“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 mobilized 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 harbor, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favors. 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 from either 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 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 somber, dissolving only very gradually into a chemically fueled 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 resleeved 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 specters at the feast that no amount of alcohol or
take
would erase.
“Ado vaporized 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 to 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 toward 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 sometime last year that once the priests were dead and resleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wet-maned 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 anymore. Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.
One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soap-like in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.
I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.
Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.
“Okay, then. Can I interest you in some team sports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?”
I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar were working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.
“Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.”
He shrugged. “Certainly can’t expect to have a good time
with
you anymore. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact. You really are turning northern, Tak.”
“Like I said—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.” He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. “Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.”
I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering. The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the
take
cookie, barely tasting it.
“Well,
you
look like you’re having fun.”
“Envoy camouflage,” I said reflexively. “We’re trained to blend in.”
“Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.”
I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand. I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.
“Is one of those for me?”
“If you like.”
I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier Western Rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.
“I’m sorry about Ado,” I said.
She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.
“Not now, Tak.”
Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.
This,
I remembered suddenly.
This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived
for.
And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime why I had ever walked away.
• • •
It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning. Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the
take
and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.
Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.
“You know,” she said finally. “I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to
be
one of the Bugs.”