“Tom—”
Marsalis grinned. It was like a muscle flexing. “Well, I did save your partner’s life for you. Does that count?”
“As far as I can see you saved your own skin, with some collateral benefits. Sevgi, if this Williamson is going to raise a stink about our friend here, we need to get you both out of here.”
“Now, there’s an idea.”
Marsalis’s voice was amiable, but something at the bottom of it made Sevgi look at him. She recalled the way he’d stared after the escaped assassin, the flat sound his voice made then as he told her Right after the meat van gets here, I think you’d better take me in to COLIN so we can start work. There was a finality to the way he’d said it that was like the silence following a single gunshot. And now, suddenly, she was afraid for Tom Norton and his dismissive flippancy.
“Sounds good to me, too,” she said hurriedly. “Tom, can we wire up the n-djinn from Horkan’s Pride at COLIN? Run a direct interface?”
Norton looked at her curiously, let his gaze slip to the black man at her shoulder and then back again. He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose we could. But what the hell for? MIT already handed down the transcripts.” He addressed himself directly to Marsalis. “They’re on file at the office. You can go over them if you want.”
“But I don’t want.” Marsalis was smiling gently. A small chill blew down Sevgi’s spine at the sight. “What I want, Tom, is to talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn.”
Norton stiffened. “So now suddenly you’re an expert on the psychology of artificial intelligence?”
“No, I’m an expert on the hunting and killing of variant thirteens. Which is why you hired me. Remember?”
“Yeah, and don’t you think that precious expertise might be—”
“Tom!”
“—better deployed going over the scenes of the crimes we’re trying to bring an end to?”
Still the black man smiled. Still he stood relaxed, at a distance that Sevgi abruptly realized was just outside Norton’s easy reach.
“No, I don’t.”
“Tom, that’s enough. What the fuck is wrong with you this mor—”
“What’s wrong with me Sev, is that—”
Two-tone rasp—a throat being ostentatiously cleared. They both stopped, switched their gazes back to Marsalis.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly.
They were silent. The call for attention hung off the end of his words like a spoken command.
“You don’t understand what you’re up against.” The smile came back, fleeting, as if driven by memory. “You think because Merrin’s killed a couple of dozen people, he’s some kind of serial killer writ large? That’s not what this is about. Serial killers are damaged humans. You know this, Sevgi, even if Tom here doesn’t. They leave a trail, they leave clues, they get caught. And that’s because in the end, consciously or subconsciously, they want to be caught. Calculated murder is an antisocial act, it’s hard for humans to do, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable the capacity. But that’s you people. It’s not me, and it’s not Merrin, and it’s not any variant thirteen. We’re not like you. We’re the witches. We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context. You have to understand this: there is nothing wrong with Merrin. He’s not damaged. He’s not killing these people as an expression of some childhood psychosis, he’s not doing it because he’s identified them as some dehumanized, segregated extratribal group. He’s just carrying out a plan of action, and he is comfortable with it. And he won’t get caught doing it—unless you can put me next to him.”
Norton shook his head. “You say Merrin’s not damaged? You weren’t there when they cracked the hull on Horkan’s Pride. You didn’t see the mess he left.”
“I know he fed off the passengers.”
“No. He didn’t just feed off them, Marsalis. He ripped them apart, gouged out their eyes and scattered the fucking pieces from one end of the crew section to the other. That’s what he did.” Norton took a steadying breath. “You want to call that a plan of action, go right ahead. To me, it sounds like good old-fashioned insanity.”
It was a fractional pause, but Sevgi saw how the news stopped Marsalis dead.
“Well, you’ll need to show me footage of that,” he said finally. “But my guess is there was a reason for whatever he did.”
Norton grinned mirthlessly. “Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.”
“It’s not enough.”
“So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.”
That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. “Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?”
CHAPTER 20
The night sky lay at his feet.
Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded one another’s brilliance or studded the multicolored marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way; it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel gray, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.
Fucking ghosts in the machine.
No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses that made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.
It was Carl’s opinion, admittedly not founded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punch line delivered.
In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.
“Marsalis.”
The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.