Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “My father’s flying in from New York,” she said, and sighed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”

  “I don’t suppose he is, either.”

  She ghosted a chuckle, barely louder than the brook. “No, I guess not. We haven’t been getting along all that well the last few years. Don’t see each other much, don’t really talk. Not the way we used to, anyway.” Another faint laugh. “He’s probably going to think I did this just to get his attention. Deathbed reconciliation. What a fucking drama queen, huh?”

  Carl felt his mouth tighten, back teeth locking down with involuntary force. It cost him more effort than he’d thought to keep looking at her.

  “Norton here?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” He tried to smile. It was as if he’d forgotten which muscles to use. “I think he’s kind of hurt you asked to see me first.”

  Ertekin pulled a face. “Yeah, well. Be time for everybody, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of friends.”

  He took an interest in one of the brightly colored birds around his feet.

  “Marsalis?”

  He looked up reluctantly. “Yeah?”

  “How much time have I got?”

  “I don’t know,” he said quickly.

  “But you know how the Haag system works.” Urgency in her voice like pleading. “You’ve used the fucking thing often enough, you must have some idea.”

  “Sevgi, it depends. They’re treating you with state-of-the-art anti-virals here—”

  “Yeah, just like fucking Nalan.”

  “Sorry?”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Look, you’re not going to scare me any more than I already am. Tell me the truth. They can’t stop it, can they?”

  He hesitated.

  “Tell me the fucking truth, Carl.”

  He met her eyes. “No. They can’t stop it.”

  “Good. Now tell me how long I’ve got.”

  “I don’t know, Sevgi. Honestly. They can probably back it up with what they have here, maybe model it enough to…”

  He saw the look on her face and stopped.

  “Weeks,” he said. “A couple of months at most.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sevgi, I—”

  She raised a hand, made a smile for him. She got out of the chair.

  “Going to walk down to the river. Want to come? They told me I’m not supposed to exert myself, even in here. Stimulus feedback, apparently it affects the nervous system almost like the real thing. But I think I’d like to walk a little while I still can.” She held up the book. “And there’s only so much fifteenth-century poetry you can handle without a break, you know.”

  He read the title off the antique russet-and-green binding. The Perfumed Garden by Ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi.

  “Any good?”

  “The aphrodisiac recipes are shaky, but the rest is pretty solid, yeah. Always promised myself I was going to get around to reading it one day.” Again the brief flicker of fear in her eyes, rapidly quashed. “Better late than never, right?”

  Again, he had no answer, not for what she said or for what he’d seen in her eyes. He followed her across the lawn toward the sound of the water and helped her hold back the hanging branches that blocked passage. They eased through, bent-backed, and stood up in sun-dappled foliage on the bank of the shallow stream. Sevgi stared down at the flow for a while as it slipped past them.

  “I need to ask you a couple of favors,” she said quietly.

  “Sure.”

  “I need you to stay on here. I know I said you were free to go, I know I more or less sent you away, but—”

  “Don’t worry.” His voice thickened. He had to damp down the surge of fury. “I’m not going to just walk away from this. Onbekend is a dead man walking. And so is whoever sent him.”

  “Good. But that’s not what I meant.”

  “No?”

  “No. With what’s happened now, there’s more than enough to keep the case wide open. It’d be good if you were there to help out after I’m…” She made a limp gesture at the flow of the stream. “But that’s not what I’m asking you for. This is, well, it’s more selfish.”

  “I’m alive because of you, Sevgi,” he said tonelessly. “That buys you a lot of indulgence.”

  She turned. She touched his hand.

  There was a brief, visceral shock to it; tactile contact was one of the wrinkles the technology still hadn’t really ironed out, and format etiquette tended against it as a result. Outside of the crude and curiously unsatisfying porn virtuals he’d used on base in the military, he doubted he’d touched anyone in format more than half a dozen times in his life, and most of those would have been accidental collisions. Now he felt Sevgi Ertekin’s hand as if through gloves, and a twitching sense of frustration rose to fan the embers of his fading anger.

  “I need you to stay with me,” she said. She looked down at where their hands met, as if trying to make out some detail she wasn’t sure was there. “It’s going to be hard. Murat—that’s my father—he’s going to be hurting too much. Norton’s too conflicted. Everyone else is too far off, I’ve pushed them all away anyway, since Ethan. I wouldn’t know what to say to them. That leaves you, Carl. You’re clean. I need you to help me do this.”

  Clean?

  “You said two favors,” he reminded her.

  “Yeah.” She dropped his hand, went back to staring at the flow of the water. “I think you know what the other one’s going to be.”

  He stood beside her and watched the stream flow.

  “All right,” he said.

  CHAPTER 44

  He waited for Norton in the corridor outside the visiting station and the v-format cubicles. The COLIN exec came out puffy-eyed and blinking, as if the light in the corridor was too harsh to deal with.

  “I need to talk to you,” Carl told him.

  Norton’s face twitched. “And you think now’s the time?”

  “She isn’t going to improve, Norton. You’d better get used to operating under these conditions.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Have you read the statement I gave to RimSec?”

  “No, I.” Norton closed his eyes for a moment. “Yes. I skimmed it. So what?”

  “Someone sent Onbekend to take me out. Probably the same someone who hired Carmen Ren to partner Merrin, the same someone who had Merrin brought back to Earth in the first place. We’re not done here, we’re not even half done.”

  Norton sighed. “Yes, I’ve just spent the last twenty minutes with Sevgi telling me the same thing. I don’t need you to ram it home. COLIN will step up the inquiry, RimSec are already covering bases here. Right now, though—”

  “I’m not going home until this is done.”

  “Yes, Sevgi made that quite clear to me as well.” Norton tried to brush past him. Carl fought down a desire to snag his arm and snap him around. He backed up a couple of rapid paces instead and put his arm out across the corridor to the wall, so the COLIN exec had to stop. Norton’s teeth clenched, his fists balled at his sides.

  “What, do you want, from me, Marsalis?”

  “Two things. First, you need to get on to Ortiz and have him put a stopper on my release back to UNGLA jurisdiction. I had a call from the Brussels office last night and they’re very keen to have me back in the fold.”

  “Ortiz is barely out of intensive care. He’s in no condition—”

  “Then talk to whoever is. I don’t want to have fight UNGLA as well as whoever’s running Onbekend.”

  Norton pulled in a compressed breath. “Very well. I’ll pass this on to Nicholson when I speak to him this afternoon. What else?”

  “I want you to lean on Colony. I want to talk to Gutierrez.”

  COLIN ran a small administrative unit out of two blocks in downtown Oakland, with facilities for a Mars coms link. Norton got a RimSec autocopter detailed to fly them back up and across the bay, and a COLIN limo to meet them at touchdown. He did it all with the remote com
mand of a preoccupied man driving a familiar route home. In the limo, he called ahead to the coms link duty technician and set up the call.

  Sevgi burned in his head like a brand, dry-eyed beside the small stream, all the things she didn’t say. All the things he didn’t, either.

  The red tape from the Colony police administration at the Mars end was fierce and self-referential. Having Gutierrez arrested and interrogated had been easy by comparison—Colony knew, in their own cloddish way, how to do that. But authorized off-world communication, from custody, with non-COLIN personnel was apparently just too exotic to have precedent or established procedure. It took three levels of rank before he reached someone who’d do what he told them. And the distances didn’t help—Mars currently sat just less than 250 million kilometers away, and transmission time was around thirteen and a half minutes each way. Almost a full half hour between each act of communication. It seemed somehow emblematic.

  Marsalis prowled outside the chamber, occasionally visible through the head-height windows on the door. There was a small, mean-spirited pleasure in excluding the thirteen from the early proceedings, an impulse that Norton knew only too drearily well was the human equivalent of a tomcat pissing to mark his territory.

  He was too tired to combat the urge, too nonspecifically furious to feel embarrassed by his behavior. He battered down the red tape at Colony with a cold, controlled anger he hadn’t known he owned, appealed to reason where he could, bullied and threatened where he could not. He waited out the long delay silences that punctuated the whole process with the patience of an automaton. None of it seemed to matter, except as a way to stave off the knowledge that Sevgi would die, was dying right now by stages as her immune system staggered under the repeated blows from the Falwell viruses and their mutating swirl.

  Finally, he let Marsalis in. Ceded the operational seat and folded himself into an off-scope chair at the side of the chamber. Stared emptily at the thirteen as he settled himself.

  “You really think this is going to work?”

  His voice was slack and careless in his own ears, run flat with emotional overload.

  “That depends,” said Marsalis, studying the countdown clock above the lens-and-screen array in front of him.

  “On what?”

  “On whether Franklin Gutierrez wants to go on living or not.”

  The last digits blinked through, the receiving announcer chimed, and the screen rezzed up to an image of a similar transmission chamber at the Mars end. Gutierrez sat there, cleaned up since Norton had last seen him dragged out of interrogation. There was a clean white plaster wrap on his damaged hand, and the bruising around his face and eye had been treated with inflammation suppressants. He frowned into the camera a little, glanced aside to someone off screen, then cleared his throat and leaned forward.

  “Till I see who the fuck’s on the other end of this, I don’t say anything. Got that? You get these morons to pull their claws out of me, we can maybe do some kind of deal. But that’s when I see your face, not before.”

  He sat back. The transmission-locked seal blipped across the screen in green machine code, and the image froze. The online light glowed orange. Marsalis sat looking at the screen, moved no more than a corpse.

  “Hullo, Franklin,” he said flatly. “Remember me? I’m pretty sure you do. So now that you know who’s on the other end, listen carefully to me. You will give me everything you know about Allen Merrin and why you helped send him home. You get one chance to do this. Don’t disappoint me.”

  He snapped the arm control and the transmission sealed, fired off. Above their heads, the counter started down again.

  “You’ll forgive me if I’m not impressed yet,” Norton said.

  Marsalis barely shifted in the seat, but his eyes tracked around and out of nowhere, through all the weariness and grief, Norton saw something there that sent a small chill chasing around the base of his skull like cold water rinsing around a basin.

  They waited out the counter. It reached zero, started counting up again into time used before transmission at the other end.

  “Hey, the lottery man!” Gutierrez came back sneering, but behind it Norton could see the chill, the same jolt he’d felt when Marsalis looked at him half an hour earlier. And the counter told its own tale in glowing frozen digits. They were up around two and a half minutes over base transmission-and-turnaround time—and unless the datahawk had made a speech to the camera, the time overspill was hesitation. Gutierrez had jammed up, had had to put a reply together on hold. The bravado rang false as a Tennessee Marstech label. “Yeah, how’s your luck holding back home, Marsalis? How you doing? Missing the girls from the Dozen Up club?”

  After that, Gutierrez switched into Quechua. The screen fired up stilted subtitles to cover. You are three hundred million kilometers away from me. That is a long way off for making threats. What will you do, take the long sleep? Come all the way back here, just to kill me? You don’t scare me anymore, Marsalis. You make me laugh. It went on, derisory, building the bravado up. It boiled down to fuck off and die.

  It still rang false.

  Marsalis watched it all with a thin, cold smile.

  When the transmission ended, he leaned forward and started speaking, also in Quechua. Norton had no knowledge of the altiplano tongue beyond counting one to twenty and a handful of food items, but even through the blanket incomprehension, he felt a dry-ice cold coming off the black man and what he was saying. The words husked out of him, rustling and intent, like something reptilian breaking out of an egg. In the fog of sleeplessness that was gradually shutting down his senses, Norton had one moment of clarity so supreme he knew it had to be a lie; but in that moment it was as if something else was speaking through Marsalis, something ancient and not really human using his mouth and face as a mask and a launch point to hurl itself across the gulf between worlds, to reach out and take Franklin Gutierrez by the throat and heart, as if he were sitting across a desk and not a quarter of a billion kilometers of empty space.

  It took little more than a minute to say, whatever it was, but for Norton the whole thing seemed to happen outside real time. When Marsalis was finished speaking, the COLIN exec opened his mouth to say something—say anything, to break the creaking, something-has-left-the-building silence—and then stopped because he saw that Marsalis had not thumbed for transmission. The message was still open, still waiting to be sealed, and for what seemed like a very long time the black man just looked into the facing lens and said nothing at all, just looked.

  Then he touched the button and, in some way Norton could not define, he seemed to slump.

  It was a solid minute before the COLIN exec found words of his own.

  “What did you say?” he asked, through dry lips.

  Marsalis twitched like someone waking from a doze. Shot him a normal, human look. Shrugged.

  “I told him I’d go back to Mars and find him if he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know. Told him COLIN would fund the ticket, there and back. Told him I’d kill him and everyone he cares about.”

  “You think he’ll buy it?”

  The black man’s attention drifted back to the screen. He must also, Norton suddenly realized, be very tired. “Yes. He’ll buy it.”

  “And if he doesn’t? If he calls your bluff?”

  Marsalis glanced at him again, and Norton knew what the answer was going to be before the quiet, matter-of-fact words fell into the quiet room.

  “This isn’t a bluff.”

  They waited, down to zero on the glowing counter and then minutes clocking up beyond. Neither of them said anything; Norton at least could think of nothing to say. But the lack was almost companionable. Marsalis met his eye once or twice, and once he nodded as if the COLIN exec had said something, so securely that Norton wondered if he hadn’t in the extremities of his grief and weariness vocalized some random internal thought.

  If he had, he couldn’t recall what it was.

  The quiet in the room settled in arou
nd him like a blanket, warming and soothing, inviting escape, exit from the mess and the grief, the slide down into the soft oblivion of long-deferred sleep…

  He jerked awake.

  The chime of the receiver, and his neck, cricked and aching.

  The screen rezzed up again.

  Gutierrez came through, panic-stricken and babbling.

  CHAPTER 45

  You’re clean.

  He couldn’t work out what she meant, not really. He tried. He tugged at the tightly knotted intricacies of it while he sat in a pool of lamplight in the darkened offices at COLIN and played back the transcript of Gutierrez cracking wide open. He gave up exasperated, left it alone. Came back and tugged at it some more.

  That leaves you. Carl. You’re clean.

  He felt around the rough contours of it, but it was like searching for holds on one of the improbably towering cliff faces in the Massif Verne. Your fingers told you what was there, gave you something to hold on to or lever off, but that was immediate applicability, not the shape of the whole. It wasn’t understanding. He knew the moves that were coming, what That leaves you, you’re clean meant in terms of what she wanted him to do, but that no more told him what she believed about him, what she thought they were to each other, than a successful series of moves back on that Verne rock gave you a topographic map of the face.

  It was like being back in the Osprey compound, puzzling over one of Aunt Chitra’s more obscure training koans.

  You’re clean.

  The phrase ticked in his head like a bomb.

  Norton left, presumably to get some sleep before he collapsed. He offered no comment other than See you in the morning. His tone was hesitant, if not friendly then a close analog, buffered soft by exhaustion. Somewhere in the last few hours, the tension between them had shifted in some indefinable way, and something else was emerging to take its place.