‘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 IV.’
‘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 rationalisation. 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 metre 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 worshippers.’
‘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:
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.