The sarcastic one chuckled. “I’ve met your folks. They were both bribing you, but your dad was trying to make himself feel better.”
Etcetera shook his head. “It’s more complicated. Dad wanted me to want to do the right thing for the right reason. Mom only wanted me to do the right thing. I get Dad. But it’s easier to get people to do stuff if you don’t care why they’re doing it.”
Limpopo surveyed the boys’ baskets, trimmed to more modest proportions. She nodded. “This discussion usually gets to parenting and friendship. Those are the places where everyone agrees that being generous is right. Your chore list is to ensure that everything gets done. The kid who spends her time watching her sisters to make sure they have the same number of chores is either getting screwed, or is screwed up. It sounds corny, but being a walkaway is ultimately about treating everyone as family.”
The girl shuddered. Limpopo thought she had her number. “Okay, treating everyone like you’d want your family to treat you.”
“Christianity, basically,” the sarcastic one said, making a cross of his body, drooping his head to one side, and rolling his eyes up.
“Christianity if it had been conceived in material abundance,” Limpopo said. “You’re not the first to make the comparison. Plenty of these places have grad students – poli sci, soc, anthro – trying to figure out if we’re ‘post-scarcity Fabian socialists’ or ‘secular Christian communists,’ or what. Most are funded by private-sector spooks that want to know if we’re going to burn down their offices, and whether they can sell us anything. A third of them go walkaway. Meanwhile, we’re ready to do measurements and styles, right?”
They did, letting the stables’ cams image them and then sanity-checking the geometry the algorithms inferred. The system rendered them in new clothes and let them play with colors and prints. You got this in default, consumerist clicktrances of perpetual shopping and they clearly knew it. They whipped through options quickly and hit commit and marveled at the timers.
“Six hours?” the girl said. “Seriously?”
“You can do it in less,” Limpopo said, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes. Look at this—” She held out her sleeve and showed them a place where a seam had been resealed during fab. “No one said abundance was easy.”
[IV]
WHEN ETCETERA FINALLY hit on her, she surprised herself by saying yes.
The three of them had stuck around the B&B long after they’d gotten everything they needed to hit the road. That hadn’t surprised her. They were a good fit. The sarcastic one – he’d kept up the Gizmo von Puddleducks business and everyone called him “Ducky” – was a great storyteller and a fun opponent at board games. Both were highly prized skills in the B&B’s common-room, and he’d become a fixture. The girl joined a survey crew that was chasing up feedstock sites IDed by the drone-flock. She’d come back from a hard day in some ghost-town, grimed and wiry in a tank-top and work-boots, leading a train of walkers that crashed into the stables with their load of textiles, metals, and plastics, the sad remnants of collapsed industry and the people who’d slaved for it.
But Etcetera hadn’t fit in, no matter what he tried. None of the work captivated him. None of the leisure caught his interests. He had no stack of books he’d been meaning to read, no skill he’d planned on practicing, no project he’d put off. He was either a slack loser or a Zen master.
At least he wasn’t a pest. He did chores, got checked out on everything in the Stables and did maintenance, laughed at Ducky’s jokes and went out on crew with the girl – he called her Natalie, though she’d switched from “Stable Strategies” to “Iceweasel.” But he clearly didn’t give a shit about any of it.
One dawn, she went into the onsen and found him there, reclining in an outdoor pool with his nose and mouth above water, plumes of steam rising as he exhaled. She slid into the water next to him, anxious to get her feet off the icy paving stones and into the warmth. He raised his head, cracked an eye, nodded minutely, and sank back. She nodded at his vapor-plume, reclined too. Within moments the fish were on her, nibbling here and there. She closed her eyes and let her face sink beneath the water until only her own mouth and nose stuck out.
A fish brushed against her hand, then did it again. It wasn’t a fish. It was his hand, casually laid alongside hers, pinky-edge against pinky-edge. She checked her own internal instruments and decided she was happy about this. She picked up her hand and set it atop his.
They were still for a long while, fish tickling them. The fish made it weird. She and Etcetera were the main attractions at someone else’s orgy, their own contact saintly in its chastity. Their fingers moved in the tiniest of increments, spreading, entwining. It may have taken thirty minutes. Each of their hands was saying, “Is this okay?” and waiting for the other’s to move, “Yes, it’s okay,” before moving again. They were sending pulsed SYN/ACK/SYNACKs over a balky network.
When their hands entwined, it was anticlimactic. Now what? The tentative physical contact beneath the waters had been magic, but they weren’t going to give each other hand jobs in the pool. Oh, Etcetera that was a romantic gesture, but now what?
She got tired of wondering and disentangled her hand and went inside. She wasn’t often up this early, but when she was, she liked to come to the onsen because she had it to herself. It was empty. She stood by the hottest pool, chilled from the walk through the frosty air to the steaming door. The door behind her opened and Etcetera came in with a distracted smile. He dipped a bucketful of near-scalding water and soaked his small towel, then drew it out in a cloud of steam.
She smiled back, liking where this was going. She turned her back and looked over her shoulder, giving him a head-tilt invitation. It was enough. He rubbed the near-scalding towel on her back tentatively, and she rocked her weight towards him. He rubbed harder, soaked the towel. He knelt to do her butt and legs, and she turned around when he got to her ankles and he started to work his way back up. As he got back to his feet, she met him with her towel, steaming from the pail, rubbed his chest and arms. They held hands again and stepped into the hottest pool, water so hot that it obliterated all thought except for the hand squeezed in hers. They lowered themselves, hands so tight that their knuckles ground. Hand in hand, they went to the coldest pool, took towels in hand and washed one another down.
Back and forth, his left hand in her right, washing one another down, clinging tight to one another, alone in the onsen and merging into one being of flesh, nerves, heat, and cold. When they were done, they sat at the showers and soaped each other, sprayed each other with the shower wands. They went into the changing room and put their robes on, separating briefly. When they did, she felt the ghost of his hand in hers. When they clasped again, it felt like something missing had returned.
Hand in hand, they walked through the dim corridors. They skirted the common-room and the groggy voices they heard over the gurgle of coffium. They took the stairs slowly, gaits matched, feet rasping on the gritty laminate on the treads. On the first landing, and she used her free hand to ask a touchable surface about empty rooms, located one on the uppermost fourth floor, which had the smallest rooms – coffins, almost.
Wordless, breathing heavily, they ascended, hearing the building waking around them: a baby crying, someone peeing, a shower. One more floor, a few deft turns through the twisty little maze of the fourth floor, he put his hand on the doorplate and it rolled aside. The lights came on, revealing the bare cell whose loft-bed was neatly made up with fresh sheets. Beneath it was a desk and chair and some homey touches – a few books, a handful of sculptural prints of mathematical solids. Some part of Limpopo’s brain remembered putting them there, because this was one of the rooms she’d finished. She hadn’t been to it in more than a year, and she was pleased the B&B had kept it up. Either its tenants had been conscientious, or the B&B noticed the room getting moopy and had it on the chore list, and someone had taken care of it.