythm on the gum in his mouth. “You ain’t no believer.”

  It didn’t require an answer. Garcia and Foltz were old hands; they knew what went down in the chapel. Foltz’s eyes tracked across to Dudeck and Lee. He nodded to himself.

  “Findin’ racial harmony in the Lord, are we, boys?”

  Neither of the front-pew Aryans said anything. And back at the door, the third supremacist had the butt of Garcia’s carbine almost at his ear.

  “That’s enough,” snapped the new face. “Marsalis, you’re required in admin.”

  A tiny surge of hope. Meetings with Andritzky, the UNGLA rep, were alternate Tuesdays, late morning. For someone to turn up this late in the week unannounced, it had to be progress. Had to be. Someone somewhere had found the key log in the Republican logjam of xenophobia and moral illusion. Pressure applied, it would break up the jam and set the whole legal and diplomatic process flowing downstream once more. The trigger line of code that would crack Carl Marsalis out of this fucking prison glitch and send him home.

  Yeah, you’d better hope, soak. He let the shank slide out of his sleeve and land gently on the pew beside him. He tucked it back against the upright with his fingers and got up, leaving it there, invisible to anyone, including the Aryans, who didn’t have a clear angle of vision on where he’d been sitting. Seventeen, he remembered, and felt a faint chill at the thought. He didn’t have the finances or the juice to buy again if this didn’t work out and they sent him back to B wing to face Dudeck and the supremacist grudge. And mesh or no mesh, without an edged weapon he was probably going to get hurt.

  Suddenly the hope in his belly collapsed into sick despair and a pointless, billowing anger.

  Reggie Barnes, I hope you fucking die on that respirator.

  He walked up the aisle toward the COs. Dudeck turned to watch him go. Carl caught it in peripheral vision, swung his head to meet the Aryan’s gaze. He saw the hunger there, the deferred bloodlust, and summoned a stone-faced detachment to meet it. But beneath the mask, he found he was suddenly falling-down weary of the youth and fury in the other man. Of the hatred that seemed to seep not just out of Dudeck and his kind, but right out of the prison walls around him, as if institutions like South Florida State were just glands in the Republican body politic, oozing the hate like some kind of natural secretion, stockpiling it and then pumping it back out into the circulatory system of the nation, corrosive and ripe for any focus it could find.

  “Eyes front, Dudeck.” Foltz had spotted the sparks. His voice came out rich with irony. “That ain’t how you pray, son.”

  Carl didn’t look back to watch Dudeck comply. He didn’t need to. Whichever way Dudeck was now looking, it didn’t matter. Carl could feel the Aryan’s hatred at his back, pushing outward behind him like a vast, soft balloon swelling to fill the space in the house of worship. Faith-based prison charter. Each man to his own personal god, and Dudeck’s was white as polypuff packing chips.

  Sutherland’s voice, deep and amused, like honey ladling down in the back of his head.

  Nothing new in the hate, soak. They need it like they need to breathe. Without it, they fall apart. Thirteen’s just the latest hook to hang it off.

  That supposed to make me feel better?

  And Sutherland had shrugged. Supposed to prepare you, is all. What else were you looking for?

  The hope and despair played seesaw in his guts all the way out of B wing and across the exercise yard to the administration building. Florida heat clutched at him like warm, damp towels. The glare off the nailed-down cloud cover hurt his eyes. He squinted and craned his neck in search of omens. There was no helicopter on the roof of the building, which meant no high-ranking visitors in from Tallahassee or Washington today. Nothing in the gray-roofed sky either, and no sound or sense of anything going on in the parking lot on the other side of the heavy-duty double fence. No journalistic flurry of activity, no uplink vans. A couple of months back, not long after he was transferred up to Florida State, Andritzky had leaked details to the press in an attempt to generate enough public embarrassment for a quick release. The tactic had backfired, with the Republic’s media picking up almost exclusively on Carl’s UNGLA covert ops status and the death of Gabriella at the Garrod Horkan camp. UN connections, fruitful leverage in any other corner of the globe, here only played directly into a longstanding paranoia that Washington had carefully nurtured since Secession and before. And it didn’t help that Carl was the color of the Republic’s deepest atavistic fears. Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained.

  Black male, detained, dangerous.

  For now, that seemed to be more than enough for Republican purposes. Neither Sigma nor the Florida state legislature had seen fit to leak details of Carl’s genetic status so far—for which he was duly grateful: in prison population here it would have been tantamount to a death sentence. There’d be a line out the fucking cell block for him, young men like Dudeck but of every race and creed, all filled with generalized hate and queuing up to test themselves against the monster. He wasn’t sure why they were holding back; they must have the data by now. It was no secret what he was, a little digging at Garrod Horkan camp, or into UNGLA general record, or even a trawl back eight years to the Felipe Souza coverage would have turned it up. He assumed the Jesusland media had backed off and muzzled themselves in time-honored compliance with governmental authority, but he still couldn’t work out why. Possibly they were holding back the knowledge as a weapon of last resort against the UN, or were afraid of the widespread panic it might trigger if it hit the public domain. Or maybe some worm-slow process of interagency protocol was still working itself out, and as soon as it cleared they’d have their vengeance for Willbrink via that long line of shank-equipped angry young men.

  If he was still here by then.

  Hope. Despair. The wrecking-ball pendulum swing in his belly. They went in through the steel-barred complications of admin block security, where Carl was prodded about, machine-swiped, and patted down by hand. Harsh, directing voices; rough, efficient hands. Foltz bowed out, leaving Garcia and the stranger to lead their charge up two flights of clanging steel stairs, through a heavy door, and into the abrupt thickly carpeted quiet of the prison’s offices. Sudden cool, sweat drying on his skin. Textured walls, discreet corporate logos, SIGMA and SFSP in muted tones, the deep blue and bright orange that characterized the inmate uniform bleached out here to pastel shades. The soft, occasional chime from a desk as data interfaces signaled a task complete. Carl felt his senses prickle with the change. A woman moved past him in a skirt, an actual woman, not a holoporn confection, early fifties maybe, but fleshily handsome and moving for real under the clothing. He could smell her as she passed, scent of woman and some heavy musk fragrance he knew vaguely. Life outside prison came suddenly and touched him at the base of his spine.

  “This way.” The CO he didn’t know gestured. “Conference Four.”

  His heart dropped sickeningly into his guts. It was Andritzky. Conference Four was a tiny, one-window cham
ber, no room for more than two or three people around the small oblong table, certainly no room for the assembled worthies of a state legislature or UN delegation. Nothing of consequence was going to go down in Conference Four. He’d have an hour with Andritzky, maybe some updates on the appeal, and then he was going back into general population and watching his back for Dudeck. He was fucked.

  Lock. It. Down.

  He breathed, drew in the new knowledge, and started to map it. Sutherland’s situational Zen. Don’t bitch, don’t moan, only see what is and then ready yourself. Here came the door, here came Andritzky and his attempts at camaraderie and comfort, none of it ever quite masking the obvious personal relief at not being where Carl was. Here came an hour of useless bureaucratic narrative, punctuated with awkward silences and bitten-back rage at UNGLA’s total fucking impotence in this Jesusland shithole. Here came—

  It wasn’t Andritzky.

  Carl stopped dead in the open doorway. Sutherland’s situational Zen spiraled away from him, like a sheaf of papers spilled down a well, like gulls riding the wind. The anger went with it, bleeding out.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Marsalis.” The speaker was a white male, tall and smoothly elegant in a gray-blue micropore suit that hung like Shanghai custom as he got up and came around the table, hand extended. “I’m Tom Norton. Thank you, gentlemen, that’ll be all for now. I’ll buzz you when we’re ready to leave.”

  There was an electric silence. Carl could feel the exchange of glances going on behind his back. Garcia cleared his throat.

  “This is a violent-crime inmate, sir. It’s not acceptable procedure to leave you alone with him.”

  “Well, that’s curious.” Norton’s tone was urbane, but abruptly there was an edge in it. “From my records, it seems Mr. Marsalis is being held on a putative Dade County vice charge. And hasn’t even been formally arraigned yet.”

  “It’s against procedure,” insisted Garcia.