Like a Boss (30 page)

I put a bottle of Old Windswept on the table and cracked the top. “I know it’s early, but would anyone care for a taste? I’m afraid we don’t have cups.”

“We do now,” said KajSiab, setting bamboo plates and mugs on the table. She shrugged. “Murray Henson wasn’t at his homewares stall, so I left a note.”

I poured a tiny sip into a teacup and handed it to her. “Cheers.”

She downed the rum in one gulp, then sucked in a breath. “Oh, my. That is nice. You going to have some?”

“Maybe later,” I said, looking to Hawa. “Were you really going to sell my stash?”

She shook her head, the beads clicking. “It would have been haram. Besides, there wouldn’t have been any profit in it.”

“You could have gotten more than thirty yuan a bottle,” I said, shooing the boys away from the rum.

Hawa chuckled. “Whatever the margin, it’s haram. You should make sure those sales people from your Co-Op know that.”

“What sales people?”

She waved her hand in the air, like she was chasing away a trifling thought. “It was weeks ago. Some nice young lady showed up at closing time, going from stall to stall. Talking about buying shares of some Co-Op fund. I told her not to waste her time with the faithful, just to keep on walking–”

I put a hand on her wrist. “Shares in
what
?”

She shrugged. “A mutual fund, something like that. Said it was going to let us all become investors in the Co-Op. She was very kind, with really incredible skin. I’ll give you that, Padma. You put your best-looking salespeople out there…”

But I didn’t hear the rest of Hawa’s complaint. I couldn’t for the sound of all the gears clicking in my head. Vikram’s fears about the harvest, Letty’s fears about not meeting the budget, everyone’s fears of not having enough money for food and meds: my brain rolled them around and around until the pieces fit. “Holy fucking shit. That’s what she’s doing.”

Hawa eased her hand out of my grip. “You all right?”

“No,” I said. “None of us are.”

“We’re not?” said Soni.

“I know what Letty’s game is. I know why she’s letting this strike drag on. I know why she’s letting everyone get pissed off. Oh, my God, I can’t believe I voted for her.”

“What are you going on about?” said Onanefe.

I pointed at him. “Don’t you get it? She’s changing her vote. She wants to blow everything up.”

“Okay,” said the man with the missing ear and the abacus tattooed on his cheek. Once again, I wished the goddamn Public was fixed so I could ping this guy and find out his name. “Explain this to us like we’re stupid.”

“What, were you in WalWa middle management?”

That got a laugh from the crowd. There were now a few hundred people gathered around Hawa’s stall, all of them munching on tacos or sipping bowls of the stew we’d knocked together from second-hand vegetables and questionable cuts of meat. I recognized a few faces, merchants and rabble-rousers and attractive street poets who’d drifted in and out of my orbit every time I came to Bakaara. They were fed, and calm, and attentive. They were also angry, and I was making sure their anger had focus.

I tapped the marker on the side of Hawa’s stall. She had protested when I started scribbling on her table, so I started writing on the pourform walls with a packet of marker pens the kids had found. Longshore crews used pens like this to scribble on the sides of cargo cans before they went up the cable. The ink was durable enough to deal with the hazards of deep space, and the colors were electric and vibrant. Hawa’s gray stall now looked like the aftermath of a fight between a bunch of MBAs and abstract expressionists.

“Where does money come from?” I held the marker to a box at the very top of my chart. It had a single yuan symbol.

Abacus Cheek said, “Well, when an economist and a central planner love each other very much…” A titter ran through the crowd.

I pointed the marker at the man. “Mister, maybe
you
ought to be talking instead of me.”

He waved me off. “Sorry about the heckling. I just been hiding under my couch for the past few days, and… you know. Letting off steam.”

“No, please, keep it up,” I said. “I’m terrible at being funny.”

“That’s not what I’ve seen,” said Soni, leaning against a coral steel beam. Another laugh. It was good to hear that instead of shouting. “But if you’re talking about
value
, it comes from us. Our work.”

“Right you are, Chief Accountant.” I touched the capped marker to the yuan symbol. “We all know what our work is worth, because the Union and the Big Three have sat down and hammered it all out. We know what the price of cane is, we know what the price of meds are, we know how to trade one for the other. And it’s worked pretty well until it hasn’t.”

Below the yuan box was a green box with the word CANE. One of the kids, Jianji, stood on a bench, filling that box with black dots. He gave me a look to see if he should stop; I shrugged, so he kept on dotting. “When the black stripe hit the fields, it meant that we couldn’t sell cane until Thronehill certified our crops were clean. Since they’re a bunch of dicks, they still haven’t done that, even though everybody who knows anything about cane can tell you we’re good to go. The Union, of course, had prepared for this, in the form of something new and exciting from my friends at the Co-Op.”

The kids had drawn arrows between the CANE box and the silver CO-OP box. Below the CO-OP was the word MUTUAL FUND in blue. “For the price of a single blue boy, you can buy twenty shares of the Santee Anchorage Rum Co-Operative Mutual Fund. Eventually, you sell those shares, and you hope that the price has gone up enough so you get back more than you put in. But the big question is: what are they shares
of
?”

Everyone looked at each other. Even Abacus Cheek was quiet. “The Co-Op, right?” said Onanefe.

“And what does the Co-Op produce?”

“RUM!” everyone answered, holding their cups aloft. Against Soni’s protests, we had made a simple bumboo by grabbing an empty molasses barrel and filling it with water, lime juice, honey, whatever spices we could cadge from Little Jan Sørensen, and Old Windswept. It was a pretty weak punch, but it meant my case would go a lot farther.

“Correct!” I called out. “The Co-Op ensures that we’ll make rum to a certain quality, sell it at a certain price, and that everyone will back up everyone else if need be. A union for boozers.”

“Best kind,” said Abacus Cheek.

“You’d think so,” I said. “Because whenever there’s a serious crisis, the Co-Op falls apart like wet ricewheat paper. For example.” I tapped the CANE box and smeared one of Jianji’s fresh dots. He gave me a glare, and I glared right back until he backed off. Now was not the time to let an eight-year-old interrupt me over a tiff on artistic integrity. “Vytai Bloombeck’s gengineered black stripe was a wild card that none of us had prepared for. We could handle small outbreaks, because that would mean losing only a few thousand hectares at most. Bloombeck’s black stripe cost us fifty million hectares, then put the other five billion out of commission. Neither the Union nor the Co-Op had plans for that because, as far as I can tell, it was too terrifying an idea. Too big a failure to contemplate.”

I spread my hands to the crowd. “Except it’s happened, and now we’re here on day seven of a planet-wide strike that no one seems to have expected, with the exception of the congregants at the Temple of the New Holy Light. And they were prepared because Leticia Arbusto Smythe” – I tapped a box with LETTY in red letters – “is the one really in charge. Not just of the Union. But of the Temple, of the FOC, of this entire strike. She’s behind the Mutual Fund, too, in clear violation of the Union’s Second Clause, which states that the Union shall not do anything it’s not contracted to do, including selling shares in rum-backed securities. She’s calling the shots, and she’s not going to stop until everyone’s burned themselves out.”

That got me stony silence from everyone with ink on their faces. Even the Freeborn looked uncomfortable. “That’s a hell of a thing to say,” said Abacus Cheek. “That’s some Ghost Squad shit there.”

“I wish it were Ghosts,” I said. “I wish I could point at Thronehill and say that it’s all the Big Three’s fault. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get everyone on the same page and march on the Colonial Directorate and remind those fuckers that they don’t manage
us
, no matter what the Contract says.
We
manage ourselves.
We
make this planet run. People like us on every world in Occupied Space,
we
make sure there
is
an Occupied Space.”

I cleared my throat. This next part made my guts shrivel and my stomach flip. If I couldn’t sell it here, then I couldn’t sell it anywhere. This crowd, these people, Union and Freeborn, cops and marchers, the scared and hungry, they were everywhere in Santee City. I took a breath and plunged in.

“And that’s why it kills me to accuse Letty of not only letting this chaos happen, but of orchestrating it. She told the Chief of Police to stand down, she let gangs of criminals come back from Maersk, and she goaded Evanrute Saarien into pushing for a planet-wide strike when she
knew
our food and medical stores were at their lowest. She strong-armed the Co-Op into forming the Mutual Fund as a backup plan, then used her assistants to push shares on everyone with spare cash. But she didn’t make any contingencies for the lifter getting cut.”

“By you,” said Abacus Cheek.

I nodded. “By me. And I will spend the rest of my life living with the consequences of my choice, but I won’t apologize for it. If Bloombeck’s black stripe had gotten to the anchor, if it had spread to just one ship–”

“If,” said a woman holding a burrito. She had stars inked on her face and forearms that looked like they were made of coral steel. “That was all just a possibility, but you went ahead and did it. You cost me work.”

“I know,” I said, looking at her right in the eyes. “And I’m sorry that happened. But if I hadn’t–”

“If you hadn’t, some other world
might
have gotten in trouble,” she said. “
Might
. You have no idea what would have happened. But that didn’t stop you, O Great Sky Queen Of Justice. You were up there, and you made a choice on your own, just like some Big Three executive. You didn’t consult your fellow members. You didn’t ask for a vote.”

“If I could have, I would have. The Ghosts had smashed all the comms on the platform, they’d scrambled the Public lines… oh, and they also had control over our pais. I was sitting on a pile of contaminated molasses. Would you rather I had let it go? I could have done that, and then the Ghost who had hijacked the lifter would have hijacked a ship and
jumped from orbit
. It would be tough to have a vote as you’re being vaporized.”

She snorted. “Rah, rah. You save us, and you still screw us. All for what?”

“To save everyone else.” I pointed at the fist on my face. “Remember this? We all fight together, or we die alone. That means fighting for everyone else who’s Union, even if they’ll never know you’re helping them. It wasn’t an abstract decision. I was doing what I was supposed to do.”

“Deciding everyone’s fates on your own?”

I shook my head. “Going up the cable meant helping everyone else in the Union. If I had stayed on the ground when that bad molasses hit orbit, then what good would I have been? If Bloombeck’s black stripe had spread, it would have wiped out cane, and that would have wiped out everyone else’s livelihoods. If I let that happen, then what good am I? If we’re not going to stand up for each other, if we’re not going to take care of each other, then why be a Union? I hated making that choice, but I would do it again. Some Big Three assholes came here and wanted to burn us to ash. You’re goddamn right I blew up the lifter, because I know that any of you would have done the same.

“And now someone’s screwing with us, and it’s not just one of our own, it’s our President. We
chose
her to make the hard choices that are supposed to benefit us all, and it turns out she’s not making them. She’s not doing anything to ensure the Union can pay out benefits or disburse cash to all the subcommittees that run our city. And there
are
choices she could make. She could ask all of us to cut back, or to share what we’ve got, or to work together to get the cane recertified so we can get some cash rolling in. She could work with the Co-Op to put the freeze on all those Mutual Fund shares. She could, God forbid, work with all the Freeborn who have been demanding seats at the table. We could come up with solutions together.

“But she’s not doing any of that. She’s winding us all up, letting criminals loose from Maersk, and giving them machetes or churches. She’s made us afraid of each other, all in the hope that we’ll be so busy hoarding cans of pickles or fighting each other that we won’t turn on
her
.”

That silenced the crowd. I had to get them buzzing again. “I don’t like pointing fingers at Letty. I don’t make these accusations lightly. I’m not the police, I’m not the courts. I’m just a rank-and-file member who thinks the Executive Council has lost sight of what it’s supposed to do. Letty and the rest have forgotten the First Clause: the Union exists to protect its members from the Big Three. How can she do that when she can’t protect the members from
her
?”

Abacus Cheek rubbed his face as he rocked back and forth. It was so quiet I could hear his boots squeak on the pavement. “Then what do you propose we do?”

“We start with what we’re doing now,” I said. “We remember why we Breached our Indentures with the Big Three.” I nodded to Onanefe. “Or we remember why we didn’t join the Union. We break out the bottles and the grills and the tortilla presses, and we sit down and eat and talk. We remember that
this
is the life we chose, everything that goes with it, even the crap work and the miserable hours and how nasty the air smells when the palm crabs are mating.”

Jianji gagged. “That’s the worst.”

“Indeed,” I said, giving him my marker. He got to work drawing stars around all the boxes. “This is how the Union started in the first place. Somewhere, back in the mists of time, a bunch of people got pissed off with the Big Three and Breached. They worked together to find gigs on their own terms, they looked out for each other, and they did their best not to climb over each other. We’ve all had lean times, and we’ve all dealt with disasters and crap Contracts and getting stuck in horrible Slots. Hell, I used to be a Ward Chair, and now I muck out the mains in the Brushhead Water Works.”