Woken Furies

“She told you that?”

We were eye to eye, a scant half metre of seawind between us. “Yes, she told me that.”

“I don’t fucking believe you.”

She kept my gaze for a long moment, then turned away. Shrugged.

“What you believe is your own business, Kovacs. From what Brasil told me, you’re just looking for easy targets to take your existential rage out on. That’s always easier than a constructive attempt at change isn’t it?”

“Oh, fuck off! You’re going to hand me that tired old shit? Constructive change? Is that what the Unsettlement was? Constructive? Is that what tearing New Hok apart was supposed to be?”

“No, it wasn’t.” For the first time, I saw pain in the face before me. Her voice had shifted from matter-of-fact to weary, and hearing it, then, I almost believed in her. Almost. She gripped the gantry rail tightly in both hands and shook her head. “None of it was supposed to be like that. But we had no choice. We had to force a political change, globally. Against massive repression. There was no way they’d give up the position they had without a fight. You think I’m happy it turned out that way?”

“Then,” I said evenly. “You should have pla

“Yeah? Well, you weren’t there.”

Silence.

I thought for a moment she’d leave then, seek more politically friendly company, but she didn’t. The retort, the faint edge of contempt in it, fell away behind us and Angelfire Flirt flew on across the wrinkled surface of the sea at almost-aircraft speeds. Carrying, it dawned on me drearily, the legend home to the faithful. The hero into history. In a few years they’d write songs about this vessel, about this voyage south.

But not about this conversation.

That at least dredged the edges of a smile to my mouth.

“Yeah, now you tell me what’s so fucking fu

I shook my head. “Just wondering why you prefer talking to me to hanging with your neoQuellist worshippers.”

“Maybe I like a challenge. Maybe I don’t enjoy choral approval.”

“Then you’re not going to enjoy the next few days.”

She didn’t reply. But the second sentence still chimed in my head with something I’d had to read as a kid. It was from the campaign diaries, a scrawled poem at a time when Quellcrist Falconer had found little enough time for poetry, a piece whose tone had been rendered crassly lachrymose by a ham actor’s voice and a school system that wanted to bury the Unsettlement as a regrettable and eminently avoidable mistake. Quell sees the error of her ways, too late to do anything but mourn:

They come to me with