[xi]
WHEN THEY GOT back, the B&B was in flames. It seemed the fire was everywhere, but it became clear it was centered on the stables and the power plant. A fire in the hydrogen cells was supposed to be impossible, they were engineered for five kinds of fail-safe, the design was so widely used that flaws were quickly spotted and fixed. Judging from the wreckage, though, they’d gone up.
The inn was also on fire, but seemed under control, water coursing out of windows where automated systems had kicked in. It was Iceweasel’s third disaster in weeks, and there was a curious doubling feeling as she took in the infirmary, the mechas stomping in and out of the burning building with armloads of salvaged gear.
“Shit.” Limpopo snapped into motion. Iceweasel watched in awe. Limpopo took in the same details in an eye-blink, but while Iceweasel had been frozen, Limpopo was spurred into motion. She jogged to the infirmary, head swiveling. Her presence was enough to call three of those tending the injured to her. She gestured forcefully at the blaze from the stables and all nodded and moved, shifting the wounded further away. The blaze intensified in seconds. Now she was heading for a mecha pilot and –
“Come on,” Gretyl said. “Let’s go help.”
Iceweasel was grateful to be told what to do.
*
They lost it all. For a while, the fires were under control, just a little mopping up to extinguish the last flames in the inn, but as they swapped power-cells in the mechas and brought up new hoses, there was a fresh explosion from the back, another concussion wave and then flaming debris. They had congregated on the front lawn or they would have all died.
The B&B’s drone outriders scouted surrounding territory, bridging network service over the holes in the mesh left behind by the fallen B&B. Fed by their intelligence, the B&B crew fell back and back again, heading west, towards the built-up outer perimeter of default, where the wilds ended and Toronto began. It was the least hospitable direction to go, but there was a hamlet up the road where the Better Nation could tie off. The zeppelin crew threw everything into the impellers, though bumblers were not supposed to be steered except in emergencies. This qualified.
There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: “I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there’d be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn’s explosives, going off hours later? Either we’re dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It’s what you’d do if you wanted to convince your bosses you’d been a good little mad bomber, but didn’t want too much blood on your hands.”
“Limpopo, it’s been a long day and you’ve been amazing,” Iceweasel said. They were huddled in a tent, seven in a sleeping space intended for two, rain thudding on the tent’s skin overhead and lashing at its sides. They’d made camp right in the middle of the road, using the highway’s cracked tarmac as a base. The road was domed, just enough to provide drainage into the choked ditches on either side. The insulating cells on the tent-floor rucked up over the dome’s apex, crinkling like bubblewrap when they moved. They were dead tired, hungry and hurt, but no one in their tent was going to sleep any time soon.
“But that sounds like bullshit. The university got attacked by mercs and we got hit by mercs again on our way back. Why assume these bombs were set by double agents? Sentimental double agents? Ask yourself if it wouldn’t make you happier to imagine the bad guys were blackmailed into infiltrating us, but found us so wonderful they couldn’t bring themselves to kill us?”
A scary flash of anger on Limpopo’s normally calm face. Iceweasel had been pleased when Limpopo joined their tent, anointed the cool-kids’ club by her presence. When Limpopo’s eyes flashed, it was like being trapped with a dangerous animal. She pulled back, and, to her embarrassment, whimpered. Limpopo mastered herself.
“That is not entirely stupid. It’s hard to know when you’re kidding yourself. Figuring that out has been my life’s major project. But.” She turned and listened to the wind lash the tent, touched the cool fabric. “Okay, yeah. Maybe they wanted us on the road and they’re sending a snatch-squad for anyone who understands uploading for real. Maybe they knew the B&B had realtime monitors that would make them look like monsters if there were a lot of bodies, but if they kill us out here, they can shove us into the ditches and—”
“I get it,” Iceweasel said. She couldn’t stand any more. The self-recrimination after meeting the campus crew had finally given way to fear. It was almost a relief to be tortured by something external, rather than her internal nagging voice. Gretyl had a tattoo around one of her biceps that read FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER, but as far as Iceweasel was concerned, her mind could use some killing.
She wished she and Gretyl could be alone. Something about being enfolded in Gretyl soothed her in a deep place, switched off the voice that knew all her weaknesses. She’d never had that, not with boys or girls. Sometimes she’d had fleeting moments of peace after fucking, but with Gretyl, it came easily, even without sex.
As the voice liked to remind her, the psychology of falling in love with an older woman when your own mother all but abandoned you wasn’t difficult. All the peace Iceweasel got from being engulfed in Gretyl’s embrace led to wondering whether she was giving Gretyl back anything in exchange.
She really wanted some time alone with Gretyl.
Limpopo slumped and Iceweasel saw something even rarer than Limpopo’s anger: exhaustion. “It may be self-serving bullshit that living walkaway will soften the hardest heart and convert pigopolist despoilers to post-scarcity Utopians, but it keeps me going, sometimes. Part of me wants to stay up doing forensics on the B&B’s log-files, finding the sellout, but the rest of me wants to live with the fantasy of unstoppable moral suasion. I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.”
“Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence – she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered-dish’ person?”
“Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish; or b) a shotgun? It’s game-theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”
“Game-theory,” Gretyl said. “That’s the stag hunt. Two hunters together can catch a stag, the top prize. Either hunter alone can only catch rabbits. Both of them want to get stags, but unless they trust each other, they’ll have coney surprise for supper.”
“I didn’t know there was a name for it. Good to know. Once things have settled, I’ll have to do some reading. When things go bad, the stag is rebuilding something better than whatever’s burned down; the rabbit is huddling in a cave in terror, eating shoe-leather soup, hoping you don’t die of TB because there aren’t any hospitals anymore. I’ve always thought the whole walkaway project was a way to turn people into covered-dish types. There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”
Iceweasel smiled for the first time in a long time. “Put like that, it’s beautiful.”
Limpopo didn’t smile back. She looked too exhausted to smile. “I’d settle for plausible. Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”
“You’re assuming that families aren’t about acting like selfish, untrusting assholes,” Iceweasel said.
“The fact that your family is so fucked up is not proof that being fucked up is natural – it’s proof that shotgun people rot from the inside and their lives turn to shit.” She closed her eyes. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Iceweasel was surprised to discover it was true. The words were liberation, a framework for understanding what had made her, what she could become.
“Limpopo,” Gretyl said, “you look like chiseled shit. No offense.”
“None taken,” Limpopo said with a ghost of a smile.
“What would it take to make you sleep?”
Limpopo shrugged. “I don’t think I could at this point. I’ve gone through sleep and come out the other side.”
“I think that’s macho bullshit,” Gretyl said. She moved around, asked some others to move, rearranged packs and bags until there was a Limpopo-shaped space on the floor. “Lie down.” She patted her hands on her lap.
Limpopo looked from her to Iceweasel, the others, shrugged. “I’m not going to fall asleep, you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—”
“Silence, fool. Lie down.”
She did, her head settling into Gretyl’s lap. She locked eyes with Iceweasel, a nonverbal “Is this okay?” and Iceweasel smiled and stroked her greasy hair, a tousled short mess of spun sugar in pink and blue. They’d been in plenty of cuddle-puddles, but that was different. She and Gretyl locked eyes, they shared a smile. Her fear melted. Miraculously, it was not replaced by self-doubt. The rain, the breathing, the dim light, the cozy closeness made her feel, against all odds, safe.
Gretyl tilted her head at one soft shoulder and Iceweasel shinnied around until she could rest her head on it. Gretyl put an arm around her and she put an arm around Gretyl, and the three women were quiet.
*
They rendezvoused with the Better Nation at sunset the next day. Limpopo watched the crew descend on tether-lines and harnesses, toes grazing the ground. There was a brief moment of excited reunion as they related their adventures to one another. Etcetera was right in there, regaling his buds with tales of their near-death, oohing and aahing as the aviators recounted their own experiences with drones, chaff, weather, and infowar harassment.
The Better Nation had been tethered in deep Mohawk territory, and had been generously resupplied with venison, corn, chapatis, and ice-cream in amazing flavors from rose-water to marzipan. Some Mohawk kids came along for the flight, not quite walkaways, but certainly not default. They stuck together and looked on solemnly as food sizzled on the grills the aviators set out and more crew touched down. Then one of them – a girl, with long straight hair and a loose-fitting t-shirt with the word LASAGNE in huge letters across it – stepped out of their tight pack. She wandered over to the grill to kibitz, and Tam, who was cooking, cracked a joke Iceweasel couldn’t hear, but made the girl smile so radiantly it transformed her into something out of a painting (or maybe a stock-art catalog: “Smiling indigenous woman, suitable for brochures on diversity policy”) and the two groups merged.
The medical contingent oversaw lifting the wounded into the zeppelin. They discussed the deadheads who’d been cargo and scientific curiosities for so long it was hard to think of them as “wounded” (for the mercs, “wounded” was certainly not the word). Iceweasel saw Tam head to the caucus that was discussing the issue over huge ice-cream cones, and she ambled over.
“What happens to the injured is a lot less important than what happens to those two mercs. They must be kept safe.”
Limpopo rocked her chin from side to side. She’d gone for a swim in a creek nearby and was looking enviably fresh and rested, and, frankly, beautiful. Tam had also gone for a dip, and her hair was braided into a pair of thick Pippi Longstocking pigtails that hung to her breasts, like schematic arrows pointing out a salient feature.
“I get that the fact that those two are with us is bad publicity, but there are bigger priorities—”
Tam shut her up with a sharp hand wave. “You don’t get it – that’s totally backwards. The reason it’s bad publicity is what we did is monstrous. Now we fucking own them, so we owe them. Once you take a prisoner, they’re your responsibility. Not just legally, but morally. We started down a path we can’t escape. If it was up to me, we’d thaw them and set them loose—”
“I don’t think we can do that safely.” That was Tekla, a med-type who’d served with CC on the deadheading project. “Not after everything they’ve been through. We need a full lab and controlled experiments before we attempt it or they could end up vegetables. I think we’ll be able to bring up their sims before we’re ready for that, ask them what they think we should do with their bodies. That seems only fair—”
Tam made her two-handed, furious wave. “Are you kidding? Where’d you study before you went walkaway? Mengele U? Scanning those two without consent was terrible, bringing their sims up and making them decide whether to risk their lives—”
“Not their lives,” Limpopo said. “Their bodies.”
Tam’s mouth snapped shut and she visibly got herself under control. “They have never accepted that the part that matters is in that sim. They’ve never been given that choice. Maybe we can bring them up into a state like the one that Dis was in, so they don’t care about the difference, but without their consent, that’s brainwashing. Unforgivable, monstrous brainwashing.”
Limpopo looked up at the undercarriage of the zepp overhead, the multi-story gondola, bottom covered in cargo hooks, sensor packages, and gay illustrations of androgynous space-people dancing against a backdrop of cosmic pocket-litter: ringed saturnesques and glittering nebulae. She, too, was on the verge of snapping. Just like that, the carnival atmosphere vanished.
“Let’s get them on the blimp,” Limpopo said, ignoring the rule about never calling it a blimp, only a zeppelin. No one corrected her. She looked tired again. She turned and walked away.
*
The Better Nation lowered down a supply of hexayurts that they put up with practiced ease, glomming some together to make communal sleeping areas. More rains were coming and the aerialists would have to bumble to beat them. Their weather-conjurers predicted a drift toward the maritimes, possibly as far as Nova Scotia, and they solicited supplies, gifts and letters for anyone they met on the way. The scouring of their meager possessions to find gifts restored some of their cheer, a moment of delight in abundance, and the renewed idea that there was always more where that came from, an end to scarcity on the horizon.
Some of their crew went with the aviators, accompanying the deadheaders. Some of the Mohawk kids, including the girl (who called herself Pocahontas and dared anyone to give her shit) joined the B&B crew. When Iceweasel shyly asked her why she stayed, she shrugged: “Want to live forever. Isn’t that why we’re all here?”
Seth, who overheard, put his arms in the air and shouted amen! and they laughed.
They walked.
Iceweasel found herself with Etcetera and Seth. She looked at them and remembered that impossible time when they’d met at a Communist party, and thought about self-replicating beer and poor Billiam, about her father – it had been ages since he’d last sent an email; she never answered them – and her sister and mother, and default, all that had become of such a short time.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” She twirled to take it in, feeling young and beautiful in a way she’d lost track of. “Who the fuck are we to decide to walk away, to make a better society?”
“I know who I am,” Seth said. “You’re a rich girl I kidnapped with terminal Stockholm syndrome. This douchebag is Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza.”
“Needs more bananapants,” she said.
Etcetera smiled. “You can call me Bananapants if you want.” He hugged her and the hug wasn’t precisely brotherly, but it was more brotherly than not, and to the extent that it was not, there was sweet nostalgia for when they’d flirted like crazy, and she’d had that push-pull feeling of not being precisely interested, but being kind of reassured that he’d been interested in her. Funny how complicated it had been in default, when they only played walkabout, weekend bohemians. Once she’d stopped pretending she was normal, it got easier.
“Guys,” she said, her tone unexpectedly serious. It was a serious time. “I want you to know—” She looked from Seth to Etcetera, back again. They’d been aged by walkaway, but it gave them gravitas. A moment of lensing time let her see them as strangers, how rakishly handsome they were. She smiled. Her affection felt like molten chocolate. “I just love you both, okay? You’re good. The best.”
Neither knew what to say. Seth was trying for something smartassed. Etcetera tried to figure out what this meant in the great scheme. She could almost hear their thoughts. Before either could say something stupid, she gathered them into a hug, reveling in their familiar smells. Their arms tangled then found their way. The hug went on and on.
When they undocked, Gretyl and Limpopo were standing by, grinning like proud parents. She and Gretyl had scored a private hexayurt for the night, and she’d felt low-grade, anticipatory horniness ever since she learned they’d be alone. Now, with the boys in her arms and Gretyl looking on with Limpopo – so fucking hardcore and so hot, she’d had a low-grade crush on her for years – her horniness spiked with toe-curling intensity. She laughed at the sheer physicality. The boys laughed along, though who knew why. She was no longer inside their heads. That was okay. They were walkaways, and god help them, they’d figured out how to live as though it were the first days of a better nation, and she was going to get her brains fucked out that night. The world was good.
*
The sex was everything she’d hoped for and then some. There’d been a moment beside each other, legs tangled, hands working furiously, eyes locked, when she’d experienced time-dilation that would have been scary under other circumstances, a moment that literally felt like an eternity, and when it crescendoed with an orgasm that made her legs kick like a galvanized frog, she’d been disappointed to see it go.
Then they talked in the way of lovers. In the way of lovers, what began as murmurs about one another’s beauty and prowess, with strategic kisses and snuffling each other’s scents, a walkaway from everything suddenly veered into the default of life among the walkaways.
“It’s a nice idea, but it’s ultimately childish,” Gretyl said. “The idea that there’s no objective merit. You can believe that if you do something qualitative. But in math, it’s easy to see who’s got merit. There’s no sense in pretending every dolt is Einstein in waiting.”
“Einstein failed math,” Iceweasel said quickly. Einstein came up a lot in discussions like this.
“That wasn’t math, that was arithmetic. People who can do sums in their head aren’t doing math, they’re just calculating. No person will ever calculate as well as the dumbest computers. It’s a party trick. Arithmetic isn’t math. Knowing which arithmetic to do is math.”
Iceweasel sighed. The science crew treated the B&Bers with patronizing amusement when the subject came up, but she’d assumed her Gretyl was on-side.
“No one can do science on her own, right? Look at what Dis and CC did, it was such a team effort, everyone had to contribute, and even with all that, we don’t know if we’ll get CC back.”
Gretyl rolled on her side, let one of her small, clever hands trail down Iceweasel’s body from chin to pubis, resting on her thigh. No lover had touched her that way. It made her shiver. Gretyl had such a powerful hold on her. It scared her, in a good, sexually charged way. When Gretyl worked on her, face fixed in an expression of extreme concentration, she experienced absolute surrender.
Now Iceweasel moved her hand off her leg. The discussion was serious and she wanted to have her wits about her. Limpopo had explained it so clearly. She didn’t want to let her down.
“We were all needed for the upload project. There are others around the world who are also indispensable. But not everyone is indispensable. Look at what you did for Dis, keeping her spirits up and distracting her. You were very good, but there are others who are just as good. If you hadn’t been there, someone else would have done the job.
“Now take Dis. She was indispensable. We couldn’t bring her back without her! We’re in different fields, but I follow hers closely. There likely isn’t anyone else in the world who can do what she does. She is literally one of a kind. I’m not one of a kind – I’m good, but at the end of the day, I’m an applied mathematician with pretenses to pure math. There are pure math people who spend ten years contemplating the algebra necessary to prove the topological equivalence of a coffee cup and a donut. Wizards from another dimension. Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who’d do your job every bit as well. Especially when you’re supporting the one person who really can’t be replaced.”
“I’ve heard this all. My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. I told him: he might have an ‘indispensable’ skill for running the business, but he couldn’t do it himself. The reason everyone else shows up to help him isn’t because of his magic ‘indispensable’ skill, either. It’s because they need money, and he has it.”
Gretyl’s jaw worked. “You’re assuming that because zottas talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there. Astrologers talk about orbital mechanics because it sounds sciencey and helps them kid the suckers.”
“My dad’s an astrologer then?”
“That’s an insult to astrologers.” They laughed. Some of the tension boiled off of Iceweasel. They’d bonded over talking shit about her dad. Gretyl used him as an avatar of every evil of the system. Iceweasel was pleased to go along with that for her own reasons. “Your dad is like a bloated duke who’s hired court astrologers to sacrifice chickens and reassure him that he’s the cat’s ass.”
“You’re talking about economists,” she said.
“Of course I’m talking about economists! I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.”
Iceweasel stiffened. She knew Gretyl was kidding, but didn’t like to be told she “wasn’t qualified” to have a discussion, even in jest. She pushed the feeling down, strove to access the part of her that lit up when Limpopo described this stuff.
If Gretyl noticed, she gave no sign: “Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a sciencey vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. Like job creator. As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing.
“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.
“I used to watch you kids do your Communist parties, when I was in default and pretending any of that shit mattered. I’d get so angry at you, beyond any sane response. It wasn’t until I walked away that I figured out why: because every time you broke into an empty factory and turned the machines on, you proved I was a plow horse whose poor lips had been scarred by the bit in my teeth as I pulled a cart for the man with the whip and the feedbag.
“That’s my point about the difference between the kind of meritocracy we have in the university and the bullshit the zottas swim in. When we say that Amanda is a better mathematician than Gretyl, we mean there are things Amanda can do that Gretyl can’t. They’re both nice people, but if there’s a really important math problem, you’re better off with Amanda than Gretyl.”
Limpopo’s voice ricocheted in Iceweasel’s mind. “But Amanda can’t do it all. Unless she’s working on a one-woman problem, she’ll have to cooperate with others. If she sucks at that, it might take a hundred times more work in total to get it done than if Gretyl – who’s good at sharing her toys and keeping everyone purring – were the boss. This isn’t anecdote – as you keep telling me, the plural of anecdote is not fact. Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median – one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency – that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”
Gretyl sat up, momentarily distracting Iceweasel with her body. “Explain that?”
“I just read the summary and skimmed the stats and the methodology for smooshing together the different data-sets. The tldr is these hacker-wizards who produce better code than anyone were often so hard to work with that they made everyone else’s work worse, buggier and slower. The amount of time they had to spend fixing that code slowed them down so much, it ate up their virtuosity gains.
“Attempts to put together ‘Manhattan Project’ teams made from wizards without normal dumb-asses like me showed exactly the same effect.
“They footnoted one study, one I did read – an ethnographic survey of projects that went to shit, even though they had brilliant programmers. The authors found there were two major causes of failure. The first was some wizards were colossal assholes. ‘Asshole’ was what they called it, because the phrase came up from three different teams. It’s impossible to work with assholes, even brilliant assholes. ‘Don’t work with assholes’ is great advice, but it’s also a duh moment, because if you haven’t figured that out by your second or third team, you might be the asshole.
“The other category was when you had wizards who had no clue how to work with others. They weren’t dicks, they just didn’t have the instinct. The authors found teams where the wizard and everyone else hadn’t failed, and in these cases, it was because there was someone good with people who figured out how to smooth over differences and see how people fit together. These people were wizards of teams, and they made more of a difference to a team’s success than a programming wizard.”
Gretyl shook her head. “We’re still talking about wizards. If the evidence is that the most important kind of wizard is a people-motivating wizard, that’s the kind of wizard you recruit. That doesn’t disprove the existence of wizards, and it sure as shit doesn’t mean they aren’t important.”
“You’re mixing me up, Gret. My point” – thinking Limpopo’s point – “is even if you have a bunch of wizards, you can’t get shit done without other people helping. Everyone is a wizard at something. Okay, not quite. But in any group, there will be people who do things better than anyone else in that group. Some of them will be helpful to the group and some won’t. But it would be lonely and shitty if only wizards participated in life. It’d be hard for wizards not to decide, arbitrarily, that their buddies and the people they wanted to fuck were also wizards, to use their supposed indispensability to boss non-wizards around.”
“The fact that people are dicks a lot of the time doesn’t mean some people aren’t better at stuff than others. It doesn’t mean those people aren’t more important for getting certain things done than the rest of us. It doesn’t mean they’re more important, just more important for some context. It’s fucking stupid, it’s delusional to insist we’re all equal.”
Iceweasel clamped her emotions before she started shouting. “Gretyl.” Her voice was measured. “No one is saying we’re equivalent, but if you don’t think we’re equally worthy, what the fuck are you doing here?”
“Oh, calm down. Of course everyone deserves respect and all that shit, but in every normal distribution there’s stuff on one end of the curve and stuff at the other end. If you ran a math faculty by pretending everyone was as good as everyone else at math—”
“That’s not what I said!” Iceweasel’s cheeks were hot. Tears pricked her eyes. How many fights had she had with her asshole father that featured phrases like “oh, calm down”? How many times had he dismissed everything by talking about the “natural” abilities of his zotta pals, like they were supermen? She was about to say something she would regret. She climbed to her feet, jaws clenched so tight she heard her teeth grinding. She dressed, vision telescoped to a red-tinged black circle. Gretyl said some words. She sensed Gretyl getting to her feet so she bolted from the yurt, wearing her underwear and carrying her shirt and pants, sockless feet jammed into her hiking boots. It had stopped raining and a brisk wind had blown most of the clouds out of the sky, leaving a blaze of starlight and a fingernail paring of crescent moon, vignetted by black dramatic clouds at the edge of the woods. The after-rain smell of ditch-water and pine forest was strong. Her feet splashed through black puddles, cold water sloshing around her toes.
She thought she heard Gretyl behind her, splashing through the same puddles. Part of her wanted Gretyl to catch up, so she could apologize and take back the awful things she’d said. Another part understood her feelings about Gretyl were caught up with her feelings about her father. Any apology Gretyl offered would never make up for the apologies she never received from him.
She made for camp’s edge, wanting to be far from humans and wanting to find somewhere to balance on one foot while she finished dressing. She laced up her boots and stood, pulling her shirt off a tree-branch and pulling it on, fighting through the overlapping layers of wicking stuff and insulating stuff and brightly colored rags woven in bands around it, a look she’d invented that many others had flattered her by copying. Suited and booted, she calmed. She ran her hands over the shirt, which looked fucking awesome and was acknowledged as a technical and aesthetic triumph, in which she took enormous pride.
She scrubbed her cheeks with her palms and planted her hands on her hips and looked at the sky. She’d had a lot of summer nights at the family cottage, staring at skies like this, impossibly populated by cold stars that reminded her of humanity’s general insignificance and comforted her with her father’s specific insignificance. Sometimes, there’d been cousins on stargazing nights, a few she’d felt affection for, and she panged at the thought of them, lost to her, being twisted into the gnarled shape of a zotta mired in self-delusional garbage.
Something snagged her attention, coming up over the tree line. It was the Better Nation. As she saw it, she heard it, which was incongruous, because the bumblers were not supposed to run their impellers except for emergencies. It was transport that went where the wind blew, making hay while the sun shone, treating nature as a feature, not a bug. The impellers grew louder – an insect-buzz, then a swarm, then a full-throated roar. The Better Nation was supposed to be on its way to Nova Scotia.
There was a breeze out of the woods that left her in goosebumps. The hair on her neck stood. She was rooted to the spot, staring at the zepp straining across the sky, twisting to and fro as it fought the winds. It grew faster, and she realized belatedly that it was descending as well as impelling. Her heart thudded in her ears.
“HELP!” she shouted, without meaning to. “HELP THEM!” She smacked her interface surfaces, turning on her cameras and sensors without consciously deciding to.
The sound of her shouts in her ears unfroze her feet. She ran through camp, toward the zepp. She saw black shapes moving through the sky behind it, invisible except where they blotted out starlight. Inaudible over the impellers’ whine, a shrill tone of machines laboring beyond their safety margin.
Others were around, aiming scopes at the sky. There was shouting. Cursing. A fan of pencil-thin, violet lasers lit the sky, so bright it hurt to look. They converged on a black shape, tracked it jigging and jagging across the sky. She followed them down to their source, saw three of the university crew frantically plugging hydrogen cells into a rig like a miniature antiaircraft gun on a wide metal plate they weighed down with their boots. She ran to them and stood on the plate, freeing two of them to move closer to the batteries.
The drone in the lasers’ path fell. The lasers followed it until it fell below the tree line. Where they briefly touched the trees, the lasers set sizzling fires that smoked but quickly extinguished themselves as nearby shaking branches spilled payloads of raindrops on them.
The lasers retargeted, skewering another drone. As a third one opened fire with small missiles that wove through the sky on cones of flame, they split into two and targeted both drones. In the same eye-blink instant, two of the missiles found the Better Nation, one hitting the bag. The other hit the gondola. That one skated its surface and spun out of the sky like a maple-key, detonating beneath it, shock-wave sending up the gondola’s tail. The whole thing shook like it was caught in the teeth of an enormous dog. The missile on the gasbag blew. There was a sound like a thousand balloons popping as the cells bag ruptured in a cascade that swept back and forth across the bag’s length. The zepp fell, but it didn’t free fall – some of the cells, incredibly, were intact, a tribute to their fail-safes – but it came down fast.
Another drone caught fire and became a meteor. The lasers jumped to the remaining one, but it lifted as the stricken Better Nation smashed into camp, plowing a furrow through the roofs and walls of five hexayurts before its nose made contact with the road and it crumpled, the smoking remains of the gasbag settling over it a moment later. The sound – rending noises ending with a tooth-vibrating crunch – blended with shouts of dismay and terror. Walkaways swarmed the gondola, using their hands to bend back the smashed fiberglass hull to get at the people inside.
Etcetera ran past with a pry bar, but didn’t see her. He was fixed on the Better Nation, the zepp crew he’d befriended. The Mohawk kids were right behind him, with tools of their own, hammers and a wrecking bar. She remembered some of their friends had gone up in the airship. She pushed her fists into her guts, somewhere between punching herself in the stomach and massaging it, trying to drive the grief out.
One of the hexayurts that had been knocked down, right at the start, was the one she’d shared with Gretyl. The zepp had only grazed its roof, but the light, composite panels bent, then snapped, leaving the walls to tilt like ancient tombstones. Moving as if in a dream, Iceweasel walked to the yurt, kneading at her stomach. More people raced past her and there was a chorus of explosive bangs, the remaining gasbag cells overheating. She felt the fire’s heat on the back of her neck and smelled her hair singeing.
Before going to bed, she and Gretyl had taken advantage of the spacious privacy of the hexayurt to unpack their jumbled gear, squeezing the water out of the wet stuff and folding it carefully, coiling their rope and swapping the cells of their devices. It was still all laid out in the precise, Cartesian grid that Gretyl created, barely ruffled by the fragments of roof that tumbled into it. Next to it was the air mattress, trillions of mezoscale bubbles that filled if you laid the bed out and gave it a few brisk shakes, but deflated easily if you rolled it from one corner.
On the bed: Gretyl, on her side, dressed to chase Iceweasel into the night, like she was sleeping. Between her and Iceweasel, the air wavered with a cloud of steam, and she bent over Gretyl, solarized by the flashlight beam that her computer automatically sent arcing from her chest, without Iceweasel noticing. She reached a hand for Gretyl’s shoulder, touching it, then cupping and tugging it, trying to rock Gretyl onto her back. She was dead weight.
There was blood on the bed beneath her head.
Iceweasel tried to breathe three deep breaths. Got to one. Snapped into focus. She bent to Gretyl’s mouth, heard her breathing, slid a hand onto her neck and felt for a pulse, encountering blood but not caring. The pulse was strong. She played light over Gretyl, probing with her fingers, starting at her feet and working up, checking each arm, then her throat again, her chin.
Now, at last, she examined Gretyl’s head, probing carefully, unmindful of the chaos and bangs. There was a shallow cut on the back of her scalp, bleeding profusely, but small. There was no dent, no pulpy depression like the one that she’d half-seen/never-unseen on Billiam’s head. She heard her own breathing, slowed it down, peeled back each eyelid, looking at the contracting pupils, were they the same size? Gretyl blinked, brushing her hands away from her eyelids, leaving behind smears of blood from her fingertips.
Gretyl blinked several times, moved her arms and legs weakly, tried to sit up. Iceweasel held her down. “You’re hurt.” She spoke into her ear, trying to be calm and comforting.
“No shit. Fuck.” She blinked more. There were screams from the crash, and some that sounded nearer. Iceweasel looked into the night, dark and spotted with erratic orange flame-light. While she was distracted, Gretyl sat, shrugging off her restraining hand. She touched her scalp wound, and she stared at the blood on her palm with an affronted scowl. “Fuck this,” she said. Iceweasel folded the bloody hand in her own bloody hands.
“Babe, you have a head wound. You should lie down, in case there’s a spinal injury or a concussion.”
Gretyl stared out, seeming to have not heard, then, “Fine in theory, but I don’t think we get to choose tonight. Let’s go unfuck this. Help me up.” She turned to Iceweasel, stared with an intensity that admitted no debate, shifting her grip to pull her hand. Iceweasel struggled with herself, then pulled. Gretyl staggered, put her free hand to the back of her head, straightened.
“What the fuck is going on?” she said, as she lurched in the direction of the fire.
They were nearly upon it when someone grabbed Iceweasel’s arm and yanked. She swung around, hands in fists, eyes wide, heart pounding, sure she was about to be tazed by a merc sent by the zottas to terrorize them. It was Etcetera, his face smudged, eyes panicked. “Come on!” He yanked again, oblivious to the fact that she’d been about to break his nose.
Even with a head wound, Gretyl was faster on the uptake. She yanked Iceweasel’s other arm and they followed Etcetera to another yurt where the wounded lay on air mattresses, lit by pea-sized OLEDs hastily stuck to the walls and casting overlapping crazy shadows. It was chaos, an impromptu morgue, but she saw some were moving, some were attended by people crouching over them. Pocahontas, one arm bandaged, soothed a figure on the ground, a hand on his forehead, other hand holding a screen and concentrating on the readout. Iceweasel supposed she was conferenced in to the pool of walkaway docs who helped with care around the walkaway net, and she wondered how many of these skirmishes they’d dealt with in the middle of the night, lately. She wondered who was crawling walkaway net, doing traffic analysis to find and target those docs.
Before long, she was conferenced into a doc of her own, working with a mercifully unconscious zepp-rider, burned terribly and groaning every time she touched her, following the doc’s directions, sometimes asking him to send them as text because she couldn’t always understand him through a very thick Brazilian accent. She wondered what timezone Brazil was in, and whether it was the middle of the night there. Presently, another Brazilian doc came on the line and helped her set a broken leg using an inflatable cast from a pack that, ironically, the zepp had dropped off the day before.
She looked up from her patient, who’d been palpably grateful for the painkiller she’d placed under his tongue. Gretyl sat on one of the few empty pads, face in her hands. She went to her, put her arm around her shoulders, kissed her tentatively on her ear, tasted dried blood and smelled stale sweat and scalp-oil. Gretyl’s thick hair was a mat of blood.
“You okay?”
“Just tired. I ice-packed my head and someone in Lagos checked me for a concussion and pronounced me bloodied but unbowed. But shit, girl, I feel like I’m about to collapse.”
“That’s probably because you’re about to collapse.”
“You think?”
“Lie down. We’re almost through. Even Etcetera’s taking breaks.” He’d been manic, torn between rescuing more aeronauts from the burning wreck and tending the ones they’d gotten out. He’d pulled two dead ones out of the Better Nation and wept as he carried them, then tended three more who’d died on the infirmary’s mats, helping carry them to another yurt that was now a morgue. Limpopo shadowed him for some of that, so had Seth, helping around the edges, gently calming him before he hurt himself.
“Okay. How about you?” Her voice was thick, groggy.
“What about me?”
“You need a break, too. Look like walking death. I’ve got an excuse, I’m an old lady with a scalp wound. You’re bursting with youth’s vibrant juices. When you start to look like a zombie-movie reject, it’s a sign for you to take it easy. You can’t help anyone if you’re not taking care of yourself.” She paused. “I know I embody the opposite of that advice, but I’ve got an excuse: I’m an idiot. What’s yours?”
“You’re right. I’m going to grab a piss and do a walkaround and I’ll come in. Leave room on the mat for me, old timer?”
“I’ll use you as a pillow if you’re not careful.”
“Done deal.”
Gretyl tilted her face up and they kissed, and Gretyl kept her mouth closed, which she did when she was self-conscious about her breath, which was darkly hilarious under the circumstances. As ever, Iceweasel kept kissing until her lips parted, and they mingled breath and saliva for a moment that stretched like taffy before she broke off and struggled to her feet, putting one hand on a wall panel, which flexed and bowed, then bounced back when she got her balance.
She glanced back at Gretyl before she ducked through the door, and she was on her side, motionless. Iceweasel squinted until she made out the rise and fall of her chest, then stepped through into the night.
It was coming on dawn, gray with pink on the eastern tree line, black on the western one. Limpopo and Etcetera sat on folding chairs on the roadside, Etcetera holding her and weeping into her neck. Limpopo locked eyes with her; they raised their eyebrows at one another in simultaneous, are you okay? that made them both smile wearily. Iceweasel tossed her an okay sign and blew her a kiss. Limpopo kissed back and she turned to the dark woods, digging out the paper gauze she’d pocketed on her way out of the tent to use as bumwad. She picked her way through the underbrush, killing her chest-light when it came up, letting her eyes adjust as she sought out the requisite log with a tree nearby to use as a handhold.
She assumed the position and did her thing, listening to the sounds from the camp, the crackle of small things in the underbrush. She should have brought a shovel, but under the circumstances, no one would blame her for a lapse in woodcraft. She’d pack out the bumwad, at least, put it with med-waste in the incineration pile.
There was a louder sound in the brush, not scurrying and small. Big and stealthy. She tugged up her pants, tabbed them closed, peered into the night. She dropped the bumwad, patted her pockets, which had accumulated a litter of small devices and objects through the night. Nothing of use. Disposable wrappers. She looked into darkness, taking a step toward camp, trying to find a club-worthy branch. She snatched one up, sodden with water and rotten. She listened intently for the steps. No one from camp would sneak through the woods. She had visions of mercs, wearing smart stuff that was more than dark, bending light to make itself invisible.
She took another step. Someone abruptly yanked at the club and she reflexively tightened her grip, so she went with it, off balance. She fell with an oof, a confusion of sinking into wet things and colliding with sharp rocks. In the instant between standing and falling, a part of her brain that she was rarely on speaking terms with took over. She rolled with the fall, taking most of it on her shoulder, using the momentum to goose her motion as she got to her knees, then into a runner’s stance. She ran, because someone was right behind her and there was the camp, and if she could –
She couldn’t. Someone was in front of her, small but wiry, effortlessly catching her hands as she raced past, a grip immovable as a steel clamp, not painful but perfectly unyielding. She nearly crashed into the unseen person, but it sidestepped her neatly as a cartoon toreador avoiding a bull, swung her around in a parody of a square-dance move, bringing her up short with her hands pinned before her. She focused on the person who held her wrists, a woman, she thought, small and short-haired, features painted in a dazzle-array of grays and greens. She had small white teeth, visible through her parted lips, and eyes hidden behind a matte visor hooked behind her ears.
The other one was right behind her, moving swiftly and almost silently, breath easy. She made herself relax, feeling for just a little slack in the grip of the woman holding her. Was that it? It was. With terrified strength, she feinted a head-butt at the visor, then yanked her arms so hard she felt skin leave her wrists, felt something in her shoulder or maybe her ribs pop. It didn’t matter. She opened her mouth to scream as she ran –
Then she was back in the woman’s grip, a strong hand over her mouth. The small woman smiled, a You’ve got moxie, kid smile, or that’s what Iceweasel chose to believe. Then the person with the large, male hand over her mouth – smelling of machine oil and something else that tickled her memory – clamped something to her bicep that immediately tightened like a blood-pressure cuff. She felt a tiny lance of pain as the automated syringe found home. Her panic was pre-empted by another feeling, a delirious feeling like syrup in her spine and down her butt, delicious like stolen snooze-bar sleep. The feeling grew. She smiled as her eyes closed.