Black Man / Thirteen

Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.

“And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is good, this is right, this is what’s supposed to be. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling now it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the air lock. You tell yourself the genetic-privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that the legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD. You’re the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on your door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.”

“You met Ethan through the force?”

It got him a sour smile. “How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialize much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.” She shrugged. “I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cozy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.”

“Not quite. You can always leave the police force.”

She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. “You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself. The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.”

“And did you? Tear it all down?”

“You mean, did we fuck?”

“Actually, no. But—”

“Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.” She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again. Snac. “Like that. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blond bitch worked Datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organize a move across the river when I made Midtown Homicide. Just an old neighborhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.” Another frown. “Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.”

“Had he told you what he was?”

“Not then, no. I mean—” She gestured again, more carefully this time. “—not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?”

“Not generally, no.”

“No.” She nursed her drink for a while. “I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.”

“What did he want?”

Her lip curled. “He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of Central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still aboveground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while till he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.”

“He recognized him? I’d have thought—”

“Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim states, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face, it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.” She clenched a fist in the low light. “He wouldn’t believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way. That’s not the way we do things, he kept saying. You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip.”

A darted look. “That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.”

“It’s been known.”

“Yeah, well this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case—” She shrugged. “Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right? Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.”

Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out at sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.

“So what happened?” he asked finally.

She looked away. “I think you know.”

“Ethan solved the problem.”

“Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.” Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. “Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned me, when Ethan wasn’t around.”

“Did you tell Ethan about it?”

“I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.”

She paused. Picking words.

“But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth. There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?”

He shrugged. “So the psychomonster flicks would have us believe.”

“Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, Internal Affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that, and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.”

“Until.”

She nodded. “Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Ski

More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the raki bottle. Offered it to him.