Black Man / Thirteen

Carl looked at him for a while. “No,” he said finally. “She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.”

“That’s good.” A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. “Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.”

“I’m not your fucking brother.”

Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.

Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.

So.

He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men Are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Hall stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.

“Fifteen.”

He looked across at Onbekend. “What?”

“Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.”

“Fifteen, huh?”

“Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?”

“Three.” Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. “Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?”

Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. “Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips? No contest.”

Carl grimaced. “Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?”

“Nah, stay awhile. Gives us time to talk.”

Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. “We’ve got something to talk about?”

“Sure we do.” Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. “You still don’t get it, do you. Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“What we are.” The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. “Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.”

The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the gray matte surface of the weapon in his hands.

“But not us, right?”

“Fucking right, not us.” Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. “Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?”

Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

But let Onbekend talk his way out.

“Tell you how you get that,” the dying thirteen rasped. “How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis—we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.” More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. “Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cutoffs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?”

“Yeah, so did we,” Carl said somberly. “Remember.”

“They tried to contain us.” Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desperately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like forever. “But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.”

“If you say so.” Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving toward Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

“Yeah, I do fucking say so.” The other thirteen gri

“You aren’t,” Carl pointed out.

Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. “No, but you can.”

“I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.”

“Hey, you’re the lottery guy.” Onbekend was gasping now. “Telling me you don’t feel lucky?”

“I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.”

Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. “There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.”

He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

“You’ll show them,” he bubbled.

The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

Outside, Carl could hear Bambarén’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

It was almost as if she were there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

We all will.

Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock, and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines, and then slung it around his neck, adjusting the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.