Black Man / Thirteen delivered
So it's done. Black Man is complete - delivered, line edited and polished to a high gloss. Waiting now on the copy edit and galley proofs. Editorial comment runs to "your best book so far by some margin." Which I confess I'm quite relieved to hear. It'd be pretty mortifying to spend two years on something, pile delay on delay, and come out at the end of it all with some weak-assed shit that's a step down from previous work. I think it's safe to say I gouged more out of myself to write this novel than anything else I've worked on so far. And since everybody's been waiting so long, here's a quick sample: please welcome to the stage Carl Marsalis - the Black Man.
He finally found Gray in a MarsPrep camp just over the Bolivian border and into Peru, hiding behind some cheap facial surgery and the name Rodriguez. It wasn't a bad cover in itself, and probably would have stood standard scrutiny. Security checks in the prep camps were notoriously lax, the truth was that they didn't much care who you'd been before you signed up. But there were still a few obvious signs you could look for if you knew how, and Carl, with a methodical intensity that was starting to resemble desperation, had been looking for weeks. He knew that Gray was up on the altiplano somewhere, because the trail led there from Bogota, and because where else, ultimately, was a variant thirteen going to run. He knew this, and he knew it was just a matter of time before the traces showed up and someone called it in. But he also knew, with induction programmes everywhere skimping and speeding up to meet increasing demand, that time was on the other man's side. Something had to give, and soon, or Gray was going to be gone and Carl wasn't going to get his bounty.
So when the break came, the tiny morsel of data finally fed back from the web of contacts he'd been plying all those weeks, it was hard not to jump. Hard not to dump his painstakingly constructed cover, fire up his Agency credit and badge and hire the fastest set of all-terrain wheels available in Copocabana. Hard not to tear across the border at Agency speed, raising road dust and rumours all the way to the camp, where Gray, of course, if he had any kind of local support, would be long gone.
Carl didn't jump.
Instead, he called in a couple of local favours and managed to blag a ride across the border with a military liaison unit - some superannuated patrol carrier with a colony corporation's logo sunbleached to fading on the armoured sides. The troops were Peruvian regulars, drafted in from dirt poor families in the coastal provinces and then seconded to corporate security duties. They'd be pulling down little more than standard conscript pay for that, but the interior of the carrier was relatively plush by military standards and it seemed to have air-con. And anyway, they were tough and young, a sort of young you didn't see so much in the western world anymore, innocently pleased with their hard-drilled physical competence and cheap khaki prestige. They all had wide grins for him, and bad teeth, and none was older than twenty. Carl figured the good cheer for ignorance. It was a safe bet these kids didn't know the charge-out rate their high command was extracting from its corporate clients for their services.
Sealed inside the jolting, sweat-smelling belly of the vehicle, brooding on his chances against Gray, Carl would really have preferred to stay silent altogether. He didn't like to talk, never had. Felt in fact that it was a much overrated pastime. But there was a limit to how taciturn you could be when you were getting a free ride. So he mustered some light-weight chat about next week's Argentina-Brazil play-off and threw as little of it into the conversational mix as he thought he could get away with. Some comments about Patricia Mocatta, and the advisability of female captains for teams that were still predominantly male. Player name checks. Tactical comparisons. It all seemed to go down fine.
"¿Eres Marciano?" One of them asked him, finally, inevitably.
He shook his head. In fact, he had been a Martian once, but it was a long, complicated story he didn't feel like telling.
"Soy contable," he told them, because that was sometimes what he felt like. "Contable de biotecnologia."
They all grinned. He wasn't sure if it was because they didn't think he looked like a biotech accountant, or because they just didn't believe him. Either way they didn't push the point. They were used to men with stories that didn't match their faces.
Merry Xmas and all that. See you in the new year at the readings.
