Black Man (47 page)

“Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Carl shook his head irritably. “Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?”

“I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.”

“You certain about that?”

“Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.”

Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to—

“And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?”

“Is coincidence,” said Matthew crisply.

He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. “Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.”

“Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition toward paranoia to contend with as well.”

Carl grimaced. “Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that—”

“Matthew.”

“Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?”

“Yes, and evolutionarily selective, too.” The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. “But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect the underlying mathematics.”

“But not when they clash.” Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. “Right?”

“Not when they clash,” Matthew agreed. “When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.”

“So Norton’s clean?”

“Norton is clean.”

Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognized the reflex-seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.

So use it, fuckwit.

“Does it ever bother you?” he asked into the phone.

“Does what bother me, Carl?”

“This whole thing.” He gestured as if Matthew could see him. “Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.”

“To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?”

Carl sighed. “Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.”

“In what way?”

“Well, no offense, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.”

“My emotional range has been psychochemically rebalanced and extended.”

“Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.”

“Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?”

Carl thought about that.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” he admitted gloomily. “No.”

“So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.”

“Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.” Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in showing up the datahawk and his hyperbalanced mind-set, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. “This isn’t
about
rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilization crew.” For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. “I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in ’89, ’90? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?”

“Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.”

Carl shrugged. “Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.”

“And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.”

“Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.”

Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stefan Nevant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.

“Look, Matt, thanks—”

“Matthew.”

“Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.”

He hung up. Tossed the phone on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.

The interior was low-lit and cozy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armored screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealized female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asian-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high-collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.

“Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?”

He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.

Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.

“Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,” he said.

Switched off and careless from jet lag, long sleep, and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.

Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique—
if you want to call it that,
he fumed—mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.

Wundawari’s shipment never made it through MTC in Jakarta; Wundawari herself was now banged up in an Indonesian jail on trumped-up holding charges until some scummy Seattle-based rights lawyer she used could wire across and get her out. The money was gone.
Write it off,
the Seattle guy advised drily down the line,
what you maybe claw back from the Maritime Transit guys in compensation, you’re going to be paying me in fees
. Dougie might have called him on that one, but Wundawari wouldn’t do the time, and both he and Seattle knew it. She was too soft, came from Kuala Lumpur money and a whole crèche of spoiled-brat connections down in the Freeport. She’d pay whatever Seattle wanted.

On the street, things were no better. Alcatraz station were coming down hard and heavy all over the fucking place, big-ass RimSec interventions at levels those guys mostly didn’t bother with. He still couldn’t find out why. Some shit about a factory raft bust last night and the fallout, but none of his few bought-and-paid-for touches inside the RimSec machine ranked high enough to know any more than that. More importantly, they were too fucking scared of Alcatraz to risk sniffing around any closer. End result was, he couldn’t move shit anywhere north of Selby or west of the Boulevard, and even in the yards at Hunter Point, he was getting heat he didn’t need. And the border had been sticky for fucking
months
now, none of the gangs he knew could get more than the odd fence-bunny across, mostly straitlaced white girls out of the Dakotas who took fucking forever to break in and even then didn’t play too well to popular demand.

Mama was still coughing. Still wouldn’t take her fucking pills.

Now Valdez was lining up in the wake of another too-hard-too-fast fuckup, two spots floating nice and loose over open pockets, clean backup angles everywhere, and then the eight-ball doubled into the side, one of Valdez’s favorite cheap trick shots, he’d do it with his fucking eyes closed if he wanted. Another fifty bucks. He’d—But Valdez frowned instead and lifted his chin off the cue. Got up and came around the table to Dougie, eyes narrowed.

“Hey,
pengo mio
. You say Elvira
wasn’t
working tonight?” He nodded across the gloom to the bar.

“Because if that ain’t work, then you got a problem.”

So Dougie slanted a glance across the gloom to where Valdez was looking, and like the rest of it wasn’t fucking enough, here’s Elvie on her stool with her back to the bar, elbows down and tits cranked out in that red top he bought her back in May, legs making all kinds of slit-skirt angles on the frame of the stool, and all for this big black guy draped over the next stool and just looking her over like she’s fruit on some Meade Avenue street stall.

Too fucking much.

He hefted the cue up one-handed through his own grip, half a meter down from the tip where it thickened, reversed his hold, and carried it low at his side across to the bar. Elvira saw him coming, made that dumb fucking face of hers, and stopped gabbing. Dougie let the silence work for him, came on a couple more steps and locked to a halt a meter and a half off the black guy’s shoulder.

“That’s a mistake you’re making, pal,” he said, breathing hard. Anger slurred through his tone like smeared paint on a cheap logo. “See, Elvira here isn’t working tonight. You want some cheap fucking pussy, you’d better come around and see her another fucking day. Got that?”

“We’re just talking.” The black guy’s tone was low and reasonable, almost bored. Weird fucking accent as well. He didn’t even look at Dougie. “If Elvira’s not working, I guess she’s free to do that, right?”

Dougie felt the weight of the day come down on him like demolition.

“I don’t think you’re paying attention,” he told the guy tightly.

And then the black guy did look at him, a sudden switch so his eyes collected Dougie’s stare like third base snapping up a low ball out at Monster Park.

“No, I am,” he said.

It stopped Dougie dead in his tracks, knocked him back and kept the cue at his side, because at some level he couldn’t quite nail he knew this guy was actively looking for what came next. It felt like a skid, like ice under his wheels when he least expected it. He knew he had to keep going, no one much in the place tonight but Valdez was watching, so were the barkeep and a couple of others, whatever went down, street feed would have it out to everyone by morning, he
had
to fuck this guy up, but the ground under his feet had shifted, was no longer safe, he couldn’t fucking read this guy or what he’d do.

He tightened his grip on the cue.

“Try to hit me with that thing,” said the black man softly. “I will kill you.”

Dougie’s heart kicked in his chest. He felt the rage flicker, overstoked, held too long, suddenly unreliable.

Tiny, rain-drip voice of caution in the gap. He drew breath, forced the knowledge down.

“Door’s over there,” he said. “Just walk the fuck away.”

“My feet are tired.”

So Dougie just swung that fucking cue like he’d always known deep down he’d have to. Lips peeled back off a snarl and the shaky lift of the held-too-long adrenal surge.

Situation like that, what else was he going to fucking do?

Even as the fight bloomed, Carl could feel the small seep of disappointment at the back of it all. This swaggering low-grade gangster in front of him, a little more spine than most pimps maybe, but in the end no competition, no real threat.

Yeah, like you expected anything else out here, black-walled bunker bar in a derelict neighborhood on the edge of an all but fully automated navy yard
. Not like he hadn’t discussed it carefully enough with the autocab, walked the deserted streets for long enough looking.
Face it, soak, this is
exactly
what you’ve been prowling for. This is what you wanted. Enjoy
.

The fight was so mapped out in his head, it was almost preordained. He already had his weight braced off the stool he’d been using, some in the forearm where he leaned on the bar, more in his legs than he showed. He saw the intention tremor down the other guy’s arm, grabbed a leg of the stool and yanked the whole thing savagely upward. The leg ends hit and gouged, face and chest. Swing momentum on the seat end hooked the thing around and blocked out the cue completely—the strike never made it above waist height. He let go, stepped in as the pimp reeled back, hand up to the rip in his face. The stool tumbled away. Carl threw a long chop, hard as he could make it, into the unguarded side of the throat.

The pimp hit the floor, dead as far as he could tell. Elvira shrieked.

At the pool table, the pimp’s shaven-headed friend stood shocked and motionless, cue held defensively across his body in both hands. Carl stalked forward a couple of steps, proximity sense peeled for the rest of the room.

“Well?” he rasped.

It was half a dozen meters at most; if the skinhead had a gun, he wasn’t going to have time to clear it before Carl was on him. Carl saw in his face that he knew it.

Peripheral vision, left. The barkeep, fumbling for something, phone or weapon. Carl threw out an arm, finger raised.

“Don’t.”

On the floor, the pimp moaned and shifted. Carl checked every face in the room, calibrated probable responses, then kicked the downed man in the head. The moaning stopped.

“What’s his name?” he asked of the room.

“Uh, it’s Dougie.” The barkeep. “Dougie Kwang.”

“Right. Well anyone here who’s a big friend of Dougie Kwang’s, maybe wants to stay and discuss this with me, you can. Anyone else had better leave.”

Hasty shuffle of feet, graunch of chair legs jammed back in a hurry. The thin crowd, scrabbling to leave.

The door swung open for them. He felt the cold it let in touch the back of his neck. The barkeep snatched the opportunity, went too. Left him with Elvira, who’d started grubbing about on the floor next to Dougie in tears, and the skinhead, whom Carl guessed just didn’t trust getting safe passage to the door. He gave him a cold smile.

“You really want to make something of this?”

“No, he doesn’t. Look at his face. Stop being an asshole and let him go.”

Control and the mesh stopped him whipping around at the voice, the cool amusement and the iron certainty beneath. He already knew from the tone that there was a gun pointing at him. That he wasn’t on the floor next to Dougie, shot dead or dying, was the only part that didn’t make sense.

He shelved the wonder, stepped aside with ironic courtesy, and gestured the skinhead to pass him.

Momentary flashback to the chapel in South Florida State, the sneering white supremacist walking past him up the aisle. Suddenly he was sick of it all, the cheap postures and moves, the use of stares, the whole fucking mechanistic predictability of the man-dance.

“Go on,” he said flatly. “Looks like you get a free pass. Better take Elvira there with you.”

He watched Dougie Kwang’s friend drop the pool cue he was clutching and come forward a hesitant step at a time. He couldn’t work out what was going on, either. His eyes flickered from Carl to whoever the new arrival was and back. A numb failure to catch up was stamped across his face like a bootprint.

He knelt beside the off-duty whore and tried to manhandle her to her feet. She wriggled and wept, refused to get up, hands still plastered on Dougie’s motionless form, long dark-curling hair shrouding his eyes-wide, frozen face. She keened and sobbed, half-comprehensible fragments, some Sino-Spanish street mix Carl couldn’t follow well.

Enjoying our handiwork here, are we?

He wondered momentarily if, when the time came, there’d be a woman, any woman, to weep like this for him.

“We don’t have all night,” said the voice behind him.

Carl turned slowly, fear of the bullet prickling at the base of his neck. Time to see what the fuck had gone wrong.

Right. Like you don’t already know.

There was a tall man at the door.

A couple of others, too, neither of them small, but it was this one who drew attention the way you vectored in on color in a drab landscape. Carl’s mesh-sharpened senses fixed on the heavy silver revolver in the raised and black-gloved hand, the bizarre, consciously antiquated statement it made, but it wasn’t that. Wasn’t the oily, slicked-back dark hair or the slight sheen on the tanned and creased white features, telltale marks of cell-fix facial and hair gel for an assassin who had no intention of leaving genetic trace material at the scene of his crime. Carl saw all this and set it aside for what really mattered.

It was the way the man stood, the way he looked into the room as if it were a stage set purely for his benefit. It was the way his dark clothes were wrapped on his body as if blown there by a storm, as if he didn’t much care whether he wore them or not. The way his tanned face had some vague familiarity to it, some sense that you must have met this person before somewhere, and that he had meant something to you back then.

Thirteen.

Had to be. Paranoia confirmed. Merrin’s back-office crew, come for payback. It wasn’t over.

Beside Carl, the pool player spoke urgently to Elvira, finally succeeded in getting her to her feet, and shepherded her past Carl with an arm around her shaking shoulders. The same dazed mix of shock and incomprehension on his face as before. Carl nodded him past, then turned slowly to watch him half carry Elvira to the door. The new arrivals stood aside to let the couple out, and one of them closed the door firmly afterward. All the time, the silver gun never shifted from its focus.

Carl gave its owner a sardonic smile and moved a few casual steps forward. The other man watched him come closer, but he didn’t move or make any objection. Carl breathed. He wasn’t going to get shot just yet, it appeared.

But it’s coming.

He took the bright flicker of fear, broke it, and folded it away. The mesh and a sustained will to do damage pulsed brighter.

Push it, see how far it goes.

It went almost to touching distance.

The tall man let him come on that far, even gave him a gentle, encouraging smile, like an indulgent adult watching a child in his charge do something daring. Close enough that Carl’s assessment of the situation began to flake apart, to leave him abruptly uncertain of how to play this. But then, a couple of meters off the muzzle of the revolver, the tall man’s smile shifted on his face, never quite left it, settled into something hard and careful.

“That’ll do,” he said softly. “I’m not that careless.”

Carl nodded. “You don’t look it. Do I know you from somewhere?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Onbekend.”

“Marsalis.”

“Yes, I know.” The tall man nodded toward a nearby table. “Sit down. We’ve got a little time.”

So
. Cool gust of confirmation down the back of his neck, down the muscles of his forearms.

“You sit down. I’m fine right here.”

The revolver’s hammer clicked back. “Sit down or I’ll kill you.”

Carl looked in the eyes and saw no space there, not even for the snappy one-liner—
Looks like you’re going to do that anyway
. This man would put him down right here and now. He shrugged and stepped across to the table, lowered himself into one of the abandoned chairs. It was still warm from its previous occupant. He leaned back and set his feet apart, as far off the table edge as he thought he could get away with. Onbekend glanced at one of his shadows, nodded at the door. The man slipped quietly outside.

The remaining backup stood immobile, fixed Carl with a cold stare, and folded his arms. Onbekend checked him with another glance and then moved across and seated himself opposite Carl at the table.

“You’re the lottery guy, aren’t you?” he said.

Carl sighed. It wasn’t entirely faked. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“The one who woke up halfway home?”

“Yeah. You looking for an autograph?”

He got a thin smile. “I’m curious. What was it like, being stuck out there all that time, waiting?”

“It was a riot. You should try it sometime.”

Onbekend didn’t react any more than a stone. The sense of familiarity grew—Carl was certain it was specific. He knew this face, or one very like it, from somewhere.

“Did you feel abandoned? Like when you were fourteen all over again?”

Fourteen?

Carl grinned. The tiny piece of advantage felt adrenal in his veins. He cocked his head, elaborately casual.

“So you were a Lawman, huh? Fortress America’s final set of southern-fried chickens coming home to roost.”

Just there, just as tiny, but there nonetheless, there in the corners of Onbekend’s eyes. Loss of poise, siphoned sip of anger. For just that moment, Carl had him backed up.

“You think you know me? You don’t fucking know me, my friend.”

“I’m not your fucking friend, either,” Carl told him mildly. “So there you go. We all make these mistakes.

What do you want from me, exactly?”

For a moment so brief it was gone before he even registered it, Carl thought he was dead. The barrel of the revolver didn’t shift, but it seemed to glimmer with intent in the lower field of his vision. Onbekend’s mouth smeared a little tighter, his eyes hated a little more.

“You could start by telling me how it feels to hunt down other variant thirteens for the cudlips at the UN.”

“Remunerative.” Carl stared blandly back into the other thirteen’s narrowed eyes. One of them was going to die in this bar. “It feels remunerative. What are
you
doing for a living these days?”

“Surviving.”

“Oh.” He nodded, mock-understanding. “Playing the outlaw, are we?”

“I’m not working for the cudlips, if that’s what you mean.”

“Sure you are.” Carl yawned-sudden, tension-driven demand for oxygen, out of nowhere, but it played so fucking well he could have crowed. “We’re all working for the cudlips, one way or another.”

Onbekend set his jaw. Tipped his head a little, like a wolf or a dog listening for something faint. “You talk very easily about other men’s compromises. Like I said, you don’t fucking know me at all.”

“I know you bought food today. I know you traveled here in some kind of manufactured vehicle, on city streets built and paid for in some shape or form by the local citizenry. I know you’re holding a gun you didn’t build from raw metal in your spare time.”

“This?” Onbekend raised the gun slightly, took the muzzle fractionally out of line. He seemed amused.

Carl forced himself not to tense, not to watch the wavering weapon. “I took this gun from a man I killed.”

“Oh, well there’s a sustainable model of exchange. Did you kill the guy who served you breakfast this morning as well, so you wouldn’t have to pay for that, either? Going to murder the guy who sold or rented you your transport option, and the guy who runs the place you sleep tonight? Got plans for the people who employ them, too, the ones who run the means of production, the managers and the owners, and the people who sell for them and the people who buy from them?” Carl leaned forward, grinning hard against the cool proximity of death. It felt like biting down. “Don’t you fucking get it? They’re all around us, the cudlips. You can’t escape them. You can’t cut loose of them. Every time you consume, you’re working for them. Every time you travel. On Mars, every time you fucking
breathe
you’re part of it.”

“Well.” Onbekend put together another small smile of his own. “You’ve learned your lesson well. But I guess if you whip a dog often enough, it always will.”

“Oh
please
. You know what? You want to pretend there’s some other way? You want to escape into some mythical pre-virilicide golden age—go live in Jesusland, where they still believe in that shit. I was there last week, they love guys like us. They’d burn us both at the stake as soon as look at us. Don’t you understand?
There is no place for what we are anymore
.” Sutherland’s words seemed to rise in him, Sutherland’s quiet, amused, bass-timbre voice like thunder, like strength. “They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. They won, Onbekend, and you want to know why? They won because it
worked
. Group cooperation and bowing down to some thug with a beard worked better than standing alone as a thirteen was ever going to. They ran us ragged, Onbekend, with their mobs and leaders and their fucking strength in numbers. They hunted us down, they
exterminated us, and they got the future as a prize. And now here we are, standing in the roof garden of the cudlip success story, and you’re telling me no, no, you didn’t take the elevator or the stairs, you just fucking flew up here all on your own, all with your own two fucking wings. You are
full
of shit.”

Onbekend leaned forward, mirroring, eyes flaring. It was instinctive, anger-driven. The revolver shifted fractionally in his hand to allow the shift in posture. Angled minutely to one side. Carl saw, and held down the surge of the mesh.
Not yet, not yet
. He met the other man’s eyes, saw his own death there, and didn’t much care. There was a rage rising in him he barely understood. The words kept him alive, warmed him as long as he could spit them out.

“They
built
us, Onbekend, they fucking built us. They brought us back from the fucking dead for the one thing we’re good at. Violence. Slaughter. You, me.” He gestured, slashing, open-handed disgust. “All of us, every fucking one. We’re
dinosaurs
. Monsters summoned up from the deep dark violent past to safeguard the bright lights and shopping privileges of Western civilization. And we
did
it for them, just like they wanted. You want to talk about cudlips, how they bow and fold to authority, how they let the group dictate? Tell me how we were different. Project fucking Lawman? What does that sound like to you?”