‘Did you want to say yes?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘But we can’t owe her, can we? So we’ll have to work things out by ourselves,’ Newt said.
The voyage back to Proteus and the long contentious meeting had exhausted Macy, but sleep eluded her. While Newt slept beside her, her thoughts turned in futile circles. She remembered a virtual model of a possible adaptation for life in Triton’s ocean that Sada had shown the PacCom diplomats: a human-sized tadpole with a thick tail formed from its fused legs, small arms clasped across its narrow chest, a neck-less head with a band of electrical sensors instead of eyes, a tiny pouting mouth, a feathery collar of blood-red gills. While it slept, Sada had said, a membranous caul rich in blood vessels and colonies of symbiotic bacteria would extrude from its anus, absorbing nutrients from the water and turning them into sugars and fats. A true posthuman species, the first of many.
Macy had long ago come to terms with the changes that had been made to the genomes of Newt and the other Outers. But the Ghosts had changed the way their children thought because they believed it would bring about the future that was their rightful destiny, and they were willing to turn their grandchildren into fishpeople or batpeople for the same reason. Yes, they would do anything to fulfil Levi’s prophesies and they would not let anyone stand in their way. For long sleepless hours, Macy wondered how she and Newt and the twins would be changed if the Ghosts ever decided that it was necessary to end the Free Outers’ vestigial independence.
6
Cash Baker belonged to a floating pool of pilots who operated out of the depot at Bastrop with no fixed routes or duties. He spent half his time making front-line deliveries, and the rest on milk runs - flying officers between bases as required, ferrying small loads to other R&R depots or to the regional administration headquarters in Austin. It was common knowledge that much of the stuff was luxury goods for high-ranking officers, but Cash could care less. He flew every place he was told to fly. It suited him personally because he loved flying and hated routine, and it suited his uncle’s business because he was able to make unscheduled stopovers and drop off all kinds of clandestine cargo.
The drought didn’t let up. It hadn’t rained since early spring. Summer stretched out hot and dry and endless. Rivers shrank into their channels. Dust storms extended the desert’s edge east and south, erasing decades of R&R work. Fire ripped through ten thousand hectares of rewilded forest north of Bastrop and hot winds blew smoke and soot across the city. Productivity in city farms was at an all-time low because of power and water shortages. Food rationing was strictly enforced. There were several serious clashes when police tried to stop people leaving Bastrop and other cities around and about to forage in the countryside. Freedom Riders claimed responsibility for numerous acts of sabotage. East of Dallas, a group hijacked trucks carrying military provisions and distributed them to hungry citizens.
Half the personnel of R&R Corps #669 were seconded to security detail, standing guard at roadblocks or patrolling hot spots. Howard Baker suspended the smuggling operation because there were too many strangers on the base and every load going in or out was being checked.
‘We’ll hunker down and wait this out,’ he told Cash. ‘When it’s over our friends will be begging to be resupplied with more of our good stuff.’
‘Assuming they don’t bring on their revolution,’ Cash said.
‘They’ve been talking about revolution since for ever, but it won’t ever happen. Sure, they’re taking advantage of the unrest right now, but it’ll pass. Things will get back to normal before you know it.’
Flying into Austin from Columbus River early one evening, carrying iceboxes full of crabs and shrimp for a reception for senior R&R officers and the region’s governor, Cash saw threads of smoke rising from the western quarter of the city - the low tree-clad hills where the rich and powerful had their homes. Fires were burning along the culvert of the Hondo River and a hood of smoke was creeping over half the city, making the sunset even more apocalyptic than usual.
Traffic control instructed him to divert away from the area and make a dogleg south and then east to reach the R&R base. He landed and taxied up to the hangars, and the sergeant who took delivery of the seafood told him that people had tried to march up the Hondo’s bare channel, a big demonstration led by the archbishop of Austin against use of water in the gardens of the rich.
Cash, thinking of how the lush green quilt of the rich quarter contrasted with the scorched and dusty browns of the rest of the city, allowed that they might have a point.
The sergeant was a veteran who wore a patch over the empty socket of his right eye and had three fingers missing from his left hand, the kind of bluff no-nonsense soldier who always knew exactly where to fix the blame. Telling Cash, ‘Used to be the families would have been the first to make sacrifices. I can remember the time, must have been thirty years ago, when we had food shortages worse than this. And the families, they dug up their gardens and parks to grow corn and such. They all ate dole yeast like the rest of us, too. But these days, they seem to feel entitled to do whatever they want. People are on rations, they’re starving, and the young blades are throwing extravagant parties or they’re driving around town looking for prole girls to pick up, throwing bread at passers-by. And they keep their swimming pools filled and their fountains working while ordinary folk have to queue at bowsers for a drink of water. So it isn’t any wonder that something like this has happened. And it isn’t any one-day wonder, either. Most every one of my people has been drafted for riot control.’
‘It’s that bad?’
‘They even took my clerks. Everyone bar base security. You stick around, flyboy, they’ll take you, too.’
‘I don’t think so. Someone has to truck in their seafood.’
‘Point,’ the sergeant said, and spat dryly.
Cash told Howard Baker about it the next day. ‘I borrowed a jitney and drove out of the base, tried to get as close to the action as I could. I wasn’t in uniform and the jitney wasn’t an official R&R vehicle, but more than a few people threw rocks at it anyhow. You know the big square they have, where the old railroad station is? It had been turned into a field hospital. There must have been a couple hundred wounded people there, and more turning up all the time. There were dead outside, too. Elements of the Fourth Battalion had been deployed by then and they were using live rounds.’
‘How many dead, do you reckon?’ Howard said.
‘I counted twenty-eight bodies. Men and women, and two children. Then a bunch of police turned up to try to clear everyone out of there and I left. I couldn’t get close to the river, but I saw plenty of smashed storefronts. One block was on fire and no one was doing anything to put it out. All the fire trucks were probably on the other side of the river, protecting those mansions.’
Cash took a pull on his bottle of beer. It was his first, ten in the morning. He knew his uncle disapproved, but he needed it to ease the tremor in his hands and the pressure in his head. They were up on the roof of the accommodation block where members of the Baker clan bunked down. Howard Baker kept his pigeons in wire-mesh cages there, grew tomato plants and herbs in tubs. He was pinching out side shoots from a trough of young tomato plants and using a spray bottle to wash dust from their leaves, working calmly and slowly as always. The city of Bastrop stretched out beyond the camp perimeter and the elevated section of the ring road, hundreds of identical ten-storey blocks laid out across the valley in a grid that simmered under a haze of smog. Tree-clad hills rose to the north, fresh and green against the hard blue sky.
Howard said, ‘From what I heard, it had been brewing for some time in the blocks, and Austin’s archbishop is a young firebrand wants to make a name for hisself. Well, the OSS has him under house arrest right now. They say it’s for his own protection, but you can bet we won’t be hearing from him again.’
‘At least he took a shot at the status quo,’ Cash said.
‘What happened in Austin, the status quo got pushed and it pushed right back,’ Howard Baker said, squirting water methodically over leaves, working from top to bottom. ‘You saw those wounded people, and the dead. You want to see that happen here? I know I don’t. The way you change people’s minds, it isn’t by burning down their houses. Let me know if I’m wasting my breath, by the way.’
‘I’m not about to do anything stupid,’ Cash said.
‘I hope not, because there’s a strong strain of stupidity runs through our family. You may not appreciate me telling you this, but you are a valuable asset to our business. It may not be as glamorous as flying spaceships around the rings of Saturn, but it’s a hell of a lot more useful as far as we are concerned. Stick with it. We Bakers have fought enough wars for other people’s causes. It’s past time we looked after ourselves.’
Cash Baker’s family were Scottish-Irish stock who’d moved from Virginia to Texas while Texas was still a Republic. A goodly number had fallen in the Confederate War, and many more in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They’d clung on through the bad years of climate change and the Overturn, when rising ocean levels had overcome every attempt at defending the coastal plain along the Gulf of Mexico against inundation and had driven millions of refugees inland, and Bastrop had swollen from a sleepy county seat to a city crammed with block housing and high-rise farms. They were proud and stubborn, governed by kinship and ancient unwritten codes of honour rather than common law, prone to addiction to every kind of drug, and to violent deaths. Most lived and died unremarked, but every other generation threw up someone who distinguished themselves in the outside world, including a boxing champion, a football star, a country-music singer who’d blown a fortune on a blizzard of crack cocaine and crystal meth, and a couple of handfuls of war heroes.
Cash had definitely inherited a good dose of his family’s wild side. He’d been smart enough to join the Air Defence Force and get the hell out of Bastrop, but he’d been cocksure and reckless too, and eventually his luck had given out. He’d been a hero, and then he’d fallen from grace. He knew there was no way back to what he’d once been, he was grateful for his uncle’s help, and he was down with the smuggling racket, he really was, but he also knew that running guns to the Freedom Riders wasn’t enough. The injustice thrown into stark relief by the drought and the food shortages mirrored his own smouldering grievances. Like the ordinary people who had taken to the streets, he’d also been held in contempt by the powers that ruled the land. Picked up and used and cast aside.
There were riots in many of the cities on either side of the Rio Grande that summer. They were put down with brutal force and their ringleaders were given show trials and executed. Cash stood shoulder to shoulder with other members of R&R Corps #669 at roadblocks and barricades, patrolled the streets. All the while thinking that he was on the wrong side, upholding the rule of people who’d done him wrong against people who deserved better.
When the rains finally came in late November, more than three thousand people had been killed in riots and ten times that number were in prison camps. Cash spent some time helping distribute food aid in Bastrop and Columbus River, and then went back to flying, mostly between R&R Corps #669’s depot and the territory to the west, where the R&R Corps were cleaning up old pump-jack oil wells and the remains of wind farms and erasing the ruins of small towns and roads. The land there had mostly healed itself. Rewilded territories stretching vast and quiet and empty under the big sky. Candelilla and scrub catclaw, creosote bush and dry grassland. Some new kind of engineered tree that seemed able to grow where nothing else could. Antelope and bighorn sheep and deer, mountain lions and wolves and black bears, descendants of animals bred and released by the R&R Corps half a century ago.
One day, early in April, Cash was flying over tawny hills when he saw a flash like broken glass winking amongst trees crowded into a ravine. He circled around and saw a white house tucked amongst the trees near the top of the ravine, hung out over a dry river bed. His comm beeped and a robotic voice told him that he had entered a restricted airspace. He made a wide turn and flew on to his destination, the ruin of a town near an ancient nuclear test site that the R&R Corps had recently begun to clean up, thinking about the house on the ridge looking out over the playa and thinking about another house, in the Venezuelan jungle, puzzling over an idea that had come to him.
He turned it over in his head, studied it from every angle, and at last mentioned it to his cousin. Billy thought it was a joke at first, but when Cash pressed on he grew quiet and serious, saying at last, ‘You have any notion about how much trouble you’ll get yourself into?’
‘I’ve been in places like that, Billy. I know how they’re fixed for security, and I reckon I know how to take that security down. And if they do catch me, then at least I can say I stood up for something. Besides, I’ve done jail before. I can do it again, no problem.’
Billy shook his head. ‘Something like this, they won’t keep you in jail long. Pretty soon you’ll be taking that short walk to the long drop. And that ain’t nothing to what old Howard will do to you, if he hears of this. He’ll tear off your hide and nail it to the hangar door and use it for target practice. Just to start with.’
‘I appreciate the advice.’
‘But you aren’t going to take any notice of it, are you? Well, when they stretch your neck, at least I can say that I tried to stop you.’
‘I’d also appreciate a little help.’
‘Oh man. Don’t even think of getting me involved in this.’
‘It isn’t anything. I’ve met plenty of foot soldiers, dropping off loads, but I reckon I need to get close to people higher up. People who can make things happen.’