Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  Ethan’s words. He used to grin as he said them, that something-burning grin.

  She waited to see what he’d do. If he’d move.

  He didn’t. He raised an eyebrow instead, looked down at the open blade of his right hand. She recognized the displacement training, and a faint shiver ran through her.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Well, it’s nice to know I’m so well understood. But you see, Ms. Ertekin, there seems to be a major flaw in your procedures here. If I’m the ravening, duress-shattering thirteen motherfucker you—”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “—have me down as, then what’s to stop me caving in your skull here and now, slashing you open to get some warm blood for your precious DNA locks, and then doing my predawn sprint across town after all?”

  “The lock only works off saliva.”

  He stared at her. “I could always scrape it out of your dead mouth.”

  “Do you think you’re going to scare me, Marsalis?”

  “I couldn’t care less if I scare you or not.” For the first time since she’d met him, his voice tightened toward anger. “You were fucking some burned-out genetic augment who said he was a thirteen, and you want to delude yourself I’m him, that’s your problem. I don’t know what I symbolize to you, Ertekin, what you want me to symbolize, but I’m not up for it. I’m not a fucking number, I’m not a fucking gene code. I’m Carl Marsalis, I think we met already.” He stuck out his hand bluntly, mock-offer of a clasp, then let it fall. “But in case it hasn’t sunk in, that’s all I am. Got a problem with that, then fuck off and deal with it somewhere I don’t have to listen to you.”

  They faced each other either end of the stare, a couple of meters apart. To Sevgi, the room seemed to rock gently on the axis of their locked gazes.

  “This is my house you’re in,” she reminded him.

  “Then book me into a fucking hotel.” He held her eyes for a moment, then looked down at the extended futon. “One with room service that doesn’t lecture the guests.” Another pause. “And an elevator.”

  Out of nowhere, the laugh broke in her. She coughed it up.

  “Right,” she said.

  He looked up again. Grimaced. “Right.”

  She seated herself on one arm of the couch. Hands still tucked in her pockets, but she could feel the tension in her begin to ease. Marsalis raised an arm toward her and let it fall.

  “I’m tired,” he said. It wasn’t clear if he meant it as an apology or information. “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not going to try and run out on you. I’m going to get some sleep and see if we can’t make a fresh start in the morning. Sound okay to you?”

  Sevgi nodded. “Sounds good.”

  “Yeah.” He looked around, fixed on the futon again. “Well. Thanks for making up the bed.”

  She shrugged. “You’re a guest.”

  “Could I get a glass of water?”

  She stood up and nodded toward the kitchen. “Sure. Chiller on the counter. Glasses are in the cupboard above. Help yourself.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. G’night.”

  She went to the bedroom and hooked the door closed behind her. Stood there for a while, listening to him move about in the kitchen.

  Then she took her right hand out of her jacket pocket, opened her palm, and considered the Remington stunspike it held. It looked innocuous, a short thick tube in smooth matte gray. The charge light winked green at her from one end. Thrown hard or jabbed into the target by hand, it carried enough power to put anything human on the floor and leave it there for the best part of twenty minutes.

  She hesitated for a moment, then slipped the spike under her pillow and began to get undressed.

  He lay flat on his back on the futon, head pillowed on his crossed palms, and stared at the ceiling.

  Still locked up, then.

  Stupid fucking bitch.

  Well, not really. She saw you coming a thousand meters out. That makes her pretty fucking smart.

  He sighed and looked across at the window. Six floors up, probably jacked into the same security as the door anyway. Not a chance.

  Could always—

  Oh fuck off. Weren’t you listening to Sutherland? Only do what you are happy to live with. She made your bed, for fuck’s sake. You’re out of the Republic, you’re out of jail. How bad can it be? Sit it out, look at the case. Make some suggestions, let them get comfortable with you. If they want this to work, they can’t keep a leash on you twenty-four seven.

  He reached over for the glass and propped himself up to drink.

  So she’s an unluck-fucker. Doesn’t seem the sort.

  The sort being? Zooly?

  Come on, that was a one-off.

  A twice-off. So far.

  Zooly’s a friend.

  Yeah, a friend who likes to fuck unlucks on an occasional basis.

  Maybe it’s me Zooly likes to fuck on an occasional basis. Ever think of that? Maybe my genetic status has fuck-all to do with it.

  Right. And maybe this Ertekin woman just liked to fuck her unluck boyfriend for who he was, too.

  Ah, go to sleep.

  He couldn’t. The mesh sent rusty twinges through him, out of time with his pulse.

  Better deal with that tomorrow. Nearly four months of substandard chloride, you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t seize up on you soon.

  Seemed to work on Dudeck and his pals.

  Yeah, this isn’t some bunch of neo-Nazi fuckwits you’re dealing with now, this is another thirteen. An adapted thirteen, by the sound of it. You’ll need to be wired all the way right if you’re going to—

  Hoy. Going to what? Couple of days and a dropped guard, we’re out of here, remember.

  He went back to staring at the ceiling.

  CHAPTER 18

  A bad chloride twinge kicked him awake, bone-deep aching along his left forearm and sudden sweat from the intensity of the pain. He’d curled up around it instinctively in his sleep, and there was a faint whimper trapped in his throat as he woke. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training, the silent imperative. Take the pain, breathe, breathe it under control, and don’t make a fucking sound. He swallowed and rolled over, protecting the aching limb with his other arm.

  Remembered he was in Sevgi Ertekin’s home, and relaxed. The whimper got free as a low groan.

  The room was full of barely filtered light—there were varipolara drapes at the windows, and someone had forgotten to opaque them the all the way down the night before. His watch said it was a little after nine. He grunted and flexed the fingers of his left hand, chased the pain to fading. The mesh, for reasons the Marstech biolabs apparently still didn’t understand, “remembered” injury trauma and tended to overload the system in those parts of the body that had suffered it in the past. Fine so long as you fueled the system right; the worst you got was a faint warmth and itching at the site of previous wounds. But with the shit he’d been buying from Louie over the last few months, the neuromuscular interfacing would be ragged and inflamed. And Carl had once stopped a Saudi opsdog with that forearm. Some monstrous engineered hybrid, ghost-pale and snarling as it materialized out of the desert night and leapt at his throat. The impact put him on his back, the jaws sank into the bone, and even after he killed the fucking thing, it took them nearly five minutes to break the bite lock and get it off him.

  He listened for sound through the apartment, heard nothing. Evidently Ertekin was still out cold. No chance of going back to sleep now, and the door was still locked. He thought about it for a moment then got up, pulled on his pants, and padded through to the kitchen. A brief search of the cupboards produced coffee for the espresso machine in the corner. OLYMPUS MONS ROBUSTA BLEND—FROM ACTUAL MARSTECH GENE LABS! Yeah, right. He allowed himself a sour grin and set up the machine to make two long cups, then went to the fridge for milk.

  There were a couple of LongLife cartons open, one weighing in at about half full, the other a lot less. On impulse he sniffed
at the torn cardboard openings on both. Pulled a face and upended each carton carefully one after the other over the sink. With the least full of the two, the contents came out slow and semi-solid, splattered across the metal in slimy white clots. He shook his head and rinsed the mess away.

  “You and Zooly’d get on like a fucking house on fire,” he muttered and went back to the cupboards to find more milk.

  “Who you talking to?”

  He turned with the fresh carton in his hand. The kitchen had filled with the smell of coffee, and either that or the noise he was making rummaging in the cupboards had woken Ertekin. She stood in the kitchen doorway, eyes heavy-lidded, hair stuck up in clumps, wearing a faded NYPD T-shirt several sizes too big for her and, as far as he could tell, nothing much else. The look on her face wasn’t friendly.

  “Singing,” he said. “To myself. I made coffee.”

  “Yeah, so I fucking see.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “You’re welcome.”

  She looked back at him for a moment, impassively, then turned away. He caught the lines of her hips under the T-shirt, the length of her thighs as the about-turn brought her legs together.

  “What time is it?”

  “’Bout half past nine.”

  “Fuck, Marsalis.” Her voice trailed away, back toward the bedroom. “What you got, insomnia or something?”

  Sounds of water splashing, a door closing it off. A sudden, unlooked-for image opened in his head. Sevgi Ertekin strips off her T-shirt and steps into the shower, hands gathered under her chin beneath the stream of warm water, arms pressing breasts flat and—

  He grinned wryly and derailed the internal experia script before it reached his groin. Finished making the coffee anyway. It came out rich and creamed with bubbles, steaming an aroma that kicked him straight back to the dusty bubblefabs of Huari camp. The ominous itch on his skin of sunlight through an atmosphere only recently made thick enough to breathe, the uneasy pull of Mars gravity, the loose grip of a planet that didn’t recognize him as its own and didn’t really see why it should hold on to him. Coffee in aluminium canisters, dust crunching underfoot, and Sutherland at his shoulder, rumbling speech like the reassuring turnover of heavy plant machinery. Nothing human-scale around here, soak. Just shade your eyes and take a look. And the staggering, neck-tilting view up Massif Verne, to drive the other man’s point home.

  He poured the coffee into two mugs, took one for himself and left hers to get cold on the kitchen counter. Serve her fucking right. He sipped from his mug, pulled a surprised face. From actual Marstech gene labs was right. He hated it when reality bore out the clanging boasts of the hype. He went back to the living room and peered out at the market below. He didn’t know the city well, and this part less than most, but Ertekin’s building was a pretty standard nanotech walk-up and he guessed the open plaza below had been a part of the same redevelopment. It had the faintly organic lines of all early nanobuild. He knew parts of southeast London that looked much the same. Buildings in a bucket—just pour it out and watch them grow.

  He heard her come out of the bedroom, heard her in the kitchen. Then he could feel her in the room with him, at his back, watching. She cleared her throat. He turned and saw her on the other side of the room, dressed and somewhat groomed, coffee mug held in both hands. She gestured with the drink.

  “Thanks.” She looked away, then back. “I uh. I’m not great first thing in the morning.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Randomly, for something to fill the quiet between them: “Possible sign of greatness. Nor was Felipe Souza, by all accounts.”

  Flicker of a smile. “No?”

  “No. Did all his molecular dynamics work at night. I read this biography of him, once I got back to Earth. Seemed appropriate, you know. Anyway, book says, when they took him on at UNAM, he refused to lecture before midday. Great guy to have as a tutor, right?”

  “Not for you.”

  “Well, my head starts to spin once you get past basic buckyball structure, so—”

  “No, I meant the morning thing.” She gestured with the cup again, one-handed this time, a little more open. “You wouldn’t be—”

  “Oh, that.” He shrugged. “It’s the training. Never really goes away.”

  Quiet opened up again in the wake of his words. The conversation, caught and scraping in the shallow waters of her continued embarrassment. He reached for something to pole them clear again. Something that had flared dimly in his mind the previous night as he finally arced downward toward sleep.

  “Listen, I’ve been thinking. You guys debriefed the onboard djinn for Horkan’s Pride, right? Back in June, when this all started.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice stretched a little on the word, quizzical. He liked the sound it made. He fumbled after follow-up.

  “Yeah, so who’d you have do it? In-house team?”

  She shook her head. “I doubt it. We got transcripts handed down, probably some geek hired out of MIT’s machine interface squad. They handle most of our n-djinn work. Why, you think there’s something they missed?”

  “It’s always a possibility.”

  A skeptical look. “Something you’d pick up?”

  “Okay, maybe not something they missed, as such.” He sipped his coffee. Gestured. “Just something they weren’t looking for, because I wasn’t on the scene. A close link between Merrin and me. Something that’ll put me next to him.”

  “A link? You said you didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t, directly. Come on, Ertekin, you were a cop. You must know something about complexity theory. Social webbing.”

  She shrugged. “Sure. We got the basics in our demodynamics classes. Yaroshanko intuition, Chen and Douglas, Rabbani. All the way back to Watts and Strogatz, all that small-world networks shit. So what? You know, once you get out on the streets for real, most of that demodynamics stuff’s about as useful as poetry in a whorehouse.”

  He held back a grin. “Maybe so. But small-world networks work. And the variant thirteen club on Mars is a very small world. As is Mars itself. I may not know Merrin, but I’m willing to bet you can link me to him in a couple of degrees of separation or less. And if those links are there, then nothing’s going to spot them out better than an n-djinn.”

  “Yeah. Any n-djinn. Why’s it got to be Horkan’s Pride?”

  “Because Horkan’s Pride was the last djinn to see Merrin alive. It stands to reason that—”

  Soft chime from the door.

  Ertekin glanced at her watch, reflexively. Confusion creased in the corners of her eyes.

  “Guess Tom just doesn’t trust the two of us together,” Carl said, deadpan.

  The confusion faded out, traded for a disdain he made as manufactured. She crossed to the door and picked up the privacy receiver.

  “Yes?”

  He saw her eyes widen slightly. She nodded, said yes a couple more times, then hung up. When she looked at him again, there was a fully fledged frown on her face. He couldn’t decide if she was worried or annoyed, or both.

  “It’s Ortiz,” she said. “He drove here.”

  He covered his own surprise. “What an honor. Does he collect all his new hires by limousine?”

  “Not since I’ve been working there.”

  “So it must be me.”

  He’d intended it to come out light and supple with irony. But somewhere, sometime in the last four months, he’d lost the knack. He heard the weight in his own words, and so did she.

  “Yeah.” She looked at him over her coffee mug. “It must be you.”

  He’d met Ortiz a couple of times before, but doubted the man would remember him. Both meetings were years in the past, both had been swathed in the glassy-smile insincerity of diplomatic visits, and Carl had been only one of several variant thirteen trackers in a queue of agency staff lined up to press the visiting flesh on arrival. Munich II was in process, there was talk of COLIN coming back to the table to approve the Accords, fully this time, and everyone was walking
on eggs. Back then—Carl recalled vaguely, he hadn’t been that interested—Ortiz was a newly recruited policy adviser, fresh from a political career in the Rim States and not yet a major figure in the COLIN hierarchy. Detail had faded, but Carl remembered grizzled hair and a tan, a slim-hipped dancer’s frame that belied the other man’s fifty-something years. A slight lift to the serious brown eyes that might have been Filipino ancestry or just biosculp to suggest the same to voters. A good smile.

  For his own part, Carl had been busy enjoying the comforts of his newly reacquired anonymity at the time. The media focus attendant on his rescue and return from Mars and the Felipe Souza had died down, to his relief, the previous year; the celebrity machine, in the absence of any attempt on his part to restoke the fires of its interest, had grown bored with him and moved on. Sure, he’d made it back alive and sane from a nightmarish systems breakdown in deep space, but what else had he done recently? UNGLA was sealed up tight, bureaucratically impassive, not the kind of brightly confected media play the networks liked at all. The high-profile cases were still to come. Meanwhile, some adolescent son of African royalty was up and about on the Euro scene, deploying his Xtrasome capacity at a Cambridge college and his polished-jet good looks in the dj-votional clubs of west London. The Bannister family were settling, amid some local acrimony, into their Union citizenship. A Thai experia star was getting married. And so on. The unblinking media eye rolled away, and Carl felt its absence like the sudden cool of shade from the Martian sun.

  They went down to the street. Cold struck through the thin fabric of the S(t)igma jacket he’d blagged in Florida.

  Ortiz was waiting for them on the other side of the thoroughfare, leaning against the flank of the COLIN limo in a plain black topcoat and sipping coffee from a stall up the street. Carl could see the yellow-and-black logo repeat, weak holoplay in the bright winter air of the market and again in stenciled micro on the Styrofoam in Ortiz’s hand. Steam coiled up out of the cup and met the frost of the man’s breath as he raised the coffee to his lips. An unobtrusive security exec stood nearby, hands lightly clasped, scanning the façade from behind lens-sheathed eyes.