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 multistory 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 douche bag 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 smart-assed. 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 science-y 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 m
ade 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 ditchwater and pine forest was strong. Her feet splashed through black puddles, cold water sloshing around her toes.