Black Man (53 page)

Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.

He sat by the bed in shock.

For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.

“I look like shit,” she murmured. “Right?”

“You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?”

She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.

He sat by the bed.

He held her hand.

“Tell me a secret.”

“What?” He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds in the sheet.

Her face was in shadow.

“Come on,” she croaked. “You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?”

He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. “Thought you’d already worked that out.”

“Well, you tell me. Did I?”

He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years.
It’s another world,
it’s another time,
Sutherland had said once.
Got to learn to let it go
.

“You were close,” he admitted.

“How close? Come on, Marsalis.” A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. “Grant a dying woman a last wish.”

His mouth tightened.

“Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,” he said. “There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.”

“Which was?”

“Same as it always is. The human angle.”

“Oh, humans.” She laughed again, a little stronger now. “I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any farther than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?”

He smiled. “Right.”

“So which particular human did you finesse?”

“Neil Delaney.” Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. “He was Bradbury site administrator back then.”

“He’s on the oversight council now.”

“Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.” Carl found himself loosening up. Words were flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet.

“Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.”

“Mother
fucker
!” But it was the whispered ghost of outrage; you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.

“Yeah, well. Helps if you just think of it as outsourcing—NPH buying COLIN expertise under the table, probably cheaper than they could afford to do the surveys themselves. In market terms, it makes perfect sense. There’s a lot of planet to cover, not many people to do it. And the Chinese were just doing what they’ve always done—dangling enough dollars in the right places to get the West’s corporate qualms to go belly-up.”

“Somehow I don’t think the feeds would have seen it that way.”

“No. That’s the way we put it to Delaney.” Carl reflected, found he still got a faint warm glow from the recollection. “It was a good sting. He caved in completely. Gave us everything we asked for.”

“He sent you home.”

“Well, he opened up the security on the lottery system for us. Gave Gutierrez a clear run at it. So yeah, I won the lottery.”

“And what did Gutierrez get?”

Carl shrugged. “Cash. Favors. We had a few other players on the team as well, they all got paid.”

“But only you got to go home.”

“Yeah, well. Only one cryocap up for grabs, you know. And it was my sting, my operation from the start.

I put the crew together, I made it pretty clear from the start what I wanted out of the deal.”

“So.” She wheezed a little. He reached for the glass, held it to her lips, and cradled her head. The actions felt smooth with custom. “Thanks, that’s better. So you think Gutierrez was jealous. Fucked you after the event?”

“Maybe. Or Delaney asked him to do it, hoped I’d flip out before the rescue ship got there. You remember that guy who woke up on the way back from the Jupiter moon survey, back in the eighties?

Spitz, or something?”

“Specht. Eric Specht. Yeah, I remember.”

“He went crazy waiting for the rescue. Maybe Delaney hoped the same thing’d happen to me. Who knows?”

“You don’t know?”

“I know Gutierrez sent me a very scared mail once I made it back to Earth, said he’d had nothing to do with it. So maybe it was just a glitch. Or maybe Delaney hired another datahawk. Then again, Gutierrez always was a lying little fuck, so like I said, who knows?”

“You don’t care?”

He twisted a little in his seat, smiled at her. “There’s no
point
in caring, Sevgi. It’s a different planet.

Another world, another time. What was I going to do—go
back
there? Just for revenge? I’d put the whole of my last year on Mars into scamming my way back to Earth. Sometimes, you know, you’ve just got to let go.”

Beneath the covers, she drew into herself a little. “Yeah,” she whispered. “I guess that’s the truth.”

They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her.

“Why’d you come back, Carl?” she asked him softly.

He made a crooked grin in the gloom. “Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.”

“But you were free there.” She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. “You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.”

“Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy-thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.” He shrugged. “Pretty good odds.”

“And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?” She craned forward in the bed, halfway to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. “What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?”

Another shrug, another crooked grin. “Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.”

She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.

“I don’t believe you,” she said when she’d gotten her breath back. “All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?”

He hesitated. “It’s not that important, Sevgi.”

“It is to me.”

Footsteps down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.

“Sutherland,” he said.

“Your sensei.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. “See, there’s a point you get to with
tanindo.
A level where it stops being about
how
to do it, becomes all about
why
. Why you’re practicing, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.”

“You didn’t know why?” She puffed a breathless laugh. “Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?”

Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.

“Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,” he said distantly. “You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.”

“Sutherland’s a thirteen, too, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So how come he managed it?”

Carl nodded. “Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.”

“And that was?”

“He told me to make a list, keep it to myself, and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.”

“You didn’t go for the round dozen?”

“The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.” He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. “Nine of those, I realized I needed to be on Earth to do.”

The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out the window.

“Have you done them all yet?” she asked quietly.

“No. Not yet.” He cleared his throat, frowned. “But I’m getting through them. And it does work.

Sutherland was right.”

For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched around to face him again.

“You want to hear a secret of mine?”

“Sure.”

“Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide-eyed and innocent.” She coughed a little. “Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could
have set it in motion.”

She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilized again.

He leaned in closer. “So who’d you want to kill?”

“Amy fucking Westhoff,” she said bitterly. “Fucking bitch who killed Ethan.”

“You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.”

“Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at City Hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in Datacrime?”

“Vaguely.”

“That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.”

“You think she knew what he was?”

“I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.”

“Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.”

That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.

“I don’t believe she knew back then,” Sevgi said finally. “Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did, too, if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana.
The Truth About Thirteens,
how to recognize one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, free phone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. ’Are You Sleeping with a Thirteen—Thirteen Telltale Signs That Let You Know.’ Fucking bullshit like that.”

She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated.

Voice impatient.

“Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.”

“She knew about the pregnancy?”

“Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.” Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. “That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—”

“So, not his surrogate then?”

“No. That was finished business, as far as he was concerned. He never wanted to see her again. Never talked about her to me. But he was hung up about finding Patti. The baby really kicked him into action.”

Carl saw the link. “You think he went to Westhoff to do the searches?”

“I don’t know. But he went to Datacrime, I know that much because he told me he was going to. They’ve got the best machines in the city for that kind of work, and he knew quite a few people there, not just Amy.” He saw the way her fists clenched where they lay on the bed. “But Amy knew. She came up to me on the street, congratulated me on the baby, said something about how it was great Ethan was getting back in touch with his family. I
told
Ethan that, but—” She rolled her head back and forth on the pillow.

“—like I said, we got so fucking complacent about everything.”

“Is there any actual evidence Westhoff tipped off UNGLA?”