“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 made 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.
She thought she heard Gretyl behind her, splashing through the same puddles. Part of her wanted Gretyl to catch up, so she could apologize and take back the awful things she’d said. Another part understood her feelings about Gretyl were caught up with her feelings about her father. Any apology Gretyl offered would never make up for the apologies she never received from him.
She made for camp’s edge, wanting to be far from humans and wanting to find somewhere to balance on one foot while she finished dressing. She laced up her boots and stood, pulling her shirt off a tree-branch and pulling it on, fighting through the overlapping layers of wicking stuff and insulating stuff and brightly colored rags woven in bands around it, a look she’d invented that many others had flattered her by copying. Suited and booted, she calmed. She ran her hands over the shirt, which looked fucking awesome and was acknowledged as a technical and aesthetic triumph, in which she took enormous pride.
She scrubbed her cheeks with her palms and planted her hands on her hips and looked at the sky. She’d had a lot of summer nights at the family cottage, staring at skies like this, impossibly populated by cold stars that reminded her of humanity’s general insignificance and comforted her with her father’s specific insignificance. Sometimes, there’d been cousins on stargazing nights, a few she’d felt affection for, and she panged at the thought of them, lost to her, being twisted into the gnarled shape of a zotta mired in self-delusional garbage.
Something snagged her attention, coming up over the tree line. It was the Better Nation. As she saw it, she heard it, which was incongruous, because the bumblers were not supposed to run their impellers except for emergencies. It was transport that went where the wind blew, making hay while the sun shone, treating nature as a feature, not a bug. The impellers grew louder—an insect buzz, then a swarm, then a full-throated roar. The Better Nation was supposed to be on its way to Nova Scotia.
There was a breeze out of the woods that left her in goosebumps. The hair on her neck stood. She was rooted to the spot, staring at the zepp straining across the sky, twisting to and fro as it fought the winds. It grew faster, and she realized belatedly that it was descending as well as impelling. Her heart thudded in her ears.
“HELP!” she shouted, without meaning to. “HELP THEM!” She smacked her interface surfaces, turning on her cameras and sensors without consciously deciding to.
The sound of her shouts in her ears unfroze her feet. She ran through camp, toward the zepp. She saw black shapes moving through the sky behind it, invisible except where they blotted out starlight. Inaudible over the impellers’ whine, a shrill tone of machines laboring beyond their safety margin.
Others were around, aiming scopes at the sky. There was shouting. Cursing. A fan of pencil-thin, violet lasers lit the sky, so bright it hurt to look. They converged on a black shape, tracked it jigging and jagging across the sky. She followed them down to their source, saw three of the university crew frantically plugging hydrogen cells into a rig like a miniature antiaircraft gun on a wide metal plate they weighed down with their boots. She ran to them and stood on the plate, freeing two of them to move closer to the batteries.