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 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 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.”