Gardens of the Sun (36 page)

Cash was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and hand-tooled red leather boots - they were the most expensive things he owned, the boots. Luiz Schwarcz, who’d always been a piss-elegant little fucker, wore black silk trousers and a white, round-collared jacket under the cage of his exoskeleton - he’d spent most of the past six years on the Moon, and despite gene therapy and exercise regimes his muscles weren’t able to cope with Earth’s gravity. A pale yellow silk scarf was twisted around his neck; his moustache was waxed to sharp points and his head was shaved to a close stubble; his mirrored sunglasses reflected Cash and the sunset behind him.

‘If I flew out to some camp in the ass-end of nowhere dressed like you,’ Cash said, ‘the roughnecks’d probably shoot me. After they’d picked themselves up from laughing so hard.’

Luiz smiled. ‘I was worried that you might have let yourself go. Now I see that you have gone native.’

Cash set his bottle of beer on the picnic table and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. He was getting the first pangs of a headache. He had a lot of headaches these days, and there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about them.

He said, ‘I’m a working man, Luiz. I wear my uniform on the job, and afterwards I kick back with everyone else. Besides, I was born here. This is what I am. This is what I do.’

‘You are still a pilot. Vera Jackson was good, but you were better. As I should know, having flown with both of you.’

Here it was, the thing they’d been circling around since Luiz had touched down. Hell, since he’d gotten in contact, two weeks ago. Telling Cash he was coming back to Earth for his father’s funeral, he could jog over to Bastrop one day and they could catch up . . .

Cash said, ‘Vera didn’t get hit. And you didn’t get hit either. I did. You both had what I didn’t have: luck. And luck is what you need plenty of if you want to be the best there is.’

‘Some people say that a man makes his own luck,’ Luiz said. ‘But as far as I am concerned luck is just what happens to you, out in the world. For no one can control the world, and they are crazy if they think they can.’

‘I always thought you had your shit together,’ Cash said. ‘I mean, here I am with my funny little plane made of cobwebs, and there you are, still flying singleships.’

‘These days I most often fly a desk. I want to tell you,’ Luiz said, ‘that the charges they brought against you, attacking a ship against orders and all the rest, were the purest kind of bullshit. You were gone, man. You and Vera were dealing with the automatic defences planted on that chunk of ice, while I was hanging back, waiting to come in and lay my egg. I saw it all. You were attacked by drones, you took them down, but one blew up very close to your bird. You were hit, you lost control, you lost your comms, you went shearing off. I couldn’t raise you, and I couldn’t chase after you because by then Vera had dealt with the last of the defences and I had to get in close to the slab and set down the H-bomb. And after the bomb blew, Vera and I were busy chasing fragments and blowing them to dust before they hit Phoebe, and you were still veering off at something like four per cent maximum thrust. I put in a call for retrieval, gave them your delta vee and vector, and I assumed that’s why they knew where to pick you up. All of this, it is in the deposition I made when you were charged.’

‘I wish I could remember it,’ Cash said. ‘They told me the retrograde amnesia might wear off, but it never has. I guess that can happen when you have a hole bored right through your head.’

He meant it as a joke, but it didn’t seem to come out right. He pinched the bridge of his nose again, trying to snuff out the red pulse of his headache.

‘I know you got hit by shrapnel from that drone,’ Luiz said. ‘I saw it. And they say you managed to fix your bird and join in the war and then get hit again, by some ring fragment? It seems very unlikely to me.’

‘I guess I was having a shitty day.’

‘Well, you survived it,’ Luiz said. ‘Your real bad luck, that was when they decided to go after General Peixoto and wanted to use you as part of their case.’

‘They had a record of the messages he sent, Luiz. Telling me to back off from attacking that Outer tug. They had the flight recorder of my bird, too, showing that I brought it in from the edge of the Saturn system. And the fleck of basalt they recovered, it definitely wasn’t part of any drone. Oh, sure, they could have planted it. Made the whole thing up. But before you accept that, you have to ask one simple question - why would they bother? They had plenty of other stuff to use against the general. They didn’t need to make anything up. They didn’t need to fake up shit to show that I wasn’t the hero the general claimed I was. That he’d suppressed the real facts about how I was killed and brought back to life. No, it’s easier to believe it really happened.’

‘All I know is what I saw,’ Luiz said. ‘And if the action that took down that chunk of ice doesn’t make you a hero I don’t know what would. I was ready to speak for you, man. I would have done it. Vera would have done it too.’

‘I thank you for it,’ Cash said. ‘But you want to talk about luck, they never used my testimony because the general took the honourable way out. A room with a locked door, a bottle of brandy, a revolver. He knew his family would lose everything if he was disgraced by a court martial, so he killed himself to save them. And after he killed himself the whole thing fell apart. They were going to throw me to the wolves, and suddenly it didn’t matter. So after a while, they just let me go.’

‘He was a good man,’ Luiz said. ‘And a good soldier.’

‘Yeah. And he won the war, too. They can’t ever take that away from him.’

‘They tell us there’s another war coming. Maybe against the PacCom. For real, not like the last time.’

Cash and Luiz talked about that for a little while. They watched the wreckage of the sunset fade. Venus following the sun down to the west; the sickle of the Moon cocked eastward; the first stars pricking the wide sky as it darkened towards night. Cash found the steady yellow star of Saturn, asked Luiz if he thought he might ever go back there.

‘I don’t think so. We beat them, didn’t we?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Here on Earth, this is where the next war will be. The Outer System, it’s history,’ Luiz said. ‘Right now we’re building a prison on the far side of the Moon to accommodate the worst of the Outers - the ones who fought back. Word is that there are plans to ship all of them to the Moon eventually. No, they’re irrelevant. What is important now, the Pacific Community is pushing hard to assert itself. I’ve been hearing that those Freedom Riders and all the other rebel groups, they’ve been receiving clandestine help from PacCom infiltrators. Weapons, money, you name it. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to push back. We’re going to have us a real war.’

‘I’m ready for it,’ Cash said. ‘Think they’d take me back then?’

‘If they have any sense. I guess I better get going. I have many klicks to go before I sleep.’

They walked to Luiz’s tiltrotor, the little motors in Luiz’s exoskeleton tick-tocking, Cash’s bootheels clicking on slab concrete. Embraced each other, told each other to take care.

‘I can get you a full medical at Monterey if you want it,’ Luiz said. ‘They owe you that.’

‘I’m doing fine,’ Cash said. ‘Don’t be a stranger, you hear?’

Luiz climbed stiffly into the tiltrotor. The wash of its cruciform blades blew over Cash as it rose up, and then it put its nose down and buzzed away southwards.

Cash watched until the blink of the tiltrotor’s green and red running lights had dwindled into the twilight, then walked back to the hangar, stepped through the half-open door into the cool dark inside, and said, ‘Well, that’s that.’

Two men emerged from the shadows. Cash’s cousin, Billy Dupree, and his uncle, Howard Baker. Billy scratched a match alight on his thumbnail and cupped its little flame to his face and lit the jay, its end glowing bright as he pulled in smoke and said in a pinched voice, ‘I didn’t know whether to shit or run when you started talking about the Riders.’

‘He called them bandits. I felt I should qualify it,’ Cash said.

‘It wasn’t wise,’ Howard Baker said.

He was in his late sixties but still strong and straightbacked, in blue jeans, scuffed work boots, and a leather vest over a broad chest thick with white hair. He’d taken Cash in hand after Cash had agreed to quit the smuggling racket, and fast-tracked him into R&R Corps #669, a small transport unit that worked out of a base outside their home city of Bastrop. Sergeant Howard Baker had half his family working in the unit, and passed a cut of the profits from his various schemes to the base commander to make sure the man looked the other way.

Cash was carrying a beer bottle by its neck, his fifth. He took a long drink and wiped his lips on the back of his hand and said, ‘It was just like I said it - he wanted to see how I was, and to shoot the shit about old times. No more, no less.’

‘Colonel Schwarcz may be your friend, and maybe he did come out here just to catch up and talk about old times, no other reason,’ Howard said. ‘But you can’t ever trust him. Not one hundred per cent. Not because he’s in the military, but because he isn’t blood. That’s the one thing we have in common with the great families. We trust blood before everything else.’

‘If someone wanted to find out, am I connected to anything bad,’ Cash said, ‘they wouldn’t send Luiz. It isn’t the kind of errand they give to someone of his rank. No, what they’d do is pull me in, start asking me hard and direct questions.’

Howard shook his head. ‘It’s always good policy to believe that your enemy is at least as smart as you are. To put yourself in their place and think of what you’d do, and then assume that they’ll do it. If I were them? I wouldn’t arrest you. Maybe I’d get something out of you if I did, maybe not. But I’d definitely learn a lot more if I let you run around, see who you met, who you talked to.’

‘If this was something more than a visit from an old service buddy I’d agree,’ Cash said.

‘Even if we could be sure that’s all it was, we still have to believe it wasn’t,’ Howard said. ‘How we turn a tidy profit without getting into trouble? We keep one step ahead of trouble, all the time. But in this case, I reckon you did all right. Apart from that little slip, bringing up the Riders, you were about note perfect.’

Cash took another drink of beer. ‘You heard what he said about the Riders, and PacCom infiltrators?’

‘That’s the line they’re using now,’ Howard said. ‘They put it about that the Riders are in cahoots with the enemy so the military, if they’re ordered to go after them, won’t have any qualms about attacking their fellow citizens.’

Billy exhaled a big cloud of sweet rank smoke. ‘That goes for your service buddy the colonel, too.’

‘The military isn’t the real enemy,’ Cash said. ‘Most of the people in the armed services, they’re just like us, come from the same places we do. I should know. No, it’s the politicians feeding them lies are the problem.’

‘Listen to your cousin,’ Howard told Billy. ‘He’s beginning to figure out how things work.’

‘I still reckon we should have snatched him,’ Billy said. ‘A full colonel? The man in charge of some secret training programme up on the Moon? We could have named our price.’

‘That’s not even funny,’ Cash said.

‘That’s good to know, because I’m deadly serious.’ Billy drew on his jay and said, ‘I got to ask, Cash. Were you two ever sweethearts? The way he dresses, the way you were talking together . . . And I know it must get lonely, out there in outer space.’

‘You’re thinking of your time in jail,’ Cash said.

Billy smiled through wreaths of exhaled smoke, and Howard told them to knock it off. ‘You two squabble so much I swear you must of been married in former lives. How about you exercise more than your jaw muscles? We need to get the shit on board so Cash can get going at first light.’

Cash drained his beer and tossed the bottle, Billy snuffed out his jay on the doorpost, and the two cousins followed Howard inside. The old man switched on the hangar’s lights, the hard glare shining off the dull green fuselage of Cash’s T-20 courier plane. Off to one side were pallets stacked with cardboard boxes and wooden crates, everything stencilled with red crosses. Some really did contain medical supplies; others were packed with munitions. Rifles and power packs and ammunition, two kinds of plastic explosive, and sidewinder mines - smart, deadly little things that could be keyed to home in on a particular location or to chase down a person’s heat signature or scent.

Early tomorrow morning, flying a milk run to an R&R plantation, Cash would be making an unscheduled stopover a couple of klicks west of what was left of the town of Odessa. Back in the twentieth century they’d pumped oil from the Permian shale all around Odessa. Long after the Overturn and the civil war that had ended with incorporation of what was left of the United States of America into Greater Brazil, descendants of some of those oilmen were still living out there. Wildsiders. Ordinary men and women who’d clung stubbornly to their birthright, who’d joined the Freedom Riders because they wanted to win back the legitimacy and dignity that had been snatched from them. Cash would have liked to have explained it properly to Luiz, but they were on different sides, and now Luiz was on his way back to the Moon. He probably wouldn’t ever see his old friend again, Cash thought, and was struck by a brief pang of regret. That part of his life was well and truly over.

The dead girl lay in the middle of the apartment’s single room, near the sunken and padded sleeping niche. Sprawled carelessly on her back on tawny halflife grass, arms outflung. She was naked and her pale breasts and stomach and flanks were smeared and ribboned with dried blood. Her dry eyes stared sightlessly past Loc Ifrahim as he leaned over her. Rigor had come and gone. She had relaxed into death, beyond help, beyond all human plight.