Black Man (27 page)

“Hey.” Another grin. “I won the lottery. Would have been pretty ungracious not to take the prize.”

“I’m serious.” Fiercely, into the wind between them. “I know it’s grim out there, but every thirteen I ever heard talk about it loved the whole idea of Mars. Escape to a new frontier, a place you can carve out something of your own.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“I know. But that doesn’t stop anyone believing it.” She looked out across the water. “It’s where they’re all heading, isn’t it. The ones you hunt down. They’re heading for the camps and a one-way ticket to the Martian dream. Somewhere they’ve been told they’ll be wanted, valued for their strengths. Not rounded up and kept on fenced ground like livestock.”

“Most of them try for the camps, yeah.”

“You ever ask yourself why UNGLA doesn’t just let them run, let them hitch a cryocap ride out of everyone’s hair?”

He shrugged. “Well, primarily because the Accords say they can’t. The Agency exists to make sure every genetic variant on Earth is filed and monitored appropriate to their level of risk to society, and in the case of variant thirteens that means internment. If we start turning a blind eye to fence-breakers just because we think they’re going to skip for Mars, pretty soon some of them
aren’t
going to skip for Mars, they’re just going to hole up somewhere here on Earth and maybe start breeding. And that puts the whole fucking human race back to pre-Munich levels of panic.”

“You talk as if they weren’t like you,” she said, accusation rising in her voice. “As if you were different.”

“I am different.”

Just like Ethan, just fucking like him
. Her own despair guttered upward on its wick. Her voice sounded dull in her own ears. “It doesn’t matter to you that they’re treated this way?”

Another shrug. “They’re living the choices they made, Ertekin. They could have gone to Mars when COLIN opened the gates at Munich. They chose to stay. They could get on with their lives on the reservations. They choose to break out. And when I come for them, they’ve got the option to surrender.”

Jagged memory of Ethan’s bullet-ripped corpse on the slab. Called to make the identification, trembling and cold with the shock.

“Choices, yes,” she snarled. “Every choice a fucking humiliation. Give up your freedom, roll over and do as you’re told. You know full fucking well what kind of choice that is for a thirteen.”

“It’s a choice I made,” he said mildly.

“Yeah.” She looked away again, disgustedly. “You’re right. You are different.”

“Yeah, I’m smarter.”

Another ferry passed them a hundred meters off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug toward the little island of lights and windowed warmth, the vaguely glimpsed figures moving about within. Then the stupidity of the situation came and slapped at her like the sea wind. Right behind her, pressing into her shoulders, were the window rims of an identical haven of lit and heated space, and she’d turned her back on it.

Yeah, much better that way, Sev. Turn away. Stay out in the cold and stare across the water at the fucking unattainable as it sails away from you.

Fucking idiot.

“So he went down fighting?”

She snapped around to face him again. “Who did?”

“The thirteen you were having a relationship with.” The same mild calm in his voice. “You told me he’s dead, you’re angry about what I do for a living. Makes a certain kind of sense this guy got taken down by someone like me.”

“No,” she said tightly. “Not someone like you.”

“Okay, not someone like me.”

He waited, let it sit between them like the darkness and the noise of their passage through it.

She clenched her teeth.

“They sent the SWATs,” she said finally. “A fucking dozen of them. More. Body armor and automatic weapons, against one man in his own home. They—”

She had to swallow.

“I wasn’t there, it was morning and I’d already gone to work. He was off duty, just off a stack of night work. Someone in the department tipped him off they were coming, they found a call on the phone later, downtown number. He—”

“He was a cop?”

“Yeah, he was a cop.” She gestured helplessly, hand a claw. “He was a
good
cop. Tough, clean, reliable.

Made detective in record time.
He never did anything fucking wrong
.”

“Apart from faking his ID, presumably.”

“Yeah. He got himself Rim States citizenship back before the internments started. Said he saw it coming way ahead of time. He bought a whole new identity in the Angeline Freeport, lived up and down the West Coast for a couple of years building it up, then put in for official immigration to the Union. They still weren’t testing for variant thirteen then, and once he was in he had the Cross Act to protect him, the whole right-to-genetic-privacy thing.”

“Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.”

“Yeah?” She gave him a smile smeared with pain. “That your professional opinion?”

“For what it’s worth. I guess he was smart.”

“Yeah, well. Like Jacobsen says—
sociopathic tendency allied with dangerous levels of raw intelligence
. That’s why we’re locking thirteens up, right?”

“No. We’re locking thirteens up because the rest of the human race is scared of them. And a society of scared humans is a very dangerous thing to have on your hands. Well worth a bit of internment to avoid.”

She scanned his face for the irony. Couldn’t tell.

“His name was Ethan,” she said at last. “Ethan Conrad. He was thirty-six years old when they killed him.”

The other ferry was almost gone now, fading amid the other flecks of traffic and the lights of the European side. She drew a deep breath.

“And I was six months’ pregnant.”

On the Asian side, with Europe reduced to glimmering lights across the water, she got drunk and told him the rest.

He wasn’t sure why—it might have been a by-product of the alcohol, or a desired result. Either way, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d watched the way her mouth clamped shut behind the sudden admission of loss, and he recognized damage that wouldn’t be healing anytime soon. They got off the ferry in Kadiköy without speaking, carrying a personal silence between them that deadened the clank and clatter of disembarkation. The same bubble of quiet stayed with them as they trudged the half a dozen rising blocks up from the waterfront, following the street-finder holo in the keytab, until they reached the winding thoroughfare of Moda Caddesi and the low-rise apartment tower that COLIN owned there. It was a residential neighborhood, long since put to bed, and they saw no one along the way.

There was a strange, secretive feeling of release and refuge in it all. Quietly, quietly, up and away from the lights of the ferry terminal, past the shuttered frontages of a market and the curtained windows of the sleeping world, the glimmering map in the hollow of Ertekin’s palm and the pale bluish light it cast up into her face. When they arrived, she opened the door in from the street with exaggerated care, and they took the stairs rather than wake the machinery of the elevators. In the apartment—air infused with the slightly musty chill of no recent occupancy—they fetched up together in the kitchen, still without speaking, and found an open but barely touched bottle of Altınbaş rakı on the counter.

“You’d better pour me some of that,” she told him grimly.

He searched for the appropriate long slim glasses, found them in a cabinet, while Ertekin filled a jug with water from the tap. He poured each glass half full with the oily transparent weight of the rakı and watched as she topped the measures off from the jug. Milky, downward-tumbling avalanche cloud of white as the water hit. She grabbed up a glass and drank it off without drawing breath. Set it down again and looked expectantly at him. He poured again, watched her top up. This one she sipped at and carried through to the abandoned chill of the living room. He took bottle and jug and his own glass, and followed her.

They were on the top floor, a broad picture-window vantage opening out over the rooftops of Kadiköy at a couple of stories’ advantage. With the lounge lighting dimmed back, they had a clear view all the way to the Sea of Marmara and the minaret-spiked skyline of Sultanahmet back on the European side.

Staring at it, Carl had the sudden, hallucinatory sensation of leaving something behind, as if the two shores were somehow drifting apart. They sat in squashy mock-leather armchairs facing the window, not each other, and they drank. Out on the Sea of Marmara, big ships sat at anchor, queuing for entry to the Bosphorus Straits. Their riding lights winked and shifted.

They’d killed well over half the bottle by the time she started talking again.

“It wasn’t fucking planned, I can tell you that much.”

“You knew what he was?”

“By then, yes.” She sighed, but it got caught somewhere in her throat. There was no real relief in the noise it made. “You’d think we’d have terminated it, right? Knowing the risks. Looking back, I’m still not really sure why we didn’t. I guess… I guess we’d both started thinking we were invulnerable. Ethan had that from the start, that whole thirteen thing. He always acted like bullets would have bounced off him. You could see it in him across a crowded room.”

Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.

“And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is
good,
this is
right,
this is what’s supposed to
be
. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling now it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the air lock. You tell yourself the genetic-privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that the legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution
and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD.
You’re
the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on
your
door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.”

“You met Ethan through the force?”

It got him a sour smile. “How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialize much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.” She shrugged. “I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cozy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.”

“Not quite. You can always leave the police force.”

She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. “You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself.

The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.”

“And did you? Tear it all down?”

“You mean, did we fuck?”

“Actually, no. But—”

“Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.” She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again.
Snac
. “Like
that
. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blond bitch worked Datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organize a move across the river when I made Midtown Homicide. Just an old neighborhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.” Another frown.

“Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.”

“Had he told you what he was?”

“Not then, no. I mean—” She gestured again, more carefully this time. “—not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?”

“Not generally, no.”

“No.” She nursed her drink for a while. “I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.”

“What did he want?”

Her lip curled. “He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of Central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still aboveground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while till he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.”

“He recognized him? I’d have thought—”

“Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim states, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face, it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.” She clenched a fist in the low light. “He
wouldn’t
believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way.
That’s not the way we do things,
he kept saying.
You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip
.”

A darted look. “That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.”

“It’s been known.”

“Yeah, well this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case—” She shrugged. “Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right?

Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.”

Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out at sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.

“So what happened?” he asked finally.

She looked away. “I think you know.”

“Ethan solved the problem.”

“Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.” Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. “Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned
me,
when Ethan wasn’t around.”

“Did you tell Ethan about it?”

“I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.”

She paused. Picking words.

“But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth.

There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?”

He shrugged. “So the psychomonster flicks would have us believe.”

“Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, Internal Affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that, and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.”

“Until.”

She nodded. “Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Skinned knuckles, finger gouges in his throat.” A faint, weary smile. “And the house was cleaner than I’d seen it in months. Washed floors everywhere, bathroom like a screen ad, everything nanodusted. You could still hear the stuff working if you put your ear up close to the tub. He never cleaned up like that again in the whole time we were together.”

More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the rakı bottle. Offered it to him.

“You want?”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

He watched as, a little unsteadily, she built herself a new drink. When she was done, she held the glass without drinking from it and stared out at the ships.

“It seemed like we held our breath all summer,” she said quietly. “Waiting to see. I knew a lot of cops in Queens from before I moved to Midtown, I started hanging out with them again, on and off, to see if there was a missing persons filed, or if a body had turned up. We checked the NYPD links to UNGLA’s most wanted all the time for news. Keegan never made it onto the list. Ethan reckoned you guys had him down as such a fuckup he wasn’t worth chasing, he’d dig his own grave soon enough if you’d just give him some time.”

Carl shook his head. “No, we like the stupid ones. They’re easy to track down, and that makes the Agency look good. If your guy wasn’t listed, the most likely thing is whoever helped him over the wire at Cimarron found some way to keep it quiet. Or whoever had the contract to run the place at the time just hushed the whole thing up to keep the statistics sweet. Oversight provision for Cimarron is pretty fucking weak, even by Jesusland standards, and if the contract was up for a renewal bid, well.” He spread his hands. “Every lag on that reservation knows the best time to plan an escape is just before tender. They know the operating corporation is going to try like crazy to squeeze maximum efficiency out of badly paid staff and end up with riot-level tension instead, and they know that if they do make it over the wire, there’s going to be no public nationwide manhunt, because the contract holders can’t afford the publicity.

It’s how half these guys keep getting away so easily.”

“Fucking Jesusland,” she slurred.

He gestured lazily. “Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s the sort of thing keeps me in work. Come to that, Jesusland isn’t the only place I’ve seen weak oversight.”

“No. Only place they’re fucking proud of it, though.” She peered morosely into her drink. “Still can’t fucking believe it sometimes, you know?”

“Believe what?”

“Secession. What America did to itself. I mean.” She made an upward-groping gesture with her free hand. “We fucking
invented
the modern world, Marsalis. We modeled it, on a continental scale, got it working, sold it to the rest of the world. Credit cards, popular air travel, global dataflow. Spaceflight. Nanotech. We put all that in place, you know? And then we let a bunch of fucking Neanderthal Bible-thumping lunatics tear it all to pieces? What the fuck is that, Marsalis?”

“Don’t ask me. Little before my time.”

“I mean.” She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. “If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had come and just chased us out of the driver’s seat, you know I could maybe handle that. Every culture has to give way to something in the end. Someone fresher and sharper always comes along. But we fucking did this to ourselves. We let the grasping, hating, fearing idiot dregs of our
own society
tip us right over the fucking precipice.”

“You live in the Union, Sevgi. That’s hardly the abyss, is it?”

“But that’s just the fucking point. That’s what they always wanted, Marsalis. Separation from the North.

Secession. Their own fucking mud puddle of ignorance to wallow in. It took them two hundred fucking years to do it, but in the end
they got exactly what they wanted
.”

“Come off it. They lost the Rim States. That’s what, a third of American GDP?” He couldn’t work out why he was arguing so hard with her. He knew the ground because anyone working for UNGLA had to, but it wasn’t like he was an expert. It wasn’t like he
cared.
“And look, from what I hear out of Chicago these days, they might not be able to hang on to the Lakes much longer either. Then you’ve got Arizona—”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted, and sank deeper into her chair. “Fucking Arizona.”

“They’re talking about admission to the Rim.”

“Marsalis, it’s
Arizona
. They’re more likely to declare an independent republic of their own than anything else. And anyway, if you think Jesusland is going to let either them or any of the Lake states secede the way the Northeast did, you’re crazy. They’ll put the national guard in there faster than you can say
Praise the Lord
.”

Because he didn’t care one way or the other—
right?
—he said nothing, and the conversation closed up on her final words with a snap. There was a long pause. They both looked out at the ships.

“Sorry,” she muttered after a while.

“Skip it. You were telling me about Keegan. Waiting to hear if his body turned up.”

“Yeah, well.” She sipped her drink. “Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the beginning. That was when we started getting confident. Started not worrying about the situation, just living as if there were no danger, as if Ethan was just some regular guy.

Year or so of that and, bang, oops.” She smiled bleakly. “Biology in action.”

“And they took it away from you.”

The smile dropped off her face. “Yeah. Union law’s pretty progressive, but they won’t buck the consensus that far. No siring of offspring from variant thirteen stock, any and all incubated genetic material to be destroyed. I’ve got lawyers fighting it, claiming moral precedent from pre-Secession cases on late-stage abortion, right to life, all that shit. Been nearly five years now, and we’re still fighting.

Appeal, block, object, counterappeal. But we’re losing. UNGLA have all the money in the world to fight this one, and their lawyers are better than mine.”