Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

This has been a tough one, and I owe a great deal of thanks in a great many places. I have begged, borrowed, and stolen from just about everywhere to get Thirteen written.

It being a novel of science fiction, let’s start with the science:

The original idea for variant thirteen was inspired by the theorizing of Richard Wrangham on the subject of diminishing human aggression, as described by Matt Ridley in his excellent book Nature Via Nurture . I have taken vast fictional liberties with these ideas, and variant thirteen as it emerges in this book is in no way intended to represent either Mr. Wrangham’s or Mr. Ridley’s thoughts on the subject. These gentlemen simply provided me with a springboard—the rather ugly splash that follows is of my making alone.

The concept of artificial chromosome platforms is also borrowed, in this case from Gregory Stock’s fascinating and slightly scary book Redesigning Humans , which, along with Nature Via Nurture and Steven Pinker’s brilliant The Blank Slate and How the Mind Works , served as the bulk inspiration for most of the future genetic science I’ve dreamed up here. Once again, any mangling or misuse of the material I found in these outstanding works must be laid solely at my door.

Yaroshanko intuitive function, though my own invention, owes a large debt of inspiration to very real research done on social networks, as described in Mark Buchanan’s book Small World . And I’m personally indebted to Hannu Rajaniemi at the University of Edinburgh for taking the time to (try to) explain quantum game theory and its potential applications to me, thus giving me the basis for the New Math and its subtle but far-reaching social impact. Thanks also must go to Simon Spanton, star editor, for patiently helping me wrangle the technical logistics of Mars—Earth cryocapping.

In the political sphere, I was heavily influenced by two very perceptive and rather depressing books about the United States, The Right Nation by John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge and What’s the Matter with America by Thomas Frank, as well as the brilliant and slightly less depressing Stiffed by Susan Faludi. While these books all fed into the concept of the Secession and the gender themes arising in Thirteen , the Confederated Republic itself (aka Jesusland) was inspired by the now famous Jesusland map meme, created (according to Wikipedia) by one G. Webb on the message board yakyak.org. Way to go, G.! Special personal thanks must also go to Alan Beatts of Borderlands books in San Francisco for listening to my meanderings over whiskey and shwarma, and lending me a little informed American opinion with which to polish up what I had.

For insights into a possible future (and widely misunderstood past) Islam, I’m also indebted to Tariq Ali for The Clash of Fundamentalisms , Karen Armstrong for Islam: A Short History , and the very courageous Irshad Manji for The Trouble with Islam Today . Here also, I have done my fair share of mangling, and the outcomes in Thirteen do not necessarily bear any relation to anything these authors might endorse.

And finally, I owe a massive debt of gratitude to all those who waited with such immense patience, and still told me to take all the time I needed:

Simon Spanton—again!—and Jo Fletcher at Gollancz, Chris Schluep and Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, my agent Carolyn Whitaker, and last but not least all those well-wishers who e-mailed me during 2006 with messages of condolence, reassurance, and support. This book would not exist without you.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Margaret Ann Morgan, who taught me to hate bigotry, cruelty, and injustice with an unrelenting rage, and to despise the hypocrisy that looks away or makes comfortable excuses when those same vices crop up closer to home than we’d like.

I miss you.

Gleaming steel, gleaming steel…

Larsen blinks and shifts slightly on the automated gurney as it tracks under a linear succession of lighting panels and lateral roof struts. Recognition smears in with vision, blurry and slow; she’s in the dorsal corridor. Overhead, light angles off each metal beam, sliding from glint to full-blown burst and back as she passes below. She supposes it’s the repeated glare that’s woken her. That, or her knee, which is aching ferociously, even through the accustomed groggy swim of the decanting drugs. One hand rests on her chest, pressing into the thin fabric of the cryocap leotard. Cool air on her skin tells her she’s otherwise naked. An eerie sense of déjà vu steals over her with the knowledge. She coughs a little, tiny remnants of tank gel in the bottom of her pumped-out lungs. She shifts again, mumbles something to herself.

…not again…?

“Again, yes. The cormorant’s legacy, yes, again.”

That’s odd. She didn’t expect another voice, least of all one talking in riddles. Decanting’s usually a wholly mechanized process, the datahead’s programmed to wake them before arrival, and unless something’s gone wrong…

So you’re the big expert on cryocapping now, are you?

She isn’t—her entire previous experience comes down to three test decantings and the one real deal at journey’s end on the voyage out, whence, she supposes, the déjà vu. But still…

…more than three…

…it is not more, it is not …

The vehemence in the retort has a ragged edge on it that she doesn’t like. If she’d heard it in another person’s voice, a test subject’s voice, say, she’d be thinking sedatives, maybe even a call to security. In her own thoughts, it’s suddenly, intimately chilling, like the realization that there’s someone in the house with you, someone you didn’t invite in. Like the thought out of nowhere that you might not be wholly sane.

This is the drugs, Ellie. Let go, ride it out.

Gleaming stee—

The autogurney bumps slightly as it takes a right turn. For some reason, it sets off a violent jolt in her pulse, a reaction that, drugged, she labels almost idly as panic. A tremor of impending doom trickles through her like cold water. They’re going to crash, they’re going to hit something, or something’s going to hit them, something massive and ancient beyond human comprehension tumbling endlessly end-over-end through the empty night outside the ship. Space travel isn’t safe, she was insane to ever think it was, to sign up for the contract and think she could get away with it, there and home again in one piece as if it were no more than a suborbital across the Pacific, you just couldn’t—

Let go, Ellie. It’s the drugs.

Then she realizes where she is. The autosurgeon’s folded arachnoid arms wheel past in one quadrant of her vision as the gurney slots into position on the examination rack. A qualified relief seeps into her. Something’s wrong, but she’s in the right place. Horkan’s Pride is equipped with the finest automated medical systems COLIN knows how to build, she’s read it in a Colony News digest, the whole shipboard AI suite was overhauled a couple of weeks before she left. And look, there’s a limit to what can go wrong with a cryocapped body, right, Ellie? Organic functions slow to a chilled crawl, and so does anything hostile that you might be carrying.