Like a Boss (19 page)

“Yes, in fact it was.” He gave me a sideways smirk. “Well, not uphill. But I got onshore winds going to work sites, and offshore on the way home. It made riding my bike that much harder.”

“Looks like you did well enough to jump up to a truck.”

He shook his head. “That damn thing. It eats as much as my teenage nephews. Every time it breaks down, I wonder if it was worth the expense. And it’s getting harder to find parts or a mechanic I can afford. You know, the guy I used to go to, he was Freeborn, moved to the city and picked up the trade. He had a great business going, and then the Materiél Committee decided there weren’t enough serviceable Hanumans on the planet to push for better prices for parts.”

Onanefe ran his lower lip under his teeth. His mustache’s tips twitched. “So, my guy figures, okay, he can start making the parts himself, right? He rustles up a metallurgist who knows a gal with a forge, talks a couple of design guys into making templates. He’s going to become his own supplier, right? And it works out for a while, enough to recoup some of his costs and keep my truck running. Until the lady who runs the forge gets sick and can’t work anymore. The whole supply chain collapses almost overnight. Who does my guy have to turn to? Who do
I
have to turn to?”

“The Union?” I offered.

His face darkened. “Why would we do that?”

“Because if enough owners of MacDonald Heavy Hanumans screamed bloody murder at the people who live off dues, then maybe you’d still be getting parts. Or they’d have found someone else willing to run the forge. Or found some other way to get you what you need.” I rubbed my fingers together. “If you want to play, you got to pay.”

“Pay. Pfft.”

“Says the man who wants his fifty K.”

“I had a contract for goods rendered, not that piracy you call ‘dues’.”

“You make it sound so
dirty
,” I said, giving him a wiggle of my eyebrows.

“And you don’t think it is?” He pointed at the globe on my cheek. “You once signed your life away,
literally
signed it away. You come here, and what do you do? Sign up with another outfit that takes a chunk of your pay.”

“That’s how society works,” I said.

“That’s not how it
has
to work.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said. “Are you going to start talking about anarcho-syndicalism or some other crap like that?”

“You think tramping on human liberty is crap?”

I stopped and held up a finger. “I think
talking
instead of
working
is crap. I think trying to organize people without listening to them is crap. And I think hearing the same recycled labor theory glurge over and over again is complete and utter crap.”

Onanefe’s mustache twitched. “You don’t have to be so harsh about it.”

I let out a breath, as a group of ugly-looking people wearing glass Temple pins filtered past us. They all had the posture of someone ready to fight. I scooted to the other side of the street. “Every six months, some kid gets to the Marxism section on the Public Library, and then there’s a lot of speeches and noise without anyone doing the work.” I held out my hands at the milling, listless crowd. “This is what speeches get you. Everyone is pissed off, but no one is
asking
for anything, let alone
demanding
. All the talk about ‘history’s elect’ smacks of people who want to vent and be famous for a couple of days without doing the goddamn work. I’ve stuck with the Union because there are people in it who do the work, every day.”

Onanefe
hmph
ed. “Looks like they’ve been slacking on the job.”

“No arguments there.”

Onanefe smirked. “So, is that what you’re going to do at Bakaara?
The work
?” The jerk actually made air quotes with those last words.

“What, you don’t think I can?”

He smiled and shook his head. “The time for any of you Union people to quit gabbling and do
the work
” – he wiggled his fingers again, his smirk growing more punchable by the moment – “was about twenty years ago when y’all were prepping the Contract.
That
was when you could have built a true coalition between Freeborn and Union, back when the traffic was high, the prices were strong, and we
all
had a real dose of power. But no, you had to piss it away.”

“First of all, twenty years ago, I was still living the Life Corporate,” I said, dodging a woman selling pre-soaked rags (
Keep the riot gas away, only five yuan a pop!
). “So you can stow that ‘you Union people’ crap right the hell now. And second, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Onanefe narrowed his eyes. “I thought you were supposed to be a big wheel in the Union.”

“I was just a Ward Chair. Where did you get that idea?”

“Your theme song.” He cleared his throat and belted out, in a booming basso:

When she sits at the table

Negotiations stop

When she lists her demands

The Sky Queen comes on top!

I groaned. “That bloody song.”

He put his hand to his chest and opened his eyes wide. “Do you mean to tell me that the oral traditions of Santee Anchorage aren’t
accurate
?” He held that look of feigned outrage for a moment before bursting out laughing. “No, seriously, I just heard through the grapevine that you had the Executive Council’s ear.”

“The grapevine is wrong,” I said. “After my little trip up the cable, none of them would touch me if I were covered in money.”

“Which brings me back to what I was talking about,” said Onanefe. “All the cash that was left on the table. Well, it was hypothetical cash, but still…”

“What money?”

Now he looked surprised for real. “You really don’t know? Two Contracts ago, the Union and all the Freeborn were on the verge of uniting forces. Instead of the Union doing all the negotiations with the Big Three, we’d enter into a compact and do it together. Everything would be distributed fairly: profits, benefits, education, health care, tech. There would be no more trickling down of money from the city to the kampong.”

This was all news to me. “Go on.”

He shrugged. “Not much else to tell. Depending on who you talk to, one side said the other overreached, and the whole thing collapsed.”

“What did the Freeborn want?”

“The usual: a bigger cut of cane profits, better infrastructure, more clinics in the kampong. Plus an acknowledgement of the Freeborn contribution to the thriving mess that is Santee Anchorage.”

I kept the guffaw in check. “Since when is that
not
acknowledged?”

He stopped and shook a finger at me. “See? That’s just what I’m talking about. You want to dismiss me.”

“I do not!”

“Are you saying I don’t know what my own life has been like?” said Onanefe, his eyebrows beetling. “I was
born
on Santee. My parents, and their parents’ parents? Born here. I grew up in the shadow of the Union pushing us around, calling us peasants because we didn’t want to join up.”

“And where did your great-grandparents come from?” I said, crossing my arms. “Did they spontaneously generate out of the ground?”

His mouth quirked. “No, they were Breaches.”

“Uh-huh. That ‘We Were Here First’ argument doesn’t wash, and you know it. Trace any Freeborn family back, and they came from Breaches or Shareholders or
someone
connected to the Union. And the Union keeps money and gear flowing until we get enough homegrown science and industry to cut ourselves loose from the Big Three. You want to tell me of a single Freeborn scientist or engineer whose work has been turned away? Can you name one?”

“That’s beside the point,” said Onanefe. “We have to rely on the Union, and you – I mean, the Union leadership knows it. Just like they know the Union depends on the Big Three. We’re all dependents. The people who walked away from the table twenty years ago knew that, and the people on the street today know that.”

“And you think this strike is going to stop that?”

His face softened. “I know there are just as many Union people marching as there are Freeborn. Is that such a bad thing?”

“It is when no one knows what they’re marching
for
.”

“You think that?”

“I know it.”

Onanefe crossed his arms over his chest. “And what do you base that assertion upon?”

I gave him a tiny smile. “You know, for a guy who spends his days cutting cane, you sound a lot more like one of us gabbling Union people.”

He shrugged. “You gotta learn how to play the game if you want to win. I study, you know?”

“And so do I, which is why this is nothing like the last two strikes I’ve seen. You make your demands before you hit the streets, not the other way around. This is theater.”

“You wanna bet?”

I held out a hand. “I’ll bet you a case of Old Windswept.”

Onanefe considered this. “Which kind?”

I made a face. “Standard, of course.”

“Not a bottle of Ten-Year?”

I blew him a raspberry. “Don’t you start on me, too. There’s no such thing as Ten-Year. That was Estella Tonggow’s magical marketing bullshit. But the
two
cases of Standard I’m betting are real.”

“Okay, then.” He reached for my hand, then stopped. “And what if you win? ’Cause I’m not giving up the fifty K.”

“Then you give up your cut,” I said. “And, before you protest about me ripping you off, I’ll make sure it’s rum made before I took over.
That
I still have.”

He took my hand. “You are on.”

We shook on it. I let go and asked the first passer-by, a man with a young girl perched on his shoulders, “Excuse me, could you tell me why you’re marching today?”

For the rest of the way to Bakaara Market, we talked to everyone going our way who would talk back. I heard complaints about preschool cutbacks, about broken sidewalks, about how the latest pai firmware update made this one guy’s implant play
The Lincolnshire Poacher
in the middle of the night, every night, for a month. The only people who wouldn’t talk to me were the ones wearing Temple pins. They scooted away as soon as I approached them.

I recorded all of it, making as much space as I could on my buffer. And, with every interview, I got confirmation: everyone was angry, everyone wanted something done about what was making them angry, but no one had any plans on how to accomplish that.

“I just heard people were marching,” said a man handing out shelled coconuts. He had parked a loaded bakfiets on the corner of Jodpur and Fleetwood. “And I figured, hey, it’s about time I did, too.”

“But you’re standing here,” I said.

He shrugged. “All my stock’s going to rot. Might as well write it off and keep people from dehydrating.”

“So what do you hope to get from being out here?”

He whacked at a coconut with a machete, then handed me the cleaned-up fruit and a straw. “I want the Executive Committee to do their goddamn jobs.”

I thanked him for his time and walked up Jodpur, sipping my coconut water. Onanefe called to me from across the street, and I wove my way through the crowd. He had a wood cup full of lychees in his hand, and he offered me one. “Well?”

“I know what I saw and heard.”

“Which is?”

“Six kilometers of angry people with no focus.”

He made a face, then spat out a lychee. “We’re still not at Bakaara. I’m not giving up.”

“You might want to,” I said, offering him the coconut. “Not even the Freeborn I talked with had any idea of why they were marching. Everyone’s out in the streets because everyone’s out in the streets.”

“I just don’t get this,” said Onanefe. “Last time, we all had our act together. We had solidarity.”

“There’s that Union talk again.”

He gave me a sideways glare. “I’m not so high-and-mighty that I can’t rip off a perfectly good idea to suit my own needs, okay? Besides, if there’s any one thing we Freeborn need, it’s sticking together.”

“Well, you’re all certainly following each other out of the kampong and into the streets.” I tried not to smirk as we rounded the corner to the edge of Bakaara Market.

Onanefe stepped in front of me and turned around. “I didn’t get a good enough representative sample.”

I laughed. “No one likes a sore loser.”

“It wasn’t enough! This is a heavy Union route you took us on, and there will be a lot more Freeborn in the market.”

I bowed. “Of course, Your Quantitativeness.”

He
hmph
ed. “You don’t have get sarcastic about it.”

Any other day, Bakaara Market would have been a great place to visit. It was one of the first structures the first Breaches had built, a beautiful open-air lattice of coral steel, caneplas roof tiles, and PV cells. It kept cool in the day and warm at night, thanks to the system of louvered shades that ringed the lattice. It stayed open twenty-six hours a day, sold just about everything there was to sell, and was now a complete and utter mess.

People jammed the aisles, grabbing and pushing for anything left in the stalls. Two men held a tug-of-war over a packet of biryani spice mix next to a table stained with tumeric and paprika. Old ladies wrestled for the remaining packages of lug nuts at Bernice’s Pick-A-Peck-Of-Parts. Kids wailed, Union and Freeborn people yelled at each other, and–

Something in the back of my head snapped. I had no idea if it was The Fear trying to get loose, or if it was the stress of the previous day, or what. I just knew I had had my fill of this bullshit and that it was time for it to end. I grabbed the wrench from my trouser loop, climbed atop a table, and started whacking the wrench on a coral steel strut. After a minute, the crowd at my feet stilled and looked up.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I bellowed. People winced and clutched their heads. I forgot that my pai was still pinging everyone nearby, so my words blasted right into their eyeballs. A few people gave me smiles; the rest glared.

I pointed my wrench at the mob. “This is not how it’s supposed to go. Whatever’s gotten you angry, is it bad enough to get you to turn on strangers? On your neighbors?”

“There’s no food!” yelled someone.

“That’s because the Freeborn are blocking the farms!” yelled someone else.