Black Man (49 page)

The RimSec medical team took her out in a stretcher, got her in the helicopter. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened; one minute Marsalis was cradling her in the corpse-strewn shithole bar, the next they were out in the chilly air and she was looking straight up at the shrouded stars. Awareness was a flapping cloth behind her eyes, there then gone, gone then back again. She tried to crane her neck and see what was going on around her, but it was all a blur of shouts and lights and hurrying busy figures. The clatter of the helicopter rotors just added to what was now a splitting headache.

“Sevgi?”

Oh, Marsalis. There he was.

“It’s okay, sir. We’ll take it from here.”

“You tell them it’s a Haag slug.” She couldn’t work out why he was shouting, unless it was the racket of the rotor blades. Nothing seemed to connect up the way it should. She thought maybe she’d lost a lot of blood after all. “You tell them they’ve got to get the smartest antivirals they have into her, right now.”

“We know that, sir. We’ve called ahead.”

She squinted in the glare from the helicopter’s landing lights. It hurt to do it. She just about made out Marsalis’s bulk. He had one of the paramedics by the shoulders, was shaking him.

“Don’t you fucking let her die,” he was yelling. “I will kill you and everyone you care for if you let her die.”

Scuffling. The helicopter shifted about, lifted, and wheeled away. Studded lights all over the hills of the city, the rise and fall of it, the tilting horizon. As if she weren’t fucking dizzy enough already.

And she seemed to have been hanging on forever. Not just this shit, whatever it was, the whole
Horkan’s Pride
case. The whole fucking thing with Marsalis, the wrecked attempt to make something of it. The repeated calls to her father, the stilted, carefully polite conversations and the barrier she could no longer break through. The memories of Ethan, the battle for custody and reimplantation of Murat-to-be, the serried ranks of lawyers and their fucking waiting rooms. The struggle to hold on to faith, to go back to the mosque and find whatever it was that welled up out of Rabia’s poetry and Nazli Valipour’s writing, and Meltem’s kindly smiling patience. The search for reasons to go on that didn’t come in bottles or foil wafers.

It marched through her mind in tawdry procession, and she was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the effort.

Better to just watch the sway and twinkle of the city lights below, go where the ride was taking her, listen to the motors hammering out their white-noise refrain, like lying next to a waterfall that smelled ever so slightly of oil and hot metal. The tilting night sky, sense of the sea, flat and black beyond. Not so bad, when you thought about it, not really. Not so hard.

She gave up holding on not long after that, just let go and slid away down the gradient of her own immense tiredness.

The problems we address here are general to humanity. No amount of privileged withdrawal, segregation, or hierarchical exclusion will serve to insulate any of us from a process of fallout that has already begun. If we are arrogant, if we fail to acknowledge this generality and to act on it while there is still time—then the price that we pay for our failure will be horrific, and it will be levied on us all.

—Jacobsen Report,
August 2091

Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing color into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of gray toward a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the black man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse for human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical center knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anesthetic—the slow, sawtoothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.

Out on Highway 101, the occasional brushing sound of nighttime traffic was building to a steady background murmur. Birdsong made self-important, twittering aural counterpoint, like handfuls of brightly colored pebbles tossed continually onto a broad gray conveyor belt. Human voices splashed between with increasing strength and frequency, feet crunched in gravel like a grave being dug. Day stormed the walls Carl had built around himself in the cold hours, smashed and battered down the simplicity of his vigil with human detail. He looked up out of the wreckage with a quiet and implacable hatred for everything he could see and hear.

“Happy now?”

Norton stood in front of him, not in reach. He’d slept in his clothes somewhere; even the Marstech jeans were creased.

He seemed to be genuinely waiting for an answer.

“No. You?”

There was a stone bench on the other side of the path, twin to the one Carl was using. Norton lowered himself onto it.

“You’re not going to get away with this,” he said woodenly. “I’m going to have you sent back to South Florida State. I’m going to have you sent to Cimarron or Tanana for the rest of your fucking life.”

By the look of him, he’d been crying. Carl felt a brief stab of envy.

“How is she?” he asked.

“You’re joking, of course. You
fuck
.”

The mesh pounded up out of his desolation. He lifted a shaky, loose-fingered hand, pointed it. “Don’t push me, Norton. I could do with killing something right now, and it might as well be you.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Norton stared down at his own hands as if assessing their suitability for the task. “But that isn’t going to help Sevgi.”

“Nothing’s going to help Sevgi, you fucking prick!” There was a brutal pleasure somewhere in the snapped words, like biting down on a mouth ulcer until it split and bled. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s a Haag slug.”

“Yes, they told me. They also tell me Stanford has the best immune system repair clinic on the West Coast. Cutting-edge techniques.”

“It won’t matter. It’s Falwell. Nothing short of death stops that motherfucker.”

“That’s right, give up why don’t you? Very fucking British.”

Carl stared at him for a couple of seconds, made a disgusted spitting noise, and looked away. A young woman went by pushing a bike. The small black backpack she wore had a smiley face pinned to it, winking a merciless yellow in the fresh morning light. whatever you are, a tinselly patch above the badge suggested brightly, be a good one.

“Norton,” he said quietly. “How is she?”

The COLIN executive shook his head. “They’ve stabilized her. That’s all I know. They’ve got an n-djinn mapping the viral shift.”

Carl nodded. Sat in silence.

Finally, Norton asked him. “How long has she got?”

“I don’t know.” Carl drew breath. Let it out by shuddering increments. “Not long.”

More quiet. More people went past, talking intimate irrelevancies. Living their lives.

“Marsalis, how the fuck did this guy get hold of a Haag gun in the first place?” There was a high, desperate note in Norton’s voice now, like a child protesting an unfair punishment. “They’re illegal everywhere I know, incredibly expensive to get hold of on the black market. Lethally dangerous in the wrong hands. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred people on the planet with a Haag carry permit.”

“Yeah. For anyone with major male tendency, you just described the perfect object of desire.” Carl drew on the collateral detail like dying embers in a fire, huddling to the warmth and distraction it offered. “Haag gun’s infinitely attractive to anyone even remotely enamored of weaponry. Guy I knew in Texas once offered me half a million dollars for mine. Cash in a suitcase.”

“Okay, look.” The COLIN exec rubbed hands over his face. Dragged his head up through his fingers.

“Say this guy, this Onbekend, he somehow gets hold of a Haag gun because it makes his dick hard. He carries it into a situation where he runs the risk of arrest or a shoot-out with RimSec, and just before the action starts he leaves the damn thing in the
car
? There’s no sense in that.”

“Yes there is.” He’d had the whole night to think it through, sitting in a chair outside the intensive-care unit and fitting together the irreversible march of events that put Sevgi Ertekin in a support cocoon on the other side of the biosealed doors. He had his solution before dawn, and it stared him in the face like a skull, drove him out of the cleanly kept corridors and away, down into the gardens and their graying light.

“Onbekend brought the Haag gun for me, because he thought he was going to have to walk me out of the hotel and get me somewhere they could fake my suicide. They couldn’t afford a murder, they’re trying to run silent right now. And Onbekend couldn’t afford to sedate me, because it might show up in an autopsy. He was looking to back me up and push me around fully conscious, and that’s a tricky thing to do with a thirteen. We don’t scare easily, and we’re generally not that afraid of dying. But there are ways and ways to die. I might have tried to jump almost any ordinary weapon, even against the odds. Not the Haag gun.”

“He told you that. That he was planning to fake your suicide?”

“Yeah, he told me.” Carl stared back into the memories. “Above and beyond anything he was hired to do, Onbekend hated me. I’m used to that from other thirteens, it’s standard. But this was a little more. He wanted me stripped down before I died. Wanted me to know how stupid I’d been, how far ahead and above me he was. How pitiful I was going to look with my brains blown out by my own hand somewhere.”

“But they shelved the suicide.”

“Yeah.” Carl drew another hard breath. Onbekend’s remembered scorn cut through him. “They didn’t need it. I went walkabout, and the plan changed. It was going to be enough to fake a street death instead. No need for the Haag as a threat, and it would have been entirely the wrong weapon to actually kill me with. Onbekend left it in the teardrop, only used it on Sevgi because he didn’t have anything else at hand.”

Norton stared at him. “I’m sure that’ll be a great comfort to her.”

Carl looked tiredly back at him. “You want to blame me for this, Norton? Need a target for your impotent male rage? Go right ahead, hate me. I’m used to it, I’m not going to notice the extra weight. Just don’t push your luck, because I’m tired and I will break you in half if you cross the line.”

“If you hadn’t—”

“If I hadn’t gone out, it would have been different. I know. They would have taken me in the hotel, walked me out, and Sevgi Ertekin would still have been there when it happened because, Norton, she was coming to see me anyway. Maybe that’s what’s really eating you, huh?”

“Oh fuck you.” But it was said wearily, and he looked away.

“You want to know the truth, Norton? Why she was coming to see me?”

“No, I don’t.”

“She was coming to clear your name.”

The COLIN exec looked back at him as if Carl had just slapped him.

“What?”

“I didn’t trust you, Norton, any more than a Jesusland presidential address. Those skaters were outside Sevgi’s place that morning, and you were the only one who knew where I was. I figured you had some agenda that involved wiping me off the landscape.”

“
What?
I fucking got you out of jail in the first place, Marsalis. It was
my
call,
my
initiative. Why the hell would I—”

“Hey, call it thirteen paranoia.” Carl sighed. “Anyway, seems last night Sevgi got a call from NYPD: they’d picked up the third skater and he talked. I was never the target. Ortiz was. Sevgi was coming to tell me that, because she couldn’t bear the idea of your name being smeared.”

Norton said nothing.

“Feel any better now?”

“No.” It was a whisper.

“She never wore it as a theory anyway. Slapped me down when I tried to sell it to her. I don’t know if you guys were ever an item—”

“We weren’t.” Snapped out, brittle and harsh.

“No, well, whatever you had, it still went pretty deep, apparently.”

Long silence. Norton looked around the garden as if he might see some kind of explanation hanging up in a shrub, sparkling there in the fountain.

“She was a cop,” he muttered finally. “Two and a half years in COLIN, but I don’t think she ever really changed.”

“Yeah. She was a cop. That’s why she backed you, her partner, against anything I could sell her. And that’s why she went out into the street after Onbekend, and that’s why she got shot.”

More quiet. Direct sunlight reached the bottom of the buildings, gilded the gravel. There was some real warmth seeping into the day now. A group of students went past in a hurry, late for something. A woman in a blue doctor’s tunic came toward them from the acute unit building.

“Which of you is Marsalis?” she asked peremptorily. Under close-cropped black hair, her Chinese features were smudged with tiredness.

Carl raised his hand. The doctor nodded.

“You’d better come in. She’s asking for you.”

Norton looked away.

The v-format was state-of-the-art and took less time than he’d expected to cajole his thirteen nervous system into relaxing and accepting the illusion. He blinked in behind floor-to-ceiling sliding glass doors.

On the other side there was a garden, less arid and stylized than the one he’d been sitting in back in the real world. Here, there was a border of lush growth around the well-kept lawn, nodding ferns and draped foliage, tall, straight trees beyond. A pair of wooden easy chairs were set out in the center.

Sevgi Ertekin sat in one of them, loosely robed in a slate-and-blue kimono with embroidered Arab characters, waiting. There was a book in her lap, but she held it closed, fingers loosely inserted between the pages; her head was lifted, as if listening. She was staring at something else, as if someone already stood there on the other side of the garden, waiting as well.

The glass slid back soundlessly, and he stepped through. The motion caught her eye, or the system was wired to chime the arrival of visitors. She saw him, lifted an arm in greeting.

“Nice, isn’t it,” she called out. “No expense spared for dying COLIN executives, you know.”

“So I see.” He walked to her, stood looking down into her face. The system had allowed no trace of her illness into its imaging.

She gestured. “Come on, then. Sit down, soak it up.”

He sat.

“I guess I’m looking a lot better in here than I do for real,” she said brightly, treading on the heels of his own thoughts with an accuracy that made him blink. “Right?”

“I don’t know. They haven’t let me in to see you yet.”

“Well, they haven’t shown me a mirror yet, either. Then again, I haven’t asked. I figure the idea is to make you feel as good about yourself as possible, hope that kicks your will to live into high gear, boosts your immune system, and gets you out of their expensive acute-care unit as soon as humanly possible.” She stopped abruptly, as if unplugged, and he saw for the first time how scared she really was. She licked her lips. “Of course, that’s not a dynamic that applies to me.”

He said nothing, could think of nothing to say. A brook chuckled to itself somewhere beyond the foliage.

A couple of small birds hopped about on the grass, closer to the humans than would have been likely in the real world. Sunlight struck through the surrounding trees at a high angle.

“My father’s flying in from New York,” she said, and sighed. “I’m not looking forward to that.”

“I don’t suppose he is, either.”

She ghosted a chuckle, barely louder than the brook. “No, I guess not. We haven’t been getting along all that well the last few years. Don’t see each other much, don’t really talk. Not the way we used to, anyway.” Another faint laugh. “He’s probably going to think I did this just to get his attention. Deathbed reconciliation. What a fucking drama queen, huh?”

Carl felt his mouth tighten, back teeth locking down with involuntary force. It cost him more effort than he’d thought to keep looking at her.

“Norton here?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He tried to smile. It was as if he’d forgotten which muscles to use. “I think he’s kind of hurt you asked to see me first.”

Ertekin pulled a face. “Yeah, well. Be time for everybody, it’s not like I’ve got a lot of friends.”

He took an interest in one of the brightly colored birds around his feet.

“Marsalis?”

He looked up reluctantly. “Yeah?”

“How much time
have
I got?”

“I don’t know,” he said quickly.

“But you know how the Haag system works.” Urgency in her voice like pleading. “You’ve used the fucking thing often enough, you must have some idea.”

“Sevgi, it depends. They’re treating you with state-of-the-art anti-virals here—”

“Yeah, just like fucking Nalan.”

“Sorry?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Look, you’re not going to scare me any more than I already am.

Tell me the truth. They can’t stop it, can they?”

He hesitated.

“Tell me the fucking truth, Carl.”

He met her eyes. “No. They can’t stop it.”

“Good. Now tell me how long I’ve got.”

“I don’t know, Sevgi. Honestly. They can probably back it up with what they have here, maybe model it enough to…”

He saw the look on her face and stopped.

“Weeks,” he said. “A couple of months at most.”

“Thank you.”

“Sevgi, I—”

She raised a hand, made a smile for him. She got out of the chair.

“Going to walk down to the river. Want to come? They told me I’m not supposed to exert myself, even in here. Stimulus feedback, apparently it affects the nervous system almost like the real thing. But I think I’d like to walk a little while I still can.” She held up the book. “And there’s only so much fifteenth-century poetry you can handle without a break, you know.”

He read the title off the antique russet-and-green binding.
The Perfumed Garden by
Ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi.

“Any good?”

“The aphrodisiac recipes are shaky, but the rest is pretty solid, yeah. Always promised myself I was going to get around to reading it one day.” Again the brief flicker of fear in her eyes, rapidly quashed.

“Better late than never, right?”

Again, he had no answer, not for what she said or for what he’d seen in her eyes. He followed her across the lawn toward the sound of the water and helped her hold back the hanging branches that blocked passage. They eased through, bent-backed, and stood up in sun-dappled foliage on the bank of the shallow stream. Sevgi stared down at the flow for a while as it slipped past them.

“I need to ask you a couple of favors,” she said quietly.

“Sure.”

“I need you to stay on here. I know I said you were free to go, I know I more or less sent you away, but—”

“Don’t worry.” His voice thickened. He had to damp down the surge of fury. “I’m not going to just walk away from this. Onbekend is a dead man walking. And so is whoever sent him.”

“Good. But that’s not what I meant.”

“No?”

“No. With what’s happened now, there’s more than enough to keep the case wide open. It’d be good if you were there to help out after I’m…” She made a limp gesture at the flow of the stream. “But that’s not what I’m asking you for. This is, well, it’s more selfish.”

“I’m alive because of you, Sevgi,” he said tonelessly. “That buys you a lot of indulgence.”

She turned. She touched his hand.

There was a brief, visceral shock to it; tactile contact was one of the wrinkles the technology still hadn’t really ironed out, and format etiquette tended against it as a result. Outside of the crude and curiously unsatisfying porn virtuals he’d used on base in the military, he doubted he’d touched anyone in format more than half a dozen times in his life, and most of those would have been accidental collisions. Now he felt Sevgi Ertekin’s hand as if through gloves, and a twitching sense of frustration rose to fan the embers of his fading anger.

“I need you to stay with me,” she said. She looked down at where their hands met, as if trying to make out some detail she wasn’t sure was there. “It’s going to be hard. Murat—that’s my father—he’s going to be hurting too much. Norton’s too conflicted. Everyone else is too far off, I’ve pushed them all away anyway, since Ethan. I wouldn’t know what to say to them. That leaves you, Carl. You’re clean. I need you to help me do this.”

Clean?

“You said two favors,” he reminded her.

“Yeah.” She dropped his hand, went back to staring at the flow of the water. “I think you know what the other one’s going to be.”

He stood beside her and watched the stream flow.

“All right,” he said.