The Complete SF Collection

by Morgan, Richard

  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 cancelled 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. Nor 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 round 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 ’69 and ’71.’ She slid down into a sitting position against the bale and looked at her hands as if examining them for traces of the labour she was describing. ‘Of course, they kept us working ’til 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’s got what he wants.’

  ‘And you? You haven’t got 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 defences 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 of battlefields and elective surgery, that kind of thing just doesn’t—’

  ‘Kovacs, it’s an analogy, alright? 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 per cent 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 organise 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 sub-routine that’s got out of hand. A cancer, if you want to switch analogies. They’re programmed to feed off the rest of the body at no matter what 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 re-emerge 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 re-grouping. 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.’

  ‘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 mobilised 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 fo
r 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 harbour, using state-of-the-art wet-bunker technology filched via a military contractor in Newpest who owed him favours. 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 either from 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 were 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.