Black Man / Thirteen

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“It’s not?”

“No, we’ve pretty much got free rein on this one. Word down from on high, do what you want but clean up the mess.”

“And what mess would that be, exactly? Feeds say everyone aboard is dead.”

“Yeah. Since when did you trust what you see on the feeds? Truth is, we’ve got a live one, and he made it off the ship. This is confidential information I’m giving you, Jeff. Can’t go any farther than this room, this conversation. Not even Megan.”

Jeff spread his hands. Slow smile. “Hey, since when did I ever tell Megan everything? You know me, Tom.”

“Yeah, well.” He held down the anger, old and accustomed like the kick he got out of the Cadillac when he downshifted without the brake.

“So come on. What’s the big secret?”

“Big secret is that this guy is a variant thirteen.”

There was a small satisfaction in watching the way Jeff reacted. Eyes widened, mouth dropping to frame a response he didn’t have. Norton thought it came off a little phony, but he’d grown used to that aspect of Jeff over the years, the actorly, slightly-larger-than-life way he deployed himself for whatever audience there was. He’d always tried to see it, charitably, as the price of admission into the charmed power circle his brother had inhabited with such aplomb when they were both younger men—but now, now that his brother had apparently become charitable himself without losing any of that ma

“You deal with this kind of thing on a daily basis, Jeff,” he said simply. “I need some advice here.”

“Did you call UNGLA?”

“Not yet. Way things are, it’s not likely we will.”

“You want my advice? Call ’em.”

“Come on, Jeff. COLIN wouldn’t even sign up to the Accords at Munich. You think they’re going to want the UN walking all over their stuff with big international treaty boots?”

Jeff Norton set his drink aside on a tall driftwood table, distant cousin to the cabinet. He rubbed hands over his face. “How much do you know about variant thirteen, Tom?”

Norton shrugged. “What everyone knows.”

“What everyone knows is bullshit hype and moral panic for the feeds. What do you actually know?”

“Uh, they’re sociopaths. Some kind of throwback to when we were all still hunter-gatherers, right?”

“Some kind of, yeah. Truth is, Tom, it’s like the bonobos and the hibernoids and every other misbegotten premature poke at reengineering that last century’s idiot optimist pioneers saddled us with. Guesswork and bad intentions. Nobody ever built a human variant because they thought they were giving it a better shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of fucking happiness. They were products, all of them, agenda-targeted. Spaceflight programs wanted the hibernoids, the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream of womanhood—”

“Yours, too, huh?”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Would Megan?”

“Megan doesn’t know. It’s my problem, not hers.”

“That’s big of you.”

“No, it’s weak and masculine of me. I know that. Guess I’ll just never have your moral fucking rectitude, little brother. But telling Megan isn’t going to achieve anything except hurt her and the kids. And I won’t do that.”

He picked up his glass again and lifted it in Norton’s direction.

“So here’s to living with your mistakes, little brother. Either that, or fuck you very much.”

Norton shrugged and raised his own glass. “Living with your mistakes.”

And Megan flitted through his mind, sun-splashed hair and laughter amid the redwood trunks, and later, naked body sun-dappled and straining upward to press against him on the sweat-damp sheets of the motel bed.

“So,” he said, to drive out the vision, “if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?”

“Variant thirteen?” Jeff gave him the crooked grin again. “Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood.”

“Oh come on.”

“Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.”

“You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there, either.”

“So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-Secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and supervirility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which in the end is suicide, just slower and a bit more fucking fun.”

“I thought they criminalized that stuff.”

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. “Oh yeah, and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.”

“I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk-show genetics, Jeff.”

“Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a single social biologist who doesn’t count alpha-male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood”—the grin again—“so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas wants to be a soldier, because hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid, ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes”—Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody—“they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep, and breathe hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with them. See, a feminized, open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.”

“I didn’t ask for a class on the Secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.”

“Yeah, getting there.” Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. “See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked, and shut down with a halfway decent black-market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a bighearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship program at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?”

“Vaguely.” He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high gray gloss that clashed with the rough matte finish of the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of stores on a sun-blasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as gray as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. “I was what, five or six?”

“If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toy set I had, but full-size, smashing into the house, flattening Mom and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.”