Black Man / Thirteen

Knowing there wasn’t one.

CHAPTER 48

Afterward, the COLIN exec came to find him in the garden. Carl hadn’t said he was going there, but it wouldn’t have taken a detective to work it out. The benches around the fountain had become a standard haunt for all of them over the past few days, familiar with habitual use. It was where they went when the weight of the hospital pressed down on them, when the antiseptic-scented, nano-cleansed air grew too hard and arid to breathe. Norton slumped onto the bench beside him like someone getting home to a shared house and hitting the sofa. He stared into the sunlit splash of the fountain and said nothing at all. He’d cleaned up, but his face still looked feverish from the crying.

“Any trouble?” Carl asked him.

Norton shook his head numbly. His voice came out mechanical. “They’re making some noise. The COLIN mandate should cover it. Ertekin’s talking to them.”

“So we’re free to go.”

“Free to…?” The exec’s brow furrowed, uncomprehending. “You’ve always been free to go, Marsalis.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Norton swallowed. “Listen, there’s the funeral. Arrangements. I don’t know if—”

“I’m not interested in what they do with her corpse. I’m going to find Onbekend. Are you going to help me?”

“Marsalis, listen—”

“It’s a simple question, Norton. You watched her die in there. What are you going to do about it?”

The COLIN exec drew a shuddering breath. “You think killing Onbekend is going to make things better? You think that’ll bring her back?”

Carl stared at him. “I’m going to assume that’s rhetorical.”

“Haven’t you had enough yet?”

“Enough of what?”

“Enough of killing whatever you can get your fucking hands on.” Norton came off the bench, stood over him. The words hissed out like vented poison gas. “You just took Sevgi’s life in there, and all you can think of to do is go look for someone else to kill? Is that all you fucking know how to do?”

Across the gardens, heads turned.

“Sit down,” Carl said grimly. “Before I break your fucking neck for you.”

Norton gri

“You want to break my fucking neck.” He gestured up. “Here it is, my friend. Right fucking here.”

He meant it. Carl closed his eyes and sighed. Opened them and looked at Norton again, nodded slowly.

“All right.” He cleared his throat. “There are two ways to look at this, my friend. See, we can do the civilized, feminized, constructive thing and work a long by-the-book investigation that may or may not lead us eventually back to Manco Bambarén and the altiplano and Onbekend. Or we can take your COLIN authorization and a little hardware, and we can fly down there and set fire to Manco’s machine.”

Norton levered himself upright again. He shook his head. “And you think that’s going to make him cave in? Just like that?”

“Onbekend is a thirteen.” Carl wondered fleetingly if he shouldn’t try harder with Norton, lever his voice up out of the dead tone he could hear in it. “Manco Bambarén may have hired him, or he may just be doing business with the people who did, but whatever the co

“We?”

“Slip of the tongue. I’m going anyway. You can come with me or not, as your nonvariant conscience sees fit. Be easier for me if you did, but if you don’t, well.” Carl shrugged. “I promised Gutierrez I’d go back to Mars to kill him, and I meant it. The altiplano’s a lot easier gig than that.”

“I could stop you.”

“No, you couldn’t. First sign of trouble from you, I’m on an UNGLA bounce out of here. They practically tried to drag me onto the shuttle last week. They’ll jump at the chance if I call them. Then I’ll just double back to Peru on my own ticket.”

“COLIN could still make your life very tough down there.”

“Yeah, they usually do. Occupational hazard. It never stopped me before.”

“Hard man, huh?”

“Thirteen.” Carl looked at him levelly. “Norton, this is what’s wired into me, it’s what my body chemistry’s good for. I am going to build a memorial to Sevgi Ertekin out of Onbekend’s blood, and I will cut down anyone who gets in my way. Including you, if you make me.”

Norton sank back onto the bench.

“You think that’s just you?” he muttered. “You think we don’t all feel that way right now?”

“I wouldn’t know. But feeling and doing are two very different things. In fact, there’s a guy back on Mars called Sutherland who tells me humans have built their entire civilization in the gap between the two. I wouldn’t know about that, either. What I do know is that an hour ago in there”—Carl gestured toward the hospital—“Murat Ertekin felt he wanted to put his daughter out of her misery. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I won’t judge him for that, just like I won’t judge you for not coming with me, if that’s the choice you make. Maybe this stuff just isn’t wired into you people as deep. That’s what they told us at Osprey, anyway. That we were special because we were able to do what the society that created us no longer had the stomach for.”

“Right,” Norton said bitterly. “Believe everything the recruiting poster says, why don’t you.”

“I didn’t say I did, I said that’s what they told us. I don’t necessarily think they were right. This much is true—it certainly didn’t work out well, not for us or for you people.” Carl sighed. “Look, I don’t know, Norton. Maybe the fact that you don’t have the stomach for single-minded slaughter anymore, the fact that you’re forgetting how to do it—maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you a better human being than me, a better member of society, a better man even. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t care because for me it isn’t relevant. I am going to destroy Onbekend, I am going to destroy anyone who stands in my way. Now, are you coming with me or not?”

In the hotel, he found mundane things to do. The last four days of Sevgi’s life had frozen his own existence in its tracks; he’d done nothing awake but sit by her and wait. He’d been in the same set of clothes since the night she was shot, and even the Marstech fabrics were starting to look shabby. He bundled them up and sent them for cleaning. Ordered something similar from the hotel catalog and wore it out into the street when he went looking for a phone. He supposed that he could have gotten phones easily enough from the hotel along with the clothing, but a habitual caution stopped him. And besides, he needed to walk. Away from or toward what, he wasn’t quite sure, but the need sat in the pit of his empty stomach like tiny bubbles, like frustration rising.

“Bambarén’s cousin’s a bust,” Norton had told him on their way back into town. The COLIN exec slumped in the back of the autocab as if broken at the joints. “So if you’re looking for a way in, that isn’t it. We got a name, Suerte Ferrer, street hook Maldición, string of small-time stuff on the fringes of the Jesusland familias. Did his three years in South Florida for gang-related, but he’s out right now and he’s dropped right off the scope.”

“The n-dji

“He’s gone to ground somewhere in the Republic, and I can’t get an n-dji