I'm back for what I'm counting as first post of the month, and naturally, I have nothing prepared but a Space Guys installment. This is easily the single biggest waste of time in this entire project, and that is really saying something. Still, it's done, and I am posting it so I never revise it again. The only thing I will say is, if you're trying work the civil rights movement into alternate history... don't. As usual, a table of contents is at the end.
The traverse from Saturn to Uranus was the longest of the voyage, and the bleakest. TV transmissions became infrequent and garbled by static. The game cabinets fell into disuse. Reading became perfunctory and repetitive outside of required technical material, mostly on their own equipment. The disc library still held hundreds of movies and thousands of songs, but it remained in regular use only by a handful who played their favorites almost continuously. Jason’s own collection was long since exhausted, though he was still pestered to loan out his choicest titles. Donald offered regular lessons with his telescope. There was little to see, however, except the slowly growing orb of Uranus, featureless except for its rings, which were turned at right angles to those of Saturn. Jason found the sideways planet and its vertical rings like a buzzsaw viewed head-on, as cold and baleful as the pre-Olympian god of myth.
In the midst of the trek, a day came when Jason and Alek lounged with Donald and Anastasia. Across the corridor, Jackie played chess with Jax. The player was running a disc nobody would admit putting on, about the adventures of Sheriff Buckner of Mars. The midpoint of the film found him chasing bootleggers through the foothills of Olympus. Anastasia was stretched out on the couch looking at a technical schematic, her feet and calves in her husband’s lap. Abruptly, he tried to pull her to him, without regard for the fact that she was taller than him. She pushed him back with a curse, forcibly extricating his hand from her fatigues in the process. It was as tired as it was brazen for both of them. She stretched out again, then grudgingly reversed herself. Alek, already in Jason’s lap as usual, looked up briefly, then went back to sketching.
Jackie
looked up from the game as a speeding rover hurtled off a cliff. “Who the Hell
came up with this, anyway?” he said.
“It’s
a space western,” Donald said. “They were a thing in Italy, 15 or 20 years ago.
It didn’t really catch on. I think they shot this one in Croatia, with a red
filter.”
Alek took a closer look at the screen. “You are right,” she said. After a moment, she turned to Jason. “Did any of this really happen?”
He sighed. “Yeah, kind of,” he said. “We had trouble with smuggling, early on. It was all because of restrictions by the Agency. They prohibited any `nonessential’ payloads in shipments from Gaia. That meant no discs, no musical instruments, no toys, not even books that weren’t `informational’, which was anything they didn’t like. Of course, we looked for ways to get around it…”
“It
was one guy,” Anastasia said. “Bootlegger Boris. He had already made a fortune
on gray-market goods in the Federation, you know, stuff that was never banned
but too `decadent’ for the state factories to make. He used his connections to
do the same thing in Olympus Mons. He figured out that the ships carry extra
fuel for emergency maneuvers, and that spacers were already cutting into the
margin to carry personal belongings. So, he started paying them off to carry stuff
for him. Later on, he started siphoning off the emergency fuel so he could
replace it with merchandise and resell the fuel. Eventually, he just got too
greedy. He couldn’t sell off what he had, then a passenger ship came down
hard because it didn’t have enough fuel for an emergency maneuver. They say
when they finally searched his dome, they found a whole room full of nothing
but toy soldiers and unsold copies of The Outlaws.”
“What
happened to him?” Alek asked.
“He surrendered,” Jason said, glaring toward an ongoing gun battle onscreen. “Where was he gonna go?”
“So
are there police?” Alek asked.
“We
have the Sheriffs,” Jax chimed in. He frowned as he sacrificed his queen for
Jackie’s rook. “We call them that. The official title is Social Wellness
Officer.”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “Their job is to visit every household at least twice a year. Three or four times in the outer settlements.”
That
got Donald’s interest. “Then, what, they knock on an airlock door and ask to
come in?” He laughed at that. “Now that would let Hollywood down.”
“It
wasn’t any different in the Old West, really,” Jason said. “The movies talk
about the natives and the outlaws, but the biggest problem was cabin fever.”
“Sure,”
Anastasia said. “Why don’t you tell them about Jonah Johnson, farmboy? He was
on your side. They never made a movie about him.”
Alek
looked at Jason, her eyes wide in curiosity. “Come on, that was a long time ago,”
he said, instinctively evasive. “It couldn’t happen now; it wouldn’t have
happened then, if we’d known what we do now.”
“That is not no answer,” Alek said politely.
That was when Jackie spoke up again. “I can tell you about it,” he said. “It was on the Utopia Pipeline, halfway between Mons and the ice. They tried to have a manned outpost every thousand K’s. Somebody decided it was better to put the settlers with families on the line. Anyway, Jonah Johnson had been married 10 years, and they had three kids. He was moreno and she was Anglo, if it matters. Everybody said they were a model family, very enlightened.”
He took a bishop that had put him in check, only to lose his queen. “The first anyone knew there was trouble was when an automated sensor showed the safety on their air lock was burned out. Then there was no answer on the wire. It took 30 hours for a repair team to arrive,” he said. “Near as anyone could figure, Jonah took out a flare pistol. It was completely legal, though they wouldn’t have been issued one if they hadn’t been so far out. He made their oldest put her brothers to bed and tie up her mother before he shot her. Then he hotwired the lock and opened up the hab. It would have taken a while, maybe an hour, probably not more than two. Before it was halfway done, he loaded another shell and ate it.”
Alek
only gaped. “I heard something about it,” she said. “What happened? What did
they do, I mean?”
Anastasia shrugged. “They set up the Sheriffs, like Farmboy said,” she said. “There was a cover story for the press, of course. They couldn’t say it was an accident, but they made it out like the grownups were fighting for the gun and it went off by accident. It could have happened that way… except for where the girl was hit.”
By then, Jax had rallied and taken Jackie’s remaining rook. “They shouldn’t have been out there alone, no matter how long they had been together,” he said. “Couples need to stay part of their families, especially if they have differences.”
Jackie
rested one arm on the table. “You think that puts you in line for saint?” he
said. “You ask me, what happened to the Johnsons came down to one thing: Anglo
women aren’t afraid to talk back.”
“Why
shouldn’t they?” Jax said. He moved a rook. “Check, mate in two.”
“Of
course they can,” Jackie answered. “But there’s a time when a woman needs to
shut up or run for the door.”
“We’re leaving,” Anastasia announced abruptly. As she led Donald away, she called over her shoulder, “And being right doesn’t mean you aren’t full of kaka!”
Jax and Jackie played on in silence. It took four moves before Jax won, a fact neither of them mentioned. “Look, I want to know,” Jason said. “What’s your deal? Why don’t you get along with Jax? Why haven’t either of you talked to us?”
“Why
does there have to be a problem?” Jackie said. “It’s not about his morena. It’s
not about the Anglo woman, either. Folks are folks. Sometimes, they don’t mix.”
“Jill and I are both Old Creole,” Jax said. “I’m
probably as much colored as she is white. Jason is one-fourth Spanish Malay. We
were all on the same side.
“That’s the thing about wars,” Jackie said. “There’s always people who chose the wrong side, even on the winning team.”
After a time of silence, Jax said, “Look, I asked Lana if she wanted to get married, when we get back to Mars. We could do it, if Jill consented, but she would have to file for divorce from her man back on Gaia. She said no. She has her reasons.”
“Yeah, I’m sure a lady like Jill would be open-minded,” Jackie said. “Except, she doesn’t have a lot of choice, does she? Sure, she could take the kid back to her folks. But then what? It’s hard enough getting a man in a free love sector in the first place. How do you think it would work trying to do it with a mixed baby in tow? I’ll be the first to admit, morenos aren’t saints.”
He abruptly pointed to Alek. “Bloody Hell, look at her. She and your friend are all mush for each other now, that’s fine. But she’s literally from another planet, she has more millions than his family has thousands, even if she is too wrapped up in her math to notice, and she can build an actual murder robot. If he wanted to leave and she wanted him to stay, would you want to be in the middle of it?”
Alek flushed, though it was clear she was not entirely displeased. “Of course, I would let you go,” she said. She stroked Jason’s knee. “I am an enlightened woman. But we both know you would come back.”
Alek hooked into one of old Yuri’s feed. They found a war movie that Alek immediately identified as her favorite. It was the tale of resistance fighters in Jugoslavia, bitterly divided between communists and nationalists even as they fought or hid from the Reich’s occupation forces. The leaders of two such bands argued whether to intervene in a battle beyond their borders to the west, which proved to be American and British force in northern Italy that had been cut off from their own lines by a Reich counter-attack. Finally, the Jugoslavs banded together came to their aid. Every time Jason was ready to scoff, one of the others would confirm it.
“About
half of them were from all-colored units,” Jackie said. The film represented a
group of Americans from the southern US with a single moreno at the head of an
assortment of obviously Latin actors. “Another 10% were campesinos…” That drew
troubled looks from Jax, Jason and even Alek.
“Whoa,
dude,” Jason said. “I don’t know about where you’re from, but in the Hellas
sector, you don’t say that. Leastways not if you aren’t one of them.”’
That got a laugh from Jackie. “If you say so,” he said. He continued after a pause, “I had a great uncle who fought. He came home, but they say he never got all the way back.”
“What
did happen, anyway?” Jason said. “I don’t mean during the Troubles, I mean
between your folks and Jill’s.”
Jackie
shook his head. “It wouldn’t matter now,” he said. He glanced toward Jax. “He
could probably tell you more about it than me. His lady writes books about it.”
“It was the Fed’s fault,” Jax said. “Look, I’ve told you, morenos aren’t the same. It didn’t always mean all of them. It started as what the braceros in Texas called the ones who came west during the Wars. After a while, people got the idea that it meant something different from Creole. It probably wasn’t, but even braceros could tell the difference. When the Registry of African-Descended Citizens was started, the Fed wanted the same split. The Separatists in the communes went along with it, the Integrationists threatened to back out, especially the Creoles.”
“Okay,” Jason said. “So maybe
you are different. What was the difference to the Fed?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Jackie said. “The colored Creoles were enslaved by the French and the Spanish, not the Anglos. A lot of them were freed before the Louisiana Purchase, or leastways, their families said they were. That meant they weren’t taken for forced labor in a territory under United States authority… so their descendants wouldn’t be eligible for reparations.”
Jason
puzzled over that a moment. He finally said, “They were talking about that, then?”
“Why not?” Alek said in her flat lecture voice. “The War Reparations treaties
were supposed to apply to both sides. Some of the slaves from your war were
still alive.”
Jason shook his head, but he did not protest. “So that split the colored rights movement?”
Jackie
shrugged. “The law put a chisel where we were splitting ourselves, same as
always,” he said. “The nice Integrationists in the big cities could say the
Separatists were going the wrong direction, because they had gone their own way
so far they couldn’t turn back if they wanted to. For us, once we were on our
own, we didn’t have anywhere else to go when the Troubles started.”
“Damn,”
Jason said.
“That’s
us,” Jackie said. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” As the credits
rolled, he said, “Say, want to play chess?”
He beat Jason in 10 moves.
Table of contents
Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!
Part 10: The domestic disturbance!!!
Part 12: The inevitable geography lesson!
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