Black Man / Thirteen

“Talk to whom?”

Carl shrugged, but it felt anything but casual. He was too freighted with the cold memories. “To the machines. To the people in the cryocaps. Did he talk to himself? To the stars, maybe? He was out there a long time.”

“If you consider this talking, then yes. He talked.”

“Often?”

“I am not calibrated to judge what would be considered often in human terms. Merrin was silent for eighty-seven point twenty-two percent of the trajectory, including time spent in sleep. Forty-three point nine percent of his speech was apparently directed—”

“All right, never mind. Are you equipped for Yaroshanko intuitive function?”

“Yaroshanko’s underlying constants are present in my operating systems, yes.”

“Good, then I’d like to run a Tjaden/Wasson honorific for links between myself and Merrin, making inference along a Yaroshanko curve. No more than two degrees of separation.”

“What referents do you wish employed for the curve?”

“Initially, both our footprints in the total dataflow. Or as much of it as they’re letting you have access to. You’re going to get a lot of standard Bacon links, they’re not what I’m after.” Carl wished suddenly that Matthew were here to handle this for him, to reach quicksilver-swift and cool down the wires and engage the machine at something like its own levels of consciousness. Matthew would have been at ease in here—Carl felt clumsy by contrast. The terminology of complexity math tasted awkward on his tongue. “Cross-reference to everything Merrin said or did while he was aboard Horkan’s Pride. Bring me anything that shows up there.”

The blue shredded figure shifted slightly, rippling in the gale that Carl could not feel.

“This will take time,” it said.

Carl looked around at the unending sky-floored desolation of the construct. He shrugged.

“Better get me a chair then.”

He could, he supposed, have left the virtuality and killed the time somehow in the vaulted neo-Nordic halls of COLIN’s Jefferson Park complex. He could have talked to Sevgi Ertekin some more, maybe even tried to massage Tom Norton back into a more compliant attitude with some male-on-male platitudes. He could have eaten something—his stomach was a blotched ache from lack of anything but coffee since Florida the previous night; he ignored it with trained stoicism—or just gone for a walk among the jutting riverside terraces of the complex. He had the run of the place, Sevgi said.

Instead he sat under the rivet-scarred metal sky and watched Merrin walk through the n-dji

The ’face had left him to his chair—a colliding geometry of comet trail lines and nebula gas upholstery, spun up out of the night sky as if flung at him—and disappeared into the dwindling perspectives of the wind that blew continually through its body. Something else blew back in its place—at first a tiny rectangular panel like an antique holographic postage stamp Carl had once seen in a London museum, fluttering stiff-cornered and growing in size as it approached until it slammed to a silent halt, three meters tall, two broad, and angled slightly backward at the base a handful of paces in front of where he sat. It was a cascade of images like the curtain where he’d seen his own face fall from the dji

He saw Merrin wake from the beta capsule in the crew section, groggy from the revival but already moving with a recognizable focused economy. Saw him pacing the dorsal corridor of Horkan’s Pride, face unreadable.

Saw him clean Helena Larsen’s meat from between his teeth with a micro-gauge manual screwdriver from the maintenance lockers.

Saw him request a lateral vision port unshuttered, the ships’ interior lighting killed. Saw him brace his arms on either side of the glass and stare out like a sick man into a mirror.

Saw him scream, jaw yawning wide, but silent, silent.

Saw him cut the throat of a limbless body as it revived, splayed palm held to block the arterial spray. Saw him gouge out the eyes, carefully, thoughtfully, one at a time, and smear them off his fingers against the matte-textured metal of a bulkhead.

Saw him talking to someone who wasn’t there.

Saw him turn, once, in the corridor and look up at the camera, as if he knew Carl was watching him. He smiled, then, and Carl felt how it chilled him as his own facial muscles responded.

There was more, a lot more, even in the scant time it took the n-dji

Maybe the dji

Maybe it was what he wanted. He wasn’t sure.

He wasn’t sure why he stayed there watching. But he was glad when it was over.

The floating blue shredded figure returned.

“There is this,” it told him, and raised one restless, rippling arm like a wing. On the screen beneath, Merrin walked behind the automated gurney as it took Helena Larsen on her short journey from the cryocap chamber to the autosurgeon. The second trip for her—just below the line of her leotard, her right thigh already ended in a neatly bandaged stump. She was mumbling to herself in postrevival semi-wakefulness, barely audible, but the n-dji

“…not again,” she pleaded vaguely.

Merrin leaned in to catch the murmur of her voice, but not by much. His hearing would be preternaturally sharp, Carl knew, tuned up by now in the endless smothering stillness aboard the vessel as it fell homeward, honed in the dark aural shadow of the emptiness outside, where the abruptly deepened hum of a power web upping capacity in the walls would be enough to jerk you from sleep, and the sound of a dropped kitchen utensil seemed to clang from one end of the ship to the other. Your footfalls went muffled in spacedeck slippers designed not to scratch or scrape, and after a while you found yourself trying almost superstitiously not to break the hush in other ways as well. Speaking—to yourself, for sanity’s sake, to the sentient and semi-sentient machines that kept you alive, to the dreaming visages behind the cryocap faceplates, to anyone or anything else you thought might be listening—speaking became an act of obscure defiance, a reckless violation of the silence.

“Again, yes,” Merrin told the woman he was feeding off. “The cormorant’s legacy.”

The image froze.

“Cormorant,” said Carl, memory flexing awake.

“Merrin uses the same word, out of context, on several occasions,” said the dji

Carl sat quietly for a while. The memories came thick and fast, the emotions he thought he’d discarded half a decade ago. He felt his fingers crook like talons at his sides.

“Well, well, well,” he said at last. “Gutierrez.”