Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose-thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day, and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unraveled or snapped.

  “So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.

  He stared out of the side window. “I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.”

  “That’s Arequipa, right?”

  “Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.”

  “And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.”

  Marsalis shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.”

  “You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirror-shade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?”

  Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia bodyguards moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgment, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.

  She sighed.

  “Yeah, okay.” She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times. “Insha’Allah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.”

  Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.

  “Course-correct. Long haul, Arequipa.”

  Scribbles awoke on the displays.

  “This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,” Asia Badawi told her coolly.

  “Yeah, fucking tell me about it.”

  CHAPTER 30

  The center of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No cooperation, no overview—the late-afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amid it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noisemaking process.

  The jeep was a carpool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

  “You want to drive?”

  Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose-to-tail metal they were trying to break into.

  “Not really.”

  “You mind if I do?”

  The lights changed, and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a meter, then jerked to a halt again as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

  Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

  “Right.”

  It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realized what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, toward the car behind them.

  “Marsalis, don’t—”

  But he was already gone, striding back toward the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood—she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time—and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s-side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.

  “Ah, shit.”

  Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window. She scrabbled it open.

  “What the fuck are you—”

  “Scoot over.”

  “What did you just do?”

  “Nothing. Scoot over, I’m going to take it on manual.”

  She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn’t see anything through the darkened glass windshield. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their favor again and shook her head in weary resignation.

  “Whatever.”

  He took down the automation, engaged the drive, and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he’d cut off, and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of meters and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  He shrugged. “Had a certain operational satisfaction.”

  “I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How’s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?”

  “Ertekin, there was no fight.” He looked across and met her eye. “Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best.”

  “And if he hadn’t backed down?”

  “Well.” He thought about it for a moment. “You people usually do.”

  It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening toward dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within. Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaned intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus mustache worked on the innards. A mother seated on a front step, smoking and watching the traffic go by, three tiny children clinging about her. A young man in a suit leaning into a shop doorway and flirting with the girl behind the counter. Each scene slipped by and left her with the frustrated sense of life escaping through her fingers like sand.

  On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co. and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly colored lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco’s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she’d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn’t make sense of any of it—just the general ache.

  Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

  Right.

  Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. “You okay?”

  “Fine,” she lied.

  At the jeep, he got into the driver’s seat then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

  “You don’t want to drive anymore?”


  “No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don’t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic.”

  He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialize out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowboat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their running lights, then pulling ahead and away into the night. The jeep’s systems chirruped softly in the dashboard-lit cabin space, talking to each rig, interrogating, adjusting. Maybe bidding farewell.

  “You get used to that on Mars?” she asked him. “The machine thing?”

  He frowned. “Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?”

  “I thought on Mars—”

  “Yeah, everybody does. It’s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it’s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day even the scientists thought the terra-forming would take centuries. Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our time scales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch-up.” He gestured. “So now we’re still stuck with the red-rocks-and-air-locks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don’t like to let it go.”

  “Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

  He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. “Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the illusion. It’s a lot of empty black to cross just for that.”

  The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

  “It was bad, huh?” she said quietly. “Out there?”

  He shot her a glance. “Bad enough.”

  Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space, rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

  “There was this woman,” he said at last. “In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like…someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day’d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I’d tell her what I’d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth Control and the rescue ship crew.”

  He cleared his throat.

  “See, after a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren’t there. The fact that you’re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You’re asking yourself, Why me? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on my watch? You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit.” He grimaced. “That’s religion, right?”

  “No, that’s not religion.” Sudden asperity in her voice.

  “It’s not?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something out there trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there’d be something else as well, a kind of opposed force, something in there with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn’t take me long to make one—see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre’s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the Felipe Souza to watch over me.”

  “But she was.” Sevgi gestured. “A person. Just a human being.”

  “I didn’t say it made any sense, Ertekin. I said it was religion.”

  “I thought,” she said severely, “thirteens were supposed to be incapable of religious faith.”

  Ethan certainly had been. She remembered his incurious, stifled-yawn incomprehension whenever she tried to talk about it, as if she were some Jesusland fence-hopper stood on his doorstep trying to sell him something plastic and pointless.

  Marsalis stared into the blue glow of the dashboard displays. “Yeah, they say we’re not wired for it. Something in the frontal cortex, same reason we don’t take direction well. But like I said, it got pretty bad out there. You’re stuck in the empty dark, looking for intent where there’s only incidence. Feeling powerless, knowing you’ll live or die dependent on factors you can’t control. Talking to sleeping faces or the stars because it beats talking to yourself. I don’t know about the cortical wiring argument, all I can tell you is that for a couple of weeks aboard Felipe Souza it felt like I had religion.”

  “So what changed?”

  He shrugged again. “I looked out the window.”

  More silence. Another autohauler droned by, buffeting them with the wind of its passage. The jeep rocked in its wake, adrift on the night.

  “Souza had vision ports let into the lower cargo deck,” Marsalis said slowly. “I went there sometimes, got the n-djinn to crank back the shields. You have to kill the interior lights before you can see anything, and even then…”

  He looked at her, opened his hands.

  “There’s nothing out there,” he said simply. “No meaning, no mindful eye. Nothing watching you. Just empty space and, if you travel far enough, a bunch of matter in motion that’ll kill you if it can. Once you get your head around that, you’re fine. You stop expecting anything better or worse.”

  “So that’s your general philosophy, is it?”

  “No, it’s what Elena Aguirre told me.”

  For a moment, she blanked. It was like those moments when someone talked to her in Turkish out of the blue and she was still working in English, a failure to process the words she’d heard.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “What I said. Elena Aguirre told me to stop believing all that shit and face up to what you can see out the window.”

  “Are you laughing at me?” she asked him tautly.

  “No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m telling you what happened to me. I stood at that window with the lights off, looking out, and I heard Elena Aguirre come up behind me. She’d followed me down to the cargo deck and she stood there behind me in the dark. Breathing. Talking into my ear.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  “Yeah, I know that.” Now he did smile, but not at her. He was looking into the light from the dashboard again, eyes blind, washed empty with the electric blue glow. “She’d have left tank gel all over the deck, wouldn’t she. Not to mention, she would have rung every alarm on the ship climbing out of the tank in the first place. I mean, I don’t know how long I stood frozen to the window after she’d gone, you tend to lose track of time out there, and I was pretty scared, but—”

  “Stop it.” She heard the jagged edge on her tone. Felt the urge to shudder creep up her neck like a cold, cupped hand. “Just stop it. Be serious.”

  He frowned into the blue light. “You know, Ertekin, for someone who believes in a supreme architect of the universe and a spiritual afterlife, you’re taking this remarkably hard.”

  “Look.” Thrown down like a challenge. “How could you know it was her? This Elena Aguirre. You’d never even heard her voice.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  There was a quiet simplicity in the question that tilted her, suddenly, weightlessly, like sex the first time she got to do it properly and came,
like her first dead-body crime scene by the tracks off Barnett Avenue. Like watching Nalan’s breathing stop for the final time in the hospital bed. She shook her head helplessly.

  “I—”

  “See, you asked if it got bad,” he said softly. “So I’m telling you how bad it got. I went down deep, Sevgi. Deep enough for some very strange shit to happen, genetic wiring to the contrary or not.”

  “But you can’t believe—”

  “That Elena Aguirre was the incarnation of a presence watching over me? Of course not.”

  “Then—”

  “She was a metaphor.” He breathed out, as if letting something go. “But she got out of hand, like metaphors sometimes can. You go that deep, you can lose your grip on these things, let them get free. I guess I’m lucky whatever was waiting for me down there spat me out again. Maybe my genetic wiring gave it indigestion after all.”

  “What are you talking about?” Flat anger. She couldn’t keep it out of her voice. “Indigestion? Metaphors? I don’t understand anything you’re telling me.”

  He glanced across at her, maybe surprised by her tone.

  “That’s okay. I’m probably not explaining it all that well. Sutherland would have done better, but he’s had years to nail it all down. Let’s just say that out there in transit I talked myself into something at a subconscious level, and it took an invented subconscious helper to talk me back out. Does that make more sense?”

  “Not really. Who’s Sutherland?”

  “He’s a thirteen, guy I met on Mars, what the Japanese would call a sensei, I guess. He teaches tanindo around the Upland camps. He used to say humans live their whole lives by metaphor, and the problem for the thirteens is that we fit too fucking neatly into the metaphorical box for all those bad things out beyond the campfire in the dark, the box labeled monster.”