“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.”
“Okay, so male force and hierarchy nail the human race into a coherent social order, weed out the worst of the loose cannons, and provide a stable base, all so that thousands of years later female principles can emerge to govern with a modicum of civilized decency. That’s your imam’s stance?”
Sevgi nodded. “It’s Valipour’s stance as well, give or take. And a valid Sufistance, too, insofar as it represents a continuing revelation.”
“Sort of explains the backlash, though, doesn’t it.” Yavuz grinned. “Thanks, guys, you’ve done a bang-up job, given your gender limitations, but we’ll take it from here. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the shahuda sitting still for that.”
“Well.” She shrugged. “They didn’t, no.”
“Yeah, I remember the mobs here, chanting in the streets when I was a kid.” Yavuz put a raised, droning note into his voice. “Men have authority over women because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other. So forth.”
Sevgi snorted. “That tired old shit.”
“That tired old shit’s the Qu’ran, as I recall. Is the Qu’ran not a part of Islam in New York?”
“Very funny. Is historical context not a part of intelligent human thought around here?”
The impish grin again. Yavuz seemed to be shrugging off his sudden bout of male guilt. “Around here, sure. But you don’t have to go too far southeast before intelligent human thought is pretty severely frowned on. Come to that, from what I hear you don’t have to go too far southwest of New York before the same thing applies.”
She laughed. “Fair comment. Marsalis told me you wrote a thesis on that stuff. Similarities in the US before Secession and Turkey, something like that?”
“‘Psychosocial Parallels in Turkish and American Nationalisms,’” Yavuz quoted with mock-bombast. He gestured modestly, undercut the effect. “Nothing’s ever that simple, of course, but there were a lot of similarities. Both big, stroppy nationalisms founded in very shallow cultural soil. Both constitutionally secular societies with a resentful fundamentalism snapping at their heels. Both running a massive cultural gap between urban and rural society. Both very uneasy with the New Math, both trying to beat back the virilicide with draconian drug laws and wishful thinking. You know this place might have fractured apart, too, the way the US did, if we hadn’t had the Europeans sneaking about pulling levers from the outside.”
“You don’t sound that pleased about it.”
The Turk sighed. “Yeah, I know. And I should be, I guess. Certainly don’t want the fucking shahuda prowling the streets here, stoning my daughters if they go out unchaperoned or showing more flesh than a wrapped corpse. But it’s no fun, either, knowing your whole country’s just the new backyard for a bunch of over-the-hill ex-imperial cynics.”
“Now you sound almost patriotic.”
“Not me.” He shook his head grimly. “Did Carl tell you I used to teach in the prison system before I got this gig?”
“He mentioned it.”
“Yeah, well you get to see some unpleasant things in the Turkish penal system. I’ve met a few too many torture-scarred political prisoners to be much of a Turkish patriot anymore. The way I see it, anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet.”
“I like that.” Sevgi smiled into her salep. “So you think the US might have held together the way Turkey did. I mean, if there’d been an outside force to apply the right pressure?”
“Not necessarily, no.” Yavuz looked unaccountably sad as he said it. “I mean, you’ve got the whole states’ rights issue, which we never had. Two centuries of southern resentment and cultural abrasion, religious fury, racial tension. Those are pretty deep fissures. Plus the anti-drug laws meant less chance for the virilicide to do its weeding out the way it was elsewhere.”
He put his salep mug down on the counter, sat back, and held his open palms toward it, as if in obscure invocation.
“But anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it. Because there never was an outside force big enough to make you people behave. COLIN didn’t exist as such back then, the UN was still a toothless tiger trying to find its dentures, the Chinese just didn’t give a shit. Homegrown corporate interests were all behaving like thugs, they just wanted the cheap resources and labor for as long as it lasted. You’ve got the environmental lobby screaming, Zhang fever scaring the shit out of the Asian populace. Pacific Rim commercial interests don’t want a fight, they just step in and make their offer, and pretty much everyone on the West Coast breathes a big sigh of relief when they do. Los Angeles goes first, toe in the pool, and then the whole coast takes the plunge when it works.”
Sevgi nodded. Somewhere in a box on top of a wardrobe, she still had a replica scroll of the Angeline Freeport charter. Murat had brought it back from a West Coast medical conference for her when she was still in junior high. Like most successful first-generation immigrants, he’d been passionate about his adoptive homeland, even after it fractured apart under his feet almost as he stepped off the plane.
“Yeah,” she said grayly. “And anything the fucking West Coast can do…”
Yavuz nodded, teacher-like. “Just so. The northeastern states seize the precedent and walk away as well. And on all sides, the rhetoric has been stoked so high that there can be no climb-down for anyone. It’s the classic male impasse. Honor satisfied, and everybody loses. A textbook case. Have you ever read Mariela Groombridge? Evolving States?”