Black Man / Thirteen

“Do you get high when you chew coca?”

“Oh come on—”

“Answer the question.”

Norton set his jaw. “No. I don’t get high. Sometimes your mouth goes numb, but that’s it. It’s just to give you energy, stop you feeling tired.”

“Right. Now listen. That energizing effect is part of an evolved working relationship between humans and the coca plant. Coca gives humans medicinal benefits, humans ensure that there’s plenty of coca being cultivated. Everybody wins. And human physiology copes very comfortably with the effects the leaf provides. It’s a benefit that doesn’t interfere with any of your other necessary survival dynamics. You’re not going to do anything stupid just because you’re chewing those leaves.”

“Why is it,” Norton asked heavily, “that every time I come to you for help, you have to lecture me?”

Jeff gri

“And variant thirteen,” Norton said drearily.

“Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look—by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough, and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.”

“Apart from the kleptocrats.” Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorizing. “I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?”

Jeff shrugged. “Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profiles for a kleptocrat and a thirteen don’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.”

“Oh come on. How are you going to measure something like that?”

“Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the washups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well—apparently before Jacobsen and the roundup, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-size backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.”

“Which means what?”

“Well, what’s the preeminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?”

“I don’t know. Networking skills?”

Jeff laughed. “You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.”

“So were you, once.”

“Charisma!” Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. “Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their forcefulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.”

“What if they are women?”

“Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.”

“I thought you were talking about now.”

“Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.”

“Apart from wiping out the thirteens.”

“Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilization getting an early start.”

Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. “Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?”

His brother sighed. “Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition toward charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us quietly hate them but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys ran for any elected office, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label wi

Norton gestured irritably “No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to cooperate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.”

“Well, how’s she doing?”

“I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.”

“Exotic Istanbul, huh?”

“Oh shut up.”

Jeff quelled his grin. “Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw—”