Black Man / Thirteen

“I like that.” Sevgi smiled into her salep. “So you think the US might have held together the way Turkey did. I mean, if there’d been an outside force to apply the right pressure?”

“Not necessarily, no.” Yavuz looked unaccountably sad as he said it. “I mean, you’ve got the whole states’ rights issue, which we never had. Two centuries of southern resentment and cultural abrasion, religious fury, racial tension. Those are pretty deep fissures. Plus the anti-drug laws meant less chance for the virilicide to do its weeding out the way it was elsewhere.”

He put his salep mug down on the counter, sat back, and held his open palms toward it, as if in obscure invocation.

“But anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it. Because there never was an outside force big enough to make you people behave. COLIN didn’t exist as such back then, the UN was still a toothless tiger trying to find its dentures, the Chinese just didn’t give a shit. Homegrown corporate interests were all behaving like thugs, they just wanted the cheap resources and labor for as long as it lasted. You’ve got the environmental lobby screaming, Zhang fever scaring the shit out of the Asian populace. Pacific Rim commercial interests don’t want a fight, they just step in and make their offer, and pretty much everyone on the West Coast breathes a big sigh of relief when they do. Los Angeles goes first, toe in the pool, and then the whole coast takes the plunge when it works.”

Sevgi nodded. Somewhere in a box on top of a wardrobe, she still had a replica scroll of the Angeline Freeport charter. Murat had brought it back from a West Coast medical conference for her when she was still in junior high. Like most successful first-generation immigrants, he’d been passionate about his adoptive homeland, even after it fractured apart under his feet almost as he stepped off the plane.

“Yeah,” she said grayly. “And anything the fucking West Coast can do…”

Yavuz nodded, teacher-like. “Just so. The northeastern states seize the precedent and walk away as well. And on all sides, the rhetoric has been stoked so high that there can be no climb-down for anyone. It’s the classic male impasse. Honor satisfied, and everybody loses. A textbook case. Have you ever read Mariela Groombridge? Evolving States?”

She shook her head.

“You should. She’s brilliant. Taught at the University of Texas until they threw her out for signing an anti-creationist petition. She’s in Vie

“Which is what?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Fear.”

“It’s a power beyond numbers.” Nevant still hadn’t touched the meze, but he was a couple of fingers down the raki glass now. He sneered. “You think the cudlips give a shit about facts? Statistics and formal studies? It’s the knee-jerk, man. That’s what these people live and breathe. There are monsters, there is evil, and it’s somewhere out there in the dark. Whoo-oo-oo. You know, before I got out to Peru, Manco was putting out a rumor that he had pistacos working for him. Settling scores for that turf squabble they had back in ’03.”

Carl nodded. On Mars, he’d seen the familias run a similar dynamic among the less educated end of the Uplands Initiative workforce. He’d been offered pistaco work himself a couple of times, lack of pale skin notwithstanding.

“Whatever works, I guess.”

“Yeah, well. Worked for a while.” Nevant snorted disgustedly and knocked back another chunk of his raki. “Manco was so fucking pleased with himself, he couldn’t see it’d crash and burn soon as one of his fake pistacos got called and couldn’t cut it. I told him—the way I had it mapped out, he could have that monster threat for real. Real, honest-to-DNA monsters doing his enforcing for him. Something to scare everybody, not just the illiterates. Just think what would have happened if the word got around: Cross the familias and they’ll send a fucking thirteen to visit you.”

“Always assuming you and your future army of thirteens could cut it any better than tayta Manco’s fakes.”

Nevant looked at him. “You lose many fights to a normal human recently?”

“No. But like you just got through telling me, it isn’t the facts that do it for humans. Maybe Manco didn’t need a real threat. Or at least, he didn’t need it badly enough to cuddle up with a bunch of fucking twists.”

“Didn’t have any problem cuddling up to that hib cunt Jurgens,” said Nevant sourly. “Amazing how your prejudices can go out the window when there’s a decent rack in the equation.”

“Greta Jurgens?” Carl summoned vague recollection of a languid, gray-eyed blonde from his inquiries after Nevant three years back. She’d been ru

“Yeah, she was. Why?”

Carl shrugged. “No reason. Just the way Manco was about the whole twist thing, it’s strange he’d tolerate one that far up the ladder on the inside.”

“Like I said, check out the rack. The ass. And hey, for all I know, hibs do some dickshift tricks you can’t get out of a human woman.”

Carl sipped his drink, shook his head. “That’s bonobos, and even then it’s bullshit hype. Anyway, Manco wants that kind of thrill, he can go down to Lima and have his pick of twist brothels. Come on. It doesn’t add up.”

“Well then, maybe it’s just that there are twists and twists.” Nevant’s lip curled. “Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only people like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding.”

Carl gazed at the cutlery on the table. He nodded, a little sadly. “People like you. They lock people like you up. Me, I’m licensed.”

“Domesticated, you mean.”

“Call it what you like. You can’t turn the clock back twenty thousand years, Stefan.”

Nevant unsheathed the wolf-snarl grin again.

“Can’t you?”

“See, once upon a time,” Yavuz was saying, “fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait. She cites—”

Down the promenade, the splintering crack of glass. Sevgi whipped about in time to see the restaurant window shattered outward around two grappling bodies. Someone shrieked.

“Ah, fuck.”

She grabbed after the gun she wasn’t permitted to carry here, blind fingers registering the lack ahead of conscious thought. Flung herself off the stool—it teetered and toppled behind her, she heard it go down clattering—and toward the fight. Yavuz was at her side, brandishing an authorized pistol…

On the floor, the pale thirteen had Marsalis pi