Black Man / Thirteen

He shot her a glance. “Bad enough.”

Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space, rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

“There was this woman,” he said at last. “In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like…someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day’d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I’d tell her what I’d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth Control and the rescue ship crew.”

He cleared his throat.

“See, after a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren’t there. The fact that you’re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You’re asking yourself, Why me? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on my watch? You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit.” He grimaced. “That’s religion, right?”

“No, that’s not religion.” Sudden asperity in her voice.

“It’s not?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something out there trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there’d be something else as well, a kind of opposed force, something in there with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn’t take me long to make one—see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre’s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the Felipe Souza to watch over me.”

“But she was.” Sevgi gestured. “A person. Just a human being.”

“I didn’t say it made any sense, Ertekin. I said it was religion.”

“I thought,” she said severely, “thirteens were supposed to be incapable of religious faith.”

Ethan certainly had been. She remembered his incurious, stifled-yawn incomprehension whenever she tried to talk about it, as if she were some Jesusland fence-hopper stood on his doorstep trying to sell him something plastic and pointless.

Marsalis stared into the blue glow of the dashboard displays. “Yeah, they say we’re not wired for it. Something in the frontal cortex, same reason we don’t take direction well. But like I said, it got pretty bad out there. You’re stuck in the empty dark, looking for intent where there’s only incidence. Feeling powerless, knowing you’ll live or die dependent on factors you can’t control. Talking to sleeping faces or the stars because it beats talking to yourself. I don’t know about the cortical wiring argument, all I can tell you is that for a couple of weeks aboard Felipe Souza it felt like I had religion.”

“So what changed?”

He shrugged again. “I looked out the window.”

More silence. Another autohauler droned by, buffeting them with the wind of its passage. The jeep rocked in its wake, adrift on the night.

“Souza had vision ports let into the lower cargo deck,” Marsalis said slowly. “I went there sometimes, got the n-dji

He looked at her, opened his hands.

“There’s nothing out there,” he said simply. “No meaning, no mindful eye. Nothing watching you. Just empty space and, if you travel far enough, a bunch of matter in motion that’ll kill you if it can. Once you get your head around that, you’re fine. You stop expecting anything better or worse.”

“So that’s your general philosophy, is it?”

“No, it’s what Elena Aguirre told me.”

For a moment, she blanked. It was like those moments when someone talked to her in Turkish out of the blue and she was still working in English, a failure to process the words she’d heard.

“I’m sorry?”

“What I said. Elena Aguirre told me to stop believing all that shit and face up to what you can see out the window.”

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked him tautly.

“No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m telling you what happened to me. I stood at that window with the lights off, looking out, and I heard Elena Aguirre come up behind me. She’d followed me down to the cargo deck and she stood there behind me in the dark. Breathing. Talking into my ear.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Yeah, I know that.” Now he did smile, but not at her. He was looking into the light from the dashboard again, eyes blind, washed empty with the electric blue glow. “She’d have left tank gel all over the deck, wouldn’t she. Not to mention, she would have rung every alarm on the ship climbing out of the tank in the first place. I mean, I don’t know how long I stood frozen to the window after she’d gone, you tend to lose track of time out there, and I was pretty scared, but—”

“Stop it.” She heard the jagged edge on her tone. Felt the urge to shudder creep up her neck like a cold, cupped hand. “Just stop it. Be serious.”

He frowned into the blue light. “You know, Ertekin, for someone who believes in a supreme architect of the universe and a spiritual afterlife, you’re taking this remarkably hard.”

“Look.” Thrown down like a challenge. “How could you know it was her? This Elena Aguirre. You’d never even heard her voice.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

There was a quiet simplicity in the question that tilted her, suddenly, weightlessly, like sex the first time she got to do it properly and came, like her first dead-body crime scene by the tracks off Barnett Avenue. Like watching Nalan’s breathing stop for the final time in the hospital bed. She shook her head helplessly.

“I—”

“See, you asked if it got bad,” he said softly. “So I’m telling you how bad it got. I went down deep, Sevgi. Deep enough for some very strange shit to happen, genetic wiring to the contrary or not.”

“But you can’t believe—”

“That Elena Aguirre was the incarnation of a presence watching over me? Of course not.”

“Then—”

“She was a metaphor.” He breathed out, as if letting something go. “But she got out of hand, like metaphors sometimes can. You go that deep, you can lose your grip on these things, let them get free. I guess I’m lucky whatever was waiting for me down there spat me out again. Maybe my genetic wiring gave it indigestion after all.”

“What are you talking about?” Flat anger. She couldn’t keep it out of her voice. “Indigestion? Metaphors? I don’t understand anything you’re telling me.”

He glanced across at her, maybe surprised by her tone.

“That’s okay. I’m probably not explaining it all that well. Sutherland would have done better, but he’s had years to nail it all down. Let’s just say that out there in transit I talked myself into something at a subconscious level, and it took an invented subconscious helper to talk me back out. Does that make more sense?”

“Not really. Who’s Sutherland?”

“He’s a thirteen, guy I met on Mars, what the Japanese would call a sensei, I guess. He teaches tanindo around the Upland camps. He used to say humans live their whole lives by metaphor, and the problem for the thirteens is that we fit too fucking neatly into the metaphorical box for all those bad things out beyond the campfire in the dark, the box labeled monster.”

She couldn’t argue with that. Memory backed it to the hilt, faces turned to her full of mute accusation when they knew what Ethan had been. Friends, colleagues, even Murat. Once they knew, they didn’t see the Ethan they’d known anymore, just an Ethan-shaped piece of darkness, like the perp sketch that served in virtual for the man who’d murdered Toni Montes.