Black Man / Thirteen

Carl paced across the office to the bar. He stared down at the assembly of bottles and glasses. The Bayview tavern mapped itself onto his vision, drinking with Sevgi Ertekin, stolen whiskey from behind the bar, and the stink of gunfire still hanging in the air. He felt the swift skid of anger in his guts, wanted to smash everything in the cabinet, take one shattered bottle by the neck, go back to Jeff Norton with it and—

“N-dji

“You were winding up.” Realization etching wonder into Tom Norton’s tone. “Shutting the whole operation down and scattering.”

Carl turned back to face the sofa, empty-handed.

“When, Jeff? When, and why?”

Jeff Norton glanced across at his brother. “I’d have thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourself, Tom.”

The COLIN exec nodded. “You came out here, took up the Human Cost job in ’94. They were burying you, too. Had to be sometime around then.”

Jeff put down his latest clump of bloodied tissue, reached for more. There was a thin smile playing about his lips. A little more blood trickled down into the grin before he could soak it up.

“Little earlier in fact,” he said. “Thing like that has quite a momentum once it’s rolling, it takes awhile to brake. Say ’92 for the decision, early ’93 to cease operations. And we were all gone by the following year.”

Carl stepped closer. “I asked you why.”

The Human Cost director stared back up at him, dabbing at his nose. He seemed still to be smiling.

“Can’t you guess?”

“Jacobsen.”

The name fell off his lips, dropped into the room like an invocation. The era, ’89 to ’94, blazed across his memory in feed-footage flicker. Riots, the surging crowds and lines of armored police, the vehicles in flames. Pontificating holy men and ranting political pundits, UNGLA communiqués and speeches, and behind it all the quiet, balding figure of the Swedish commissioner, reading from his report in the measured tones of the career diplomat, like a man trying to deploy an umbrella in a hurricane. Words swept away, badly summarized, quoted, misquoted, taken out of context, used and abused for political capital. The awful, creeping sense that it did, after all, have something to do with him, Carl Marsalis, Osprey’s finest; that, impossible though it had once seemed, some idiot wave of opinion among the grazing cudlips really did matter now, and his life would be affected after all.

Jacobsen.

Oh yes, affected after all.

Covert heroes to paraded monsters in less than five years. The bleak pronouncements, the bleaker choices; the tracts, or the long sleep and exile to the endless tract of Mars, jostled toward one or the other by the idiot mob, like a condemned man swept forward toward a choice of gallows.

And the cryocap, chilly and constraining, filling slowly with gel as the sedatives took his impulse to panic away from him, the same way they’d taken his discarded combat gear at demob. The long sleep, falling over him like the shadow of a building a thousand stories tall, blotting out the sun.

Jacobsen.

Jeff Norton leaned forward for his glass again. “That’s right, Jacobsen. We weren’t sure what the Accords would actually look like in ’92; it was all still at a draft stage. But the writing was pretty fucking clearly on the wall. Didn’t take a genius to see the way things were going to fall.”

“But.” Tom Norton, shaking his head. “What’s that got to do with anything? Okay, you had Onbekend. But all these other people—Montes, Tanaka, and the rest. They weren’t variants, they were ordinary humans. You were an ordinary human. Why should Jacobsen have mattered?”

Carl stood over the Human Cost director and saw, vaguely, the shape of what was coming.

“It mattered,” he said evenly, “because of what they were doing. Right, Jeff? It wasn’t the perso

Jeff Norton shrugged and drained his cognac.

“Breeding,” he said.

His brother blinked. “Breeding what?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Tom, what do you think?” Jeff gestured violently, nearly knocked over the bottle. The cognac seemed to have gone to his head. “Breeding fucking variants. Like your friend here, like Nuying. Like everything we could lay our hands on over there.”

“Over there?” Carl asked from the depths of an immense, rushing calm. “You’re talking about the Chinese mainland?”

“Yeah.” Jeff kept the tissues loosely pressed to his nose, worked the cork on the bottle one-handed, poured himself another tumblerful. “Scorpion Response had been ru

Carl saw the way Tom Norton was looking around the office, dazed, stark disbelief smashed through with understanding.

“Human Cost. Promising material. You’re talking about people? Jesus Christ, Jeff, you’re talking about fucking people?”

His brother shrugged and drank. “Sure. People, live tissue culture, cryocapped embryos, lab notes, you name it. Small-scale, but we were into everything. We were a big unit, Tom. Lot of backing, lot of resources.”

“This is not possible.” Norton made a two-handed gesture as if pushing something away. “You’re telling us Human Cost was…you ran Human Cost as a, as some kind of pirate genetic testing program?”

“Not exactly, no. Human Cost was the back end, shell charity to cover the operation here in the Rim. It was a lot smaller then, back before we had official state funding, before I came out here to run it officially. Back then it was a guerrilla outfit. Couple of transit houses here and there, some waterfront industrial units down in San Diego. Scorpion Response were the sharp end, gathering the intelligence, going in and getting the goods.” Jeff stared through his brother at something else. “Setting up the actual labs and the camps.”

“Camps,” Norton repeated sickly. “Black labs, here in the Rim? I don’t believe you. Where?”

“Where do you think, little brother? Where do the Rim stick anything they don’t like the smell of?”

“Jesusland.” Carl nodded to himself. “Sure, why not? Just preempting Cimarron and Tanana, after all. Where’d you set up shop? Nevada? That’s nice and close to the fenceline. Utah, maybe?”

Jeff shook his head. “Wyoming. Big place, barely any population. No one to see what’s going on, no one to care, and state legislature in that part of the world will take your hand right off at the wrist if you offer good money for use of the land. We just told them it was another gene-modified crop project.” Still, the glassy, through-everything stare. “I guess that’s even the truth when you get right down to it, right? So. We took a couple of hundred square kilometers, power-fenced it in. Minefields and sca

“What happened to it all when you folded?” Carl asked quietly.

“Can’t you guess?”

The black man kicked out, smashed into Jeff Norton’s shin just below the knee. The Human Cost director yelped and hunched over. Carl grabbed his head by the hair and smashed his face down on the coffee table. Pulled back, smashed again—