6 - The next days of a better nation
[i]
THE WEIRDEST THING about getting old was not sleeping. Tam routinely found herself awake at hours that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Weird hours when you could spot unsuspected urban wildlife: foraging raccoons, stealthy foxes, bats. Seth, that asshole, didn’t suffer from this problem. Slept like a rock. A bald rock, didn’t have the decency to admit being self-conscious about his receding hair line (“what do you call one hundred rabbits running backwards?” he’d say whenever she raised the subject). She’d had a freak when her hair started going, did several consultations with walkaway docs around the world, found one in Thailand who specialized in trans people, got a file for printable pills she took every day. They did the trick.
The weirdest thing about sleeplessness was the friendships she’d kindled with people awake and chattering in exotic timezones. The second weirdest thing about growing old was being with Seth. She’d always been saddened by old couples who never spoke to one another. Those long silences felt desperate. She’d promised herself she’d never end up like that, decades of aging, falling apart in the company of a silent, farting lump of a man, racing to see who reached the grave first.
But as an actual old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, she understood the silences. She didn’t have to talk to Seth about most things, because she had him modeled so well in her mind, she knew what he would say to practically anything she might say to him – and vice versa. They could sit together, not speaking. The silence wasn’t distance, it was closeness. She’d catch him looking and grinning sometimes. She’d grin back. Those grins might be charged with more sexual innuendo than the horniest moment of her entire – admittedly confused – teen years.
The third weirdest thing was Seth himself, who – for all he could sleep like he was in the world championships – didn’t feel old. She’d come on him once, sitting on the bedside, staring at his bare legs, bare lap, the gray, wiry hair, the veins, the sagging, wrinkled skin. She’d realized with a start he was practically in tears, which was not like the Seth she modeled so well in her own mind.
“What is it?”
“This isn’t me. I’m a young man. When I see myself in the mirror, I double-take. This isn’t how I see myself.”
“Is this about your hair? Because I could introduce you to Dr Wibulpolprasert—”
“It’s not the fucking hair. I don’t give a shit about my hair – it’s this.” He slapped his thigh viciously.
“Easy.” She smoothed his hand.
“You don’t understand, it’s like there’s a different person looking out of the mirror at me—”
“Seth?”
“What?”
She looked at him for a long moment. Saw realization slowly dawn.
“Oh. You understand.”
“I understand.” She lowered him gently to the bed, held him until, goddamn him, he fell asleep.
Now it was 3:15 in the morning. He was asleep again. She caught him mid-freak more than ever. She worried. She knew what it was not to recognize the person in the mirror. She understood the nagging sense of wrongness. Part of her wanted to go upside his head and tell him to grow up, if he wanted to feel dysphoria, he should try being born trans, try a whole world telling him that he was something he wasn’t.
She knew it was pointless. Pain was pain. He was being told by everyone around him, in ways subtle and gross, he wasn’t the young man he felt like. Worst of all, she knew, was his body stubbornly insisting on being an old man’s body.
She’d felt traces of whatever Seth was going through. They’d passed. She’d been through this when she was younger. She could handle it with grace. She could work through it with better thoughts and changes to her hormone regimes. She wasn’t in denial like Seth. Seth had been very boyish looking until, suddenly, he wasn’t.
She padded the hall, ear cocked for other people moving around the house, tugging her robe shut. The hall lights were muted and the skylight revealed a cloudless night tinged with city lights, not so many to drown out the swollen moon, the spray of stars. There were walkaways up there, some old farts from the Thetford days. She chatted them sometimes, though high latency made it more novelty than social occasion.
No one was up. The lights dialed up when she drifted into the kitchen, brighter over the prep-surfaces, dimmer over tables, the house guessing she wanted to prep something before sitting, nudging her. There were pink glows in places where there was work to do – some cooling leftovers needed to go into the fridges, a few out-of-place pans set upside-down to dry on the big prep-surface and forgotten. The house knew who’d forgotten them. If they wanted, they could have live leaderboards of “chore heroes” and “mess miscreants” splashed on surfaces around the place. Some houses put them on bathroom mirrors. You’d confront the stark reality of the division of labor while you were swishing your morning tooth-juice.
Tam and Seth were B&B people. Limpopo people. People who’d been touched by Limpopo refused to turn on leaderboards. The reason to clean up after yourself was you respected your house-mates and wanted a place where anyone could walk up to anything and use it, without having to put away someone else’s shit first. When spots were consistently under-maintained, the solution was to figure out why it was hard to get that spot reset, not figure out how to shame people who weren’t doing something that inevitably turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it had any right to be.
The other houses swore by their “reputation economies.” Limpopo-descended households were the ones where the good designs for living that worked well and failed well came from. They had the nicest house spirits, literally and figuratively. In a Limpopo house, the fact that you were pissed off at your housemates signaled a design opportunity.
She put away the pans and stuck the leftovers in the fridge. Contemplated the imposing wall of sealed tubs of food and ingredients.
“I’m snackish.”
The house knew what that meant. The lazy-Susan shelves spun, presenting her with three options: ginger and honeycomb ice-cream with so much ginger it could blow your head off, which she loved more than was decent; jerk goat and lentils; weird freeze-dried almond cakes that were doped with chili and cardamom so fiendishly addictive that they’d made the collective decision to remove their files from the house repo. Eventually temptation always won out and someone mirror-pulled the latest version. The recipe kept getting better.
“Like you even had to ask.” She picked up the almond cookies, squeezing the rim to pop the seal and smelling the mouth-watering almond smell as she crossed through the archway, around the carp pool that bubbled softly in the cooler, wetter air, into the small lounge.
She flumfed on a pile of cushions and picked out a single cake and bit, savoring the crunch, the sweetness and fire that spread through her mouth. She whimpered at the deliciousness. She knew she’d finish the whole batch.
She fired her finger at the far wall. It screened, showed her favorite hangouts, queued messages for her, news items from feeds judged likely to please. A few higher-priority reminders from people she liked and trusted bounced to let her know they were waiting. She crunched a second cake. Goddamn they were good.
“Who’s awake?” She repeated herself because the house misapprehended her through her mouthful of food. The screened wall showed faces, avs and handles, highlights from rooms where stuff was happening, pulsing things closer and further as conversations waxed and waned. She had the contradictory feeling of wanting to talk to someone but not wanting to talk to anyone, a stuck-in-a-rut 3:00 A.M. feeling.
She flumfed again, waved away the screen. There were books, movies, but that 3:00 A.M. wanting-something-but-nothing feeling went for those. She was nostalgic for the excitement of near-death.
“How do you deal with it?”
“You mean me?” Limpopo’s voice hadn’t aged, though there were algorithms for making the voice age as the years went by.
“Who do you think? The house?”
“I just deal. I’ve got bumpers. When I get to the edge, they knock me back.”
“Do you ever turn yourself off? Go into watch-cursor mode?”
“Haven’t been tempted. I think it’s the trauma of my wakeup, all those years—”
It took fourteen years before anyone figured out how to stabilize Limpopo’s sim. That reflected the long gap between World War Default and the Walkaway Decade, which was a dumb name everyone hated, but at least it had a built-in expiry date. It was also Limpopo’s idiosyncrasies, her weird neuroanatomy. That weirdness was practically normal. When they’d succeeded in bringing up Dis and then, briefly, CC, there was going to be a set of categories you could sort imaged human brains into, like blood types, and each used different sim parameters.
Scans were more like fingerprints than blood types, each with distinctive and uncooperative wrinkles (literally and figuratively). Stabilization of sims was resistant to overarching systematization, pigheadedly insisting on remaining art, not science.
Between chaos and the intractability of human brains, Limpopo lay dormant for a long time. When she woke, she immediately grasped the situation. It helped that Etcetera was there. For a time the two had been fast friends. They’d even conducted a famous set of discussions on the years Limpopo had missed, all-important years of chaos when no one had been sure what was going on, posting an hour of voice every day, then running on huge clusters that let them absorb millions of replies to their discussion and integrate it into the next day’s debate. The Limpopo/Etcetera Talks were as famous in their own way as the Feynman Lectures.
Neither ever publicly explained their falling out – nor had either told Tam what it was about (not that she’d asked, though she’d burned with curiosity). They’d kept it secret as long as possible – it wasn’t like house spirits went out to dinner together – but eventually someone produced a signed email from Limpopo to Etcetera in which she told him to go fuck himself forever. That was it, instant viral gossip evil that went around the world.
The gossip lasted longer than most scandals, because of the questions it raised about sims. If Limpopo and Etcetera had been soul-mates when made of meat, how could an accurate simulation get to a point where they hated each other and never wanted to speak again?
Tam wished there was a graceful way to raise it with Limpopo, explain she thought it was bullshit, most relationships came to an end, the fact that two people fell out of love could be cited as proof the sim was faithful as much as proof it was inaccurate. People grew and changed. A true sim was true to its originator, and what kind of freak wouldn’t be changed by waking up inside a computer?
“A lot of years,” is what she said.
“Not aging gracefully, is he? It’s ironic that he looked so young for so long; it let him pretend that he was immune.”
“None of us can be exactly the person we want to be. I’m not delighted about my hips, don’t like that I’ve lost my night-vision—”
“Sometimes, it’s something you can get used to, sometimes it’s not. You know there are some kinds of body–mind mismatch that people just can’t—”
She sighed. “How do you cope?”
“Being a head in a jar? Bumpers. While I never go into suspension, I sometimes dial myself way slow, let myself dream. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to switch off for another decade. It was refreshing to get that time-lapse view. Imagine if I suspended and left instructions not to wake me for a century.”
“Sounds awful.”
“Think it through. Pretty much everyone you loved would be around, in some form. The world would be an amazing new place, jetpacks and shit—”
“Maybe gone back to default. There’s plenty of walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set. They spent a hell of a long time on top, who’s to say they won’t get there again?”
“That’s what you lazy assholes are for, fighting that shit. Wake me when it’s over. I like the sound of that.”
“They’re right, you’re not Limpopo, she’d never have wanted to sit out the action.”
There was a longer pause than was comfortable. Tam worried she’d offended Limpopo. She was about to apologize, then –
“No, there was action the old Limpopo would have wanted to sit out. No one is pure. You guys give me so much sainthood for never wanting leaderboards, never letting anyone keep track of the fact that I was doing all that heavy lifting – but it wasn’t because I didn’t crave the brownie points. It was precisely because I was jonesing for recognition that I refused it. Every day was a struggle to squash the part of me that wanted to be seated on a golden throne and carried around the town square.”
“Everyone craves recognition, Limpopo. Look at the kids—” There were eleven kids in the house, from six mothers: two dribble-factories that had only just started sleeping through the night, then a smooth bell-curve that tapered off at twelve or thirteen (she could never keep track, they had the contradictory property of being impossibly young and always much older than she remembered). “They’re always wanting credit for their work.”
“They also want to monopolize their parents’ attention, are clutter-blind, and the small ones are incontinent. There are many virtues to the state of childhood, but just because children do something, it doesn’t follow we should aspire to it.”
“You’ve had this discussion before.”
“There’ve been kids around as long as there’ve been walkaways. There were always parents who found the risk of taking their kids out of default was less than the risk of leaving them in. The ‘accountability’ stuff in schools accelerated it – once they started paying teachers based on test-scores, parents saw their kids getting crammed relentlessly by the system, no room for helping them with their problems or passions. Then they threatened parents with jail for not sending their kids to school—”
“They didn’t really do that!”
“Tam, I know you never paid attention to parenting and children, but this can’t have escaped your notice. It was a huge scandal, even by the standards of the day. A bridge too far for lots of parents. There were some big lawsuits. Ever hear of the Augurs?”
“Rings a bell, ish?”
“Both parents raised by residential school survivors, saw that their daughter was miserable, decided to take her out for home-schooling, wanted to get her in touch with her First Nations heritage, but refused to buy official home-schooling materials or pay for home-schooling standardized tests. They put ’em in jail.”
“I sort of remember.”
“It was huge. The number of parents who walked away – it was when we got the first nursery at B&B, had to adapt refugee-ware from the third Arab Spring, get all the fabbers doing toy-safety checks and mounting changing tables all over the place.”
“Before my time. I was at the university then.”
“Right.”
“There were kids there, but not in my group. The LGBT crowd, I guess it was kinda toxic to people who wanted kids, that bullshit about ‘breeders’ that seems funny when you’re a kid but is shitty in hindsight. Imagine how Gretyl and Iceweasel would have felt if they’d had to hear us talking that way.”
Iceweasel had delivered two kids, both boys, without much drama, though Gretyl was a bundle of nerves through both labors and had to leave the room, both times. The boys were, what, six and eight? Five and eight? She was a shitty honorary aunt, though she loved both of them in an abstract, cautious way that kept its distance from their penumbra of boogers, spit, and destruction.
“It’s Stan’s birthday next week.”
“How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Keep track of everyone’s birthday?”
“I’m the house spirit. Comes with the job. Setting reminders, triggering them when any subject comes up, adding context around the corner. Everyone’s house does it.”
“But you’re not a bunch of code, you’re a person. It’s different when you’re conversing with someone and that person just happens to recall, perfectly, all the minutiae context brings up.”
“You could have that. Just get your eyes done.” She was almost totally night-blind now, had to magnify text to extra-huge to read it. Lots of people had the surgery, got displays implanted at the same time, all the tickers and augmented reality bullshit the goggleheads lived for, without the goggles. She hadn’t yet, because the tech got better fast. If she was going to let a laser-cutter near her eyeballs, she wanted to make sure it was for the first and last time and not have to go back next year for a crucial upgrade. She was holding off until her vision was unbearable. “For the record, ‘not code, a person’ is a philosophical point we could run for hours, though I’m tired of it.”
“Not my thing, either.” Though it was something she often thought about. “Talking to you isn’t like talking to someone who’s getting dribs fed to a HUD by some dumb algorithm. With you, it feels natural.”
“If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s natural, but thank you.”
She yawned, checked the time. “4:00 A.M. Shit. Well, the sleepies are finally arriving, I should get my head down and make them welcome.”
“You gotcha. Love you, Tam.”
“Love you, too.” She meant it, knew Limpopo meant it. She’d loved and been loved in every walkaway place, but this was the first house that loved her.
She snuggled up to Seth and put her arms around his paunch, kissed his back where the sparse gray hairs tickled her nose. Her hips ached. She closed her eyes, found her sleep.
She roused a bit when Seth got up a few hours later. She half-parsed the sounds of him putting on slippers and jim-jams and getting a hint about the closest free toilet, felt him come back in, sit on the bed, looking at her. She smiled a little. He murmured, “It’s okay, you sleep,” and squeezed her hand, leaned over slowly and with a grunt and kissed her on the forehead, then on the lips, stubble rasping her skin.
He rubbed her back and she groaned appreciatively, just for the joy of human contact on a drowsy morning.
“Gonna get breakfast,” he murmured. She turned her head and kissed his fingers.
“Kay.”
“Another bad night, huh?”
“Just sleepless. Not bad.”
“Sleep in. Doesn’t matter when you sleep.”
“Right.” She pulled the covers over her head.
Stories helped lull her to sleep. She cracked one eye, wiped a surface onto the headboard, and tapped a recording of an old Terry Pratchett novel, the one about the founding of the Discworld newspaper. She’d listened to it a thousand times and could listen to it a thousand times more, and let the reader carry her sleepwards.
She drifted on words and buttery sun that leaked around the edges of the windows’ polarization film, sometimes waking herself a little with her own soft snores, and then –
“Tam?”
She sat bolt upright. Seth’s voice did not often reach that panicked level. She was wide awake, looking at him, standing in their doorway, breathing hard, eyes wide, sparse hair sticking out at mad-professor angles. He held a forgotten piece of toast.
“Jesus, what is it?”
“Limpopo is on the phone.”
She blinked, confused.
“Seth?”
“The real Limpopo. Sorry, the living Limpopo. She’s alive, is what I’m saying. She’s alive. She’s on the phone.”
She brought her hands to her cheeks, a silly way to register surprise, but there you had it.
“Limpopo is alive?”
“She’s talking to Limpopo.” He noticed the toast in his hand, stared at it, put it down. She took it away and bit it. It was slathered in butter, brewer’s yeast, and tabasco – Seth’s Platonic ideal breakfast.
“Jesus.” She found her robe on the floor, put on slippers, finished Seth’s toast. “Come on.”
The biggest common-room had five others in it already, looking stunned and excited, silently listening.
“They never let you write to anyone?” That was Limpopo’s voice – their Limpopo. The house spirit.
“Never. I wasn’t the only one. There are – there were? – a bunch of us in policy-segregation, no visitors, no messaging anyone outside. Held under other names.” That voice was Limpopo, too, but older, an old lady’s voice, the voice of a Limpopo that had lived – where? – for more than a decade.
“But now—”
“Now the inmates run the asylum.” She sounded giddy. “There were three days when it was really bad. Almost no guards showed up. The ones that did were too scared to do anything except huddle in their control rooms and bark at us over the speakers. Not even that on the third day.
“At midnight yesterday, click-clunk, all the doors opened. No guards. No admin staff. Nothing. Everyone was starving, of course. We found our way to the caf, once we figured out what was going on. Some of us ad-hocced a kitchen committee, got the fabbers running and fed everyone. Then someone called for volunteers to check out the clinics and started seeing to the sick best as they could. Lot of nurses in here and – sorry, I guess that doesn’t matter. No one here knows what happened out in default. When they used the comms room to call their lawyers, they said Corrections Canada had some kind of internal coup and no one there was talking to the outside world. They say it’s not the first ministry this happened to – apparently Veterans Affairs Canada did this last month? I don’t get a lot of high-quality news and analysis in jail—”
Tam started to make sense of what she was saying. She’d been in jail. The jails had ruptured. Ruptured was the word they were using for government institutions that fell apart, turned into walkaway-style co-ops that gave away office supplies and opened up the databases for anyone who wanted a crack. She’d heard of ruptured hospitals, police departments, public housing – but jails were a new one. A big one.
“Limpopo,” she said.
Both of them answered, which would have been funny and might be later.
“Sorry, not the house spirit, the living one.”
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Tam.”
“Tam? No fucking way! Tam! You’re still there? Still with Seth?”
She smiled and squeezed Seth’s hand.
“Yes, he’s here too.”
“You poor fucker.” Everyone knew she was kidding, even Seth.
“I’ve got him trained. He’s gotten old and slow, and I’m mean.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Where are you, Limpopo? I mean, physically?”
“Near Kingston, north a bit. Past Joycetown. Kingston Prison for Women.”
“Are you safe?”
“You mean, are there murderers about to come and kill me? Not that I can see. I’m not worried about that. There are plenty of sketchy people in here, but there are plenty of sketchy people out there. Most of these women are my friends. Some are like sisters.”
“Can we come and get you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, can we come and bring you here? Pocahontas is still here, and Gretyl and Iceweasel, and their kids, and Big Wheel, and Little Wheel, and even Kersplebedeb, though she calls herself Noozi now—”
“Hold up a sec. I don’t know who half those people are. Shit, I don’t even know where you people are—”
“Gary.”
“I don’t know who that is either.”
“Gary, Indiana. Nice place. World leaders in bringing back buildings from the dead. Colonized brickwork, smart trusses, big old places that haven’t been maintained in fifty, seventy-five years.”
“A state that begins and ends with a vowel? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”
“You’d love it here, Limpopo. You’re a hero.”
“It’s true,” said Limpopo-the-House-Spirit. “You’re a saint around here.”
The other Limpopo groaned. “You’re killing me.”
“Sorry, Limpopo,” Seth said. “We thought you were dead. Martyrdom was in order.”
She groaned again.
“Seriously,” Tam said. “Come and see us. Or we’ll all come see you. I don’t care which. We love you. We’ve missed you.”
“Hey!” said house-spirit Limpopo.
“Missed hugging and holding you,” Tam said. “And you should meet this other Limpopo, our Limpopo, she’s wonderful.”
“Don’t suck up,” said the house spirit. “You’re getting mouse turds in your cornflakes for a week, asshole.”
The other Limpopo laughed. “She sounds like my kind of person. Literally, I suppose. Fuck, who knew this week could get any weirder.”
There was a crash and thunder of feet on the stairs, and Gretyl and Iceweasel burst into the room, preceded by their boys, who were comets of snot and destruction, squabbling over a toy even as they came through the door, the little one pulling the big one’s hair. Gretyl fluidly pried his fingers out of the curly mop, hauled him into the air and set him down away from his big brother.
“She’s alive?” Iceweasel said, grabbing the bigger one and swinging him around – he laughed and flung his head back.
“We’re talking to her now,” Tam said. “Limpopo, Iceweasel and Gretyl are here.”
“Iceweasel is alive?”
Iceweasel laughed. “I guess we have a lot to catch up on.”
The younger boy suddenly looked at her seriously and pushed his hair out of his eyes. “You aren’t dead, Mommy.”
“I’m not dead. Don’t worry, Jacob.”
“Mommy?”
“There’s two of them,” Gretyl said. “Boys. Jacob’s seven and Stan is ten. Say hello to Limpopo, boys.”
“Limpopo?” Jacob screwed his face up. “The house spirit?”
“No, another Limpopo. She’s a long way away and we haven’t seen her in a long time. We love her.”
Jacob shrugged. Stan rolled his eyes at his younger brother’s slow uptake. “Hi, Limpopo! Hi, other Limpopo!”
Far away, Limpopo cursed imaginatively, which made both boys’ eyes go wide and put smiles on their faces. Tam could see them storing away the language for future deployment. “Hello, boys. Hello, Gretyl. Hello, Iceweasel. It’s good to hear everyone’s alive and thriving.”
“What’s it going to be,” Tam said. “Are we coming to you or are you coming to us? Because, darling, we have some catching up to do, and for all we know, default is going to get its shit together and come in there and kill or lock up every last one of you.”
“That’s a possibility we’ve considered. There’s one more thing – the root auth tokens were left in the control center by a guard, that’s what we figure. We have this place pwned from asshole to appetite. Thing about a jail, it’s just as good at keeping people out as it is at keeping people in. Anyone who wants to take this place away is going to have a hell of a time.”
Tam bit her lip. Everyone looked at everyone. Even the boys were quiet. “Limpopo. We don’t want you hurt. We’re walkaways. There are plenty of big, dumb institutional buildings you and your friends can occupy.”
“Bullshit.” She surprised them with her vehemence. “They stole our lives. Locked us up. We earned this place. It’s ours. If we walk away, if we fragment, they’ll pick us off, one at a time. We’re never going to be anyone’s captive, never.”
“You’re going to stay in jail to stop yourself from being a captive?” Seth’s mouth, as always, ran ahead of his sense.
“It’s no joke. We bought this place with blood, with our lives. It’s ours. It was our captivity. Now it’s our freedom.”
“Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real-estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.”
“Bullshit,” Limpopo said. “Maybe in your corner of the world. The state doesn’t just wither away. Someone paid those guards’ salaries for all those years, kept the slop coming into our fabbers’ ingesters. Victory isn’t a thing that walkaways will ever have. Walking away isn’t victory, it’s just not losing.”
“We haven’t lost,” Iceweasel said. “There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.” She paused. “Did you hear about the Iraqi invasion?”
“A new one or one of the old ones?”
“A totally new one. Iran was supposed to be invading Iraq because, shit, that’s been going on for a long time. Except this time, it didn’t. The pilots they sent into Iraq didn’t drop their bombs – they landed on Kurdish airstrips. The infantrymen, soon as they hit the battle lines, they refused to fight. Bunch of officers, too. Everyone’s kind of freaked. The Iraqi side gives the order to kill the shit out of these weird-ass invaders. Instead, those soldiers refuse, too. The ones that try to fight, their buddies take away their guns. Seriously!”
“That’s too weird to be true.”
“Only because she didn’t tell you the best part,” Gretyl said.
“They were all walkaways,” Jacob shouted. “Just like us!”
“Way to clobber my punchline, kiddo.” Iceweasel swung him onto her hip and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a legend around here. There’s a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group, running over the same nets everyone else uses to get around their national firewalls, so there’s cover. Once the walkaways on both sides figured they were about to be sent to kill each other, they decided, fuck that noise, and made a plan.”
“Fuck that noise!” Jacob punched the air. Stan rolled his eyes. Tam was sure he wished he’d seized the opportunity to detonate an f-bomb with impunity. Gretyl and Iceweasel insisted the boys would never learn to swear properly unless they had good role models. So they were enjoined to closely observe swearing, not attempting it until they were sure they had it right. When they tried it, they were subjected to embarrassing judging and coaching on swear-expertise. This was more effective at curbing their language than anything the other parents tried on their kids.
“That’s amazing, all right,” Limpopo said. “Why didn’t the generals drone them all? Stop the rot from spreading?”
“There’s a rumor both sides gave the order and the drone operators refused and no one wanted to make an issue out of it. Last thing a general wants is to discover that he’s in charge of an army of one, in the middle of an army of everyone else.”
“How long ago did this happen?”
“What was it, a year ago?” Iceweasel said.
“Eight months,” Tam said.
“Well, shit. That’s impressive. We don’t get a lot of news in here.”
“The point is you don’t know what’s going to happen, we can’t know, but there’s reason to be optimistic. People are tired of shooting each other.”
Tam chuckled. “I don’t know if I’d go that far. There’s a—” She fished for the word. “Credibility for walkaways. A sense we’ve got it figured. Once you realize there’s a world that wants what you have to give, well, it’s hard to convince people to kill each other.”
“Fuck my ass,” Limpopo said, sending Stan and Jacob into giggles. There was some background noise from her end, a muffled conversation. “I need to think, and there’s not a lot of interface stuff here so I’ve got to give someone else a turn. Sit tight and I’ll call tomorrow, okay?”
“Sure,” Tam said, and the house spirit echoed her an instant later. Everyone shouted good-bye and Limpopo said good-bye. The room went silent except for the whistling of breath in and out of Jacob’s snotty nose.
“You’re not going to wait for her to call back, are you?” the house spirit said.
“Are you shitting me? No way,” Iceweasel said.
“You want to pack for the kids or should I?” Gretyl said. The boys figured it out a moment later and exchanged excited looks and began to run in circles.
“You do it. I’ll look around for berths on a train.”
“Check the bumblers.” Seth was also bouncing. “Winds are favorable to the northeast lately, I bet we can snag a ride a long way.”
“Good thinking,” Iceweasel said. “Boys, you want to ride in a zeppelin?”
Both boys babbled and shouted. Then Jacob got so excited he punched Stan, because reasons. They tumbled on the floor, punching and shouting.
Their moms exchanged a look, shook their heads apologetically at the rest of the adults. “We’re trying to let them sort these out on their own,” Gretyl said. “Sorry.”
Everyone else was in too good spirits to be bothered. Tam looked in amazement at her house-mates, her extended family, and realized she was about to start walking again.