CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The rayhunter
Angelfire Flirt,
like most vessels of its type, cut a mean and rakish figure at sea. Part warship, part oversize racing skiff, combining a razor-sharp real-keel center of gravity and ludicrous quantities of grav lift in twin outrigger pods, it was built above all for reckless speed and piracy. Elephant rays and their smaller relatives are swift in the water, but more importantly their flesh tends to spoil if left untreated for any length of time. Freeze the bodies and you can sell the meat well enough, but get it back fast enough to the big fresh-catch auctions in centers of affluence like Millsport, and you can make a real killing. For that you need a fast boat. Shipyards all over Harlan’s World understand this and build accordingly. Tacitly understood in the same yards is the fact that some of the best elephant ray stock lives and breeds in waters set aside for the exclusive use of the First Families. Poaching there is a serious offense, and if you’re going to get away with it your fast boat also needs to present a low, hard-to-spot profile both visually and on radar.
If you’re going to run from Harlan’s World law enforcement, there are worse ways to do it than aboard a rayhunter.
On the second day out, secure in the knowledge we were so far from the Millsport Archipelago that no aircraft had the range to overfly us, I went up on deck and stood on the left-hand outrigger gantry, watching the ocean rip past underneath me. Spray on the wind, and the sense of events rushing toward me too fast to assimilate. The past and its cargo of dead, falling behind in our wake, taking with them options and solutions it was too late to try.
Envoys are supposed to be good at this shit.
Out of nowhere, I saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin new face. But this time there was no voice in my head, no instilled trainer confidence. I wasn’t getting any more help from that particular ghost, it seemed.
“Do you mind if I join you?”
It was called out over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, toward the center deck, and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver-gray hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.
Another fucking ghost.
“Sure. Why not?”
She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips, and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream. Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.
“You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?”
Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d gotten wrecked on
take
with a virtual whore in a—failed—attempt to break the system’s desire fulfillment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d gotten equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.
“Don’t read anything into it,” I told her. “I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”
She hesitated. “I’m remembering a lot of detail.”
I watched the sea. Said nothing.
“We fucked, didn’t we?”
The ocean, pouring past beneath me. “Yeah. A couple of times.”
“I remember—” Another hovering pause. She looked away from me. “You held me. While I was sleeping.”
“Yes.” I made an impatient gesture. “This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?”
“It’s. Difficult.” She shivered. “There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.”
Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing,
I felt like saying.
It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.
“Do you remember someone called Plex?” I asked her instead.
“Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.”
“What do you remember about him?”
The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.
“That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.”
“Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court-level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.”
“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”
I shrugged. “Just putting you straight on the facts.”
“Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.”
I looked sideways at her. “You been talking to the others?”
“They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.”
I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. “I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction Four.”
“Yes, they said.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalization. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”
“I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?”
“Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.”
“You talk as if I had a choice.”
I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. “You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you? What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?”
The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. “Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?”
“Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.”
“Yes, well, right now that’s not possible,” she snapped. “Is it?”
I stared back at her. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.” She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. “I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic.
She’s
the one who sent
me
back up when you came for us.”
“Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come
on
!”
“No. She is grieving.”
That stopped me.
“Grieving what?”
“What do you think? The fact that every member of her team died in Drava.”
“That’s crabshit. She wasn’t in contact with them when they died. The net was down.”
“Yeah, that’s right.” The woman in front of me drew a deep breath. Her voice lowered and paced out to explanatory calm. “The net was down, she couldn’t access it. She has told me this. But the receiving system stored every moment of their dying, and if she opens the wrong doors down there, it all comes screaming out. She’s in shock from the exposure to it. She knows that, and as long as it lasts she’s staying where it’s safe.”
“She told you that?”
We were eye-to-eye, a scant half a meter of seawind between us. “Yes, she told me that.”
“I don’t fucking believe you.”
She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged. “What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change, isn’t it?”
“Oh,
fuck off
! You’re going to hand me
that
tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?”
“No, it wasn’t.” For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. “None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?”
“Then,” I said evenly. “You should have planned it better.”
“Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.”
Silence.
I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and
Angelfire Flirt
flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.
But not about this conversation.
That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.
“Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking funny,” the woman at my side said sourly.
I shook my head. “Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshipers.”
“Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.”
“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”
She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:
They come to me with
>Progress Reports<
But all I see is change and bodies burned;
They come to me with
>Targets Achieved<
But all I see is blood and chances lost;
They come to me with
Choral fucking approval of every thing I do
But all I see is cost.
Much later, running with the Newpest gangs, I got hold of an illicit copy of the original, read into a mike by Quell herself a few days before the final assault on Millsport. In the dead weariness of that voice, I heard every tear the school edition had tried to jerk out of us with its cut-rate emotion, but underlying it all was something deeper and more powerful. There in a hastily blown bubblefab somewhere in the outer archipelago, surrounded by soldiers who would very likely suffer Real Death or worse beside her in the next few days, Quellcrist Falconer was not rejecting the cost. She was biting down on it like a broken tooth, grinding it into her flesh so that she wouldn’t forget. So no one else would forget, either. So there would be no crabshit ballads or hymns written about the glorious revolution, whatever the outcome.
“So tell me about the Qualgrist Protocol,” I said after a while. “This weapon you sold the yakuza.”
She twitched. Didn’t look at me. “You know about that, huh?”
“I got it out of Plex. But he wasn’t too clear on the detail. You’ve activated something that’s killing Harlan family members, right?”
She stared down at the water for a while.
“It’s taking a lot for granted,” she said slowly. “Thinking I should trust you with this.”
“Why? Is it reversible?”
She grew very still.
“I don’t think so.” I had to strain to pick out her words in the wind. “I let them believe there was a termination code so they’d keep me alive trying to find out what it was. But I don’t think it can be stopped.”
“So what is it?”
Then she did look at me, and her voice firmed up.
“It’s a genetic weapon,” she said clearly. “In the Unsettlement, there were volunteer Black Brigade cadres who had their DNA modified to carry it. A gene-level hatred of Harlan family blood, pheromone-triggered. It was cutting-edge technology, out of the Drava research labs. No one was sure if it would work, but the Black Brigades wanted a beyond-the-grave strike if we failed at Millsport. Something that would come back, generation after generation, to haunt the Harlanites. The volunteers, the ones who survived, would pass it on to their children, and those children would pass it on to theirs.”
“Nice.”
“It was a war, Kovacs. You think the First Families don’t pass on a ruling-class blueprint to their offspring? You think the same privilege and assumption of superiority isn’t imprinted, generation after generation?”
“Yeah, maybe. But not at a genetic level.”
“Do you know that for a fact? Do you know what goes on in the First Family clone banks? What technologies they’ve accessed and built into themselves? What provision there is for perpetuating the oligarchy?”
I thought of Mari Ado, and everything she’d rejected on her way to Vchira Beach. I never liked the woman much, but she deserved a better class analysis than this.
“Suppose you just tell me what this fucking thing does,” I said flatly.
The woman in Oshima’s sleeve shrugged. “I thought I had. Anyone carrying the modified genes has an inbuilt instinct for violence against Harlan family members. It’s like the genetic fear of snakes you see in monkeys, like that built-in response the bottlebacks have to wingshadow on water. The pheromonal makeup that goes with Harlan blood triggers the urge. After that, it’s just a matter of time and personality—in some cases the carrier will react there and then, go berserk and kill with anything at hand. Different personality types might wait and plan it more carefully. Some may even try to resist the urge, but it’s like sex, like competition traits. The biology will win out in the end.”