“You! You’re back on the World?”
“No, I’m calling from orbit. What the fuck do you think?”
Long pause. Breathing on the line. I look up and down the Kompcho wharf with reflexive caution.
“What do you want?”
“You know what I want.”
Another hesitation. “She’s not here.”
“Yeah, right. Put her on.”
“I mean it. She left.” There’s a catch in the throat as he says it—enough to believe him. “When did you get back?”
“A while ago. Where’s she gone?”
“I don’t know. If I had to guess . . .” His voice dies off in breath blown through slack lips. I shoot a glance at the watch I ransacked from the bunker in the Uncleared. It’s been keeping perfect time for three hundred years, indifferent to human absence. After years of chipped-in time displays, it still feels a little odd, a little archaic.
“You do have to guess. This is important.”
“You never told anyone you were coming back. We thought—”
“Yeah, I’m not much for homecoming parties. Now guess. Where’s she gone?”
I can hear the way his lips tighten. “Try Vchira.”
“Vchira Beach? Oh come on.”
“Believe what you like. Take it or leave it.”
“After all this time? I thought—”
“Yeah, so did I. But after she left, I tried to—” He stops. Click in his throat as he swallows. “We still had joint accounts. She paid hard-class passage south on a Kossuth speed freighter, bought herself a new sleeve when she got there. Surfer specs. Cleaned out her account to make the price. Burned it all. She’s, I know she’s down there with fucking—”
It chokes off. Thick silence. Some corroded vestige of decency makes me wince. Keeps my voice gentle.
“So you think Brasil’s still around, huh?”
“What changes on Vchira Beach?” he asks bitterly.
“All right, Yaros. That’s all I need. Thanks, man.” A cranked eyebrow at my own words. “You take it easy, huh.”
He grunts. Just as I’m about to kill the connection, he clears his throat and starts to speak.
“Listen, if you see her. Tell her . . .”
I wait.
“Ah, fuck it.” And he hangs up.
Daylight fading.
Below me, lights were starting to come on across Tekitomura as night breathed in from the sea. Hotei sat fatly on the western horizon, painting a dappled orange path across the water toward the shore. Marikanon hung coppery and bitten at one edge overhead. Out to sea, the running lights of sweepers already studded the deeper gloom. Faintly, the sounds of the port floated up to me. No sleep at deCom.
I glanced back toward the archaeologue cabin, and the Martian eyrie caught at the corner of my eye. It rose massive and skeletal into the darkening sky on my right, like the bones of something long dead. The copper-orange mix of moonlight fell through apertures in the structure and emerged at sometimes surprising angles. There was a cold breeze coming in with the night, and the dangling cables stirred idly on it.
We avoid them because we can’t make much use of them on a world like this, but I wonder if that’s the whole story. I knew an archaeologue once who told me human settlement patterns avoid the relics of Martian civilization like this on every world in the Protectorate. It’s instinctive, she told me. Atavistic fear. Even the dig towns start to die as soon as the excavations stop. No one stays around from choice.
I stared into the maze of shattered moonlight and shadow made by the eyrie, and I felt a little of that atavistic fear seeping into me. It was all too easy to imagine, in the failing light, the slow-paced strop of broad wings and a spiral of raptor silhouettes turning against the evening sky above, bigger and more angular than anything that had flown on Earth in human memory.
I shrugged off the thought, irritably.
Let’s just focus on the real problems we’ve got, eh, Micky? It’s not like there aren’t enough of them.
The door of the cabin flexed open and light spilled out, making me abruptly aware of how chilly the air had turned.
“You coming in to eat something?” she asked.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Time on the mountain did nothing much to help.
The first morning I slept in, but it left me headachy and vague when I finally ventured out of the bedroom. Eishundo Organics didn’t design their sleeves for decadence, it seemed. Sylvie was not around, but the table was littered with breakfast items of one sort or another, tabs mostly pulled. I poked around in the debris and found an unused coffee canister, tabbed it, and drank it standing at the window. Half-recalled dreams skittered about in the back of my head, mostly cell-deep stuff about drowning. Legacy of the overlong time the sleeve had been tanked—I’d had the same thing at the beginning in the Uncleared. Mimint engagement and the rapid flow of life with Sylvie’s Slipins had damped it out in favor of more conventional flight-and-fight scenarios and reconstituted gibberish from the memories of my own overlaid consciousness.
“You are awake,” said Dig 301, glimmering into existence at the edges of my vision.
I glanced over at her and raised my coffee canister. “Getting there.”
“Your colleague left a message for you. Would you like to hear it?”
“I suppose.”
“Micky, I’m going for a walk into town.” Sylvie’s voice came out of the construct’s mouth without a corresponding shift in visuals. In my fragile state of wakefulness, it hit me harder than it should have. Spikily incongruous, and an unwelcome reminder of my central problem. “Bury myself in the datawash down there. I want to see if I can get the net up and running, maybe use it to call through to Orr and the others. See what’s going on over there. I’ll bring back some stuff. Message ends.”
The sudden reemergence of the construct’s own voice made me blink. I nodded and carried my coffee to the table. Cleared some of the breakfast litter away from the datacoil and brooded on it for a while. Dig 301 hovered at my back.
“So I can get into Millsport University through this, right? Search their general stack?”
“It will be quicker if you ask me,” said the construct modestly.
“All right. Do me a précis search on,” I sighed. “Quellcrist F—”
“Commencing.” Whether out of boredom at the years of disuse or just poor intonation recognition, the construct was already off and running. The datacoil brightened and expanded. A miniature copy of Dig 301’s head and shoulders appeared near the top and started in on the précis. Illustrative images tumbled into the space beneath. I watched, yawning, and let it run. “Found, one, Quellcrist, also Qualgrist, native Harlan’s World amphibious weed. Quellcrist is a species of shallow-water seaweed, ocher in color, found mostly in temperate zones. Though containing some nutrients, it does not compare well in this with Earth-origin or purpose-bred hybrid species and is not therefore considered a sufficiently economic food crop to cultivate.”
I nodded. Not where I wanted to start, but—
“Some medicinal substances may be extracted from mature Quellcrist strands, but outside certain small communities in the south of the Millsport Archipelago, the practice is uncommon. Quellcrist is in fact remarkable only for its unusual life cycle. If and when stranded in waterless conditions for long periods of time, the plant’s pods dry out to a black powder, which can be carried by the wind over hundreds of kilometers. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into microfronds from which a whole plant may grow in a matter of weeks.
“Found, two, Quellcrist Falconer, nom de guerre of Settlement-years insurgent leader and political thinker Nadia Makita, born Millsport, April eighteenth, forty-seven (Colonial Reckoning), died October thirty-third, one-oh-five. Only child of Millsport journalist Stefan Makita and marine engineer Fusako Kimura. Makita studied demodynamics at Millsport University and published a controver
sial master’s thesis, ‘Gender Role Leakage and the New Mythology,’ as well as three collections of verse in Stripjap, which quickly attained cult status among the Millsport literati. In later life—”
“Can you give me a little closer focus here, Dig?”
“In the winter of sixty-seven, Makita left academia, reputedly turning down both a generous offer of a research post within the faculty of social sciences and literary patronage from a leading member of the First Families. Between October sixty-seven and May seventy-one, she traveled widely on Harlan’s World, supported partly by her parents and partly through a variety of menial jobs including belaweed cutter and ledgefruit harvester. It is generally thought that Makita’s experiences among these workers helped to harden her political convictions. Pay and conditions for both groups were uniformly poor, with debilitating illnesses common on the belaweed farms and fall fatalities high among the ledgefruit workers.
“In any event, by the beginning of sixty-nine, Makita was publishing articles in the radical journals New Star and Sea of Change in which a clear departure can be traced from the liberal reformist tendency she had evinced as a student (and to which her parents both subscribed). In its place, she proposed a new revolutionary ethic that borrowed from existing strands of extremist thought but was remarkable for the vitriol with which said strands were themselves savagely critiqued almost as much as ruling-class policy. This approach did nothing to endear her to the radical intelligentsia of the period, and she found herself, though recognized as a brilliant thinker, increasingly isolated from the revolutionary mainstream. Lacking a descriptor for her new political theory, she named it Quellism via the article ‘The Occasional Revolution,’ in which she argued that modern revolutionaries must when deprived of nourishment by oppressive forces blow away across the land like Quellcrist dust, ubiquitous and traceless but bearing within them the power of revolutionary regeneration where- and whensoever fresh nourishment may arise. It is generally accepted that her own adoption of the name Quellcrist followed shortly after and derives from this same source of inspiration. The origin of the surname Falconer, however, remains in dispute.
“With the outbreak of the Kossuth belaweed riots in May seventy-one and the resulting crackdown, Makita made her first appearance as a guerrilla in—”
“Hold it.” The canister coffee wasn’t great and the steady march of comfortably familiar fact had grown hypnotic as I sat there. I yawned again and got up to toss the canister. “Okay, maybe not that close-focused after all. Can we skip farther forward?”
“A revolution,” said Dig 301 obligingly, “which the newly ascendant Quellists could not hope to win while holding down internal opposition from—”
“Farther than that. Let’s get to the second front.”
“Fully twenty-five years later, that seemingly rhetorical boast now at last came to fruition as a working axiom. To use Makita’s own imagery, the Quellcrist powder that Konrad Harlan’s self-described harrowing storm of justice had blown far and wide in the aftermath of the Quellist defeat now sprouted new resistance in a dozen different places. Makita’s second front began exactly as she had predicted it would, but this time the insurgency dynamic had shifted beyond recognition. In the context of . . .”
Digging around in the packs for more coffee, I let the narrative wash over me. This, too, I knew. By the time of the second front, Quellism was no longer the new fish on the reef. A generation of quiet incubation under the heel of the Harlanite crackdown had made it the only radical force left on the World. Other tendencies brandished their guns or sold their souls and were taken down all the same, stripped back to a bitter and disillusioned rump of has-beens by Protectorate-backed government forces. The Quellists meanwhile simply slipped away, disappeared, abandoned the struggle, and got on with living their lives as Nadia Makita had always argued they should be prepared to do. Technology has given us access to time scales of life our ancestors could only dream of—we must be prepared to use that time scale, to live on that time scale, if we are to realize our own dreams. And twenty-five years later, back they came, careers built, families formed, children raised, back to fight again, not so much aged but seasoned, wiser, tougher, stronger, and fed at core by the whisper that persisted at the heart of each individual uprising; the whisper that Quellcrist Falconer herself was back.
If the semi-mythical nature of her twenty-five-year existence as a fugitive had been difficult for the security forces to get to grips with, Nadia Makita’s return was worse. She was fifty-three years old but sleeved in new flesh, impossible even for intimate acquaintances to identify. She stalked through the ruins of the previous revolution like a vengeful ghost, and her first victims were the backbiters and betrayers from within the ranks of the old alliance. This time, there would be no factional squabbles to diffract the focus, hamstring the Quellist lead, and sell her out to the Harlanites. The neoMaoists, the Communitarians, the New Sun Path, the Parliament Gradualists, and the Social Libertarians: she sought them out as they sat in their dotage, muttering over their respective fumbled grabs at power, and she slaughtered them all.
By the time she turned on the First Families and their tame assembly, it was no longer a revolution.
It was the Unsettlement.
It was a war.
Three years, and the final assault on Millsport.
I tabbed the second coffee and drank it while Dig 301 read the story to its close. As a kid, I’d heard it countless times and always hoped each telling for a last-minute reversal, a reprieve from the inevitable tragedy.
“With Millsport firmly in the hands of government forces, the Quellist assault broken, and a moderate compromise being brokered in the assembly, Makita perhaps believed that her enemies would have other more pressing matters to attend to before hunting her down. She had above all believed in their love of expediency, but faulty intelligence led her to misjudge the vital role her own capture or elimination had to play in the peace accord. By the time the error was realized, flight was all but impossible . . .”
Scratch the all but. Harlan sent more warships to ring the Alabardos Crater than had been deployed in any single naval engagement of the war. Crack helicopter pilots flew their craft at the upper edges of the four-hundred-meter limit with semi-suicidal brinkmanship. Spec ops snipers crammed inside, armed with weapons as heavy as it was thought the orbitals’ parameters would permit. Orders were to bring down any escaping aircraft by all and any means including, if necessary, midair collision.
“In a final, desperate attempt to save her, Makita’s followers risked a high-level flight in a stripped-down jetcopter that it was believed the orbital platforms might ignore. However—”
“Yeah, okay, Dig. That’ll do.” I drained my coffee. However, they fucked up. However, the plan was flawed (or possibly a deliberate betrayal). However, a lance of angelfire lashed down from the sky over Alabardos and carved the jetcopter into a flash-burned midair image of itself. However, Nadia Makita floated gently down to the ocean as randomized organic molecules among metallic ash. I didn’t need to hear it again. “What about the escape legends?”
“As with all heroic figures, legends about Quellcrist Falconer’s secret escape from Real Death are rife.” Dig 301’s voice seemed faintly tinged with reproach, but that might have been my groggy imagination. “There are those who believe she never entered the jetcopter in the first place and that later she slipped away from Alabardos disguised among the occupying ground troops. More credible theories derive from the idea that at some point before her death, Falconer’s consciousness was backed up and that she was revived once the postwar hysteria had died down.”
I nodded. “So where would they have stored her?”
“Beliefs vary.” The construct raised one elegant hand and extended slim fingers in sequence. “Some claim she was needlecast offworld, either to a deep-space datavault—”
“Oh yeah, that’s likely.”
“—or to another of the Settled Worlds where she had friends.
Adoracion and Nkrumah’s Land are the favorites. Another theory suggests that she was stored after sustaining a combat injury in New Hokkaido from which she was expected to die. That when she recovered, her followers abandoned or forgot the copy—”
“Yep. As you would with your honored hero-leader’s consciousness.”
Dig 301 frowned at the interruption. “The theory presupposes widespread, chaotic fighting, extensive sudden deaths, and a breakdown of overall communication. Such salients did occur at various stages in the New Hokkaido campaigns.”
“Hmm.”
“Millsport is another theorized location. Historians of the period have argued that the Makita family was sufficiently elevated among the middle class to have had access to discreet storage facilities. Many data brokerage firms have successfully fought legal battles to maintain the anonymity of such stacks. The total discreet storage capacity in the Millsport metropolitan zone is estimated at over—”
“So which theory do you believe?”
The construct stopped so abruptly her mouth stayed open. A ripple blinked through the projected presence. Tiny machine-code specs shimmered briefly into existence at her right hip, left breast, and across her eyes. Her voice took the flattened tone of rote.
“I am a Harkany Datasystems service construct, enabled at basic interactional level. I cannot answer that question.”
“No beliefs, huh?”
“I perceive only data and the probability gradients it provides.”
“Sounds good to me. Do the math. What’s the majority probability here?”
“The highest-likelihood outcome from the data available is that Nadia Makita was aboard the Quellist jetcopter at Alabardos, was vaporized with it by orbital fire, and no longer exists.”
I nodded again and sighed.
“Right.”
• • •
Sylvie came back a couple of hours later, carrying fresh fruit and a hotbox full of spiced shrimpcakes. We ate without talking much.
“Did you get through?” I asked her at one point.
“No.” She shook her head, chewing. “There’s something wrong. I can feel it. I can feel them out there, but I can’t pin down enough for a transmission link.”