Black Man (41 page)

He drifted awake in a bed he didn’t know, among sheets that emanated the scent of a woman. A faint grin touched his mouth, something to offset the bitter aftertaste of the Osprey memories.

“Bad dream?” Rovayo asked him from across the room.

She sat a couple of meters off in a deep sofa under the window, curled up and naked apart from a pair of white briefs, reading from a projected display headset. Streetlight from outside lifting a soft sheen from the ebony curves of her body, the line of one raised thigh, the dome of a knee. Recollection slammed into him like a truck—the same body twined around him as he knelt upright on the bed and held her buttocks in his hands like fruit and she lifted herself up and down on his erection and made, again and again, a long, deep noise in her throat like someone tasting food cooked to perfection.

He sat up. Blinked and stared at the darkness outside the window. Sense of dislocation—it felt wrong.

“How long was I out?”

“Not long. An hour, maybe.” She tipped off the headset and laid it aside on the back of the sofa, still powered up. Tiny panels of blue light glowed in the eye frames, like the sober gaze of a robot chaperone.

She shook back her hair and grinned at him. “I figured you earned the downtime.”

“Fucking jet lag.” He remembered vaguely the last thing, long after her hands and mouth could no longer get him to rise to the occasion, lying with his head pillowed on her thigh, breathing in the odor of her cunt as if it were the sea. “My time sense is shot to pieces. So looked like I was having a bad dream, huh?”

“Looked like you were wrestling Haystack Harrison for the California title, if you really want to know.

You were thrashing all over the place.” She yawned, stretched, and stood up. “Would have woken you up myself, but they say it’s better to let something like that play out, let the trigger images discharge fully or something. You don’t remember what you were dreaming?”

He shook his head and lied. “Not this time.”

“Well then, maybe you were dreaming about me.” She put her hands on her hips. Another grin. “Going a fifth round, you know.”

He matched the grin. “Don’t know, I think I’m pretty fully beaten into submission right now.”

“Yeah, I guess you are,” she said reflectively. “You certainly seemed like a guy knew what he wanted.”

He couldn’t argue with that—self-ejected from the screening room, tight with anger at Ertekin, he’d stood in the center of the operations space and when he’d spotted Rovayo propped on the edge of her desk and watching him, he’d drifted toward her like a needle tugging north.

“Problems?” she asked neutrally.

“You could say that.”

She nodded. Leaned back across her desk space to the datasystem and punched in a quit code. Looked back at him, dark eyes querying.

“Want to get a drink?”

“That’s exactly what I want,” he said grimly.

They left, rode an elevator stack up through the levels of the Alcatraz station until they could see sky and water through the windows. It felt like pressure easing. On the upper balconies, Rovayo led him to a franchise outfit called Lima Alpha that had chairs and tables with views across the bay. She got heavily loaded pisco sours for them both, handed him his, and sank into the chair opposite with a fixed, speculative gaze. He sipped the cocktail, had to admit it was pretty good. His anger started to ebb. They talked about nothing much, drank, soaked in the late-afternoon sunlight. Slipped at some point from Amanglic into Spanish. Their postures eased, sank lower in their chairs. Neither of them made an obvious move.

Finally, Rovayo’s phone wittered for attention. She grimaced, hauled it out, and held it to her ear, audio only.

“Yeah, what?” She listened, grimaced again. “On my way home, why?”

A male voice rinsed tinnily out of the phone, distant and indistinct.

“Roy, I haven’t been home in thirty, no wait”—she checked her watch—“thirty-five hours. I haven’t slept in twelve, and that was ninety minutes on the couch in operations…”

Crackled dispute. Rovayo glowered.

“…No, it fucking wasn’t…”

Coyle crackled some more. She cut him off.

“Look, don’t try to tell me how much sleep I’ve had, Roy. You don’t…”

Spit, spit, crack.

“Yeah, you’re right, we
are
all tired, and when you’re this fucking tired, Roy, you know what you do?

You get some sleep. I’m not going to pull another macho all-nighter just so you can play at old-school cop with Tsai. Outside of all those pre-mil period flicks you love so much, nobody cracks a case like that. You guys want to act like the New Math never fucking happened, be my guest. I’m going home.”

A more muted crackling. Rovayo glanced across at Carl and raised an eyebrow.

“No,” she said flatly. “Haven’t seen him. Doesn’t he have a phone? No? Well, try his hotel, maybe. See you in the morning.”

She killed the call.

“People are looking for you,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You want to be found?”

“Not particularly.”

“What I thought.” She drained what was left in her glass and gave him the speculative look again. “Well, I’d say your hotel is a bust right now. Want another drink at my place?”

He gave her back the look. “Is that a trick question?”

Alcatraz station ran smart-chopper shuttles for its staff, twenty-four seven to both sides of the bay. The Oakland service dropped off at a couple of points within an easy walk of Rovayo’s apartment. They walked, easily, pisco sours and the shared sense of truancy, laughing in the early-evening air. She asked him how come he spoke Spanish, he told her a little about Marisol, a little more about Mars and the Upland projects. As before, she seemed hungry for the detail. They touched, far more than her Hispanic background could write off as a cultural norm. Signals coming through clear and tight. They got up the stairs and in the door of her second-floor apartment a couple of grins short of the clinch.

The door swung shut behind them with a solid snap and the burble of electronic security engaging.

Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.

“So what do you want to do now?”

Still standing in front of him, hipshot, wide grin. Despite everything, he felt his sore and shrunken prick twitch at the sight.

“I thought you were tired.”

She shrugged. “So did I. Cyclical, I guess. Give me another couple of hours, I probably will be again.”

“You’re not Xtrasoming on me, are you?”

“No, I’m not fucking Xtrasoming on you.” Suddenly there was a real edge in her voice. “Do I look like I come from that kind of money? You think if my parents had the finance for built-in, I’d be working for RimSec?”

He blinked. Held up his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Rim States have got a reputation for that stuff, you know.”

She wasn’t listening. She gestured at herself with one splayed hand, motion robbed of any sensuality by the look on her face. “What I’ve got, I was either born with or I fucking worked to build. I came up through the ranks, it’s taken me eight years to make detective, and I didn’t take any fucking genetic shortcuts along the way. I didn’t have—”

“I said
okay,
Detective.”

It stopped her. She sank back onto the sofa, sat hunched at the edge with her arms resting on her thighs, hands dangling into the space between. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was something hunted in her expression.

“Sorry,” she muttered. “We’re all just a little fucking tired of the Asia Badawis and the Meredith Changs around here.”

“Badawi’s New York Sudanese,” he pointed out.

“Yeah? You want to see the house she’s got down the coast. Lot of fucking acreage for a foreigner.

Anyway, that’s not what I meant.”

“No?” Suddenly the postcoital intimacy was too tight, like binding on his limbs and a masking film across his face. Rovayo was abruptly the stranger she’d always been, but naked and in too close. He felt an unlooked-for visceral surge of nostalgia for sex with Sevgi Ertekin. “So you’re not a big fan of enhancement generally, then?”

She snorted. “You think
anyone’s
a big fan of Xtrasomes that doesn’t have them?”

“I am” But he knew at base he was trying to provoke her. “You think I’d be in this fucking mess if they’d had working artificial chromosome technology for humans forty years back? You think we’d be running around looking for some superannuated supersoldier turned cannibal fucking survivalist if thirteen tendency could be platform-loaded and switched on and off at need? Take a good look at me, Rovayo.

I’m the walking fucking embodiment of last century’s pre-Xtrasome jump-the-gun genetics.”

“I know.”

“I seriously doubt that.” Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. “You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.”

The Rim cop shrugged. “Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong color for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were?

A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?”

“I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.”

She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.

“You did
four months
in there? I thought—”

“Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on-off switch to fall back on.”

“You don’t think?” Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt, and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. “What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean,
really
know?”

He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.

“Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think
that
means anything.”

He gestured. “Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.”

It got him a thin, unamused smile. “Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.” She sat back in the sofa. “I’m a bonobo.”

He stared. “No, you’re fucking not.”

“No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?”

“No, but—”

“I’m not full. My mother’s the hundred percent deal, she used to work escort for a Panama agency, met my father when he was on a fishing trip down there. He smuggled her out.”

“Then you’re not a bonobo.”

“Half of me is.” Said defiantly, jaw tight, eyes locked with his. “Read your Jacobsen.
Inherited traits will be an unknown factor for generations to come
. Quote, unquote.”

Something happened to the room. A dense, deafening quiet sat behind her voice, washed in like a tide when she stopped talking.

“Does Coyle know?” he asked, for something to break the stillness.

“What do you think?”

And quiet again.

Finally, her mouth crimped at one corner. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I look at what I am, the way I react to things, and then I look at
her,
and I just don’t know. My old man tells me she never fit in down there, never was submissive the way bonobos are supposed to be. He says that she was different from all the others, that’s why he picked her out. I don’t know whether to believe that shit or write it off to rose-tinted romantic fucking nostalgia.”

Carl thought back to the bonobos he’d seen in the transit camps in Kuwait and Iraq, the ones you couldn’t get away from on R&R in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some that he’d talked to, one or two he’d fucked. And back in London, Zooly’s friend from the club, Krystalayna, who always claimed she was but never showed him any proof that wasn’t fan-site fantasy bullshit.

“I think,” he said carefully, “you don’t want to confuse submissive with maternal or nonviolent. Most of the bonobos I ever ran into knew how to get what they wanted about as well as anyone else.”

“Yeah.” Violence rose simmering in her voice. “I know how to give a pretty good blow job myself. Don’t you think?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.” A sour smile in Carl’s direction. “Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck
with,
even the
way
you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that,
all the time
?”

He nodded. “Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.”

“I’m a good cop,” she said urgently. “You don’t last in RimSec if you’re not. I’ve shot and killed three men in the line of duty, I don’t lose sleep over any of them. I mean, I got sick at the time, went through the counseling like everyone else, but after that I was fine. I’ve got commendations, early promotion to special cases, clearance rates that—”

“Rovayo, stop it.” He held up a hand, surprised at how weary the sudden mirroring of his younger self in her was making him feel. “I told you, I know. But you’re going about this the wrong way. You don’t have to justify yourself to anyone except you. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

She smiled the hard, humorless smile again. “Spoken like a true variant thirteen. Pretty obvious you’ve never had to face a genetic suitability assessor.”

“I thought in the Rim—”

“Yeah, Rim States citizens have a lot of rights that way. But citizen or not, I’ve still got my Jacobsen license to live with. And before you say it, yes, that is confidential data, Charter-protected up the ass. But you waive your right to that protection when you sign up for RimSec.”

“And Coyle still doesn’t know about you?”

“No. Assessment comes as part of the standard officer vetting procedure. There’s no way for anyone to know I went through anything different from all the other grunts. Tsai knows, he’s my commanding officer, he’ll have the file. And there are a few others at divisional level, the ones who were on the vetting committee. But it’s more than any of their jobs are worth to let something like that leak.”

“You think if Coyle knew, he’d care?”

“I don’t know. You tell all your friends what you are?”

“I’m a thirteen,” he said with a straight face. “We don’t have any friends.”

She made the effort, laughed. There was some genuine amusement in it this time. “That why you’re here?”

“I’d have thought my reasons for being here were transparently obvious.”

“Well.” She tilted her head to one side. “I guess you did explain yourself pretty thoroughly earlier, yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Question remains, though.” Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg, and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. “What do you want to do now?”

He smiled.

“Got an idea,” he said.