“I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.”
She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.
“You did four months in there? I thought—”
“Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on-off switch to fall back on.”
“You don’t think?” Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt, and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. “What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean, really know?”
He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.
“Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think that means anything.”
He gestured. “Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.”
It got him a thin, unamused smile. “Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.” She sat back in the sofa. “I’m a bonobo.”
He stared. “No, you’re fucking not.”
“No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?”
“No, but—”
“I’m not full. My mother’s the hundred percent deal, she used to work escort for a Panama agency, met my father when he was on a fishing trip down there. He smuggled her out.”
“Then you’re not a bonobo.”
“Half of me is.” Said defiantly, jaw tight, eyes locked with his. “Read your Jacobsen. Inherited traits will be an unknown factor for generations to come. Quote, unquote.”
Something happened to the room. A dense, deafening quiet sat behind her voice, washed in like a tide when she stopped talking.
“Does Coyle know?” he asked, for something to break the stillness.
“What do you think?”
And quiet again.
Finally, her mouth crimped at one corner. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I look at what I am, the way I react to things, and then I look at her, and I just don’t know. My old man tells me she never fit in down there, never was submissive the way bonobos are supposed to be. He says that she was different from all the others, that’s why he picked her out. I don’t know whether to believe that shit or write it off to rose-tinted romantic fucking nostalgia.”
Carl thought back to the bonobos he’d seen in the transit camps in Kuwait and Iraq, the ones you couldn’t get away from on R&R in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some that he’d talked to, one or two he’d fucked. And back in London, Zooly’s friend from the club, Krystalayna, who always claimed she was but never showed him any proof that wasn’t fan-site fantasy bullshit.
“I think,” he said carefully, “you don’t want to confuse submissive with maternal or nonviolent. Most of the bonobos I ever ran into knew how to get what they wanted about as well as anyone else.”
“Yeah.” Violence rose simmering in her voice. “I know how to give a pretty good blow job myself. Don’t you think?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.” A sour smile in Carl’s direction. “Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck with, even the way you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that, all the time?”
He nodded. “Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.”
“I’m a good cop,” she said urgently. “You don’t last in RimSec if you’re not. I’ve shot and killed three men in the line of duty, I don’t lose sleep over any of them. I mean, I got sick at the time, went through the counseling like everyone else, but after that I was fine. I’ve got commendations, early promotion to special cases, clearance rates that—”
“Rovayo, stop it.” He held up a hand, surprised at how weary the sudden mirroring of his younger self in her was making him feel. “I told you, I know. But you’re going about this the wrong way. You don’t have to justify yourself to anyone except you. In the end, that’s all that matters.”
She smiled the hard, humorless smile again. “Spoken like a true variant thirteen. Pretty obvious you’ve never had to face a genetic suitability assessor.”
“I thought in the Rim—”
“Yeah, Rim States citizens have a lot of rights that way. But citizen or not, I’ve still got my Jacobsen license to live with. And before you say it, yes, that is confidential data, Charter-protected up the ass. But you waive your right to that protection when you sign up for RimSec.”
“And Coyle still doesn’t know about you?”
“No. Assessment comes as part of the standard officer vetting procedure. There’s no way for anyone to know I went through anything different from all the other grunts. Tsai knows, he’s my commanding officer, he’ll have the file. And there are a few others at divisional level, the ones who were on the vetting committee. But it’s more than any of their jobs are worth to let something like that leak.”
“You think if Coyle knew, he’d care?”
“I don’t know. You tell all your friends what you are?”
“I’m a thirteen,” he said with a straight face. “We don’t have any friends.”
She made the effort, laughed. There was some genuine amusement in it this time. “That why you’re here?”
“I’d have thought my reasons for being here were transparently obvious.”
“Well.” She tilted her head to one side. “I guess you did explain yourself pretty thoroughly earlier, yeah.”
“Thanks.”
“Question remains, though.” Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg, and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. “What do you want to do now?”
He smiled.
“Got an idea,” he said.
CHAPTER 36
Seen from the descending autocopter, Bulgakov’s Cat had the blunt, blocky look of a nighttime skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthwise on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment, and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at her made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.
In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned-up jacket collar. “I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.”
“You asked what I wanted to do.”
“Yeah.” She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. “Not quite what I had in mind at the time.”
The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms plowing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.