THE BUMBLER TOUCHED down in the parking lot of an old mall on the west side of town the next day, crewed by a grinning gang of old Brazilians, men with dreads in their thinning hair, women with surefooted rolling walks like sailors. Stan and Jacob were immediately adopted by the crew’s kids, whose status was somewhat mysterious – they were from an orphanage in Recife which had run out of funding. The kids ended up in a makeshift camp, which hadn’t gone well, and these aerialists took them in and brought them into their enormous, beautiful zeppelins, decorated like the legendary baloeiro balloons that had plied the Brazilian skies for centuries.
However these kids ended up in the sky, they took to it like fish to water. Within minutes, Stan and Jacob were barefoot and climbing rigging, barely shouting good-bye at their mothers, who watched them go with trepidation and pride.
They’d struggled with packing. It had been so long since they’d been voluntary refugees, even longer since they’d been involuntary ones. They’d conferenced their common-rooms. Marshalled their minimum carry, using the house spirits to keep track of who was bringing what to cut down on duplication. Spouses, kids and house-mates piled ever-more stuff into the to-be-packed pile. They laughed nervously. They hadn’t become shleppers, had they?
Seth and Iceweasel shared hilarity and horror. They told the story of Limpopo engineering the divestment of their worldly possessions on their first day in the B&B. Limpopo the House Spirit sputtered and objected she’d done no such thing. They’d had a mock-fight that was slightly deadly serious. They hawed and horse-traded their way down to a small pack each, plus another bag for the two boys, whose prodigious aptitude for enfilthening even the dirt-sheddingest fabrics was balanced by indifference to their own cleanliness.
“They’ll be dirty,” Gretyl said. “They’ll survive. Good for the immune system.”
Once aboard the Gilbert Gil, they realized they could have brought ten times as much. The Brazilians had just dumped a load of high-quality plastics polymerized out of a toxic swamp in Florida by smart bacteria. All that was left of the cargo was the smell, not exactly unpleasant. It reminded Iceweasel of the wrapping on the really high-end cosmetics her mother favored.
They bustled around the huge, hangar-sized hold, working with the aerialists to reconfigure it for sleeping quarters, clicking panels into grooves in the floor and fitting roof sections over them to build a village of hexayurts. Iceweasel was glad they hadn’t brought more. There was every chance that they’d do some walking – real walking, walkaway walking – on this trip. The boys were going to be trouble enough without a lot to carry. The bumbler had favorable winds to take it all the way to Niagara Falls or even Toronto. But they were called “bumblers” for a reason. If Old Man Climate Change handed them one of his quotidian thousand-year storms, they’d have to find other arrangements.
Gretyl went for bedrolls, using the Gil’s house spirit to tell her where everything was stashed. The house spirits were descended from wares that powered the B&B, a mix of quartermaster, scorekeeper, and confessor, designed to help everyone know everything as needed. She’d been so taken with the B&B’s paleolithic version of this stuff. Now it was everywhere, some of it even powered by the living dead, like Limpopo in Gary. That was too weird, even for her. She could talk with sims, provided that she didn’t think about it too hard. But the idea of having one as a haunt who wore your house like its body, that was just fucked up.
Etcetera gabbled in machine-Portuguese with the aerialists, who snapped together dining tables for their welcoming feast, with help from Seth and Tam. She’d had an earbud implanted a couple years before, when she’d started to have trouble with her hearing after a bad fever that crossed the country. The bud murmured a translation to her that only sometimes entered the realm of machine-trans garble.
The Brazilians bragged on the Gil, its lift and handling characteristics; the strength and resilience of the redundant graphene cells; their prowess as navigators, able to find fair winds where no algorithm predicted. Etcetera gave every sign of being delighted, spoke knowledgeably about the ships that preceded the Gil, wonderful things coming out of Thailand, where airships were different in some important, highly technical way she didn’t understand.
The kids arrived in time for food, though judging from the food already smudged around their faces they had been introduced to a kitchen fabber somewhere in the ship’s deeps. She collected jammy kisses from both, resisted the urge to clean their faces with spit, was introduced to new friends, a range of ages and genders. An older boy named Rui – old enough to have a bit of a mustache, an adam’s apple, and a mix of self-assuredness with kids and awkwardness with adults, told her in accented English how great her boys were and how he would teach them all they needed to be fliers. She thanked him in absolutely awful Portuguese, prompted by the implanted bud. He smiled and blushed and ducked his head in a way that made her want to take him home and raise him.
“You boys ready for lunch?” Gretyl asked, coming up with a fan of plates bearing scop meat-ite skewers that smelled amazing, garnished with feijoada and heaps of hydroponic vegetables. The boys looked guiltily at one another and Gretyl instantly clocked the sweet, sticky stuff around their mouths.
“Looks like you’ve already had dessert. Hope that doesn’t mean you think you’re not going to eat lunch, too.” Gretyl was the family disciplinarian. If it was up to Iceweasel, the kids would eat ice-cream and candy three meals a day. She’d join them. Gretyl kept them from dying of malnutrition. Her word was law.
The boys nodded and took plates. Rui took in all the salient details of their family arrangements and led the kids to a spot at the table, promising they’d eat every bite.
Gretyl handed Iceweasel one of the remaining plates and they found a spot at a table, surrounded by crew-members who joked and made them feel at home.
“This is amazing food,” Iceweasel said, chasing the last curly carrot with her forkchops.
“We got new starter cultures from Cuba,” a crewwoman explained. She was beautiful, tall, with a shaved head, a wasp-waist, and wide hips and skin the color of burnt sugar. Iceweasel and Gretyl had both snuck looks at her when they thought the other wasn’t looking, then caught each other. Her name was Camila. Her English was excellent. “You program it with lights during division-cycle, causes it to express different flavor- and texture-profiles.”
“It’s incredible,” Gretyl said.
“We’ll give you some to take when you go. The Cubans eat like kings.”
There was white pudding for dessert, made with the last of the ship’s supply of real coconut and tapioca cultured from Cuban scop. Neither Gretyl nor Iceweasel had enough experience of tapioca to say whether it was faithful, but it was just as tasty as lunch and Camila assured them that even a tapioca farmer couldn’t tell the difference.
“Do you need any more crew?” Iceweasel said, jokingly. “I want to eat like this every day.”
Camila looked grave. “We have no more crew berths, sorry to say.” She contemplated the crowded tables. “It’s something we’re arguing about. It’s a good crew, a good ship. Some of us want to bud off a new one, start another crew. We’ve got something so wonderful, it should grow. Others say there’s something in the chemistry of this group, and if we split up, it would go. The children are growing, many of them think they will be aerialists. We’ll need more ships.”