She shook her head.
“You should. She’s brilliant. Taught at the University of Texas until they threw her out for signing an anti-creationist petition. She’s in Vienna these days. Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn’t cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of.”
“Which is what?”
Yavuz shrugged. “Fear.”
“It’s a power beyond numbers.” Nevant still hadn’t touched the meze, but he was a couple of fingers down the raki glass now. He sneered. “You think the cudlips give a shit about facts? Statistics and formal studies? It’s the knee-jerk, man. That’s what these people live and breathe. There are monsters, there is evil, and it’s somewhere out there in the dark. Whoo-oo-oo. You know, before I got out to Peru, Manco was putting out a rumor that he had pistacos working for him. Settling scores for that turf squabble they had back in ’03.”
Carl nodded. On Mars, he’d seen the familias run a similar dynamic among the less educated end of the Uplands Initiative workforce. He’d been offered pistaco work himself a couple of times, lack of pale skin notwithstanding.
“Whatever works, I guess.”
“Yeah, well. Worked for a while.” Nevant snorted disgustedly and knocked back another chunk of his raki. “Manco was so fucking pleased with himself, he couldn’t see it’d crash and burn soon as one of his fake pistacos got called and couldn’t cut it. I told him—the way I had it mapped out, he could have that monster threat for real. Real, honest-to-DNA monsters doing his enforcing for him. Something to scare everybody, not just the illiterates. Just think what would have happened if the word got around: Cross the familias and they’ll send a fucking thirteen to visit you.”
“Always assuming you and your future army of thirteens could cut it any better than tayta Manco’s fakes.”
Nevant looked at him. “You lose many fights to a normal human recently?”
“No. But like you just got through telling me, it isn’t the facts that do it for humans. Maybe Manco didn’t need a real threat. Or at least, he didn’t need it badly enough to cuddle up with a bunch of fucking twists.”
“Didn’t have any problem cuddling up to that hib cunt Jurgens,” said Nevant sourly. “Amazing how your prejudices can go out the window when there’s a decent rack in the equation.”
“Greta Jurgens?” Carl summoned vague recollection of a languid, gray-eyed blonde from his inquiries after Nevant three years back. She’d been running front-office operations for Manco in Arequipa. “She was a hibernoid?”
“Yeah, she was. Why?”
Carl shrugged. “No reason. Just the way Manco was about the whole twist thing, it’s strange he’d tolerate one that far up the ladder on the inside.”
“Like I said, check out the rack. The ass. And hey, for all I know, hibs do some dickshift tricks you can’t get out of a human woman.”
Carl sipped his drink, shook his head. “That’s bonobos, and even then it’s bullshit hype. Anyway, Manco wants that kind of thrill, he can go down to Lima and have his pick of twist brothels. Come on. It doesn’t add up.”
“Well then, maybe it’s just that there are twists and twists.” Nevant’s lip curled. “Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only people like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding.”
Carl gazed at the cutlery on the table. He nodded, a little sadly. “People like you. They lock people like you up. Me, I’m licensed.”
“Domesticated, you mean.”
“Call it what you like. You can’t turn the clock back twenty thousand years, Stefan.”
Nevant unsheathed the wolf-snarl grin again.
“Can’t you?”
“See, once upon a time,” Yavuz was saying, “fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait. She cites—”
Down the promenade, the splintering crack of glass. Sevgi whipped about in time to see the restaurant window shattered outward around two grappling bodies. Someone shrieked.
“Ah, fuck.”
She grabbed after the gun she wasn’t permitted to carry here, blind fingers registering the lack ahead of conscious thought. Flung herself off the stool—it teetered and toppled behind her, she heard it go down clattering—and toward the fight. Yavuz was at her side, brandishing an authorized pistol…
On the floor, the pale thirteen had Marsalis pinned. His arm hauled up, something in it, slashed down. Somehow, Marsalis twisted aside, did something with his legs that shifted the balance of the fight. Nevant reeled, shaking a hand that must have hit the concrete floor with killing force, must have broken bones. He was trying to keep the black man down with his other arm, but the lock wasn’t working. Marsalis skated sideways by fractions, his shoulder slipped loose. His hand flapped, grabbed, pulled the Frenchman down toward him. He hinged upward from the stomach, hard, met Nevant’s face with the crown of his skull. Sevgi heard the noise it made, and her teeth went on edge.
They arrived.
“That’s it, motherfucker.” Yavuz, in English. Voice shocked hoarse, pistol jammed in Nevant’s ear. “Game over.”
Nevant swaying, one hand clutched to his face, blood dripping between fingers from a nose that had to be broken. Coughing, bubbling, but through it came laughter. Marsalis grunted and tugged himself out from beneath, folded a leg, and shoved the Frenchman sideways with his knee. Nevant went halfway to collapsing, still clutching his face. Still chuckling. The hand he was using was the same one he’d just broken on the concrete.
“Going to have to.” He sucked a breath, wetly. “Buy my own cigarettes after all.”
“Looks like it, yeah.” Marsalis rolled to his feet, one smooth coiling motion. He was checking himself for cuts from the glass.
“I did warn you.”
“Yeah, and you made a real pig’s ear of palming that cutlery knife as well.” The black man’s tone was absent. He turned his right hand, frowning, and Sevgi saw tear-track ribbons of blood in the cup of it. Marsalis lifted the hand to eye level, twisted it palm-outward, and pulled back his sleeve. He grimaced. There was a long cut, narrow sliver of glass still embedded, in the flesh on the outer edge of his palm.
“You stay there, you fuck,” Yavuz was telling Nevant shakily. The pistol muzzle floated about close to the pale thirteen’s forehead. “You sit there, and you don’t fucking move.”
He fished in his jacket with his spare hand, brought out a phone, and punched a speed-dial number. Beyond, in the cave made by the hole through the window, people stood about and gaped at the tumbled chairs and table. Waiters hovered, uncertain. A big downward-jagged triangular chunk of glass dropped suddenly from among its fellows in the top of the frame and broke undramatically in three pieces on the ground.
At the apex of the narrowest fragment, as if indicated by an arrowhead of glass, Sevgi saw the glint of the cutlery knife where Nevant had dropped it. The words the two thirteens had just traded caught up with her. She stared at Marsalis.