Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  Carl thought back to the boy with the machete, the gibbering religious abuse.

  “You sold Osborne some story about me?”

  “Not as such.” Ren looked suddenly tired. “I told him Merrin was the, what do you call it, the second coming? Christ returned and hiding because a black man was out there, coming to do him harm. Mix-and-match imagery, cooked it up from what I knew about Jesusland ideology and the way Osborne was rambling.”

  Very Christ-like, he remembered saying when he saw Merrin’s file photo. Very Faith Satellite Channel.

  He nodded. “I can see how that would work.”

  “Yeah, well. Jesuslander, you know. Seemed like a nice enough kid deep down, but you know what that old-time religion will do. Wasn’t hard to sell him the concept, half those people live their whole fucking lives waiting for their Savior to show up. They’d jump at the chance for a walk-on role.” She shrugged, perfectly. “Plus, he was hot for me and concussed from a smack in the head he got from Merrin in the fight at Ward’s place. Poor little fucker never stood a chance.”

  “So I’m the black man.”

  She pulled a face. “Yeah, you just showed up and fit the role a little too well.”

  “Tell me about.” Carl stirred through his recollections again, the fight in the nighttime mall. “You didn’t send him after me then?”

  “No, that was all his idea.” Ren’s tone was sour. “Thought it up all on his own, and I wasn’t there to stop him. Wasn’t for that, we might all have gotten off the Cat quietly while RimSec were still clumping about up on deck trying to lock us down.”

  “You have any idea why you were supposed to bodyguard Merrin?”

  “None. I’m strictly for hire. Got the word he’d be coming in, emergency splashdown, and Ward goes out to collect. My end was just keep him safe for a few months, they were going to need him later. We were going to do that at Ward’s place, but it seems Merrin had a few trust issues after what he went through aboard Horkan’s Pride.”

  “Yeah. Understandable. So how’d you talk him down?”

  “Initially?” Ren grinned. “With ninjutsu.”

  “And after that?”

  The grin stayed. “How do you think?”

  “Really? Osborne and Merrin? How’d you make that work?”

  Another elegant shift of the gray-fleeced shoulders. “Playing handmaiden to Christ, I get to do what I like in Scotty’s eyes. Or at least, he sells it to himself that way as long as he can, because he doesn’t want the rest of it to go away. Maybe that’s what really went wrong when you showed up. Who can tell?”

  “And Merrin?”

  “Well, I’d say Merrin never quite came back from that ride he took home on Horkan’s Pride. I’d been bracing myself for all the usual arrogant thirteen bullshit when he arrived.” She shook her head. “Not much sign of it. I wouldn’t say he was broken, but I’m not sure he ever straightened out what was really going on. I rammed it home that if he made waves, he was just going to blow cover, and I guess he was smart enough to take that much in. He had covert training, right?”

  “Yeah. Field experience, too.”

  “So. Something to hang on to, I guess.”

  Carl felt the sequence of the fight rise up in his mind again. Slurred tanindo, the slack, not-quite-committed feel to the moves, the lack of force. Almost as if Merrin were still half back on Mars and living a lesser gravitational pull. As if he’d never really made it home after all.

  “So, you had any field experience?” he asked Ren.

  “Not as such.”

  “Not as such, huh?” Carl glanced out across the bay to Marin. The light was almost gone now. “Who the fuck are you, Ren?”

  “That’s not what matters here.”

  “I think it is.”

  She stared at him for a couple of seconds in the gloom. Put together a throwaway gesture.

  “I’m just some guy they hired.”

  “Just some guy. Right. With ninjutsu technique good enough to beat an ex-Lawman. Try again. Who are you?”

  “Look, it’s simple. Forget whatever skills I picked up on my way around the Pacific Rim. I got hired here, in California, to do a handling job, because that’s what I do. I did my job, I handled the mess when Merrin boiled over, and I kept him covered. Then, when the heat got turned up high again, my scumbag client cut me loose. And now I’m looking for payback.”

  “I thought you were here to help.”

  “I am. My payback is handing you the people who cut me loose.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “I’m sorry, it’ll have to do.”

  “Then go peddle your grudge to someone else.”

  He turned his back and leaned on the seaward wall. Stared at the lights out across the water, tried hard not to think of Istanbul, and failed. Under certain superficial differences, the two cities shared an essence you couldn’t evade. Both freighted with the same distilled dream of shoreline, hills, and suspension spans, the same hazy sunlit air and rumble by day, the same glimmer on water at evening as ferries crisscrossed the gloom and traffic flowed in skeins of red and pale gold light across the bridges and through the street-lamp-studded veins of the city. What was in the air there was here as well, and he felt it catching in his throat.

  He heard her boots move behind him. Footfalls on evercrete, closing the gap. He looked out at the glimmer of lights.

  “Kind of careless tonight, aren’t you?’ She draped her arms on the wall, mimicked his posture about a meter off to his left.

  He shrugged, didn’t look at her. “I figure if you want to feed me some information, it doesn’t pay you to take me out. You were going to do that, you would have done it awhile ago.”

  “Fair analysis. Still a risk, though.”

  “I’m not feeling very risk-averse right now.”

  “Yeah, but you’re being fucking choosy about who you take your leads from. Mind telling me why?”

  He tipped a glance at her.

  “How about because I don’t trust you any farther than I would a Jesusland preacher with a choirboy? You’re handing me what looks like half a solution, Ren. And it doesn’t match up with what I already know. To me, that stinks of deflection. You want me to believe you’re really ready to sell out your boss? Tell me who you are.”

  Quiet. The city breathed. Reflected light trembled across the water.

  “I’m like you,” she said.

  “You’re a variant?”

  She squinted at the blade of her outstretched hand. “That’s right. Harbin black lab product. Nothing but the best.”

  “You some kind of bonobo then?”

  “No, I am not some kind of fucking bonobo.” There were a couple of grams of genuine anger in the way her voice lifted. “I had sex with Merrin and Scotty for my operational benefit, not because I couldn’t keep my hands off them.”

  “Well, you know what?” He kept his voice at a drawl, not really sure why he was pushing, just some vague intuitive impulse to feed the anger and keep Ren off balance. “The real bonobo females, the pygmy chimps in Africa? That’s what they do a lot of the time, too. Fuck to calm the males down, keep them in line. I guess you could call that operational benefit, from a social point of view.”

  She got off the wall and faced him.

  “I’m a fucking thirteen, Marsalis. A thirteen, just like you. Got that?”

  “Bullshit. They never built a female thirteen.”

  “Right. Tell yourself that, if it makes you feel better.”

  She stood a meter off, and he saw her force the anger back down, iron it out of her stance, and put it away. Shiver of unlooked-for fellow feeling as he watched it happen. She leaned on the wall again, and her voice came out cool and conversational.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Marsalis, to wonder why Project Lawman failed so spectacularly? Has it occurred to you that just maybe cramming gene-enhanced male violent tendency into a gene-enhanced male chassis is overloading the donkey a little?”

  C
arl shook his head. “No, that hasn’t occurred to me. I was there when Lawman blew apart. What went wrong was that thirteens don’t like to do what they’re told, and as soon as the normal constraints come off, they stop doing it. You can’t make good soldiers out of thirteens. It’s that simple.”

  “Yeah, like I said. Overloading the donkey.”

  “Or just misunderstanding the concept of soldier.” He brooded on the outline of the Marin Headlands against the sky, watched the neat, corpuscular flow of red dotted lights funneling off the bridge and into a fold in the darkened hills. “Anyway, speaking of soldiering, if Harbin put you together, gave you the genes and the ninjutsu, I’ve got to assume that means you belong to Department Two.”

  He thought she maybe shivered a little. “Not anymore.”

  “Care to explain that?”

  “Hey, you asked who I was. No one said anything about a full fucking résumé.”

  He found he was smiling in the gloom. “Just sketch it out for me. Bare bones, enough to convince. One thing I don’t intend to be is a cat’s paw for the Chinese security services.”

  “You’re starting to piss me off, Marsalis. I told you I don’t do that shit anymore.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a naturally untrusting motherfucker. You want me to murder your boss for you? Indulge my curiosity.”

  He heard her breath hiss out between her teeth.

  “Late ’96, I worked undercover to crack a Triad sex-slave operation in Hong Kong. When we finally hit them, it got bloody. Department Two aren’t overly concerned about innocent bystanders.”

  “Yeah, I heard that about them.”

  “Yeah, well I took the opportunity of all that blood and screaming to step out quietly. Disappeared in the crossfire, crossed the line. Used the contacts I’d made to hook a passage to Kuala Lumpur, and then points south.” An odd weariness crept into her voice. “I was an enforcer in Jakarta for a while, played in the turf wars they had going against the yakuza, built myself an Indonesia-wide rep. Headed south again. Sydney and then Auckland. Corporate clients. Eventually the Rim States, because that’s where the real money is. And here we are. That sort out your curiosity for you?”

  He nodded, surprised once again by the twinge of kinship he felt. “Yeah, that’ll do for the CV. But I do have one more question, general point of information you could clear up for me.”

  Weary sigh. “And that is?”

  “Why bother with me? You’re lethal as shit, well connected, too. Staying one step ahead of RimSec and making it look easy. Why not go in and take this faithless fuck out for yourself. Not like you don’t know where he is, right?”

  She was silent for a while.

  “It’s a simple question, Ren.”

  “I think I’ve told you enough. In the end, you’re an UNGLA bounty hunter. You take me down, it puts food on your table.”

  “I already know what you are,” he said roughly. “You see me reaching for a Haag gun?”

  Voice not quite even on those last two words. Her head tilted, as if she maybe caught the tremor. She examined the blade of her hand again.

  “You’ve made a career of betraying your own kind. No reason why you’d stop now, is there?”

  “Ren, let me tell you something. I’m not even sure I still have my license.” Memories of di Palma flitted through his head, the prissy bureaucratic superiority of the Agency. “And even if I do, first thing I plan on doing when I get back is turn it in.”

  “Change of heart, huh?” It wasn’t quite a sneer.

  “Something like that. Now answer the question. Why me?”

  More quiet. He noticed the chill in the air for the first time. His eyes kept sliding back to the Marin hills, the disappearing stream of traffic headed north. As if there were something there waiting for him. Ren seemed to be making calculations in her head.

  “Two reasons,” she said, finally. “First, he’s likely to be expecting me. You, he’s got no reason to watch for.”

  “If I were standing where you are, that kind of risk wouldn’t be enough for me to hand things over to a proxy.”

  “I know. But you’re a male thirteen. I’m a little smarter than that. For me it’s enough to know that it’ll get done. I don’t have to be there and smell the blood.”

  “Maybe I’m smarter than you think. Maybe I just won’t do it.”

  He saw her smile. “Well, we’ll see.”

  “You said two reasons.”

  “That’s right.” Now she was the one looking out across the water. Her voice tinged with something that might have been embarrassment, might have been pride. “It seems I’m pregnant.”

  The silence seemed to rush them, like dark fog coming in off the bay. The noises of the city, already faint, receded to the edge of perception. Carl placed his hands flat on the stonework of the wall, peered down at them in the gloom.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Is it Merrin’s? Or machete boy’s?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t much care. And neither will your Agency friends. It’s enough that the mother’s a certified thirteen, without worrying about the father as well. They’ll send everything they’ve got after me. I need to be leaving, Marsalis. Bowing out and heading somewhere safe.”

  “Right.” He folded his arms against the chill, turned to face her. “On the other hand, you do have one major advantage over the Agency.”

  “Which is.”

  “They don’t even know you exist.”

  And somewhere in his head, Sevgi Ertekin’s voice.

  Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.

  Carmen Ren regarded him narrowly. “That’s right. Right now, they don’t know I exist.”

  Carl looked away across the bay again. Something was aching in his throat. Sevgi, Nevant, all the others. His whole life seemed to pulse with grief.

  “They aren’t going to hear it from me,” he said.

  CHAPTER 49

  It felt strange, walking into the Human Cost Foundation’s offices for real. Memories of the v-format clashed with the actual architecture of the reception space and the corridors leading off it. There was no Sharleen sitting there, no one in the waiting area at all, and the walls were a paler, colder blue than he recalled. The artwork he remembered wasn’t there, and the prints and Earth First shout-out posters that had replaced it seemed grubby and tired. Jeff, when he came out to greet them, looked similarly worn.

  “In the flesh,” he said, hugging Norton briefly at the shoulders. “Nice surprise.”

  Norton hugged back. “Yeah, strictly business, I’m afraid. Come to pick your professional brains again. This is Carl Marsalis. Marsalis, my brother Jeff.”

  Jeff shook the thirteen’s hand without a blink. “Of course. Should have recognized you from the feed photos. Do you want to come through?”

  They took a different corridor from the one Norton remembered in the virtual offices, and of course it didn’t blur out the way it had in the format. They passed doors with cheaply lettered plastic signs that hinted at the foundation’s daily round: TRAUMA COUNSELING, COAST GUARD LIAISON, HARASSMENT RESPONSE, FUNDING… Through one open office door, Norton glimpsed a stout Asian woman looking sleepily into the middle distance and drinking from a Styrofoam coffee cup. She half raised a hand as they passed, but said nothing. Otherwise, the place seemed to be deserted.

  “Quiet this morning,” Marsalis said.

  Jeff glanced back across his shoulder. “Yeah, well, it’s early yet. We’ve just ridden out a major funding crisis, so I sent everyone home with instructions to celebrate and come in late. In here.”

  He let them into the office marked with the simple word directorate, closed the door carefully behind them. Changes from the virtual here, too: the décor was a higher-powered blend of reds and grays; the sofa was the same but had been turned so its back was to the window and there was space to walk around behind it, a low coffee table in front. Ornaments had moved around, been replaced. The photo of
Megan was gone from the desk, there was a smaller one of the kids instead. Jeff gestured at the sofa.

  “Grab a seat, both of you. How are COLIN treating you, Mr. Marsalis?”

  The thirteen shrugged. “Well, they got me out of jail in Jesusland.”

  “Yeah, I guess that could count as a pretty good opening offer.” Jeff came around to the sofa and seated himself facing both of them. He put on a weary smile. “So what can I do for you guys?”

  Norton shifted uncomfortably. “How much do you know about the Harbin black labs, Jeff?”

  Raised brows. His brother blew out a long breath.

  “Well, not a whole lot. They keep that end sewn up pretty tight. Long way north, a long way from the sea. Very high security, too. From what we can piece together, it’s where the high-end product comes out.”

  “You ever meet a variant from the Harbin labs?” Marsalis asked. “Human Cost ever handle any?”

  “Christ, no.” Jeff sat back and rested his head on one hand. He seemed to be giving it some thought. “Well, certainly not since we’ve been set up in our current form anyway. I mean, before we got state funding, back before my time, they might have, I could check the files. But I doubt it. Most of the escapees we get are failed variants from the experimental camps. They don’t quite let them go, but they don’t much care what happens to them, either, so it’s easier for them to slip out, grab a fishing boat or something, maybe stow away. Anyone coming out of Harbin, though, they’d be very highly valued, and probably very loyal as well. I doubt they’d be interested in running, even if security was lax enough to let them.”

  “I met one last night,” said Marsalis.

  Jeff blinked. “A Harbin variant? Where?”

  “Here. In the city.”

  “Here? Jesus.” Jeff looked at Norton. “You see this as well?”

  Norton shook his head.

  “Well.” Jeff spread his hands. “I mean, this is fucking serious, Tom. If someone out of Harbin is here, chances are they work for Department Two.”

  “No.” Marsalis got up and went to the window. “I had quite a long talk with her. She bailed out of Department Two awhile back.”