That’s what Quellcrist Falconer believes, and though sometimes it sounds a little too slick, like Soseki Koi’s march-of-history rhetoric, I’m inclined to agree with her. I’ve seen this process on other worlds, in some places I’ve worked to bring it about, and there’s the ring of truth to her projections. Plus she was there for the Unsettlement and that makes her a bigger expert on political change on Harlan’s World than any of us.

It’s strange, being around her. Bad enough that you know you’re talking to a centuries-old historical legend—that knowledge is a fluctuating thing, sometimes vague, sometimes eerily immediate. But beyond it, there’s the increasing fluidity with which she comes and goes, switching places with Sylvie Oshima the way Japaridze changes watch on the bridge with his first officer. Sometimes you’ll see it happen, and it’s like a flash of static across her face—then she blinks it away and you’re dealing with a different woman. At other times, I have moments when I’m not sure which of them I’m talking to. I have to watch the way the face moves, listen to the cadences of the voice again.

I wonder if in the decades to come, this slippery new kind of identity is going to become a common human reality. From what Sylvie tells me when she’s up, there’s no reason why not. The potential in the deCom systems is almost unlimited.

It’ll take a stronger kind of human to deal with it, but that’s always been the case, with every major step in knowledge or technology that we take. You can’t get by on past models, you have to keep moving forward, building better minds and bodies.

Either that or the universe moves in like a swamp panther and eats you alive.

I try not to think too much about Segesvar and the others. Especially the other Kovacs. Slowly, I’m talking to Jad again because in the end I can’t blame her for what she did. And Virginia Vidaura, the night we pulled out of Newpest harbour aboard Haiduci’s Daughter, gave me an object lesson in learning to let these things go. We fucked, gently, careful of her slowly healing face, and then she wept and talked to me about Jack Soul Brasil all night. I listened and soaked it up, the way she trained me a century ago. And in the morning, she took my waking erection in her hand, pumped it and mouthed it and slid it inside herself and we fucked again, and then got up to face the day. She hasn’t mentioned Brasil since, and when I did, inadvertently, she blinked and smiled, and the tears never made it out of her eyes onto her face.