The walkaways who’d taken over Thetford treated it as a hostile alien planet, where the air could kill you, where the terrain was treacherous and the extreme climate showed no mercy. This was precisely the environment they’d sought, because it was a dress-rehearsal for going to other planets.
“It’s the ultimate walkaway,” Kersplebedeb said. He was gangly, with a prominent Adam’s apple, and spoke English with a funny accent that came from having a French mother and a Kiwi father in bilingual Montreal. “All that first days of a better nation stuff, it’s just bourgie bullshit. Nations are bullshit. You know what’s not bullshit? Space. No room for power-games in space. No room for coercion, or war.”
“Run that past me again?” They were in one of the airtight capsules that had been deposited, like the egg sacs of sky-squids, all over Thetford. “Why no war?”
“Why war?” Kersplebedeb said. He spread his long fingers over the table. He had chipped silver nail polish and a yellow housedress and short hair, which assuaged any fear Etcetera had that the Thetfords would be boringly socially conservative. That was the reputation of space-exploration types.
“Jealousy. Greed. Irrational hatred.”
“Once you’re in space, you’re mobile. Unlimited power, anywhere the sun shines. Oxygen anywhere you can find ice to fractionate with solar-powered electrolysis. Food anywhere you can find feedstock, including your poop. Someone wants your lump of ice? Walk away. Someone wants your space habitat? Walk away. Walk away, walk away.
“People who think about space end up thinking about bullshit like Star Wars and Star Trek. They have faster-than-light travel, but they still fight? Over what? They’ve got transporters. What are they fighting over? What does anyone have that anyone else can’t get, instantly, for free? They have to invent unobtaniums, magic crystals that, for some reason, can’t just be printed out by their transporter beams, or there’s no story.
“Why do they even die? We’re already making scans of ourselves—if they’ve got transporters, they should do hourly scans!”
“I get your point.” He wished Limpopo was there, but she’d gone off to get trained at the space-suit factory, along with a contingent of Walkaway U scientists and some B&B people. There was talk of building another factory, because they were all tunnel-bound until they were outfitted. The academics who’d lived in the tunnels accepted this with resignation and mostly just wanted space, time, and freedom from distraction so they could scan everyone. That was okay with everyone. The long march to Quebec was fraught with danger. Sound from the sky made them flinch in anticipation of death-by-drone. Every crackle in the night had been a merc. The case for getting every walkaway into the cloud could not be stronger.
The B&B crew and the surviving aeronauts wanted the scientists to bear down on the scanning project, indoors and safe from the blowing asbestos and leaching heavy metals of Thetford; they themselves wanted to get the fuck out of the tunnels. Walkaways who couldn’t walk away were like foxes whose den lacked an emergency back door. The space-suit project was a priority. The Thetford crew had improvements on the space-suit fab they couldn’t wait to go 2.0 with, so that was likely to achieve liftoff.
Kersplebedeb laughed, showing horsey teeth and the insides of his nostrils. “You people kill me. You’ve done so much for the project, but you don’t appear to have given any thought to how it changes everything. The rate we’re going, we’ll be launching a thousand walkaways into space by New Year’s.”
“Where do you plan on getting the launch capacity to put a colony into orbit? Last time I checked your wiki, you had a deal to lift a couple cubesats a year.”
“All we need is one cubesat, up high with decent comms to Earth-station, and we’re set.”
The penny dropped. “You want to run a cluster in orbit and put sims on it?”
Kersplebedeb gave him a “duh” look and pawed through a cooler for a jar of astronauts’ moonshine, made from distilled lichen. It tasted amazing, like a slightly sweet tequila, deceptively smooth and very strong. He spun the lid off the jar and poured two small glasses of greenish liquid. These sit-downs with Kersplebedeb involved a lot of lichen booze. It was a theory-object from walkaway space programs. It was cheap and easy to make even if you didn’t have hard vacuum right outside your airlock.
“What else would we do?”
“What would they do up there?”
“Same thing we’re doing here, but far from people with bombs and weird ideas about doing what you’re told and accepting your station.”
“You’re going to run copies of yourself in space, on a cubesat, and what, exchange email with them? Let them have high-latency flamewars about engineering problems?”
“I’ll grant it’s weird.” He sipped the drink and his affect got less wild, more—Etcetera struggled for the word. Default. More sane, more respectable. At some time in Kersplebedeb’s life, he’d been the kind of person who could explain to a boardroom of normal people and make it sound normal. Now he was busting out his normal register for Etcetera. “Things”—he waved his hands—“are coming to a head. Zottas are freaking.”
“Zottas are always freaking. That’s what they do. Worry whether they have more than everyone.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Ets.” This was Kersplebedeb’s name for Etcetera. For a guy called Kersplebedeb, Kersplebedeb was impatient with other peoples’ multisyllabic names. Everyone else got one syllable. “That’s the baseline social anxiety that keeps default’s boilers running. But for the past three generations, zottas have expanded their families. It used to be only one kid got to be stratospherically wealthy. The others would be shirttail squillionaires. They’ll never be poor, but they’re not going to change the course of nations. They’re two orders of magnitude poorer than the eldest.
“Money’s relative. When your big brother gets to be a hundred times richer than you, it means his kids get to go into orbit for Christmas break, have dinner with presidents, while your kids merely go to Eton or UCC and do deep-sea sub dives instead of space shots. They have dinner with pro athletes and the pop star who plays their fifteenth birthday party. Big brother’s number-two kid ends up like yours, and he’s not happy about that, because number two knows it early. It warps him like it warped you. It rots a family from inside.
“The 0.001 percent can bud off three fortunes, branching dynasties for the whole brood. This makes things worse because when you’re jealous of your brother, that’s Old Testament badness. Ends with ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.’”