“And virgins. Right? Seventy virgins each, or something?”
“Not if you’re a woman. Anyway, that’s for martyrs.” She pulled a face. “Anyway, it’s a crock of shit. Simple-minded post-Qu’ranic desert Islam propaganda. No one in the modern Muslim world with two brain cells to rub together believes that shit anymore. And who wants a fucking virgin anyway? You got to teach them every fucking thing. Like having sex with a fucking mannequin with its motion circuits shot up.”
“Sounds like you’re talking from experience there.” He grabbed the change of subject, glad of the chance.
It drew a crooked smile from her. “I’ve broken in one or two in my time. You?”
“Not that I know of.”
“That’s not very public-spirited of you. Somebody’s got to do it.”
He shrugged. “Well, you know, maybe I’ll still get out there and do my share, later on in life.”
Her smile faded, shaded out at the mention of the future, like the passing of cloud cover across the sunlit lawn. She shivered and hunched her body a little in the chair. He cursed himself for the slip.
“I was reading somewhere,” she said quietly. “They reckon in another thirty or forty years they’ll have v-formatting so powerful you’ll be able to live inside it. You know, the n-djinn just copies your whole mind-state into the construct and then runs you as part of the system. You just sedate the body and step through. They say you’ll even be able to go on living there after your body actually dies. Forty years away, they’re saying, maybe not even that long.” She grinned desperately. “Bit late for me, though, huh?”
“Hey, you’re not going to need that shit.” Floundering for a response. “You’re going to heaven, right? Paradise, like you said.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I really believe in paradise, Carl. You want to know the truth, I don’t think any of us do really. Deep down, down where it counts I think we all know it’s a crock of shit. That’s why we’re all so fucking determined to spread the good news, to shove it down other people’s throats. Because if we can’t make other people believe it, how are we going to stamp out the doubt in ourselves. And it’s cold, that doubt.” She looked at him, shivered as she said it. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Like November in the park, you know. Like winter coming in.”
He got up and went to where she sat, and tried as best he could to hold her. Blunt, glove-skinned sensation, like fistfuls of crushed velvet, like nothing real. No feeling of warmth, but as she shivered again he pulled her close anyway, and he held her head against his chest so she wouldn’t see how his jaw was clenched tight and his mouth had become a savage down-drawn line.
Like winter coming in.
CHAPTER 47
Sevgi lived four more days.
They were the longest days he could remember since the week he waited for Marisol to come back, believing somehow against everything the uncles told him that she would. He’d sat blankly then, as he did now at the hospital, detached for hours at a time, staring into space in classes he’d previously excelled in. He took the punishment beatings from the uncles with a stoic lack of response that bordered on catatonic—fighting back would do no good, he knew, would only ensure that he took more damage. Aunt Chitra’s pain-management training had come just in time.
Many years later, he wondered if that particular course hadn’t been deliberately scheduled for the months leading up to the removal of the surrogate mothers. There wasn’t much that happened in Osprey Eighteen without carefully considered planning. And pain, after all, as Chitra began the series of classes by telling them, came in many forms. Pain is unavoidable, smiling gently at their group, shaking each of them formally by the hand. Something of an unknown quantity after their other teachers, this small, hawkish-featured woman with skin like some fire-scorched copper alloy, cropped black hair, a figure that sent vaguely understood signals out to their prepubescent hormones, and dry, callus-edged hands that told those same hormones exactly how they’d better behave around her. Her grip was firm, her eyes direct and appraising. Pain is all around us. It takes many forms. My job will be to teach you how to recognize all those forms, to understand them, and to not allow any of them to keep you from your purpose. Carl had learned the lessons well. He dealt with the careful brutality the uncles were applying exactly as if it were one of Chitra’s worked examples. He knew they would not damage him beyond repair because all the Osprey Eighteen children had been told, time and time again, how valuable they were. He also knew the uncles would have preferred not to use physical violence to this extent. It was never a preferred method of discipline at Osprey, was only ever used to punish serious breaches of respect and obedience, and only then as a last resort. But every other punishment task they set Carl that week, he simply refused to carry out. Worse, he spat back his refusal in their faces, savoring the tug of disobedience like the pain of pushing himself on a run or a cliff climb. And when the measured violence came, he embraced it, shrugged himself into Chitra’s training like a harness, and faced the uncles with a blank fury they could not match.
In the end, it was Chitra who unlocked his efforts, just as she’d given him what he needed to shore them up. She came to him one gray afternoon as he sat, bruised and bleeding from the mouth, aching back propped against a storage shed near the helipad. She stood for a while without saying anything, then stepped into his direct field of vision, hands in her coverall pockets. He tried to look around her, shifted sideways, but it hurt too much to sustain the posture. She didn’t move.
In the end he had to look up into her face.
What’s your purpose, Carl? she asked him quietly. There was no judgment in either tone or expression, only genuine inquiry. I understand your pain, I see the ways in which you’ve tried to make it external. But what purpose do you have?
He didn’t answer. Looking back he didn’t think she ever expected him to. But after she’d gone, he realized—allowed himself to realize—that Marisol really wasn’t coming back, that the uncles were telling the truth, and that he was wasting his own time as well as theirs.
Waiting with Sevgi was different. He had her there with him. He had purpose.
He was still going to fucking lose her.
He met her father in the gardens, a big, gray-haired Turk with powerful shoulders and the same tigerish eyes as his daughter. He wore no mustache, but there was thick stubble rising high on his cheeks and bristling at his cleft chin, and he had lost none of his hair with age. He would have been a very handsome man in his youth, and even now—Carl estimated he must be in his early sixties—even seated on the beige stone bench and staring fixedly at the fountain, he exuded a quiet, charismatic authority. He wore a plain dark suit that matched the thick woolen shirt beneath it and the purplish smudges of tiredness under his eyes.
“You’re Carl Marsalis,” he said as Carl reached the bench. There was no question mark in his voice. It was a little hoarse but iron-firm beneath. If he’d been crying, he hid it well.
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“I am Murat Ertekin. Sevgi’s father. Please, join me.” He gestured at the empty space beside him on the bench, waited until Carl was seated. “My daughter has told me a lot about you.”
“Care to give me specifics?”
Ertekin glanced sideways at him. “She told me that your loyalty cannot be easily bought.”
It brought him up short. The received wisdom about variant thirteen was that they had no loyalties at all beyond self-interest. He wondered if Ertekin was quoting Sevgi directly or putting his own spin on what she’d said.
“Did she tell you what I am?”
“Yes.” Another sidelong look. “Were you expecting disapproval from me? Hatred, perhaps, or fear? The standard-issue prejudices?”