“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.”