[xi]
“WE ARE WELL and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.
Seth looked from side to side. The snow started an hour after they set out. It hadn’t been in the meteorological projections, normal for decades of weird weather. The first flakes were pretty, turning poisoned countryside into a Christmas card of birches and pines iced with fluffy snow like iced gingerbread. Toxic icing, but they weren’t going to eat it and, as Seth had inevitably pointed out, sugar was only slightly better for you than asbestos.
Pocahontas’s friends were welcoming, though they had little to call their own. They weren’t from one band, but were a commune living on territory the Quebec government had turned over in reparations for jail time, each of them exonerated by physical evidence, sometimes after decades of lock up. It had been the work of a Mohawk legal collective in Quebec City, and after a string of these, they’d been audited, audited again, investigated by the Law Society, and half their lawyers were disbarred and found themselves with full-time jobs saving themselves.
The community was called Dead Lake. It sported a few windmills and some second-rate fuel cells the residents had carefully coaxed into performing better than anyone could believe. Even Gretyl was impressed. Tam marveled at their improvements. Their technical crew relieved the wagon of the suit-fabbers and started assembling them. It took less than a day. That evening, all thirty residents came to the utility shed to watch them run.
Gretyl, Tam, and Seth were invited to a modest dinner, printed stuff with feedstock from down south because game around Thetford was poison and the Dead Lakers knew better than to eat it. Conversation was merry, if stilted. The Dead Lakers thought walkaways were crazy, or maybe silly, and didn’t hide it. They liked walkaways, and provided wonderful hospitality, but it was clear these folks didn’t rate the walkaways’ chances of getting anything done. For them, walkaway was a lifestyle and a hobby. Seth bristled because it was his deepest fear and also his turf – he could make fun of walkaways, but who were these people to tell him what to do? He’d buried his sarcasm, because the Dead Lakers knew the difference between a joke-joke and a ha-ha-only-serious joke, and Seth liked to live on that edge.
He was relieved to go the next morning. They hit the trail to Thetford in suits, riding the empty cargo wagon as it rumbled across the deep snow at a slow walking pace, sometimes nosing down precipitously as it discovered drop-offs, sometimes listing so far to one side they were nearly thrown.
The snow had started, about an hour out. Flakes, swirling clouds, then, whiteout.
“Vuko jebina, huh?” he said. There were trees somewhere – the wagon’s radar automatically avoided them, but it was turning again and again. Its collision-avoidance systems were fubared. This was definitely the place where wolves fucked.
He looked at Tam, trying to make out her face through the snow and her clear plastic visor. The suits were in whiteout mode, strobing a slow flicker that made it easy to pick a person out against the snow; defoggers blew over the visors, the mask’s ear pieces played pin-sharp reproductions of the defoggers from the other two masks, a white-noise symphony overlaid with the gusting wind.
“Even wolves don’t fuck in this,” Gretyl said. She was in the back, thumping at a mechanical keyboard she’d magneted to its skin, watching a screen projected against her mask. “Shit.” The wagon stopped. “Might as well stop, this thing’s gonna chase its tail until it runs out of juice.”
Seth’s butt vibrated with ghost sensation of wagon motors, That stopped, and there was just the sound of the wind, the blowers and the thrum of his pulse. He felt transient fear: where wolves fuck, snow blowing, ground saturated with carcinogens, sky a source of potential death. If he died here, no one would know. If they did know, almost no one would care. His father died when he was ten, his mother had been in jail since he was seventeen and they hadn’t spoken since he was fifteen. Natalie was... Natalie was gone. He had to admit she probably wouldn’t be back.
He was so small. They were pimples on the world’s face. Unwanted. Uninvited. Alone in snow, on their silly homemade wagon, in high-tech pajamas, where wolves fuck.
The feeling passed. It had contracted his sense of self to a pinprick and then expanded the world around him to a yawning gulf.
The world kept on expanding. It wasn’t just him that was tiny and insignificant. It was everything. Zottas, all they’d built. The world’s great cities. Humming networks of meaningless, totalizing money, endlessly and algorithmically shuffled. Deeds and contracts, factories and satellites, endless oil and stone, poison in the sky and carbon in the air. In a thousand years no one would give a shit. The universe didn’t care about humans. The wind didn’t care. The snow didn’t care. The fucking wolves didn’t care. If he froze and moldered to dirt, like Thetford’s rotting homes, it would be no better and no worse than living to 90 and going into the ground in a box with a stone over his head. It would be no better and no worse than what was coming for all those asshole zottas who thought they could speciate and overcome death.
Everything they did was human. Everything he did was human. Here, where wolves fucked, it didn’t mean anything; it meant everything.
“Awooo!” It was louder than he’d intended, but who cared? Tam and Gretyl’s gloves clonked their helmets, then the gain-control cut in. They stared, faces barely visible behind visors, suits strobing silently in swirling flakes. They were annoyed, hungry, needed to pee, and so did he but: “Awooo!” It came out louder this time.
“Come on, you wolves!” A wild laugh chased the words.
“Enough.” Tam’s voice had a warning note.
“It’s not enough. Come on, just try it. Seriously serious.”
“Seth, come on—”
Gretyl cut loose with a howl that made their visors rattle and left their ears ringing. “Fuck yeah!” She punched the air.
Tam heaved a sigh, looked from one to the other, wiped snow off Seth’s shoulders. She filled her lungs and howled. Seth joined. Gretyl joined. They howled and howled, in the place where wolves fuck, and Seth found himself with tears in his eyes, which he couldn’t wipe, but it didn’t matter. He was shedding his skin, leaving behind the last vestiges of default, the last shreds of belief that someday he’d forget this craziness and try to find a job and a place to live and hope no one took them away.
“I love you people.” He squeezed them so their visors clonked.
“Ow,” Tam said, but didn’t pull away. “You’re a jerk, but we love you, too.”
“Yeah,” Gretyl said. “Most of the time.”
“What do we do? Walk?”
“And end up frozen to death,” Gretyl said. “Snow can’t keep falling. Once it stops, we’ll ride home. Meantime, we shelter in cargo pods. If we each take one, we’ll be able to shin out of the suits to take a dump or eat, then get back inside to keep from freezing to death.”
“How would that work?” Seth said. “I mean, where do we poop?”
She rapped the engine’s cowl. “Not much room in these. But with care you could crap outside the suit, then get back inside, without getting crap on you. It’ll get on the outside of the suit, but that’s life in the big city. No worse than the stuff that gets stuck to it while we’re walking. We’ll wash them off when we get back.”
“I’ll strip off outside and hang my butt over the snow. The amount of snow on the ground now, there’s not going to be any airborne contaminants.”
“Suit yourself, but remember, there’s only so much power in these things and getting naked at minus twenty is going to suck heat out of your body that the suit’s going to have to put back or you’ll die of hypothermia. There might come a moment when you’re wishing you still had those amps in your battery – when your toes are turning black.”
“This conversation’s taken a delightful turn.” Tam jumped off the engine and sank to her knees. She swept her arms, mounding snow up. “We’re not going to walk very far through this. How about we try to tell someone where we are, and could use help?”
“I’ve got zero bars,” Gretyl said. “Been that way almost since we left Dead Lake. The aerostats probably landed themselves when the wind kicked up.”
“I packed a couple drones in the survival kit. Hexcopters, they can fight heavy wind, but they’re not going to get a geographic fix until the sky clears. Still—”
“Get one high enough and it might bounce a connection between us and Thetford,” Tam said. “There’s a good chance we’ll lose it – another decision we might regret later.”
“In summary: we should hide in these boxes, shit ourselves and wait out the weather.” Seth discovered the idea didn’t sound as horrible as it should. The revulsion he wasn’t feeling was part of the package of default-ness that he’d sloughed off.
“About right,” Tam said. “The weather isn’t ours to command. Physics is physics. Snow is snow. Batteries are batteries. Sometimes the best action is no action.”