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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 i
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 ru
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 gri
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.”