Gretyl was better than Etcetera had any right to expect. Seth told him what she’d done, and though she rarely heard from Dis—the sim was running on the safe room’s own servers, to avoid the risk of discovery through mountains of traffic where none was expected—the terse messages made her stoic, if not cheerful. According to Dis, Iceweasel was sane and intact despite torture. She was made of indomitable steel. “If she’s not losing her shit, how could I?” Gretyl said, one morning, as Limpopo brought them coffium and fresh rolls.
“You going to sing?” Limpopo said. Etcetera looked sharply at her. Gretyl had a beautiful voice, torchy. Back in the ancient days of the B&B common room, she’d passed evenings singing songs from her deep repertoire, accompanied by zero or more B&B musicians. A capella, she was astounding; with a band, she was transcendent. But she hadn’t sung since Iceweasel was taken from her.
“At the party?” Gretyl said.
“At the party.”
“Is there a band?” Etcetera thought she was looking for an out—I don’t think I could do it unaccompanied or we don’t have time to practice—but her eyes glinted.
“The spacies have a couple of bands, but I don’t know if they’re any good.”
Pocahontas—who’d flitted through the common space, directing people as they set up for the party—homed in on them, having followed this conversation on the hoof.
“There’s a good band and a so-so band,” she said.
“What kind of music?”
“The good band is loud and fast. The so-so band does folk stuff.”
“I’ll sing with both of them,” she said.
Pocahontas gave her hand a squeeze. “Done. Thanks.”
“You want some coffium?” Etcetera said. Watching Pocahontas dash around made him exhausted.
“I don’t drug.”
They all looked uncomfortable. Etcetera hadn’t known any First Nations people personally, but he knew there was stuff about booze and other substances. He shrugged. They were all walkaways, right? Man, woman, white, brown, First Nations, or otherwise.
“Sorry,” Limpopo said. He wondered if he should have apologized, too. He felt stupid and anxious, and that meant it was something he should be paying attention to.
“No biggie. Your neurotransmitters are your own business.”
“What can we do to help?” Etcetera looked for a better subject.
Instantly: “Get the fab to Dead Lake,” she said. “They can’t come to the party without protective suits.”
“Ah,” Etcetera said. He should have known she’d say that.
“We’ll all get on it,” Limpopo said, and squeezed his hand, though whether it was sympathy or a reminder to live up to his promises, he couldn’t say. “Count on us.”
“I am,” she said, with the solemn simplicity that she had in endless supply. It killed the mood’s lightness, made them gravely committed to throwing a party of unparalleled fun. Pocahontas looked from face to face, smiled, and launched herself in the direction of another group.
Gretyl watched her go. “She’s amazing. A party.” She shook her head. “And now we’ve got to get those fab parts, what, seventy klicks?”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. It’s high time we got the cargo-train running.” She drank her coffium. “Some of that stuff is wedged tight and won’t come out without a fight. We’ll hack it out. It’ll be tough in the suits.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be glum,” Limpopo said. “It’ll be fun to do hard work for a change.”
She was right. Back when they’d built the second B&B, this was a common fixture of their days—some big, hard technological challenge they’d have to solve together, downloading tutorials and tapping the global walkaway frequency to find someone who could get through the problem. Sometimes, they’d labor over a trivial technical problem for weeks, stumped, until, one day, something worked, and the experience would be sweeter for the bitterness of the struggle.
He drained his coffium and looked at the party preparations all around him, and remembered he was a walkaway. He was living the first days of a better nation, doing something that meant something. His existence was a feature and not a bug.
Limpopo smiled. She’d read his thoughts.
“Drink up,” she said to Gretyl. “Let’s get down to it.”
Etcetera felt the tension melt out of his back, replaced with warm purpose. Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?
* * *
When Gretyl shucked her suit, she was a mass of aches that had not manifested when she was deep in work, hacking at the damaged carrier train with saws, blasting it with cutting torches, hammering at unyielding metal and polymers.
She stood by the airlock, smelling her stink. She groaned and put her forehead to the wall.
“You okay?” Tam looked genuinely, embarrassingly concerned. When Tam joined the Walkaway U crowd, Gretyl mothered her, helping her navigate the opaque waters of the academic enclave. After the attack, Gretyl watched with pride as Tam transformed into a dervish, ferrying people and supplies into the tunnels, risking her life, strong and inspiring.
Since she’d lost Iceweasel, Gretyl’s world had smashed to fragments. Even at the best of times she felt like a fractured vase that had been glued together by a cack-handed repairer, cracks on display for all to see. Damaged goods. Tam had flipped their script, trying to mother Gretyl in a way Gretyl hated, not least because she needed it.
“I’m okay.” Gretyl tried to starch her posture, paint on a smile. Working on the engine was hard, but it gave her a break from all-consuming fear for Iceweasel. The worst part about being mothered was her own pathetic need to be mothered.
“That’s good. Because honestly, you look like chiseled shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Someone had to tell you the truth, dude.” Tam slipped behind her. Her hands gripped Gretyl’s shoulders. “You’re tight as a tennis racket.” She squeezed experimentally, strong thumbs digging into Gretyl’s shoulders. Gretyl groaned. Now Tam’s hands were on her, she felt the tension, like a rubber band pulled to the breaking point. Despite herself, she leaned into Tam, and Tam squeezed back. Gretyl groaned again.
“Come on, then.” Tam continued to knead. “Tell me where it hurts.” Gretyl heard the grin. Tam was enjoying this. Gretyl gave up. “What are you doing now?”
“Gonna find somewhere to sleep.” The spacies’ complex, crowded before they arrived, was now thronged, and it was a juggling act to find a free bed—or even a corner where bedding could be placed temporarily—in the evening. “We stopped for a late lunch and I was gonna sleep dinner. I mean skip dinner.”
“You’re in luck.” Tam worked the knots. “Seth and I found a place. It’s big.” She squeezed. “And comfy.”
Gretyl groaned. “Come on then.” Surrender felt good.
The room was big enough that Gretyl felt guilty. But it was a weird shape, with low ceilings in places, uneven flooring in others, the result of a weather event that buckled the bulkheads, introducing cracks whose temporary seals no one had made permanent.
It was lit with constellations of throwie lights, scattered in smears across the ceiling and walls, and there was a spacie-style adaptive sleep-surface, millions of sensor-embedded foam cells, like a living thing that cuddled and supported you according to an algorithm that second-guessed your circulation, writhing in a way that was disturbing and wonderful.
Seth was already lounging in his underpants, sipping lichen tequila from one of the glass bulbs that were everywhere in Thetford, though she hadn’t met the prolific glassblower.
He waved the bulb blearily and called out a greeting. Tam barked at him in mock drill sergeant to pull himself together and offer their guest hospitality. He climbed to his feet, found booze and another bulb—elongated like a teardrop, shot with swirls of cyanotic blue and rusty orange/red—and poured. She started to wave it off, then caught the smell and relented.
Fuck it. She took a burning sip, swirling it through her foul-tasting mouth, and letting it trickle down her dry throat.
“Hot towels.” Tam snapped her fingers. Seth groaned theatrically but pulled on drawstring pants and stepped out.
“You don’t need to—” Gretyl said.
“Oh yes we do.” Tam pinched her nose dramatically. Gretyl shrugged. She probably did stink—the B&B’s onsen was far behind, and the weeks underground after the bombing of Walkaway U had accustomed her to a baseline of BO that fulfilled every default stereotype of stinky walkaways.
Tam rifled through chests crammed into a crawl space, consulting her interface, coming up with a pair of silk-like robes, chucking one to Gretyl. They kicked their dirty clothes into the sizable pile left by Seth, shrugged into the robes, and collapsed into bed.
Seth wheeled in an insulated chest. He popped the lid, releasing fragrant steam. There were showers at the spacies’ compound, but swollen numbers had driven everyone to the wikis for alternatives from other walkaways, and the towels were a winner. It wasn’t easy to bathe yourself with them, but that was a feature, not a bug, far as most people were concerned.
Seth flopped down between them. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Tam slugged him in the arm—Gretyl saw that she kept her middle knuckle raised, driving it straight into the meat of his bicep. “No. Way.”
He rubbed his arm. “Ow.”
“Yes,” she explained. “Ow. Want another?” She made a fist. Gretyl saw they were both trying to suppress grins. Young love.
“Okay, who’s first?”
“Guests first,” Tam said.
Gretyl wanted to object, but lying on the bed, swaddled in the soft robe, sapped her of her residual strength.… Groaning—theatrically, this time—she shrugged out of the robe, feeling her skin goose-pimple as the recirculated air kissed it.
The first heavy, wet, fragrant towel made contact, draped across her back with a wet slap followed by a spreading heat that was like a languorous tongue, and then it was joined by another, wielded by Tam, across the backs of her legs. Tam rubbed along her sore, tight hamstrings. The four hands scrubbed at her through the heat, strumming her aching muscles, clever thumbs and grinding knuckles, elbows in the unyielding knots. Where the towels slipped, her wet skin shrank from the air currents.
All too soon, they told her to roll over, and they did her front, working her abdominal muscles, her thighs, her clenched jaw, her scalp. The towels were soaked with sage and pine. The smell suffused the room. She kept nodding off, luxuriating in attention, then waking as a knuckle caught a sore spot.
Then it was Tam’s turn. There were more hot towels in the crate. Seth found a thermostat interface and cranked up the heat. Gretyl dispensed with the robe, which made things easier as she worked the hot towels into Tam’s skinny legs and bony back. Seth brought more lichen juice, and she spilled some on her fingers, and when she licked it off, she tasted the sage and pine. The flavor was incredible and she told them so. They dribbled booze over their fingers and licked away and everyone agreed and they also got looser and mellower. And sloppier.
By the time they moved on to Seth, the heat, moisture, and booze made the room as swimmy as a Turkish bath. There were dry towels in a compartment with its own element. They came out warm and fluffy as kittens. Bundled up, they burrowed beneath the covers.
Gretyl marveled at the feeling of peace, the intimacy that was asexual and sensuous at the same time. It was childlike, a feeling from before sex, or maybe the feeling of someone very old, beyond sex. Everything was at peace.
So why was she crying?
The tears had slipped silently down her cheeks for some time. She noticed them because they were pooling in her ears and slipping down her neck. She’d once sliced her hand with a kitchen knife, and there’d been a moment when she’d stared at the pulsing blood, understood it, but not felt it, before the pain crashed on her, radioactively intense and thunderclap-sudden. She’d shouted in surprise—not at the wound, but at the sudden onset of pain.
It was the same now: the wound visible, the ache lagging it. She gulped, sobbed, then brayed, doubling over like she’d been punched in the stomach. The pain there was sickening. All her buried fear and sadness for her lover crashed down.
Seth figured it out first, wrapping her in his arms, murmuring shh-shh, rocking her. Tam was slower on the uptake, but she took Gretyl’s hands and squeezed them, saying that’s right, let it out. Gretyl was so far down her pain that she didn’t worry about being mothered by Tam.
The sorrow was obliterating. The siren-wail blotted out coherent thought. It abated to the point where she could hear her thoughts, and first among them was terror that Iceweasel would never come back. Her father and family would turn her into a zotta.
The storm passed, floods of tears slowing to trickles. Her eyes stung and her guts ached. She disentangled herself and swung her legs over the bed and put her face in her hands.
“What are we doing?”
“You mean in general, or specifically, right here and now?” Seth said, and Gretyl felt Tam reach out and pinch him.
“I’m not being funny,” he said.
“You’re never funny,” Tam said. “That’s the point.”
“Ouch.”
Gretyl looked up, tugged her robe around her and stood to pace, promptly stubbing a toe on the cold, uneven floor. She yelped and sat back down, rubbing her toe.
“I have an answer, you know,” Seth said.
“To what?”
“What we’re doing,” he said.
Tam sighed. “Go ahead. If Gretyl doesn’t mind.”
She shook her head. She felt affection for these broken, sweet, loving people.
“When I was a kid and I’d hear about walkaways, they always seemed insanely optimistic to me. If they ever seriously threatened default, it would crush them. It was naïve—thinking default could peacefully coexist with anything else. How could it? If the excuse for putting a clutch of rich assholes in charge of the world was that without them we’d starve, how could they allow people to live without their stern but loving leadership?
“I thought of myself as a realist. Reality had a well-known pessimistic bias, so that made me a pessimist. I liked the idea of walking away, but I was on the other side.”
Tam squeezed his hand. “Then you followed a hot rich girl into the woods and everything changed. I’ve heard this.”
“Not the important part, because I only figured it out when we got to Thetford.” He paused. Gretyl thought he was being dramatic, but he was gathering his thoughts, uncharacteristic vulnerability on his face in the dim light. She wanted to hear what he’d say next. Maybe he’d discovered something important.
“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don’t give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do something.”
He stopped, wrung his hands.
“Realistically speaking, if you’re in the middle of the sea, you’re a goner. But you tread water until you can’t kick another stroke. Not because you’re optimistic. If you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading water in open sea, every one would tell you they’re not optimistic.
“What they are is hopeful. Or at least not hope-empty. They don’t give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can’t change a fucking thing.
“I’ve never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you’d kick just as hard, because you’d be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you.
“Now I’m walkaway, I’ve been shot at and chased from my home, but I can’t feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other non-zottas, someone who’ll do someone else’s job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instea
d of marginal costs. We are surplus to default’s requirements. If they could, they’d sink us.
“So what we’re doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It’s all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That’s realism, but everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can’t win, and whose winners—the zottas—get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope’s what we’re doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”
“So, basically, ‘live as though it were the first days of the better nation?’” But Gretyl smiled when she said it.
“That kind of wry cynicism is my department, you know.”
“It’s fun being a dick.”
He grinned back. “It is, isn’t it?”
“So it’s hope. But—” She heaved a sigh.
Tam brought lichen tequila. She had a fleeting thought about how it was a bad habit to use alcohol to cope with distress, then drank from the bulb. It burned pleasurably.
“Iceweasel,” she said.
“Poor Iceweasel,” Tam said. “Have you heard from Dis?”
“No. I don’t want to break security protocol. Every time I call her, it raises the chances of her being discovered. She said she’d get in touch when things changed, when there was something I could do. But she hasn’t called.”
“Let’s call her. Fuck protocol. They didn’t discover her when she rooted their network, what more could one more network session do?”
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