All too soon, they told her to roll over, and they did her front, working her abdominal muscles, her thighs, her clenched jaw, her scalp. The towels were soaked with sage and pine. The smell suffused the room. She kept nodding off, luxuriating in attention, then waking as a knuckle caught a sore spot.
Then it was Tam’s turn. There were more hot towels in the crate. Seth found a thermostat interface and cranked up the heat. Gretyl dispensed with the robe, which made things easier as she worked the hot towels into Tam’s skinny legs and bony back. Seth brought more lichen juice, and she spilled some on her fingers, and when she licked it off, she tasted the sage and pine. The flavor was incredible and she told them so. They dribbled booze over their fingers and licked away and everyone agreed and they also got looser and mellower. And sloppier.
By the time they moved on to Seth, the heat, moisture, and booze made the room as swimmy as a Turkish bath. There were dry towels in a compartment with its own element. They came out warm and fluffy as kittens. Bundled up, they burrowed beneath the covers.
Gretyl marveled at the feeling of peace, the intimacy that was asexual and sensuous at the same time. It was childlike, a feeling from before sex, or maybe the feeling of someone very old, beyond sex. Everything was at peace.
So why was she crying?
The tears had slipped silently down her cheeks for some time. She noticed them because they were pooling in her ears and slipping down her neck. She’d once sliced her hand with a kitchen knife, and there’d been a moment when she’d stared at the pulsing blood, understood it, but not felt it, before the pain crashed on her, radioactively intense and thunderclap-sudden. She’d shouted in surprise—not at the wound, but at the sudden onset of pain.
It was the same now: the wound visible, the ache lagging it. She gulped, sobbed, then brayed, doubling over like she’d been punched in the stomach. The pain there was sickening. All her buried fear and sadness for her lover crashed down.
Seth figured it out first, wrapping her in his arms, murmuring shh-shh, rocking her. Tam was slower on the uptake, but she took Gretyl’s hands and squeezed them, saying that’s right, let it out. Gretyl was so far down her pain that she didn’t worry about being mothered by Tam.
The sorrow was obliterating. The siren-wail blotted out coherent thought. It abated to the point where she could hear her thoughts, and first among them was terror that Iceweasel would never come back. Her father and family would turn her into a zotta.
The storm passed, floods of tears slowing to trickles. Her eyes stung and her guts ached. She disentangled herself and swung her legs over the bed and put her face in her hands.
“What are we doing?”
“You mean in general, or specifically, right here and now?” Seth said, and Gretyl felt Tam reach out and pinch him.
“I’m not being funny,” he said.
“You’re never funny,” Tam said. “That’s the point.”
“Ouch.”
Gretyl looked up, tugged her robe around her and stood to pace, promptly stubbing a toe on the cold, uneven floor. She yelped and sat back down, rubbing her toe.
“I have an answer, you know,” Seth said.
“To what?”
“What we’re doing,” he said.
Tam sighed. “Go ahead. If Gretyl doesn’t mind.”
She shook her head. She felt affection for these broken, sweet, loving people.
“When I was a kid and I’d hear about walkaways, they always seemed insanely optimistic to me. If they ever seriously threatened default, it would crush them. It was na?ve—thinking default could peacefully coexist with anything else. How could it? If the excuse for putting a clutch of rich assholes in charge of the world was that without them we’d starve, how could they allow people to live without their stern but loving leadership?
“I thought of myself as a realist. Reality had a well-known pessimistic bias, so that made me a pessimist. I liked the idea of walking away, but I was on the other side.”
Tam squeezed his hand. “Then you followed a hot rich girl into the woods and everything changed. I’ve heard this.”
“Not the important part, because I only figured it out when we got to Thetford.” He paused. Gretyl thought he was being dramatic, but he was gathering his thoughts, uncharacteristic vulnerability on his face in the dim light. She wanted to hear what he’d say next. Maybe he’d discovered something important.
“If your ship goes down in the middle of the open water, you don’t give up and sink. You tread water, clutch onto a spar, do something.”
He stopped, wrung his hands.
“Realistically speaking, if you’re in the middle of the sea, you’re a goner. But you tread water until you can’t kick another stroke. Not because you’re optimistic. If you polled ten random shipwreck victims treading water in open sea, every one would tell you they’re not optimistic.
“What they are is hopeful. Or at least not hope-empty. They don’t give up because that means death and living people can sometimes change their situations, while dead ones can’t change a fucking thing.
“I’ve never been lost at sea, but I think if your buddy was weaker than you, and you were holding him up, you’d kick just as hard, because you’d be hoping for both of you. Because giving up for someone else is even harder than giving up for you.
“Now I’m walkaway, I’ve been shot at and chased from my home, but I can’t feature going back to default, because default is the bottom of the sea and walkaway is a floating stick we can clutch. Default has no use for us except as a competition for other non-zottas, someone who’ll do someone else’s job if they get too uppity and demand to be treated as human beings instead of marginal costs. We are surplus to default’s requirements. If they could, they’d sink us.
“So what we’re doing, Gretyl, is exercising hope. It’s all you can do when the situation calls for pessimism. Most people who hope have their hopes dashed. That’s realism, but everyone whose hopes weren’t dashed started off by having hope. Hope’s the price of admission. It’s still a lotto with shitty odds, but at least it’s our lotto. Treading water in default thinking you might become a zotta is playing a lotto you can’t win, and whose winners—the zottas—get to keep winning at your expense because you keep playing. Hope’s what we’re doing. Performing hope, treading water in open ocean with no rescue in sight.”
“So, basically, ‘live as though it were the first days of the better nation?’” But Gretyl smiled when she said it.
“That kind of wry cynicism is my department, you know.”
“It’s fun being a dick.”
He grinned back. “It is, isn’t it?”
“So it’s hope. But—” She heaved a sigh.
Tam brought lichen tequila. She had a fleeting thought about how it was a bad habit to use alcohol to cope with distress, then drank from the bulb. It burned pleasurably.
“Iceweasel,” she said.
“Poor Iceweasel,” Tam said. “Have you heard from Dis?”