There were no deaths. It was miraculous, but Limpopo had a theory: “I think the bombers lost their nerve. The stables went up during their maintenance cycle, when there’d be no one there. The power plant went up ten minutes later, plenty of time for everyone to be on the lawn, staring at the stables, far from the blast. The inn’s explosives, going off hours later? Either we’re dealing with a terrorist who sucks at timers, or they wanted to be sure of minimal casualties. It’s what you’d do if you wanted to convince your bosses you’d been a good little mad bomber, but didn’t want too much blood on your hands.”
“Limpopo, it’s been a long day and you’ve been amazing,” Iceweasel said. They were huddled in a tent, seven in a sleeping space intended for two, rain thudding on the tent’s skin overhead and lashing at its sides. They’d made camp right in the middle of the road, using the highway’s cracked tarmac as a base. The road was domed, just enough to provide drainage into the choked ditches on either side. The insulating cells on the tent-floor rucked up over the dome’s apex, crinkling like bubblewrap when they moved. They were dead tired, hungry and hurt, but no one in their tent was going to sleep any time soon.
“But that sounds like bullshit. The university got attacked by mercs and we got hit by mercs again on our way back. Why assume these bombs were set by double agents? Sentimental double agents? Ask yourself if it wouldn’t make you happier to imagine the bad guys were blackmailed into infiltrating us, but found us so wonderful they couldn’t bring themselves to kill us?”
A scary flash of anger on Limpopo’s normally calm face. Iceweasel had been pleased when Limpopo joined their tent, anointed the cool-kids’ club by her presence. When Limpopo’s eyes flashed, it was like being trapped with a dangerous animal. She pulled back, and, to her embarrassment, whimpered. Limpopo mastered herself.
“That is not entirely stupid. It’s hard to know when you’re kidding yourself. Figuring that out has been my life’s major project. But.” She turned and listened to the wind lash the tent, touched the cool fabric. “Okay, yeah. Maybe they wanted us on the road and they’re sending a snatch-squad for anyone who understands uploading for real. Maybe they knew the B&B had realtime monitors that would make them look like monsters if there were a lot of bodies, but if they kill us out here, they can shove us into the ditches and—”
“I get it,” Iceweasel said. She couldn’t stand any more. The self-recrimination after meeting the campus crew had finally given way to fear. It was almost a relief to be tortured by something external, rather than her internal nagging voice. Gretyl had a tattoo around one of her biceps that read FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER, but as far as Iceweasel was concerned, her mind could use some killing.
She wished she and Gretyl could be alone. Something about being enfolded in Gretyl soothed her in a deep place, switched off the voice that knew all her weaknesses. She’d never had that, not with boys or girls. Sometimes she’d had fleeting moments of peace after fucking, but with Gretyl, it came easily, even without sex.
As the voice liked to remind her, the psychology of falling in love with an older woman when your own mother all but abandoned you wasn’t difficult. All the peace Iceweasel got from being engulfed in Gretyl’s embrace led to wondering whether she was giving Gretyl back anything in exchange.
She really wanted some time alone with Gretyl.
Limpopo slumped and Iceweasel saw something even rarer than Limpopo’s anger: exhaustion. “It may be self-serving bullshit that living walkaway will soften the hardest heart and convert pigopolist despoilers to post-scarcity Utopians, but it keeps me going, sometimes. Part of me wants to stay up doing forensics on the B&B’s log-files, finding the sellout, but the rest of me wants to live with the fantasy of unstoppable moral suasion. I know we don’t need everyone in the world to agree for this to work, but there’s got to be a critical mass of covered-dish people or we’ll never win.”
“Okay.” Gretyl broke her silence – she’d been prodding the screen in a way that radiated leave-me-alone-I’m-working (Gretyl was good at this). “What’s a ‘covered-dish’ person?”
“Oh. If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish; or b) a shotgun? It’s game-theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”
“Game-theory,” Gretyl said. “That’s the stag hunt. Two hunters together can catch a stag, the top prize. Either hunter alone can only catch rabbits. Both of them want to get stags, but unless they trust each other, they’ll have coney surprise for supper.”
“I didn’t know there was a name for it. Good to know. Once things have settled, I’ll have to do some reading. When things go bad, the stag is rebuilding something better than whatever’s burned down; the rabbit is huddling in a cave in terror, eating shoe-leather soup, hoping you don’t die of TB because there aren’t any hospitals anymore. I’ve always thought the whole walkaway project was a way to turn people into covered-dish types. There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”
Iceweasel smiled for the first time in a long time. “Put like that, it’s beautiful.”
Limpopo didn’t smile back. She looked too exhausted to smile. “I’d settle for plausible. Once you’ve been a shotgun person for a while, it’s hard to imagine anything else, and you start using stupid terms like ‘human nature’ to describe it. If being a selfish, untrusting asshole is human nature, then how do we form friendships? Where do families come from?”
“You’re assuming that families aren’t about acting like selfish, untrusting assholes,” Iceweasel said.
“The fact that your family is so fucked up is not proof that being fucked up is natural – it’s proof that shotgun people rot from the inside and their lives turn to shit.” She closed her eyes. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Iceweasel was surprised to discover it was true. The words were liberation, a framework for understanding what had made her, what she could become.
“Limpopo,” Gretyl said, “you look like chiseled shit. No offense.”
“None taken,” Limpopo said with a ghost of a smile.
“What would it take to make you sleep?”
Limpopo shrugged. “I don’t think I could at this point. I’ve gone through sleep and come out the other side.”
“I think that’s macho bullshit,” Gretyl said. She moved around, asked some others to move, rearranged packs and bags until there was a Limpopo-shaped space on the floor. “Lie down.” She patted her hands on her lap.
Limpopo looked from her to Iceweasel, the others, shrugged. “I’m not going to fall asleep, you know. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—”
“Silence, fool. Lie down.”
She did, her head settling into Gretyl’s lap. She locked eyes with Iceweasel, a nonverbal “Is this okay?” and Iceweasel smiled and stroked her greasy hair, a tousled short mess of spun sugar in pink and blue. They’d been in plenty of cuddle-puddles, but that was different. She and Gretyl locked eyes, they shared a smile. Her fear melted. Miraculously, it was not replaced by self-doubt. The rain, the breathing, the dim light, the cozy closeness made her feel, against all odds, safe.