Windswept

by Adam Rakunas

  “The first is easy,” she said. “I have a pretty hefty shipment going up the cable tomorrow. I want you to make sure it gets there in one piece.”

  “I can’t get out on the water,” I said. “You saw my bail tags.”

  “Yes, but I consider this a test of how you delegate,” she said. “Think you can swing that?”

  I nodded. “What’s the second?”

  “I need you to go to every bar in this city and drink.”

  I waited a moment to see if she was going to smile. She didn’t. “I think I’m missing something.”

  “You know there have been... odd events with some of the Co-Op’s product,” she said, tenting her fingers on her lap.

  “You mean the skunked rum?”

  “Well, I could talk about the proper chemical terms” –Tonggow tapped her left cheek, right on the barely visible tattoo of an Erlenmeyer flask–“but, yes. There is a new kind of contaminant affecting our rum, and no one can figure it out what it is. Some of the best distillers in the Co-Op are releasing product that goes bad somewhere between crushing the cane and decanting. None of them wants to admit there’s something wrong, but every distiller knows something is going wrong, and we’re all scared shitless it’s going to be one of our bottles next.”

  “But this has happened before, right?” I said. “Impurities in the bottles, something in the water, a smut on the cane?”

  “For one or two producers every few years, yes,” she said. “But for this number...”

  I sat back. “How many are we talking about?”

  “Right now,” she signed, “fifty-seven. Fifty-eight, if I add that picture you sent me.”

  “Who else?”

  She handed me a piece of paper; on it was a list of distillers done in Tonggow’s loopy handwriting. None of the skunked bottles I’d smelt (other than the Nelson’s Column from that dive on Murdoch) were on the list. “You can add two more to this,” I said, then told her about the bottles at Big Lily’s and in the office. “Maybe a third,” I said, remembering the Freeborn woman in the jail.

  Tonggow’s fist clenched. “It’s happening faster than I thought,” she said, waving toward the front of the limo. “You’ll have to move quickly if you’re going to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “Why me? Why this? Why can’t the Co-Op just... I dunno, co-operate?”

  Tonggow gave me a sweet smile as she shook her head and put her hand on my knee. “We may be a Co-Operative in name, but we’re barely like it in practice. The Big Three have been driving down the price for industrial molasses for years, and now they’re trying to do the same with the rum. Profits are down, expenses are up, and the last thing anyone wants to admit to the other members is that they’re in trouble. Even if it really means everyone is in trouble. This has to stay quiet until we can figure out what the hell’s going on.”

  “So, this is all on me?”

  She shrugged. “Mostly on you. You get me labels, and I’ll do what I can to sort it out.”

  “That’s a lot of rum for just me to sample,” I said.

  “I know,” said Tonggow as the limo smoothed to a stop. “That’s why you’re going to take your new Breach friends along. Nothing like a bar crawl to celebrate one’s liberation, hm?”

  “I can’t take them out in public,” I said.

  “Why? You’re afraid the rank and file will lynch you?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  Tonggow’s smile disappeared, and I shivered. “Miss Mehta, if you’re afraid of that, then maybe you aren’t the one to run my distillery. I always thought you had more spine.”

  I fought the urge to swallow my heart back into my chest and banged on the divider window. “Oy!” I yelled at the driver. “Take us to Samarkand and Benares, and get ready to pick up extra passengers.” I caught Tonggow’s surprised smile. “You can’t expect me to haul my new friends out on foot, Madame Tonggow. We’d never last the day.”

  Tonggow raised her glass as the limo sped up.

  Chapter 15

  “OK,” said Banks. “OK, OK, OK. The thing.”

  “Is,” I said.

  “Is what?”

  “The thing,” I said, waving for the bartender to pour us another round.

  “Right!” yelled Banks as he thumped the sticky metal bartop. “The thing is that I still don’t get how the whole thing works.”

  “The hell” –One-Eye paused long enough to burp and grab another fistful of edamame from the bowl–“kind of lawyer are you, Banks?”

  “Real estate, remember?” he said, trying and failing to keep himself together.

  “I mean... I get how the whole thing works, and I hate it!” said One-Eye. “Why do we hafta wait for someone else to come down so we don’t have to, y’know...”

  “...work?” offered Mimi, a bamboo stirrer in her hands.

  “Exactly!” said One-Eye. “Why the hell can’t we start not working now?”

  “Because,” I said, looking at the upended and empty shot glasses that surrounded our elbows, “because that’s the way it’s always worked.”

  “Work,” said Banks, reaching for the empty bottle of Bastard’s Blend that spun on the bartop. “You know, I always worked. When I was a kid, I worked inna potato field. When I was older, I worked inna recyling plant.”

  “Recyling?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, bobbing his head. “When you use old stuff to make new stuff. Recyling. Anyway, I did that, then I got this” –he jabbed at the scales tattooed on his cheek–“and I worked more. An’ we had to work to get here.”

  “Damn hard work,” said One-Eye.

  “Damn hard,” said Banks. “And now you’re telling me that we hafta work again? Doing shit work?”

  “It’s not all shit work,” I said. “I mean, yeah, a lot of it is, but not all of it.”

  “But why?”

  “Because,” said Madolyn, lifting her head off the bartop and jabbing Banks on the forehead, “because there are only so many jobs to go around, and WalWa or LiaoCon or MacDonald don’t want to give away any more jobs than they have to, so that’s how it goes.” She plunked her head back down and started snoring.

  “What she said,” I replied, focusing on the round of shots that had just appeared. I blinked a picture of the label – Next Century Amber, which always tasted like rotting bananas – then held the glass aloft. “Here’s to Banks, may he not have to work too long so we won’t have to hear his whining about it.”

  “Hear, hear!” said One-Eye, slamming down the rum and wincing. “This is horrible.”

  “I know,” I said, hiding the glass below the bartop. I poured the rum on the ground, then lifted the empty glass to my mouth and tipped it up fast. I had done stealth dumps for the past six hours. We’d gone to thirty different bars, tried a hundred fifty different rums, always insisting on new bottles. We hadn’t encountered any more skunked rum, which really pissed me off: if it had gone bad, at least I wouldn’t have had to pay for it. Right now, I was almost two thousand yuan down, an amount that I realized Tonggow hadn’t promised to reimburse.

  “But it’s also great!” said One-Eye, her cheeks flushed bright red.

  I passed her a plate full of takoyaki. “Eat up,” I said. “These are great for soaking up booze.”

  “Righteous,” she said, scarfing two of the battered balls at once. She chewed for a few moments, then said, her mouth full, “It’s not always going to be like this, is it? The food, the drinks, the... the not working?”

  “There’s always going to be work,” I said. “It’s just a matter of there being enough jobs. We got the Contract coming up for renewal in less than two years, and everyone’s fighting for a piece of the pie.” I waved for one last round. “Problem is, the pie’s been getting smaller for decades, and no one wants to admit it.”

  “How many jobs are we talking about?” said One-Eye. “Like... enough for us?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m h
igh enough on the totem pole to know there’s a problem, but not high enough to know the exact number. Every time I’ve asked the people above me, they tell me not to worry, which is a sure sign that something bad is gonna happen.” I twirled an empty shot glass in my fingers, watching the light glint off the hard edges. “But if you’re worried about getting into hot water with WalWa, don’t. There’s no way they can get you, not here. Not now.”

  “What about all that talk back on the beach?”

  The bartender put a new bottle of Olmos Green in front of us. The Green was a favorite of mine that had fresh cane shoots mixed into the mash. It looked like liquid emeralds. I smiled at One-Eye as I opened the bottle. “Hell, you know the old saying. All that stuff I said was recruitment. This is real.”

  The rum smelled perfect, like freshly cut grass on a spring day. The bartender held up five fingers; fifty yuan a bottle. Jesus. I poured shots for me and One-Eye, and, this time, I downed the whole thing.

  Banks groaned and lifted his head off the bar; a string of drool hung from his mouth. “This place is dead,” he said. “Can we go somewhere fun?”

  We piled out of the bar and into Tonggow’s waiting limo. The driver and I exchanged pointed glances; he was a Freeborn man who’d barely said a word during our tour. I was embarrassed; I couldn’t tell if he was angry or bemused. “Where to next?” he said.

  I blinked up the time: four-ten. We were a good twenty minutes from Brushhead, which meant one more round at Big Lily’s, and then I was throwing in the towel. Tonggow’s polite request could wait until after six o’clock. “Mercer and Moore,” I said. “Don’t take the scenic route.”

  “I hear the sewage plant’s lovely this time of day,” said the driver. I shook my head and hopped in. The limo glided into traffic like an armored swan. I texted Big Lily to prepare for our arrival.

  “You know,” said One-Eye, turning toward me, “I was pretty sure you’d have a pitch to make.”

  “What, this isn’t enough?” I said. She didn’t laugh. Neither did Mimi or the old ladies. They all stared at me, like hungry dogs waiting for someone to toss them a steak. Except Banks. Banks looked out the window.

  “The pitch,” I sighed, then took a sip of water from the bottles the driver had set out for us. “Why did you jump ship?”

  “What kind of pitch is that?” said One-Eye.

  “Why did you all get into an empty fuel can that dropped a hundred and fifteen thousand kilometers onto a planet you’d only heard about through whispers and graffiti, rather than stay upstairs in your nice, solid lives? Why?”

  One-Eye crossed her arms and leaned back. “Really? That’s all you’ve got? We want to know what’s in it for–”

  “The smell,” said one of the old ladies. Gricelda. The one allergic to eggplant.

  “What about the smell?” I said.

  She cleared her throat. “Every morning, I would wake up in my bunk, and the air smelled like dead roses and rust. It was all the recycling. It may have scrubbed out the CO2, but it did nothing about the smells from all the fishsticks. All the belching, the farting, the way their bodies got a little pickled in the hibernant. Every night, I would clean myself up, wash my nose and throat, hoping to get the smell out. And then there it would be the next morning, reminding me that this was my life, and would continue to be my life for the rest of the trip.”

  “How long?”

  “We tended that ship for six jumps,” said Madolyn. “Two years to get past the Red Line, two years to return. A few weeks in port...”

  “Eight jumps,” said Gricelda, taking Madolyn’s hand. “You forgot the first two. We’ve been underway for over thirty years.”

  “When was the last time you were on solid land?” I said

  Madolyn shook her head, and a tear trickled down Gricelda’s cheek. “Every time we got close to fulfilling our Contract, a WalWa rep would talk us into an extension for greater benefits,” said Madolyn. “Do another jump, get more stock options. Put in another jump, your medical’s bumped up to the next tier. Sign on for an extended tour, and we’d be set for life.” She set her jaw as her eyes got wet. “Then I looked in the mirror and realized I wouldn’t have much of a life left. No matter how good the artificial gravity is, you know you’re in a cage and dying by degrees.”

  I nodded, then turned to Mimi. “How about you?”

  “It was all Thanh,” she said, the drunken wavering gone from her voice. “We only had one more run to do to meet our obligation. Another four years, and our Indentures would have been fulfilled. We managed those plants for five seeding trips, raised all of them our own, and now it’s gone. For what?” She snuffed with bitter laughter, wiped an arm on her sleeve, already stained from a long day’s drinking. “Fool couldn’t wait another four years, and now he’s dead and I’m stuck here without our plants.” She swallowed, fighting down the lumps in her throat.

  Comfort and understanding I could fake, but what this woman wanted, I couldn’t deliver.

  “Mimi?” We both looked up at Banks, who had reached out with an open hand. Mimi hesitated, then took it.

  “I was only with you guys for that one run, but we both know Thanh wanted you two off that ship,” he said. “Remember how we all used to work the water hyacinth tank together? Four hours a day, in muck up to our waists?”

  Mimi shivered, then laughed at herself.

  “And WalWa wouldn’t replace the waders they’d issued you on your first trip,” said Banks. “Remember that?”

  “Awful things, even then,” she said, gripping Banks’s fingers. “Always rode up funny, didn’t keep the water out. Wore out two months in.”

  “And that wasn’t all that crapped out on that ship, was it?” His voice was smooth and mellow.

  She shook her head. “That ship was a nightmare. Leaking steam fittings, parasites in the water lines, and the way the fishsticks would come awake sometimes...” She shuddered and let go of Banks’s hand, going for her water bottle.

  Banks nodded. “You weren’t getting quite the deal WalWa said you were, and Thanh knew it. He was waiting for a run to a place like Santee so he could get you two out of there.”

  Mimi swayed a bit and took a long pull at the bottle. “But how could he leave me?” she said, her voice getting thick again. “How could he go away like that?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t want to,” said Banks. “In fact, I think he’d be sad to see you like this right now. This was his dream for the both of you: to be free of WalWa and to run your own lives for once.”

  Mimi looked up at Banks with watery, reddened eyes. “I just want him back.”

  “I know,” said Banks, moving to the seat next to Mimi her and wrapping an arm around her. She cried a while, and Banks rocked her back and forth. I took the now-empty bottle from her hand, and she gripped my arm with fierce, bony fingers. Finally, her crying eased off, and she let go of us both. “I need a moment,” she said, and she scooted to an empty part of the cavernous limo.

  I crunched the caneplas bottle. “Thanh must have been quite a man,” I said, dropping the trash into the compost bucket.

  “He was a bullying asshole,” said One-Eye.

  “Ellie!” cried the old ladies.

  “He was,” said One-Eye. “It didn’t matter that I was the one who had authority over running the ship. Whenever there was an issue with his goddamned plants, he’d piss and moan about how he was the only one keeping us alive, and if we didn’t help him we were all dead. Every fucking day he’d push us around the greenhouse until our fingers bled. Literally.” She held up her hands, a constellation of scars on her knuckles and fingertips. “He didn’t want to Breach to be free. He’d just heard the porn on Santee was better than the stuff WalWa let him carry on the ship.” She pounded the side of the car, then sat back, crossing her arms and staring into the distance.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I started that rumor myself.”

  One-Eye snorted, crossed her massive arms over her chest. “Then you di
d your marketing professors proud, ’cause you sure as hell knew your audience.” She shook her head. “The only two good things that son of a bitch ever did were getting Mimi into that can and dropping dead on the way down.”

  “Spoken like a true resident of Santee,” I said, giving the compost bucket a shake. “They probably would’ve gotten divorced within the year. The cracks show pretty quickly in bad Breach marriages.”

  “How high is the divorce rate?” asked Banks.

  “Astronomical,” I said. “Of course, if you want to divorce someone, you just say so in front of a paied witness or a Public terminal, and that’s that.”

  “Damn,” said Banks.

  “So, what about you?” said One-Eye.

  I blinked up the time: four-twenty. “Oh, you know... got screwed over one time too many and decided I wanted more. How about you... Ellie?” I said. “Why’d you jump?”

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said, still staring out the window.

  “And what’s that?”

  She looked at me, her scarred face shriveled and red. “I know your type,” she said, leaning forward like a cane viper coiling up for a strike. “You learn how to psyche people out, how to manipulate them, how to get them to do what you want. And you start by getting into our heads, finding our weak points.”

  “If it’s any comfort, I don’t think you have any weak points.”

  “See? See?” She pointed her finger, and her face got harder. “There you are, doing it. Trying to get me on your side.”

  “I don’t care what side you’re on, just as long as it’s not the Big Three’s.” I felt like she was going to take a swing at me, the way her entire body tensed and focused all that energy in one finger. The back of my brain itched, the feeling that I had seen this woman before.

  And, of course, I had: there had been plenty of people who got in my face and wanted to start fights with them. Good thing I was nice and drunk and not in the mood to take any shit from her, especially since I was on Tonggow’s business. I wasn’t about to let her screw things up for me. “You still want to go Sou’s Reach? I’ll call you a tuk-tuk, have you delivered in twenty minutes. Just let me get you signed up with the Union so you’re protected.”