Black Man / Thirteen

In the hotel, Sevgi sat and ate with Norton, food she didn’t want and conversation she wasn’t up to. The restaurant’s romantic low-lighting scheme felt like darkness crowding her eyes at the edges. The syn had crashed, definitively.

“How do you feel about this?” Norton asked her as she picked disinterestedly at an octopus salad.

“How do you think?”

It was deflection, something—yeah, the only fucking thing—she’d learned from the department-paid counseling sessions after Ethan and the rest of the shit came down. The specialist had sat across the room from her, smiling gently and pushing back every question she’d asked him with the same infuriating elicitation techniques. After a while, she started to do the same thing to him. Not helpful, she supposed, but it had brought the sessions to a rapid close, which was what she wanted. I can’t help you if you won’t help me, he’d said at the end, an edge of anger finally awake in his soporific, patient voice. He was missing the point. She didn’t want to be helped. She wanted to do damage, gashed red, bleeding, and screaming damage to all and any of the bland facets of social restraint that meshed her about like spiderweb.

“Nicholson’s probably going to kick,” Norton said quietly. “He’ll say you’re conflicted.”

“Yeah.”

“Not enjoying your octopus, then?”

“I’m not hungry.”

Norton sighed. “You know we can let this one go if you want, Sev. Tsai’s guys don’t want us here anyway, and RimSec would just love the chance to flex its secessional muscle. If this guy didn’t drown in the Pacific, he’s on their land now. Added to which, the fact he’s a thirteen pretty much makes it an UNGLA matter. Why don’t we just step back and let the UN and the Rim fight it out for jurisdiction.”

“No fucking way.” Sevgi tossed her chopsticks onto the plate. She sat back. “I didn’t join COLIN for an easy ride, Tom. I needed the money is all. And this is as good a way to earn it as busting black-market Marstech or chasing cultists away from the racks. Did you fucking see what he did to those bodies? Helena Larsen had a fucking life waiting for her when she got home. This is the first worthwhile thing I’ve done in over two years. This is ours.”

Norton looked at her in silence for a moment. Nodded. “All right. I’ll have Tsai upload the CSI files to COLIN New York. That should take the ambiguity out of the situation. What do you want to do about Coyle and Rovayo?”

“Retain them. Joint task force, indispensable local law enforcement support.” She found energy for a grin. “Should play well with the Rim media. COLIN fucks up and spills one of their transports into the Pacific, West Coast cops ride to the rescue. It’ll open some doors for us.”

“And save us some legwork.”

“Well, there’s that. You know the Bay Area pretty well, right? Got a sister here?”

Norton sipped at his wine. “Sister-in-law. Brother moved over here about fifteen years ago, he’s a special asylums coordinator with the Human Cost Foundation. You know, screening, social integration program. But it’s probably her you heard me talking about. Megan. We, uh, we get on pretty well.”

“You going to see them while we’re here?”

“Maybe.” Norton frowned into his drink. “How much of this are we going to let the media have?”

Sevgi yawned. “Don’t know. See how it goes. If you’re talking about the variant thirteen thing, I vote we keep a lid on it.”

“If I’m talking about the variant thirteen thing? Gee, I don’t know, do you think I could be? This is me, Sev. Do you think you could drop the say-what casual act for a while?”

She stared off into the gloom of the restaurant. Her eye caught on an underlit motion ad from the fifties—some nanotech dream of change, a ripple of green and blue marches across Martian red to the horizon, a bright new sun rises in synchrony.

“It’ll be enough to make him out a stowaway and a criminal,” she said carefully. “Say that he murdered members of the crew, keep the details back to screen out all the crank calls we’re going to pull down. Bad enough that he’s back from Mars. Telling them he’s a thirteen as well is just asking for trouble. You saw the way Coyle reacted. Remember Sundersen last year? We don’t need another Abomination Among Us panic on our hands.”

“You think they’d go that way again? After the spanking they all got from the Press Ethics Commission?”

Sevgi shrugged. “The media likes panic. It boosts viewing.”

“Are we going to give race type?”

“If and when Organic Trace get it for us. Why?”

“I’m wondering,” Norton said softly, “if he’s Chinese.”

Sevgi thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. There’s that. Don’t want a replay of Zhang fever. That shit was fucking awful. Least with Sundersen, no one died.”

“Apart from Sundersen.”

“You know what I mean. You ever see that lynching footage? They made us watch it in school.” Sevgi brushed fingertips to her temples. “I can still see it in here like it was fucking yesterday.”

“Bad times.”

“Yeah.” She pushed her plate away and bridged her arms in the space it left. “Listen, Tom, maybe we should run silent on this whole thing. For the time being, anyway. Just tell the media everybody died in the crash, including this guy. It’s not like there’s a plausibility problem with that, after all. Shit, we still haven’t worked out how he survived.”

“On the other hand, if we get a photo ID off the trace—”

“Big if.”

“—then broadcasting it’d be our best chance of nailing this guy.”

“He can change his face, Tom. Any backstreet salon in the Bay Area’ll do it for a couple of hundred bucks. By the time we get a face out to the media, he’ll have peeled it and gone underground. Gene trace is the only thing that’s going to work here.”

“If the gene code is Chinese, and that gets out, then you’re up against the same problem.”

“But it’ll be a specific code we’re looking for.”

“It was a specific face they were looking for with Zhang. I don’t recall it making much difference. Hell, Sevgi,” Out of nowhere, Norton burlesqued Nicholson for her. “You know those damn people all look alike anyway.”

Sevgi smeared a smile. “I don’t think it’s like that out here. This isn’t Jesusland.”

“You got idiocy everywhere, Sev. The Republic isn’t ru

“I don’t know. Faith Satellite Cha

“Hall-e-lu-jah! Praise the Lord, Jesus go

They both smirked a little more, but the laughter wouldn’t come. The bodies from the virtual still hung around them in the gloom. Presently, a busboy came and asked if they were done. Sevgi nodded; Norton asked to see the desserts. The busboy gathered the plates and headed off. It dawned slowly on Sevgi that he was peculiarly gaunt for his age, and that his speech had been oddly patterned, as if it hurt him to talk. His features looked northern Chinese, but his skin was very dark. The realization hit her liquidly in the stomach. She stared after the retreating figure.

“Think that’s one of your brother’s success stories then?” she asked.

“Hmm.” Norton followed her gaze. “Oh. Doubt it. Statistically, I mean. Jeff told me they get a couple of thousand new black lab escapees a year, minimum. And he’s mostly in management anyway, trying to keep the whole thing together. They got nearly a hundred counselors working, on and off, and they’re still swamped.”

“Human Cost’s a charity, right?”

“Yeah. The Rim gives them a budget, but it’s not what you’d call generous.” A sudden animation flooded her partner’s voice. “And then, you know, it’s tough work. Kind of thing that wears you down. Some of the stories he’s told me about what comes out of those black labs, I don’t think I could do it. I don’t really understand how Jeff can. It’s weird. When we were younger, it always looked like I was going to be the one with the justice vocation. He was the power-and-influence man, not me. And then”—Norton gestured with his wineglass—“somehow he’s out here doing charity work and I end up with the big job at COLIN.”