Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  “I am to blame,” he said quietly. “I failed her. All our lives together, I encouraged Sevgi to push the boundaries. And then, when she finally pushed them too far for my liking, I reacted like some village mullah who’s never seen the Bosphorus Bridge in his life and doesn’t plan to. I reacted exactly like my fucking brother.”

  “Your brother’s a mullah?”

  Murat Ertekin laughed bitterly. “A mullah, no. Though perhaps he did miss his vocation when he chose secular law for a career. I’m told he was never more than an indifferent lawyer. But a self-righteous, willfully ignorant male supremacist? Oh yes. Bulent always excelled at that.”

  “You talk about him in the past. Is he dead?”

  “He is to me.”

  The conversation jerked violently to a halt on the assertion. They both sat for a while staring into the space where it had been. Murat Ertekin sighed. He talked as if picking up the pieces of something broken, as if each bending down to retrieve a fragment of the past was an effort that forced him to breathe deeply.

  “You must understand, Mr. Marsalis, my marriage was not a successful one. I married young, and in haste, to a woman who took her faith very seriously indeed. When we were still both medical students in Istanbul, I mistook that faith for a general strength, but I was wrong. When we moved to America, as it still was then, Hatun could not cope. She was homesick, and New York frightened her. She never adjusted. We had Sevgi because at such times you are told that having a child will bring you together again.” A grimace. “It’s a strange article of faith—the belief that sleepless nights, no sex, less income, and the constant stress of caring for a helpless new life should somehow alleviate the pressures on a relationship already under strain.”

  Carl shrugged. “People believe some strange things.”

  “Well, in our case it didn’t work. My work suffered, we fought more, and Hatun’s fear of the city grew. She retreated into her faith. She already went head-scarfed in the streets; now she began to wear the full chador. She would not receive guests in the house unless she was covered, and of course she had already quit her job to have Sevgi. She isolated herself from her former friends and colleagues at the hospital, frustrated their attempts to stay in touch, eventually changed mosques to one preaching some antiquated Wahhabi nonsense. Sevgi gravitated to me. I think that’s natural in little girls anyway, but here it was pure self-defense. What was Sevgi to make of her mother? She was growing up a streetwise New York kid, bilingual and smart, and Hatun didn’t even want her to have swimming lessons with boys.”

  Ertekin stared down at his hands.

  “I encouraged the rebellion,” he said quietly. “I hated the way Hatun was changing, maybe by then I even hated Hatun herself. She’d begun to criticize the work I did, calling it un-Islamic, snubbing our liberal Muslim or nonbelieving friends, growing more rigid in her attitudes every year. I was determined Sevgi would not end up the same way. It delighted me when she started asking her mother those simple child’s questions about God that no one can answer. I rejoiced when she was strong and determined and smart in the face of Hatun’s hollow, rote-learned dogma. I egged her on, pushed her to take chances and achieve, and I defended her to her mother whenever they clashed—even when she was wrong and Hatun was right. And when things finally grew unbearable and Hatun left us and went home—I think I was glad.”

  “Does her mother know what’s happened?”

  Ertekin shook his head. “We’re not in contact anymore, neither Sevgi nor I. Hatun only ever called to berate us both, or to try to persuade Sevgi to go back to Turkey. Sevgi stopped taking her calls when she was fifteen. Even now, she’s asked me not to tell her mother. It’s probably as well. Hatun wouldn’t come, or if she came she’d make a scene, wailing and calling down judgment on us all.”

  The word judgment went through Carl like a strummed chord.

  “You are not a religious man, are you?” Ertekin asked him.

  It was almost worth a grin. “I’m a thirteen.”

  “And thus genetically incapable.” Ertekin nodded. “The received wisdom. Do you believe that?”

  “Is there another explanation?”

  “When I was younger, we were less enamored of genetic influence as a factor. My grandfather was a communist.” A shrewd glance. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Read about them, yeah.”

  “He believed that you can make of a human anything you choose to. That humans can become what they choose. That environment is all. It’s not a fashionable view any longer.”

  “That’s because it’s demonstrably untrue.”

  “And yet, you—variant thirteens everywhere—were thoroughly environmentally conditioned. They did not trust your genes to give them the soldiers they wanted. You were brought up from the cradle to face brutality as if it were a fact of life.”

  Carl thought of Sevgi, tubes and needles and hope withering away. “Brutality is a fucking fact of life. Haven’t you noticed?”

  Ertekin shifted on the bench, turned toward him. Carl sensed that the other man was close to reaching out, to taking his hands in his own.

  Groping for something.

  “Do you really believe that you would have become this, that you were genetically destined to it, however you were raised as a child?”

  Carl made an impatient gesture. “What I believe isn’t important. I did become this; how I got here is academic. So let the academics discuss it at great length, write their papers and publish, get paid to agonize. In the end, none of it affects me.”

  “No, but it might affect others like you in the future.”

  Now he found he could smile—a thin, hard smile, the rind of amusement. “There aren’t going to be any others like me in the future. Not on this planet. In another generation, we’ll all be gone.”

  “Is that why you don’t believe? Do you feel forsaken?”

  The smile became a laugh of sorts. “I think you’ll find, Dr. Ertekin, that the technical term for that is transference. You’re the one feeling forsaken. I haven’t ever expected to be anything other than alone, so I’m not upset when I find it to be true.”

  Marisol sat in his head and called him a liar. Elena Aguirre ghosted past, whispering. He held down a shiver, talked to stave it off.

  “And you’re missing a rather important point about my lack of religious convictions as well. To be a believer, you have to not only believe, you also have to want someone big and patriarchal around to take care of business for you. You have to be apt for worship. And thirteens don’t do worship, of anyone or anything. Even if you could convince a variant thirteen, against all the evidence, that there really was a God? He’d just see him as a threat to be eliminated. If God were demonstrably real?” He stared hard into Ertekin’s eyes. “Guys like me would just be looking for ways to find him and burn him down.”

  Ertekin flinched, and looked away.

  “She’s chosen you well,” he murmured.

  “Sevgi?”

  “Yes.” Still looking away, fumbling in a jacket pocket. “You will need this.”

  He handed Carl a small package, sealed in slippery antiseptic white with orange flash warning decals. Lettering in a language he couldn’t read, Germanic feel, multiple vowels. Carl weighed it in his palm.

  “Put it away, please.” Ertekin told him. The garden was starting to fill as students and medical staff came out on lunch break to enjoy the sun.

  “This is painless?”

  “Yes. It’s from a Dutch company that specializes in such things. It will take about two minutes from injection.”

  Carl stowed the package.

  “If you brought this,” he said quietly, “why do you need me?”

  “Because I cannot do it,” Ertekin told him simply.

  “Because you’re a Muslim?”

  “Because I’m a doctor.” He looked at his hands again. They hung limp in his lap. “And because even if I had not taken an oath, I do not think I would be capable of ending my own daughte
r’s life.”

  “It’s what she wants. It’s what she’s asked for.”

  “Yes.” There were tears gathering on Ertekin’s eyelids. “And now, when it most matters, I find I cannot give her what she wants.”

  He took Carl’s hand suddenly. His grip was dry and powerful. The tiger-irised gaze burned into Carl’s, blinked tears aside so they trickled on the leathery skin.

  “She’s chosen you. And deep in my hypocritical, doubting soul, I give thanks to Allah that you’ve come. Sevgi is getting ready once more to push the boundaries, to cross the lines drawn by others that she will not heed. And this time I will not fail her, as I did four years ago.”

  He wiped away the tears with quick, impatient gestures of his hand.

  “I will stand with my daughter this time,” he said. “But you must help me, thirteen, if I am not to fail her again.”

  The Haag complex rips through Sevgi’s system like vacuum in a suddenly holed spacecraft. Cells rupture, leak vital fluids. Debris flies about, her immune system staggers, flushes itself desperately, clings to the antiviral boosters Stanford fed her, and still it fails. Her lungs begin to fill. Her renal functions slow and must be artificially stimulated if her kidneys are not to explode. Tubes in, tubes out. The creep of waste products through her system begins to hurt.

  She finds it harder to think with clarity for any length of time.

  Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.

  He sat by the bed in shock.

  For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.

  “I look like shit,” she murmured. “Right?”

  “You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?”

  She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.

  He sat by the bed.

  He held her hand.

  “Tell me a secret.”

  “What?” He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds in the sheet. Her face was in shadow.

  “Come on,” she croaked. “You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?”

  He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. “Thought you’d already worked that out.”

  “Well, you tell me. Did I?”

  He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years. It’s another world, it’s another time, Sutherland had said once. Got to learn to let it go.

  “You were close,” he admitted.

  “How close? Come on, Marsalis.” A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. “Grant a dying woman a last wish.”

  His mouth tightened.

  “Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,” he said. “There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.”

  “Which was?”

  “Same as it always is. The human angle.”

  “Oh, humans.” She laughed again, a little stronger now. “I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any farther than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?”

  He smiled. “Right.”

  “So which particular human did you finesse?”

  “Neil Delaney.” Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. “He was Bradbury site administrator back then.”

  “He’s on the oversight council now.”

  “Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.” Carl found himself loosening up. Words were flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet. “Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.”

  “Motherfucker!” But it was the whispered ghost of outrage; you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.

  “Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as outsourcing—NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done—dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly-up.”

  “Somehow I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.”

  “No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.” Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. “It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.”

  “He sent you home.”

  “Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.”

  “And what did Gutierrez get?”

  Carl shrugged. “Cash. Favors. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.”

  “But only you got to go home.”

  “Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start. I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.”

  “So.” She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips, and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. “Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?”

  “Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties? Spitz, or something?”

  “Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.”

  “He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?”

  “You don’t care?”

  He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. “There’s no point in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet. Another world, another time. What was I going to do—go back there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.”

  Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess that’s the truth.”

  They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her.

  “Why’d you come back, Carl?” she asked him softly.

  He made a crooked grin in the gloom. “Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.”

  “But you were free there.” She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. “You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got
back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.”

  “Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy—thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.” He shrugged. “Pretty good odds.”

  “And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?” She craned forward in the bed, halfway to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. “What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?”

  Another shrug, another crooked grin. “Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.”

  She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said when she’d gotten her breath back. “All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?”

  He hesitated. “It’s not that important, Sevgi.”

  “It is to me.”

  Footsteps down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.

  “Sutherland,” he said.

  “Your sensei.”

  “Yeah.” He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. “See, there’s a point you get to with tanindo. A level where it stops being about how to do it, becomes all about why. Why you’re practicing, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.”

  “You didn’t know why?” She puffed a breathless laugh. “Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?”

  Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.

  “Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,” he said distantly. “You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.”