Carl made an impatient gesture. ‘What I believe isn’t important. I did become this, how I got here is academic. So let the academics discuss it at great length, write their papers and publish, get paid to agonise. In the end, none of it affects me.’
‘No, but it might affect others like you in the future.’
Now he found he could smile – a thin, hard smile, the rind of amusement. ‘There aren’t going to be any others like me in the future. Not on this planet. In another generation, we’ll all be gone.’
‘Is that why you don’t believe? Do you feel forsaken?’
The smile became a laugh of sorts. ‘I think you’ll find, Doctor Ertekin, that the technical term for that is transference. You’re the one feeling forsaken. I haven’t ever expected to be anything other than alone, so I’m not upset when I find it to be true.’
Marisol sat in his head and called him a liar. Elena Aguirre ghosted past, whispering. He held down a shiver, talked to stave it off.
‘And you’re missing a rather important point about my lack of religious convictions as well. To be a believer, you have to not only believe, you also have to want someone big and patriarchal around to take care of business for you. You have to be apt for worship. And thirteens don’t do worship, of anyone or anything. Even if you could convince a variant thirteen, against all the evidence, that there really was a god? He’d just see him as a threat to be eliminated. If god were demonstrably real?’ He stared hard into Ertekin’s eyes. ‘Guys like me would just be looking for ways to find him and burn him down.’
Ertekin flinched, and looked away.
‘She’s chosen you well,’ he murmured.
‘Sevgi?’
‘Yes.’ Still looking away, fumbling in a jacket pocket. ‘You will need this.’
He handed Carl a small package, sealed in slippery antiseptic white with orange flash warning decals. Lettering in a language he couldn’t read, Germanic feel, multiple vowels. Carl weighed it in his palm.
‘Put it away, please,’ Ertekin told him. The garden was starting to fill as students and medical staff came out on lunch-break to enjoy the sun.
‘This is painless?’
‘Yes. It’s from a Dutch company that specialises in such things. It will take about two minutes from injection.’
Carl stowed the package.
‘If you brought this,’ he said quietly, ‘why do you need me?’
‘Because I cannot do it,’ Ertekin told him simply.
‘Because you’re a Muslim?’
‘Because I’m a doctor.’ He looked at his hands again. They hung limp in his lap. ‘And because even if I had not taken an oath, I do not think I would be capable of ending my own daughter’s life.’
‘It’s what she wants. It’s what she’s asked for.’
‘Yes.’ There were tears gathering on Ertekin’s eyelids. ‘And now, when it most matters, I find I cannot give her what she wants.’
He took Carl’s hand suddenly. His grip was dry and powerful. The tiger-irised gaze burned into Carl’s, blinked tears aside so they trickled on the leathery skin.
‘She’s chosen you. And deep in my hypocritical, doubting soul, I give thanks to God that you’ve come. Sevgi is getting ready once more to push the boundaries, to cross the lines drawn by others that she will not heed. And this time I will not fail her, as I did four years ago.’
He wiped away the tears with quick, impatient gestures of his hand.
‘I will stand with my daughter this time,’ he said. ‘But you must help me, thirteen, if I am not to fail her again.’
The Haag complex rips through Sevgi’s system like vacuum in a suddenly holed spacecraft. Cells rupture, leak vital fluids. Debris flies about, her immune system staggers, flushes itself desperately, clings to the anti-viral boosters Stanford fed her, and still it fails. Her lungs begin to fill. Her renal functions slow and must be artificially stimulated if her kidneys are not to explode. Tubes in, tubes out. The creep of waste products through her system begins to hurt.
She finds it harder to think with clarity for any length of time.
Only when the v-format was no longer viable, when she sputtered in and out of existence there like a disinterested ghost, did she let him see her for real.
He sat by the bed in shock.
For all he’d prepared himself, it was a visceral blow to see how the flesh had burned off her, how her eyes had grown hollow and her cheeks drawn. He tried to smile at her, but the expression flickered on and off his face, the way she’d flickered in virtual. When she saw, she smiled back at him and hers was steady, like a lamp burning through the stretched fabric of her face.
‘I look like shit,’ she murmured. ‘Right?’
‘You’ve been skipping meals again, haven’t you?’
She laughed, broke up into coughing. But he saw the look in her eyes, saw she was grateful. He tried to feel good about that.
He sat by the bed.
He held her hand.
‘Tell me a secret.’
‘What?’ He’d thought she was sleeping. The little room was dim and still, adrift in the larger quiet of the hospital at night. Darkness pressed itself to the glass of the window, oozed inward through the room. The machines winked tiny red and amber eyes at him, whispered and clicked to themselves, made vaguely comprehensible graphic representations, in cool shades of blue and green, of what was going on inside their charge. The night lamp cast a faded gold oblong on the bed where Sevgi made mounds under the sheet. Her face was in shadow.
‘Come on,’ she croaked. ‘You heard me. Tell me what really happened on Mars. What did Gutierrez do to you?’
He blinked, cleared his eyes from long aimless staring into the gloom. ‘Thought you’d already worked that out.’
‘Well, you tell me. Did I?’
He looked back at it, bricks of his past he hadn’t tried to build anything with in years. It’s another world, it’s another time, Sutherland had said once. Got to learn to let it go.
‘You were close,’ he admitted.
‘How close? Come on, Marsalis.’ A laugh floated up out of her, like echoes up from a well. ‘Grant a dying woman a last wish.’
His mouth tightened.
‘Gutierrez didn’t fix the lottery for me,’ he said. ‘There’s too much security around it, too much n-djinn presence. And it’s a tough thing to do, fix a chance event so it does what you want and still looks like chance. Something like that, you’ve got to look for the weak point.’
‘Which was?’
‘Same as it always is. The human angle.’
‘Oh, humans.’ She laughed again, a little stronger now. ‘I guess that makes sense. Can’t trust them any further than a Jesusland preacher with a choirgirl, right?’
He smiled. ‘Right.’
‘So which particular human did you finesse?’
‘Neil Delaney.’ Faint flare of contempt as he remembered, but the years had bleached it back almost to amusement. ‘He was Bradbury site administrator back then.’
‘He’s on the oversight council now.’
‘Yeah, I know. Mars works well for some people.’ Carl found himself loosening up. Words flowing easier now, here in the low light at her bedside, just the two of them in the gloom and quiet. ‘Delaney was selling to the Chinese. Downgrading site reports, writing them off as low potential, so COLIN wouldn’t bother filing notice of action. That way, the New People’s Home teams could get in and stake their claim instead, without having to do the actual survey work.’
‘Motherfucker!’ But it was the whispered ghost of outrage, you could hear how she didn’t have strength for the real thing.