“Very well, as far as it goes. But give me a single >>
binding example?
<< to support those claims.”
“Ahhhhhh . . .”
“Exactly. Demodynamics isn’t >>
blood in the water?
<<, it’s an attempt to . . .”
“But—”
And on and on, until, in a clatter of cheap furniture, Koi was suddenly on his feet.
“That’s enough,” he said gruffly.
Glances flickered back and forth among the rest of us. Koi came around the side of the table, and his old face was taut with emotion as he looked down at the woman sitting there. She looked back up at him without expression.
He offered her his hands.
“I have,” he swallowed, “concealed my identity from you until now, for the sake of. Our cause. Our common cause. But I am Soseki Koi, ninth Black Brigade command, Saffron theater.”
The mask on Sylvie Oshima’s face melted away. Something like a grin took its place.
“Koi?
Shaky
Koi?”
He nodded. His lips were clamped together.
She took his outstretched hands, and he lifted her to her feet beside him. He faced the table and looked at each of us in turn. You could see the tears in his eyes, hear them in his voice when he spoke.
“This is Quellcrist Falconer,” he said tightly. “In my mind there is no longer room for doubt.”
Then he turned and flung his arms around her. Sudden tear ribbons glistened on his cheeks. His voice was hoarse.
“We waited so long for you to come again,” he wept. “We waited
so long.
”
PART FIVE
THIS IS THE STORM TO COME
No one heard Ebisu returning until it was too late and
then what had been said could not be unsaid, deeds done
could not be undone, and all present must answer for
themselves . . .LEGENDS OF THE SEAGOD
TraditionalUnpredictable wind vectors and velocity . . . expect heavy
weather . . .KOSSUTH STORM MANAGEMENT NET
Extreme Conditions Alert
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I woke to Kossuth-grade heat and low-angle sunlight, a mild hangover and the serrated sound of snarling. Out in the pens, someone was feeding the swamp panthers.
I glanced at my watch. It was very early.
I lay for a while in sheets tangled to my waist, listening to the animals and the harsh male whoops of the feeding crew on the gantries above them. Segesvar had taken me on a tour of the place two years previously, and I still remembered the awful power with which the panthers flailed up to catch chunks of fishsteak the size of a man’s torso. The feeding crew had yelled then as well, but the more you listened the more you realized that it was bravado to shore up courage against an instinctive terror. With the exception of one or two hardened swamp game hunters, Segesvar recruited pretty exclusively from the wharf fronts and slums of Newpest, where the chances of any of the kids having seen a real panther were about even with them ever having been to Millsport.
A couple of centuries back, it was different—the Expanse was smaller then, not yet cleared all the way south to make way for the belaweed monocropping combines. In places, the swamp’s poisonously beautiful trees and float-foliage crept almost up to the city limits, and the inland harbor had to be redredged on a twice-yearly basis. It wasn’t unheard of for panthers to turn up basking on the loading ramps in the summer heat, the chameleon skin of mane and mantle shimmering to mimic the sun’s glare. Peculiar variations in the breeding cycles of their prey out on the Expanse sometimes drove them in to roam the streets closest to the swamplands, where they ripped open sealed refuse canisters with effortless savagery and occasionally, at night, took the homeless or the unwary drunk. Just as they would in their swamp environment, they sprawled prone in back alleys, body and limbs concealed beneath a mane and mantle that would camouflage to black in the darkness. To their victims, they would resemble nothing so much as a pool of deep shadow until it was too late, and they left nothing behind for the police but broad splashes of blood and the echo of screams in the night. By the time I was ten, I’d seen my share of the creatures in the flesh, had even myself once run screaming up a wharf-shed ladder with my friends when a sleepy panther rolled over at our step-freeze-step approach, flapped one corner of its sloppy, tendriled mane at us, and treated us to a gape-beaked yawn.
The terror, like much that you experience in childhood, was transient. Swamp panthers were scary, they were lethally dangerous if you encountered them under the wrong circumstances, but in the end they were a part of our world.
The snarling outside seemed to reach a crescendo.
To Segesvar’s crew, swamp panthers were the bad guys of a hundred cheap hologames and maybe a school biology class they hadn’t cut, made suddenly real. Monsters from another planet.
This one.
And maybe, inside some of the young thugs who worked for Segesvar until the lower-echelon
haiduci
lifestyle inevitably took them down, maybe these monsters awoke the shivery existential understanding of exactly how far from home we all really were.
Then again, maybe not.
Someone shifted in the bed beside me and groaned.
“Don’t those fucking things ever shut up?”
Recollection arrived at the same moment as the shock, and they canceled each other out. I rolled my head sideways and saw Virginia Vidaura’s elfin features squashed up under a pillow she’d crushed to her own head. Her eyes were still closed.
“Feeding time,” I said, mouth sticky as I spoke.
“Yeah, well, I can’t make up my mind what’s pissing me off more. Them or the fucking idiots feeding them.” She opened her eyes. “Good morning.”
“And to you.” Memory of her the night before, hunched forward astride me. Beneath the sheets, I was hardening with the thought. “I didn’t think this was ever going to happen in the real world.”
She looked back at me for a moment, then rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling.
“No. Neither did I.”
The events of the previous day floated sluggishly to the surface. My first sight of Vidaura, poised in the snout of Segesvar’s low-profile skimmer as it held station on the roiled waters beneath the urbraft’s massive load-bearing supports. The dawn light from the opening at the stern had not reached this deep into the space between hulls, and she was little more than a gun-handed, spike-haired silhouette as I came down through the maintenance hatch. There was a reassuring operational toughness to the figure she cut, but when torchglow fell briefly across her face as we boarded, I saw something else there that I couldn’t define. She met my eyes briefly, then looked away.
Nobody spoke much during the skimmer ride across the early-morning waters of the Gulf. There was a solid wind out of the west and a cold gunmetal light across everything that didn’t encourage conversation. As we closed on the coast, Segesvar’s contraband driver called us all inside and a second hard-faced young
haiduci
swung himself up into the skimmer’s gun turret. We sat in the cramped cabin in silence, listening to the engines change pitch as we slowed on approach to the beach. Vidaura took the seat beside Brasil, and down in the gloom where their thighs touched I saw them clasp hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back in the comfortless metal-and-webbing seat, running the route behind my eyes for something to do.
Off the ocean, straight up some shabby, effluent-poisoned beach somewhere at the north end of Vchira, out of sight, but barely, of the Newpest suburb skyline whose shanties supplied the poison by piped outflow. No one stupid enough to come here to swim or fish, no one to see the blunt-nosed, heavy-skirted skimmer come brazening through. Across the oil-stained mudflats behind, through choked and dying float-foliage and then out onto the Expanse proper. Zigzag through the endless belaweed soup at standard traffic speeds to break the trail, three stops at different baling stations, each with
haiduci
-connected employees, and a change of heading after each one. Isolation and journey’s end at Segesvar’s home from home, the panther farm.
It took most of the day. I stood on the dock at the last baling station stop and watched the sun go down behind clouds across the Expanse like wrappings of bloodstained gauze. Down on the deck of the skimmer, Brasil and Vidaura talked with quiet intensity. Sierra Tres was still inside, trading
haiduci
gossip with the vehicle’s two-man crew last time I checked. Koi was busy elsewhere, making calls. The woman in Oshima’s sleeve wandered around 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 sixty-nine and seventy-one.” She slid down into a sitting position against the bale and looked at her hands as if examining them for traces of the labor she was describing. “Of course, they kept us working till 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 has what he wants.”
“And you? You haven’t gotten 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 defenses 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 battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—”
“Kovacs, it’s an analogy, all right? 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 percent 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 organize 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 subroutine that’s gotten out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They’re programmed to feed off the rest of the body no matter what the 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 regrouping. 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.”