‘Oh, well there’s a sustainable model of exchange. Did you kill the guy who served you breakfast this morning as well, so you wouldn’t have to pay for that either? Going to murder the guy who sold or rented you your transport option, and the guy who runs the place you sleep tonight? Got plans for the people who employ them too, the ones who run the means of production, the managers and the owners, and the people who sell for them and the people who buy from them?’ Carl leaned forward, grinning hard against the cool proximity of death. It felt like biting down. ‘Don’t you fucking get it? They’re all around us, the cudlips. You can’t escape them. You can’t cut loose of them. Every time you consume, you’re working for them. Every time you travel. On Mars, every time you fucking breathe you’re part of it.’
‘Well.’ Onbekend put together another small smile of his own. ‘You’ve learnt your lesson well. But I guess if you whip a dog often enough, it always will.’
‘Oh, please. You know what? You want to pretend there’s some other way? You want to escape into some mythical pre-virilicide golden age – go live in Jesusland, where they still believe in that shit. I was there last week, they love guys like us. They’d burn us both at the stake as soon as look at us. Don’t you understand? There is no place for what we are any more.’ Sutherland’s words seemed to rise in him, Sutherland’s quiet, amused, bass timbre voice like thunder, like strength. ‘They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. They won, Onbekend, and you want to know why? They won because it worked. Group co-operation and bowing down to some thug with a beard worked better than standing alone as a thirteen was ever going to. They ran us ragged, Onbekend, with their mobs and leaders and their fucking strength in numbers. They hunted us down, they exterminated us, and they got the future as a prize. And now here we are, standing in the roof garden of the cudlip success story, and you’re telling me no, no, you didn’t take the elevator or the stairs, you just fucking flew up here all on your own, all with your own two fucking wings. You are full of shit.’
Onbekend leaned forward, mirroring, eyes flaring. It was instinctive, anger driven. The revolver shifted fractionally in his hand, to allow the shift in posture. Angled minutely to one side. Carl saw, and held down the surge of the mesh. Not yet, not yet. He met the other man’s eyes, saw his own death there and didn’t much care. There was a rage rising in him he barely understood. The words kept him alive, warmed him as long as he could spit them out.
‘They built us, Onbekend, they fucking built us. They brought us back from the fucking dead for the one thing we’re good at. Violence. Slaughter. You, me.’ He gestured, slashing, open-handed disgust. ‘All of us, every fucking one. We’re dinosaurs. Monsters summoned up from the deep dark violent past to safeguard the bright lights and shopping privileges of western civilisation. And we did it for them, just like they wanted. You want to talk about cudlips, how they bow and fold to authority, how they let the group dictate? Tell me how we were different. Project fucking Lawman? What does that sound like to you?’
‘Yeah, because they fucking trained us.’ For the first time, Onbekend’s voice rose almost to a shout, was almost pain. He flattened it again, instantly, got it down to a cold, even-tempered anger. ‘They locked us up from fucking childhood, Marsalis. Beat us down with the conditioning. You know that, Osprey must have been the same. How were we supposed to—’
‘We did, as we, were told!’ Carl spaced his words, leaned on them like crowbars going into brickwork. ‘Just like them, just like the cudlips. We failed, just like we failed twenty thousand years ago.’
‘That was then,’ Onbekend snapped. ‘And this is now. And some of us aren’t on that path any more.’
‘Oh, don’t make me fucking laugh. I already told you, everything about you is part of the cudlip world. If you can’t come to some kind of accommodation with that, you might as well fucking shoot yourself—’
A ghost grin came up across Onbekend’s face. ‘It was your suicide I was sent to arrange, Marsalis. Not mine.’
‘Sent?’ Carl jeered it, leered across the scant space between them. ‘Sent? Oh, I rest my fucking case.’
‘Thirteens have had an unfortunate propensity for death by their own hand.’ The other man’s voice came out raised, words rushed, trampling at Carl’s scorn, trying to drive home a winning point he hadn’t embedded quite as well as he’d hoped. ‘Violent suicide, in the tracts and reservations. And a thirteen carrying as much guilt as you—’
‘Guilt? Give me a fucking break. Now you’re talking just like them. Variant thirteen doesn’t do guilt, that’s a cudlip thing.’
‘Yes, all the ones you’ve hunted down, murdered or taken back to a living death in the tracts.’ But Onbekend was calmer now, voice dropping back to even. ‘It stands to reason you couldn’t live with it for ever.’
‘Try me.’
A bleak smile. ‘Happily, I don’t have to. And as for the suicide, you’ve made it easy for me.’
‘Really?’ Carl looked elaborately around him. ‘This doesn’t look much like a suicide scene to me.’
But under the drawl, he already saw the angle and something very like panic started to ice through him. He’d played all his cards, and Onbekend just hadn’t loosened enough. The other thirteen was watching him minutely again, back to the cold control he’d walked in with. Awareness of the place they were in congealed around him – ancient grimy fittings, the long arm of the bartop, scars and spill stains gleaming in the low light and the piled-up glassware and bottles behind. The worn pool tables in their puddles of light from the overheads. Dougie Kwang face up on the floor, head rolled to one side, eyes staring open across the room at him. Waiting for company, for someone to join him down there in the dust and sticky stains.
‘Suicide would be hard to fake here,’ Onbekend agreed. ‘Would have been harder to fake wherever we did it. But you’ve been kind enough to let your drives get the better of you and so here we are, a mindless bar brawl in a low-grade neighbourhood with low-grade criminals to match, and it seems Carl Marsalis just miscalled the odds. Pretty fucking stupid way to die, but hey.’ A shrug. Onbekend’s voice tinged suddenly with contempt. ‘They’ll believe it of you. You’ve given them no reason not to.’
The oblique accusation stung. In the back of his head, Sutherland concurred. If we are ruled by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth.
Ertekin might not buy it.
Yeah, but she might. You don’t always get a clean wrap, Marsalis. Remember that? Life is messy, and so is crime.
Kwang seemed to wink at him from the floor.
Could be this’ll be just messy enough for her, soak.
As if he didn’t have enough with his own thoughts beating him up, Onbekend was still going strong.
‘They’ll believe you were too stupid to beat your own programming, ’ he said matter-of-factly, as if he’d been there for Sutherland’s musings too. ‘Because you are. They’ll believe you went looking for trouble, because you did exactly that, and they’ll believe you found a little too much of it down here to handle alone. So they’ll do a little light investigating, they’ll talk to some people, and in the end they’ll decide you got shot at close range with a nondescript gun that’ll never be found, in the hand of some nameless street thug who’ll also never be found, and they’ll walk away, Marsalis, they’ll walk away because it’ll fit right in with this idiocy you’ve spontaneously generated for us. I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.’