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If we are ruled by what they have trained into us, said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage, then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear.
Carl flexed a smile and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.
“Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,” he said. “Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?”
He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambarén blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long lost treasure of the Incas was kept.
“What are you talking about?”
Carl shrugged. “I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?”
Bambarén spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. “No one talks to Mars. You know that.”
“You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.”
“They walked away from that possibility back in ’75. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.”
Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-dji
“You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”
Carl gri
The familia chief studied the ground. “Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the afrenta Marciana with me?”
“Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.”
Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. “A resurgence of what, black man? We are at war. That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.”
“Or until you curry enough favor with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.”
Manco looked pointedly back toward the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.
“COLIN is a fact of life,” he said somberly. “We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.”
“Yeah, very fucking poetic.”
Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care. Marsalis held on to the rough-ride strap above his door.
“Well, he has a point.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him—apart from cheap poetics—that was worth coming all this way for.”
Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back toward the center of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head-on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenaline and sweat through her pores. But slow—she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambarén’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a curb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine-irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing still.
“Well?”
“Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.”
She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go of the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.
“Please state your destination.” Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.
“City center,” she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. “Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.”
“I know that.”
“Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.”
He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.
“Bambarén’s clean.” He said it reluctantly. “I reckon.”
“But that’s not all?”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.”
She heard the raised tone at the end. “But?”
“But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambarén, I’d just blown up a truckful of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there. This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose-thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day, and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unraveled or snapped.
“So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.
He stared out of the side window. “I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.”
“That’s Arequipa, right?”
“Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.”
“And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.”
Marsalis shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.”
“You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?”
“I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirror-shade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?”
Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia bodyguards moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgment, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.
She sighed.
“Yeah, okay.” She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times. “Insha’Allah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.”
Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.
“Course-correct. Long haul, Arequipa.”
Scribbles awoke on the displays.
“This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,” Asia Badawi told her coolly.
“Yeah, fucking tell me about it.”