Black Man / Thirteen

Norton gri

“Is that so?” An attempted smile wavered on the COLIN director’s face for a moment. “Ironic, then, that he provided both the agents of my death and the means to foil them. Ironic, too, that you, Mr. Marsalis, should both save my life and then bring everything tumbling down around me. But then, that has always been the double-edged blade that your kind offered us, from the very begi

Carl listened to the lilt of imagery in Ortiz’s voice and thought abruptly of Manco Bambarén’s ma

“Where is Onbekend?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know.” Maybe Carl twitched forward, because Ortiz’s voice tightened a little with anxiety. “Really, I don’t. Believe me, if I knew—”

“Jeff Norton said he’d gone back to the altiplano. Back to Bambarén. That’s where you would have contacted him in the begi

“Yes, but through Bambarén’s organization. In the end, I could only leave messages. It was he who came to me, here in New York one night, like a ghost through the security around my home.” Ortiz stared away through the window and shivered a little. “Like something I had summoned up. I should have known then, all those lessons our myths and legends scream at us, time and again. Never summon up what you ca

“You must have had direct contact with him after that,” Carl said pragmatically. “You set him on me in San Francisco, after the Bulgakov’s Cat arrests.”

Ortiz tried another smile. It guttered and died. “Believe me, Mr. Marsalis, I tried harder than you’ll ever know to prevent that. I am not an ungrateful man, and you had saved my life. But once decided, Onbekend is a force of nature. You had already threatened the object of his affections in Arequipa; he would not take less than your death. I tried to move you out of range, I had UNGLA attempt to recall you, but it seems you are in your way no less stubborn than any other of your kind. You would not shift. And Onbekend was closing on you too fast for me to do anything else.”

The shock sparked in him. “You had di Palma call me?”

“Yes, Mr. Marsalis.” Ortiz sighed. “And not only then. From the very begi

Carl remembered the UNGLA clinic in Istanbul. Mehmet Tuzcu and his diplomatic attempts at extraction. His own refusal to shift, the weak fistful of reasons he threw out, like sand in his own eyes. But it had always been Sevgi Ertekin, he knew, even then.

“Greta Jurgens is Onbekend’s?” he asked distractedly.

“So it would appear. A curious match, is it not? But then they do at least have in common that they are both objects for the hormonal hatred the rest of humanity seems constantly to need a target for.”

Norton was dealing with something else, staring at Ortiz. “You’re pulling favors with UNGLA already? You’ve got your hooks in that far?”

“Tom, I have a secure nomination for secretary general. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.” The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer. “Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and cooperative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all of that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation-state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.”

Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

“One more year,” said Ortiz urgently. “That’s all I need, and I can continue that work from the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the General Assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past—not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, supera

Carl thought briefly of Toni Montes, imagined her fighting Onbekend with the decayed vestiges of her combat skill, then letting go and dying to keep the thirteen away from her husband and children. He wondered if she’d thought of smoking ruins in Wyoming as she stood there waiting for the bullet, or only the children she would never see walk through the door again.

He wondered what he’d have to picture when the time came for him.

Elena Aguirre, whispering behind him.

The quiet, filling him up…

“You’re full of shit, Ortiz.” The rasp of Norton’s voice pulled him out of it. “You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were ru

“No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time.” Ortiz, pitching his tone raised but reasonable. Arguing his point in good faith. “You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.”

Norton jolted forward, face tight with rage. He gripped the arms of Ortiz’s wheelchair, pushed it back half a meter before the autobrake cut in. Carl saw tiny specks of spittle hit Ortiz in the face as the COLIN exec yelled at his boss.

“A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries? Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?”

Carl pulled him back. “Get a grip, Tom. This isn’t what we’re here for.”

But the force had already gone out of Ortiz’s face, like a candle flame blown out by Norton’s rage. Suddenly the wheelchair held only an ill old man, shaking his head in weary admission.

“I…was…young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are.” Ortiz shifted his gaze to Carl, grew animated once more. “There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when the explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture our society apart from the differential.”