“You live in the Union, Sevgi. That’s hardly the abyss, is it?”
“But that’s just the fucking point. That’s what they always wanted, Marsalis. Separation from the North. Secession. Their own fucking mud puddle of ignorance to wallow in. It took them two hundred fucking years to do it, but in the end they got exactly what they wanted.”
“Come off it. They lost the Rim States. That’s what, a third of American GDP?” He couldn’t work out why he was arguing so hard with her. He knew the ground because anyone working for UNGLA had to, but it wasn’t like he was an expert. It wasn’t like he cared. “And look, from what I hear out of Chicago these days, they might not be able to hang on to the Lakes much longer either. Then you’ve got Arizona—”
“Yeah, right.” She snorted, and sank deeper into her chair. “Fucking Arizona.”
“They’re talking about admission to the Rim.”
“Marsalis, it’s Arizona. They’re more likely to declare an independent republic of their own than anything else. And anyway, if you think Jesusland is going to let either them or any of the Lake states secede the way the Northeast did, you’re crazy. They’ll put the national guard in there faster than you can say Praise the Lord.”
Because he didn’t care one way or the other—right?—he said nothing, and the conversation closed up on her final words with a snap. There was a long pause. They both looked out at the ships.
“Sorry,” she muttered after a while.
“Skip it. You were telling me about Keegan. Waiting to hear if his body turned up.”
“Yeah, well.” She sipped her drink. “Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the beginning. That was when we started getting confident. Started not worrying about the situation, just living as if there were no danger, as if Ethan was just some regular guy. Year or so of that and, bang, oops.” She smiled bleakly. “Biology in action.”
“And they took it away from you.”
The smile dropped off her face. “Yeah. Union law’s pretty progressive, but they won’t buck the consensus that far. No siring of offspring from variant thirteen stock, any and all incubated genetic material to be destroyed. I’ve got lawyers fighting it, claiming moral precedent from pre-Secession cases on late-stage abortion, right to life, all that shit. Been nearly five years now, and we’re still fighting. Appeal, block, object, counterappeal. But we’re losing. UNGLA have all the money in the world to fight this one, and their lawyers are better than mine.”
“Sort of thing that makes a COLIN salary very attractive, I imagine.”
“Yeah.” Her expression hardened. “Sort of thing that makes working for an organization that doesn’t give a fuck about UNGLA very attractive, too.”
“Don’t look at me. I’m freelance.”
“Yes. But it was someone like you in UNGLA liaison at City Hall that came looking for Ethan, that put the SWATs onto him. It was someone like you that authorized inducing my fucking baby at six and a half months and sticking it in a cryocap until UNGLA’s legal team can get a ruling to have it fucking murdered.”
Her voice caught on the last word. She buried herself in her drink. Wouldn’t look at him anymore.
He didn’t try to disabuse her and deflate the jagged anger she’d fenced herself in with, because it looked like she needed it. He didn’t point out the obvious flaws.
In fact, Sevgi, he didn’t say, it probably wasn’t someone like me, because in the first place there aren’t that many like me around. Four other licensed thirteens working UNGLA that I know of, and none of them in a liaison capacity.
And more to the point, Sevgi Ertekin, if it had been someone like me hunting Ethan Conrad, that someone would have shown up in person. He wouldn’t have handed it to a mob of SWAT cudlips and stood on the sidelines like some fucking sheep hierarch supervising.
Someone like me would have done his killing himself.
Instead he sat quietly and watched as Ertekin slid from brooding silence into a raki-sodden doze. Awareness of where he was made its way back into his consciousness, the darkened apartment in the cloven city, the distant lights, the sleeping woman at barely arm’s length but curled away from him now, the quiet—
Hey, Marsalis. How you been?
—the tidal fucking quiet, like swells of black water, the seeping silence and Elena Aguirre, back again, talking softly to him—
Remember Felipe Souza? Stars and silent, empty corridors and safely dreaming faces behind glass that locked you out in the alone. That little whining I made in the pits of your ears, the way I’d come up behind you and whisper up out of it. Thought I’d gone away, did you? No chance. I found you out there, Marsalis, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. You and me, Marsalis. You and me.
—and the ships out at anchor on the silent swell, waiting.
CHAPTER 24
They kept him waiting at reception. Not entirely an unpleasant experience; like a lot of Rim States v-formats, the Human Cost Foundation’s site was subtly peopled with short-loop secondary ’faces, hardwired into the system to provide the environs with what product brochure enthusiasm liked to call a more authentic feel. Sitting across from him in the waiting area, a svelte young woman in a short business skirt crossed one long thigh over the other and gave him a friendly smile.
“Do you work for the foundation?” she asked.
“Uh, no. My brother does.”
“You’re here to see him?”
“Yes.” The format sculpters had done their work well. He felt positively rude stopping on the dry monosyllable. “We don’t see each other that much these days.”
“You’re not local then?”
“No. Wiring in from New York.”
“Oh, that is a long way. So how do you like it out there?”
“It isn’t out there for me, it’s home. We both grew up in the city. My brother’s the one who moved.” Tiny flicker of sibling rivalry riding a base of Manhattan exceptionalism, and the tiny adrenal shock as he recognized both. He began to see how the interface psychiatry he’d always sneered at might work quite well after all.
“So, uh.” The question rose to his lips; he tasted its idiocy but weariness let it through anyway, part challenge, part deflection from more talk about Jeff. “Where are you from?”
She smiled again. “That’s almost a metaphysical question, isn’t it. I suppose I’d have to say I’m from Jakarta. Conceptually, anyway. Have you ever been there?”
“Couple of times, wiring in. Not for real.”
“You should go. It’s beautiful now the nanobuild is finished. Best to try to see it in…”
And so on, effortlessly evading any conversational currents that might bring them up too hard against the fact of what she was. He guessed that this must be how high-class prostitution worked as well, but he was too tired to really care. He let go, let himself be lulled by the erudite flow of what she knew, the participative dynamic she ran the conversation on, the stocking-sheathed geometry of her elegantly crossed legs. There seemed to be a reactive subroutine that measured how much he wanted to talk and adjusted the response output accordingly. He found, oddly enough, that he wanted to talk quite a lot.
He wasn’t aware of Jeff approaching until his brother stood almost over him, smiling wearily.
“Okay.” He fumbled to his feet, recovered himself. “At last.”
“Yeah, sorry. Whole boatload of washups came in from Wenzhou a couple of days ago, it’s going to put us way over budget for the quarter. Been negotiating with the legislature all fucking day.” He nodded at the still-seated woman. “I see you’ve met Sharleen.”