[ii]
THE GUY’S FRIENDS woke from their nap while Limpopo and he were clearing dishes, which meant filing bugs where the dish-clearing routines failed. The tricky thing was that half the bugs were already tracked, but it wasn’t clear whether they were the same bugs, and it was dickish to create duplicate bugs when you could spend time to determine whether the bug was already there. Plus, adding more validations to an existing bug made it more likely to get fixed. If you wanted your bug fixed, you should really check it in depth.
They wandered over, gummy-eyed and torpid, whiffy of unwashed skin. Limpopo suggested they visit the onsen in the back. Everyone was amenable. They gave up on the bugs – let the other B&Bers get a crack at filing bugs of their own – and shouldered their shlepper packs and headed, staggering, to the back of the tavern.
“How’s this work?” the girl said. “Give us the FAQ” – she pronounced it “fack” – “for this kinky soapy thing of yours.” Limpopo thought she was putting up a front and the “kinky soapy” snark was a tell for anxiety about being inducted into a walkaway orgy.
“It’s co-ed, but there’s no sexytime, don’t worry. It’s 30 percent walkaway, 70 percent Japanese in approach. Just enough formalism that everyone can enjoy themselves, not so much that you worry about doing it wrong. The thing to remember is that baths are for relaxing, not washing. You don’t want to get anything except clean skin into them. No bathing suits, and you sit down at the shower stall for a hardcore scrubadub and a decontam stage before you get in. The hot water is limitless – it’s solar pasteurized in barrels on the roof, then there’s a three-stage filter through printed charcoal with the surface area of Jupiter’s moons.
“Once you’re clean, do your own thing. Some of the baths will parboil you in ten minutes, some are cold enough to give you hypothermia if you stay in them, and the rest are in between. Go where the mood takes you. I like outdoor baths, but the fish in them may creep you out. They’ll eat your dead skin, which tickles, but something deep-seated rejects being something else’s snack, so wave them away if you don’t want them nibbling. I like ’em, though. The little towels are all-purpose: keep them handy but don’t wring them out in the pools.”
“Is that it?” the smartass guy said.
“That’s it.”
“What about the dirty stuff?”
She rolled her eyes. “If you meet someone of your preferred gender and want to do something, get showered, get dressed and get a room. We don’t do dirty in the onsen. Strictly platonic.”
“If you say so.”
“So say we all.”
“Where do we leave our stuff?” That was Etcetera, and her mental assessment of him dropped a notch. Shleppers and stuff.
“Anywhere.”
“Will it be safe?”
“Dunno.”
The noobs exchanged easy to read glances: That’s not cool. I’m sure it’s safe, don’t be such a tourist. This is all our stuff. Don’t embarrass us.
“Ready?”
They followed her. They all changed together in the dry-room, and she didn’t bother being subtle about peeking, that was the deal when you were a walkaway. Skin is skin – interesting, but everyone’s got some. These three were young and firm, but not offensively so, and the smartass had totally depilated, which had been a style when she went walkaway, but had since atrophied, judging from the lush bushes the other two sported.
The funny thing about not caring if you get caught peeking is you get to watch everyone peek, and these three did, in a way that made her sure that they weren’t a sex thing with each other – yet. The other thing about not caring about peeking is you catch other people peeking at you, which all three did in turn, and she held each of their eyes in turn, frankly and unsexually. It was her duty to these noobs to help them go walkaway in their minds, the sex and scarcity death-cult they’d grown up with and turned their backs upon.
She needed to do it for herself, too. She knew it was possible to be in the presence of naked people without it being about sex – she knew that stuff was a liability, not an asset; she knew that work was not a competition – she still needed to remind her psyche. Habits didn’t die easy, they were so closely tied to her fear and fear was hardest to ignore. Taking noobs into the onsen was occupational therapy for her own walkaway.
“Let’s hit the showers.” She led them into the cleanup room, pretending not to notice their anxious glances at their packs in the unguarded room, which were no more subtle than their looks at her bare ass as she led them onward.
She started in the hottest pool, a trick to get her mind out of her muscles. That heat made thought impossible, all she could do was be, willing each muscle in turn to unclench, breathing the mineral-scented steam, until she melted beneath the water, legs, arms, ass, back, the soles of her feet, and the palms of her hands going soft as perfect barbecue, flesh just about ready to fall off her bones, relaxation lapping up her spine. The panic of the heat oozed down from her brain, warring in tiny neck muscles and in her occiput, until they gave way, and the last centimeter of stress that she’d not known was there gave. She was sensation, play of muscles and heat, pleasure balanced upon the knife-edge of pain. She relaxed deeper, the postural muscles that kept her in a Z loosened, her butt floated one increment off the porous stone step, and the sudden occurrence of a gracious interval between flesh and unyielding rock caused a deeper loosening, starting with the criss-crossing muscles of her butt, working deep into her pelvis and core. She was so relaxed her tummy bulged as the girdle of tissues that wrapped from ribs to hips gave. She felt like sous-vide meat, muscle fibers unraveling, underlying tissues sloughing away from the bag of elastic fascia that wrapped them. She let out a bass groan that hummed in her loose vocal cords. “I’m cooking.”
Someone was next to her in the water, probably Etcetera to judge from the amount of displaced water. He panted as he struggled with his body’s instinct to flee the remorseless heat. She listened to his breath deepen, heard the sighs as he unwound. There was a sympathy between their bodies as the ripples carried the signals of relaxation between them.
You can’t stay in that kind of heat forever, no matter how much you’d like to. She stayed right to the last instant, then stood up quickly, cool air tingling everywhere it kissed her. She gasped. The heat cooked away all self-consciousness. She could stand naked and gasping on the pool’s steaming edge without even the awareness of not being self-conscious. She walked in measured steps, smooth flagstones sensual against her feet’s half-boiled soles, to the edge of the coldest pool. She dipped a nearby pail into it, then used the pail to wet her small towel, squeezing it on her skin, starting on the top of her head and nearly choking as the icy water sluiced down her shaven scalp and behind her ears and into her eyes, nose and mouth.
She dipped the towel, scrubbed her skin, clenching her jaw to keep from gasping. She forced herself to scour her skin with the water, dipping the towel again and again, lashing herself with the cold until the pail was empty. She contemplated another pailful – sometimes she did two or three – but couldn’t bear the thought.
She stepped into the coldest pool, up to her ankles, and made herself descend the steps, keeping her hand light on the grab-rail despite the death-grip she wanted. One more step and she was in the water to her knees, another step and she was up to her thighs, and the water lapped at the bottom of her butt and her vulva. The thought of taking one more step was impossible, no sane person would plunge their tenderest places into icy hell. She knew from experience that if she didn’t go for it, she’d lose her nerve. She brought her weight forward until she had no choice but to plunge chest-first into the water, head dipping under for a moment that made her ears go instantly numb and the skin on her eyeballs and forehead feel like it was being pulled to her hairline.
She refused, by iron will, to allow herself to gasp. She made herself stay in that punishing water for one long breath, and then walked out in measured steps. The air, chilly before, now felt hot. She took her small towel back to the hottest pool and filled a fresh bucket and started the process in reverse. The water was blister-raising, scorching, scalding, but she made herself wash down with it before sinking back into the hottest pool.
Five minutes before, she’d thought every muscle had released its reservoirs of tension. This time, as the hot water boiled her, the feeling was transcendent. She closed her eyes and there was nothing behind them, no flickering worries, nothing but animal joy.
The sensation ended with a shocked cry from the coldest pool. She turned placidly, saw Etcetera in the cold water, face a rictus, nostrils flared so wide they looked horsey, and he snorted down them with steam-train intensity. To his credit, he stayed for a five-count and came back to the hottest pool with a measured pace. She smiled lazily as he washed himself with his small towel. He stepped into the hottest pool and their eyes met.
She held his gaze as he let the heat and his muscles and nerves do their dance.
“Oh, wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Wow.”
She waited for him on the next cold plunge, and they locked eyes as they stepped into the cold, a playful dare. Neither of them made a sound, not even when the water touched his scrotum, though he gave the smallest jolt. They waded in up to their necks, and, without saying a word, dipped their heads, surfaced. Neither wanted to be the first to get out. They stared, then glared, until he muttered “you’re crazy” between gritted teeth and started for the stairs. She followed. He had a cute butt, she noticed, in the most abstract way.
She had to admit that it wasn’t all that abstract.
Back into the hot, giggling as they silently dared each other to sluice the scalding water over themselves, to step into the bubbling heat, quickly sink in. The third immersion in the heat took her to places she had forgot, driving out all conscious thought, turning her into a thermotropic organism that reacted to the convection currents through a process below her brain stem.
Once again, her body told her she couldn’t stay in this heat much longer. It was a return to awareness from that blissful no-place, eyes opening to cracks, then fully, head lifting out of the water. He joined her a moment later, just long enough that he might have been proving some macho point about his ability to withstand pain. She banished the thought. If it was true he was only hurting himself. His business, not hers. If it wasn’t true, she was being needlessly mean.
They stood beside the pool beside each other, stress wrung out of their flesh, faces falling into unconscious bliss.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Now we go for the normal pools.” She pointed to the onsen’s other pools where a dozen bathers sat, chatting quietly or contemplating their eyelid-backs. His friends sat in a warm, bubbly bath with an awkward distance between them.
They ambled over, and as always happened in the baths, Limpopo found the stimulus had dissolved any sense of nudity. Even their eyes on her body didn’t awaken any feeling of nakedness. It was the psychological equivalent of the ringing in your ears after a long-humming refrigerator compressor shut down. The baseline hum of worry about her appearance, where she was hairy, what the hair looked like, where she had fat, where her bones protruded, where her skin was striated with stretch marks and where it was curdled with burn-scars, all ceased to matter.
She slid into the water beside the noobs. Seen from this side of hot/cold treatment, they were gnarled by years in default reality. Being in the death-cult of money and status marked you. They bore the marks. She hoped to erase her own someday.
“Can we join you?”
“You already have,” the sarcastic one said, good natured. He was between her and Etcetera – who’d followed her into the water – and Etcetera gave him a brotherly elbow in the ribs. They were at ease side by side, like brothers but not, pink arm by brown arm, hairless chest next to Etcetera’s thick mat.
“Herr Von Puddleducks,” she said, “what say you to our humble baths?”
“Decadent,” he sniffed. “Sure to be a breeding ground for something entirely unsavory.”
“Don’t listen,” the girl said. “It’s amazing.”
Etcetera said, “You’ve got to try that hot/cold thing. It’s consciousness-alteringly good.”
“Maybe later,” the sarcastic one said.
“Definitely later,” the girl said. “How’d you get your scar?”
Which was very forward of her and a good walkaway kind of question, in that it violated every norm of default. Limpopo levered her torso out of the water and torqued to look at the mess of burn-scar from her ribcage down her thigh. She ran her fingers over it, the tightness and its irregular surface merely sensations now, no longer horrors.
“Happened not long after I first went walkaway. We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptive eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.
“We were right up on the edge of default, close to the border. It was nice because we’d get day-trippers we could talk to about what was going on in the world. Tell the truth, I liked being on the border because it was an escape hatch. If things got bad, I could throw it in, walkback. Call my mom.
“The day-trippers weren’t always nice. There was a group of guys, neighborhood watch, who’d show up whenever anything went wrong in their fortress-condos. Someone got robbed: it must have been a walkaway. Graffiti? Gotta be walkaways. Murder? One of us, can’t possibly be one of those civilized types.
“For people living with continuous surveillance, they had a lot of crime. The property violations were their kids, who’d figured out how to turn off daddy’s spyware so they could get busy. If you think drones are going to stop teenagers from fucking, you’re out of your mind.
“I don’t know who did the murder. I heard it was horrible. Arson. Someone pwned a whole block of houses and did something with the safety sensors and the gas and whoof. Twenty-plus dead, including kids. Including a baby. I can’t imagine someone doing that, and I know it wasn’t anyone from our settlement. Something like that, it’s got to be personal.”
The three watched raptly, looks of horror dawning as they realized where the story was going. But Etcetera, bless his earlobes, spoke up, “Maybe totally sociopathic. A six-sigma event in someone’s neurotypicality. Not saying that a stranger doing that wouldn’t be totally fucked up and shit, but don’t discount the school-shooter/bad brains hypothesis outright.”
“I’ve wondered about that. I thought it might be provocateurs, because of what happened.” She traced the scar with her fingers. “Those rammed-earth houses, they’re really easy to instrument. The standard build has environmental sensors and fail-safes and alarms. They used the earthworks machines near the camp to mound up dirt on the façade and back lane of a whole row of houses, shifting tons of dirt and gravel in front of the doors. They walked down the line, calm as you like, smashing out windows and throwing Molotovs in each. Then they walked around the other side and tried the same for the back windows.
“But those windows were shatterproof, which is what saved us. They had a big argument about the best way to get through them. While that was happening, we were inside, organizing. The rammed-earth houses were two-up/two-downs, a family room and kitchen on the ground floor, an upper loft with two small bedrooms and a toilet. They were built to be thermostatic, cool in the summer, warm in the winter, circulation channels cut into each connecting wall, with nautilus-chambered noise-labyrinths that let air through but dampened sound.
“My house – I shared it with three other people – was at the end where they were arguing about smashing the windows. I knew that I had to get out, the place was full of smoke and fire. We were on the top floor, in the sleeping rooms, because it was the middle of the night. That meant that we weren’t in the flames, but the smoke was congregating on that floor. My friend kicked out the noise-labyrinth and we were able to squeeze through it into the next house, where there were five people, with the walls knocked out between their bedrooms to make one big sleep pit. They were in a panic because one of them had already passed out from the smoke. They wanted to try for the door. We calmed them, explained what was going on outside, sent them through the noise-guard into the next place.
“I had to get the word going, get people moving to that last place, so I hung back and messaged everyone, sipping at the pocket of fresh air until it got too rank, then I followed them. The next place was already cleared out and so was the next, and the fire in that place wasn’t so bad, so I paused to do some more messaging.
“I misjudged the smoke. Passed out. One of my friends figured I was missing and came back, pushed me through three more noise-guards until I was with the rest of the group. They split into two teams, one group downstairs to fight the fire and the other trying to bust through the end wall. The rammed earth was really good at deflecting blows, but you could claw and dig it away, and I thought there was enough crew working on that to get the job done.
“I went downstairs to fight the fire. The walls were impervious to flames, of course, but the Molotovs had their own fuel, and there was plenty of paper furniture and plastic kitchen appliances that burned if you got them hot enough. I had a wet cloth around my face, but it had dried, and I could hardly see or breathe. I didn’t even notice that my shirt was on fire until one of the other women in my crew tackled me and rolled me on the ground.
“By then they’d scraped a good-sized hole in the top floor, and thrown a pile of bedding and clothes onto the ground outside and we hang-dropped into it as fast and as quietly as we could.
“The vigilantes figured out what was going on, and came to ride us down. They had a lot of macho A.T.V. shit, plus drones. We had the clothes on our backs, and some of us were nearly naked. We scattered. I let the woman who’d put out my fire lead me into the brush, to a muddy culvert where we lay with just our mouths and noses out of the mud, so we wouldn’t have an IR signature. I had to get up first, all my body heat gone, the hypothermia setting in. I knew what it was, knew I’d be dead soon if I didn’t get warm.
“My friend tried to keep me from going, but I knew I was right. Whatever else was going on, I was going to die if I didn’t get warm. I stood. I shivered, and there was this pain here—” she traced the scar. “My friend cursed me back to the settlement, convinced we were going to get shot. But she came. Safety in numbers.
“Safety in numbers is a powerful idea. By the time we straggled to the smoking ruins, nearly everyone was there. The walkaways were in bad shape, hurting and coughing and cold. Staring at us from the other end of the houses were the vigilantes, hostile and unsure of themselves. They’d had a group madness that let them burn their neighbors’ homes. They’d been a mob, with diffused responsibility, the whole thing an emergent property of social mass, and now it had dissipated.
“My group set up an infirmary, right in front of them, treating our wounded with whatever we had. There were some people who’d hurt themselves jumping, some who’d gotten hurt in the scramble through the woods. It wasn’t until dawn broke and we did a head-count and a network sweep that we discovered four people were missing. Two of them straggled in later. Two were found in one of the houses, charred to bone, missed in that scramble. One of the dead was fifteen years old, and no one knew how to get in touch with his parents, somewhere out there in default.
“Word got out about the fire. There was a lot of U.A.V. traffic, not just copters and gliders, but bumbling zepps with medical relief and food. Soon there were people, more walkaways, and the straights freaked out and started to arm up, build a rampart to defend themselves from reprisals.
“There was no revenge. The straights had stolen our earthmoving gear for their defensive rampart, but there were new diggers within a couple of days. Don’t know who brought it. I was laid up with bad fever, infection. When I came to my senses, they told me they hadn’t expected me to make it. I was too poorly to help for weeks. It was only once we had some wet-printers running that I had pharma for the infection – some silver-doped antibiotics that knocked it out.”
They listened raptly. Then the girl shook her head like there was a bee in her ear. “Am I getting this right? You got burned out by insane vigilantes who killed your friends and nearly killed you, personally, and you hung around?”
“We didn’t hang around.” She smiled at the memory. “We rebuilt. The normals watched from their ramparts, like a militia, but we didn’t fight. First thing, we built a kitchen, then we baked, because rammed-earth construction is hungry work. Every time cookies or granola bars came out, we brought a tray over to them under a white flag and left it. The trays piled up, untouched, until one day they were gone. Don’t know if they ate them or not.
“It was very Gandhi-ey, though I had an itchy neck from the thought of all those scopes trained on me. They’d dial their laser-sights up to visible and make the dots dance on our foreheads, or over our hearts. But when we put out videos – including a red dot over the breast of a very pregnant woman who’d come to help – there was such a flood of net-rage for the vigilantes they quit it.
“We dozed the old houses when the new ones were done. We’d lived in hexayurts and tents, because our old places were uninhabitable. Having them there, the mummies of our dead, kept us working and shamed the vigilantes. Once the old places were down, we planted wildflowers and grasses that would have been beautiful when they grew out.
“The new settlement was three times as big. A lot of our volunteers wanted to stick around, and then there were new walkaways, so disgusted with the vigilantes they left the gate-guarded town. Some were double agents, but that was okay, since we didn’t have any secrets. Secrets were just overhead.
“As we got nearer to move-in, the atmosphere got festive. There were movie nights on the sides of the buildings, which we’d painted white. We always tried to paint our stuff white, just to do our bit for the planet’s albedo. We turned our excavation site into a swimming hole with water from the creek. The earthworks machines turned into rope-swings and dive platforms.
“I was in the pool when the vigilantes moved in again. They HERFed our drones and used pain-rays and sonic flashlights to herd us all into the square between the four rows of houses. Then a guy with a semi-military private security badge used a loudtalker to warn us that he was deputized by the county to clear the land and we had ten minutes to vacate. There was a EULA after that, about how they could just blow us away under the Anti-Terror Act of such-and-such if we engaged in conduct likely to represent a threat to life or property. As soon as he was done, he cranked up that fucking pain-ray. No one even thought about going back for their stuff. It was like your face was melting. There were kids in our group, under ten, and they screamed like they were being sawn to pieces. You hear stories about parents lifting a car off their kids, but that’s nothing – I saw parents walk straight into the pain-ray to get their kids. One of them fell down seizing, and her partner lifted her in a fireman’s carry with a kid under the other arm. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive physical feat.
“We couldn’t hide in the woods. They had their U.A.V.s flying overlapping coverage, following us in flocks until we were twenty klicks away. I limped all day and all night, and every time I slowed down, babycopters would drop out of the sky and ram me, nudging me along like cattle. I stuck with a couple who were carrying their kid. They stopped and tried to camp because their little boy couldn’t take another step and none of us had it in us to carry him anymore, and I stood guard over them, batting the copters with a leafy branch. More and more of the little bastards descended on us and eventually we moved on. They begged bicycles from a noncombatant couple on the road, and then I was slowing them down. I moved off on my own.
“I eventually dropped, and I must have been out of the copters’ enforcement range, because they hovered off on the horizon, making that cricket-noise, but I drifted off even so and when I awoke they’d gone. Must have needed a recharge and the vigilantes didn’t think I warranted a relief squadron.”
“What happened next?” the girl said. Of the three, she was most horrified. Limpopo guessed that this was because she was the richest of them, the one for whom this was the most inconceivable.
Limpopo shrugged, felt a tightness in her shoulders, realized she’d harshed her mellow by reliving the experience. It was three years before, and she still got some PTSDish moments, but not for a while. This telling made it come strong. These three reminded her of who she’d been, a fresh walkaway and yes, a bit of a shlepper. The fire and the forced march had burned shlepper instinct out, made her realize the uselessness of getting attached to stuff.
“I walked away. That’s what it comes down to. It’s a big world, and most of it is fungible. Doesn’t matter where you are or what’s around you, if you can cover your basic needs and find something productive to do. I ended up with this crew, and forked a tavern off the UNHCR refugee design, and that’s how you find me today.”
“What about the rest of your old camp?”
“Here and there. Some worked on the Belt and Braces. Some went somewhere else. A couple dropped off the walkaway grid, and I’m guessing they walkbacked, it was too much for them, which is ‘totally their business and absolutely cool with me,’ as the song goes. I checked in on the site itself. It’s got a high-security perimeter. The buildings have been bulldozed. My meadow’s still growing, and the wildflowers are as beautiful as I thought they’d be. I made the world a measurably better place, which is more than you can say for the assholes who chased us off.”
“Amen,” said Etcetera. “That was an insane story and I am very glad you told it to us. Now I want to go and try a different pool. You coming?”
“Hell yeah,” said the sarcastic one. “Did you say there’s a pool where the fish will come and give you oral pleasure?”
“Follow me,” she said, and led a parade of dripping, naked people outside into the chill of the early evening and the gorgeous heat of the water. The fish came and ate away their dead skin while they lolled back and became creatures of pure nerves and breath again.