Spin the Sky (9 page)

Manny’s accountant, Castor, told me this story when he came to visit my mom. This was about eight years after the Spacer War and about two hours after Castor drank a whole pitcher of Lupe’s special margaritas that she made when Mom wanted to get a good price on something. He’d been lying on the lawn, staring at nothing when I asked him how our War started. I’m not totally sure he understood that I recorded him.

—Trevor Vaquero

T
he Spacer War started on a Wednesday, kid. It began, like most wars I guess, with a fight over money complicated by a fight over a woman. Relations between Spacers and Earthers had been strained, to say the least. The Spacers were whispering revolution, sure, but only whispering.

Manny the Maker, though, was pissed off.

You have to understand something, boy. Old Manny didn’t get rich by inheriting his fat piles of loot. He made every dime he had by selling things. That man could sell icemakers to Eskimos. He could sell sandpaper in the Sahara Desert. He had a silver tongue and he loved nothing better than new gold in his pocket.

Which was good, because Manny sure wasn’t going to get by on his looks. Even when he was in his prime, he looked like a bulldog on a bender.

Old Manny was the second richest man on Earth when he decided to leave it. He convinced the Americans to sell him their military orbital. It was the biggest orbital out there at the time, plated to the gills with armor and weapons and enough security features to fight off a whole fleet of aliens if they ever showed up. The time before the Worlder Wars were paranoid days indeed.

But the big stupid thing had been mostly useless during the Worlder Wars because they never could get the missile guidance systems working or something and then the US was strapped for cash and Manny always made it sound like you were getting such a bargain.

If he told me once, old Manny told me a thousand times, “The meek are going to inherit the Earth? They can have it. The rest of us are going into space.”

He’d growl, chomping on a cigar like a pit bull on a mailman’s shoe. We used to have these guys called mailmen, kid, and they… Oh, forget it.

I’ve heard that he had the American military convinced he wanted the orbital for scrap parts or to hang on the wall in his mansion or maybe even to fly off to Jupiter and never come back.

With the money he paid for it, they could have built themselves two more even bigger and more lethal military bases in the orbitals, but they never did because Manny greased enough palms in the American government to make sure any plans for more military bases in the sky were abandoned. Manny never missed a trick, except the one your old man played on him, kid.

Whatever those military types thought he was planning to do with it, they sure had plenty of time later to regret letting him have it. Before the ink was even wet on the deal, Manny moved himself and his entire empire up into that floating tank in the sky.

“You can have anything in this universe you want, Castor old buddy,” Manny told me. “You just have to commit to it. You have to believe in it. And you have to spend way too much time explaining to every other jerkwad out there that if they get between you and what you want, you are going to wear their guts for garters.”

Before elastic, they used to have these things called garters to hold up your socks, kid. Did you know that? The Ether is supposed to have every scrap of human knowledge right there just waiting to get absorbed into your synaptic processes, but no one seems to know anything any more, do they?

Anyway, Manny was a big believer in the power of belief. That’s why I followed him up here. To live the good life and keep an eye on Manny’s money.

Of course, Manny’s gorgeous wife Helen insisted on going with us. There’s a woman I never got tired of looking at, that’s for sure. Back then anyway. The old girl has let herself go a little.

Helen was a big star back in the day, the darling of the Ether dramas and twenty years younger than Manny. At the time, I thought what everybody thought. That old frog-faced Manny had got himself a trophy wife and she thought that his money was pretty enough to make up for his face.

But later… let me get to that part in a minute.

Manny and Helen set up their castle in the sky and they let the Ether stations document every minute of it. Manny would look into the vidscreen with that million-dollar smile and tell everyone on Earth, “The place to be is up here in the heavens.”

Within five years, there was a waiting list for the orbital colonies with over a hundred thousand names on it. And that was before they started airing tether tantrum games on the Ether and forming the Nullball League.

They couldn’t build orbitals fast enough. Everyone wanted to live in the stars like Manny and his megababe. Of course, I moved up with Manny and Helen and had a front row seat to the whole carnival.

There were tech millionaires who telecommuted and leper colonies and religious fanatics and that crazy Ark hippy colony and all the miners and even a fat farm that specialized in low gravity weight loss, if you can believe it. All of them trying to get away from the ugliness of Earth and hoping for someplace new to start over.

“And all them are crazy,” Manny would laugh. “Well, that’s all right with me. There comes a point in life when you realize that the fight for sanity is a losing battle. My own energies are better spent enjoying the benefits of megalomania.”

If anyone was better adjusted to a wicked case of megalomania than Manny, I never met them.

Then the Worlder Wars started and the orbitals were left to fend for themselves as best they could. A lot of them didn’t.

So many people died.

Those of us that were left were understandably less than enthusiastic about the Earthers who abandoned us.

Eventually the Earth ran out of oil and after a while they figured out that if there was no more oil, there was no point in fighting over it. It took them longer than you might think. They are still down there bickering over who actually won, if you can believe it, kid. Fortunately they are still too broke to do anything more than throw dirt at each other. Damned Earthers.

As soon as they got regular transport ships running again, Helen went down to her old Earth hometown to visit her parents for the first time in six years. The Ether news was overjoyed to be able to again cover every breath taken by their favorite golden girl. They documented her bumpy trip to America and her tearful reunion with her family. They also documented the American police throwing her in jail.

It seems America still considered Manny a citizen, a citizen who owed them a fat pile of tax money that he hadn’t paid in the last five years.

They sent him a bill.

Manny sent them a video clip of himself using the bill to do something very rude.

So they arrested Helen.

The history archives typically refer to this as a “diplomatically poor choice,” because Manny totally flipped out. I mean, bug nuts, kid. He raged on every electron of the Ether against the government that kidnapped his wife.

Manny swore, “I will not rest! I will not stop until my wife is returned! I will use every last cent of my mountains of money, every last person in my army of employees and every missile on my huge frickin’ flying armored arsenal to see my wife home where she belongs! And God help her kidnappers if one hair on her head is harmed.”

Meanwhile, some enterprising Ether journalist got herself arrested just so she could smuggle out a video of the lovely Helen looking stunningly tragic in a jail cell, tearfully looking into the hidden camera and saying, “Oh, I just hope nothing bad happens to my dear husband and my sweet cockapoodle before I can get home to them. Manny’s health is delicate and CooCoo’s digestion is fragile. They need me.”

Not that anything about Manny was ever delicate and that stupid cockapoodle is still alive. It gnaws on my ankle every chance it gets. I’m sure the Americans spent plenty of time wishing Manny was anything other than the big healthy ox that he is to this day.

But with that drippy interview played back-to-back every fifteen minutes against Manny’s frothing rants about the tyranny of Earthers, how could it not be a call-to-arms for every able body in the colonies? They were all still in love with the Helen they’d followed into space.

Now, kid, I know your mom was not a supporter of the Spacer War. There were plenty that weren’t at the start, although most threw in eventually. I remember she was pretty dead set against your dad going off to fight. He told me once that she had some pretty strong words to say on the subject. He seemed fairly certain she didn’t want him back afterwards. Maybe that’s why he never came home? None of my business, I know.

Even with the sky spinning like it is right now on account of those margaritas I drank, I know she wouldn’t want me telling you all this, so for the sake of my hide, please keep this story to yourself. I came here to negotiate with her for fertilizer and steaks and Manny will have my head if I don’t deliver.

At first, it seemed like a fight between Manny and America would get settled pretty quickly. How could America, sucked dry by the Worlder Wars, as they now call them, compete with Manny and his flying battle station in the sky?

“We declare ourselves to be free colonies, a nation of anarchists, a law unto ourselves,” Manny shouted into the Ether. “We will be beholden to no country or corporation, only to our own free will and our ability to carve a life out of hard vacuum.”

Those were heady days.

You wouldn’t mind fetching me a glass of water, would you, kid? That’s fantastic. Thanks, boy.

Of course, the rest of the Earthers were willing to tear the planet apart in the Worlder Wars and they were willing to sit back and laugh at America’s troubles with Manny. When it came to an orbital uprising, though, all those countries were quick to agree that our bid for freedom must be stopped.

They weren’t quick enough.

The Spacers spent years thinking about how to stay out of the Earthers’ way when they were on the warpath. One of the Russian research bases came up with a way for the colonists to disrupt all the satellites so the Earthers couldn’t even report the weather down there, much less have a look into the skies.

About five minutes after they declared independence, every orbital that could moved itself out of missile range, just in case the Earthers figured out how to launch a missile without using their satellites. Which they did eventually.

Almost got us with that. They would have creamed your little world if your dad hadn’t done his thing, that’s for sure.

Honestly?

We thought the Earthers wouldn’t care what we did. We thought we’d declare independence, there’d be a month or two of fussing from down below and then they’d give up and decide we weren’t worth the effort.

We just weren’t prepared for the ferocity of their response. We also thought they didn’t have the attention span to keep up a blockade for two months, much less five years.

We weren’t totally wrong. The Earthers lobbed nukes and missiles and even a few neutrino guns at us before they gave up and just decided on a blockade. They figured that we’d eventually get hungry enough to mind our manners.

Over the five years of Spacer War, America sent up a few troop ships and what happened with them, you wouldn’t believe. I’d tell you but I’ll probably throw up if I start on that bloody saga and then your mother will definitely yell at me.

Anyway, we Spacers were all starting to get a little worried, you know? Down to eating our shoelaces because we’d already gobbled up the rats. Then the Americans started making noises, like they invented a longer-range nuke that could pick off the bigger colonies no matter how far out we parked them.

That’s why we were so thrilled when that deep space mining expedition returned. It took them years but those insane Hathor miners went out and found huge chunks of rock and water. Water! There was rejoicing all over the sky about the water. They saved our bacon with that one.

Of course, Manny only had eyes for the huge chunk of plutonium ore they hauled back. They filled an entire mining ship full of it, one of the biggest starships ever built. That thing was the size of New York. No, that doesn’t mean anything to you, does it, kid? It was bigger than this whole Ithaca colony. And after we found out how much plutonium that sucker had it in, there was no shutting Manny up about that rock.

I got so sick of hearing him go on and on about all the weapons we were gonna make and how Manny was gonna serve those Earthers up some of their own medicine.

And then I will be damned if your dad doesn’t go and lob the entire ship full of plutonium rock right at the planet!

Not only does he kill all Manny’s war machine dreams, but he ends the War doing it!

If Manny could have turned green with envy, he would have, kid. It’s probably a good thing your dad disappeared right after the War, because I’m pretty sure Manny hired out a hit squad to find the runty little upstart that hijacked his war and stole all the glory.

Not that old Manny wasn’t right on the Ether afterwards telling the Earthers that he never would have condoned such an atrocity, even if they did sort of ask for it by saying they were going to make an example of your dad’s home colony. Oh, Manny wept for poor flattened Mexico on the vidscreen, but what really chapped his hide was that he didn’t think of it first.

I guess you saw the touching drama that was Helen’s homecoming right? The Queen of the Skies is released from her prison and flies back to her warty king and they have a wonderful romantic reunion?

No one ever gives Helen credit for her acting abilities, but that was pure fiction from the first close-up to the last elegant tearful smooch, kid. She was totally pissed off at Manny and for the first time in his life, the poor guy didn’t deserve it!

Helen never would believe that he had nothing to do with lobbing the spaceship down at Mexico while she was in prison in Louisiana. She’s just smart enough to know that it’s not like you can aim a rock the size of New York and that nuclear bomb of a ship could just have easily landed on her. No, Helen has never forgiven poor old Manny for almost squashing her to death and she’s been giving him merry hell ever since.