Black Man / Thirteen

Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her: cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.

The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war zone. Every available counter was piled with used dishes. Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris—dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of sigara börek pastry, eggplant and tomato in oil gone cold, half a lahmacun left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried-out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.

Good party.

A few of her departing guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It had been a good party.

Yeah—pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterward.

Why was that, Sev?

She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.

You know why.

The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.

The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.

“I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?”

Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.

She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.

The first wrong thing was the car.

Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sunbathed on. He was grin-proud of the fucking thing, too, which was odd given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalizing the catalog of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland. Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.

Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realized it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.

Today he wasn’t driving it.

Instead, as she let herself out onto the street—still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders—he unfolded from the backseat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognizably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of gray in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun; the ta

He gave her a trademark slanted grin.

“Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.”

“Yeah, right.”

“What time’d you wind it up in the end?” He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.

“Don’t recall. Late.”

She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th, and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.

“What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?”

“Not going to the office, Sev.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed to yesterday. So why are we headed east?”

Norton gri

The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She really hadn’t been looking forward to the gut-swooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through her system. And the thought of starting an investigation in this state—with her abused brain and belly bleating protest at the zero g and the Earth rolling past somewhere sickeningly far below—already had her palms lightly greased with sweat.

“Right. So you want to tell me where we are going?”

“Sure. JFK suborb terminal. Got the eleven o’clock shuttle to SFO.”

Sevgi sat up. “What happened, Horkan’s Pride overshoot the docking slot?”

“You could say that.” Norton’s tone was dry. “Overshot Kaku, overshot Sagan, splashed down about a hundred klicks off the California coast.”

“Splashed down? They’re not supposed to land those things.”

“Tell me about it. From what I hear, only the main crew section made it down in one piece. The rest is wreckage along a line from somewhere in Utah to the coast or burned up on reentry. The Rim authorities are having what’s left towed back to the Bay Area, where you and I will crack it open and dazzle them all with our lucid analysis of just what the fuck went wrong. Those are Nicholson’s words, by the way, not mine.”

“Yeah, I guessed.” Norton spoke four-letter words the way a miser spends wafers—when he was utterly inescapably driven to it or when they belonged to someone else. It seemed to be a linguistic rather than a moral quirk, though, because he evinced no apparent embarrassment or distaste when he quoted other people like this, or when Sevgi swore, which was a lot of the time these days.

“So how come you didn’t phone me earlier with this shit?”

“Believe me, I tried. You weren’t answering.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, so I covered for you with Nicholson, if that’s what you were wondering. Said you were somewhere downtown chasing leads from the Spring Street bust, you were going to meet me at the terminal.”

Sevgi nodded to herself. “Thanks, Tom. I owe you one.”

She owed him more than one, quite a lot more over the last two years, but neither of them would ever acknowledge it. The debt lay unspoken between them, like complicity, like family. And Nicholson, anyway, they both agreed was an asshole.

“You think any of them are still alive?” Norton wondered.

Sevgi stared out of the window at the traffic, marshaling facts from the file. “Horkan’s Pride is a five series. They built them to survive crash-landing at the Mars end, and there aren’t any oceans there to do it in.”

“Yeah, but that’s a lot less gravity to worry about on the way down.”