Black Man / Thirteen

Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up, and by the time she came out he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

“You going?” she asked dully.

“Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.” He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. “I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?”

Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realized that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and halfway into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

“Listen,” he said.

“No, you go.” The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he—idiot grin—was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she were accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

“Well,” he said experimentally. “I mean, can’t you. You know.”

Her shoulders shook. “This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.”

“And there’s no one here who—”

“Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal, man.”

A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. “Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.”

She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the streetlight falling into the room. She snorted. “Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back-alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly: “How much do you need?”

Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritation at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying, and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand, and he guessed she was terrified that if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighborhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighborhood was low-end semi-residential, and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the storefronts; bright yellow decals a

The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two meters tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad, and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.

The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair molded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.

“Hello, sir,” said the datapoint chattily. “Would you like to hear the customer options available to—”

“No.” Carl fitted the iris reader over his head, blinked a couple of times into the lens cups, and waited for the chime that told him he’d been read. Idly he wondered what would happen if he ever had to do this with a black eye.

“Thank you, sir. You may now access your accounts.”

He took the credit in ten limited-load wafers, reasoning that the girl wouldn’t want to trust a clandestine clinic with a single upfront payment. As he handed them to her in the cramped space, he realized that he didn’t know her name. A couple of seconds after that, the second realization hit home, that he didn’t really want to. She took the wafers in silence, looking him up and down in a way that made him think she might try to give him a gratitude blow job there in the cabin. But then she muttered thanks in a voice so low he almost missed it and he wondered if he was, after all, just one more sick-headed fuck with an overactive imagination. He thumped the lock stud again and the door cycled open on a compressed sigh. He followed her out.

“Okay, boy! Get your motherfucking hands up where I can see them!”

The yell was off to his left; the shapes that jumped him came from both sides. The mesh leapt alive like joy. He grabbed an arm, locked it, and hurled its owner toward the dying echo of the voice. Curses and stumbling. The other figure tried to grapple with him, there was some technique in there somewhere, but…he yanked hard, got a warding arm down, and smashed an elbow into the face behind. He felt the nose break. Pain wrung a high yelp from his attacker. He stepped, hooked with one foot, and pushed. The one with the broken nose went down. There was another one, coming back from the left again. He spun about, fierce grin and crooked hands, saw his target. Blocky, slope-shouldered, fading pro-wrestler type. Carl feinted, then kicked him in the belly as he rushed in. Sobbing grunt and the solid feel of a good co