“Very pro.” She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming around a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.
“Right,” Williamson agreed. “Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.”
“No.”
“Yeah.” The New York detective hesitated again. “So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang on to this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that news flash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.”
The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of coordinated effort from RimSec and the Cat’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide—it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.
“Well, listen, Detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favor someday.”
“No need. Like I said, saw the news flash. Lot of talk about agency cooperation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to be some, too.”
“I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.”
“Will do. Hope it helps.”
The New York patch clicked out, taking Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.
“Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.”
Carl shook his head irritably. “Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?”
“I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.”
“You certain about that?”
“Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.”
Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to—
“And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?”
“Is coincidence,” said Matthew crisply.
He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. “Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.”
“Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition toward paranoia to contend with as well.”
Carl grimaced. “Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that—”
“Matthew.”
“Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?”
“Yes, and evolutionarily selective, too.” The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. “But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect the underlying mathematics.”
“But not when they clash.” Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. “Right?”
“Not when they clash,” Matthew agreed. “When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.”
“So Norton’s clean?”
“Norton is clean.”
Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognized the reflex—seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.
So use it, fuckwit.
“Does it ever bother you?” he asked into the phone.
“Does what bother me, Carl?”
“This whole thing.” He gestured as if Matthew could see him. “Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.”
“To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?”
Carl sighed. “Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.”
“In what way?”
“Well, no offense, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.”
“My emotional range has been psychochemically rebalanced and extended.”
“Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.”
“Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?”
Carl thought about that.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” he admitted gloomily. “No.”
“So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.”
“Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.” Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in showing up the datahawk and his hyperbalanced mind-set, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. “This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilization crew.” For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. “I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in ’89, ’90? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?”
“Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.”
Carl shrugged. “Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.”
“And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.”
“Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.”