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“Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.”
“They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.”
“I know.”
“Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?”
“Variant thirteen.”
“Yeah, variant thirteen. Precivilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.”
“Now you sound like the feeds.”
Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. “Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough, and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.”
“I fail to see,” said Norton acidly, “how that gives us back our manhood.”
“That’s because you live in New York.”
Norton snorted and drained his arrack.
His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done. “I’m serious, Tom. You think Secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?”
“Among other things, yeah, it was.”
Jeff shook his head. “That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Cooperation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table was pointing toward a future so feminized, it’s just downright un-American.”
Norton laughed despite himself. “You should be writing speeches, Jeff.”
“You forget,” his brother said unsmilingly, “I used to. Now, think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re wi
Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had leveled on his brother, looked into his glass, and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.
“That’s the way I read it, anyway.”
The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the bar again. “Get you another?”
Norton shook his head. “Got to get back, get up early.”
“You’re not going to stay the night?”
“Well…”
“Jesus, Tom. Do we get along that badly?” Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. “Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way around the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?”
“Jeff, it’s not—”
“Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?”
“I don’t know,” Norton said quietly. “But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him.”
“You didn’t catch me. I fucking told you about it.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
“Tom, I’m your brother for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?”
Norton shot to his feet. “I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.”
“Tom, wait. Wait.” Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. “I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my brother, don’t you think that means something to me?”
“Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not—” He stopped, gestured helplessly. “It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for. Something. I don’t know, something fresh, something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.”
“That’s how you see Mom and Dad?”
“That’s how they are, Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.”
“Yeah, right. You fucked one of your bonobo refugee clients because Mom and Dad are old. Makes a lot of sense.”
“Tom, you got no fucking idea what you’re talking about. You’re thirty-seven years old, you’ve never been married, you don’t have a family. I mean—” Jeff seemed to be straining to reach something inside himself. “Look, do you really think Megan would care that much if she knew? I mean, sure, she’d go through the motions, the emotions, she’d make me move out for a while, there’d be a lot of crying. But in the end, Tom, she’d do what’s best for the kids. They’re her world now, not me. I couldn’t break her heart anymore, even if I wanted to, even if I tried. It’s genetics, Tom, fucking genetics. I’m secondary to the kids for Megan because that’s just the way she’s wired.”
“And you fucked Nuying because that’s just the way you’re wired, right?”
Jeff puffed out a breath, looked down, spread his hands up from his sides. “Pretty much, yeah. My wiring and hers, Nu I’m talking about. I’m the big alpha male around the foundation, the patriarch and the most expensive suit in sight. For a bonobo, that’s a bull’s-eye bigger than Larry Lastman’s dick.”
“So you just obligingly stepped into range, right? Just couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl.”
Another sigh. This time, Norton heard in it how the fight had gone out of his brother. Jeff dropped back into his seat. Looked up.
“Okay, Tom,” he said quietly “Have it your own way. I guess you’ve probably never fucked a bonobo in your life, either, so you don’t know how that feels, all that submission, all that broken-flower femininity in your hands like…”
He shook his head.
“Forget it. I’ll call you a cab.”
“No.” Norton felt an odd, sliding sensation in his chest. “I’ll stay, Jeff. I’m sorry, I’m just…it’s been a long day.”
“You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure. Look, I don’t want to judge you, Jeff. You’re right, none of us is a saint. We’ve all done things”—Megan, astride him in the motel, feeds him her breasts with eyes focused somewhere else, as if he’s some accustomed household task. Toward the end, she closes her eyes altogether, thrusts herself up and down on his erection and into her climax, grunting you motherfucker, oh you fucking motherfucker through gritted teeth. It will make him rock-hard just thinking about it for weeks afterward, though he’s close to certain it isn’t him she’s talking to and when, in the aftermath, he asks her, she claims not to remember saying anything at all—“things we regret, things we’d take back if we could. You think I’m any different?”