CHAPTER FIVE
For the next two days, Cesar does nothing but sleep fitfully and drink the never-ending stream of soup Lupe pours into him. Although Lupe practically raised him from infancy, she shows no sign of recognizing him. This depresses him even more. Cesar feels like a ghost, haunting his old life.
Finally, his fever breaks. On the third morning, he watches the reflected glow of the sun light up this little world. He finally feels human again, or at least human enough to desperately want to get out of bed and get clean. He hears footsteps approaching.
“No more nonsense. Today we put him in the medibox, Lupe,” he hears Penelope say resolutely as she approaches. He can hear her determined stride, matched by the rushing steps of Lupe.
“Ach, mija. Those mediboxes are just coffins. You can’t trust them. Lasers and scans and computers poking you. They are no match for rest and good food.” Lupe is vehement in her dislike of the orbital solution to the lack of medical personnel and equipment.
Mediboxes were so reliable that every Spacer and Earther who could afford one had them, even if they were a bit claustrophobic. Although most of the time, a Spacer medibox would recommend diet and exercise modifications in keeping with Spacer’s rabid dislike of “unnatural” remedies.
“Besides, my soup will cure him. My soup can cure anything,” Lupe declares righteously. “If he doesn’t die first.”
The door opens and both women peer in at him. Cesar has never seen Lupe in anything but the colorful skirts and ornately embroidered blouses she loved. Today is no different.
When he was little, Lupe told him that her skirts reminded her of who she was and where she came from. That was something he could stand to remember now and then, she would inevitably add.
Penelope is wearing a pair of the multi-pocketed pants much favored by Spacer women. The legs are cut to fall in folds like a skirt. They have drawstrings to gather them tight to the ankle for the lower gravities where a skirt is an unfortunate fashion choice.
Lupe flatly refuses to wear them. But then, she has not left Ithaca in decades. She even refuses to visit the storage level. Weightlessness is her worst nightmare. Cesar could never understand what convinced her to leave the Earth in the first place.
“You look pretty bright-eyed today, gringo,” Penelope comments as she inspects him.
Cesar gives her a wan smile.
“You see? My soup,” Lupe pronounces triumphantly, poking Cesar like a steak of questionable tenderness.
She beams at him approvingly until she sees he has not finished the cup of soup she left him the night before. Her face takes on a look of steely disapproval. He drinks it cold.
“I am definitely on the mend, ma’am,” Cesar agrees quietly, glancing quickly at Penelope. “I would surely love to get cleaned up. I know I must smell like death on a cracker. My last stop before I came here was the Satsuma Silk Colony and two billion tons of silkworms leave a stench that takes days to get out.”
“Well, good. We have a medibox if you’d like to get checked out, just to be sure?” Penelope offers.
“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll skip it unless I’m still feeling poorly in a day or two,” Cesar answers as he gets up and stretches. Cesar will die before getting in a medibox again, but he doesn’t see the need to mention that right now.
Penelope shrugs. “Fine by me. I will be gone most of the day, but Lupe will point you towards clean clothes and a shower.” And with that Penelope leaves without a backwards glance. Cesar frankly admires her retreating figure.
When he left all those years ago, she was his fluffy little kitten. He knew the only reason he’d ever gotten her aboard the ship from Earth was by appealing to that insatiable dream of travel. A dream that apparently died on the shuttle up.
Argos stopped by earlier to chat with Cesar and see if the new stranger would live or die. Argos had not recognized Cesar at all, but he did say that Penelope had not left Ithaca once since setting foot inside the orbital all those years ago.
Cesar could not get over the difference in her. His little kitten may have hissed and shown her claws on occasion, but that Penelope was too gentle and sweet to ever cause harm. The woman he saw now was a panther—sleek, strong and ready to devour those that got in her way.
What a woman, Cesar thinks appreciatively.
He smiles to think that if she’d been this confident and unassailable when they’d met, he’d probably have run in fear. He is deeply uncomfortable with the man he used to be, a man who had all this and walked away without a second thought.
Lupe helps him up, calling on various saints for strength.
“A shower is not going to cut it. I am filling up the water trough. You get a bath, mister.”
Cesar thinks this is a grand idea, but he protests the decadence of it. You don’t get a lot of baths in space. Water is at a premium. Most orbitals are designed with enough plants and culture vats to make air an easy commodity. They tend to err on the side of too much oxygen, building photosynthesis panels into the roofs of every building. Food is usually not a problem as the bacterial vats can supply enough to live on, even if bac-food tends to be mostly unappetizing. Yeast cakes smell like yeast cakes no matter how you culture them.
Which is why the majority of colonies devote the largest amount of room for raising food. But water was a real issue until they perfected large-scale asteroid mining.
Even now, nearly all orbitals try to clean their populace with the barest minimum of water. A bath is the ultimate luxury, even if it is in the trough used to water the mules. It was the greatest testament to how well Ithaca and this ranch were doing, that Lupe would offer a bath to a stranger. He thanks her profusely.
“Well, a bath will at least take a few layers of the funk off of you. The trough needed cleaning anyway,” she says, brushing aside his thanks. “And don’t think I won’t make you scrub a mess of laundry while you’re in there.”
He follows her slowly, still unsteady and weak.
Lupe gives Cesar a cake of coarse homemade soap that he scours himself with. He washes his hair at least three times and then sits in the tub combing it. It is longer and more matted than he realized. Lupe brings out some scissors and does the best she can to hack his hair and beard into a more presentable shape.
But she refuses to touch a single hair until he parts ways with his filthy undershirt so she can give it a good scrub. Cesar doesn’t want to get practically naked in anybody’s front yard, especially this one.
He is careful to keep Lupe from seeing the large scar on his thigh. He’d gotten it as a youngster, the day he learned that cows may look stupid, but they bite pretty hard when you poke them with a stick. Lupe had been the one to stitch it up.
He remembers the lectures she gave him and all the soup she made him drink after that. If she sees the scar, she’ll recognize him for sure.
Lupe grunts, “Cleaned up you don’t look half-bad, mister. Especially now that you got a little color back in your cheeks. Thought you was a ghost that first day, staggering around half-dead like you were.”
Caesar laughs his thanks. He is getting dressed when four women round the corner of the main house. They are all wearing the traditional roughneck uniform of boots, jeans and bandannas. They stop to stare when they see him. Three or four burst out laughing.
“Abuela, there’s a naked old man in the yard,” a freckle-faced girl drawls.
Even though he’s got on underpants and an undershirt, Cesar curls up in a very embarrassed ball, quickly yanking on pants and a shirt.
“Not that old,” a blond with pigtails giggles as she eyes the wiry body he scrambles to cover up.
“You girls are wicked,” Lupe says, threatening to hose them down if they come any closer. “A good shower will clean out your dirty minds.”
“You are so right, Mama Lupe. I’ll take one right now if this nice man will wash my back,” the dark-skinned blond winks at him as they all saunter inside, giggling and swishing their hips. He throws on the rest of his clothes quickly, but Lupe just laughs.
“Like they can see anything through all that hair,” she clucks. But when Lupe surveys her handiwork with respect to his hair and beard, she is satisfied.
“Where did they come from anyway?” Cesar asks, retreating into the bunkhouse.
“Just now, they come from the Ag level, tending the herd. We’ve got a private elevator,” Lupe can’t help bragging.
Looking after the women, she snorts, “They call themselves cowgirls, if you can believe such a thing. They eat like cows, that’s for sure.”
Lupe starts towards the main house, her mind on cooking. Cesar knows this because she tells him so. He wonders if the woman has been talking nonstop these last fifteen years.
“No other cowboys here on the ranch?” asks Cesar, pausing in the doorway of his little room.
Lupe shakes her head. “No. The lady won’t have them. Except for Argos. Those are his old clothes I’m giving you. All of these girls showed up like driftwood with nasty stories from other orbitals. She takes ’em in, puts them to work until they are strong enough to do for themselves. They keep her gentlemen callers on their toes too. She likes to take in strays, that one.” Lupe plainly does not approve.
“Lucky for you,” she adds. Then she turns and fixes him with a piercing gaze. “Mister, I need to start calling you by a name, don’t you think?”
“Ulixes. Call me Jonas Ulixes,” he lies smoothly. He’s used the name before but never on this side of the stars. He runs a hand through his cropped hair, testing the feel of it.
Lupe snorts, but Cesar isn’t sure what that means. “Well, Mr. Ulixes. You sure look like you been run over by a tractor and then maybe someone backed up to finish the job. Where’d you get all those scars?”
“That’s a lot of stories. A lot of long stories. Mostly from the War. Some after.” He closes his eyes remembering.
She turns back to the big house. “So tuck your shirt in and you can tell me one while you help me with lunch,” Lupe calls over her shoulder.