Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.”

  Bambarén stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the familia chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

  “How far it went? Black man, I gave Nevant to you. How far do you think it went?”

  “You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.”

  The tayta took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed. “Stefan Nevant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.”

  “But he might have, given time.”

  “I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Nevant himself?”

  Carl grinned. “I did. He tried to kill me.”

  Bambarén’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

  “That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,” he said tonelessly. “In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.”

  “Quite.”

  They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks, each the size of a small car. It was instinctive: the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

  Manco Bambarén’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood, and stone itself.

  “I’m not suggesting you personally bought in to Nevant’s plans,” Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? “But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.”

  Bambarén paced in silence for a while.

  “My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.”

  “Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterward. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.”

  “Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,” said the other man coldly. “More of a species gap.”

  Carl coughed a laugh. “Oh you wound me, Manco. To the core.”

  “And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.”

  “We make very convenient monsters.”

  Bambarén shrugged. “The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.”

  “Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.”

  A sharp glance. “Heard from who?”

  “Nevant.”

  “You told me Nevant tried to kill you.”

  “Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?”

  “No.” The familia chief appeared to consider. “Nevant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.”

  Carl nodded. “But you still kept him around.”

  Bambarén spread his hands. “He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways, he had a skill in this.”

  Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Nevant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist maneuvered them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him. A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobsen had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ’s sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It’s the rest of you people who don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.

  Later, hungover, he’d apologized. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.

  Beside him, Bambarén was still talking.

  “…cannot tell, but if his schemes did include this genetic pistaco fantasy, then he was a fool. You do not need real monsters to frighten people. Far from it. Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumor, is a far greater power.”

  Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.

  “Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.”

  The tayta must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two bodyguards twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambarén’s throat while he grabbed right-handed at the tayta’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the guards drew whatever probable high-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men down in time…

  He saw her falling, outgunned, or just not fast enough…

  “Easy, Manco,” he murmured. “You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?”

  The tayta’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. “You think you can kill me, twist?”

  “I know I can.” Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown. “I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem anymore, that’s a promise.”

  The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of gray cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.

  Oh fuck…

  The familia chief drew a hard breath.

  His fists uncurled.

  His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twinned there instead.

  The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.

  Bambarén laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.

  “You’re a fool, black man,” he said harshly. “Just as Nevant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumors about the pistacos? You think I need an army of monsters
, real or imagined, to maintain order? Men will do that for me, ordinary men.”

  He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away toward the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thinned to something more general and weary.

  “Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honor the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains. The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We—my people—invented the pistacos to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they cannot obtain what they want by other means. I pass no rumors of the pistaco, black man, because the lie of the pistaco is already in us all, and it comes to life time and time again on the altiplano without any encouragement from me.”

  Carl glanced back toward the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.

  “So,” he said breezily. “Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?”

  Bambarén drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.

  “Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?”

  “It’s my intention, tayta, to get some straight answers out of you. And speechifying on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.”

  “You dismiss—”

  “I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.”

  “I have to have the respect of my men.”

  “Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.”

  Beneath the sunglasses, Bambarén’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. “What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every—”

  “British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman.”

  “It makes no difference. You.” The familia chief’s face twitched. “Nevant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonized women too poverty-stricken to afford children of their own—”

  “Go fuck yourself, Manco.”

  But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.

  “Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day—”

  “Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.” Now he had the tone, the drawl. “We’re not here to discuss my family history.”

  But tayta Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive. “Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be harvested of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel, twist?”

  And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambarén’s death at the edge of his striking hand. There was no art in this; this was thumbs hooked into the familia chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite—

  If we are ruled by what they have trained into us, said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage, then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear.

  Carl flexed a smile and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.

  “Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,” he said. “Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?”

  He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambarén blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long lost treasure of the Incas was kept.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Carl shrugged. “I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?”

  Bambarén spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. “No one talks to Mars. You know that.”

  “You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.”

  “They walked away from that possibility back in ’75. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.”

  Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-djinn on a ship home, climb inside a spare cryocap—you can always eat the previous occupant if you’re hungry—and dive-bomb the Pacific Ocean with the survivable modules. Piece of cake.

  “You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

  Carl grinned. “Hate will find a way, huh? That old deuda de sangre magic.”

  The familia chief studied the ground. “Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the afrenta Marciana with me?”

  “Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.”

  Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. “A resurgence of what, black man? We are at war. That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.”

  “Or until you curry enough favor with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.”

  Manco looked pointedly back toward the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.

  “COLIN is a fact of life,” he said somberly. “We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, very fucking poetic.”

  Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care. Marsalis held on to the rough-ride strap above his door.

  “Well, he has a point.”

  “I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him—
apart from cheap poetics—that was worth coming all this way for.”

  Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back toward the center of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head-on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenaline and sweat through her pores. But slow—she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambarén’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a curb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine-irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing still.

  “Well?”

  “Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.”

  She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go of the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.

  “Please state your destination.” Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.

  “City center,” she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. “Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.”

  “I know that.”

  “Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.”

  He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.

  “Bambarén’s clean.” He said it reluctantly. “I reckon.”

  “But that’s not all?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.”

  She heard the raised tone at the end. “But?”

  “But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambarén, I’d just blown up a truckful of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there. This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”