The remaining backup stood immobile, fixed Carl with a cold stare, and folded his arms. Onbekend checked him with another glance and then moved across and seated himself opposite Carl at the table.
“You’re the lottery guy, aren’t you?” he said.
Carl sighed. It wasn’t entirely faked. “Yeah, that’s me.”
“The one who woke up halfway home?”
“Yeah. You looking for an autograph?”
He got a thin smile. “I’m curious. What was it like, being stuck out there all that time, waiting?”
“It was a riot. You should try it sometime.”
Onbekend didn’t react any more than a stone. The sense of familiarity grew—Carl was certain it was specific. He knew this face, or one very like it, from somewhere.
“Did you feel abandoned? Like when you were fourteen all over again?”
Fourteen?
Carl grinned. The tiny piece of advantage felt adrenal in his veins. He cocked his head, elaborately casual.
“So you were a Lawman, huh? Fortress America’s final set of southern-fried chickens coming home to roost.”
Just there, just as tiny, but there nonetheless, there in the corners of Onbekend’s eyes. Loss of poise, siphoned sip of anger. For just that moment, Carl had him backed up.
“You think you know me? You don’t fucking know me, my friend.”
“I’m not your fucking friend, either,” Carl told him mildly. “So there you go. We all make these mistakes. What do you want from me, exactly?”
For a moment so brief it was gone before he even registered it, Carl thought he was dead. The barrel of the revolver didn’t shift, but it seemed to glimmer with intent in the lower field of his vision. Onbekend’s mouth smeared a little tighter, his eyes hated a little more.
“You could start by telling me how it feels to hunt down other variant thirteens for the cudlips at the UN.”
“Remunerative.” Carl stared blandly back into the other thirteen’s narrowed eyes. One of them was going to die in this bar. “It feels remunerative. What are you doing for a living these days?”
“Surviving.”
“Oh.” He nodded, mock-understanding. “Playing the outlaw, are we?”
“I’m not working for the cudlips, if that’s what you mean.”
“Sure you are.” Carl yawned—sudden, tension-driven demand for oxygen, out of nowhere, but it played so fucking well he could have crowed. “We’re all working for the cudlips, one way or another.”
Onbekend set his jaw. Tipped his head a little, like a wolf or a dog listening for something faint. “You talk very easily about other men’s compromises. Like I said, you don’t fucking know me at all.”
“I know you bought food today. I know you traveled here in some kind of manufactured vehicle, on city streets built and paid for in some shape or form by the local citizenry. I know you’re holding a gun you didn’t build from raw metal in your spare time.”
“This?” Onbekend raised the gun slightly, took the muzzle fractionally out of line. He seemed amused. Carl forced himself not to tense, not to watch the wavering weapon. “I took this gun from a man I killed.”
“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 learned 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 anymore.” 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 cooperation 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 civilization. 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 anymore.”
“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—”