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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 gri
part III. AWAY FROM IT ALL
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.
CHAPTER 22
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 begi
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-dji
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 perso
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 gri
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.