“You coming in to eat something?” she asked.
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 favour 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 re-emergence 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.
“Alright. 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, ochre in colour, 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 of 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 kilometres. The remainder of the plant dies and decays, but the Quellcrist powder, upon coming into contact with water once more, reconstitutes into micro fronds 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 18th 47 (Colonial Reckoning), died October 33rd 105. Only child of Millsport journalist Stefan Makita and marine engineer Fusako Kimura. Makita studied demodynamics at Millsport University and published a controversial 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 67, 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 67 and May 71, she travelled 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 69, 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 which 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 recognised as a brilliant thinker, increasingly isolated from the revolutionary mainstream. Lacking a descriptor for her new political theory, she named it Quellism via an 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 71 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 further forward.”
“A revolution,” said Dig 301 obligingly, “Which the newly ascendant Quellists could not hope to win whilst holding down internal opposition from—”
“Further 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 timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, we must be prepared to use that timescale, to live on that timescale, if we are to realise 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.