Free Black Man by Richard K. Morgan

guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It had been a good party.
    Yeah—pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterward.
    Why was that, Sev?
    She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.
    You know why.
    The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.
    The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.
    “I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?”
    Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.
    She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.
    The first wrong thing was the car.
    Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sunbathed on. He was grin—proud of the fucking thing, too, which was odd given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalizing the catalog of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland.
    Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.
    Today, in an abrupt spike of syn insight, she realized it was the kind of car Ethan would have loved to own, and that was why this aberration in Norton’s otherwise flawless Manhattan male urbanity drove her time and again to a silent, waspish anger.
    Today he wasn’t driving it.
    Instead, as she let herself out onto the street—still settling a grabbed-at-random tailored summer jacket onto her shoulders—he unfolded from the backseat of a dark blue autodrive teardrop that was recognizably from the COLIN pool. He stood there looking as smooth and self-contained as the vehicle he’d stepped out of, a poem in groomed competence. The filaments of gray in his close-cropped hair glinted in the sun; the tanned future-presidential-candidate Caucasian features that he swore were his own crinkled around pale blue eyes.
    He gave her a trademark slanted grin.
    “Morning, Sev. Rise and shine.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    “What time’d you wind it up in the end?” He’d gone home well before midnight, chemically unimpaired as far as Sevgi could remember.
    “Don’t recall. Late.”
    She pushed past him and dumped herself in the car, slid over to let him in beside her. The door hinged down and the teardrop pulled smoothly away, cornered into West 118th, and kept going. Traffic surged around them. They’d cruised four blocks before Sevgi woke up to the direction and the second jarring nail in the day’s expected course. She glanced across at Norton.
    “What’s the matter, you leave something at the office?”
    “Not going to the office, Sev.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I thought we agreed to yesterday. So why are we headed east?”
    Norton grinned again. “Not going out to Kaku, either. Change of plans. No freefall for you today.”
    The relief that rolled through her at the news felt like sun on her skin, suddenly warming and way ahead of any accompanying curiosity. She really hadn’t been looking forward to the gut-swooping elevator ride up the Kaku nanorack or the creeping around weightless when they got to the top. They had drugs to take the sting out of both experiences at the ’rack facility, but she wasn’t at all sure they’d mix well with the syn already coursing through