Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

Come see the humans.

See them mate in authentic surroundings.

A grimace twitched through him, too deeply buried to register in the muscles of his face.

See the female’s postcoital douching ritual.

Another buried tremor of intent told him to get up off the bed, get dressed, and get the fuck out. There was really nothing else left to do. She’d run his wafer as soon as they’d gotten through the door—swiped it up the crack in the reader with the same clinical competence that she’d later employed to spray-coat his swollen cock and slot it inside her. Then he got some basic pay-per-view tricks—sucking her own fingers as he thrust into her, squeezing her own breasts as she rode him—a couple of well-timed posture changes, and a crescendo of throaty moaning until he blew. Now streetlighting and a tree outside made yellowish swaying shadows across the wall and ceiling of the darkened room, the alkaline smell of recent sex seeped out of the sheets tangled around his waist, and suddenly he felt old and tired and very slightly ill. The wound in his side had started to hurt again, and he thought the dressing might be coming off.

Intention made it to his motor system. He sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed. In the bathroom universe, the toilet flushed. For some reason, the sound speeded him up, and by the time she came out he’d found his trousers and was stepping into them.

“You going?” she asked dully.

“Yeah, I think it’s that time, you know.” He hooked his shirt off one arm of the couch and shouldered his way into it. “I’m tired and you, well I guess you got places to be, right?”

Silence. She stood there, looking at him. He heard a tiny clicking sound as she swallowed, then a wet gulp. Abruptly he realized that she was crying in the gloom. He stopped, awkward and halfway into his shirt, peering at her. The gulp became a genuine sob. She turned away from him, hugging herself.

“Listen,” he said.

“No, you go.” The voice was hard and almost unblurred by the tears, schooled by the trade he supposed. She wasn’t milking for effect, unless her method acting ran better to grief than sexual ecstasy. He stood behind her, looked at the untidy ropes of her hair where it had frizzed in the damp heat.

Images of the back of Gaby’s head coming apart.

He grimaced, put his hand on her shoulder with a hesitation that should have been broad farce after the cheap intimacy he’d purchased from her twenty minutes ago. She flinched slightly at his touch.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

It ricocheted off the corner of his mind, and for a moment he thought he’d misheard. Then, when she didn’t repeat it, he took his hand off her shoulder. She’d fished the Trojan spray can from her bag with the professional dexterity of a blindfolded circus performer, used it on him the same way. There’d been a coolly reassuring comfort to watching her do it, a sense that he—idiot grin—was in good hands. Now the same idiot part of him felt betrayed by this admission of previous error, almost as if she were accusing him of having something to do with it himself.

“Well,” he said experimentally. “I mean, can’t you. You know.”

Her shoulders shook. “This is Florida. Been illegal down here for decades now. You gotta go to the Union or Rimside, and I don’t have the parity payments on my medicode for that. I could sell everything I own and still not have enough.”

“And there’s no one here who—”

“Didn’t you hear me. It’s fucking illegal , man.”

A little professional competence, a sense of being on his home ground, asserted itself. “Yeah, legal’s got nothing to do with it. Not what I meant. There’ll be places you can go.”

She turned to face him, palm-heeling the tears off one cheek. The streaks it left gleamed as they caught the streetlight falling into the room. She snorted. “Yeah, places you can go, maybe. Places the governor’s daughter can go. You think I have that kind of money? Or maybe you think I want to risk a back-alley scrape-bar, come home bleeding to death inside or collapse from enzyme clash because they were too cheap to run the specs right. Where you from, man? It costs a lot of fucking money to get sick around here.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to fuck off. It wasn’t his problem, he hadn’t signed on for this shit. Instead, he saw Gaby’s head come apart again and, as if from a distance, he heard himself saying quietly: “How much do you need?”

Fuck it. He derailed his rising irritation at the girl, at himself, retargeted it north and east. Let fucking UNGLA pay for something worthwhile for a change. Not like they can’t afford it. Let that piece of shit di Palma query it if he fucking dares.

When he’d calmed her down, stopped her crying, and stemmed her protestations of gratitude before they started to sound hollow, he explained that he’d need a datapoint to download the credit to wafers she could use. That might mean going back to the hotel. At that, she clutched his hand, and he guessed she was terrified that if she let him out of her sight, or at least out of the neighborhood, he’d change his mind. She knew a datapoint that was secure a couple of blocks over, one of her clients from downtown used it now and then. She could show him where it was, right now, she’d get dressed, wouldn’t take a moment.

The streets outside were pretty much deserted, the neighborhood was low-end semi-residential, and at this hour people were either inside or downtown. There was alloy shuttering on all the storefronts; bright yellow decals announced the anti-tampering charges lurking in the metal. A couple of bars were still open, showing dim neon signs over corner doorways like weak urban lighthouses. Outside one, a flock of aspiring street thugs propped themselves against walls and perched on parked vehicles, staring dangerously at the few passersby. Carl felt the mesh come gently, suggestively online. He ignored it and avoided gazes instead, put an arm around the girl’s shoulder, and picked up the pace a little. He heard the boys talking about him in a densely arcane dialect of Spanglish as they fell behind. It didn’t take much imagination to work out what was being said. Fucking tourists, fucking foreigners, fucking our women. The age-old plaint. He couldn’t really blame them. Then they were lost around a corner and instead music floated down from a window jacked open for the heat, clumpy Cuban jazz that sounded like someone playing the piano with their fists.

The datapoint was a blunt concrete outcrop two meters tall and about the same wide, swelling from the wall of a commercial unit like some kind of architectural tumor. It was fitted with a solid tantalum alloy door. Heavily grilled LCLS panels set into the top of the structure threw down a pale crystalline light. Carl stepped into the radiance and felt, ludicrously, like some kind of stage performer. He punched his general access code into the pad, and the door cycled open. Old memories and scar tissue from Caracas made him usher the girl inside and bang a fist on the rapid-lock button as soon as they were both in. The door cycled again.

The interior was much the same as secure modules he’d used the world over, an iris reader mask on a flexible stalk, a broad screen edged with an integral speaker and set above a wafer dispenser, a double-width chair molded up from the floor, presumably for obese patrons rather than courting couples. The girl, in any case, stayed discreetly on her feet, looked pointedly away from the screen. She really had been here with clients before.

“Hello, sir,” said the datapoint chattily. “Would you like to hear the customer options available to—”