“The only way this makes sense is if I insist that I can’t ‘have’ more than one B&B. The only claim I can have is that I’m doing it good by staying there and vice versa. What good do I do to the B&B once I leave? What good does it do me? If I’ve got somewhere to stay, I’m good.”
“Yeah, yeah. What about other people who want to stay at the B&B, but have to deal with Captain Asshole and his League of Prolapses to get a bed?”
“I plan on building somewhere else. I hope they help build it. I hope you stay and help.”
“Of course. We’re all going to build it. But when they come and take that away—”
“Maybe I’ll go back to the B&B. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is to convince people to make and share useful things. Fighting with greedy douches who don’t share doesn’t do that. Making more, living under conditions of abundance, that does it.”
The look she got from the younger woman was so shrewd that she came clean. Or maybe it was the crack. “I’ll admit it. I felt the B&B was ‘mine,’ like my work on it entitled me to it. The truth is even if you’re right and I did more than others, that doesn’t mean I could have built it without them. The B&B is more than any one person could build, even in a lifetime. Building the B&B, running it, that’s a superhuman task, more than a single human could do. There are lots of ways to be superhuman. You can trick others into thinking that unless they do what you tell them, they won’t eat. You can cajole people into doing what you want by making them fear god or the cops, or making them feel guilty or angry.
“The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyone, you’re still only doing that because that’s what you choose.”
Iceweasel stared at her gloves, flexing her fingers minutely, which made Limpopo want to do the same, sympathetic fidgeting. “Doesn’t it depress you? All that work?”
“A little. But it’s exciting. The thing about starting over is you get to see the thing grow in leaps. Once it’s built, all you get is tweaks, new paint, and minor redecorations. Seeing a piece of blasted ground and a pile of scavenge leap into the sky and become a place, having its software get into you and you get into it, so wherever you are, no matter what you’re doing, there’s something you can do to make it better, that’s amazing.” The crack was fizzling, and as always, she felt fleeting melancholy as it bade her farewell. “Not to change the subject, but—”
The rest of the group was coming. In a minute or two they’d be marching.
“You know this,” she said, hefting her vaper, which Iceweasel deftly relieved her of, taking another bump and blowing a plume of fragrant steam, like pine tar and burned plastic, a homey smell. “That feeling of happiness and intensity you get? Did you ever wonder whether it was something we were meant to experience more than fleetingly? Take orgasms. If you had an orgasm that didn’t stop, it’d be brutal. There’d be a sense in which it was technically amazing, but the experience would be terrible. Take happiness now, that feeling of having arrived, having perfected your world for a moment—could you imagine if it went on? Why would you ever get off your ass? I think we’re only equipped to experience happiness for an instant, because all our ancestors who could experience it for longer blissed out until they starved to death, or got eaten by a tiger.”
“You’re still high,” Iceweasel said.
She checked. “Yup.” The group was on them. “It’s going away. Let’s move.”
They fell into the column and marched.
3
takeoff
[i]
The ashes of Walkaway U were around Iceweasel. It was an unsettled climate-ish day, when cloudbursts swung up out of nowhere, drenched everything, and disappeared, leaving blazing sun and the rising note of mosquitoes. The ashes were soaked and now baked into a brick-like slag of nanofiber insulation and heat sinks, structural cardboard doped with long-chain molecules that off-gassed something alarmingly, and undifferentiated black soot of things that had gotten so hot in the blaze that you could no longer tell what they’d been.
There were people in that slag. The sensor network at WU had survived long enough to get alarmed about passed-out humans dotted around, trapped by blazes or gases. There was charred bone in the stuff that crept around her mask and left a burnt toast taste on her tongue. She’d have gagged if it hadn’t been for the Meta she’d printed before she hit the road.
The Banana and Bongo was bigger than the Belt and Braces had ever been—seven stories, three workshops, and real stables for a variety of vehicles from A.T.V. trikes to mecha-walkers to zepp bumblers, which consumed Etcetera for more than two years, as he flitted through the sky, couch-surfing at walkaway camps and settlements across the continent. She’d thought about taking a mecha to the uni, because it was amazing to eat the countryside in one, the suit’s wayfinders and lidar finding just the right place to plant each of its mighty feet, gyros and ballast dancing with gravity to keep it upright over the kilometers.
But mechas had no cargo space, so she’d taken a trike with balloon tires as big as tractor wheels, tugging a train of all-terrain cargo pods of emergency gear. It took four hours to reach the university, by which time, the survivors had scattered. She lofted network-node bumblers on a coverage pattern, looking for survivors’ radio emissions. The bumblers self-inflated, but it was still sweaty work getting them out of their pod and into the air, and even though she worked quickly—precise Meta-quick, like a marine assembling a rifle blindfolded—everything was smeared with blowing soot by the time they were in the sky.
“Fuck this,” she said into her breather, and turned the A.T.V. and its cargo-train around in a rumbling donut. The survivors would be nearby, upwind of the ash plume, and out of range of the heat that must have risen as the campus burned. She’d seen a demo of a heat-sunk building going up before. It had been terrifying. In theory, graphene-doped walls wicked away the heat, bringing it to the surface in a shimmer, keeping the area around the fire below its flash point. The heat sink was itself less flammable than everything else they used for building materials, so if the fire went on too long, the heat sinks heated up to the flash point of the walls, and the entire building went up in a near-simultaneous whoom. In theory, you couldn’t get to those temperatures unless eight countermeasures all failed, strictly state-actor-level arson stuff.
She tried not to think about state actors and why they’d want to reduce the Niagara Peninsula’s Walkaway U campus to char.