There had been tears in her eyes.
Her father said, “Things aren’t what you think. You think you’ve found a way everyone can get along without bosses. There are always bosses – if you don’t know who the boss is, you can’t question her leadership. A system of secret bosses is a system without accountability or consent. It’s a manipulocracy.”
She looked at the merc, wondering if she was following this, whether she appreciated the irony of her father – her father – criticizing society on the grounds that it was run from behind the scenes by shadowy fixers and string-pullers.
He caught her look. He nodded and made a charming face. “Takes one to know one, daughter-mine. If I can’t recognize a conspiracy, who could?”
“When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” She regretted saying it. Why argue with her fucking father? He won as soon as you acknowledged there was a debate.
He knew it. He smiled wider, put on a frowny, thinky face. “I understand what you’re saying. We all see ourselves reflected in data. Analysis is subjective. But Natalie, I’m not asking you to take what I’m saying at face value. I want you to look at the data yourself, see if what I’m saying is true. That’s not monstrous, is it?”
“No. Kidnapping and administration of pain-weapons is monstrous. This is just bullshit.”
“I get you’re angry. I’d be angry. But if I was brainwashed by a cult – if I couldn’t understand what was going on – I would want you to do everything you could to get me to understand what was happening. You have my permission to do everything I’ve done here, to me, if I am ever in the grips of some irrational impulse that puts me in imminent and grave danger.”
Natalie restrained herself from snorting. Not to spare his feelings, but because derision was acknowledgment, another chance for him to argue. Give him a millimeter, he’d take a parsec. That’s how you became a zotta. It’s how he’d been raised. It was how she’d been raised, which scared the shit out of her, especially these days. She was back in her father’s demesne. In this house, there was so much pressure to accept the easy justifications. Some people had to be on top, some on the bottom, big and little cornflakes. Besides, the Redwaters weren’t really rich; not rich rich, not like Jacob’s cousin Tony Redwater.
“Believe me, if there was any other way, I would take it. I don’t want this. I want my daughter back. I know what you’re capable of. It’s why I kept you close to home, made sure you knew what went on behind the scenes. You could put it all together.”
Even though she knew he was flattering her, it worked. Goddamn him, and goddamn her, too. She knew her dad’s bullshit. Even so, something inside her rolled over and preened when Daddy said nice things.
“That’s what I want you to do. Pull it together.” He twiddled his interface surfaces and a piece of wall slid away, revealing a huge touchscreen, stretching across the room’s width. It was showing a screensaver, the manufacturer’s loop of kids playing lacrosse, blond and lanky, with muscular legs and horsey white teeth. Not zottas, because zottas didn’t need to pose for screensaver photos. But they looked like zottas. Maybe they were actors. Or CGI.
Her dad made the image go away and replaced it with a social graph. In the graph’s middle, like a gas giant surrounded by a thousand moons, was a circle labeled LIMPOPO [Luiza Gil], a circular cameo of Limpopo, looking younger and scowling ferociously, like she wanted to kick the photographer’s ass. Around her, the moons of various sizes were labeled with the names of her friends, all the walkaways. Just seeing those names made her mist with unbearable nostalgia. The feeling of being away from her true family was a clawed thing gnawing at her guts.
“Look at it, okay?” He turned to go. The merc followed, contriving to keep an eye on Natalie without walking out backwards. Natalie hardly noticed, because she was trying not to smile, because she’d just noticed Etcetera’s disc, and the minuscule type the system used to render his name in full.
She drifted over to the wall and caressed Etcetera’s circle, as though she were caressing him, and the graph jumped into life, helpfully arranging itself to better convey its meaning.
[XI]
“WE ARE WELL and truly at vuko jebina now,” Tam declared. She’d learned the phrase from Kersplebedeb, who said it was Serbian for deepest boonies, literally, “where wolves fuck.” Tam loved this phrase, to no one’s surprise.
Seth looked from side to side. The snow started an hour after they set out. It hadn’t been in the meteorological projections, normal for decades of weird weather. The first flakes were pretty, turning poisoned countryside into a Christmas card of birches and pines iced with fluffy snow like iced gingerbread. Toxic icing, but they weren’t going to eat it and, as Seth had inevitably pointed out, sugar was only slightly better for you than asbestos.
Pocahontas’s friends were welcoming, though they had little to call their own. They weren’t from one band, but were a commune living on territory the Quebec government had turned over in reparations for jail time, each of them exonerated by physical evidence, sometimes after decades of lock up. It had been the work of a Mohawk legal collective in Quebec City, and after a string of these, they’d been audited, audited again, investigated by the Law Society, and half their lawyers were disbarred and found themselves with full-time jobs saving themselves.
The community was called Dead Lake. It sported a few windmills and some second-rate fuel cells the residents had carefully coaxed into performing better than anyone could believe. Even Gretyl was impressed. Tam marveled at their improvements. Their technical crew relieved the wagon of the suit-fabbers and started assembling them. It took less than a day. That evening, all thirty residents came to the utility shed to watch them run.
Gretyl, Tam, and Seth were invited to a modest dinner, printed stuff with feedstock from down south because game around Thetford was poison and the Dead Lakers knew better than to eat it. Conversation was merry, if stilted. The Dead Lakers thought walkaways were crazy, or maybe silly, and didn’t hide it. They liked walkaways, and provided wonderful hospitality, but it was clear these folks didn’t rate the walkaways’ chances of getting anything done. For them, walkaway was a lifestyle and a hobby. Seth bristled because it was his deepest fear and also his turf – he could make fun of walkaways, but who were these people to tell him what to do? He’d buried his sarcasm, because the Dead Lakers knew the difference between a joke-joke and a ha-ha-only-serious joke, and Seth liked to live on that edge.
He was relieved to go the next morning. They hit the trail to Thetford in suits, riding the empty cargo wagon as it rumbled across the deep snow at a slow walking pace, sometimes nosing down precipitously as it discovered drop-offs, sometimes listing so far to one side they were nearly thrown.
The snow had started, about an hour out. Flakes, swirling clouds, then, whiteout.
“Vuko jebina, huh?” he said. There were trees somewhere – the wagon’s radar automatically avoided them, but it was turning again and again. Its collision-avoidance systems were fubared. This was definitely the place where wolves fucked.