“Apart from the kleptocrats.” Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorizing. “I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?”
Jeff shrugged. “Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profiles for a kleptocrat and a thirteen don’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.”
“Oh come on. How are you going to measure something like that?”
“Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the washups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well—apparently before Jacobsen and the roundup, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-size backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.”
“Which means what?”
“Well, what’s the preeminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?”
“I don’t know. Networking skills?”
Jeff laughed. “You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.”
“So were you, once.”
“Charisma!” Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. “Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their forcefulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.”
“What if they are women?”
“Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.”
“I thought you were talking about now.”
“Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.”
“Apart from wiping out the thirteens.”
“Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilization getting an early start.”
Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. “Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?”
His brother sighed. “Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition toward charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us quietly hate them but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys ran for any elected office, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label winners every time. Why do you think Jacobsen wanted them interned and chemically castrated? The way he saw it, let them out into general population and within a couple of decades they’d be running every democratic nation-state on the planet. They’d demolish the democratic process, roll back everything feminized civil society’s achieved in the last couple of centuries. And they’d breed right back into base humanity like rabbits, because any woman who’s at all drawn to male sexuality is going to fall like a bomb for these guys.” Jeff gave him another wry grin. “The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance. That what’s bothering you, little brother?”
Norton gestured irritably “No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to cooperate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.”
“Well, how’s she doing?”
“I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.”
“Exotic Istanbul, huh?”
“Oh shut up.”
Jeff quelled his grin. “Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw—”
“Great.”
“—but wanting to fuck a guy’s brains out isn’t necessarily the same thing as switching your own brain off. I mean, look—the bonobo thing is similar. They’ve got an amped-up feminine appeal that’ll blast the average guy’s sexual systems like a cocaine hit every time—”
“Yeah, you’d know all about that.”
Jeff stopped and looked at him reproachfully. “Tom, I said I was sorry about the Istanbul crack. Give me a fucking break, will you? What I meant was, you don’t see me leaving Megan and the kids for Nuying, do you. Risking divorce, separation from Jack and Luisa, maybe a lawsuit for professional misconduct, all because I’m crazy for some modified pussy. Those things are important to me, and I manage to balance them against what Nu does for me. And I come out ahead, Tom. In control, the best of both worlds. Sure, I’ve got a drug problem, and the drug is bonobo tendency. But I’m handling it. That’s what you do, you deal with your weaknesses. You take up the strain. If this woman you’re talking about really is professionally focused, serious about her work, knows who she is and what she’s about, then there’s no reason she can’t do the same cost—benefit analysis and play the game accordingly. If anything, the genetic evidence suggests women are better at that shit anyway, so she’s got a wired-in head start right there. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want to have to hand-wash the sheets in whatever Istanbul hotel they’re in right now—”
“Oh Christ, Jeff.”
Jeff spread his hands. “Sorry, little brother. You want me to make you feel better, tell you the field’s clear for you to make your Manhattan urbanite move on this woman? I can’t. But if what you’re concerned about really is her professional grip on things—then I wouldn’t worry.”
They sat quietly for a few moments. To Norton, letting Jeff have the last word felt like a kind of defeat.
“Well, what about this Istanbul clue then? I mean, seriously, it doesn’t come close to any of our current investigation, it’s right out of left field. Some other thirteen the Europeans have interned in Turkey, who might have a connection to some Peruvian gangster who might have ties to the people who maybe had our renegade thirteen shipped back from Mars. I mean, am I supposed to trust that? It’s pretty thin.”
Jeff stared out of the window.
“Maybe it is,” he said absently. “Thirteens don’t think the same way as us. They have a whole different set of synaptic wiring. Some of that, the more extreme end, we just go ahead and label paranoia or sociopathic tendency. But often it just comes out as a different way of looking at things. That’s why UNGLA employs guys like this Marsalis in the first place. In some ways, that’s why I suggested you dig him out of Florida and hire him. Give you access to those other angles.” A sudden, hard look. “You didn’t tell anyone that was my suggestion, did you?”