Spin the Sky (8 page)

She picks up some dishes and takes them to the sink.

Trevor protests, “Aw, Mom. Of course we had to fight the Earthers.”

Penelope snaps, “I had a baby to raise. Getting you to the age you are now was all I was thinking about in those days.” But she ruffles his hair.

Cesar looks away, the sight stings his heart.

“I want to hear the rest,” Trevor says mutinously as she pushes him towards the sink to help Lupe clean the dishes.

“Argos will tell that same tired story about Helen and Manny again tonight,” says Penelope sternly, pointing him back to work. “And he’ll ham it up and make them out to be comic-book superheroes even though he knows Helen is short and pudgy now and Manny has that gimp leg. Honestly, Argos, it might be better to let the kid watch Ether dramas.”

“Those things will rot his brain,” says Argos, though he never had enough brains himself to worry about, one way or the other. “Better he learn by talking to actual people about real things than all that make-believe muck. Oral histories were the best way to learn for thousands of years before they came up with the Ether.”

“But I want to know how it ends,” says Trevor, sticking out his lower lip.

Penelope sighs and rolls her eyes. “You know what happened. It was all over in the blink of an eye. Just at the end, when we thought the best we could hope for was to be shot out of the sky, Cesar the Scorcher obliterated Mexico. Then the Earthers were begging us to declare peace. Not only did they not want us back after that, they’d have pushed us out farther if they could. I heard tales of Earthers who wouldn’t even look at the sky for years after. They didn’t want to see the stars if we were up in them.”

For the first time, Cesar wonders if he didn’t get the better part of the deal. Sure everyone hated him for dropping the nuclear starship on Mexico, but how much harder has it been on the Ithacans? To live every day knowing that the millions of Mexicans had died to save them? To have to feel guilt for an act they had no part in?

Some of the cowgirls titter nervously as they file out of the room and head back to work. Trevor looks like he wants to argue about the ending of the story regardless of whether it was true or not.

Penelope sees that look and holds up her hands with exasperation, “Well, who could blame them? Eighty million people gone in the blink of an eye and with all the radiation, it will be hundreds of years before that land in Mexico is livable again. You know how this story ends, Trevor. It ends with you here about to get your bottom smacked if you don’t go help Lupe with the dishes right now, young man.”

The remaining cowgirls snicker and that alone is enough to send Trevor back to work. He is just old enough to be both fascinated and terrified by the cowgirls. Unable to decide which, whenever they notice him the boy usually flushes bright red and bolts like he does now.

Cesar gulps hard. He has spent years perfecting a blank look whenever people talk about Cesar the Scorcher, but this is literally too close to home.

“Feeling poorly,” he mumbles as he staggers out the door.

He sits on the porch and stares out at the land. After a minute, Penelope comes out and sits next to him. “Need to go lay down again, Mister Ulixes?” she asks calmly.

It takes him half a second to respond to his assumed name, but Cesar shakes his head.

She gives him a charming grin. “Then maybe you can help me out in the vegetable garden this afternoon?”

This time, Cesar nods with a smile.

Penelope laughs. “You won’t be smiling for long. I got weeds like a water filter has algae. We got work to do.”

•

The therapeutic effects of hard work in the hot light of the reflected sun work their cure on Cesar. He labors alongside Penelope in an easy silence. She works just as hard as he does, pulling weeds, hoeing, and transplanting tomatoes from the hydroponics.

“You got to love a controllable environment,” Cesar comments when they pause for a glass of iced tea. “I visited Earth a few times. Never could get used to rain falling whenever it felt like it. And the whole idea of seasons is bizarre. Sometimes it’s hot and sometimes it’s cold, but you never know what you’re gonna get? Not for me. They can keep it.”

Penelope chuckles. “So I guess you grew up in the orbitals? I was born on Earth, but I haven’t been back in almost twenty years. Sometimes I miss the unpredictability of it all. But only sometimes.”

“We got plenty of unpredictability up here,” Cesar replies companionably.

Penelope smiles. “Plenty of work to do as well. We need to get some compost for the tomatoes now, if you’re up to it.”

He was, so they grab a large cart and push it to the elevator. They talk about weather algorithms and soil chemistry and all the other things space farmers talk about.

Finally, Cesar gets up the nerve to ask about Trevor.

“So that boy of yours looks almost grown,” he says gruffly. Cesar knows perfectly well that Trevor is sixteen years, seven months and four days old. “He going to take over the ranch soon?”

It’s a legitimate question. Earth might have rules about adulthood or child labor, but that means next to nothing in the orbitals. The Caribbean Coffee Conglomerate has been running smoothly for the last eight years under the leadership of a boy who inherited it at the age of thirteen.

Penelope shrugs. “We’ll see. He wants to travel, you know? See the rest of the sky and maybe even visit Earth. Trevor is still young enough to think he wants adventure. He talks about piloting a merchant ship.”

She doesn’t sound enthusiastic about it.

Cesar isn’t anxious for the boy to go flinging himself across the void either. Particularly since Cesar knows exactly what kind of trouble a young boy with wanderlust can find out there.

“Adventure,” scoffs Cesar. “I guess all young men are foolish that way. I hope he survives to learn the value of a boring life.”

Penelope sighs, “Me too. I think he’s keyed up to go because of his dad being… not around.”

Cesar scowls. “Maybe Trevor thinks he can find out what happened to him? Or maybe Trevor thinks he can right the wrongs his father committed?”

Penelope laughs, “Oh, he’s just a kid. I doubt Trevor thinks about much of anything. He’s got too many hormones running around in his body. There aren’t enough pretty girls his age to distract him here so he’s hot for space.”

“Cowgirls aren’t good enough for him?”

“They are all older than he is or too scary for my tender young boy,” she laughs.

The elevator doors open onto the agricultural level. It’s like a doorway to the Garden of Eden. Pastures, fields of crops, and other pastoral delights stretch as far as the eye can see. Of course, they stretch up and away, following the curve of the orbital’s outer wall.

Until they solved the problem of how to shield plants and people from the deadly radiation in space, long-term colonies of people outside of the Earth hadn’t been possible. The key to solving this complicated technological dilemma turned out to be dirt. Packing dirt several feet deep along the outer walls stopped the radiation. With tons of dirt lining the outer walls, it made that level of the orbitals primed for agricultural purposes.

As Cesar’s father, Larry, said on more than one occasion, “If you got a pile of dirt, you might as well stick a bean in it.”

The only down side is that complementary plants and animals must be genetically engineered to thrive at a higher gravity than Earth normal since the habitation levels were invariably above the agricultural levels. Spacers learned to spin their orbitals so the habitation level has Earth normal gravity. It’s easier to sleep when your head weighs what it should.

Penelope turns and grins at Cesar. The sight of the herd always makes her smile. “You remember being Trevor’s age? Doing insane things because you are too stupid to know better?”

Cesar vividly remembers the feel of Penelope in his arms the night she promised to fly to the stars with him. He also remembers a very steamy ride in the drone cab before they boarded the shuttle away from the planet. Cesar convinced Penelope to run away to Ithaca with him when she was only two years older than Trevor was now.

“Nope,” coughs Cesar, turning away from her. “I’m too old to be remembering kid stuff.”

Penelope looks disappointed, but not really upset. “Let’s get this stuff over to the composter.”

Every home on Ithaca has a small composting unit, but for a large garden on the upper level like Penelope’s, it is easier to bring it straight down to the main composter for the herd.

As they unload the vegetable refuse, the herd moves toward them on the off chance that there might be tomatoes or sugar cane or something else that cows consider the height of sophistication in cud flavoring.

When Cesar sees the herd, he can’t help but whistle in appreciation. “That’s a fine looking head of beef,” he tells Penelope. He inspects their hooves, checks their teeth and slaps their meaty flanks with frank approval.

They are too. Genetically engineered to have the tenderest, most delicious meat in the solar system. Larry Vaquero was scrupulously honest with the original investors in the mad scheme that was Ithaca. He insisted they spin the colony at just the right gravity and got the oxygen levels just so. The man was fanatical about setting up the perfect conditions for the penultimate steak, down to electronically monitoring the pH of their water three times a day.

Penelope basks in the reflected glow of Cesar’s admiration. They pass the time discussing herd genetics and the troubles of trace mineral deficiency and whether supplementing bovine food with fungal protein was really beneficial or just the latest fad.

They are both pleasantly surprised to find another soul who knows and cares about these things. Obviously, Penelope takes her job as ranch woman seriously.

“How is it you know so much about cows?” she asks.

“Oh, I worked on a ranch and my old dad was crazy for cows,” he mutters, hoping she’ll assume he’d been an Earther ranch hand. She does.

Cesar knows much from his father and also because his bouts of homesickness over the years tended to manifest in the compulsive reading of literature on space ranching. Fortunately, there wasn’t that much on the subject for him to read.

Cesar watches two cowgirls round up the herd and move them through the gate to the next field for grazing while Penelope brags that they have so many now that they had to split the herd in two or else the combined weight of several thousand tons of beef on the hoof will interfere with the orbital’s rotation.

“Well, we better get going,” sighs Penelope with regret. She’s just as happy talking steers and calves all day. “I’m meeting with a man from Earth in a little bit. He wants to start importing our leather again.”

“They want to buy your leather and transport it down to the planet? That seems like a lot of work for something they could do themselves,” he remarks.

“Yeah, I was surprised too,” replies Penelope.

Cesar laughs, “Well, who can blame them? Everything is better up here. Unless they’ve recovered a whole lot from the last time I was down there, they don’t have anything to compare to Ithaca beef.”

“When you’ve got a controlled environment and fine gene stock, it’s hard to go wrong,” Penelope allows.

“I would still think the cost of transportation would make it too expensive,” muses Cesar.

Penelope shakes her head. “Well, we’d process the beef here so the weight would be much less of an issue than sending down the whole cow. Also, they’ve come up with some new designs for ships that function like space blimps. They basically just float down to the planet, using almost no energy. Then they shoot them back up here again with that laser umbrella launcher thingy.”

“Still not a ride I’d like to take,” says Cesar.

Penelope agrees, “I know they say it’s safe, but I’d rather not find out in person.”

Penelope tells him that the cowgirls move the herd each day to prevent overgrazing any of the fields that stretch around the orbital. The gates are set up to open automatically each day so they can move both herds at about the same time. Once they have all the cows through, they trigger the lock on the gate behind them.

Penelope asks the girl with blond pigtails, “Shani, any progress at the mating pens?”

“Nothing to report. And we already checked on the bulls, boss,” says the blond, shaking her head. “We’re going to go work on the gate locks in Section C. They’ve been slipping loose lately.”

Shani leaves with a wink at Cesar. Cesar chuckles and Penelope rolls her eyes.

“That girl is the biggest flirt alive,” she tells him.

“No need to apologize,” replies Cesar with a self-deprecating grin. “I’m too old to read much into a girl’s wink. You need me to take anything up to the house?”

She did.

Penelope shows him the mulch she wants to haul up to spread in her herb garden and Cesar begins shoveling it into the bin they brought the compost down in. Penelope watches his muscles ripple over his wiry arms as he works.

“He’s not that old after all,” she murmurs to herself. He was sickly, pale and filthy when he showed up, but now he looks like a strong, competent man who just needs a little feeding up.

Before she realizes what she is doing, Penelope lightly touches his arm. Her impulse was to feel his bicep like a piece of meat, checking its tenderness. When Ulixes turns to look at her, though, Penelope sees something in his eyes that makes her breath catch even though she isn’t sure why. She snatches her hand away and shoves it in a pocket.

“Well, I’ve got to go,” she blurts out. As Penelope hurries away, she turns back to look at this stranger she invited into her home.

The man is standing tall, watching her go. He looks straight into her eyes and the strength of his gaze causes something to twist free and flutter around in her chest, but she doesn’t want to think too deeply about what it might be. On the way to meet the representative from Earth, she spends far more time thinking about the stranger in her bunkhouse than she does about the business meeting ahead.

MANNY’S WAR

Excerpt from Trevor Vaquero’s “Tales of my Father” Archive