Black Man / Thirteen

“No, that’s still good.”

“Still doing the same shit, huh?” Nevant plumed a lungful of smoke across the table. “Still hunting your brothers down for the man?”

“Oh, please.”

“You know, it wouldn’t just be for me, Mars man.”

“Sorry?”

“Killing you. It wouldn’t just be for me. You have a large fan club back there in the tract. Can hardly blame them, right? And if I killed you, and they knew about it.” Nevant yawned and stretched, loosening the combat tension from his frame. “Well, I’d probably never have to buy my own cigarettes again.”

“I’d have thought they’d want to kill me themselves.”

The Frenchman gestured. “The limits of revenge. They can’t all kill you, and stuck where they are right now none of them can. You learn a kind of wisdom in the tract—settle for what you can get, it’s better than nothing.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

The wolfish grin came back. “Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.”

“They had their chance, Stefan. You all did. You could have gone to Mars.”

“Yeah, it’s not all red rocks and air locks, apparently. Saw the ads on my way in.” Nevant touched the raki glass on the table in front of him with one fingernail. He hadn’t yet picked it up, or touched the tray of meze laid out between the two men. “Sounds great. Hard to see why you came back.”

“I won the lottery.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so much fun on Mars that the grunts buy a ticket every month to see if they can’t get the fuck out of there and home again.”

Carl shrugged. “I didn’t say it was paradise. It was an option.”

“Look, man. You came back, and the reason you came back is that life on Mars is a pile of shit.” Nevant blew more smoke at him. “Some of us just didn’t need to make the trip to work that one out.”

“You were busy making plans to spend the rest of your life up on the altiplano when I caught up with you. That’s just Mars with higher gravity.”

Nevant smiled thinly. “So you say.”

“Why should I lie?”

Outside, streetlights were glimmering to life along the seawall walkway. Sevgi Ertekin sat with Battal Yavuz on tall stools at a salep stall a dozen meters down the promenade. They sipped their drinks in cupped hands and were apparently getting along okay. Nevant tipped his head in their direction.

“Who is she, then?”

“No, I’m not his partner.” Sevgi struggled to keep the edge out of her voice. “This is strictly a temporary thing.”

“Okay, sorry. My mistake. Just the two of you seem, you know…”

“Seem what?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Co

“Tell me about it.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to sound like those Human Purity fuckwits, but I’ve been working the tract for nearly a decade now, and I’ve got to say variant thirteen are the closest thing to an alien race you’re ever going to see.”

“I’ve heard the same thing said about women.”

“By men, yeah.” Yavuz slurped at his salep and came up gri

“You people?”

“I’m joking, of course. But the same way male and female genetic wiring is substantially different”—Yavuz jerked a casual thumb back toward the lit interior of the restaurant, and the two men who sat facing each other in the window—“that’s the way those two are substantially different from you and me both.”

“Bit closer to you people, though,” said Sevgi sourly. “Right?”

Yavuz chuckled. “Fair point. In testosterone chemistry, in readiness for violent acts and suspension of basic empathy, yes, I suppose so. They are more male than female, of course. But then, no one ever tried to build a female thirteen.”

“That we know of.”

“That we know of,” he echoed, and sighed. “From what I understand, readiness for violent acts and suspension of empathy were exactly the traits the researchers hoped to amplify. Small surprise they opted for the male model, then.”

For just a moment, his gaze drifted out past her shoulder to the sea.

“At times,” he said quietly, “it shames me to be male.”

Sevgi shifted uncomfortably on her stool. She turned her salep mug in both hands. They were speaking Turkish, hers a little creaky with lack of use, and for some reason, some association maybe with childhood misbehavior and scolding, the Turkish phrasing of that sentiment—it shames me—lent an obscure force to Yavuz’s words. She felt her cheeks warm against the cold air in sympathy.

“I mean,” he continued, still not looking at her. “We index how civilized a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male social dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem.”

Sevgi’s eyes flickered away to the restaurant window. Stefan Nevant was leaned across the table, gesturing, talking intently. Marsalis looked back at him, impassive, arms draped on the back of his chair, head tilted slightly to one side. The same intensity seemed to crackle off both men for all the differences in their demeanor. The same raw sense of force. It was hard to imagine either of them ever talking about a sense of shame. For anything.

Deep in the pit of her stomach, despite herself, something warmed and slid. She felt her cheeks flush again, harder. She cleared her throat.

“I think there’s another way to look at it,” she said quickly. “Back in New York, I’ve got a friend, Meltem, who’s an imam. She says it’s a question of stages in social evolution. You’re Muslim, right?”

Yavuz put tongue in cheek, gri

“Well, Meltem says—she’s Turkish, too, Turkish American, I mean, and she’s a believer, of course, but—”

“Yeah,” Yavuz drawled. “Comes with the job, I imagine.”

She laughed. “Right. But she’s a feminist Sufi. She studied with Nazli Valipour in Ahvaz before the crackdown. You’ve heard of the Rabia school?”

The man in front of her nodded. “Read about them. That’s the Ibn Idris thing, right? Questions all authorities subsequent to the Prophet.”

“Well, Valipour cites Idris, yeah, but really she’s tracing a line right back to Rabia al-Basri herself, and she’s arguing that Rabia’s interpretation of religious duty purely as religious love is uh, is you know, the prototypical feminist understanding of Islam.”

And then she dried up, suddenly self-conscious. Back in New York, she wasn’t used to talking about this stuff. She was rarely at the mosque these days, never found the time for it. Her conversations with Meltem had stopped soon after Ethan died. She was too angry, with a God she wasn’t at all sure she believed in anymore, and in his echoing absence with anybody who made the mistake of taking his side.

But Battal Yavuz just smiled and sipped at his salep.

“All right, that sounds like an interesting angle,” he said. “So how does your imam square her Islamic feminism with all that inconvenient textual shit in the hadiths and the Book?”

Sevgi frowned, mustering her rusty Turkish. “Well, it’s cycles, you know. The way it looks from the historical context, the male cycle of civilization had to come first, because there was no other way outside of male force to create a civilization in the first place. To have law and art and science, you have to have settled agrarian societies and a nonlaboring class that can develop that stuff. But that kind of society would have to be enforced, and pretty brutally in the terms we look at things today.”