The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  No, we’re not.

  Then-

  But Norton had already raised his head to scan the crowd, already signalled 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 morning. 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, eye-witness accounts, maybe even back-door 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 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 pronunciation 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 vs NSA on its collective chest like a medal of honour. Cub reporters came up on the legend, senior staffers told pre-secessional 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 disc 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 Horkan Garrod camp. Mercifully nothing about Willbrink. Norton rode cautious and courteous herd on it all, didn’t quite shut the Jesuslanders down, but leaned heavily towards Union journalists he knew and trusted enough not to throw curves. Sevgi yawned and watched it 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 draughty, lit from above by sporadic spot-lamps 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 grey 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 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 smoke stack and long waist of the antique ships still on the Karakoy-Kadikoy run spoke of departure to further-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 got more looks for his skin, but now he stood out no more than the half-dozen Africans waiting around the dock as passengers and the two that 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, Kadikoy. The two men on the ferry rolled out gangplanks, and a slow drift of humanity began towards the boat.

  Impelled by memory of childhood visits, Sevgi moved along the starboard rail and seated herelf on the outward-facing bench near the stern, propped 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 only previously see
n 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. Karakoy 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, colour-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 onto the illusory sense of departure.

  Marsalis leaned towards her. He pitched 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 ’til 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?’

  ‘Hey.’ Another grin. ‘I won the lottery. Would have been pretty ungracious not to take the prize.’

  ‘I’m serious.’ Fiercely, into the wind between them. ‘I know it’s grim out there, but every thirteen I ever heard talk about it loved the whole idea of Mars. Escape to a new frontier, a place you can carve out something of your own.’

  ‘It isn’t like that.’

  ‘I know. But that doesn’t stop anyone believing it.’ She looked out across the water. ‘It’s where they’re all heading, isn’t it? The ones you hunt down. They’re heading for the camps and a one-way ticket to the Martian dream. Somewhere they’ve been told they’ll be wanted, valued for their strengths. Not rounded up and kept on fenced ground like livestock.’

  ‘Most of them try for the camps, yeah.’

  ‘You ever ask yourself why UNGLA doesn’t just let them run, let them hitch a cryocap ride out of everyone’s hair?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, primarily because the Accords say they can’t. The Agency exists to make sure every genetic variant on Earth is filed and monitored appropriate to their level of risk to society, and in the case of variant thirteens that means internment. If we start turning a blind eye to fence-breakers just because we think they’re going to skip for Mars, pretty soon some of them aren’t going to skip for Mars, they’re just going to hole up somewhere here on Earth and maybe start breeding. And that puts the whole fucking human race back to pre-Munich levels of panic.’

  ‘You talk as if they weren’t like you,’ she said, accusation rising in her voice. ‘As if you were different.’

  ‘I am different.’

  Just like Ethan, just fucking like him. Her own despair guttered upward on its wick. Her voice sounded dull in her own ears. ‘It doesn’t matter to you that they’re treated this way?’

  Another shrug. ‘They’re living the choices they made, Ertekin. They could have gone to Mars when COLIN opened the gates at Munich. They chose to stay. They could get on with their lives on the reservations. They choose to break out. And when I come for them, they’ve got the option to surrender.’

  Jagged memory of Ethan’s bullet-ripped corpse on the slab. Called to make the identification, trembling and cold with the shock.

  ‘Choices, yes,’ she snarled. ‘Every choice a fucking humiliation. Give up your freedom, roll over and do as you’re told. You know full fucking well what kind of choice that is for a thirteen.’

  ‘It’s a choice I made,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Yeah.’ She looked away again, disgustedly. ‘You’re right. You are different.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m smarter.’

  Another ferry passed them a hundred metres off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug towards the little island of lights and windowed warmth, the vaguely glimpsed figures moving about within. Then the stupidity of the situation came and slapped at her like the sea wind. Right behind her, pressing into her shoulders, were the window rims of an identical haven of lit and heated space, and she’d turned her back on it.

  Yeah, much better that way, Sev. Turn away. Stay out in the cold and stare across the water at the fucking unattainable as it sails away from you.

  Fucking idiot.

  ‘So he went down fighting?’

  She snapped around to face him again. ‘Who did?’

  ‘The thirteen you were having a relationship with.’ The same mild calm in his voice. ‘You told me he’s dead, you’re angry about what I do for a living. Makes a certain kind of sense this guy got taken down by someone like me.’

  ‘No,’ she said tightly. ‘Not someone like you.’

  ‘Okay, not someone like me.’

  He waited, let it sit between them like the darkness and the noise of their passage through it.

  She clenched her teeth.

  ‘They sent the SWATs,’ she said finally. ‘A fucking dozen of them. More. Body armour and automatic weapons, against one man in his own home. They-’

  She had to swallow.

  ‘I wasn’t there, it was morning and I’d already gone to work. He was off duty, just off a stack of night work. Someone in the department tipped him off they were coming, they found a call on the phone later, downtown number. He-’

  ‘He was a cop?’

  ‘Yeah, he was a cop.’ She gestured helplessly, hand a claw. ‘He was a good cop. Tough, clean, reliable. Made detective in record time. He never did anything fucking wrong.’

  ‘Apart from fake his ID, presumably.’

  ‘Yeah. He got himself Rim States citizenship back before the internments started. Said he saw it coming way ahead of time. He bought a whole new identity in the Angeline Freeport, lived up and down the West Coast for a couple of years building it up, then put in for official immigration to the Union. They still weren’t testing for variant thirteen then, and once he was in, he had the Cross Act to protect him, the whole right to genetic privacy thing.’

  ‘Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She gave him a smile smeared with pain. ‘That your professional opinion?’

  ‘For what it’s worth. I guess he was smart.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Like Jacobsen says - sociopathic tendency allied with dangerous levels of raw intelligence. That’s why we’re locking thirteens up, right.’

  ‘No. We’re locking thirteens up because the rest of the human race is scared of them. And a society of scared humans is a very dangerous thing to have on your hands. Well worth a bit of internment to avoid.’

  She scanned his face for the irony. Couldn’t tell.

  ‘His name was Ethan,’ she said at last. ‘Ethan Conrad. He was thirty-six years old when they killed him.’

  The other ferry was almost gone now, fading amidst the other flecks of traffic and the lights of the European side. She drew a deep breath.

  ‘And I was six months pregnant.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  On the Asian side, with Europe reduced to glimmering lights across the water, she got drunk and told him the rest.

  He wasn’t sure w
hy - it might have been a by-product of the alcohol, or a desired result. Either way, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d watched the way her mouth clamped shut behind the sudden admission of loss, and he recognised damage that wouldn’t be healing any time soon. They got off the ferry in Kadikoy without speaking, carrying a personal silence between them that deadened the clank and clatter of disembarkation. The same bubble of quiet stayed with them as they trudged the half dozen rising blocks up from the waterfront, following the street-finder holo in the keytab, until they reached the winding thoroughfare of Moda caddesi and the low-rise apartment tower that COLIN owned there. It was a residential neighbourhood, long since put to bed, and they saw no one along the way.

  There was a strange, secretive feeling of release and refuge in it all. Quietly, quietly, up and away from the lights of the ferry terminal, past the shuttered frontages of a market and the curtained windows of the sleeping world, the glimmering map in the hollow of Ertekin’s palm and the pale bluish light it cast up into her face. When they arrived, she opened the door in from the street with exaggerated care, and they took the stairs rather than wake the machinery of the elevators. In the apartment - air infused with the slightly musty chill of no recent occupancy - they fetched up together in the kitchen, still without speaking, and found an open but barely touched bottle of Altinbas raki on the worktop.

  ‘You’d better pour me some of that,’ she told him grimly.

  He searched out the appropriate long slim glasses, found them in a cabinet, while Ertekin filled a jug with water from the tap. He poured each glass half full with the oily transparent weight of the raki and watched as she topped the measures off from the jug. Milky, downward-tumbling avalanche cloud of white as the water hit. She grabbed up a glass and drank it off without drawing breath. Set it down again and looked expectantly at him. He poured again, watched her top up. This one she sipped at and carried through to the abandoned chill of the living room. He took bottle and jug and his own glass, and followed her.