Spin the Sky (10 page)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go sit down and put my head in a toilet. I wish we still had proper toilets, not these uncomfortable gizmos they got to conserve water, but a nice cool, white toilet.

Someday, kid, when you’re older, you come visit Manny and me. I will show you a toilet the way God intended toilets to be and if you leave your mom at home, I’ll make sure you drink enough liquor to truly appreciate a real toilet.

Please don’t tell your mom I talked to you at all, actually.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A
few weeks later, Cesar and Trevor walk back from town alongside the little mule as it pulls its cart. They have walked in silence for a whole five minutes, but Cesar knows it’s too good to last.

The boy is itching to ask him about his dad. Every chance Trevor gets, he asks for stories about his dad. At first, this was fine by Cesar, as he dearly loved to tell tales, especially daring adventures where the hero says something clever after foiling the bad guy and then he manfully folds a damsel under his bulging bicep. With so many years drifting in space and so little access to the Ether or other entertainments, he’s told plenty of tales.

True stories, however, are an entirely different matter he’s discovered. True stories about himself are not part of his normal repertoire. Cesar wants his son to know more about him and he’s thrilled to find Trevor so interested. He thought it would be easy to spin yarns of his actual adventures, just from the point of view of someone else.

He was wrong.

Cesar found it deeply unsettling to talk about himself in the third person.

Worse, Cesar didn’t know how to describe himself. He doesn’t want Trevor to think he’s a villain or an idiot, but he also doesn’t want the boy going out and trying any of the fool things he did. It is equally bizarre to talk about himself as a hero or glorify his actions. Most of the time, Cesar ends up telling the story baldly, stating the facts and trying to leave the whys and wherefores out of it.

And then there are the stories themselves—gory, ugly, depressing, bawdy, gross. None of his adventures in the past fifteen years seem like good topics for a teenage boy and Cesar can’t yet think of Trevor as a young man.

It’s just too much.

He’s almost been avoiding the boy for the last few days, but he couldn’t refuse Trevor’s request for company into town today to pick up supplies.

Hoping to avoid the inevitable for a few more minutes, Cesar asks, “Who won the Spacerbase game last night?”

Spacerbase is a game much played by kids growing up in orbitals. It’s basically full-contact capture-the-flag in high gravity. Cesar knows Trevor went to play with some other kids down in the Ag Level. Technically, the Ag Level on Ithaca isn’t really high gravity enough to count, but having played down there at least a thousand times himself, Cesar knows it is still fun.

“My team lost,” Trevor tells him. “The other guys had three cousins visiting from New Siberia and that’s a really high-grav colony. They creamed us. It was a bloodbath.”

Kids from high-gravity colonies love beating the pants off their contemporaries in less harsh environments. Trevor has been through this before and is unfazed.

The boy enthusiastically describes how one of the off-worlder cousins scored a point by grabbing Trevor’s head and using it as a springboard to the base. Cesar chuckles until Trevor returned to his favorite topic.

“Did my dad ever play Spacerbase?” asks Trevor, but Cesar is ready for this one.

“Of course he did,” Cesar says. “Everybody plays Spacerbase.”

“What about tether tantrum?” asks Trevor.

Tether tantrum is played in the null or low gravity parts of the colony. In Ithaca, this is one of the huge cargo bays in the large central tube that the rest of the colony rotates around.

It took the first orbital colonists very little time before they realized they needed to improve their spacesuits with tethers with magnetized latches that they could use to cast out and secure themselves and then unlatch when they needed. It took the kids in the colonies even less time to come up with fast and dangerous games to play with those tethers.

Tether tantrum is like dodgeball in null gravity with tethers. So once the balls are thrown, they keep ricocheting throughout the cargo bay until they hit someone or are caught up in a net. When there are twenty or thirty balls flying around with an equal number of players spinning themselves through the room on tethers, it can’t be anything but perilous and a whole lot of fun.

Cesar broke three fingers playing tether tantrum once and he tells Trevor so, rubbing them at the memory.

“What about Nullball?” asks Trevor.

Cesar exhales slowly. “Well kid, he wasn’t exactly a Nullball League superstar, but I think your dad told me that he played on the Ithaca team for a while before he left for the war. Then I think he played for a season in the minors, the Local L4 Lagrange League for the Hedonia colony team, I think he said. But they weren’t great teams or anything.”

Trevor only hears that his dad was a Nullball star and cries, “I knew it! I’m not great, but I practice Nullball every chance I get so I think I’ll probably get on Ithaca’s team. It’s not like there’s a
whole
lot of competition, but still it’s pretty nifty. That’s if I stay.”

Cesar tells the boy that Nullball is not a bad way to spend his time and they talk for a bit about this year’s upcoming Nullball League Playoff Tournament. Since it will be held at Ithaca this year, this is a subject of much discussion at the ranch. Ithaca’s team is strong but the Hathor Mining team is the favorite and Manny’s Mighties are also heavy contenders.

Regardless, Ithaca is determined to impress the rest of the colonies with the shininess of their orbital. They’ve all been cleaning and replacing lights and mirrors for weeks. Work finished, now they are just waiting for the games to begin.

That conversation peters out and they walk in silence for exactly ten seconds before Trevor asks, “Did you and my dad ever visit the Rasta Nation?”

“No, those Rasta guys kept themselves pretty quiet. Didn’t allow any visitors into that old research station they took over until just a few years ago and by then your dad was out of the loop.”

“Where was he?” Trevor wants to know.

Cesar replies after a pause, “I’m not really sure.”

Short answers never slow Trevor down. “Did you meet any Rastas during the War?”

Cesar sighs, “No, kid, those Rasta guys refused to take part in the War for religious reasons so I never met any of them during the fighting.”

“Oh!” cries Trevor, scandalized.

Cesar explains, “A few of the orbitals refused to take part. Most of them didn’t have weapons more powerful than sharpened spoons to throw at the enemy, so it didn’t make too much of a difference, but there was some bad blood after the war. Rasta Nation at least would take in refugees from colonies that were hit hard.”

Cesar watches Trevor fidget out of the corner of his eye and sighs again. The boy won’t give up until he gets a tale so Cesar decides to tell him one. To attempt it anyway.

“We did visit the Poppy Ship. It was really a small colony, but they called it a ship. Before the War, they produced medicines.”

Trevor pipes up, “So you knew him before the War, too?”

Cesar shakes his head, trying to get his stories and lies straight. “No, I don’t think so. I think we met during the War. I, uh, took a couple hard knocks to the head so my memory isn’t great, if you want to know the truth.”

Trevor’s face takes on the vaguely sympathetic look that teenagers get when someone tells them something tragic that they don’t really understand.

“Oh,” he says somberly.

Cesar continues, “This time we went to the Poppy Ship was about a year after the War. Your dad was finally healed up from all the hits he took in combat. He started a small trading business with a ship he was able to fix up and the men from his platoon.”

Here Cesar pauses, struggles with himself for a minute and then confesses, “Alright, so really it was more in the way of a smuggling business. Your Dad was running black market items to and from Earth.”

“Oh,” says Trevor, digesting that fact. “But I thought the war was over? How could there still be smuggling after the blockade ended?”

“Well, there’s winning and there’s winning, as it turns out,” Cesar replies, still a little bitter after all these years.

“Plenty of places on Earth were still pretty angry, so plenty of ports were closed. There were others places that weren’t officially closed, but Spacers would be gunned down or thrown in some dank prison the minute they popped the airlocks. We learned which was which pretty quick.”

“Wow,” breathes Trevor. “And my dad’s men still wanted to follow him into danger after the War?”

Cesar nods.

The kid makes it sound almost heroic, but at the time it seemed normal. Those who hadn’t headed home would want some employment and he should find it for them. Cesar mutters, “Well, yes. You spend enough years working with someone on the art of not dying and you form some strong friendships.”

“Because my dad was a commander,” says Trevor, puffing his chest out. “You followed him too? And you snuck in and out under the Earthers’ noses going wherever you wanted regardless of the law? Wow!”

“It wasn’t glamorous or anything,” Cesar protests quickly. “Weeks of boring coasting so they wouldn’t pick up your heat signal followed by a few days trying not to attract too much attention buying up all the oranges in town or whatever. Half the time nobody really cared, so we were taken by surprise when some hothead started taking potshots at our ride and we had to make a run for it. And then you make it back and the goons that sent you out want to haggle you down to half the price you agreed on because the fruit has a few bruises.”

“Huh,” says Trevor, but Cesar can see the boy doesn’t quite believe how boring and uncomfortable smuggling was.

Cesar says blandly, “Most of the time we were stuck eating protein bars, when we could get them, and chicken-little when we couldn’t.”

Trevor wrinkled his nose. “No way,” he says, looking at Cesar to see if he is playing a joke.

“Nope,” Cesar replies with relish after seeing the disgusted look on the boy’s face. “Chicken-little is the main food source for smugglers. You can’t eat the food you’re smuggling. Too valuable. You ever eat chicken-little, kid?”

“Once,” gulps Trevor, looking a little green at the memory. “My mom made me because I wouldn’t eat my vegetables. She said I needed to know how lucky I was to have vegetables.”

Chicken-little is a bioengineered protein source that, at one time long in the past, was a chicken. If you dig around in the box, you find what is left of its digestive tract and maybe an eye and sometimes a beak.

If you poke it, it twitches and quivers. Cutting off a chunk to eat is not an appetizing experience. In theory, you don’t have to cook it because no bacteria will grow on a chicken-little.

Technically, you can survive eating nothing but chicken-little for months, but most people agree that a life like that wouldn’t be worth living. It comes in a box and requires only occasional water to regenerate for decades. Most Spacers would rather eat their boots than choke down a serving of chicken-little. It’s banned in eight countries down on the Earth.

Cesar replies, “Your dad ate more than his fair share of chicken-little in the War and after. It puts hair on your chest. You don’t want to let it touch your skin too much, though. Always gave me a rash.”

“Wow,” Trevor says again. Then he shakes his head and returns to what, for him, is the important point of the story. “You guys were smugglers? That’s so cool!”

Cesar’s heart lifts, watching the wiry boy grin gleefully, but clearly this is not the impression he was hoping to make on the boy.

“So we heard about the Poppy Ship and wanted to check it out,” Cesar says loudly. “We heard they had been making medicines before the war. Nice boring medicines that healed sick people.”

Trevor seems to surface from whatever smuggling daydream he has been swimming in, so Cesar goes on in a milder voice. “They’d been out of touch for a while. We thought if they were still alive and making medicine, we could help them get their stuff out. Trade it for goods and all. Plenty of orbitals were desperate for quality meds.”

Trevor grins, “And if they all died, there’s probably be a goldmine of medicines left for you to scavenge!”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Cesar admits, looking at his feet. That was something he’d thought of, too. Trevor is so much like him that sometimes it’s downright creepy.

Running a hand through his hair, Cesar says quickly, “But we were hoping they were all alive. Because you always hope for live people instead of bodies to scavenge, even if it means more money.”

He looks so sanctimonious that Trevor wipes the grin off his face and nods solemnly.

“At any rate, they were alive, but they weren’t so much into making medicines any more,” Cesar says, thinking it was time to focus on the story and wondering how to frame this next part. “Or at least, they had decided to focus on just one kind of medicine.”

“What do you mean?” asks Trevor.

•

It took Cesar much longer than he planned to find the Poppy Ship. It had wandered pretty far off its course. The truth of the matter was that at some point during the war, the Poppy Ship’s chief engineer died of a heart attack and, as far as Cesar was ever able to discover, got replaced by a total moron. When Cesar located the ship, it was slowly drifting off into void space. Not that the people on the ship cared. Not that they noticed.

When Cesar popped his airlock and stepped out, he’d expected a pristine hospital ship with lots of clean people in white lab coats bustling down well lit and clearly labeled hallways. As he looked around, it was clear that at one point he might have found that scene, but that was a long time ago. It was hazy and dim and the air tasted faintly oily. Low mellow music piped thinly through the halls.

“Boys, go check it out,” Cesar barked without looking at his crew.