Black Man / Thirteen

“So which of you two humanitarians spotted me with the cuffmelt?”

The grin vanished into hostile watchfulness and a stiff silence that lasted until Bailey came back with his stuff and the paperwork to match.

“You’ll have to witness for these,” he said sulkily.

Camp security had bagged everything in a forty-centimeter-wide isolation strip, each item gripped tight in the vacuum-sealed plastic. Carl took the strip, unrolled it on the desk to check that everything was there. He pointed at the storage key.

“This is for a locker down by the bus park,” he said. “My pack’s in it.”

“You can collect it on your way to the helicopter,” Bailey said and flicked the release form impatiently at him. “I’ll have my men escort you.”

Carl took the form and laid it on the desk, tore the activation cover off the holorecorder decal in the corner, and leaned over it.

“Carl Marsalis, SIN s810dr576,” he droned, words worn smooth on his tongue with their familiarity “UNGLA authorization code 31 jade. I hereby state that the items on this list are the full complement of property taken from me by GH camp security on June 18, 2107, and now returned to me, date the same.”

He thumbed the disk to seal it and slid the form away from him across the surface of the desk. A curious suffocating sensation had settled over him as he recited the witness statement, as if it were he and not his personal effects vacuum-sealed in the transparent plastic.

I don’t want to do this anymore.

No, that wasn’t it. He looked up and saw the way Bailey and the two security guards were watching him.

I don’t want to be this anymore.

So.

Choppered out of camp, tilting across the brilliant blue of the lake and then on through bleak, mountainous beauty as they picked their way down from the altiplano to Arequipa. Helicopters like this had smart systems navigation that ran off a real-time satellite model of local terrain and weather, which meant the thing practically flew itself. Still, the pilot stolidly ignored him for the whole flight. He sat alone in the passenger compartment and stared out of the window at the landscape below, idly mapping it onto his memories from Mars. The similarities were obvious—it wasn’t just the thin air COLIN was up here simulating—but in the end, this was still home, with a sky-blue sky up above and the broad sweep of a big-planet horizon out ahead and the slow rolling weight of one full g pulling at your bones.

Accept no substitute. Slogans from the Earth First party political broadcasts blipped through his head. Don’t listen to the corporate hype. Keep your feet on the ground. Fight for a better life here and a better world now.

In the airport at Arequipa, he used his UNGLA credentials to hook a sleeper-class seat aboard the next direct flatline flight to Miami with Delta. He’d have preferred suborbital, but for that you still had to go to Lima, and it probably wasn’t worth the extra time and hassle the detour would take. This way at least he could get some rest. There was about an hour to wait, so he bought over-the-counter codeine, took double the advised dosage, and chased it with something generic from a departure-lounge Buenos Aires Beef Co. outlet. He munched his way through the franchise food on the observation deck, not really tasting it, staring out at the snowcapped volcanic cone of El Misti and wondering if there really, truly wasn’t something else he could do for a living.

Sure. Go talk to Zooly when you get back, see if she’s looking for doormen for the midweek slot.

Sour grin. They started calling his flight. He finished the cold remnants of his pampaburger olé, wiped his fingers, and went.

He slept badly on the flight to Miami, ticked with dreams of Felipe Souza’s silent passageways and the faint terror that Gaby’s ghost was drifting after him in the low-g quiet, face composed and miraculously undistorted by the shot that had killed her, her brains drip-drooling darkly down out of the hole he’d blown in the back of her skull. Variation on a theme, but nothing new—just it was usually another woman who came floating up behind him in the deserted spacecraft, never quite touching him, whispering sibilantly into his ear above the dead-hush whine of silence.

He jolted awake, sweatily, to the pilot’s a

Fuck.

The Virgin suborb shuttle would have put him in the sky over London forty-five minutes after it took off from Miami. He could have been home for last orders at Ba

Instead, he carried his suitcase along broad, bright concourses lined with ten-by-two-meter holoscreens that admonished think it’s all red rocks and airlocks? think again and we only send wi

He rode slideways and escalators up through it all, still feeling vaguely numb from the codeine. On the far side of the terminal complex, he checked into the new MIA Marriott, took a room with a skyline view, and ordered a medical check from the room service options. He charged it all on the Agency jack. As a contractor, he had fairly limited expense credit—working undercover in any case made for mostly wafer and cash transactions, which he then had to claim back as part of his fee—but with a worst-case couple of days left till he could get back to London and officially close the file on Gray, there was still a lot of meat on the account.

Time to use it.

In the room, he stripped off jacket and weblar mail shirt, dumped his soiled clothing in a heap on the floor, and soaked under a hot shower for fifteen minutes. The mesh was gone, back into its spinal lair, and he was a catalog of bruises he could feel through the thi

He dried himself with big fluffy Marriott towels and was putting on the cleanest of his worn canvas trousers when the door chimed. He grabbed a T-shirt, looked down at the wound, and shrugged. Not much point in getting dressed. He dropped the shirt again and went to the door still stripped to the waist.

The in-house doctor was a personable young Latina who’d maybe served her internship in some Republican i

“Been in Miami long?” she asked him.

He smiled, shook his head. “It didn’t happen here. I just got in.”

“I see.” But he didn’t get the smile back. She stood behind him and pressed long, cool fingers around the wound, testing the glue. She wasn’t particularly gentle about it. “So are you one of our illustrious military advisers?”

He switched to English. “What, with this accent?”

A tiny bend to the lips now as she moved around to face him again. “You’re British? I’m sorry, I thought—”