Five minutes later, he called Etcetera.
“Been a while,” Etcetera said.
“Fair enough. It’s all you-know around here.”
“Missed you. Both of you. All of you. It sucks being the pariah.”
“Sorry,” Seth said. This made him miserable. Freezing out his oldest friend was hard on him, but he’d never complained.
Awkward silence.
“We need your help.”
More silence.
“You’re going to like this.
“We got a phone call. From a prison. In Canada. From an inmate who’d been held there for more than fourteen years, only just got free because the guards unlocked the cell doors and walked away.”
“Seth—” Something in Etcetera’s voice, an emotion as unmistakable as it was unintelligible. Some hybrid human-machine feeling. Deeply felt. Unnameable.
“Limpopo,” Seth said.
There was the weirdest sound Tam had ever heard. It went on and on. She thought it was laughter. With horror, she realized it was sobbing. The only time she’d heard a sim sob, it was in the tunnels at Walkaway U, before they’d figured out how to make them stable. It was a sound sims made before they collapsed.
“Etcetera? It’s okay, buddy.”
He cried a long time.
“You going to be okay?” Seth said, during a lull. “I can get Gretyl, she can help with your guardrails—”
“I don’t need help. Is she okay?”
He didn’t mean Gretyl. “She sounds amazing. Fiery. Angry. Wants a fight.”
“I want a fight, too. What do you need?”
“You still have contacts who can get a bumbler?”
“You’re going to her?”
“She won’t come to us—if they come to lock her back up, she’s going to fight.”
“Fuckin’ a.”
“Can you help?”
“I’m coming. Find me a cluster and carry it on. I’m going with.”
“You could just phone in,” Tam said. She had enough complications.
“Not if they kill the network. I’ll leave a backup here. But I’m going with.”
“Etcetera,” Tam said, in her most reasonable voice.
“I’m going with.”
Seth shook his head at her, mouthed go with it.
“You’re going with,” she said.
“Get packed,” he said.
[iii]
The bumbler touched down in the parking lot of an old mall on the west side of town the next day, crewed by a grinning gang of old Brazilians, men with dreads in their thinning hair, women with surefooted rolling walks like sailors. Stan and Jacob were immediately adopted by the crew’s kids, whose status was somewhat mysterious—they were from an orphanage in Recife which had run out of funding. The kids ended up in a makeshift camp, which hadn’t gone well, and these aerialists took them in and brought them into their enormous, beautiful zeppelins, decorated like the legendary baloeiro balloons that had plied the Brazilian skies for centuries.
However these kids ended up in the sky, they took to it like fish to water. Within minutes, Stan and Jacob were barefoot and climbing rigging, barely shouting good-bye at their mothers, who watched them go with trepidation and pride.
They’d struggled with packing. It had been so long since they’d been voluntary refugees, even longer since they’d been involuntary ones. They’d conferenced their common rooms. Marshaled their minimum carry, using the house spirits to keep track of who was bringing what to cut down on duplication. Spouses, kids, and housemates piled ever-more stuff into the to-be-packed pile. They laughed nervously. They hadn’t become shleppers, had they?
Seth and Iceweasel shared hilarity and horror. They told the story of Limpopo engineering the divestment of their worldly possessions on their first day in the B&B. Limpopo-the-house-spirit sputtered and objected she’d done no such thing. They’d had a mock fight that was slightly deadly serious. They hawed and horse-traded their way down to a small pack each, plus another bag for the two boys, whose prodigious aptitude for enfilthening even the dirt-sheddingest fabrics was balanced by indifference to their own cleanliness.
“They’ll be dirty,” Gretyl said. “They’ll survive. Good for the immune system.”
Once aboard the Gilbert Gil, they realized they could have brought ten times as much. The Brazilians had just dumped a load of high-quality plastics polymerized out of a toxic swamp in Florida by smart bacteria. All that was left of the cargo was the smell, not exactly unpleasant. It reminded Iceweasel of the wrapping on the really high-end cosmetics her mother favored.
They bustled around the huge, hangar-sized hold, working with the aerialists to reconfigure it for sleeping quarters, clicking panels into grooves in the floor and fitting roof sections over them to build a village of hexayurts. Iceweasel was glad they hadn’t brought more. There was every chance that they’d do some walking—real walking, walkaway walking—on this trip. The boys were going to be trouble enough without a lot to carry. The bumbler had favorable winds to take it all the way to Niagara Falls or even Toronto. But they were called “bumblers” for a reason. If Old Man Climate Change handed them one of his quotidian thousand-year-storms, they’d have to find other arrangements.
Gretyl went for bedrolls, using the Gil’s house spirit to tell her where everything was stashed. The house spirits were descended from wares that powered the B&B, a mix of quartermaster, scorekeeper, and confessor, designed to help everyone know everything as needed. She’d been so taken with the B&B’s paleolithic version of this stuff. Now it was everywhere, some of it even powered by the living dead, like Limpopo in Gary. That was too weird, even for her. She could talk with sims, provided that she didn’t think about it too hard. But the idea of having one as a haunt who wore your house like its body, that was just fucked up.
Etcetera gabbled in machine-Portuguese with the aerialists, who snapped together dining tables for their welcoming feast, with help from Seth and Tam. She’d had an earbud implanted a couple years before, when she’d started to have trouble with her hearing after a bad fever that crossed the country. The bud murmured a translation to her that only sometimes entered the realm of machine-trans garble.