“Oh—Beards.” The steward shuffled the scanned documentation back together. “They’ve been prowling up and down the waterfront all morning. Apparently they had a run-in last night with a couple of deComs in some place way east of here. You know how they are about that stuff.”

“Yeah. Fucking throwbacks.” Sylvie took the paperwork and stowed it in her jacket. “They got descriptions, or will any two deComs do?”

The steward smirked. “No vid, they say. Place was using up all its capacity on holoporn. But they got a witness description. A woman. And a man. Oh, yeah, and the woman had hair.”

“Christ, that could be me.” laughed Sylvie.

Orr gave her a strange look. Behind us, the clamour intensified. The steward shrugged.

“Yeah, could be any of a couple of dozen command heads I passed through here this morning. Hey, what I want to know is, what are a bunch of priests doing in a place runs holoporn anyway?”

“Jerking off?” suggested Orr.

“Religion,” said Sylvie, with a sudden click in her throat as if she was going to vomit. At my side, Jadwiga swayed unsteadily, and twisted her head more abruptly than people generally do. “Has it occurred to anybody that—”

She grunted, gut deep. I shot a glance at Orr and Kiyoka, saw their faces go tight. The steward looked on, curious, not yet concerned.

“—that every human sacrament is a cheap evasion, that—”

Another choked sound. As if the words were being wrenched up out of somewhere buried in hard-packed silt. Jadwiga’s swaying worsened. Now the steward’s face began to change as he picked up the scent of distress.

Even the deComs in the queue behind us were shifting their attention from the brawl at the top of the ramp, narrowing in on the pale woman and the speech that came sputtering up out of her.

“—that the whole of human history might just be some fucking excuse for the inability to provide a decent female orgasm?

I trod on her foot, hard.

“Quite.”

The steward laughed nervously. Quellist sentiments, albeit early poetic ones, were still marked handle with care in the Harlan’s World cultural canon. Too much danger that any enthusiasm for them might spill over into her later political theory and, of course, practice. You can name your hoverloaders after revolutionary heroes if you want, but they need to be far enough back in history that no one can remember what they were fighting for.

“I—” said Sylvie, puzzled. Orr moved to support her.

“Let’s have this argument later, Sylvie. We’d better get stowed first. Look.” He nudged her. “Jad’s dead on her feet, and I don’t feel much better. Can we—”

She caught it. Straightened and nodded.

“Yeah, later,” she said. Jadwiga’s corpse stopped swaying, even lifted the back of one hand realistically to its brow.

“Comedown blues,” I said, winking at the steward. His nervousness ironed out and he grinned.