Carl glanced back towards the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.
‘So,’ he said breezily. ‘Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?’
Bambaren drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.
‘Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?’
‘It’s my intention, tayta, to get some straight answers out of you. And speech-making on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.’
‘You dismiss—’
‘I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.’
‘I have to have the respect of my men.’
‘Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.’
Beneath the sunlenses, Bambaren’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. ‘What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every—’
‘British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman’
‘It makes no difference. You.’ The familia chief’s face twitched. ‘Névant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonised women too poverty stricken to afford children of their own—’
‘Go fuck yourself, Manco.’
But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.
‘Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day—’
‘Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.’ Now he had the tone, the drawl. ‘We’re not here to discuss my family history.’
But tayta Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive.
‘Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be harvested of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel, twist?’
And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambaren’s death at the edge of his striking hand. There was no art in this, this was thumbs hooked into the familia chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite–
If we are ruled by what they have trained into us, said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage, then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear.
Carl flexed a smile, and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.
‘Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,’ he said. ‘Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?’
He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambaren blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long-lost treasure of the Incas was kept.
‘What are you talking about?’
Carl shrugged. ‘I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?’
Bambaren spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. ‘No one talks to Mars. You know that.’
‘You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.’
‘They walked away from that possibility back in ’74. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.’
Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-djinn on a ship home, climb inside a spare crycocap – you can always eat the previous occupant if you’re hungry – and dive-bomb the Pacific ocean with the survivable modules. Piece of cake.
‘You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance.’
‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’
Carl grinned. ‘Hate will find a way, huh? That old deuda de sangre magic.’
The familia chief studied the ground. ‘Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the afrenta marciana with me?’
‘Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.’
Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. ‘A resurgence of what, black man? We are at war. That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.’
‘Or until you curry enough favour with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.’
Manco looked pointedly back towards the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.
‘COLIN is a fact of life,’ he said sombrely. ‘We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.’