Koi was busy elsewhere, making calls. The woman in Oshima’s sleeve wandered round a bale of drying weed as tall as both of us and stopped beside me, following my gaze to the horizon.
“Nice sky.”
I grunted.
“It’s one of the things I remember about Kossuth. Evening skies on the Expanse. Back when I worked the weed harvests in ‘69 and ‘71.” She slid down into a sitting position against the bale and looked at her hands as if examining them for traces of the labour she was describing. “Of course, they kept us working ‘til dark most days, but when the light tipped over like this, you knew you were nearly done.”
I said nothing. She glanced up at me.
“Still not convinced, huh?”
“I don’t need to be convinced,” I told her. “What I have to say doesn’t count for much around here. You did all the convincing you needed to back there aboard Floating World.”
“Do you really think I would deceive these people deliberately?”
I thought about it for a moment. “No. I don’t think that’s it. But that doesn’t make you who you think you are.”
“Then how do you explain what has happened?”
“Like I said, I don’t have to. Call it the March of History if you like. Koi’s got what he wants.”
“And you? You haven’t got what you want out of this?”
I looked bleakly out at the wounded sky. “I don’t need anything I don’t already have.”
“Really? You’re very easily satisfied then.” She gestured around her. “So, no hope for a better tomorrow than this? I can’t interest you in an equitable restructuring of social systems?”
“You mean smash the oligarchy and the symbology they use to achieve dominance, hand power back to the people? That kind of thing?”
“That kind of thing.” It wasn’t clear if she was mimicking me or agreeing.
“Would you mind sitting down, it’s making my neck ache talking to you like this.”
I hesitated. It seemed unnecessarily churlish to refuse. I joined her on the surface of the dock, put my back to the weed bale and settled, waiting.
But then she was abruptly quiet. We sat shoulder to shoulder for a while.
It felt oddly companionable.
“You know,” she said finally, “when I was a kid, my father got this assignment on biotech nanobes. You know, the tissue-repair systems, the immune-boosters? It was kind of a review article, looking at the nanotech since landfall and where it was going next. I remember he showed me some footage of the state-of-the-art stuff being put into a baby at birth. And I was horrified.”
A distant smile.
“I can still remember looking at this baby and asking him how it was going to tell all those machines what to do. He tried to explain it to me, told me the baby didn’t have to tell them anything, they already knew what to do. They just had to be powered up.”
I nodded. “Nice analogy. I’m not—”
“Just. Give me a moment, huh? Imagine.” She lifted her hands as if framing something. “Imagine if some motherfucker deliberately didn’t enable most of those nanobes. Or enabled only the ones that dealt with brain and stomach functions, say. All the rest were just dead biotech, or worse still semi-dead, just sitting there consuming nutrients and not doing anything. Or programmed to do the wrong things. To destroy tissue instead of repairing it. To let in the wrong proteins, not to balance out the chemicals. Pretty soon that baby grows up and starts to have health problems. All the dangerous local organisms, the ones that belong here, that Earth’s never seen, they storm aboard and that kid is going to go down with every disease its ancestors on Earth never evolved defences for. So what happens then?”
I grimaced. “You bury it?”
“Well, before that. The doctors will come in and they’ll advise surgery, maybe replacement organs or limbs—”
“Nadia, you really have been gone a long time. Outside of battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—”
“Kovacs, it’s an analogy, alright? The point is, you end up with a body that works badly, that needs constant conscious control from above and outside and why? Not because of some intrinsic failing but because the nanotech just isn’t being used. And that’s us. This society—every society in the Protectorate—is a body where ninety-five per cent of the nanotech has been switched off. People don’t do what they’re supposed to.”
“Which is what?”
“Run things, Kovacs. Take control. Look after social systems. Keep the streets safe, administer public health and education. Build stuff. Create wealth and organise data, and ensure they both flow where they’re needed.
People will do all of this, the capacity is there, but it’s like the nanobes.
They have to be switched on first, they have to be made aware. And in the end that’s all a Quellist society is—an aware populace. Demodynamic nanotech in action.”
“Right—so the big bad oligarchs have switched off the nanotech.”
She smiled again. “Not quite. The oligarchs aren’t an outside factor, they’re like a closed sub-routine that’s got out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They’re programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what cost to the system in general, and to kill off anything that competes. That’s why you have to take them down first.”
“Yeah, I think I’ve heard this speech. Smash the ruling class and then everything’ll be fine, right?”
“No, but it’s a necessary first step.” Her animation was building visibly, she was talking faster. The setting sun painted her face with stained-glass light. “Every previous revolutionary movement in human history has made the same basic mistake. They’ve all seen power as a static apparatus, as a structure. And it’s not. It’s a dynamic, a flow system with two possible tendencies. Power either accumulates, or it diffuses through the system. In most societies, it’s in accumulative mode, and most revolutionary movements are only really interested in reconstituting the accumulation in a new location. A genuine revolution has to reverse the flow. And no one ever does that, because they’re all too fucking scared of losing their conning tower moment in the historical process. If you tear down one agglutinative power dynamic and put another one in its place, you’ve changed nothing. You’re not going to solve any of that society’s problems, they’ll just reemerge at a new angle. You’ve got to set up the nanotech that will deal with the problems on its own. You’ve got to build the structures that allow for diffusion of power, not re-grouping. Accountability, demodynamic access, systems of constituted rights, education in the use of political infrastructure—”
“Whoa.” I held up my hand. Most of this I’d heard from the Little Blue Bugs more than once in the past. I wasn’t going to sit through it again, nice sky or no nice sky. “Nadia, this has been tried before, and you know it. And from what I remember of my precolonial history, the empowered people you place so much faith in handed power right back to their oppressors, cheerfully, in return for not much more than holoporn and cheap fuel. Maybe there’s a lesson in that for all of us. Maybe people would rather slobber over gossip and fleshshots of Josefina Hikari and Ryu Bartok than worry about who’s running the planet. Did you ever consider that? Maybe they’re happier that way.”
Scorn flickered on her face. “Yeah, maybe. Or just maybe that period you’re talking about was misrepresented. Maybe premillennial constitutional democracy wasn’t the failure the people who write the history books would like us to believe. Maybe, they just murdered it, took it away from us and lied to our children about it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe they did. But if that’s the case, they’ve been remarkably good at pulling the same trick time and again since.”
“Of course they have.” It was almost a shout. “Wouldn’t you be? If the retention of your privileges, your rank, your life of fucking leisure and status all depended on pulling that trick, wouldn’t you have it down? Wouldn’t you teach it to your children as soon as they could
walk and talk?”
“But meanwhile the rest of us aren’t capable of teaching a functioning countertrick to our descendants? Come on! We’ve got to have the Unsettlement every couple of hundred years to remind us?”
She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the weed bale. She seemed to be talking to the sky. “I don’t know. Yes, maybe we do. It’s an uneven struggle. It’s always far easier to murder and tear down than it is to build and educate. Easier to let power accumulate than diffuse.”
“Yeah. Or maybe it’s just that you and your Quellist friends don’t want to see the limits of our evolved social biology.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. I tried to hold it down and the words came out gritted.
“That’s right. Bow down and fucking worship, do what the man with the beard or the suit tells you. Like I said, maybe people are happy like that.
Maybe the ones like you and me are just some fucking irritant, some swamp bug swarm that won’t let them sleep.”
“So, this is where you get off, is it?” She opened her eyes at the sky and glanced slantwise at me without lowering her head. “Give up, let scum like the First Families have it all, let the rest of humanity slip into a coma. Cancel the fight.”
“No, I suspect it’s already too late for that, Nadia.” I found there was none of the grim satisfaction in saying it that I’d expected. All I felt was tired. “Men like Koi are hard to stop once they’re set in motion. I’ve seen a few. And for better or worse, we are in motion now. You’re going to get your new Unsettlement, I think. Whatever I say or do.”
The stare still pinned me. “And you think it’s all a waste of time.”
I sighed. “I think I’ve seen it go wrong too many times on too many different worlds to believe this is going to be very different. You’re going to get a lot of people slaughtered for at best not very much in the way of local concessions. At worst, you’ll bring the Envoys down on Harlan’s World, and believe me, that you do not want in your worst nightmares.”
“Yes, Brasil told me. You used to be one of these stormtroopers.”
“That’s right.”
We watched the sun dying for a while.
“You know,” she said. “I don’t pretend to know anything about what they did to you in this Envoy Corps, but I have met men like you before. Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand. But it’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes. At base, you don’t really want things to get any better because then you’d be out of targets. And if the external focus for your hate ran out, you’d have to face up to what’s inside you.”
I snorted. “And what is that?”
“Exactly? I don’t know. But I can hazard a few guesses. An abusive parent. A life on the streets. A loss of some sort early in childhood. Betrayal of some kind. And sooner or later, Kovacs, you need to face the fact that you can never go back and do anything about that. Life has to be lived forward.”
“Yeah,” I said tonelessly. “In the service of the glorious Quellist revolution no doubt.”
She shrugged. “That’d have to be your choice.”
“I’ve already made my choices.”
“And yet you came to prise me free of the Harlan family. You mobilised Koi and the others.”
“I came for Sylvie Oshima.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“Yes, that is so.”
There was another pause. Aboard the skimmer, Brasil disappeared into the cabin. I only caught the tail end of the motion, but it seemed abrupt and impatient. Tracking back, I saw Virginia Vidaura staring up at me.
“Then,” said the woman who thought she was Nadia Makita, “it would seem I’m wasting my time with you.”
“Yeah. I would think you are.”
If it made her angry, she didn’t show it. She just shrugged again, got up and gave me a curious smile, then wandered away along the sunset drenched dock, peering occasionally over the edge into the soupy water.
Later, I saw her talking to Koi, but she left me alone for the duration of the ride to Segesvar’s place.
As a final destination, the farm was not impressive. It broke the surface of the Expanse resembling nothing so much as a collection of waterlogged helium blimps sunk among the ruins of yet another U-shaped baling station. In fact, before the advent of the combines, the place had seen service as an independent belaweed dock, but unlike the other stations we’d stopped at, it hadn’t sold to the incoming corporate players and was derelict within a generation. Radul Segesvar had inherited the bare bones as part-payment of a gambling debt and must not have been too happy when he saw what he’d won. But he put the space to work, refitted the decaying station in deliberately antique style and extended the whole installation across what was previously the commercial capacity harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. Now the complex boasted a small, exclusive brothel, elegant casino facilities and the blood-rich heart of it all, the thing that gave customers a frisson they couldn’t duplicate in more urban surroundings, the fight pits.
There was a party of sorts when we arrived. Haiduci pride themselves on their hospitality and Segesvar was no exception. He’d cleared a space on one of the covered docks at the end of the old station and laid on food and drink, muted music, fragrant real-wood torches and huge fans to shift the swampy air. Handsome men and women drawn either from the brothel downstairs or one of Segesvar’s Newpest holoporn studios circulated with heavily-laden trays and limited clothing. Their sweat was artfully beaded in patterns across their exposed flesh and scented with tampered pheromones, their pupils were blasted open on some euphoric or other, their availability subtly hinted at. It was perhaps not ideal for a gathering of neoQuell activists, but that may have been deliberate on Segesvar’s part.
He’d never had much patience with politics.
In any event, the mood on the dock was sombre, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fuelled abandon that never got much beyond slurred and maudlin. The realities of the kidnap raid on Mitzi Harlan’s entourage and the resulting firefight in the back streets of New Kanagawa were too bloody and brutal to allow anything else. The fallen were too evident by their absence, the stories of their deaths too grim.
Mari Ado, cooked in half by a Sunjet blast, scrabbling with the last of her strength to get a sidearm to her throat and pull the trigger. Daniel, shredded by shard blaster fire.
The girl he’d been with at the beach, Andrea, smeared flat when the commandos blew a door off its hinges to get in.
Others I didn’t know or remember, dying in other ways so that Koi could get clear with his hostage.
“Did you kill her?” I asked him, in a quiet moment before he started drinking heavily. We’d heard news items on the voyage south aboard the rayhunter—cowardly slaughter of an innocent woman by Quellist murderers, but then Mitzi Harlan could have been blown apart by an incautious commando and the shoutlines would still have read the same.
He stared away across the dock. “Of course I did. It’s what I said I’d do. They knew that.”
“Real death?”
He nodded. “For what it’s worth. They’ll have her re-sleeved from a remote storage copy by now. I doubt she’s lost much more than forty eight hours of her life.”
“And the ones we lost?”
His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.
“Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.”
He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. “I don’t know. Probably they got them.”
Neither of us needed t
o follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation.
Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.
I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.
“Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.”
“Yes.”
I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.
“Enjoying the party?”
“Not yet.” I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. “I’ll get there.”
He smiled faintly. “You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?”
“Not right now.”
Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wetmaned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more.
Woken Furies Page 46
