Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
“Just fucking think about it for a moment, will you Virginia? Think what a neoQuellist uprising is going to do to this planet. You think Adoracion was bad? You think Sharya was a mess? That’s nothing to what would have happened here if your beach-party pals had raised the revolutionary standard. Believe me, the Hapeta administration aren’t fucking about here. They’re hardliners with a runaway mandate. They’ll crush anything that looks like a revolt anywhere in the Settled Worlds, and if takes planetary bombardment to suppress it then that is what they’ll use.”
“Yeah,” she snapped. “And that’s what we’re supposed to accept as a model of governance, is it? Corrupt oligarchic overlordship backed up with overwhelming military force.”
Murakami shrugged again. “I don’t see why not. Historically, it works. People like doing what they’re told. And it’s not like this oligarchy is so bad, is it? I mean, look at the conditions people live in. We’re not talking Settlement-Years poverty and oppression any more. That’s three centuries gone.”
“And why is it gone?” Vidaura’s voice had gone faint. I began to worry that she was concussed. Surfer-spec sleeves are tough, but they don’t design them to take the facial damage she’d incurred. “You fucking moron. It’s because the Quellists kicked it in the head.”
Murakami made an exasperated gesture. “Okay, then, so they’ve served their purpose, haven’t they? We don’t need them back again.”
“That’s crabshit, Murakami, and you know it.” But Vidaura was staring emptily at me as she spoke. “Power isn’t a structure, it’s a flow system. It either accumulates at the top or it diffuses through the system. Quellism set that diffusion in motion, and those motherfuckers in Millsport have been trying to reverse the flow ever since. Now it’s accumulative again. Things are just going to go on getting worse, they’ll keep taking away and taking away from the rest of us, and in another hundred years you’re going to wake up and it will be the fucking Settlement Years again.”
Murakami nodded all through the speech, as if he was giving the matter serious thought.
“Yeah, thing is, Virginia,” he said when she’d finished, “they don’t pay me, and they certainly never trained me, to worry about a hundred years from now. They trained me—you trained me, in fact—to deal with present circumstance. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
Present Circumstance: Sylvie Oshima. DeCom.