Windswept
Authors: Adam Rakunas
Tags: #Science Fiction, #save the world, #Humour, #boozehound
Windswept
For Anne, my parents, my grandparents, and everyone who has to punch a clock.
All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.
Ralph Chaplin, “Solidarity Forever”
It only takes five fingers to form a fist.
Billy Bragg, “The Home Front”
I was sitting at my usual stool at Big Lily’s, talking with Odd Dupree about his troubles down at the plant, when something big and stupid came crashing through the front door. Vytai Bloombeck’s head swiveled like a pumpkin mounted on a sack of compost as he scanned the faces of the regulars. I tried to duck beneath the ironpalm bar, but it was too late – he had zeroed in on me. “Padma!” he shouted, moving toward me like a runaway cargo can, “I got something, make us both righteously wealthy, like Jesus would want.” He shoved Odd to the side as he plopped into two chairs. Odd’s eyes rolled back into his head from the smell. Bloombeck’s job was to fish blockages out of the city’s sewer mains, a Contract slot he’d kept since Time Immemorial because no one was stupid or desperate enough to take it from him.
“Not even Jesus wants you, Bloomie,” I said, wincing at the stabbing pain in my right eye. My pai was supposed to float text warning me that Bloombeck was within one hundred meters, but, thanks to the vagaries of my brain chemistry and the implant’s firmware, the damn thing always gave me an electric jab in the retina
after
he’d shown up. I’d complained to every tech I know, and they all shrugged their shoulders and gave me the Santee Anchorage Song-and-Dance about how We Don’t Have the Proper Tech, We Don’t Make Enough to Care about Your Problem, Just Wait for the Next Bloody Update. The Oh-God-It’s-Bloomie warning squatted between a migraine and my period on the pain scale, and the only treatment that worked was avoiding him. “You want to talk to me, you make an appointment.”
Bloombeck gave me his weird smile, all upper lip and blue gums. “You’re looking mighty fine today, Padma,” he said.
“Oh, stow it,” I said, holding my mug against my right temple, hoping the warmth would soothe my headache. If my pai hadn’t continued to be so useful, I would have paid a doc to jab a needle in my eye burn the damn thing off my optic nerve. Maybe I could do that when I retired. If I retired.
“Whatever you have can wait until I’m done with Odd.” I pointed to the other end of the bar, the part closest to the open lanai. The fresh air off the ocean would help mitigate his scent. He grumbled away, leaving a wake of distressed people.
Odd ran a finger through his thick, gray beard, pushing aside the bristles that covered his faded Indenture tattoo, a caduceus. He hadn’t been a doctor or a nurse, but a pharmaceutical test subject for LiaoCon. The long years of his Indenture had left him a nervous, twitching wreck. Odd had been lucky to walk into his Slot, where the heaviest thing he had to operate was the crayon he used to mark pipes slated for replacement. He shivered as he looked at me. “So, you think you can get me moved to a different shift, maybe?”
“Getting you off graveyard’s gonna be tough,” I said. “You just don’t have the seniority.”
“I’m the oldest guy there,” he said.
“Yeah, but you’ve only been on Santee six years,” I said, blinking up his Profile on the Public. “It’s a long line ahead of you, Odd.”
“Glenn wants us home at the same time.” Odd’s eyes flickering like hyperactive birds. “Is that too much to ask? I do good work, I don’t grumble. Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Of course it does,” I said, looking at him and giving him a calm smile in the hopes he’d relax. I’d already plied him with two fingers of Uncle Mbeki’s Finest Kind Blend, but it just made his eyelids droop while the rest of him twitched. “But there are people who’ve been here twenty who’re waiting for someone to take their Slot. And you know how much the traffic’s dried up.”
He held up his hands. “I don’t want to be a bother, I know things’re tight for everyone. It’s just…” A quiver ran down his back, down his arms, into his fidgeting fingertips. “I wonder sometimes, was this worth it? Breaching and coming here?”
I put my hands on his, holding them until they stopped shaking. “You really think you would’ve been happy if you’d stayed on that lab ship? Getting stuck with every weird anti-viral and arousal pill they cranked out? You think you’d still be alive? You’d think you’d have found Glenn?”
He shook his head, his movements calm and steady.
“I know working graveyard sucks,” I said. “I did it, too. I pulled a lot of crap shifts all over: at the brush factory, at the lifter base, even in Steelcase. I ever tell you I drove a crane for two years?”
He gave me a loose nod.
“And all that time, no matter how tired or dirty or sober I got, I never once thought I’d made a mistake coming here.” I took a sip of tea, hoping Odd would buy all this. “You have a good hard think about it, you’d agree. Breaching is never a mistake.”
He kept nodding, his head bobbing more and more. I thought that would have been enough for him, but then a thought must have come loose in his brain, because he stopped and said, “Yeah, but I still want to see my husband at breakfast. In the morning. I’ll take whatever you got. I’d even go to a refinery.”
“Odd, you know I wouldn’t do that to you. I know the treatment plant isn’t the greatest, but, Jesus, you really want to go to a place like Sou’s Reach? You think your gig’s bad now?”
Odd shrugged, his bony shoulders stacking up around his ears. “I hear Saarien’s a fair guy. He tries to work with everyone.”
“Just wait until the harvest rush when they’re working past capacity and you haven’t slept in a week and you’re slipping and sliding all over the place and trip right into the holding tanks. You slip in the water at our plant, you’ll smell horrible, but you’ll come out alive. You won’t if it’s molasses. You move out of Brushhead into that shithole, he will own you. And I couldn’t let that happen to you.”
“Then what can you do?”
I sighed and blinked up every job listing I could think of. No one at the treatment plant would want to trade away a decent Slot, not even if I paid them off. I could probably talk to another Ward Chair, see if they’d be willing to swap bodies, but I knew everyone held on to whatever they had. Ever since the Big Three decided our blessed little mudball wasn’t on an economically viable route, refueling traffic had gotten lighter and lighter, and that meant Contract Slots had gotten scarcer and scarcer. I heard whisperings that the only thing keeping Santee Anchorage from getting cut out completely was the fact that we sent more industrial molasses into Occupied Space than anyone within a six-jump radius. I suppose if I stuck with the Union long enough, I’d be promoted to those circles, but I had other plans, and all of them involved me no longer giving a shit.
Wait. Shit. There. A job flitted past my eyes, and I rewound it back. “Niccola Witt is going on maternity leave. She’ll be out for a year.”
Odd wrinkled his nose. “She does pollution control at the bottom of the plant. Her job stinks more than Bloombeck’s.”
“Odd, it’s not like you’ll be wading into the ponds without protection. You’ll get a full environment suit and a rebreather. Well, you’ll get
her
suit, ’cause we can’t afford a new one, but–”
“I don’t know, Padma. What happens when she comes back?”
“By the time she does, there’ll be people to fill her Slot
and
yours.”
He leaned closer, the always-scared look fading from his eyes. “You got a line on something?”
Bloombeck materialized out of nowhere. The smell hit me just before the needles in my optic nerve. “Padma, I really need to tell you this–”
I turned toward him, slow and steady. “Is it about your back dues?” I rubbed my eye to ease the pain. “Last I checked, you’re coming up on five years’ worth. And we haven’t even talked about penalties.”
Bloombeck scratching his face. His ink, a pair of crossed hedge clippers under a Union fist, redshifted under his grubby fingernails. I could never remember which of the Big Three he’d worked for before he’d Breached his Indenture, but you could tell they hadn’t valued him even then. The inkwork was uneven, like someone had just stamped his face with a spiked rubber pad before sending him away. At least when WalWa had tattooed me, they’d taken their sweet time, the bastards.
Bloombeck pointed at his temple. “I just texted you for an appointment. You’re free right now.”
“Since when?”
“Since your four o’clock cancelled.”
I blinked up my calendar and saw that, sure enough, Estella Tonggow had stood me up again. Bloombeck had snaked her spot. I took a deep breath, wondering for the umpteenth time why our Union forebears hadn’t allowed me the power to beat the ever-loving crap out of people like Bloombeck. I knew that all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds Breached from the Big Three, and that we had to embrace everyone, but, Sweet and Merciful Buddha, even Vytai Bloombeck would have made them change their minds. “I will be with you in one moment.”
“But–”
“Bloombeck, if you don’t shove off, I will call up Soni Baghram and have her arrest your ass.”
“For what?”
“Loitering with intent to annoy. Wait your turn.”
“Baghram wouldn’t do that,” said Bloombeck, giving me a little sneer.
“You want to bet?” I said. “You want me to call up the nice police captain and ask her who she’s more likely to listen to?”
I turned back to Odd. “You want the gig or not?”
He nodded, his face lighting up. “You’re the best, Padma. When do I start?”
I blinked over a few forms to fill out. “Get that back to me by tomorrow, and you can get rolling next week.”
Odd hugged me, then danced out of the bar. I looked back at Bloombeck and said, “Now, what can I do for you? And it had better involve you turning into a giant stack of money, ’cause I’m not interested in whatever scam you’re cooking up.”
“What makes you think I got a scam?”
“Because you’re talking.”
“What if I told you I knew about a bunch of people who wanted to Breach?”
“How could you come by info like that?”
“I got ears everywhere, and these ears tell me there’s a WalWa colony seeder six days out,” he said.
“Anyone can see the shipping queue, Bloomie.”
“But can they see there’s been grumbling ever since they came in from the Red Line?” said Bloombeck. “I heard it coming through the wireless.”
“How can you get reception all the way down there?”
He shrugged. “The piping, it does weird stuff to signals. But, look, these people know the Union runs this place, and forty people want to jump ship. That’s a good digit, yeah? Help you make your number?”
“It would, but only if I knew how much this would all cost me.”
“Only three hundred fifty yuan,” said Bloombeck. “That’s how much it’ll take to bribe the radar control officer at Sand Point–”
“Stop,” I said, looking out the window toward the lifter. Even though the giant black ribbon of coral carbon was twenty klicks offshore, its massive width filled the south window as it reached into space. The crawler platforms glinted in the late afternoon sky as they brought empty fuel tanks down to the water and full tanks and cargo cans to the sky. It was a sight that would have filled me with calm and contentment, but for the sweaty presence of Bloombeck. “I think you’ve said enough.”