Neither knew what to say. Seth was trying for something smartassed. Etcetera tried to figure out what this meant in the great scheme. She could almost hear their thoughts. Before either could say something stupid, she gathered them into a hug, reveling in their familiar smells. Their arms tangled then found their way. The hug went on and on.
When they undocked, Gretyl and Limpopo were standing by, grinning like proud parents. She and Gretyl had scored a private hexayurt for the night, and she’d felt low-grade, anticipatory horniness ever since she learned they’d be alone. Now, with the boys in her arms and Gretyl looking on with Limpopo – so fucking hardcore and so hot, she’d had a low-grade crush on her for years – her horniness spiked with toe-curling intensity. She laughed at the sheer physicality. The boys laughed along, though who knew why. She was no longer inside their heads. That was okay. They were walkaways, and god help them, they’d figured out how to live as though it were the first days of a better nation, and she was going to get her brains fucked out that night. The world was good.
The sex was everything she’d hoped for and then some. There’d been a moment beside each other, legs tangled, hands working furiously, eyes locked, when she’d experienced time-dilation that would have been scary under other circumstances, a moment that literally felt like an eternity, and when it crescendoed with an orgasm that made her legs kick like a galvanized frog, she’d been disappointed to see it go.
Then they talked in the way of lovers. In the way of lovers, what began as murmurs about one another’s beauty and prowess, with strategic kisses and snuffling each other’s scents, a walkaway from everything suddenly veered into the default of life among the walkaways.
“It’s a nice idea, but it’s ultimately childish,” Gretyl said. “The idea that there’s no objective merit. You can believe that if you do something qualitative. But in math, it’s easy to see who’s got merit. There’s no sense in pretending every dolt is Einstein in waiting.”
“Einstein failed math,” Iceweasel said quickly. Einstein came up a lot in discussions like this.
“That wasn’t math, that was arithmetic. People who can do sums in their head aren’t doing math, they’re just calculating. No person will ever calculate as well as the dumbest computers. It’s a party trick. Arithmetic isn’t math. Knowing which arithmetic to do is math.”
Iceweasel sighed. The science crew treated the B&Bers with patronizing amusement when the subject came up, but she’d assumed her Gretyl was on-side.
“No one can do science on her own, right? Look at what Dis and CC did, it was such a team effort, everyone had to contribute, and even with all that, we don’t know if we’ll get CC back.”
Gretyl rolled on her side, let one of her small, clever hands trail down Iceweasel’s body from chin to pubis, resting on her thigh. No lover had touched her that way. It made her shiver. Gretyl had such a powerful hold on her. It scared her, in a good, sexually charged way. When Gretyl worked on her, face fixed in an expression of extreme concentration, she experienced absolute surrender.
Now Iceweasel moved her hand off her leg. The discussion was serious and she wanted to have her wits about her. Limpopo had explained it so clearly. She didn’t want to let her down.
“We were all needed for the upload project. There are others around the world who are also indispensable. But not everyone is indispensable. Look at what you did for Dis, keeping her spirits up and distracting her. You were very good, but there are others who are just as good. If you hadn’t been there, someone else would have done the job.
“Now take Dis. She was indispensable. We couldn’t bring her back without her! We’re in different fields, but I follow hers closely. There likely isn’t anyone else in the world who can do what she does. She is literally one of a kind. I’m not one of a kind – I’m good, but at the end of the day, I’m an applied mathematician with pretenses to pure math. There are pure math people who spend ten years contemplating the algebra necessary to prove the topological equivalence of a coffee cup and a donut. Wizards from another dimension. Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who’d do your job every bit as well. Especially when you’re supporting the one person who really can’t be replaced.”
“I’ve heard this all. My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. I told him: he might have an ‘indispensable’ skill for running the business, but he couldn’t do it himself. The reason everyone else shows up to help him isn’t because of his magic ‘indispensable’ skill, either. It’s because they need money, and he has it.”
Gretyl’s jaw worked. “You’re assuming that because zottas talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there. Astrologers talk about orbital mechanics because it sounds sciencey and helps them kid the suckers.”
“My dad’s an astrologer then?”
“That’s an insult to astrologers.” They laughed. Some of the tension boiled off of Iceweasel. They’d bonded over talking shit about her dad. Gretyl used him as an avatar of every evil of the system. Iceweasel was pleased to go along with that for her own reasons. “Your dad is like a bloated duke who’s hired court astrologers to sacrifice chickens and reassure him that he’s the cat’s ass.”
“You’re talking about economists,” she said.
“Of course I’m talking about economists! I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.”
Iceweasel stiffened. She knew Gretyl was kidding, but didn’t like to be told she “wasn’t qualified” to have a discussion, even in jest. She pushed the feeling down, strove to access the part of her that lit up when Limpopo described this stuff.
If Gretyl noticed, she gave no sign: “Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a sciencey vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. Like job creator. As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing.
“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.
“I used to watch you kids do your Communist parties, when I was in default and pretending any of that shit mattered. I’d get so angry at you, beyond any sane response. It wasn’t until I walked away that I figured out why: because every time you broke into an empty factory and turned the machines on, you proved I was a plow horse whose poor lips had been scarred by the bit in my teeth as I pulled a cart for the man with the whip and the feedbag.