Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  Carl came to his feet, on automatic, the way he would have if someone in the room had pulled a gun.

  The new arrival saw it and smiled a little. It hit him secondarily, riding in past the wave of caution, that she was very beautiful in that Rim-blended, Asia Pacific fashion you saw in Freeport movie stars and major female political figures up and down the West Coast. She put out her hand, offered to Carl first. The grip and the look that backed it up were both coolly evaluative. Shaking hands with Rovayo was strictly a side issue, a formality dealt with and then set aside.

  “Good evening,” she said. “I’m Carmen Ren, assistant duty manager. I must apologize for the way you’ve been received. We’re all still a little shaken from our discovery up at Ward BioSupply. But of course, we want to cooperate fully with the investigation. Please come with me.”

  She led them back through the door she’d used, through cramped storage space racked with shelves of underwater equipment and other less identifiable hardware. On the far side of one sparsely loaded freestanding unit, Carl glimpsed two commercial-size elevator hatches set into a sidewall. A faint sea-salt dampness hung about in the air. At the back, the storeroom had another door that opened into an office cubicle where Carmen Ren gestured them to the two visible chairs and pulled down a third, folding seat from the wall. They sat with knees almost touching. The Chinese woman looked back and forth between them.

  “So then,” she said brightly. “I’d been given to understand that your colleagues had all the information they needed, but clearly that’s not the case. So what is it I can do for you?”

  Rovayo looked over at Carl and nodded with ironic largesse. She was still visibly fuming from their reception at the front desk and the subtle relegation Ren had dealt her. Carl shrugged and stepped up.

  “Ward BioSupply’s fields are a good two hundred kilometers northwest of here,” he said. “Nearer three hundred, when you went up there two days ago. You mind telling us why you didn’t hold off until the Cat got a little closer?”

  “Well.” Carmen Ren gestured apologetically. “I wasn’t the duty manager for that shift, so it’s not a question I can answer fully. But we quite often do attend to a contract ahead of time that way. It depends more on staffing rotations, hardware overhaul, that kind of thing, than actual proximity. As you’ll probably know from our promotional literature, Daskeen Azul has an operational deployment radius of up to five hundred kilometers should the need arise.”

  “And the need arose here.”

  “So it appears, yes. Though, as I said—”

  Rovayo joined the play. “Yeah, you weren’t on duty. We heard you. So who was?”

  “I would really need to check the duty logs to be certain.” A hint of reproach tinged Ren’s voice. “But I’m reasonably sure that the officers who visited us yesterday will already have that information.”

  Carl ignored the significant look he was getting from Rovayo.

  “I’m not concerned with what you told Donaldson and Kodo,” he said bluntly. “I’m looking for Allen Merrin.”

  Ren frowned, genuine puzzlement or immaculate control. “Alan…?”

  “Merrin,” said Rovayo.

  “Alan Merrin.” Ren nodded seriously, kept to the slightly vowel-heavy mispronunciation of the first name. “I’m afraid we don’t have an employee of that name. Or a client, as far as I’m aware. I could—”

  Carl smiled. “I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice but one way or another, it’s going to get done. He can skulk about America, hiding in the crowd like a cudlip if he wants, but it isn’t going to save him. This game is over. Next time you hear from him, you can tell him that from me.”

  Ren let go a small, sliding breath, the sound of politeness embarrassed. “And you are, exactly?”

  “Who I am isn’t very important. You can call me Marsalis, if it matters. What I am, well.” He watched her face closely. “I’m a variant thirteen, just like your pal Merrin. You can tell him that, too, if you like.”

  A defensive smile hesitated at the corners of the woman’s mouth. Her eyes slipped sideways to Rovayo, as if in appeal.

  “I’m afraid I really don’t know who you’re referring to with this Merrin. And, Detective Rovayo, I have to say that your colleague here is being considerably less well mannered than the two officers who preceded you.”

  “He’s not my colleague,” said Rovayo indifferently. “And I don’t think he’s that bothered about manners, either. I’d start cooperating if I were you.”

  “We are already cooperating fully with—”

  “You put in to Lima on your way up here,” Carl asked her. “Right?”

  This time, he thought the frown was genuine. “Bulgakov’s Cat very rarely puts in, as you express it, anywhere. We are dry-docked in the Angeline Freeport on average every five years, but otherwise—”

  “I’m not talking about the Cat. I’m talking about Daskeen Azul. You got friends on the Peruvian coast, right?”

  “I, personally, do not. No. But it may be that some of our employees do. Bulgakov’s Cat is, as I’m sure you’re aware, licensed for the whole of the Pacific Americas Rim. And Daskeen Azul certainly has contracts along the Peruvian segment. As do many of our fellow companies aboard. But this, all of this, is common knowledge—you could have ascertained it using any corporate commerce register for the region.”

  “Seen Manco Bambarén recently? Or Greta Jurgens?”

  Another elegant furrowing of the clean white brow. Lips pursed, regretful shaking of the head. Her long glossy hair shifted in sheaves. “I’m sorry, these names. None of them is familiar to me. And I’m still not clear exactly what—if anything—you are accusing us of.”

  “What are they paying you, Ren?”

  Pause. The brief smile again. “I really don’t think, Mr. Marsalis, that my salary is any of your—”

  “No, really. Give it some thought. I think the people I represent would make it worth your while to turn. And this is coming down around you anyway. We don’t have enough yet, but we will. And when Merrin breaks cover, I’ll be there. You don’t want to get caught in that particular crossfire, believe me.”

  “Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marsalis?”

  “No, I’m appealing to your sense of reality. I don’t think you scare easily, Ren. But in the end, I think you’re smart enough to recognize when it’s time to cut cable and bounce.” He held her gaze. “That time is now.”

  The polite, sliding-breath sound again. “I don’t really know how to respond to that. You’re attempting to…bribe me?” Another shuttled glance at Rovayo. “Into what, exactly? Is this standard RimSec procedure these days?”

  “I already told you I’m not a cop, Ren. I’m just like you. For hire and—”

  Ren shot to her feet, clean and rapid motion, no leverage with either arm on the furniture around her. In the confined office space, it was a remarkable piece of physical precision. She brought loosely cupped fists together at her chest, a formal stance that echoed dojo training.

  “That’s it,” she flared. “This conversation is over. I have been as cooperative as possible, Detective Rovayo, and all I have received in return are innuendo and insult. I will not be compared to some…variant in this way. Take your offensive, genetically enhanced friend, and get out. If you wish to speak to me again, you will contact our legal representatives.”

  “Think that was for real?” Rovayo asked him as they walked back to the landing pad. She was still fingering the tiny lawyer’s card Ren had handed her.

  Carl shook his head. “She wanted us out of there, and she hooked the best opportunity there was to shut us down fast.”

  “Yeah. What I thought.”

  “If she’s a Daskeen Azul duty manager, then I’m a fucking bonobo. You see the moves on her?”

  Rovayo nodded reluctantly.

  “Still think I’m paranoid?”


  “I think you—”

  And out of nowhere, a corner in the mall, shoppers still around them, out of the fractured crowd, out of the sweet piped Muzak and murmur, suddenly a panicked bystander screamed, and then the figure leaped, tall and lean, distorted face around the gut-deep yell, eyes blown wide with hate, and gunmetal glint of the machete hacking down.

  CHAPTER 37

  Scott Osborne had seen and heard enough.

  Nearly five months of sitting on his hands, waiting because Carmen told him that was how it had to be. Months while Bulgakov’s Cat churned up and down the coast of the Americas, coastline always out of sight, just below the horizon, like the harrowing that Carmen had promised was to come but hadn’t still. Months adrift. Scott had never seen the ocean for real before he came to the Rim, and living afloat in the middle of it, week after landless week, didn’t seem natural, never would. He bore it because he must, and because when Carmen came to him, it all seemed worth it. Lying with her afterward, he seemed to feel the approaching storm, and to accept it with the same comfortable ache he’d felt that last summer before he left for Bozeman and the fence run. It was the sense of your time running out, and the sudden value in everything you’d ordinarily take for granted, everything that would soon be swept away.

  But the storm never came.

  Instead they waited, and life aboard the factory raft took on the same dismal proportions as life anywhere else you tried to survive that wasn’t home. He hung around Daskeen Azul, looking for things to do and taking on whatever work they’d give him. He kept out of the stranger’s way—even now that he’d learned to call him Merrin, now that his knees no longer trembled when he looked into the hollow eyes—and he didn’t ask when Merrin and Carmen disappeared together for long periods of time. But something was happening to the exhilaration he’d felt on the deserted airfield all those months ago, and it was something bad.

  He didn’t want to believe it was lack of faith, not again. He prayed, more now than he ever had even back home, and what he prayed for mostly was guidance, because what had seemed so clear back at the airfield with his head still bandaged and the fear fresh in his heart was slowly but surely giving way to a mess of conflicting voices in that self-same head and heart. He knew the judgment was at hand, had at first derived an almost smug superiority among the other workers and shoppers aboard the Cat as he watched them living out what were probably the last months of their lives in ignorance. But that was fading fast. Now that same blissful ignorance rubbed at him like a badly fitting boot, irritated something deep inside that made him want to grab them by the throat as they browsed sheep-like through the glittery-lit glass storefronts of the mall, or sat on a break in the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat guffawing and barking like subnormals about what they’d give that slinky bitch Asia Badawi if they ever got in an elevator with her. He wanted to choke them, slap them, smash down their idiot complacency, scream into their faces Don’t you understand, it’s time! He is coming, don’t you see! You will be weighed in the balance and found wanting!

  He forced it down, deeper inside him. Prayed for patience, talked to Carmen.

  But these days, even Carmen was not the refuge she had once been. When they slept together now, he sometimes felt an impatience smoking off her in the act, as if he were some awkward tangle of weed around a marker buoy on the Ward estates. She’d snapped at him a couple of times postcoital, apologized immediately of course, told him she was sorry, she was tired, yes, she was tired of waiting, too, but that was the way it had to be, it was a hard path for the, uh, the righteous.

  And there was Merrin.

  Now the terror of precarious faith came sweeping in for real, up along his arms, lifting the hair with a ghost caress. It pricked out sweat on his palms and swathed him in a cool dread, like standing over a precipice. What if he was wrong? What if Carmen was wrong, what if they all were? Merrin was out of sight so much, Scott had no way of knowing what he did with his time. But when he was there, it didn’t feel like the presence of a Savior, of the King of Heaven come again in triumph. It was more like sharing v-time with a stripped-protocol ’face, one of the bare-bones chassis models you could buy off the rack and customize the way those kids he’d once shared a flop with in the Freeport were always doing. Merrin spoke little, answered questions even less, sat mostly wrapped in his own silence and staring out at the sea from whatever vantage point there was. It was like he’d never seen the ocean before, either, and for a while that gave Scott a warm feeling of kinship with the other man. He thought it might mean he could be a more worthy disciple.

  Of course he knew to leave Merrin alone; Carmen had been clear on that if on nothing else. But every now and then, in the tight corridors and storage spaces of Daskeen Azul, he caught the stranger’s eye and the returned gaze did nothing but chill him. And he never told Carmen, didn’t dare tell her, about the time he’d come up behind Merrin at one of his ocean vigils and said, in as steady and respectful voice as he could manage, Yeah, it got me that way when I first saw it, too. Just didn’t seem possible, that much water in one place. And Merrin whipped around on him like some bar tough whose drink he’d just spilled, only faster, so much inhumanly faster. And said nothing, nothing at all, just glared at him with the same blank unkindness in those eyes that Nocera had sometimes had, the same but not, because this time there was something in the eyes so deep, so cold, so distant that whatever else Scott believed about this man, he knew for certain that what Carmen Ren had told him was true, that Merrin really had come here across a gulf that nothing human could cross unprotected. He looked back into those eyes for the scant seconds he could bear to, and he felt the cold of it blowing over him as if Merrin’s gaze were an open door into the void he’d crossed to get here.

  Scott winced, he turned away, mumbling half-formed apologies.

  He moved like a snake.

  Walking away, he heard Merrin say something that sounded like cunt lips, knew it couldn’t be those words, tried to put the encounter out of his mind. But the way the stranger had turned on him, the whiplash-speed and venom of it, would not go away. He moves like a snake ran in his thoughts like dripping poison. He could not reconcile it with what he wanted to believe.

  Judgment means what it says, Pastor William had always warned them. You think the Lord is gonna come like some bleeding-heart UN liberal and make us all love one another? No, sir, He will come in judgment and vengeance for those who defile His gifts. Like it says in the Good Book itself—the big, black, limp-cover Bible brandished aloft—Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I come not to send peace but a sword. Yes, sir, when the Lord comes, He will be wrathful and those who have not walked in righteousness will know the terror of His justice.

  Terror, Scott could accept, could understand, but should the Savior of mankind really move like a snake?

  Questions and doubts, coiling back and forth in his head, and Carmen withdrawing, cooler now with every time they lay together, drifting away from him. There’d been times recently when she simply didn’t want him, shrugged him off, made excuses that convinced him less and less. He could see the time coming when—

  And then, instead, the black man came.

  “You stay out of it,” Carmen snapped at him as she threw on clothes. “You don’t make a move unless I call it, right?”

  At the door of the tiny lower-deck apartment, she turned back, softened her voice with an effort he saw on her face.

  “Sorry, Scott. It’s just, you know how hard this is for all of us. Just let me handle it. It’ll be fine.”

  So he watched on the monitors instead, and he saw the black man for himself. No doubt in his mind anymore; he felt the thud of certainty in his blood. The black man, betraying himself in his arrogance. I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice, but one way or another, it’s going to get done. Scott felt his previous confusion shrivel away. Regained conviction
was a solid joy in his throat, a pulsing in his limbs.

  And Carmen, showing no fear—his heart swelled with love and pride for her—but he knew the terror she must feel, there alone, facing the darkness. Carmen, brave enough to keep silent in the face of the black man’s threats, to stand his presence, but not strong enough to do what needed to be done.

  We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part.

  And now he knew what it was.

  The machete was cling-padded to a panel under the bed. He hadn’t told Carmen, but he’d seen how it might come down, the enemy smashing in the door like the faceless helmeted UN police in End Times Volume I Issue 56, dragging them naked and defenseless from the bed.

  He wouldn’t go that way.

  He dressed, pulled on a midlength deck coat with DASKEEN AZUL logos across back and sleeves. He freed the machete from its cling-pads, tucked it under the coat, under one arm. Checked himself in the mirror and saw that it worked—not enough to get past any kind of door with security on it, but in the incessant crowds of the shopping decks, more than enough to let him get close.

  The rest was in God’s hands.

  He looked into the mirror, saw the taut determination his face threw back, and for just a moment it was as if it were Him, Merrin, looking out from behind Scott’s eyes, lending him the force of will he’d need.

  Scott murmured a swift prayer of thanks, and walked out to face the black man.

  It was like the fucking Saudi opsdog all over again. Like Dudeck and the Aryans. Carl saw the eyes, locked with them on instinct, and it was the same blank, driven hatred that filled them. Who the fuck—