Like a Boss

by Adam Rakunas

  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.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “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 o
f 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.”

  “But you own a distillery,” said Star Woman.

  “No amount of rum will ever make up what I owe for blowing up the lifter,” I said. “And I know my wages won’t, either. But it’s part of taking responsibility for my choice, and I’ll keep doing it until the day I’m ready to become compost. I stand by what I did, and it’s time for Letty to do the same.”

  I waved my hand at the lower part of my presentation. “Every movement needs goals. This chaos sweeping over our city has none. So we’re going to whip some demands on the mob. Number One: turn on the damn Public.”

  “I’m missing my stories!” called Big Jan from the grill. Finally, another laugh from the crowd.

  “Number Two: we do what we’re doing here, but for the entire city. Everyone empties their larders to make sure everyone gets fed. No more hoarding, no more price gouging. If it took a week for our city to fall apart, then it’ll take a month to get us back on our feet.

  “Number Three: full accounting of the Union’s finances, including any connections between the Union and the Co-Op’s Mutual Fund.” I touched the words on the wall. “This is a big one, because it’s going to show what’s been happening with the money. We all need to know what’s happened with our dues, with the money earned through the Contract, and just what the hell happened with all those Mutual shares. This is the kind of thing that will get people tossed into prison.

  “Number Four: Letty and the entire Executive Committee are out, and they’re banned from any committee work for ten years. Same goes for anyone else responsible for the riots.”

  “Why not ban them for life?” said one of the crowd.

  “Because we still need the people we’ve got if we’re going to keep Santee from sliding back to the Industrial Age. We’re not the Big Three. We don’t have an endless supply of skilled workers. Plus we still have to live with each other, and that means reconciling with the people who’ve wronged us. If someone committed crimes, they need to be charged and tried. But if they just got caught up in the madness, then we need to work together and move forward. No grudges. That’s poison.”

  “So, cookouts and presentations are what’s going to stop this mess?”

  “If everyone’s busy eating and talking, they’re not hiding and hoarding,” I said. “Twenty-four hours ago, this place was in riot. Now you’re all here eating tacos and drinking bumboo. I think there are more people like us all throughout Santee. I would even say that the vast majority of people would rather talk and eat and drink instead of fight each other for a pack of dried beans. Don’t you think so?”

  Nods.
A lot of unsure faces.

  “Seriously? Are the tacos that bad? If they suck, then we need to get something better. Come on!”

  I pushed through the crowd, stepping over people as they munched away. I got two stalls away when I realized no one was following me. “I’m completely serious,” I said. “It’s not enough for us to get you here. We need to take this to another neighborhood. Soni! You know this city better than I do. Where should we go next to get something to eat?”

  Soni coughed. “I could really go for doubles over in Bluffton.”

  I snapped my fingers and grinned. “Perfect! You talking about Jaffa’s? Let’s go!” I grabbed the closest able-bodied people and hauled them to their feet. “We are going to Jaffa’s, and we’re going to ask Min-Na James to fire up the cooker and make us some by-God doubles.”

  “What are doubles?” asked the woman I had pulled up. She had a crane tattooed on her cheek.

  “Well, you’re not going to find out by sitting here.” We passed the remains of a dry goods stand, and the glint of glass caught my eye. I scooped up two liter jars full of chickpeas. Serendipity. “By the way, what’s your name? ’Cause I’d rather not call you Crane Face while we walk and talk.”

  Half the crowd followed me, all of them buzzed on excitement and bumboo. I told Sharon, my new friend, all about the curried channa and the chutneys and the crunchy bara that make up perfect doubles. She told me about how she worked a Contract Slot on the Sou’s Reach reconstruction project because no one else could do her job. Also because no one wanted to be near the rotting molasses mess that Saarien had presided over during his tenure as Ward Chair. She wasn’t that keen on reconciling with him. I wasn’t either and said as much, but I pointed out that we would have to work with the fucker if we were going to get through this mess together.

  Jaffa’s was two kilometers away, and I led the hundred or so that followed me through the streets. I made a point of talking as loud as I could, and my voice bounced off the shuttered rowhouses. People had broken out the hurricane shutters, and the coral steel slats not scored with soot glinted in the late morning light. Piles of burned garbage smoldered in the gutters, and someone had painted a giant red Union fist in the middle of the street. Someone else had added a raised middle finger in white.