Black Man (30 page)

“Knew I’d come, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Nevant drew on his cigarette, let the smoke gush back out of his mouth, and sucked it in hard through his nose. “Fuck you did.”

Carl shrugged. “All right.”

“Want to know why I did come?”

“Sure.”

The Frenchman grinned and leaned across the table, mock confidential. “I came to kill your ass, Mars man.”

Out beyond the glass-panel frontage of the restaurant, sunset bruised and bloodied the sky over the Sea of Marmara. Torn cloud, clotted with red. Carl met Nevant’s gaze and held it.

“That’s original.”

“Well.” Nevant sat back again, stared down at the tabletop. “Sometimes the old gene-deep reasons are the best, you know.”

“Is that why you tried to persuade Manco Bambarén to give you house room? Gene-deep reasons?”

“If you like. It
was
a question of survival.”

“Yeah, survival as a cudlip.”

Nevant looked up. Carl saw the twitch of a suppressed fight instruction flowing down the nerves of one arm. Like most thirteens, the Frenchman was physically powerful, broad in chest and shoulders, long limbs carrying corded muscle, head craggy and large. But somehow, in Nevant, the bulk seemed to have whittled down to a pale, lycanthropic coil of potential. He’d lost weight since Carl saw him last, and his nose and cheekbones made sharp angles out of his flesh. The narrowed gray-green eyes were muddy dark with anger, and the smile when it came was a slow-peeling, silent snarl. He’d been fast, back in Arequipa three years ago—it had taken the mesh for Carl to beat him. If he came across the table now, it would be like a whip, like snake-strike.

“Don’t like your jacket much. What is that, fucking incarceration chic?”

Carl shrugged. “Souvenir.”

“That’s no excuse. What’d it cost you?”

“About four months.”

Brief pause. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. What happened, your license expire?”

“No, that’s still good.”

“Still doing the same shit, huh?” Nevant plumed a lungful of smoke across the table. “Still hunting your brothers down for the man?”

“Oh,
please
.”

“You know, it wouldn’t just be for me, Mars man.”

“Sorry?”

“Killing you. It wouldn’t just be for me. You have a large fan club back there in the tract. Can hardly blame them, right? And if I killed you, and they knew about it.” Nevant yawned and stretched, loosening the combat tension from his frame. “Well, I’d probably never have to buy my own cigarettes again.”

“I’d have thought they’d want to kill me themselves.”

The Frenchman gestured. “The limits of revenge. They can’t
all
kill you, and stuck where they are right now none of them can. You learn a kind of wisdom in the tract—settle for what you can get, it’s better than nothing.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

The wolfish grin came back. “Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.”

“They had their chance, Stefan. You all did. You could have gone to Mars.”

“Yeah, it’s not all red rocks and air locks, apparently. Saw the ads on my way in.” Nevant touched the rakı glass on the table in front of him with one fingernail. He hadn’t yet picked it up, or touched the tray of
meze
laid out between the two men. “Sounds great. Hard to see why you came back.”

“I won the lottery.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so much fun on Mars that the grunts buy a ticket every month to see if they can’t get the fuck out of there and home again.”

Carl shrugged. “I didn’t say it was paradise. It was an option.”

“Look, man.
You
came back, and the
reason
you came back is that life on Mars is a pile of shit.” Nevant blew more smoke at him. “Some of us just didn’t need to make the trip to work that one out.”

“You were busy making plans to spend the rest of your life up on the altiplano when I caught up with you.

That’s just Mars with higher gravity.”

Nevant smiled thinly. “So you say.”

“Why should I lie?”

Outside, streetlights were glimmering to life along the seawall walkway. Sevgi Ertekin sat with Battal Yavuz on tall stools at a
salep
stall a dozen meters down the promenade. They sipped their drinks in cupped hands and were apparently getting along okay. Nevant tipped his head in their direction.

“Who is she, then?”

“No, I’m not his partner.” Sevgi struggled to keep the edge out of her voice. “This is strictly a temporary thing.”

“Okay, sorry. My mistake. Just the two of you seem, you know…”

“Seem
what
?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Connected, I guess. That’s unusual with Marsalis. Even for a thirteen, he’s pretty locked up. And it’s not like it’s easy getting close to these guys in the first place.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to sound like those Human Purity fuckwits, but I’ve been working the tract for nearly a decade now, and I’ve got to say variant thirteen are the closest thing to an alien race you’re ever going to see.”

“I’ve heard the same thing said about women.”

“By men, yeah.” Yavuz slurped at his
salep
and came up grinning. He cut a cheery figure in the evening gloom and the yellowish lights from the stall. His jacket collar framed a tanned, well-fed face, and there was a small but unapologetic paunch under his sweater. Life at UNGLA Eurozone seemed to be treating him well. His hair was academic untidy, his eyes merry with reflected light. “Naturally. The way you people are wired, compared with the way we are.”

“
You people
?”

“I’m joking, of course. But the same way male and female genetic wiring is substantially different”—Yavuz jerked a casual thumb back toward the lit interior of the restaurant, and the two men who sat facing each other in the window—“that’s the way those two are substantially different from you and me both.”

“Bit closer to
you people,
though,” said Sevgi sourly. “Right?”

Yavuz chuckled. “Fair point. In testosterone chemistry, in readiness for violent acts and suspension of basic empathy, yes, I suppose so. They are more male than female, of course. But then, no one ever tried to build a female thirteen.”

“That we know of.”

“That we know of,” he echoed, and sighed. “From what I understand, readiness for violent acts and suspension of empathy were exactly the traits the researchers hoped to amplify. Small surprise they opted for the male model, then.”

For just a moment, his gaze drifted out past her shoulder to the sea.

“At times,” he said quietly, “it shames me to be male.”

Sevgi shifted uncomfortably on her stool. She turned her
salep
mug in both hands. They were speaking Turkish, hers a little creaky with lack of use, and for some reason, some association maybe with childhood misbehavior and scolding, the Turkish phrasing of that sentiment—
it shames me
—lent an obscure force to Yavuz’s words. She felt her cheeks warm against the cold air in sympathy.

“I mean,” he continued, still not looking at her. “We index how civilized a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male social dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem.”

Sevgi’s eyes flickered away to the restaurant window. Stefan Nevant was leaned across the table, gesturing, talking intently. Marsalis looked back at him, impassive, arms draped on the back of his chair, head tilted slightly to one side. The same intensity seemed to crackle off both men for all the differences in their demeanor. The same raw sense of force. It was hard to imagine either of them ever talking about a sense of shame. For anything.

Deep in the pit of her stomach, despite herself, something warmed and slid. She felt her cheeks flush again, harder. She cleared her throat.

“I think there’s another way to look at it,” she said quickly. “Back in New York, I’ve got a friend, Meltem, who’s an imam. She says it’s a question of stages in social evolution. You’re Muslim, right?”

Yavuz put tongue in cheek, grinned. “Nominally.”

“Well, Meltem says—she’s Turkish, too, Turkish American, I mean, and she’s a believer, of course, but—”

“Yeah,” Yavuz drawled. “Comes with the job, I imagine.”

She laughed. “Right. But she’s a feminist Sufi. She studied with Nazli Valipour in Ahvaz before the crackdown. You’ve heard of the Rabia school?”

The man in front of her nodded. “Read about them. That’s the Ibn Idris thing, right? Questions all authorities subsequent to the Prophet.”

“Well, Valipour cites Idris, yeah, but really she’s tracing a line right back to Rabia al-Basri herself, and she’s arguing that Rabia’s interpretation of religious duty purely as religious love is uh, is you know, the prototypical feminist understanding of Islam.”

And then she dried up, suddenly self-conscious. Back in New York, she wasn’t used to talking about this stuff. She was rarely at the mosque these days, never found the time for it. Her conversations with Meltem had stopped soon after Ethan died. She was too angry, with a God she wasn’t at all sure she believed in anymore, and in his echoing absence with anybody who made the mistake of taking his side.

But Battal Yavuz just smiled and sipped at his
salep
.

“All right, that sounds like an interesting angle,” he said. “So how does your imam square her Islamic feminism with all that inconvenient textual shit in the hadiths and the Book?”

Sevgi frowned, mustering her rusty Turkish. “Well, it’s cycles, you know. The way it looks from the historical context, the male cycle of civilization
had
to come first, because there was no other way outside of male force to create a civilization in the first place. To have law and art and science, you have to have settled agrarian societies and a nonlaboring class that can develop that stuff. But that kind of society would have to be enforced, and pretty brutally in the terms we look at things today.”

“That’s right.” Yavuz nodded at the two thirteens in the restaurant window. “You’d have to wipe out all those guys, for a start.”

“She’s the client.” Carl picked up a fork and helped himself to a slice of eggplant from the
meze
tray.

“Are we going to eat some of this?”

Deep, final draw on the cigarette, raised brow. Nevant stubbed out the butt. “You freelancing now?”

“I always was, Stefan. UNGLA hold the license, but they only call me when they need me. Rest of the time, I’ve got to make a living like everybody else.”

“So what does
the client
want with me?”

“We’re chasing some
familia andina
connections. Trying to bust a Marstech ring in the induction camps.”

“There’s some reason that I’d help you do that?”

“Apart from the fact that Manco Bambarén sold you out to me three years back? No, no reason I can think of. I always did have you down as the forgiving sort.”

Nevant skinned a brief grin. “Yeah,
tayta
Manco sold me out. But it was you that came to collect.”

“Blame the messenger, huh?”

“Oh, I do.”

Carl helped himself to more
meze
. “You really think a cut-rate godfather with delusions of ethnicity was ever going to go up against UNGLA for you? Were you really that desperate to believe you’d found a bolt-hole, Stefan? There’s a reason Manco made it to
tayta
level, and it’s not his charitable nature.”

“What the fuck do you know about it, Mars man? As I recall, you were on urban fucking pacification detail most of your time in the Middle East.”

“I know tha—”

“Do you know that they’ve got warlord alliances operating in Central Asia
still
that I fucking built from nothing back in ’87? Do you know how many of those puppet presidents you see mouthing the words on Al Jazeera
I helped launch
?”

Carl shrugged. “Works in Central Asia doesn’t mean it’ll fly in South America. That’s a whole different continent, Stefan.”

“Yeah, and a whole different goal.” Nevant shook a new cigarette out of the packet. He fit it in the corner of his mouth, drew it to life, and raised his eyebrows. “You want one of these?”

“I’m eating.”

“Suit yourself.” He leaned forward, blew smoke across the table, and grinned. “See, the
familias
aren’t like those warlord motherfucks, they never were. Warlord wants the same thing any cudlip politician wants—legitimacy, recognition, and respect from the rest of the herd. The whole nine-car motorcade.”

Carl nodded, chewing. He’d had pretty much the same lecture from Nevant three years ago, waiting for the paperwork to clear so he could take the Frenchman out of Lima in restraints. But let Nevant lecture.

It was Carl’s best chance of gleaning something he could use.

“So habitually, you’ve got a lawless vacuum and a bunch of these assholes fighting to put their stamp on a new order that lets them ride up front in the lead limo. Now, with the
familias,
that’s never going to be the case. There’s
already
a structure in place, and it’s already full of legitimized scumbags,
criollo
whites, and trained token
indigenas
who’ve got the parliament, the military, the banks, the landowners, all that good shit right there in their pockets. The
familias
are locked out, all they’ve got is crime and this faint echo of an ethnic grievance.” Nevant cupped a hand at his ear. “And the echo’s fading, man. COLIN’s shipped so many altiplano natives out to Mars over the past fifty years, poured so much money into the region, the
familias
just can’t recruit like they used to. Only places they’re
strong anymore are ghetto populations in the Republic. No one else can be bothered. Nobody’s scared of them anymore.”

“So you were going to provide the fear.”

More smoke, billowing. Nevant gestured through it. “Play to your strengths. Everybody’s scared of the thirteens.”

“Yeah, would be, if they weren’t all locked up.”

The Frenchman grinned. “You wish.”

“Oh come on.” Carl waved the fork. “We’ve got a couple of dozen out there at any one time, at most.”

“Not the point, Mars man. Not the point at all.”

“No? Then what is the point?”

Nevant toyed with the cutlery on his side of the table, just touching it with the fingertips of his right hand.

“The point is that we exist. We’re a perfect fit for all those atavistic fears they have. They’ve been desperately looking for witches and monsters ever since they wiped us out the first time around. Now they’ve got us back.”