Iceweasel smiled for the first time in a long time. “Put like that, it’s beautiful.”
Limpopo didn’t smile back. She looked too exhausted to smile. “I’d settle for plausible. Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”
“You’re assuming that families aren’t about acting like selfish, untrusting assholes,” Iceweasel said.
“The fact that your family is so fucked up is not proof that being fucked up is natural—it’s proof that shotgun people rot from the inside and their lives turn to shit.” She closed her eyes. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Iceweasel was surprised to discover it was true. The words were liberation, a framework for understanding what had made her, what she could become.
“Limpopo,” Gretyl said, “you look like chiseled shit. No offense.”
“None taken,” Limpopo said with a ghost of a smile.
“What would it take to make you sleep?”
Limpopo shrugged. “I don’t think I could at this point. I’ve gone through sleep and come out the other side.”
“I think that’s macho bullshit,” Gretyl said. She moved around, asked some others to move, rearranged packs and bags until there was a Limpopo-shaped space on the floor. “Lie down.” She patted her hands on her lap.
Limpopo looked from her to Iceweasel, the others, shrugged. “I’m not going to fall asleep, you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—”
“Silence, fool. Lie down.”
She did, her head settling into Gretyl’s lap. She locked eyes with Iceweasel, a nonverbal “Is this okay?” and Iceweasel smiled and stroked her greasy hair, a tousled short mess of spun sugar in pink and blue. They’d been in plenty of cuddle-puddles, but that was different. She and Gretyl locked eyes, they shared a smile. Her fear melted. Miraculously, it was not replaced by self-doubt. The rain, the breathing, the dim light, the cozy closeness made her feel, against all odds, safe.
Gretyl tilted her head at one soft shoulder and Iceweasel shinnied around until she could rest her head on it. Gretyl put an arm around her and she put an arm around Gretyl, and the three women were quiet.
*
They rendezvoused with the Better Nation at sunset the next day. Limpopo watched the crew descend on tether lines and harnesses, toes grazing the ground. There was a brief moment of excited reunion as they related their adventures to one another. Etcetera was right in there, regaling his buds with tales of their near-death, oohing and aahing as the aviators recounted their own experiences with drones, chaff, weather, and infowar harassment.
The Better Nation had been tethered in deep Mohawk territory, and had been generously resupplied with venison, corn, chapatis, and ice cream in amazing flavors from rose water to marzipan. Some Mohawk kids came along for the flight, not quite walkaways, but certainly not default. They stuck together and looked on solemnly as food sizzled on the grills the aviators set out and more crew touched down. Then one of them—a girl, with long straight hair and a loose-fitting t-shirt with the word LASAGNE in huge letters across it—stepped out of their tight pack. She wandered over to the grill to kibbitz, and Tam, who was cooking, cracked a joke Iceweasel couldn’t hear, but made the girl smile so radiantly it transformed her into something out of a painting (or maybe a stock-art catalog: “Smiling indigenous woman, suitable for brochures on diversity policy”) and the two groups merged.
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.