Like a Boss (15 page)

I got the sunshine cane out of the press, wiped the whole thing down, then lay the shady cane in a neat row before the rollers. I would have to stop the press after each rolling in order to feed the cane back in.
Thirty times through gets you what you need
, Tonggow had said. With a crew of five, this was an easy task. With just me, it would suck. The controls for the press were hard-wired, but at least the cord was long enough that I could walk all the way around the press without getting tangled. I clicked the green START button, then ran around to catch the cane as it tumbled through the rollers. Cane juice gushed out of the rollers into the tray that sloped into a funnel.

A click of the red STOP button, and then I brought the cane back to where it had started. I could do this, I told myself as I fed the cane back into the press. Marolo and Ly Huang and everyone else wanted to walk away? Letty wanted me to stop the strike? Forget them. I could make Old Windswept on my own until menopause and senility and everything else came for me. Besides, I had stashed rum all over the planet. Not even the Big Three with their Ghost Squads could find all of them.

The cane weighed no more than a couple of kilos, but the whole process – load cane, press green button, grab cane, press red button, repeat – made my brain itch. Also, only a trickle came out after the first few passes. By the twenty-third run, my forearms were scratched raw and my back muscles burned. I watched a few lone drops slide down the funnel. Seven more times, and then do the whole thing all over again with the sunshine batch? No.

I found a clean cup and dipped it into the collection bucket. The cane juice was an emerald green, murky and sweet-smelling. Marolo had taught me to squirt a little lime into my juice to give it kick. Of course, he had taken all the limes home with him. I took a sip, let the sugary rush run up and down the sides of my tongue. I looked at the massive stacks of cane, enough to create fifty thousand liters of juice to be fermented and fed into the distillation tower. I glanced at the bucket; there was maybe half a liter in there, less the portion in my cup.

So, no, I couldn’t make Old Windswept on my own, not unless I wanted to spend the rest of my life strapped to the press. Even if I went down to microbatching, I wouldn’t make enough rum to last me the rest of my life, however long that might be. I was in great health, even taking into account my time knee-deep in sewage, but I knew entropy would catch up with me in a few decades. I would need all of the medicines that came from the Big Three’s pharma mines at one point or another, and none of that would be buyable with the planet’s economy at a standstill.

How could this have happened? I wished I had someone to help put this together, Wash or Soni or Big Lily, someone to give a fresh set of eyes and ears to all of these mismatched puzzle pieces. Saarien got out of prison three months ago and put together this movement. But the cracks had to have been there longer before he could wedge himself in. When I was still Ward Chair, we’d have issues with social funding, sure, but we made it work. Other Wards would pitch in, knowing I’d return the favor. We talked. We fixed it.

Something had happened in the past sixteen months to cause this fissure in my city. Whether it was fallout from the Ghost Squad’s soiree or something from the Executive Committee, I wasn’t sure. Any other time, I would have left it up to someone else, some young up-and-coming in the Union to call for committees and find facts and do all that crap. Now, I didn’t have the luxury of making this Someone Else’s Job. If I wanted to get my crew back here and get the cane back into the refineries and get all those angry people happy, I’d have to do it myself.

And that meant getting back to the city. The crew had taken their bicycles with them, and the distillery was three klicks past the end of the Red Bus. I pinged Jilly, but I only got a message: SORRY, BUT WE’RE ALL ON STRIKE. It took me a moment to realize it came from the Public’s sysadmins. They had walked off the job, too. Terrific. I’d have to walk until I could hitch a ride into town.

I slugged down the last of the cane juice and cleaned up. I hadn’t gotten a real dinner the night before, and the only thing left for breakfast were the stale date bars in the survival gear. I pocketed the bars and slurped the last drops of the cane juice. Those calories would have to last me until I could finagle my way into a meal. Some enterprising cook would have set up shop at the Red Bus stop. Strikes were a great time for entrepreneurs, provided they dealt in food, booze, or weapons. The faster I figured this all out, the better my chances of stymying the arms merchants. I locked up the distillery and headed down the road. The sun poked over the horizon.

The first two kilometers, I had the road all to myself. My only neighbors were Mueller Ngapoi, a Freeborn goat farmer, and Theo Papadopolis, a former MacDonald Heavy advertising executive who spent all his time making wind-powered sculptures that looked like goats. The two herds would mingle, usually with comic results. The windbeasts would butt into the ewes, and the rams would attempt to mate with the windbeasts. Every spring, there would be a fresh round of bleating goats and splintering wood. Mueller and Theo would both come to the distillery, complain about each other, then walk away with a case of rum apiece (sold to them at cost, of course. Good discounts make good neighbors).

This morning, the goats were tucked away in the barn, and the windbeasts roamed the paddocks. They clacked and clattered as the wind pushed against the sails on their spines. Their caneplas cloven hooves picked and dug at the dirt, churning the goatshit in with the grass. For all their complaints, Mueller’s and Theo’s herds got along quite well. I was pretty sure Mueller’s goats did so well because the windbeasts made the paddocks produce such rich grass. Neither would admit it, though, not even after they had downed a few cups of Old Windswept. Even my rum couldn’t overcome a hundred years of Union and Freeborn animosity.

As the crushed palm crab shells that lined the roadbed turned into actual pourform, I heard people coming out of the dawn fields. They spoke in low tones, the kind of hushed conversations people had as they were walking up on the way to work. I heard the giggles of children, the moaning of old people. The road was crowded by the time the egg-yolk sun had made a full appearance. I had the feeling none of this would be over or easy.

I smiled at a young mother walking next to me. She wore battered work clothes and had a baby strapped to her chest, her deck jacket acting as a blanket. She was Freeborn, and she made a lot of nervous glances at my cheek. “Busy day,” I said.

“Mm-hm,” she said, keeping a hand on top of the kid’s head.

“I haven’t seen it like this since the last City Cup.”

“I don’t really follow footie,” she said.

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “Last year’s match was a complete mess. Still, gotta go where the customers go, you know? Rum doesn’t pour itself.”

She gave me a side-wise glare. “You a distiller?”

“I am indeed.” I held out a hand. “Padma Mehta.”

Her look softened as she took my hand; her fingertips were rough, despite a thin layer of lotion. “Meiumi Greene. With an ‘e’ at the end.”

“I don’t think I’ve met any Freeborn with a last name.”

Meiumi laughed. “My wife’s idea. She’s Union.”

“You both work in the city?”

She nodded. “I’m a welder on a digester farm. Faye – also with an ‘e’ – she’s a safety inspector at a refinery.”

“Hard work.”

The baby stirred, and Meiumi cooed. “It is. But we’re building a future for this little stinker, so it’s worth it. Most of the time.”

I nodded. “I never did those gigs, but I know the feeling.”

We walked in silence for a moment. The wind rustled the ricewheat fields on either side of the road, and the crowd’s volume grew with the daylight. “Are you both on strike?” I asked.

Meiumi’s face grew hard before she relaxed and looked at me. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, but she now looked fifty. “I didn’t want to. Neither of us did. But we’ve had day care cut over the past year. It used to be I could drop off Lucius and know he’d be in good hands until Faye picked him up. We were subsidized, but that dried up earlier this week. The money was just gone. Now we can’t find anyone else to watch him because all of our sitters had to find better-paying jobs. I tried leaving Lucius with my gran, but then her meds allowance got cut, too, and her vertigo came back. Now I have to find someone to watch over
her
, too.”

“But why go into the city?”

“To let the Prez know that I’m not going to stand for this. That, and I’ve got to pay my respects. Uncle Gorsky died last week, and I couldn’t get to the funeral.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. About all of it.”

She shrugged. “Uncle was old, so it was a matter of time. And, unless you’re in charge of the Social Services Committee, the rest isn’t your problem.”

No
, I wanted to tell her,
it
was
.

Lucius the baby had woken up by the time we got to the terminal. The queue for the Red Bus, the line that went direct to the city center, snaked around and back on itself, an ouroborus of anxious people. Hawkers selling condoms and beignets worked the line, and a few people wearing the stainless steel supernova fist of Saarien’s church asked,
Do you need medical help? Do you require succor?
I bought a coconut and a bag of bao and offered some to Meiumi. She demurred. “Sorry, but I really shouldn’t.”

“Because I’m an evil distiller?”

A few people in the queue turned to me. One woman shot me a death glare.

Meiumi nodded. “I know your name, Ms Mehta–”

“– Padma.”

She smiled, flustered at my interruption. “Okay. Padma. Like I said, I know your name, and you’ve got a good rep. But you’re kind of the problem.”

“Because I make rum?”

She looked both ways, then leaned close, her voice a harsh whisper. “You need to be real careful here. A lot of people, they work the cane fields, and they’re not too crazy about distillers
or
Union. There’s a lot of bad blood out here, you know?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think I do. But I have the feeling I should.”

Meiumi stroked Lucius’s hair. “I got family who’ve been screwed on paychecks or lost bennies. Everyone’s used to the price of cane rising and falling, but ever since the black stripe, it’s gotten bad. And there’s a lot of people who are still pissed at that guy, the one with the church. He
stole
people out of the kampong.”

“He stole Union people, too.”

“I know.” She nodded. The queue shuffled forward. “But we have Union people out here who are promising the world and delivering nothing. I mean, I came to the city, learned a trade, so it doesn’t affect me directly. But my family who are still here? They’re hurting, and they want to see the Union hurt. They’re all coming into town to bring everything to a standstill, starting by leaving the cane fields.”

“You know there are Union people on strike, too.”

“I know, I know, it’s…” She quirked her mouth, her words trying to come out. “It’s like there’s this one level of Union people, people like Faye and everyone on her crew. They all work, they pay dues, they give back what they take. And then there’s this level
above
, the ones who run the Committees, and they just
take
. No giving.” Her green eyes drilled into me. “I don’t know what kind you are, but, if you’re in the Co-Op, it’s like you’re on the same level as the higher-ups. You’re standing on everyone’s backs.”

I must have looked horrified, because she brightened up. “But not you! I mean, probably not you. I really like your theme song, and you don’t sound like that.”

“Thanks.” I bit into my bao. It tasted like bagasse pulp.

One Red Bus after another lined up at the terminal’s entrance, each one filling within minutes before chugging off for town. All of them had STRIKE EXPRESS – NO LOCAL STOPS on their front signs. It took an hour before the queue worked its way to the loading bay. Meiumi offered me the seat next to her. I knew at any point I could have gotten word to Jilly and gotten a lift, but now, no. I had to go into town with everyone else and find out just what was pissing them off.

And I heard plenty of it.

“You know how much I used to get paid an hour?” This from an old guy sitting in front of us. A snow-white braid ran down his back. He had two anchors inked below his Union fist. “Sixty-five yuan, fifty hours a week, guaranteed.”

“Yeah, but that’s before the work dried up,” said a woman across from him. Her betel-nut-stained lips were as red as her sunburnt face. Her coat was dusted with flour. “There was a time when everyone had work in the off-season, before the harvest. Now?” She shook her head. “No one can afford my buns.”

“I still can, darlin’,” said her seatmate, a wizened old man with a diving regulator strapped around his neck. She smacked the man, and the whole bus erupted with laughter.

“Things have gotten worse, all right,” said Two Anchors – I hated not being able to blink up his Public profile and get his actual name. “Sexually harassing someone.”

“We’re married!” said Regulator Neck.

“Not if you keep embarrassing me in public,” said Flour Coat.

“Well, it’s not like you let me embarrass you in
private
.”

This time, she belted him so hard he wept. Everyone else did too, but only because they were laughing so hard.

“Look, I get what you’re saying,” said Regulator Neck. “Everything’s been sliding downhill ever since the lifter blew up.”

“No, it’s been bad since
before
,” said Flour Coat. “When we first met, there was so much traffic coming into Santee it blocked out the stars at night. You remember that?”

The older people all nodded to each other. I remembered it, too. Fourteen years ago, Santee had ships lining up ten deep in orbit. Constellations would form around the anchor, the sun glinting off their hulls as they dropped their empty fuel tanks or took on new ones, freshly loaded from the ocean. I would lie in bed at night, watching the shipping queues, wondering which ones had crews I could convince to Breach. Year by year, the traffic decreased. Now, I didn’t even bother looking up, not even when I spent nights at the distillery.