Like a Boss (42 page)

“Us, too,” said Onanefe. “It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work, like you said, but it’s the best way forward.”

Sirikit held her hand out to me, and I reached for it. “Okay,” I said. “But first, I’m going to need a very, very stiff drink.”

In my time as an organizer, I’d gone to plenty of meetings in the Prez’s office. It was on the fourth floor of the Hall, in a coral steel atrium in the middle of an ocean of desks and tables. The office’s positioning was symbolic and practical: the Prez had to be at the center of everything to make sense of what was going on. Someone had called it the Hurricane’s Eye fifty years ago, and the name stuck.

Glass art covered the walls of the Eye, collages of driftglass and hand-blown chimes and stuff that looked like it had staggered home from a really good party at a foundry. The head of the staffers, a loping man named Moritz Nguyễn, told me that it had all come from Letty’s predecessor, and that Letty hadn’t really done any decorating. “If you want to change anything, though,” said Moritz, holding his hands in front of his stomach. “Just say the word.”

“How about the desk?” I said.

The desk was a rickety thing, nothing more than an unfinished door perched on top of two sawhorses. The surface was sanded smooth but for two discolored indentations about half a meter apart, probably where past Prezes had rested their elbows. Two rusted wire baskets labeled IN and OUT sat on either end of the desk. The IN basket held a stack of yellowed paper ten centimeters high. The OUT basket was empty.

Moritz cleared his throat, which stretched his long face and made the quill inked on his cheek look like a mutant chicken leg. “You’re welcome to something else, of course, but it’s considered tradition to keep this desk here. The first Prez used it when the Union was formed, so…”

I picked up the top sheet of paper. It was a crop report from five years ago. I rooted to the bottom of the pile and found a request for reimbursement dated the day my grandfather had been born. “Why is this still here?” I said. “Hasn’t it been scanned and filed?”

Moritz nodded. “It’s meant to be a reminder of the responsibilities of the office, and how the Prez is supposed to consult with the past to point the way to the future.”

I dropped the paper. “You’re kidding, right?”

He made a face like he’d just swallowed a bug. “It’s, ah, tradition. Passed down with the office.”

“We’re going to burn it,” I said. “Please help me take all this out in the middle of the street so we can set fire to it.”

“Are you sure, Madame Presi–?”

“And please, do not call me that,” I said, giving Moritz the warmest smile I could muster. “I know it’s my job to make the decisions, but it’s a job, not a title. I’d like you to call me Padma. What would you like me to call you?”

He cleared his throat. “I suppose ‘Moritz’ will be fine. I’ll be sure to tell everyone else. Some of the older staffers might grumble, but…” He sighed. “What the hell. Those guys are assholes anyway.”

I nodded. “I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

It took two trips, one for the door and the second for the sawhorses and baskets. A dozen curious staffers followed onto the sidewalk at Koothrapalli to watch as Moritz and I took turns putting our boots through the door. It cracked and splintered nicely. People asked if they could help ball up paper for firestarters, and I was all too happy to let them. “Is there any more crap like this?” I said. “Useless stuff that we’re hanging on to because we’re supposed to? And I don’t mean art or history or anything like that. I’m talking receipts and broken shit.”

The staffers ran back into the Hall and reappeared within minutes holding busted machinery, moldy books, and stacks of paperwork. After Moritz assured me their contents were all accounted for on the Public, I helped people throw it on the pile. I pulled a lighter out of my pocket and set the pile ablaze.

Within fifteen minutes, it was all embers. We stomped on them until there was nothing but ash. A few squirts from fire extinguishers, and a hundred years of dead weight were flushed into the gutter. I blinked up the time: quarter to six. “Perfect way to wrap up a first day,” I said.

“Do you want a new desk?” said Moritz.

“No, I’m not going to be spending much time at the office,” I said. “We’ll host the initial meetings at the Hall, ’cause we’ve got enough room for everyone. But the next sessions are going to be out in the city and the kampong.”

“Really? Do they have the facilities?”

“We’ll have to string up some signal boosters for pai reception, but we need to do that anyway. Make sure you get permission from the landowners and pay them the same rate you would in town, got it?”

He nodded. “We have the funds, but it’ll take some lead-up time to get the equipment out there. Most of our line crews are busy doing firmware updates by hand.” He grunted. “There are a lot of backdoors to close.”

“Get as many people as you can spare, working in the kampong,” I said. “We’ve got a couple of weeks, but I’d rather not cut it too close. Take it out of the emergency overtime fund if you have to.”

He blanched. “There isn’t a lot left in there.”

“We’ll deal,” I said. “It’s not like we have much choice.” I held out my hand, and he shook it. “See you tomorrow. I got an appointment to keep.”

As I walked up Koothrapalli, I stretched and twisted. My back ached from sitting on the floor. For the past week, I’d been hosting the first sessions of what we simply called The Convention, and all of our meetings had been in the Hall. I had come up with the bright idea of having us all sit on cushions so we would all be on a truly level field. No one could sit next to someone they knew or were allied with, which made for an interesting game of Musical Cushions every time we convened. The plan had worked for the most part. We were all equally sore and grumpy, but we’d hammered out a hell of a lot of details. Plus, it had helped me avoid going up to the Hurricane’s Eye after everyone elected me President of the Convention.

I didn’t want the job. After Onanefe nominated me, I told him I didn’t want the job. After everyone there elected me, unanimously, I shouted I didn’t want the fucking job, to give it to anyone else. They pointed out that my not wanting the job made me perfect for it, and I told them all to go to hell. They just clapped and applauded themselves for sound democratic judgment, the bastards.

I turned down Kripner Lane, a neighborhood of pourform flats. This was one of the older neighborhoods, built around the time of the first Contract. The building materials were part of that bargain, the housing a step up from the cargo can hutongs. The flats had seen better days, and their water-stained façades looked like a bunch of sweaty old people huddling together after a long day’s work. Kids played in the street, drawing on the sidewalk or jumping in and out of the bomb crater. Some of them climbed up on the pile of rubble that had once been a building. Jeanine Doughtey, an airship engineer, had lived here, and she had held a stash for me. She and her family hadn’t been in their flat when the bomb went off, but some of their neighbors had. It would be months before Letty went to trial, and finding an impartial jury would probably be next to impossible. There was talk about doing the whole thing in the kampong since the people out there were the least affected, but that just set off a fresh round of arguing on the Public.

A giant sat on the steps of one of the buildings. He took up most of the stoop, his brows furrowed deep in thought. “You get those supplements?” I called up to Kazys.

He looked down at me. “They taste like chalk.”

“That’s because they are,” I said from the sidewalk. “Well, diatoms, mostly. But they’re supposed to be easier on your stomach.”

He grumbled. “They are, actually. Thanks.”

“Anything else you need right now?”

He grunted. “A flat where we both fit would be a nice start.”

“That’s gonna mean new construction.”

He grumbled.

I cleared my throat. “New construction means
jobs
, Kazys. Like for Class Two Mechanists.”

He cocked his head, then nodded. “I hear you.”

“Then make sure Gwendolyn hears you so everyone can hear her.” I walked up the steps and held out my hand. He took it and most of my forearm. “You working on anything new?”

He laughed. “An oral history of the strike. I’m going to be fifty characters in fifty minutes.”

“I’d pay to see that.”

“You’re in there, of course.”

“Oh, God, why?”

“Because I need a musical interlude.” He cleared his throat and belted out the chorus to “Solidarity Forever.” I rolled my eyes. It was better than hearing “Sky Queen of Justice.” With any luck, I’d never hear that again. I hurried down the street.

Off Kripner, tucked behind a pocket park, there was a small, green rowhouse with a ground floor garage. The garage door was open, and the bright red tuk-tuk parked inside looked like an apple hiding inside a leafy tree. The tuk-tuk was up on blocks, and Sirikit was underneath, swearing at the transmission. “That doesn’t work,” I said from the doorway. “Abuse just begats more abuse.”

Sirikit sighed as she crawled out from underneath. She wore a filthy coverall, and lube streaked her face. “Can’t you get us all to switch to bicycles? They’re a lot easier to work on than these damn things.”

“And then I’d have every tuk-tuk driver in the city screaming for my head.”

“To hell with ’em,” she said, wiping her hands on a rag. “All they do is sit around, anyway. The exercise would be good for them.”

“That’s a hell of a way to talk about your fellow tradespeople.”

“Feel free to report me to my slavedriving boss. That kid’s gonna be the death of us, anyway, the way she makes everyone actually work for a living.” She set down the rag. “How are you doing?”

“Are you just being social, or are we starting early?”

She shrugged. “What do you think?”

I sighed. “This is the reason I avoided actual therapy all these years. The bottle never made me question what I was doing.”

“Until it did.”

“Ah, so we
are
starting early.”

“Not until I’ve gotten out of
this
.” She motioned to her work clothes. “Tough to focus when everything itches.”

I followed her inside her flat. It looked a lot like my old one; they were both built around the same time, during the Union’s heyday when people were coming down the cable faster than they could find housing. Anyone who brought bags of pourform or other building materials with them became immediate best friends with architects and builders. Both of our places had probably come off the same drafting table.

There was a kitchen and a parlor and a single bedroom off to the left. The bay window looked out over a tiny garden. Rows of tomatoes and cucumbers lined the yard, and ricewheat stalks surrounded a single peach tree. It was bright pink with blossoms. It would be months before it bore fruit, but Sirikit said the peaches were worth the wait.

On the circular table in front of the window was a single hurricane candle, two rocks glasses, and a triangular bottle made from bumpy, sea-green glass. On the label was a cartoon of a woman’s foot propped up on a lanai railing. Tied to her big toe was a string, the anchor to a box kite flying high near the label’s top. Some shirtless, brawny men sat on a cartoon cloud, great puffs of air coming from their straining cheeks as they kept the kite aloft.

Sirikit sat down and glanced at the clock. “Almost six. Shall I pour?”

I nodded.

She unscrewed the bottle, and poured water into the glasses. Letty had indeed held on to the last bottle, and she’d turned it upside down when the riot foam consumed her. The bottle, though, had escaped unbroken. Soni’s last act before resigning as Chief of Police was to release it to me from evidence. The crime lab had gotten all the prints and chemical analysis it needed. It wouldn’t figure into the trial, anyway.

Sirikit pulled the blinds closed and lit the candle. We clinked glasses and took a sip. The water was cool and clear and absolutely nothing like Old Windswept rum. But The Fear had kept silent since Sirikit laid out this course of treatment, and I would have to trust in that for the time being. I could feel The Fear lurking in the back of my brain, like a weight inside my skull. Maybe I wouldn’t need to buy from the rebuilt distillery. Maybe I would. We’d see.

We put down our glasses. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s begin. Where are you?”

I closed my eyes and saw her tidy home. “In your house.”

“Where’s that?”

I pulled back in my mind’s eye to see the little blue house with the red tuk-tuk in the garage. “Off Kripner Lane.”

“Where’s that?”

I smiled as I floated above the neighborhood. There was the minaret of the Emerald Masjid, there was the bell tower of Our Lady of the Big Shoulders. There was the lot where my old flat had been, now swept clear of wreckage and ready to be rebuilt. “In Brushhead.”

“Where’s that?”

There were the BBQ joints, the tiny theaters, the music conservatory. There were the strip clubs, the machinist shops, the rowhouses. “In the southwest part of Santee City.”

“Where’s that?”

There was our city, huddled between the kampong and the ocean. The green cane swayed in the evening breeze, and the crews and farmers made their way home, stacks of cane on their tractors and lorries. There was Thronehill, surrounded by a small army of students and kids. They had turned back everyone who tried to sneak out, even holding down the struts of their patrol craft. WalWa wasn’t going anywhere, and neither were we. “On the eastern edge of the Big Island.”

“Where’s that?”

Off shore was Terminal Island, the mess of cargo cans clustered around the ground end of the lifter. The giant black ribbon soared into the sky, and I knew I was going to follow it up into orbit. “Twenty klicks away from the lifter.”

“Where is it anchored?”

Up and up and up I went, shooting into the sky until we were at the anchor. WalWa may have paid to move the asteroid into orbit, but they hadn’t done the work. Those first people who dropped the cable had shimmied their way to the ground and breathed that fresh air, gotten themselves windswept. I had started there, screaming my way out of a hibernant bag. Somewhere in my skull, I still might have been screaming. Maybe that’s all The Fear was: my outraged brain demanding to know what I had done to it. “Thirty-six thousand kilometers above the surface.”