‘And variant thirteen,’ Norton said drearily.
‘Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look – by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.’
‘Apart from the kleptocrats.’ Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorising. ‘I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?’
Jeff shrugged. ‘Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profile for a kleptocrat and a thirteen doesn’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.’
‘Oh, come on. How are you going to measure something like that?’
‘Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the wash-ups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well – apparently before Jacobsen and the round-up, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-sized backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.’
‘Which means what?’
‘Well, what’s the pre-eminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?’
‘I don’t know. Networking skills?’
Jeff laughed. ‘You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.’
‘So were you, once.’
‘Charisma!’ Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. ‘Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their force-fulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.’
‘What if they are women?’
‘Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.’
‘I thought you were talking about now.’
‘Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.’
‘Apart from wiping out the thirteens.’
‘Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilisation getting an early start.’
Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. ‘Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?’
His brother sighed. ‘Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition towards charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us just quietly hate them, but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys stood for any elected post, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label winners every time. Why do you think Jacobsen wanted them interned and chemically castrated? The way he saw it, let them out into the general population and within a couple of decades they’d be running every democratic nation state on the planet. They’d demolish the democratic process, roll back everything feminised civil society’s achieved in the last couple of centuries. And they’d breed right back into base humanity like rabbits, because any woman who’s at all drawn to male sexuality is going to fall like a bomb for these guys.’ Jeff gave him another wry grin. ‘The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance. That what’s bothering you, little brother?’
Norton gestured irritably ‘No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to co-operate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.’
‘Well, how’s she doing?’
‘I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.’
‘Exotic Istanbul, huh?’
‘Oh, shut up.’
Jeff quelled his grin. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw—’
‘Great.’
‘—but wanting to fuck a guy’s brains out isn’t necessarily the same thing as switching your own brain off. I mean, look – the bonobo thing is similar. They’ve got an amped-up feminine appeal that’ll blast the average guy’s sexual systems like a cocaine hit everytime—’
‘Yeah, you’d know all about that.’
Jeff stopped and looked at him reproachfully. ‘Tom, I said I was sorry about the Istanbul crack. Give me a fucking break will you. What I meant was, you don’t see me leaving Megan and the kids for Nuying, do you? Risking divorce, separation from Jack and Luisa, maybe a lawsuit for professional misconduct, all because I’m crazy for some modified pussy. Those things are important to me, and I manage to balance them against what Nu does for me. And I come out ahead, Tom. In control, the best of both worlds. Sure, I’ve got a drug problem, and the drug is bonobo tendency. But I’m handling it. That’s what you do, you deal with your weaknesses. You take up the strain. If this woman you’re talking about really is professionally focused, serious about her work, knows who she is and what she’s about, then there’s no reason she can’t do the same cost benefit analysis and play the game accordingly. If anything, the genetic evidence suggests women are better at that shit anyway, so she’s got a wired-in head-start right there. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want to have to hand-wash the sheets in whatever Istanbul hotel they’re in right now—’
‘Oh Christ, Jeff.’
Jeff spread his hands. ‘Sorry, little brother. You want me to make you feel better, tell you the field’s clear for you to make your Manhattan urbanite move on this woman? I can’t. But if what you’re concerned about really is her professional grip on things – then I wouldn’t worry.’