There were no streetlights on the road. They switched to headlights, then nightscopes, then back to headlights when the lights of Kingston brightened the horizon. They circled the city, warned off by hovering police drones and the signs warning of OPP checkpoints. They headed for 15 north, the strip of private prisons built one after another.
The moon was up and it was getting cold when they reached the exit off the highway to the prisons, a theme-park of jailhouses built by TransCanada as part of its diversification strategy. The juvie hall. The men’s prison. The minimum-security pen. As word went round that change had arrived, each acquired rings of tents and yurts. The phenomenon followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named “Walkaway Decade”. Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.
The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.
More people would drift in and out, there’d be arguments over what to do and what to make, if anything. Some people would farm scop, others would tend gardens. Or not – some communities never gelled, became ghost-towns within months of being established. Sometimes worse things happened. There were dark stories about rapes, murder sprees, cults of personality where charismatic sociopaths brainwashed hordes into doing their bidding. There’d been a mass-suicide, or so they said. Everyone argued about whether these stories were real, minimized by credulous walkaways or stoked to a fever pitch by default psy-ops.
Ahead of them was the women’s prison. Around it, the most carnival-like camp, a county fair for refugees. They had to dismount – none of the bikes had catastrophically failed – and walk the bikes into the thick of things, criss-crossing guy-wires and fragrant coffium parlors that rocked even at this late hour. Halfway, they abandoned the bikes and shared around Gretyl and Iceweasel’s packs as each woman picked up a sound-sleeping boy.
The prison gates yawned wide. There were a few women on plush armchairs dragged out from some office. They broke off their conversations to inquire casually about who these people were and where they were going. At the mention of Limpopo’s name, their faces lit and they offered to show the group inside.
“We knew her as G, of course. That’s what they booked her under. They punished her bad when she used her outside name, so she stopped. Everyone’s changing names now we’re wide open.” “Wide open” was what default press said when the prison guards stopped showing up for work, the kind of thing that you could use to terrorize people about the marauders about to rush out of the prisons and start hacking up people. As they’d ridden through the TransCanada parks, she’d seen banners celebrating “wide open.”
They were led inside, through wide open – ahem – scanning vestibules and yards and chambers where visitors or inmates could be contained. All the doors were flung back or removed and set on trestles and piled with assortments of clothes and other things that were either shared by or with the prisoners. The cellblock was made up of huge, high-ceilinged, bar-walled rooms ranked with three-high bunk beds, festooned with banners and hung with privacy blankets (maybe they’d been there before wide open, but Tam didn’t think prisons ran that way). The lighting was dim, the sound of whispered conversations around them and the snoring and breathing of hundreds – thousands? – of women made the place sound like a huge, muttering tunnel.
“This way,” their guide whispered. They went single-file down a narrow corridor between bunks, deep into the maze. Tam felt a minute’s default-ness, worry that these women were criminals, some of them had surely done unforgivable violence to land here. There were violent people everywhere. Most of the time, most of them didn’t do anything particularly violent, because even psychos needed to get along and have a life. These people had been nothing but sweet to them since their arrival. Limpopo was one of these people. She made the default part shut up.
Limpopo was asleep in her bunk, face a grayscale silhouette in dim light, but lined and older than Tam remembered. All of them clustered around her bunk and Tam flashed on the dwarfs clustered around Snow White’s bier.
“This is awkward,” Etcetera stage-whispered from Seth’s chest. Limpopo stirred. She scrunched her face – so many wrinkles! Tam’s hand went to her own face. Limpopo blinked her eyes twice, opened them and looked around. They must have appeared as silhouettes, faceless, but who else would be at her bedside?
“D,” their guide whispered. “I brought you some friends.” Her voice was thick with tears.
“Thanks,” Limpopo whispered back. “Thanks, Testshot. Thanks a lot.” She propped herself on her elbows.
“God damn, it’s good to see you.” Tam thought Limpopo said it, but it was Etcetera again, his voice weirdly modulated with machine emotion.
Limpopo half-smiled, lips quivering. Tears ran down her face. No one knew what to do. Iceweasel passed Stan to Seth and put her arms around Limpopo’s neck and pulled her into a long hug. “I love you, Limpopo,” she whispered.
“We all do.” Gretyl handed Jake to Tam and wrapped her arms around Limpopo and Iceweasel, half sliding onto the bed to do it. Tam looked at Jake’s sleepy face, saw he was waking, even though he clung like a monkey in a tree, strong arms and dirty hair and sweet/sour unbrushed-teeth breath. “Mama?” he mumbled.
“Right there.” Tam turned so he could see both mothers hugging the strange old lady in the weird dark room. Strangely, this comforted him. “Can you stand?” He thought about it, nodded. She put him down and joined the hug, squashing Limpopo’s leg as she jockeyed for position. A minute later, Seth’s arms were around her.
They hugged and cried in the dark. Jake said, with shocking loudness, “I have to pee, Mom!” They laughed and untangled themselves and shushed the boy and whispered apologies to the women roused by the noise. Limpopo led them back through the cellblock, into the courtyard, lit by flood lamps and populated with small conversational groups sitting on blankets and chairs from inside. They got folding chairs and blankets out of their packs, bottles of delicious whiskey from a fabber on the Gil. The ritual was so normal and so weird that Tam kept getting buffeted by it, until they were back in their conversational circle. The boys were mothered by Iceweasel and Gretyl, staring wide-eyed from one grown-up to the next, sleepy and cranky and excited at once. Tam knew how they felt.
Limpopo told them the story of her incarceration in fits and starts, with many interruptions. It wasn’t a nice story. She’d spent a lot of time in solitary – it was a routine punishment for the mildest infractions. Walkaways were particularly singled out for it. Her longest stretch in solitary was two years, during which she’d had no contact with the general population. It wasn’t much better the rest of the time: for years on end, prisoners were given an hour out of their cells per day. For six months, no one had been allowed out of her cellblock except for medical emergencies – no showering, no exercise. Tam thought about the huge, echoing barracks and tried to imagine being stuck in there with hundreds of women for half a year. She shivered and drank more whiskey.