Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 30

The center of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No cooperation, no overview—the late-afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amid it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noisemaking process.

The jeep was a carpool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

“You want to drive?”

Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose-to-tail metal they were trying to break into.

“Not really.”

“You mind if I do?”

The lights changed, and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a meter, then jerked to a halt again as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

“Right.”

It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realized what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, toward the car behind them.

“Marsalis, don’t—”

But he was already gone, striding back toward the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood—she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time—and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s-side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.

“Ah, shit.”

Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window. She scrabbled it open.

“What the fuck are you—”

“Scoot over.”

“What did you just do?”

“Nothing. Scoot over, I’m going to take it on manual.”

She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn’t see anything through the darkened glass windshield. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their favor again and shook her head in weary resignation.

“Whatever.”

He took down the automation, engaged the drive, and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he’d cut off, and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of meters and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

“Did you enjoy that?”

He shrugged. “Had a certain operational satisfaction.”

“I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How’s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?”

“Ertekin, there was no fight.” He looked across and met her eye. “Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best.”

“And if he hadn’t backed down?”

“Well.” He thought about it for a moment. “You people usually do.”

It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening toward dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within. Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaned intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus mustache worked on the i

On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co. and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly colored lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco’s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she’d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn’t make sense of any of it—just the general ache.

Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

Right.

Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she lied.

At the jeep, he got into the driver’s seat then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

“You don’t want to drive anymore?”

“No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don’t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic.”

He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialize out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowboat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their ru

“You get used to that on Mars?” she asked him. “The machine thing?”

He frowned. “Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?”

“I thought on Mars—”

“Yeah, everybody does. It’s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it’s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day even the scientists thought the terra-forming would take centuries. Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our time scales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch-up.” He gestured. “So now we’re still stuck with the red-rocks-and-air-locks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don’t like to let it go.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. “Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the illusion. It’s a lot of empty black to cross just for that.”

The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

“It was bad, huh?” she said quietly. “Out there?”