Black Man (3 page)

By the time they cut him loose again, his fingers were numb and his shoulders ached in their sockets from trying to press his wrists closer together. They’d drawn the loop savagely tight—even clenching his fists as they did it hadn’t won him much slack when he relaxed his hands again, and the tension in his arms tended to force his wrists apart so that however he positioned himself, the loop cut into flesh. On top of the stab wound in his side, it wasn’t what he needed.

They’d found the injury when they searched him, but they were more concerned with emptying his pockets than treating him for damage. They didn’t take off the binding loop. As long as he didn’t die in custody, he guessed they didn’t much care what shape he was in. At the camp security center, they cut back his clothing; a barely interested medic prodded around the wound, declared it superficial, sprayed it with antibac, glued it shut, and taped a dressing to it. No analgesics. Then they left him in a lightly piss-scented plastic holding cell while the GH director pretended for two hours that he had more pressing matters to attend to than a double shooting in his camp.

Carl spent the time going over the confrontation with Gray, looking for a way to play it that didn’t leave Gaby dead. He measured the angles, the words he’d used, the way the conversation had developed. He came to the same conclusion a dozen times. There was only one sure procedure that would have saved Gaby’s life, and that was to shoot Gray dead the moment he stepped out of the bathroom.

Sutherland would have been pissed off, he knew.

No such thing as time travel,
he’d rumbled patiently once.
Only live with what you’ve done, and try in the future to only do what you’re happy to live with. That’s the whole game, soak, that’s all there is
.

Hard on the heels of the memory, Carl’s own thoughts came looking for him.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

Finally, two members of the security squad, male and unarmored, came and marched him out of the cell without removing the loop, then took him to a small office at the other end of the security station. The camp director sat on one corner of a desk swinging his leg and watched as they cut Carl loose without ceremony. The solvent squirt left a couple of drops on his skin that scorched. It didn’t feel accidental.

“I’m very sorry about this,” the director said, in English and without visible remorse. He was pretty much the type, a tall, midforties white guy in designer casuals that approximated light trekking gear. His name, Carl knew from previous research, was Axel Bailey, but he didn’t offer it, or his hand.

“So am I.”

“Yes, clearly you’ve been detained unnecessarily. But if you had identified yourself before running around my camp playing at detective, we might have avoided a lot of unpleasantness.”

Carl said nothing, just rubbed at his hands and waited for the pain as his hands renewed their acquaintance with blood flow.

Bailey cleared his throat.

“Yes, well, we’ve confirmed that Rodriguez was in fact who you claim he was. Some kind of slipup in vetting there, it looks like. Anyway, your office wants you to contact them with a preliminary statement on the shooting, but since we won’t contest the jurisdiction, of course, there’ll be no need for more than that at this stage. However, I would like your assurance that you will file a full report with COLIN as soon as you get back to London, citing our cooperation. If that’s agreed, you’re free to go, and in fact we can assist you with transport out.”

Carl nodded. The first traceries of pain branched spikily out through the flesh of his fingers. “Got it. You want me gone before the press come looking for the story.”

Bailey’s mouth compressed to a thin line.

“I’m having you helicoptered directly to Arequipa,” he said evenly, “so you can get a connecting flight home. Think of it as a gesture of goodwill. Your gun and your license will be returned to you there.”

“No.” Carl shook his head. Under the UNGLA mandate, he could in theory have commandeered the helicopter anyway. In theory. “You’ll give the gun and the license back to me yourself, right now.”

“I
beg
your—”

“The Haag pistol is UNGLA property. It’s illegal for anyone unauthorized to be in possession of one. Go and get it.”

Bailey’s leg stopped swinging. He met Carl’s gaze for a moment, presumably saw what was there, and cleared his throat. He nodded at one of the security guards, visibly reading his name off the lettering on the breast pocket of his uniform.

“Ah, Sanchez. Go and fetch Mr. Marsalis’s personal effects.”

The security guard turned to leave.

“No.” Carl peeled Sanchez a glance and watched him stop with his hand on the door. He knew he was being childish, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. He looked back at the director. “I said
you
go and get it for me.”

Bailey flushed. He came off the edge of the desk. “Listen to me, Marsalis, you don’t—”

Carl closed one painfully fizzing fist up with the other hand. He grimaced. The director’s voice dried up.

“You go and get it for me,” Carl repeated softly.

The moment held, and popped. Still flushing to the roots of his carefully styled hair, Bailey shouldered past and opened the door.

“You watch him,” he snapped at the security guards, and stalked out. Carl saw a grin slip between the two men. He rubbed at his fist some more, shifted to the other hand.

“So which of you two humanitarians spotted me with the cuffmelt?”

The grin vanished into hostile watchfulness and a stiff silence that lasted until Bailey came back with his stuff and the paperwork to match.

“You’ll have to witness for these,” he said sulkily.

Camp security had bagged everything in a forty-centimeter-wide isolation strip, each item gripped tight in the vacuum-sealed plastic. Carl took the strip, unrolled it on the desk to check that everything was there.

He pointed at the storage key.

“This is for a locker down by the bus park,” he said. “My pack’s in it.”

“You can collect it on your way to the helicopter,” Bailey said and flicked the release form impatiently at him. “I’ll have my men escort you.”

Carl took the form and laid it on the desk, tore the activation cover off the holorecorder decal in the corner, and leaned over it.

“Carl Marsalis, SIN s810dr576,” he droned, words worn smooth on his tongue with their familiarity

“UNGLA authorization code 31 jade. I hereby state that the items on this list are the full complement of property taken from me by GH camp security on June 18, 2107, and now returned to me, date the same.”

He thumbed the disk to seal it and slid the form away from him across the surface of the desk. A curious suffocating sensation had settled over him as he recited the witness statement, as if it were he and not his personal effects vacuum-sealed in the transparent plastic.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

No, that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw the way Bailey and the two security guards were watching him.

I don’t want to
be
this anymore
.

So.

Choppered out of camp, tilting across the brilliant blue of the lake and then on through bleak, mountainous beauty as they picked their way down from the altiplano to Arequipa. Helicopters like this had smart systems navigation that ran off a real-time satellite model of local terrain and weather, which meant the thing practically flew itself. Still, the pilot stolidly ignored him for the whole flight. He sat alone in the passenger compartment and stared out of the window at the landscape below, idly mapping it onto his memories from Mars. The similarities were obvious—it wasn’t just the thin air COLIN was up here simulating—but in the end, this was still home, with a sky-blue sky up above and the broad sweep of a big-planet horizon out ahead and the slow rolling weight of one full g pulling at your bones.

Accept no substitute
. Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head.

Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life
here
and a better world
now.

In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper-class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage, and chased it with something generic from a departure-lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co. outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snowcapped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.

Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger
olé,
wiped his fingers, and went.

He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of
Felipe Souza
’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.

He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s announcement that they were starting their descent into Miami and that the airport was locked down under a security scare, so no connecting flights would be taking off for the foreseeable future. Local accommodation options could be accessed through—Fuck.

The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Banners and his own bed under the tree-flanked eaves of the Crouch End flat. Could have drifted awake late the next morning to the sound of birds outside the window and cloud-fractured sunlight filtering through the bright leaves. Some British summer downtime at last-with the wound, the Agency would have no choice—and the whole Atlantic between him and the emotional topography of MarsPrep.

Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two-meter holoscreens that admonished think it’s all red rocks and airlocks? think again and we only send winners to mars.

Miami was a transamericas hub, and that meant a hub for every company involved in the Western Nations Colony Initiative. Some color-supplement journalist with access to more mainframe time than she deserved estimated, for a piece of inflight fluff he’d read a couple of years ago,
at present every seventh person passing through Miami International does so on business related, directly or indirectly, to Mars and the COLIN program. That figure is set to rise
. These days it was probably more like one in four.

He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view, and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit—working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions, which he then had to claim back as part of his fee—but with a worst-case couple of days left till he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.

Time to use it.

In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor, and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalog of bruises he could feel through the thinning veils of codeine. The glued wound in his side tugged at him every time he moved.

He dried himself with big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound, and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

The in-house doctor was a personable young Latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican inner-city hospital, because she barely raised one groomed eyebrow when he showed her the knife wound.

“Been in Miami long?” she asked him.

He smiled, shook his head. “It didn’t happen here. I just got in.”

“I see.” But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. “So are you one of our illustrious military advisers?”

He switched to English. “What, with this accent?”

A tiny bend to the lips now as she moved around to face him again. “You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—”

“Forget it. I hate those motherfuckers, too.” That he’d killed one in a bar in Caracas last year, he didn’t mention. Not yet, anyway. He went back to Spanish. “You got family in Venezuela?”

“Colombia. But it’s the same story down there, only for coca, not oil. And for longer. Been going on since my grandparents got out, and it’s never going to change.” She went to her bag where it sat on the desk and fished out a handheld echo imager. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things my cousins tell me.”

Carl thought about the uniforms he’d seen on the streets of Bogotá a few weeks ago. A summary beating he’d witnessed.

“No, I would believe you,” he said.

She knelt in front of him and touched the wound again, more gently now. Improbably, her fingers seemed warmer. She ran the imager back and forth a couple of times, then got to her feet again. He caught a gust of her scent as she came up. As it happened, their eyes met and she saw that he’d smelled her. There was a brief, flaring moment, and then she retreated to her bag. She dug out dressings and cleared her throat, raised brows and sideways—slanted eyes at what had just happened.