Black Man (26 page)

“Merrin’s holed up in the UN building with a nuclear device,” suggested Carl brightly. “And enough delegates held hostage to eat his way through to Christmas.”

Norton nodded. “I’m glad you’re having a good time. Wrong guess. You’re all over the feeds. Thirteen saves COLIN director, slaughters two.”

“Oh fuck.” Ertekin’s shoulders slumped. “All we needed. How the hell did that happen?”

“Apparently, some anal little geek at one of the city feeds had a fit of total recall. Got our friend here’s face off the crime scene footage, face reminded him of something, he matched it with the trouble down in Florida.” Norton pointed. “Or maybe it was that jacket. Hard to miss, and it’s not exactly high fashion.

Anyway, the geek rings up the Twenty-eighth Precinct and asks some leading questions. Evidently he got lucky. He talked to either someone really cooperative or someone really dumb.”

“Fucking Williamson.”

Norton shrugged. “Yeah, or whoever. You’ve got to bet half an hour after Williamson got back to the Twenty-eighth, every cop in the precinct house knew they had a thirteen walking the streets. And probably saw no reason on Earth to shut up about it. In their eyes, it’s a basic public safety issue. They know they’ve got no leverage with us, they’d be more than happy to let the feeds do their demonizing for them.”

“Demonize?” Carl grinned. “I thought I was up there for saving Ortiz.”

“And slaughtering two,” said Ertekin wearily. “Don’t forget that part.”

“They’re asking for a statement, Sev. Nicholson says he figures you’re it. Former NYPD detective and all that, should make it easier to play down any anti-COLIN feeling the Twenty-eighth may have stirred up.”

“Oh thanks, Tom.” Ertekin threw herself back into her chair and glared up at Norton. “A fucking
press
conference? You think I haven’t got anything better to do than talk to the fucking
media
?”

Norton spread his hands. “It isn’t me, Sev. It’s Nicholson. And the way he sees it, no, you don’t have anything better to do right now. What do you want me to do, tell him you had to go out of town?”

Carl met her eyes across the room. He grinned.

The limited brief of this report notwithstanding, it is imperative to acknowledge that we are dealing here with actual human beings and not some theoretical model of human behavior. We should not then be surprised to encounter a complex and potentially confusing mass of emotional factors and interactions.

Nor should it perplex us to discover that any genuine solution may well need to be sought beyond the current scope of our inquiry.

—Jacobsen Report,
August 2091

COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled amid a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up.

The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain on standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great-uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadiköy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stefan Nevant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.

The less official presence he can smell on you, the better,
Marsalis told her.
Nevant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister
.

The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karaköy terminal, where the ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding around via the bridge was going to take as long as or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.

They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net while the midafternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe, Norton looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas.

He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and down-home good humor.

Dan Meredith,
Republic Today.
Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?

No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption
. Inclusive gesture to the whole room.
I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one
.

Ripple of muttering among the gathered journalists. Norton gave it just long enough, then squashed it.

Hypermale genetic tendency is, not to put too fine a point to it, autism. A hypermale would make a pretty poor security guard, Dan. Not only would he likely not recognize signs of an impending attack from another human being, he’d probably be too busy counting the bullets in his gun to actually fire them at anything.

Laughter. The footage swung momentarily to Meredith’s face in the crowd. He offered a thin smile.

Ladled urbane southern irony into his voice.
I’m sorry, Tom. Leaving aside the fact we all know the Chinese
have
bred super-autists for their n-djinn interface programs, that’s not what I meant. I was referring to variant thirteens, which most normal Americans would call hypermales
.

Hypermales like the one you admit was present at today’s attempt on Alvaro Ortiz’s life. Are you employing any of
those
as security guards?

No, we’re not.

Then—

But Norton had already raised his head to scan the crowd, already signaled for the next question.

Sally Asher,
New York Times.
You’ve described this variant thirteen, Carl Marsalis, as a consultant. Can you please tell us what exactly he is consulting on?

I’m sorry, Sally, I’m not currently at liberty to say. All I can tell you is that it has nothing to do with the tragic events of this afternoon. Mr. Marsalis was simply a bystander who took the action any good citizen with the opportunity might.

Any good citizen armed with an assault rifle, maybe
. Asher’s voice was light.
Was Mr. Marsalis armed?

Norton hesitated a moment. You could see the dilemma—data was out there, it was loose in the flow by now. Footage of the crime scene, eyewitness accounts, maybe even backdoor gossip from the path labs.

No way to tell what was or wasn’t known, and Norton didn’t want to get caught in a lie. On the other hand—No. Mr. Marsalis was not armed.

Quiet but rising buzz. They’d all seen the bullet-riddled limo, at least.

How can a man, an ordinary man, possibly—

Meredith again, voice pitched loud before Norton’s arm cut him off again, hauled in another question from the opposite side of the room. The feed didn’t show Meredith’s face, but Sevgi felt an ignoble stab of pleasure as she imagined the Jesuslander’s chagrin.

Mr. Norton, is it true, I’m sorry, Eileen Lan,
Rim Sentinel.
Is it true, Mr. Norton, that COLIN is training personnel on Mars in previously unknown fighting techniques?

No, that’s not true.

Then can you please throw light on this comment from an eyewitness at today’s events
. Lan held aloft a microcorder, and a male voice rinsed cleanly through the speaker.
The guy was like a fucking wheel. I’ve seen that stuff on Ultimate Fighting tapes from Mars, that’s
tanindo.
That’s stuff they won’t teach back here on Earth, they say it’s too dangerous to let ordinary people get to know because—

The microcorder clicked off, but Lan left it upheld like a challenge. Norton leaned an arm across the lectern and grinned easily.

Well, I’m not really an Ultimate Fighting fan
—polite laughter—
so obviously I can’t comment accurately on what your eyewitness there is talking about. There
is
a Martian discipline called
tanindo,
but it’s not a COLIN initiative
. Tanindo
has emerged spontaneously from existing martial arts in response to the lower-gravity environment on Mars. In Japanese, it means, literally, “way of the newcomer,” because on Mars, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, we are all of us newcomers. It’s also known in some quarters as Float Fighting and, in Quechua, as—you’ll perhaps forgive my pronounciation here—
pisi llasa awqanakuy.
Mr. Marsalis has served time on Mars, and may for all I know be an aficionado of the style, but really a martial art designed for a low-gravity environment isn’t likely to be all that dangerous, or
even useful, here on Earth
.

Unless you’re inhumanly strong and fast,
Sevgi qualified for him silently. Her gaze slipped sideways from the lap screen to Marsalis, dozing in the seat at her side. Norton had dug up fifty mil of COLIN-grade betamyeline and an inhaler just before they left, and Marsalis had dosed up in the departure lounge at JFK. He got some nosy sidelong glances, but no one said anything. Aside from a grunt of satisfaction as the chloride took, he made no comment, but as soon as they got to their seats he’d closed his eyes and a beatific grin split his face with ivory. He was asleep not long after.

Bonita Hanitty,
Good Morning South.
You don’t feel that by liberating a condemned criminal from a Florida penal institution, COLIN are flouting the very concept of American justice?

More muttering, not all of it sympathetic. Republican journalists were a minority in the room, and the Union press wore
Lindley v. NSA
on their collective chest like a medal of honor. Cub reporters came up on the legend; senior staffers told pre-Secession war stories and talked about their Republican colleagues with either snide pity or disdain. Norton knew the ground, and rode with it.

Well, Bonita, I think you need to be careful there talking about justice. As the briefing disk you’ll have received does specify, Mr. Marsalis had not actually been charged with anything during his four months of incarceration. And then there’s the question of the initial alleged entrapment, no let me finish please, the alleged entrapment techniques used by the Miami police to arrest Mr. Marsalis in the first place. And this is without mentioning that Republican and state law in the matter of pregnancy termination both run counter to well-established UN principles of human rights.

Choked splutters from several quarters, muted cheers elsewhere. Norton waited out the noise with a stern expression, then trod onward.

So what I’d say is that COLIN has liberated a man who is in all probability innocent, and whom the state of Florida didn’t really seem to know what to do with anyway. Yes, Eileen, back to you.

There was a lot more after that, of course. Hanitty, Meredith, and a couple of other Jesusland reps trying to dig back into Marsalis’s prior record and the deaths in the Garrod Horkan camp. Mercifully nothing about Willbrink. Norton rode cautious and courteous herd on it all, didn’t quite shut the Jesuslanders down, but leaned heavily toward Union journalists he knew and trusted enough not to throw curves.

Sevgi yawned and watched it sputter to a close. Beside her in the suborbital, the object of all their fears and attentions dozed on unconcerned.

Sleep of her own was unforthcoming—the syn wouldn’t allow it. She was still buzzing a couple of hours later as she slumped in the cheap plastic seating of the ferry hall, watching the few other waiting passengers with a cop’s eye. The place was bare bones and drafty, lit from above by sporadic spotlights on the roof girders and at the sides by the ghostly flicker of a few LCLS advertising boards whose sponsors hadn’t specified particular time slots for activation. efes extra!! jeep performance!! work on mars!! The inactive panels between looked like long gray tombstones hung on the corrugated-steel walls.

Through rolled-back shutter doors at the side, the white-painted superstructure of the moored ferry showed like a sliced view of another age. More modern additions to Istanbul’s diverse collection of water transport had a boxy, plastic look that made them out as no more than the seabuses they were, offering nothing at journey’s end but the completion of the daily commute. But the high, wide bridge, hunched smokestack, and long waist of the antique ships still on the Karaköy-Kadiköy run spoke of departure to farther-flung places, and an era when travel could still mean escape.

Marsalis came back from a prowl of the environs. She supposed in her grandfather’s time, he’d have gotten more looks for his skin, but now he stood out no more than the half a dozen Africans waiting around the dock as passengers and the two who stood in coveralls on the deck of the ferry beyond the shutters. No one gave him more than a glance, and that mostly for his bulk and the bright orange lettering on the inmate jacket he still wore.

“Do you have to keep wearing that?” she asked irritably.

He shrugged. “It’s cold.”

“I said at the airport I’d buy you something else.”

“Thanks. I like to buy my own clothes.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Klaxons groaned in the girdered space over their heads. An LCLS arrow on a movable barrow lit up pointing to the cranked-back shutters, destinations inscribed: HAYDARPASA, kadiköy. The two men on the ferry rolled out gangplanks, and a slow drift of humanity began moving toward the boat.

Impelled by memories of childhood visits, Sevgi moved along the starboard rail and seated herself on the outward-facing bench near the stern, propping herself there with her booted feet on the rail’s bottom rung. Thrum of the ship’s motors through the metal at her back. The mingled reek of engine oil and damp mooring ropes carried her back in time. Murat’s hand ruffling her hair as she stood beside him at the rail, barely tall enough to see over the top rung. The soft, chuntered rhythms of Turkish pushing out the English in her head. The impact of a whole world she’d previously seen only in the photos, a city that wasn’t New York, a place that was not her home but meant something vital—she sensed it in the way they looked around, exclaimed to each other, clutched each other’s hands at her eye level-to her parents.

Istanbul had shocked her to her four-year-old core, and each time she went back, it did it again.

Marsalis dropped into the seat beside her, copied her stance. The rail clanked dully as it took the weight of his legs.

“Now I’m really going to need this jacket,” he said cheerfully. “See.”

The engine thrum deepened, became a roar, and the stern of the ferry rose in a mound of seething water.

Shouts from the crew, ropes thrown, and a rapidly widening angle of space opened between the ferry and the dock. The boat thrashed about and picked up a vector out across the darkened water. Karaköy fell away, became a festooned knot of lights in the night. A chilly sea breeze came slapping at Sevgi’s face and hair. The city opened out around her, color-lit bridges and long low piles of skyline, all floating on a liquid black dotted with the running lights of other ships. She breathed in deep, held on to the illusory sense of departure.

Marsalis leaned toward her, pitching his voice to beat the engines and the wind of their passage. “Last time I came here, there was a delay at the suborb terminal, some kind of security scare. But I only found out about it after I’d checked out of my hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to get out to the airport.” He grinned. “I spent the whole two hours doing this, just riding the ferries back and forth till it was time to go. Nearly missed my fucking flight. Out here, looking at all this, you know. Felt like some kind of escape.”

She stared at him, touched to shivering by the echo of her own feelings in his words.

His brow creased. “What’s the matter? You getting seasick?”

She shook her head. Threw something into the gap. “Why’d you come back, Marsalis? Back to Earth?”