Etcetera looked puzzled. Kersplebedeb said, “Cain and Abel.” Etcetera mouthed, “Oh,” and made a go-on gesture. He’d had decent-sized gulps of lichen-juice and was filled with expansive goodwill.
“The endgame: even those zottas run out of new territory to conquer to carry on geometrically expanding their fortunes. There’s nothing left to squeeze out of the rest of us. The capital owned by non-zottas has dropped to negligible. If some desperate zotta figured out how to confiscate all of it, he wouldn’t get one dowry’s worth for his number-two kid.”
“So they turn on each other?”
“We’ve sat through this movie before.” Kersplebedeb touched his nose in a gesture Etcetera eventually recognized as meaning “on the nose.” “In the nineteenth century, the rich had the same pattern—one kid from each family got the name and the estate, everyone else became a comfortable nonentity, or, if they were very lucky, got married off to someone else’s number one. Then came the colonial era, new worlds to plunder, and whoosh, geometric expansion for two generations, long enough that there was no one alive who could remember a time when the dynasty was a straight line instead of an expanding tree of fortunes.”
“What happened?”
“They ran out of colonies,” Kersplebedeb said.
“What happened when they ran out?”
“Oh!” Kersplebedeb took a long drink. Sighed as his Adam’s apple worked. “World War One broke out. They turned on each other.”
[vi]
Limpopo flexed her arms in the confines of her environmental suit. It was a fourth-generation model, fresh off the printer and snapped together around her body by a Thetford spacie who made anachronistic squire-and-knight references. When she asked him, he shrugged and said, “Sci-fi and fantasy are two sides of the same coin.” He had a twang that might be Texan, and looked like he might be Vietnamese. Spacies came from all over. They had a wild-eyed visionary aspect that set them apart, even by walkaway standards, where wild-eyed-ness came with the job.
The suit was stiff but not terrible. There was a hydraulic boost in the joints that helped it support itself, gave it strength of its own, like a junior mecha-loader. She’d ordered hers skinned with a mosaic of van-art Hobbits and elves she’d picked from a catalog, and watched in fascination as an algorithm figured out how to resize and tessellate them so that they covered the whole suit without any mismatched edges.
She’d been outside once since they’d arrived, ferried by bubble-car into a bouncy-castle room they used for common space. That time, she’d gone in a loaner suit, a gen-2, and it had been so hot and ungainly that she’d done a circuit around one of the ruined houses and gone back in, face mask clouded with condensation and scratches.
Now she had the custom-fitted gen-4, she was ready to try again. They had a house rule of going in pairs, and she knew Sita had been champing to get outside. They got acquainted on the long march and working in the makeshift infirmary after the Better Nation had been shot down. They were both scared and excited by the rage that burned in Sita. It was a casual ruthlessness in her desire to defend walkaways. She took over defense of the column, putting up drones in a rotating pattern, working evenings to charge and inspect their weapons—mostly pulsed sound and energy weapons, though there was a big, weird projectile thing, a rail-gun they’d brought from Walkaway U and then towed from the B&B.
Now they were settled in at Thetford Space City, Sita led the project to get neural scanners running, providing administrative and work-flow support. Her own background—computational linguistics—didn’t have practical application to that part of the project, so once things were humming, she didn’t have anything to do besides bringing hot drinks to real experts, and she got squirrelly.
Sita’s suit was tiled with a forest camouflage pattern that was composed of thousands of distorted faces sporting bizarre expressions. Looking at it made Limpopo’s eyes go swimmy.
“Ready?” Sita said, through the point-to-point network. It was encrypted, used multiple bands for redundancy, and had clever telemetry in its radios that also detected interference and used it to infer the state of the electromagnetic environment, allowing it to overcome electrical storms. Sita’s voice was so crisp, so beautifully EQ’ed with the ambient wind sounds and the windmill thrums, so well-corrected in binaural space that she sounded like a game character.
Limpopo gave her a thumbs-up and punched the airlock button. They crowded together, and she got Sita’s elbow in the side, making the suit rub along her scar in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. At a time when so many of the people around her treated their bodies as inconvenient meatsuits they were obliged to use as mechas for toting around their precious brains, it was nice to have a piece of her identity that was inextricably bound to her flesh.
Her last trip out an airlock had been a confusion of impeded movement, chafed skin, and poor visibility. Now, stepping into the tall, brittle wild grass poking out the snow, sapphire visor so clear it felt like UI, complete with lens-flare, she was struck by the place’s beauty.
Sita gave her a shove from behind. “Dude, don’t block the door.”
“Sorry.” She sidestepped. The trees were tall and lavish with needles, the snow so fluffy, the sky an expanse of dramatic clouds. “Just a bit—”
“Hard to remember it’s a blasted wasteland when it’s this beautiful. You should see the wildlife. Moose, deer, even wildcats, judging from scat and paw prints. And birds! Owls, of course, but so many winter birds, you’d swear migration was an urban legend.”
“How?”
Sita struck off through the snow, sinking to her knees with each step. Limpopo walked in her footprints, marveling at her suit’s wicking sweat from her back.
“No people. It’s like this around Chernobyl. Turns out that, relative to sharing a biome with humans, living in the shadow of a radioactive plume or a place where the dirt and air are forty percent asbestos is a good deal.”
“You put it that way and we sound like a blight.”
“Whaddya mean ‘we,’ White Man?”
She knew the joke—“Tonto, the Indians have us surrounded!” “What do you mean ‘we’ White Man?”—even though she’d never read a Lone Ranger book or played the game or seen the cartoons or whatever, but it took a moment to get Sita’s meaning.
“Really? Anyone who wants a body is worse than asbestos?”