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 seen 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.