Black Man (35 page)

The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of gray cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.

Oh fuck…

The
familia
chief drew a hard breath.

His fists uncurled.

His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twinned there instead.

The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.

Bambarén laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.

“You’re a fool, black man,” he said harshly. “Just as Nevant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumors about the
pistacos?
You think I need an army of monsters, real or imagined, to maintain order?
Men
will do that for me, ordinary men.”

He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away toward the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thinned to something more general and weary.

“Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honor the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains.

The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We—my people—invented the
pistacos
to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they cannot obtain what they want by other means. I pass no rumors of the
pistaco,
black man, because the lie of the
pistaco
is already in us all, and it comes to life time and time again on the altiplano without any
encouragement from me.”

Carl glanced back toward the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.

“So,” he said breezily. “Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?”

Bambarén drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.

“Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?”

“It’s my intention,
tayta,
to get some straight answers out of you. And speechifying on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.”

“You dismiss—”

“I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.”

“I have to have the respect of my men.”

“Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.”

Beneath the sunglasses, Bambarén’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. “What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every—”

“British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman.”

“It makes no difference. You.” The
familia
chief’s face twitched. “Nevant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonized women too poverty-stricken to afford children of their own—”

“Go fuck yourself, Manco.”

But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.

“Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day—”

“Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.” Now he had the tone, the drawl. “We’re not here to discuss my family history.”

But
tayta
Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive. “Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be
harvested
of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel,
twist
?”

And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambarén’s death at the edge of his striking hand.

There was no art in this; this was thumbs hooked into the
familia
chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite—

If we are ruled by what they have trained into us,
said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage,
then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear
.

Carl flexed a smile and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.

“Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,” he said. “Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?”

He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambarén blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long lost treasure of the Incas was kept.

“What are you talking about?”

Carl shrugged. “I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?”

Bambarén spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. “No one talks to Mars. You know that.”

“You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.”

“They walked away from that possibility back in ’75. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.”

Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-djinn on a ship home, climb inside a spare cryocap—you can always eat the previous occupant if you’re hungry—and dive-bomb the Pacific Ocean with the survivable modules. Piece of cake.

“You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

Carl grinned. “Hate will find a way, huh? That old
deuda de sangre
magic.”

The
familia
chief studied the ground. “Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the
afrenta Marciana
with me?”

“Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.”

Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. “A resurgence of
what,
black man? We are at war.

That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.”

“Or until you curry enough favor with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.”

Manco looked pointedly back toward the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.

“COLIN is a fact of life,” he said somberly. “We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, very fucking poetic.”

Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care.

Marsalis held on to the rough-ride strap above his door.

“Well, he has a point.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him—apart from cheap poetics—that was worth coming all this way for.”

Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back toward the center of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head-on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenaline and sweat through her pores. But slow—she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambarén’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a curb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine-irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing still.

“Well?”

“Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.”

She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go of the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.

“Please state your destination.” Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.

“City center,” she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. “Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.”

“I know that.”

“Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.”

He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.

“Bambarén’s clean.” He said it reluctantly. “I reckon.”

“But that’s not all?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.”

She heard the raised tone at the end. “But?”

“But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambarén, I’d just blown up a truckful of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there.

This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose-thread itch of
something not right
. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day, and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unraveled or snapped.

“So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.

He stared out of the side window. “I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.”

“That’s Arequipa, right?”

“Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.”

“And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.”

Marsalis shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.”

“You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN

reps?”

“I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirror-shade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?”

Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the
familia
bodyguards moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgment, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.

She sighed.

“Yeah, okay.” She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times.

“
Insha’Allah,
we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.”

Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.

“Course-correct. Long haul, Arequipa.”

Scribbles awoke on the displays.

“This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,” Asia Badawi told her coolly.

“Yeah, fucking tell me about it.”

The center of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No cooperation, no overview—the late-afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections.

Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower.

That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amid it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noisemaking process.

The jeep was a carpool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

“You want to drive?”

Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose-to-tail metal they were trying to break into.

“Not really.”

“You mind if I do?”

The lights changed, and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a meter, then jerked to a halt again as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

“Right.”

It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realized what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, toward the car behind them.

“Marsalis, don’t—”

But he was already gone, striding back toward the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood—she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time—and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s-side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly.

He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.

“Ah,
shit
.”

Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window.

She scrabbled it open.

“What the fuck are you—”

“Scoot over.”

“What did you just do?”

“Nothing. Scoot over, I’m going to take it on manual.”

She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn’t see anything through the darkened glass windshield. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their favor again and shook her head in weary resignation.

“Whatever.”

He took down the automation, engaged the drive, and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he’d cut off, and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of meters and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

“Did you enjoy that?”

He shrugged. “Had a certain operational satisfaction.”

“I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How’s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?”

“Ertekin, there was no fight.” He looked across and met her eye. “Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best.”

“And if he hadn’t backed down?”

“Well.” He thought about it for a moment. “You people usually do.”

It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening toward dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within.

Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaned intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus mustache worked on the innards. A mother seated on a front step, smoking and watching the traffic go by, three tiny children clinging about her. A young man in a suit leaning into a shop doorway and flirting with the girl behind the counter. Each scene slipped by and left her with the frustrated sense of life escaping through her fingers like sand.

On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co. and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly colored lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco’s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she’d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn’t make sense of any of it—just the general ache.

Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

Right.

Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she lied.

At the jeep, he got into the driver’s seat then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

“You don’t want to drive anymore?”

“No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don’t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic.”

He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialize out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowboat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their running lights, then pulling ahead and away into the night. The jeep’s systems chirruped softly in the dashboard-lit cabin space, talking to each rig, interrogating, adjusting. Maybe bidding farewell.

“You get used to that on Mars?” she asked him. “The machine thing?”

He frowned. “Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?”

“I thought on Mars—”

“Yeah, everybody does. It’s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it’s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day even the scientists thought the terra-forming would take centuries.

Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our time scales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch-up.” He gestured. “So now we’re still stuck with the red-rocks-and-air-locks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don’t like to let it go.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. “Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the illusion. It’s a lot of empty black to cross just for that.”

The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

“It was bad, huh?” she said quietly. “Out there?”

He shot her a glance. “Bad enough.”

Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space, rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

“There was this woman,” he said at last. “In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like… someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day’d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I’d tell her what I’d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth Control and the rescue ship crew.”

He cleared his throat.

“See, after a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren’t there. The fact that you’re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You’re asking yourself,
Why me? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on
my
watch?
You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit.” He grimaced. “That’s religion, right?”

“No, that’s not religion.” Sudden asperity in her voice.

“It’s not?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something
out there
trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there’d be something else as well, a kind of opposed force, something
in there
with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn’t take me long to make one—see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre’s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the
Felipe Souza
to watch over me.”

“But she was.” Sevgi gestured. “A person. Just a human being.”

“I didn’t say it made any sense, Ertekin. I said it was religion.”

“I thought,” she said severely, “thirteens were supposed to be incapable of religious faith.”

Ethan certainly had been. She remembered his incurious, stifled-yawn incomprehension whenever she tried to talk about it, as if she were some Jesusland fence-hopper stood on his doorstep trying to sell him something plastic and pointless.

Marsalis stared into the blue glow of the dashboard displays. “Yeah, they say we’re not wired for it.

Something in the frontal cortex, same reason we don’t take direction well. But like I said, it got pretty bad out there. You’re stuck in the empty dark, looking for intent where there’s only incidence. Feeling powerless, knowing you’ll live or die dependent on factors you can’t control. Talking to sleeping faces or the stars because it beats talking to yourself. I don’t know about the cortical wiring argument, all I can tell you is that for a couple of weeks aboard
Felipe Souza
it felt like I had religion.”

“So what changed?”

He shrugged again. “I looked out the window.”

More silence. Another autohauler droned by, buffeting them with the wind of its passage. The jeep rocked in its wake, adrift on the night.

“
Souza
had vision ports let into the lower cargo deck,” Marsalis said slowly. “I went there sometimes, got the n-djinn to crank back the shields. You have to kill the interior lights before you can see anything, and even then…”

He looked at her, opened his hands.

“There’s nothing out there,” he said simply. “No meaning, no mindful eye. Nothing watching you. Just empty space and, if you travel far enough, a bunch of matter in motion that’ll kill you if it can. Once you get your head around that, you’re fine. You stop expecting anything better or worse.”

“So that’s your general philosophy, is it?”

“No, it’s what Elena Aguirre told me.”

For a moment, she blanked. It was like those moments when someone talked to her in Turkish out of the blue and she was still working in English, a failure to process the words she’d heard.

“I’m sorry?”

“What I said. Elena Aguirre told me to stop believing all that shit and face up to what you can see out the window.”

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked him tautly.

“No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m telling you what happened to me. I stood at that window with the lights off, looking out, and I heard Elena Aguirre come up behind me. She’d followed me down to the cargo deck and she stood there behind me in the dark. Breathing. Talking into my ear.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Yeah, I know that.” Now he did smile, but not at her. He was looking into the light from the dashboard again, eyes blind, washed empty with the electric blue glow. “She’d have left tank gel all over the deck, wouldn’t she. Not to mention, she would have rung every alarm on the ship climbing out of the tank in the first place. I mean, I don’t know how long I stood frozen to the window after she’d gone, you tend to lose track of time out there, and I was pretty scared, but—”

“Stop it.” She heard the jagged edge on her tone. Felt the urge to shudder creep up her neck like a cold, cupped hand. “Just stop it. Be serious.”

He frowned into the blue light. “You know, Ertekin, for someone who believes in a supreme architect of the universe and a spiritual afterlife, you’re taking this remarkably hard.”

“Look.” Thrown down like a challenge. “How could you know it was her? This Elena Aguirre. You’d never even heard her voice.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

There was a quiet simplicity in the question that tilted her, suddenly, weightlessly, like sex the first time she got to do it properly and came, like her first dead-body crime scene by the tracks off Barnett Avenue. Like watching Nalan’s breathing stop for the final time in the hospital bed. She shook her head helplessly.

“I—”

“See, you asked if it got bad,” he said softly. “So I’m telling you how bad it got. I went down deep, Sevgi. Deep enough for some very strange shit to happen, genetic wiring to the contrary or not.”

“But you can’t believe—”

“That Elena Aguirre was the incarnation of a presence watching over me? Of course not.”

“Then—”