Walkaway

by Cory Doctorow

  “I’m coming. Find me a cluster and carry it on. I’m going with.”

  “You could just phone in,” Tam said. She had enough complications.

  “Not if they kill the network. I’ll leave a backup here. But I’m going with.”

  “Etcetera,” Tam said, in her most reasonable voice.

  “I’m going with.”

  Seth shook his head at her, mouthed go with it.

  “You’re going with,” she said.

  “Get packed,” he said.

  [iii]

  The bumbler touched down in the parking lot of an old mall on the west side of town the next day, crewed by a grinning gang of old Brazilians, men with dreads in their thinning hair, women with surefooted rolling walks like sailors. Stan and Jacob were immediately adopted by the crew’s kids, whose status was somewhat mysterious—they were from an orphanage in Recife which had run out of funding. The kids ended up in a makeshift camp, which hadn’t gone well, and these aerialists took them in and brought them into their enormous, beautiful zeppelins, decorated like the legendary baloeiro balloons that had plied the Brazilian skies for centuries.

  However these kids ended up in the sky, they took to it like fish to water. Within minutes, Stan and Jacob were barefoot and climbing rigging, barely shouting good-bye at their mothers, who watched them go with trepidation and pride.

  They’d struggled with packing. It had been so long since they’d been voluntary refugees, even longer since they’d been involuntary ones. They’d conferenced their common rooms. Marshaled their minimum carry, using the house spirits to keep track of who was bringing what to cut down on duplication. Spouses, kids, and housemates piled ever-more stuff into the to-be-packed pile. They laughed nervously. They hadn’t become shleppers, had they?

  Seth and Iceweasel shared hilarity and horror. They told the story of Limpopo engineering the divestment of their worldly possessions on their first day in the B&B. Limpopo-the-house-spirit sputtered and objected she’d done no such thing. They’d had a mock fight that was slightly deadly serious. They hawed and horse-traded their way down to a small pack each, plus another bag for the two boys, whose prodigious aptitude for enfilthening even the dirt-sheddingest fabrics was balanced by indifference to their own cleanliness.

  “They’ll be dirty,” Gretyl said. “They’ll survive. Good for the immune system.”

  Once aboard the Gilbert Gil, they realized they could have brought ten times as much. The Brazilians had just dumped a load of high-quality plastics polymerized out of a toxic swamp in Florida by smart bacteria. All that was left of the cargo was the smell, not exactly unpleasant. It reminded Iceweasel of the wrapping on the really high-end cosmetics her mother favored.

  They bustled around the huge, hangar-sized hold, working with the aerialists to reconfigure it for sleeping quarters, clicking panels into grooves in the floor and fitting roof sections over them to build a village of hexayurts. Iceweasel was glad they hadn’t brought more. There was every chance that they’d do some walking—real walking, walkaway walking—on this trip. The boys were going to be trouble enough without a lot to carry. The bumbler had favorable winds to take it all the way to Niagara Falls or even Toronto. But they were called “bumblers” for a reason. If Old Man Climate Change handed them one of his quotidian thousand-year-storms, they’d have to find other arrangements.

  Gretyl went for bedrolls, using the Gil’s house spirit to tell her where everything was stashed. The house spirits were descended from wares that powered the B&B, a mix of quartermaster, scorekeeper, and confessor, designed to help everyone know everything as needed. She’d been so taken with the B&B’s paleolithic version of this stuff. Now it was everywhere, some of it even powered by the living dead, like Limpopo in Gary. That was too weird, even for her. She could talk with sims, provided that she didn’t think about it too hard. But the idea of having one as a haunt who wore your house like its body, that was just fucked up.

  Etcetera gabbled in machine-Portuguese with the aerialists, who snapped together dining tables for their welcoming feast, with help from Seth and Tam. She’d had an earbud implanted a couple years before, when she’d started to have trouble with her hearing after a bad fever that crossed the country. The bud murmured a translation to her that only sometimes entered the realm of machine-trans garble.

  The Brazilians bragged on the Gil—its lift and handling characteristics; the strength and resilience of the redundant graphene cells; their prowess as navigators, able to find fair winds where no algorithm predicted. Etcetera gave every sign of being delighted, spoke knowledgeably about the ships that preceded the Gil, wonderful things coming out of Thailand, where airships were different in some important, highly technical way she didn’t understand.

  The kids arrived in time for food, though judging from the food already smudged around their faces they had been introduced to a kitchen fabber somewhere in the ship’s deeps. She collected jammy kisses from both, resisted the urge to clean their faces with spit, was introduced to new friends, a range of ages and genders. An older boy named Rui—old enough to have a bit of a mustache, an Adam’s apple, and a mix of self-assuredness with kids and awkwardness with adults—told her in accented English how great her boys were and how he would teach them all they needed to be fliers. She thanked him in absolutely awful Portuguese, prompted by the implanted bud. He smiled and blushed and ducked his head in a way that made her want to take him home and raise him.

  “You boys ready for lunch?” Gretyl asked, coming up with a fan of plates bearing scop meat-ite skewers that smelled amazing, garnished with feijoada and heaps of hydroponic vegetables. The boys looked guiltily at one another, and Gretyl instantly clocked the sweet, sticky stuff around their mouths.

  “Looks like you’ve already had dessert. Hope that doesn’t mean you think you’re not going to eat lunch, too.” Gretyl was the family disciplinarian. If it was up to Iceweasel, the kids would eat ice cream and candy three meals a day. She’d join them. Gretyl kept them from dying of malnutrition. Her word was law.

  The boys nodded and took plates. Rui took in all the salient details of their family arrangements and led the kids to a spot at the table, promising they’d eat every bite.

  Gretyl handed Iceweasel one of the remaining plates and they found a spot at a table, surrounded by crew members who joked and made them feel at home.

  “This is amazing food,” Iceweasel said, chasing the last curly carrot with her forkchops.

  “We got new starter cultures from Cuba,” a crewwoman explained. She was beautiful, tall, with a shaved head, a wasp waist and wide hips, and skin the color of burnt sugar. Iceweasel and Gretyl had both snuck looks at her when they thought the other wasn’t looking, then caught each other. Her name was Camila. Her English was excellent. “You program it with lights during division-cycle, causes it to express different flavor- and texture-profiles.”

  “It’s incredible,” Gretyl said.

  “We’ll give you some to take when you go. The Cubans eat like kings.”

  There was white pudding for dessert, made with the last of the ship’s supply of real coconut and tapioca cultured from Cuban scop. Neither Gretyl or Iceweasel had enough experience of tapioca to say whether it was faithful, but it was just as tasty as lunch and Camila assured them that even a tapioca farmer couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Do you need any more crew?” Iceweasel said, jokingly. “I want to eat like this every day.”

  Camila looked grave. “We have no more crew berths, sorry to say.” She contemplated the crowded tables. “It’s something we’re arguing about. It’s a good crew, a good ship. Some of us want to bud off a new one, start another crew. We’ve got something so wonderful, it should grow. Others say there’s something in the chemistry of this group, and if we split up, it would go. The children are growing, many of them think they will be aerialists. We’ll need more ships.”

  “Is that why you’re heading to Ontario?”

  Camila nodded. “The
zeppelin bubble was a long time ago, but there’s still many comrades there who know how to build and want to help. Your Etcetera has been putting us in touch with others. He’s a hero to many, for his valor with the Better Nation.”

  Now Iceweasel and Gretyl looked grave. Neither of them talked about that day often, though it was a rallying cry for walkaways all over the world, eventually. Camila understood.

  “What a time to be alive. If we do make another ship, we should call it The Next Days of a Better Nation.”

  “That’s a terrible name for a ship,” Etcetera said. His voice was tinny and clipped from the acoustic properties of their table, which he used for a speaker.

  “No one asked you, dead man,” Iceweasel said.

  “‘Better nation’ talk needs to die in a fire. We’re not doing nations anymore. We’re doing people, doing stuff. Nations mean governments, passports, borders.”

  Camila rapped on the table with her knuckles. “There’s nothing wrong with a border, so long as it isn’t too rigid. Our cells hold in the lift gas, they make borders with the atmosphere. My skin is a border for my body, it lets in the good and keeps out the bad. You have your borders, like all sims, which keep you stable and running. We don’t need no borders, just good ones.”

  They were off, arguing intently, a discussion familiar to the aerialist world. It turned into jargon about “airspace priority” and “wind immunity” and “sovereign rights of way,” lost on Iceweasel and Gretyl. They bussed their plates into a hopper that slurped them out of their hands, made sure that Rui made good on his promise to get the boys to eat their protein and veg. Lay down in each other’s arms in their hexayurt for a nap. It had been a busy couple of days.

  Gretyl nuzzled her throat. “No leaving me for hot Brazilian aerialists.”

  Iceweasel arched her neck. “It’s mutual.”

  They were asleep in minutes.

  [iv]

  The zepp took just over a day to reach Toronto, circling to avoid the city’s exclusion zone, trailing aggro drones that zoomed up to the portholes to scan them and take pictures. The winds over Lake Ontario sucked. They had to rise and sink and putter and bumble for most of the rest of a day until they caught a breeze that’d take them to Pickering. Everyone agreed that it was the best place for a landing, far from paranoid zottas holed up in Toronto, insistent their nation had plenty of days to go before it was ready to make way for another, better or not.

  They touched down amid a crowd: aerialists and onlookers who helped stake down the guy-lines and fix the ramp in place (making “safety third” jokes, but ensuring that it was solid before anyone descended the gangway).

  The Limpopo reunion party hit the ramp blinking. Seth staggered under the weight of Etcetera’s cluster, which he wore in eleven chunks about his body—wristbands, a backpack, a belt, bandolier-slung bricks, some rings. The aerialists followed, led by the children, Jacob and Stan among them, wearing fresh-printed air-pirate gear, head scarves, and blousy shirts and tights patterned with photo-realistic trompe l’oeil chain mail. They collected hugs and complicated handshakes and kisses from their new friends, and returned them with gusto, speaking more Portuguese than they had any right to have acquired in such a short journey.

  The touchdown area was a school’s field. The school was a low-slung brick thing, a century old, abandoned for decades and reopened by force majeure, judging from the gay paint job and the banners, the solar skins and wind-sails on the roof.

  Tam squinted at it, remembering her own school, built on the same template but run by a private services company that shut down half the building to save facilities costs, putting steel shutters over the windows and leaving it to glower at the paved-over play areas.

  “Nice, huh?” The girl was not more that sixteen, cute as a cute thing, round face and full, purplish lips. Tam thought she might be Vietnamese or Cambodian. She had a bit of acne. Her jet-black, straight hair was chopped into artful mess.

  “This your school?”

  “It’s our everything. Technically, it belongs to a bullshit holding company that bought the town out of bankruptcy. Happened when I was little, we got a special administrator everyone hated, next thing, it’s bankruptcy and they were shutting it down, putting up fences. Final straw was when they stopped the water. Town went independent automatically after that. Kids did the school.”

  “Cool.” Tam enjoyed the girl’s obvious pride. “You go to classes in there?”

  The girl grinned. “Don’t believe in ’em. We do peer workshops. I’m a calculus freak of nature, got a group of freaklings I’m turning into my botnet.”

  Tam nodded. “Never got calculus. That lady over there with the little boy under each arm is a hero of mathematics.”

  The girl bugged her eyes out. “Duh. No offense. Why do you think I’m here? Chance to meet Gretyl? Shit. Biggest thing to hit this town since forever.” She stared intently at Gretyl. “Her proofs are so beautiful.”

  “Want to meet her?”

  The girl crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue, so perfectly adorable it had to have been practiced at great length. Tam barked a laugh, covered her mouth and, to her hard-bitten horror, giggled.

  “She’ll like you,” Tam said.

  “She’d better,” the girl said, and took her arm.

  Gretyl lost her grip on Jacob as they neared and, sensing the tide, released Stan to tear-ass after his little brother and bring him to the ground. Tam waved her down. “Yo,” she said.

  Gretyl dramatically face-palmed at the kids’ retreating backs, then smiled at Tam and the girl.

  “Gretyl, this is—”

  The girl, who had blushed to the tips of her ears, murmured Hoa.

  “Hoa. She’s a fan. Loves calculus. Came here to meet you.”

  Gretyl beamed at the girl and threw open her big arms and enfolded her in a hug. “Pleasure to meet you.”

  The girl’s blush was all-encompassing.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too, Gretyl. I use your calculus slides in my workshops.”

  “Glad to hear it!”

  “I made some improvements.” Her voice was a whisper.

  “You did?” Gretyl roared. The girl shrank and might have run off if Gretyl hadn’t caught her hands. “I insist you show them to me, right now.”

  The girl lost her shyness. She shook out a screen and took Gretyl through her changes. “The kids kept getting mixed up when we did derivative applications at the end, because without applications when we did the rest of it, limits and derivatives, it was going in one ear and out the other, just rote. When I started to mix in applications as we went, they were better at putting it together at the end.”

  Gretyl’s jolly-old-lady act slipped away. She brought down her huge eyebrows.

  “Aren’t applications without theory confusing? Without theory, they can’t solve the applications—”

  The girl cut her off with a shake of head, crazy hair all over the place. “You just need to be careful which applications you choose. You see…” She produced charts showing how she’d assessed examples with each group. Tam could tell Gretyl was loving this. She was also sure the girl was right about everything. She liked this town.

  “Ready to go?” Seth said. He’d tightened the straps on the cluster and wore a speaker on a necklace for Etcetera to use. Tam made herself not stare at it—it was tempting to think of that as Etcetera’s face. But his visual input came from thirty vantage points.

  “Soon.” She pointed. “Gretyl’s got an admirer.”

  Etcetera made an impatient noise. “That’s great, but we need to hit the road. It’s three, four days’ walk from here, assuming we don’t get bikes or a ride.”

  “I know. We still have to say good-bye to the Gil, hello to these people, and good-bye to them. It’s called sociability, Etcetera. Accommodate yourself.”

  Seth snorted. Etcetera was silent, possibly sulking. Tam imagined that he was saying unkind things about the living in his internal monologue. She recalle
d his on-the-record statements about Limpopo’s choice to live as a house spirit. She crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out, and heard Hoa and Gretyl laugh and turned to see them looking.

  She gave them the face, making a Harpo googie of it. Hoa responded with her own, and rubber-faced Gretyl made one that put theirs to shame.

  “You win. You two made the world safe for calculus yet?”

  “Done.” They grinned.

  “When do we start?” Tam looked at the boys, now in a relatively zeppelin-free corner of the field with some local kids and some aerialists, kicking a ball around in a game that involved a lot of screaming and tackling and possibly no rules.

  “You’re covered,” Hoa said. “We’ve got bikes coming out of our assholes here.”

  “Sounds painful,” Seth said. Hoa made her face.

  “We’re into deconstructed bikes, minimal topologies.”

  Tam saw Gretyl and Seth nodding. She suppressed her irritation. She tried to understand the attraction of minimal topology, but it just looked … unfinished. The drive to reduce overall material volume of mechanical solids had been a project in both default and walkaway for decades, minimizing feedstock use in each part, getting better at modeling the properties of cured feedstock. Familiar things grew more improbably gossamer. Everything was intertwingled tensegrity meshes that cross-braced themselves when stressed, combining strength and suppleness. It was scary enough in bookcase or table form, everything looking like it was about to collapse all the time. When applied to bicycles, the technique nauseated her with fear, as the bike deformed and jiggled through the imperfections in the roads.

  “Great,” she managed.

  Hoa nodded. “We’re ahead of everyone else. I did one last month that only weighs ninety grams! Without the wheels. You’d get seven hundred kay out of it before it flumfed.”

  That was the other thing about minimal topology. It had catastrophic failure modes. A single strut giving way caused a cascade of unraveling chaotic motion that could literally reduce a bike frame to a pile of 3D–printed twigs in thirty seconds. People swore the bike’s self-braking mechanisms would bring it to a safe halt before it disintegrated. But if they could model the cataclysmic collapse so well, why couldn’t they prevent it?