“I didn’t ask for a class on the Secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen.”
“Yeah, getting there.” Jeff took another chunk off his arrack. “See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold, or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked, and shut down with a halfway decent black-market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a bighearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship program at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us without us knowing it. You remember that memorial stone Dad showed us that time we drove down to New Mexico? That big fucking rock in the middle of Oklahoma?”
“Vaguely.” He had a flash on a big, pale granite boulder, sheared on one side and polished on that single surface to a high gray gloss that clashed with the rough matte finish of the rest of the stone. Letters in black he was too young to read. Arid, failing farmland, a couple of stores on a sun-blasted highway straight as a polished steel rail. An old woman behind the counter where they bought candy, hair as gray as the stone outside. Sad, he remembered, she looked sad as they chose and paid. “I was what, five or six?”
“If that. I guess it would have gone right over your head, but I had nightmares for a couple of weeks after that. This Trupex AS-81 straight out of an old toy set I had, but full-size, smashing into the house, flattening Mom and Dad, standing over my bed, pulling me out and ripping my arms and legs out of their sockets. You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.”
“Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson.”
“They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.”
“I know.”
“Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?”
“Variant thirteen.”
“Yeah, variant thirteen. Precivilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.”
“Now you sound like the feeds.”
Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. “Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough, and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.”
“I fail to see,” said Norton acidly, “how that gives us back our manhood.”
“That’s because you live in New York.”
Norton snorted and drained his arrack.
His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done. “I’m serious, Tom. You think Secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?”
“Among other things, yeah, it was.”
Jeff shook his head. “That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside quantum specialists really understands, Cooperation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table was pointing toward a future so feminized, it’s just downright un-American.”
Norton laughed despite himself. “You should be writing speeches, Jeff.”
“You forget,” his brother said unsmilingly, “I used to. Now, think about the situation the way it was back then, the sinking ship of heartland masculinity, bogged down abroad in complexities it can’t understand, failed by its military technology and its own young men. And then you put these new, big, kick-ass motherfuckers into American uniforms, you call them the Lawmen, and suddenly they’re winning. No one knows exactly where they’ve come from all of a sudden, there’s a lot of deniability going around, but who ever gave a shit about that? What counts is that these guys are American soldiers, they’re fighting for us, and for once they’re carrying the battle. You just sit there for a moment, Tom, and you think what effect that had, in all those little towns you just flew over to get here.”
Jeff lowered the stabbing finger he had leveled on his brother, looked into his glass, and raised his eyebrows, maybe at his own sudden gust of passion.
“That’s the way I read it, anyway.”
The room seemed to huddle in a little. They sat in the quiet. After a while, Jeff got up and headed for the bar again. “Get you another?”
Norton shook his head. “Got to get back, get up early.”
“You’re not going to stay the night?”
“Well…”
“Jesus, Tom. Do we get along that badly?” Jeff turned from the drink he was pouring, and nailed him with a look. “Come on, there’s no fucking way you’ll get a ferry back across at this time of night. Are you really going to ride a taxi all the way around the bay just so you don’t have to sleep under my roof?”
“Jeff, it’s not—”
“Tom, I know I can be an asshole sometimes, I know that. I know there are things about me you don’t approve of, things you think Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of, but Christ, you think the old man’s been a saint his whole fucking life?”
“I don’t know,” Norton said quietly. “But if he wasn’t, none of us ever caught him.”
“You didn’t catch me. I fucking told you about it.”
“Yeah, thanks for that.”
“Tom, I’m your brother for Christ’s sake. Who got you that fucking job at COLIN in the first place?”
Norton shot to his feet. “I won’t believe that. Tell Megan and the kids I said hi. Sorry I didn’t have time to get them a gift.”
“Tom, wait. Wait.” Hands out, placating, drink forgotten. “I’m sorry, that was a bitchy crack. All right, look, I didn’t get you your job, you were well up the list for it anyway. But I spoke well of you in a lot of ears that summer. And I’d do it again. You’re my brother, don’t you think that means something to me?”
“Megan’s your wife. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
“Christ, it’s not the same. She’s a woman, not, not—” He stopped, gestured helplessly. “It’s married life, Tom. That’s how it works. You get kids, you get tired, the gloss comes off. You go looking for, for. Something. I don’t know, something fresh, something to remind you that you’re not dead yet. That you’re not turning into two harmless little old people in a Costa Rican retirement complex.”
“That’s how you see Mom and Dad?”
“That’s how they are, Tom. You should get down there more often, you’d see that. Maybe then you’d start to understand.”