“I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ people and if you didn’t keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. I knew this important secret thing about useless and useful people, and if that’s not useful, what is? I told myself I was making more of everything for everyone. We just needed to let people who were worth the most do whatever they wanted. It was fucked up. I fucked up. That’s what I’m trying to say sorry for.”
“Your problem is you think ‘useless’ and ‘useful’ are properties of people instead of things people do. A person can perform usefulness, or anti-usefulness, depending on circumstances. Evolutionary winnowing didn’t somehow pass over the people who don’t contribute the way you want them to, leaving a backlog of natural selection for you to take care of. The reason everything about us is distributed on a normal curve, with a few weirdos way off in the long tails at the right and left and everyone else lumped together under the bulge is that we need people who get on with stuff, and a few firefighters who are kinked just the right way to sort out the weirdest shit happening around the edges. We assume someone who puts out a fire is a one-hundred-meter-tall superhero fated to save the universe, as opposed to someone who got lucky, once, and has been given lots more opportunities to get lucky since.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say, yeah. It’s hard to figure this shit. It twists my head that I only started disbelieving in useful and useless people when I proved to be useless. Then I had this revelation that the scale I’d judged people on—the scale I was failing on—was irrelevant. That’s one of those convenient things that reeks of bullshitting yourself.”
“I happen to agree the old scale was bullshit, so I’m giving you a pass.”
He winced as the medic did something to his toes. Two of them looked bad, black at the tips. Limpopo looked away, grimacing.
“Thanks,” he grunted, though whether he was talking to her or the medic, she couldn’t say.
[ix]
The party wasn’t Pocahontas’s idea, but she took off with it. At first, Etcetera was horrified at the thought. He couldn’t imagine anything worth celebrating amid the death and anxiety. Iceweasel was disappeared and Gretyl was buried in secret projects. He was convinced everyone would be offended, from spacies to late arrivals to aviators to the B&B crew who mourned their dead, but as Pocahontas posted notices of the party’s progress to the spacies’ social hub, it was clear the only anxiety anyone felt about a party was that someone else might hate it.
Pocahontas was a force of nature. She’d been the first of their crew to figure out how to run the space-suit fabbers, made herself a gorgeous suit she wore on a series of epic, multi-day treks, establishing contact with nearby First Nations bands. Though they weren’t as political as she, none had any use for default and all were curious about the weird spacies who’d taken over Thetford, so many years after it was abandoned. Pocahontas had used the Thetford fab to print parts for a new space-suit fabber, stacking them outside a utility corridor, ready to be hauled to her new friends by anyone who could make a vehicle capable of the run. Gretyl was working on refurbing the engine of their cargo-train, which limped into Thetford. They’d have scrapped it if there hadn’t been so many wounded who couldn’t finish the voyage on their own legs.
Gretyl was better than Etcetera had any right to expect. Seth told him what she’d done, and though she rarely heard from Dis—the sim was running on the safe room’s own servers, to avoid the risk of discovery through mountains of traffic where none was expected—the terse messages made her stoic, if not cheerful. According to Dis, Iceweasel was sane and intact despite torture. She was made of indomitable steel. “If she’s not losing her shit, how could I?” Gretyl said, one morning, as Limpopo brought them coffium and fresh rolls.
“You going to sing?” Limpopo said. Etcetera looked sharply at her. Gretyl had a beautiful voice, torchy. Back in the ancient days of the B&B common room, she’d passed evenings singing songs from her deep repertoire, accompanied by zero or more B&B musicians. A capella, she was astounding; with a band, she was transcendent. But she hadn’t sung since Iceweasel was taken from her.
“At the party?” Gretyl said.
“At the party.”
“Is there a band?” Etcetera thought she was looking for an out—I don’t think I could do it unaccompanied or we don’t have time to practice—but her eyes glinted.
“The spacies have a couple of bands, but I don’t know if they’re any good.”
Pocahontas—who’d flitted through the common space, directing people as they set up for the party—homed in on them, having followed this conversation on the hoof.
“There’s a good band and a so-so band,” she said.
“What kind of music?”
“The good band is loud and fast. The so-so band does folk stuff.”
“I’ll sing with both of them,” she said.
Pocahontas gave her hand a squeeze. “Done. Thanks.”
“You want some coffium?” Etcetera said. Watching Pocahontas dash around made him exhausted.
“I don’t drug.”
They all looked uncomfortable. Etcetera hadn’t known any First Nations people personally, but he knew there was stuff about booze and other substances. He shrugged. They were all walkaways, right? Man, woman, white, brown, First Nations, or otherwise.
“Sorry,” Limpopo said. He wondered if he should have apologized, too. He felt stupid and anxious, and that meant it was something he should be paying attention to.
“No biggie. Your neurotransmitters are your own business.”
“What can we do to help?” Etcetera looked for a better subject.
Instantly: “Get the fab to Dead Lake,” she said. “They can’t come to the party without protective suits.”
“Ah,” Etcetera said. He should have known she’d say that.
“We’ll all get on it,” Limpopo said, and squeezed his hand, though whether it was sympathy or a reminder to live up to his promises, he couldn’t say. “Count on us.”
“I am,” she said, with the solemn simplicity that she had in endless supply. It killed the mood’s lightness, made them gravely committed to throwing a party of unparalleled fun. Pocahontas looked from face to face, smiled, and launched herself in the direction of another group.
Gretyl watched her go. “She’s amazing. A party.” She shook her head. “And now we’ve got to get those fab parts, what, seventy klicks?”
“Sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. It’s high time we got the cargo-train running.” She drank her coffium. “Some of that stuff is wedged tight and won’t come out without a fight. We’ll hack it out. It’ll be tough in the suits.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t be glum,” Limpopo said. “It’ll be fun to do hard work for a change.”