Black Man (31 page)

“Okay, so male force and hierarchy nail the human race into a coherent social order, weed out the worst of the loose cannons, and provide a stable base, all so that thousands of years later female principles can emerge to govern with a modicum of civilized decency. That’s your imam’s stance?”

Sevgi nodded. “It’s Valipour’s stance as well, give or take. And a valid Sufistance, too, insofar as it represents a continuing revelation.”

“Sort of explains the backlash, though, doesn’t it.” Yavuz grinned. “
Thanks, guys, you’ve done a bang-up job, given your gender limitations, but we’ll take it from here.
I mean, it’s hard to imagine the
shahuda
sitting still for that.”

“Well.” She shrugged. “They didn’t, no.”

“Yeah, I remember the mobs here, chanting in the streets when I was a kid.” Yavuz put a raised, droning note into his voice. “
Men have authority over women because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other
. So forth.”

Sevgi snorted. “That tired old shit.”

“That tired old shit’s the Qu’ran, as I recall. Is the Qu’ran not a part of Islam in New York?”

“Very funny. Is historical context not a part of intelligent human thought around here?”

The impish grin again. Yavuz seemed to be shrugging off his sudden bout of male guilt. “Around here, sure. But you don’t have to go too far southeast before intelligent human thought is pretty severely frowned on. Come to that, from what I hear you don’t have to go too far southwest of New York before the same thing applies.”

She laughed. “Fair comment. Marsalis told me you wrote a thesis on that stuff. Similarities in the US

before Secession and Turkey, something like that?”

“‘Psychosocial Parallels in Turkish and American Nationalisms,’” Yavuz quoted with mock-bombast. He gestured modestly, undercut the effect. “Nothing’s ever that simple, of course, but there
were
a lot of similarities. Both big, stroppy nationalisms founded in very shallow cultural soil. Both constitutionally secular societies with a resentful fundamentalism snapping at their heels. Both running a massive cultural gap between urban and rural society. Both very uneasy with the New Math, both trying to beat back the virilicide with draconian drug laws and wishful thinking. You know this place might have fractured apart, too, the way the US did, if we hadn’t had the Europeans sneaking about pulling levers from the outside.”

“You don’t sound that pleased about it.”

The Turk sighed. “Yeah, I know. And I should be, I guess. Certainly don’t want the fucking
shahuda
prowling the streets here, stoning my daughters if they go out unchaperoned or showing more flesh than a wrapped corpse. But it’s no fun, either, knowing your whole country’s just the new backyard for a bunch of over-the-hill ex-imperial cynics.”

“Now you sound almost patriotic.”

“Not me.” He shook his head grimly. “Did Carl tell you I used to teach in the prison system before I got this gig?”

“He mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well you get to see some unpleasant things in the Turkish penal system. I’ve met a few too many torture-scarred political prisoners to be much of a Turkish patriot anymore. The way I see it, anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet.”

“I like that.” Sevgi smiled into her
salep.
“So you think the US might have held together the way Turkey did. I mean, if there’d been an outside force to apply the right pressure?”

“Not necessarily, no.” Yavuz looked unaccountably sad as he said it. “I mean, you’ve got the whole states’ rights issue, which we never had. Two centuries of southern resentment and cultural abrasion, religious fury, racial tension. Those are pretty deep fissures. Plus the anti-drug laws meant less chance for the virilicide to do its weeding out the way it was elsewhere.”

He put his
salep
mug down on the counter, sat back, and held his open palms toward it, as if in obscure invocation.

“But anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it. Because there never
was
an outside force big enough to make you people behave. COLIN didn’t exist as such back then, the UN was still a toothless tiger trying to find its dentures, the Chinese just didn’t give a shit. Homegrown corporate interests were all behaving like thugs, they just wanted the cheap resources and labor for as long as it lasted. You’ve got the environmental lobby screaming, Zhang fever scaring the shit out of the Asian populace. Pacific Rim commercial interests don’t want a fight, they just step in and make their offer, and pretty much everyone on the West Coast breathes a big sigh of relief when they do. Los Angeles goes first, toe in the pool, and then the whole coast takes the plunge when it works.”

Sevgi nodded. Somewhere in a box on top of a wardrobe, she still had a replica scroll of the Angeline Freeport charter. Murat had brought it back from a West Coast medical conference for her when she was still in junior high. Like most successful first-generation immigrants, he’d been passionate about his adoptive homeland, even after it fractured apart under his feet almost as he stepped off the plane.

“Yeah,” she said grayly. “And anything the fucking
West
Coast can do…”

Yavuz nodded, teacher-like. “Just so. The northeastern states seize the precedent and walk away as well.

And on all sides, the rhetoric has been stoked so high that there can be no climb-down for anyone. It’s the classic male impasse. Honor satisfied, and everybody loses. A textbook case. Have you ever read Mariela Groombridge?
Evolving States
?”

She shook her head.

“You should. She’s brilliant. Taught at the University of Texas until they threw her out for signing an anti-creationist petition. She’s in Vienna these days. Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn’t cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of.”

“Which is what?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Fear.”

“It’s a power beyond numbers.” Nevant still hadn’t touched the
meze,
but he was a couple of fingers down the rakı glass now. He sneered. “You think the cudlips give a shit about
facts
? Statistics and formal studies? It’s the knee-jerk, man. That’s what these people live and breathe. There
are
monsters, there
is
evil, and it’s
somewhere out there in the dark
. Whoo-oo-oo. You know, before I got out to Peru, Manco was putting out a rumor that he had
pistacos
working for him. Settling scores for that turf squabble they had back in ’03.”

Carl nodded. On Mars, he’d seen the
familias
run a similar dynamic among the less educated end of the Uplands Initiative workforce. He’d been offered
pistaco
work himself a couple of times, lack of pale skin notwithstanding.

“Whatever works, I guess.”

“Yeah, well. Worked for a while.” Nevant snorted disgustedly and knocked back another chunk of his rakı. “Manco was so fucking pleased with himself, he couldn’t see it’d crash and burn soon as one of his fake
pistacos
got called and couldn’t cut it. I told him—the way I had it mapped out, he could have that monster threat
for real
. Real, honest-to-DNA monsters doing his enforcing for him. Something to scare everybody, not just the illiterates. Just think what would have happened if the word got around:
Cross the
familias
and they’ll send a fucking thirteen to visit you.
“

“Always assuming you and your future army of thirteens could cut it any better than
tayta
Manco’s fakes.”

Nevant looked at him. “You lose many fights to a normal human recently?”

“No. But like you just got through telling me, it isn’t the facts that do it for humans. Maybe Manco didn’t need a real threat. Or at least, he didn’t need it badly enough to cuddle up with a bunch of fucking twists.”

“Didn’t have any problem cuddling up to that hib cunt Jurgens,” said Nevant sourly. “Amazing how your prejudices can go out the window when there’s a decent rack in the equation.”

“Greta Jurgens?” Carl summoned vague recollection of a languid, gray-eyed blonde from his inquiries after Nevant three years back. She’d been running front-office operations for Manco in Arequipa. “She was a hibernoid?”

“Yeah, she was. Why?”

Carl shrugged. “No reason. Just the way Manco was about the whole twist thing, it’s strange he’d tolerate one that far up the ladder on the inside.”

“Like I said, check out the rack. The ass. And hey, for all I know, hibs do some dickshift tricks you can’t get out of a human woman.”

Carl sipped his drink, shook his head. “That’s bonobos, and even then it’s bullshit hype. Anyway, Manco wants that kind of thrill, he can go down to Lima and have his pick of twist brothels. Come on. It doesn’t add up.”

“Well then, maybe it’s just that there are twists and twists.” Nevant’s lip curled. “Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only people like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding.”

Carl gazed at the cutlery on the table. He nodded, a little sadly. “People like
you
. They lock people like
you
up. Me, I’m licensed.”

“Domesticated, you mean.”

“Call it what you like. You can’t turn the clock back twenty thousand years, Stefan.”

Nevant unsheathed the wolf-snarl grin again.

“Can’t you?”

“See, once upon a time,” Yavuz was saying, “fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait. She cites—”

Down the promenade, the splintering crack of glass. Sevgi whipped about in time to see the restaurant window shattered outward around two grappling bodies. Someone shrieked.

“Ah,
fuck
.”

She grabbed after the gun she wasn’t permitted to carry here, blind fingers registering the lack ahead of conscious thought. Flung herself off the stool—it teetered and toppled behind her, she heard it go down clattering—and toward the fight. Yavuz was at her side, brandishing an authorized pistol…

On the floor, the pale thirteen had Marsalis pinned. His arm hauled up, something in it, slashed down.

Somehow, Marsalis twisted aside, did something with his legs that shifted the balance of the fight. Nevant reeled, shaking a hand that must have hit the concrete floor with killing force, must have broken bones.

He was trying to keep the black man down with his other arm, but the lock wasn’t working. Marsalis skated sideways by fractions, his shoulder slipped loose. His hand flapped, grabbed, pulled the Frenchman down toward him. He hinged upward from the stomach, hard, met Nevant’s face with the crown of his skull. Sevgi heard the noise it made, and her teeth went on edge.

They arrived.

“That’s it, motherfucker.” Yavuz, in English. Voice shocked hoarse, pistol jammed in Nevant’s ear.

“Game over.”

Nevant swaying, one hand clutched to his face, blood dripping between fingers from a nose that had to be broken. Coughing, bubbling, but through it came laughter. Marsalis grunted and tugged himself out from beneath, folded a leg, and shoved the Frenchman sideways with his knee. Nevant went halfway to collapsing, still clutching his face. Still chuckling. The hand he was using was the same one he’d just broken on the concrete.

“Going to have to.” He sucked a breath, wetly. “Buy my own cigarettes after all.”

“Looks like it, yeah.” Marsalis rolled to his feet, one smooth coiling motion. He was checking himself for cuts from the glass.

“I did warn you.”

“Yeah, and you made a real pig’s ear of palming that cutlery knife as well.” The black man’s tone was absent. He turned his right hand, frowning, and Sevgi saw tear-track ribbons of blood in the cup of it.

Marsalis lifted the hand to eye level, twisted it palm-outward, and pulled back his sleeve. He grimaced.

There was a long cut, narrow sliver of glass still embedded, in the flesh on the outer edge of his palm.

“You stay there, you
fuck,
“ Yavuz was telling Nevant shakily. The pistol muzzle floated about close to the pale thirteen’s forehead. “You sit there, and you
don’t fucking move
.”

He fished in his jacket with his spare hand, brought out a phone, and punched a speed-dial number.

Beyond, in the cave made by the hole through the window, people stood about and gaped at the tumbled chairs and table. Waiters hovered, uncertain. A big downward-jagged triangular chunk of glass dropped suddenly from among its fellows in the top of the frame and broke undramatically in three pieces on the ground.

At the apex of the narrowest fragment, as if indicated by an arrowhead of glass, Sevgi saw the glint of the cutlery knife where Nevant had dropped it. The words the two thirteens had just traded caught up with her. She stared at Marsalis.

“You.
Knew
he was going to do this?”

The black man pinched the glass sliver between finger and thumb and tugged slowly until it emerged whole from the wound. He turned it curiously this way and that in the dim light for a moment, then dropped it.

“Well.” He flexed the injured hand and grimaced again. “There was always a risk he’d get genetic about it, yeah.”

“You told us the two of you were friends.”

Choked chortle from Nevant where he now sat with his back to the undamaged neighboring window panel. Marsalis looked at Sevgi levelly over his wound.

“I think I said we got on okay.”

Sevgi grew aware of the thuttering in her chest and temples. She took a long breath, took stock.

Gestured around her.

“And you call this
okay?
“

Marsalis shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? Blame the wiring.”

On the floor, Nevant chuckled again, through blood and broken bone.