Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  The door swung shut behind them with a solid snap and the burble of electronic security engaging.

  Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.

  “So what do you want to do now?”

  Still standing in front of him, hipshot, wide grin. Despite everything, he felt his sore and shrunken prick twitch at the sight.

  “I thought you were tired.”

  She shrugged. “So did I. Cyclical, I guess. Give me another couple of hours, I probably will be again.”

  “You’re not Xtrasoming on me, are you?”

  “No, I’m not fucking Xtrasoming on you.” Suddenly there was a real edge in her voice. “Do I look like I come from that kind of money? You think if my parents had the finance for built-in, I’d be working for RimSec?”

  He blinked. Held up his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Rim States have got a reputation for that stuff, you know.”

  She wasn’t listening. She gestured at herself with one splayed hand, motion robbed of any sensuality by the look on her face. “What I’ve got, I was either born with or I fucking worked to build. I came up through the ranks, it’s taken me eight years to make detective, and I didn’t take any fucking genetic shortcuts along the way. I didn’t have—”

  “I said okay, Detective.”

  It stopped her. She sank back onto the sofa, sat hunched at the edge with her arms resting on her thighs, hands dangling into the space between. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was something hunted in her expression.

  “Sorry,” she muttered. “We’re all just a little fucking tired of the Asia Badawis and the Meredith Changs around here.”

  “Badawi’s New York Sudanese,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah? You want to see the house she’s got down the coast. Lot of fucking acreage for a foreigner. Anyway, that’s not what I meant.”

  “No?” Suddenly the postcoital intimacy was too tight, like binding on his limbs and a masking film across his face. Rovayo was abruptly the stranger she’d always been, but naked and in too close. He felt an unlooked-for visceral surge of nostalgia for sex with Sevgi Ertekin. “So you’re not a big fan of enhancement generally, then?”

  She snorted. “You think anyone’s a big fan of Xtrasomes that doesn’t have them?”

  “I am.” But he knew at base he was trying to provoke her. “You think I’d be in this fucking mess if they’d had working artificial chromosome technology for humans forty years back? You think we’d be running around looking for some superannuated supersoldier turned cannibal fucking survivalist if thirteen tendency could be platform-loaded and switched on and off at need? Take a good look at me, Rovayo. I’m the walking fucking embodiment of last century’s pre-Xtrasome jump-the-gun genetics.”

  “I know.”

  “I seriously doubt that.” Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. “You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.”

  The Rim cop shrugged. “Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong color for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were? A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?”

  “I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.”

  She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.

  “You did four months in there? I thought—”

  “Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on-off switch to fall back on.”

  “You don’t think?” Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt, and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. “What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean, really know?”

  He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.

  “Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think that means anything.”

  He gestured. “Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.”

  It got him a thin, unamused smile. “Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.” She sat back in the sofa. “I’m a bonobo.”

  He stared. “No, you’re fucking not.”

  “No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?”

  “No, but—”

  “I’m not full. My mother’s the hundred percent deal, she used to work escort for a Panama agency, met my father when he was on a fishing trip down there. He smuggled her out.”

  “Then you’re not a bonobo.”

  “Half of me is.” Said defiantly, jaw tight, eyes locked with his. “Read your Jacobsen. Inherited traits will be an unknown factor for generations to come. Quote, unquote.”

  Something happened to the room. A dense, deafening quiet sat behind her voice, washed in like a tide when she stopped talking.

  “Does Coyle know?” he asked, for something to break the stillness.

  “What do you think?”

  And quiet again.

  Finally, her mouth crimped at one corner. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I look at what I am, the way I react to things, and then I look at her, and I just don’t know. My old man tells me she never fit in down there, never was submissive the way bonobos are supposed to be. He says that she was different from all the others, that’s why he picked her out. I don’t know whether to believe that shit or write it off to rose-tinted romantic fucking nostalgia.”

  Carl thought back to the bonobos he’d seen in the transit camps in Kuwait and Iraq, the ones you couldn’t get away from on R&R in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some that he’d talked to, one or two he’d fucked. And back in London, Zooly’s friend from the club, Krystalayna, who always claimed she was but never showed him any proof that wasn’t fan-site fantasy bullshit.

  “I think,” he said carefully, “you don’t want to confuse submissive with maternal or nonviolent. Most of the bonobos I ever ran into knew how to get what they wanted about as well as anyone else.”

  “Yeah.” Violence rose simmering in her voice. “I know how to give a pretty good blow job myself. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.” A sour smile in Carl’s direction. “Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck with, even the way you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that, all the time?”

  He nodded. “Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.”

  “I’m a good cop,” she said urgently. “You don’t last in RimSec if you’re not. I’ve shot and killed three men in the line of duty, I don’t lose sleep over any of them. I mean, I got sick at the time, went through the counseling like everyone else, but after that I was fine. I’ve got commendations, early promotion to special cases, clearance rates that—”

  “Rovayo, stop it.” He held up a hand, surprised at how weary the sudden mirroring of his younger self in her was making him feel. “I told you, I know. But you’re going about this the wrong way. You don’t have to justify yourself to
anyone except you. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

  She smiled the hard, humorless smile again. “Spoken like a true variant thirteen. Pretty obvious you’ve never had to face a genetic suitability assessor.”

  “I thought in the Rim—”

  “Yeah, Rim States citizens have a lot of rights that way. But citizen or not, I’ve still got my Jacobsen license to live with. And before you say it, yes, that is confidential data, Charter-protected up the ass. But you waive your right to that protection when you sign up for RimSec.”

  “And Coyle still doesn’t know about you?”

  “No. Assessment comes as part of the standard officer vetting procedure. There’s no way for anyone to know I went through anything different from all the other grunts. Tsai knows, he’s my commanding officer, he’ll have the file. And there are a few others at divisional level, the ones who were on the vetting committee. But it’s more than any of their jobs are worth to let something like that leak.”

  “You think if Coyle knew, he’d care?”

  “I don’t know. You tell all your friends what you are?”

  “I’m a thirteen,” he said with a straight face. “We don’t have any friends.”

  She made the effort, laughed. There was some genuine amusement in it this time. “That why you’re here?”

  “I’d have thought my reasons for being here were transparently obvious.”

  “Well.” She tilted her head to one side. “I guess you did explain yourself pretty thoroughly earlier, yeah.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Question remains, though.” Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg, and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. “What do you want to do now?”

  He smiled.

  “Got an idea,” he said.

  CHAPTER 36

  Seen from the descending autocopter, Bulgakov’s Cat had the blunt, blocky look of a nighttime skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthwise on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment, and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at her made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.

  In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned-up jacket collar. “I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.”

  “You asked what I wanted to do.”

  “Yeah.” She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. “Not quite what I had in mind at the time.”

  The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms plowing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.

  “Think of it as an intuitive leap,” he said absently.

  “I’m thinking of it as a paranoid fantasy outing. Which is exactly the way it’s going to look when I have to write up the chopper time. I told you, Donaldson and Kodo came down here yesterday and talked to these people. Got the interviews and the report on file. We’re wasting our time. Long flight for nothing.”

  “Yeah, that’s something else you might want to think about. Cat there is still a couple of hundred klicks off optimum range for maintenance on Ward’s spread. How come they rushed up here to do it now instead of waiting until next week?”

  “How the fuck would I know?” she grumbled. “Maybe if you’d accessed the file instead of insisting on coming down here personally, you’d already have an answer.”

  “Yeah, I’d have an answer. I’d have whatever lie Daskeen Azul have decided to tell you to cover themselves. That’s not what I want.”

  Rovayo rolled her eyes. “Like I said. Fucking paranoid.”

  The autocopter found its designated landing pad, exchanged brief electronic chatter with the traffic-management systems, and floated down to land with characteristic, inhuman perfection. The cabin hatch hinged open, and Carl jumped down. Rovayo followed him, still mutinous.

  “Just don’t break anything,” she said.

  Daskeen Azul had an unremarkable mall frontage somewhere amidships for direct client contact and a couple of elevator-served workshops down in the hull where they kept the submarine hardware. They subcontracted landing pad time and aircraft support through a secondary provider, but had their own surface and sub vessels moored in dry dock, aft and starboard. This much Rovayo could tell him off the top of her head, detail skimmed from what she remembered of Donaldson and Kodo’s briefing. There was more in the file, and in theory they could have requested it via the autocopter’s datahead, but the Rim cop seemed disinclined to use the machine systems more than they already were—was already, it seemed, regretting the way they’d requisitioned the transport with her Special Cases badge—and Carl didn’t much care one way or the other. He had more than enough to work with.

  So they flagged their business aboard Bulgakov’s Cat as simple follow-up investigation, which the autocopter told the factory raft’s datahead, and the Rim Security protocols did the rest. Technically, vessels like the Cat were autonomous nation-states, but any nation-state that lived so solidly from niche entry into the hyperdynamic Rim States economy had to live with the political realities the relationship entailed. Bulgakov’s Cat cruised freely in and out of the Rim’s coastal jurisdiction, its citizens had right of access to Rim States soil, its contracts were legally enforceable in Rim courts—but it all came at a stiff colonial price. Rovayo led Carl along the promenades and corridors of the factory raft with a proprietorial lack of self-consciousness and an authorized, loaded gun beneath her jacket. They might have been taking a stroll inside Alcatraz station for all the tension she showed. They’d spoken to no one when they came aboard, notified no one, taken no courtesy measures whatsoever at a human level. Somewhere in the walls, the machines whispered to one another about them in incomprehensible electronic tones, but beyond that they came on Daskeen Azul unannounced.

  “And at this time of night,” the Daskeen Azul front desk agent complained, with barely disguised irritation. “I mean, our usual hours of business—”

  “—are not my problem,” Rovayo told him crisply. “We’re here for follow-up on a RimSec murder investigation, and the last I heard Bulgakov’s Cat was a twenty-four-hour service community. You’ve seen my ID, so how about you roll out some of that twenty-four-hour service and answer my questions.”

  The agent switched his eyes to Carl. “And he is?”

  “Getting impatient,” Carl said impassively.

  “I’ve seen no ID,” the agent insisted. Below the smooth upper shelf of the reception desk, his hands were busy pressing buttons. “I have to see ID for both of you.”

  Rovayo leaned on the shelf.

  “Did your mother get you this job?” she asked curiously.

  The agent gaped at her, belated anger dropping his jaw for a retort he wasn’t fast enough to make.

  “Because it appears to be a job you don’t feel any pressing need to do properly. This man is a private consultant for Rim Security and his liaison is with me, not you. I’ve shown you my fucking ID, sonny, and in about another ten seconds I’m going to be showing you the front end of a RimSec probable-cause shutdown order. Now either you’re going to answer my questions or you’re going to get someone better paid out of bed to do it for you. I don’t much care either way, so which is it going to be?”

  The man behind the desk flinched as if slapped.


  “I’ll just see,” he muttered, prodding more buttons on the screens beneath his hands. “Just, please, just, uhm, have a seat.”

  “Thank you,” said Rovayo with heavy irony.

  They folded themselves into the utilitarian bank of chairs opposite the desk. The reception agent fit a phone hook to his ear, muttered into it. Outside, on the broad sweep of the mall, a thin but unending nighttime herd of shoppers browsed past the open storefronts, clothing bright, gait unhurried and undirected, like sleepwalkers or the victims of some multiple hypnotic trick. Carl sat and tried, the way Sutherland had taught him, not to feel the usual seeping contempt. It wasn’t easy.

  On Mars…

  Yeah, like fuck.

  On Mars, things are different because they have to be, soak. Lopsided grin, like he was giving away some secret he shouldn’t. But that’s strictly temporary. No more long-term truth in it than all that bullshit they sell in the qualpro ads. Day’s going to come, this place’ll be just like home only less gravity. It’s them, Carl. It’s the humans. Take ’em wherever and give ’em time, they’ll build you the same fairy fucking playground as ever was. And that’s the construct you got to live inside, soak, like it or like it not.

  A slim, elegantly dressed woman emerged from an inner door behind the front desk. Tailored jacket and slacks in olive green and black, just a chic hint of work coveralls about the ensemble. Striking looks, strong on Chinese genes but salted with something else. She leaned down beside the reception agent, spoke briefly in low tones, then looked up again. Carl met her eyes from across the room and saw a depth of calm there that told him they’d just gone up an entire level. He saw something that might have been an acknowledgment in the return gaze; then the woman straightened up and came around the side of the desk toward them. She walked like a dancer, like a combat pro.