Spin the Sky (7 page)

But she refuses to touch a single hair until he parts ways with his filthy undershirt so she can give it a good scrub. Cesar doesn’t want to get practically naked in anybody’s front yard, especially this one.

He is careful to keep Lupe from seeing the large scar on his thigh. He’d gotten it as a youngster, the day he learned that cows may look stupid, but they bite pretty hard when you poke them with a stick. Lupe had been the one to stitch it up.

He remembers the lectures she gave him and all the soup she made him drink after that. If she sees the scar, she’ll recognize him for sure.

Lupe grunts, “Cleaned up you don’t look half-bad, mister. Especially now that you got a little color back in your cheeks. Thought you was a ghost that first day, staggering around half-dead like you were.”

Caesar laughs his thanks. He is getting dressed when four women round the corner of the main house. They are all wearing the traditional roughneck uniform of boots, jeans and bandannas. They stop to stare when they see him. Three or four burst out laughing.

“
Abuela
, there’s a naked old man in the yard,” a freckle-faced girl drawls.

Even though he’s got on underpants and an undershirt, Cesar curls up in a very embarrassed ball, quickly yanking on pants and a shirt.

“Not that old,” a blond with pigtails giggles as she eyes the wiry body he scrambles to cover up.

“You girls are wicked,” Lupe says, threatening to hose them down if they come any closer. “A good shower will clean out your dirty minds.”

“You are so right, Mama Lupe. I’ll take one right now if this nice man will wash my back,” the dark-skinned blond winks at him as they all saunter inside, giggling and swishing their hips. He throws on the rest of his clothes quickly, but Lupe just laughs.

“Like they can see anything through all that hair,” she clucks. But when Lupe surveys her handiwork with respect to his hair and beard, she is satisfied.

“Where did they come from anyway?” Cesar asks, retreating into the bunkhouse.

“Just now, they come from the Ag level, tending the herd. We’ve got a private elevator,” Lupe can’t help bragging.

Looking after the women, she snorts, “They call themselves cowgirls, if you can believe such a thing. They eat like cows, that’s for sure.”

Lupe starts towards the main house, her mind on cooking. Cesar knows this because she tells him so. He wonders if the woman has been talking nonstop these last fifteen years.

“No other cowboys here on the ranch?” asks Cesar, pausing in the doorway of his little room.

Lupe shakes her head. “No. The lady won’t have them. Except for Argos. Those are his old clothes I’m giving you. All of these girls showed up like driftwood with nasty stories from other orbitals. She takes ’em in, puts them to work until they are strong enough to do for themselves. They keep her gentlemen callers on their toes too. She likes to take in strays, that one.” Lupe plainly does not approve.

“Lucky for you,” she adds. Then she turns and fixes him with a piercing gaze. “Mister, I need to start calling you by a name, don’t you think?”

“Ulixes. Call me Jonas Ulixes,” he lies smoothly. He’s used the name before but never on this side of the stars. He runs a hand through his cropped hair, testing the feel of it.

Lupe snorts, but Cesar isn’t sure what that means. “Well, Mr. Ulixes. You sure look like you been run over by a tractor and then maybe someone backed up to finish the job. Where’d you get all those scars?”

“That’s a lot of stories. A lot of long stories. Mostly from the War. Some after.” He closes his eyes remembering.

She turns back to the big house. “So tuck your shirt in and you can tell me one while you help me with lunch,” Lupe calls over her shoulder.

CHAPTER SIX

T
hey are sitting down to eat on long bac-wood tables, listening to Argos spin tales in the large dining room, warmed by midday light and the heat of the kitchen next to it. Cesar insisted he needed some time to think of one suitable for mixed company and Argos was happy to oblige with a tale of his own while Cesar thought it over. Penelope finished her work early and is happy to join Cesar, Trevor and the cowgirls for lunch.

Argos drawls, “No one ever thought our war, the Spacer War they call it now in the history archives, would last as long as it did.”

The cowgirls glance at the older man occasionally, but they are more interested in shoveling down their food as fast as they can. Although the table is heavy with hot dishes, the women work hard, play harder, and always fight over the last of Lupe’s homemade tortillas. Cesar has picked a seat where he can watch Penelope daintily sip coffee and Trevor inhale lunch while occasionally snatching second helpings of beans or whatever else was closest.

He reached for the
queso
earlier and almost got stabbed by a cowgirl’s sharp fork. There is one girl sitting at the end cutting her enchiladas with a Bowie knife. Cesar notices the way there is plenty of space between her and the girl sitting next to her.

Argos takes a sip of his coffee and clears his throat before going on, “Five years is a long time to wonder whether you’ll die in the morning from a missile or in the evening from lack of water because the supply ships don’t run anymore. Ithaca was always a prosperous orbital and we were far enough out of Earth’s missile range. The effects on us were less severe, in the way that a tornado is less severe than a hurricane.”

Cesar turns to look at the others sitting at the table. Trevor’s mouth is open and his burrito is dangling in one hand, forgotten halfway to his mouth. Beans drip out onto his plate unnoticed, even though he’s heard this story many times.

Argos continues, “Spacers were lucky that the Earth had plumb tuckered itself out fighting wars down there. Pakistan fighting with India. The Muslim nations calling jihad against the European Union. South Africa warring with North Africa. Russia lobbing missiles at China. The USA was fighting everybody, seemed like.”

He pauses while those old enough dimly remember the ever more bizarre and bloody news waves from that era. “Seems so strange now, but at the time, it was like the whole world was just so angry. That’s what made so many people want to move out here, away from all that, I guess.”

Penelope gives a quick laugh, “You remember that colony of hippies that built a free-love orbital with all those exotic animals right before our war started?” She looks at Cesar but he shakes his head.

Lupe wrinkles her nose and crosses herself as she bustles around the table, refilling bowls and swatting Trevor when he puts his elbows on the table. “Those poor kids. They called it The Ark. They were gonna protect all the endangered animals in their little commune in the sky. I wanted to call their mamas and tell them to teach their babies about reality. And baths.”

Penelope catches Cesar’s eye across the table and smiles at him.

“Lupe believes God hates dirt more than he hates sin,” she explains. “We’d have those kids over for dinner whenever they could cobble together the fuel. For all their ideals, they sure liked steak as much as anybody else.”

Cesar grins back at her. His eyes linger over her just a second too long. Penelope looks away quickly, stuffing a bite of food in her mouth.

“Those hippies and their condors and whatnot were only barely making it with regular supply ships,” Argos says. “When all the wars down on the planet interrupted the supply ships, they had some rough times.”

Penelope nods as she swallows the last of her burrito. Then she adds, “They didn’t think to bring anybody with any actual knowledge of how to rig air processors or repair solar cells. And I don’t know how they thought they’d feed all those animals, much less themselves.”

Cesar frowns, pushing his fork around his plate, chasing beans and bits of salsa slowly. Unsure of whether he wants to break in to Argos’s story, he says, “I saw some bad things in my travels. Empty orbitals filled with the wreckage of some story we never knew the beginning of. This sounds like the start of one of those ghost stories we never liked to tell. Did any of them survive to the end of the War?”

He takes a swallow of beer and smiles with pure pleasure. Ithacans brewed their own beer and he’s never forgotten the taste. Plus, the cold liquid feels good against his dry throat as the bottle cools his hand, sweaty from the heat of the day.

“Some of them did. More than we thought,” allows Argos. “A few of their carnivores got loose and wiped out a lot of the crew and their livestock. Big shock, right? But those hippy kids turned out tougher than we gave them credit for.”

Penelope clears her throat. “We tried to help where we could. Took in some of their people and their stock, but there’s only so much room.”

“I was wearing my knees out praying for those
loco bobos
,” Lupe announces. “But I wouldn’t give a spit for their chances, until that little splicer boy showed up. Without him, they’d just be dust rolling around in a dead orbital, like lint in a clothes dryer.”

“Oh?” Cesar asks, looking between them.

Argos and Penelope both nod.

“Yes,” says Penelope. “That boy showed up on some hunk of junk tinker ship one day with a box of equipment under his arm like their own personal Jesus Christ. Took over the colony and turned it into one of the most valued exporters of small herbivores above the world and down on it.”

Gene splicers are rare and treated like gods in the orbitals because they have, time and again, saved whole colonies from certain extinction. They can whip up a shrubbery that will conserve water and cure a disease that’s crippling your colony at the same time. On Earth, splicers are still scorned and, in some areas, imprisoned and killed for practicing their genetic arts. But in the Spacer colonies, to cause the death of a good splicer would bring down the wrath of the sky.

Trevor blurts out, “They sell cashmere gerbils and milk koalas. They’ve got attack chinchillas too, but Mom won’t let me get one.” He cast a sullen look at his mother.

She wrinkles her nose, “They give me the creeps. They’ve got those huge yellow eyes and teeth the size of my hand.”

Cesar laughs quietly.

Lupe starts clearing away the dishes while the others still pick at the remains of their lunch. Penelope bends forward to explain to Cesar, “He came because of all the endangered species. He said it was like a treasure chest of genetic material just sitting up there, waiting for him. For the first year, he was like a kid in a candy factory, turning out all kinds of strange critters. Very interesting boy. A man now, I guess. He’ll be here this Saturday, I think?”

She looks at Lupe as she asks this. Lupe nods with a smile. Cesar finds himself grinding his teeth, watching them smiling over this brilliant young man.

“Can I get some more beans and
queso
?” he asks. “Hadn’t had anything that good in years. I never tasted TexMex this good and I been down to the Earth a time or two.”

Lupe puffs up with pride and dishes him up an enormous third helping of everything. Cesar wolfs it down enthusiastically.

Penelope laughs, “Well,
gringo
, it’s not like there’s a whole lot places in the heavens or the Earth to get real guacamole these days, is there? Now that Mexico is just one big smoking hole in the ground. When I first got here, I remember Lupe telling me that there was no point in living in the stars if the food sucks.”

Argos chuckles at that and then asks, “Lupe, have you ever cooked anything that didn’t involve beans, tortillas, or jalapenos?”

Lupe sniffs, “I could, but what’s the point?”

“You were telling us how the War started,” Trevor prompts impatiently, licking beans off his hand.

“So I was,” Argos says, remembering the thread of his story. “So what with all the wars down there, the supply ships got real unreliable. Some of them were delayed for months or stopped altogether. You can understand how a country struggling to survive wouldn’t put a big priority on shipping water and food to some guys up in space. But for us, it was death. Corporations sponsored some of the colonies and governments put up most of the rest. Only a few, like Ithaca, were paid for by individuals.”

The blond cowgirl breaks in, “Really? I thought the orbitals were all paid for by rich old guys looking for a pleasure planet of their very own.”

Penelope shakes her head. “Nope. Old Larry raised money from individual investors who thought space burgers would sell like hell down there. But for the rest, if a corporation went bankrupt, the orbital was often just left to die. And if a government went to war, their orbital was the last thing on their minds.”

Argos’s face goes gray. “It was bad times,” he says quietly. “The colonies started working together just to survive. It seemed natural that if you were starving to death and the next colony over was about to lose power that you’d work together so you could both live. By the time the Earth started settling down, most of the colonies up here were already wondering what we needed them for. They abandoned us when we needed them most. Why should they tell us what to do now?”

Penelope interjects, “Can you imagine? Surviving by your own wits for years and then some government a thousand miles away tries to tell you they are going to dump a bunch of lead-footed dirt-loving settlers, mostly criminals and malcontents, on you in the name of public policy? Or a corporation fires you from a job that hasn’t paid you in years and now you have to pack up and leave the home that you fought with blood and tears to defend?”

The younger cowgirls and Trevor mutter revolution.

Argos says, “We already thought they were crazy down there, committing suicide by war. We thought we had a bird’s eye view of the end of the Earthers. We felt like we were the only people left in the galaxy. Then one day they start lecturing us, throwing their weight around like we were kids playing while Daddy was at work? Of course we were thinking revolution from the start.”

“Some were,” Penelope says sharply. “Most of us were just trying to get by. There are plenty of ways to die out here and some of us didn’t think picking a fight with the Earthers was a good way to go.”