CHAPTER SEVEN
A few weeks later, Cesar and Trevor walk back from town alongside the little mule as it pulls its cart. They have walked in silence for a whole five minutes, but Cesar knows it’s too good to last.
The boy is itching to ask him about his dad. Every chance Trevor gets, he asks for stories about his dad. At first, this was fine by Cesar, as he dearly loved to tell tales, especially daring adventures where the hero says something clever after foiling the bad guy and then he manfully folds a damsel under his bulging bicep. With so many years drifting in space and so little access to the Ether or other entertainments, he’s told plenty of tales.
True stories, however, are an entirely different matter he’s discovered. True stories about himself are not part of his normal repertoire. Cesar wants his son to know more about him and he’s thrilled to find Trevor so interested. He thought it would be easy to spin yarns of his actual adventures, just from the point of view of someone else.
He was wrong.
Cesar found it deeply unsettling to talk about himself in the third person.
Worse, Cesar didn’t know how to describe himself. He doesn’t want Trevor to think he’s a villain or an idiot, but he also doesn’t want the boy going out and trying any of the fool things he did. It is equally bizarre to talk about himself as a hero or glorify his actions. Most of the time, Cesar ends up telling the story baldly, stating the facts and trying to leave the whys and wherefores out of it.
And then there are the stories themselves—gory, ugly, depressing, bawdy, gross. None of his adventures in the past fifteen years seem like good topics for a teenage boy and Cesar can’t yet think of Trevor as a young man.
It’s just too much.
He’s almost been avoiding the boy for the last few days, but he couldn’t refuse Trevor’s request for company into town today to pick up supplies.
Hoping to avoid the inevitable for a few more minutes, Cesar asks, “Who won the Spacerbase game last night?”
Spacerbase is a game much played by kids growing up in orbitals. It’s basically full-contact capture-the-flag in high gravity. Cesar knows Trevor went to play with some other kids down in the Ag Level. Technically, the Ag Level on Ithaca isn’t really high gravity enough to count, but having played down there at least a thousand times himself, Cesar knows it is still fun.
“My team lost,” Trevor tells him. “The other guys had three cousins visiting from New Siberia and that’s a really high-grav colony. They creamed us. It was a bloodbath.”
Kids from high-gravity colonies love beating the pants off their contemporaries in less harsh environments. Trevor has been through this before and is unfazed.
The boy enthusiastically describes how one of the off-worlder cousins scored a point by grabbing Trevor’s head and using it as a springboard to the base. Cesar chuckles until Trevor returned to his favorite topic.
“Did my dad ever play Spacerbase?” asks Trevor, but Cesar is ready for this one.
“Of course he did,” Cesar says. “Everybody plays Spacerbase.”
“What about tether tantrum?” asks Trevor.
Tether tantrum is played in the null or low gravity parts of the colony. In Ithaca, this is one of the huge cargo bays in the large central tube that the rest of the colony rotates around.
It took the first orbital colonists very little time before they realized they needed to improve their spacesuits with tethers with magnetized latches that they could use to cast out and secure themselves and then unlatch when they needed. It took the kids in the colonies even less time to come up with fast and dangerous games to play with those tethers.
Tether tantrum is like dodgeball in null gravity with tethers. So once the balls are thrown, they keep ricocheting throughout the cargo bay until they hit someone or are caught up in a net. When there are twenty or thirty balls flying around with an equal number of players spinning themselves through the room on tethers, it can’t be anything but perilous and a whole lot of fun.
Cesar broke three fingers playing tether tantrum once and he tells Trevor so, rubbing them at the memory.
“What about Nullball?” asks Trevor.
Cesar exhales slowly. “Well kid, he wasn’t exactly a Nullball League superstar, but I think your dad told me that he played on the Ithaca team for a while before he left for the war. Then I think he played for a season in the minors, the Local L4 Lagrange League for the Hedonia colony team, I think he said. But they weren’t great teams or anything.”
Trevor only hears that his dad was a Nullball star and cries, “I knew it! I’m not great, but I practice Nullball every chance I get so I think I’ll probably get on Ithaca’s team. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of competition, but still it’s pretty nifty. That’s if I stay.”
Cesar tells the boy that Nullball is not a bad way to spend his time and they talk for a bit about this year’s upcoming Nullball League Playoff Tournament. Since it will be held at Ithaca this year, this is a subject of much discussion at the ranch. Ithaca’s team is strong but the Hathor Mining team is the favorite and Manny’s Mighties are also heavy contenders.
Regardless, Ithaca is determined to impress the rest of the colonies with the shininess of their orbital. They’ve all been cleaning and replacing lights and mirrors for weeks. Work finished, now they are just waiting for the games to begin.
That conversation peters out and they walk in silence for exactly ten seconds before Trevor asks, “Did you and my dad ever visit the Rasta Nation?”
“No, those Rasta guys kept themselves pretty quiet. Didn’t allow any visitors into that old research station they took over until just a few years ago and by then your dad was out of the loop.”
“Where was he?” Trevor wants to know.
Cesar replies after a pause, “I’m not really sure.”
Short answers never slow Trevor down. “Did you meet any Rastas during the War?”
Cesar sighs, “No, kid, those Rasta guys refused to take part in the War for religious reasons so I never met any of them during the fighting.”
“Oh!” cries Trevor, scandalized.
Cesar explains, “A few of the orbitals refused to take part. Most of them didn’t have weapons more powerful than sharpened spoons to throw at the enemy, so it didn’t make too much of a difference, but there was some bad blood after the war. Rasta Nation at least would take in refugees from colonies that were hit hard.”
Cesar watches Trevor fidget out of the corner of his eye and sighs again. The boy won’t give up until he gets a tale so Cesar decides to tell him one. To attempt it anyway.
“We did visit the Poppy Ship. It was really a small colony, but they called it a ship. Before the War, they produced medicines.”
Trevor pipes up, “So you knew him before the War, too?”
Cesar shakes his head, trying to get his stories and lies straight. “No, I don’t think so. I think we met during the War. I, uh, took a couple hard knocks to the head so my memory isn’t great, if you want to know the truth.”
Trevor’s face takes on the vaguely sympathetic look that teenagers get when someone tells them something tragic that they don’t really understand.
“Oh,” he says somberly.
Cesar continues, “This time we went to the Poppy Ship was about a year after the War. Your dad was finally healed up from all the hits he took in combat. He started a small trading business with a ship he was able to fix up and the men from his platoon.”
Here Cesar pauses, struggles with himself for a minute and then confesses, “Alright, so really it was more in the way of a smuggling business. Your Dad was running black market items to and from Earth.”
“Oh,” says Trevor, digesting that fact. “But I thought the war was over? How could there still be smuggling after the blockade ended?”
“Well, there’s winning and there’s winning, as it turns out,” Cesar replies, still a little bitter after all these years.
“Plenty of places on Earth were still pretty angry, so plenty of ports were closed. There were others places that weren’t officially closed, but Spacers would be gunned down or thrown in some dank prison the minute they popped the airlocks. We learned which was which pretty quick.”
“Wow,” breathes Trevor. “And my dad’s men still wanted to follow him into danger after the War?”
Cesar nods.
The kid makes it sound almost heroic, but at the time it seemed normal. Those who hadn’t headed home would want some employment and he should find it for them. Cesar mutters, “Well, yes. You spend enough years working with someone on the art of not dying and you form some strong friendships.”
“Because my dad was a commander,” says Trevor, puffing his chest out. “You followed him too? And you snuck in and out under the Earthers’ noses going wherever you wanted regardless of the law? Wow!”
“It wasn’t glamorous or anything,” Cesar protests quickly. “Weeks of boring coasting so they wouldn’t pick up your heat signal followed by a few days trying not to attract too much attention buying up all the oranges in town or whatever. Half the time nobody really cared, so we were taken by surprise when some hothead started taking potshots at our ride and we had to make a run for it. And then you make it back and the goons that sent you out want to haggle you down to half the price you agreed on because the fruit has a few bruises.”
“Huh,” says Trevor, but Cesar can see the boy doesn’t quite believe how boring and uncomfortable smuggling was.
Cesar says blandly, “Most of the time we were stuck eating protein bars, when we could get them, and chicken-little when we couldn’t.”
Trevor wrinkled his nose. “No way,” he says, looking at Cesar to see if he is playing a joke.
“Nope,” Cesar replies with relish after seeing the disgusted look on the boy’s face. “Chicken-little is the main food source for smugglers. You can’t eat the food you’re smuggling. Too valuable. You ever eat chicken-little, kid?”
“Once,” gulps Trevor, looking a little green at the memory. “My mom made me because I wouldn’t eat my vegetables. She said I needed to know how lucky I was to have vegetables.”
Chicken-little is a bioengineered protein source that, at one time long in the past, was a chicken. If you dig around in the box, you find what is left of its digestive tract and maybe an eye and sometimes a beak.
If you poke it, it twitches and quivers. Cutting off a chunk to eat is not an appetizing experience. In theory, you don’t have to cook it because no bacteria will grow on a chicken-little.
Technically, you can survive eating nothing but chicken-little for months, but most people agree that a life like that wouldn’t be worth living. It comes in a box and requires only occasional water to regenerate for decades. Most Spacers would rather eat their boots than choke down a serving of chicken-little. It’s banned in eight countries down on the Earth.
Cesar replies, “Your dad ate more than his fair share of chicken-little in the War and after. It puts hair on your chest. You don’t want to let it touch your skin too much, though. Always gave me a rash.”
“Wow,” Trevor says again. Then he shakes his head and returns to what, for him, is the important point of the story. “You guys were smugglers? That’s so cool!”
Cesar’s heart lifts, watching the wiry boy grin gleefully, but clearly this is not the impression he was hoping to make on the boy.
“So we heard about the Poppy Ship and wanted to check it out,” Cesar says loudly. “We heard they had been making medicines before the war. Nice boring medicines that healed sick people.”
Trevor seems to surface from whatever smuggling daydream he has been swimming in, so Cesar goes on in a milder voice. “They’d been out of touch for a while. We thought if they were still alive and making medicine, we could help them get their stuff out. Trade it for goods and all. Plenty of orbitals were desperate for quality meds.”
Trevor grins, “And if they all died, there’s probably be a goldmine of medicines left for you to scavenge!”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Cesar admits, looking at his feet. That was something he’d thought of, too. Trevor is so much like him that sometimes it’s downright creepy.
Running a hand through his hair, Cesar says quickly, “But we were hoping they were all alive. Because you always hope for live people instead of bodies to scavenge, even if it means more money.”
He looks so sanctimonious that Trevor wipes the grin off his face and nods solemnly.
“At any rate, they were alive, but they weren’t so much into making medicines any more,” Cesar says, thinking it was time to focus on the story and wondering how to frame this next part. “Or at least, they had decided to focus on just one kind of medicine.”
“What do you mean?” asks Trevor.
* * *
It took Cesar much longer than he planned to find the Poppy Ship. It had wandered pretty far off its course. The truth of the matter was that at some point during the war, the Poppy Ship’s chief engineer died of a heart attack and, as far as Cesar was ever able to discover, got replaced by a total moron. When Cesar located the ship, it was slowly drifting off into void space. Not that the people on the ship cared. Not that they noticed.
When Cesar popped his airlock and stepped out, he’d expected a pristine hospital ship with lots of clean people in white lab coats bustling down well lit and clearly labeled hallways. As he looked around, it was clear that at one point he might have found that scene, but that was a long time ago. It was hazy and dim and the air tasted faintly oily. Low mellow music piped thinly through the halls.
“Boys, go check it out,” Cesar barked without looking at his crew.
His two best scouts, Dino and Perry, went bolting down a hallway. Cesar turned on his heel and walked back into his ship. He had the rest of the crew repaneling the exhaust shielding and cleaning up the kitchen when the two scouts came rushing back.
“Captain, you won’t believe this place!” said Dino, a grinning ex-soldier. Even though he was only few years younger than Cesar, Dino somehow seemed barely old enough to grow a beard, which he occasionally did until someone forced him to shave off the pathetic thing.
“These folks have been sampling their own product, sir,” barked the older scout, Perry, as he limped up behind Dino, wheezing slightly.
“That leg still bothering you, Perry?” Cesar asked the man.
Perry shook his grizzled head and straightened up with an effort, “I’m fine, Captain. I think there’s a few pieces of shrapnel still working their way out.”
Cesar nodded. He did not believe for a second that Perry was fine, but what could he do?
“So they’re still making meds?”
“With a will, sir,” Perry said, coughing meaningfully. “Looks like mostly, uh, mood enhancers. And I doubt they have any left over to trade, if you know what I mean.”
Cesar was catching the gist of it. Before the War, the main products of the Poppy Ship were opium-based painkillers.
“There’s all these people in there running around in their underwear, smoking dope and listening to this really calming music,” the Dino gleefully announced to all within earshot.
Cesar arched an eyebrow.
This particular scout was like the human version of an adorable tiger cub, cute and wriggly with surprisingly sharp teeth. Discretion wasn’t really a word in the boy’s vocabulary and Cesar wasn’t exactly thrilled about the whole crew knowing they were in an opium den.
“You boys find somebody in charge?” Cesar asked curtly.
Perry nodded. “She’s right behind us,” he said, jerking a scarred thumb over his shoulder.
Two hours later, Cesar was trying to maintain his dignity as a Captain while squelching around on the floor on lumpy pillows, eating some sort of drippy rice dish with his fingers. He and a few of the crew were sitting in a large open room while many other people lounged on pillows around them, clad mainly in thin winding cloths and listening to a band play low, discordant music. The haze was thick here due to the number of pipes being passed around.
Cesar was trying to look casual and breathe mainly through his nose in a futile effort not to inhale so much smoke.
The woman in front of him folded herself into a serene lotus position, her long gray dreadlocks streaming down her back and her quite minimal clothing draped artfully around her. Cesar was beginning to doubt this woman was in charge or that anyone was really in charge here. She’d been lecturing him for the last half hour on the glorious enlightenment of the Poppy Ship, which she called the Flower of Hope.
As far as he could tell, the Poppy Ship started smoking their own product almost as soon as the War broke out and they stopped caring about much else since then. He sent out more of his crew to quietly scout around and they all confirmed this impression. This really didn’t bother him.
Medical supplies would have been worth their weight in platinum, but pharmaceutical-grade opium was still worth its weight in gold and a doped-up colony wasn’t likely to haggle too much over the price.
Cesar briefly entertained the idea of just taking a whole bunch of the stuff. It was unlikely that anyone here could stop them and quite likely no one would even notice. He sighed and discarded the thought. Repeat business would be lucrative if these people didn’t let themselves die first. Also, his Momma always told him stealing was wrong.
As the woman droned on, Cesar sighed and itched his latest radiation burn. Traveling the stars was a lot less romantic and a lot more uncomfortable than he had imagined.
He really wished the Poppy Ship would embrace the concept of deodorant. Cesar wondered why, of all the things he lost or injured during the War, he couldn’t have lost his sense of smell? It brought him more grief than joy, traveling between so many different orbitals, experiencing their smells.
The minute he started feeling light-headed and dreamy, Cesar politely excused himself and commanded his crew back to the ship. Some of them looked ready to protest, but they’d seen that black look on the Captain’s face before and they shuffled back to the ship without comment.
Once inside, Cesar sealed the door and gave orders not to cycle the ship’s air with the colony. Then he barked a few orders, mainly concerned with confining the crew to the ship, before he shut himself in his cabin and dreamed opium-soaked dreams. It took a ridiculously long time over the next few days, but eventually Cesar located a few people on the Poppy Ship who seemed relatively sane and sober.
It took even longer to negotiate his way to a hull full of opiates and a treaty for regular shipments, but Cesar did it. He spent the entire time dragging his crew away from the delights the Poppy Ship offered and keeping them sober.
It was exhausting.
Truth be told, he was tempted to try the pipe himself, but a captain can’t do these things and expect to maintain any kind of order.
Just as they were about to leave, his faithful old scout, Perry stood at attention in front of him. Perry cleared his throat and barked out, “Captain, I think I ought to stay here, sir. I think someone needs to stay behind and keep an eye on this place. I know my way around a colony engine. I’ll make sure this old boat gets back to the Lagrange point safe and sound. Can’t have a valuable colony like this just drifting off into the void.”
Cesar considered this. He looked at thick, red scars running down Perry’s injured arm and knew how far down the man’s body those scars went. He thought about the limp in Perry’s gait and the many times he’d woken up to find Perry walking the hallways, unable to sleep from pain.
Then he said, “That sounds like a fine idea. I need a man I can trust up here. Lord knows I’ll have enough problems unloading this stuff.”
Cesar clapped Perry on the shoulder to let the man know there was no ill will between them. He was rewarded with the clearest smile he’d ever gotten from the old scout.
Cesar felt a man had to make his own decisions and if what he wanted to do was dream away the pain of life for a while, then it was none of Cesar’s business. In Perry’s case, the man had more than his fair share of pain.
Cesar was feeling pretty good about that choice for exactly seventeen minutes before Dino scampered up dragging a girl behind him. She had long stringy brown hair and was only wearing what appeared to be several napkins tied around her scrawny frame. Dino himself had swapped his ship coveralls for a long piece of fabric that he’d wound around himself. He had strings of flowers and beads around his neck and ankles.
“Hey Captain!” shouted Dino, because the boy had no concept of volume control. “This is Petunia. We’re in love! I’m gonna stay here and marry her and learn how to be a transcendental farmer!”
The Captain also considered this.
Dino gazed languorously at the girl who stared at nothing. They both smelled like they’d been rolling in opium and maybe they had. Dino reminded Cesar of what he thought his son might be some day. Cesar considered what he would do if his own boy wanted to make this choice.
“Mutiny!” roared Cesar. “Boy, how dare you try to shirk your responsibilities? And where are your clothes?”
Dino shrank back, bewildered. “Aw, but Captain…”
“No, Dino!” Cesar said in his most impressive Captain voice. “You signed up for a tour of duty, you serve out your term. There’s no abandoning your post in the middle of a run. Get back on board this instant!”
“Captain, I’m a grown man! I can do what I want! I wanna stay here and you can’t stop me,” Dino shouted, grabbing the girl’s hand and throwing out his chest.
Cesar was having none of it. He dragged Dino back to the ship by his ear while the Petunia girl trailed listlessly behind. Eventually, Dino stopped howling and Petunia wandered off. Back at the ship, he tossed Dino into his bunk.
“Tie that deserter to his bunk and let’s get out of here!” growled Cesar. “And make a note to dock Dino’s pay for the cost of his coveralls.”
The rest of the crew snapped to it and the ship was flying away in record time.
Sitting in his chair and pretending to go over their planned flight pattern, Cesar wondered if he shouldn’t have let the boy make his own mistakes. He knew that he had taken more crew on this expedition than he really needed because he was unable to turn away any of his men who needed a job. He could have spared Dino. But if Dino were his son, Cesar would have never let him set foot on the Poppy Ship.
* * *
“What do you mean?” asks Trevor again.
Cesar scratches his white beard and wonders how to tell it. “Well, a lot of things changed in the War and the people on the Poppy Ship were making pain killers and sometimes life gets to be a bit much, you see, so they started taking the pain killers. When we showed up, things were kind of weird. I’m sure it was like that here, too. Didn’t things get a little weird after the War?”
Trevor shrugs. “The War ended when I was seven. I don’t remember how things were before.”
“Ah, that’s true,” allows Cesar as they plod along.
“So what happened on the Poppy Ship?” asks Trevor.
“Oh, nothing too much,” says Cesar. “We bought some of their product and sold it somewhere else and made a little money doing it. We had a regular supply run there for a while. Your dad loved you like hell, you know? He talked about you some and I know he thought about you every single day of his life.”
“Oh,” says Trevor.
Cesar watches as several emotions flick across the teen’s face. First there is surprise—that wasn’t what he expected the old man walking next to him to say. Next, there is disappointment—he expected epic adventure not mushy parental love stuff. Following quickly after that, there is a rueful grin.
Trevor looks back at the old man, but Cesar has turned his head to study the horizon so Trevor won’t see his smile. He has a strong temptation to reach out and ruffle the boy’s hair, but he resists. They don’t say another word for the rest of the journey.
That is, until the monster attacks.