“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.