The Slums of the Solar System Books 1-3

Chapter 2-2

Watching Luc shake the beam, Rabia wondered for the first time just who had put this place together. Prakash was a fine cook, but as the sleeper pod above them began to sway, Rabia doubted his abilities as an engineer.

“Stop it,” she said as calmly as she could.

Luc just grinned, his hand on the beam still rocking it back and forth. Alain gave a chuckle, and Tom joined in.

“Stop,” Rabia said again.

“Please,” Prakash added as the sound of his wife’s sudden cry of alarm echoed from above them. “Please.”

Luc just grinned and kept at it. So Rabia hit him.

He staggered back, hands to his face. Rabia shook her hand. There are better places to hit a guy than right in the mouth, but that grin had pissed her off. Teeth hurt, though, and it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if she got some sort of disease.

The hand that fell on her shoulder wasn’t a complete surprise either. She let Alain spin her around, using the momentum to drive an elbow right under his ear. She was just turning to face Tom when she heard her name. It was softly spoken, but somehow it filled her with more shame than her mother’s loudest rebukes.

“Si Fu,” she said, stepping back and lowering her hands.

Huo Fei Li crossed the narrow lane, leaning heavily on his walking stick. By the time he stepped into the curry stand, Tom, Alain, and Luc had all made themselves scarce. Prakash was gone as well.

Si Fu stepped up to the counter and set down the empty cook pot he had been carrying.

“There was a reason,” Rabia began.

“Yes, there always is,” Si Fu said, and she said no more. Rabia stepped around the counter to the kitchen, turning off the flame under the enormous wok and fanning the smoke away as best she could. Whatever had been cooking in there was interestingly shaped charcoal now.

Prakash came back down the stairs, all but carrying his very pregnant wife Anjali. He went over to the loose beam and inspected the damage.

“You will need some strong help to reset that,” Si Fu said. “The butcher near my house has two apprentices who are always looking for an opportunity to make an extra coin or two. I’ll send them your way, yes?”

“Yes, thank you,” Prakash said, leading his wife to one of the chairs, but she shook her head.

“I’m fine, Prakash, really. Vindaloo, Mr. Li?”

“Always divine; thank you,” Si Fu said. Empty pot in one hand and the other curled under her belly, she disappeared in the kitchens.

“What did they want, Prakash-ji?” Rabia asked. “He said it was official.”

“It was. I don’t know who the dons are that are running this place now, but they want to make it just like the corporations we’ve all worked so hard to avoid.”

Rabia was puzzled and must have looked it, but Si Fu understood.

“The baby,” he said.

“Indeed, the baby,” Prakash said. “We have room enough for him, food enough for him, but apparently ‘all of Barnacle Town’ feels we will be taking more than our share of the water and air.”

“That’s nonsense,” Rabia said. “None of you pays for either; it all comes from Chandi Corporation.” Not legally, either, but that wasn’t a thing which needed to be said aloud.

“This is bad,” Prakash said, sinking into a chair, head in hands.

“I can speak to them for you,” Si Fu said. “They will understand.”

“But it’s more than just the baby now,” Prakash said. “My nephew is coming. He’s been expelled from Earth and I told my sister I would take him in. How could I not? He has nowhere else to go. I’m going to pick him up tomorrow. When they find out...”

“Please, don’t worry,” Si Fu said, resting a hand on Prakash’s shoulder. “I’ll speak to them. They will understand.”

“I...” But Prakash clearly had no will to argue. “I am grateful.”

“Vindaloo, Mr. Li,” Anjali said, setting the steaming pot on the counter. There were more red chilies in there than meat pieces, just the way Si Fu liked it. The fact that it would soon have her in tears in no way diminished her appreciation for the bright color of the dish. Nothing she ate at home was ever this pretty. Rabia shut the lid, then slid her sleeves down over her hands to pick it up without burning herself.

“I didn’t know you knew the dons,” Rabia said as they made their way farther down the narrow lane to the blind alley which hid the door to his former school.

“I don’t, but I know their type. They can be talked to and negotiated with if you speak their language,” Si Fu said.

“What language is that?”

“Politics, child,” Si Fu said with a little chuckle.

“But they’re thieves,” Rabia said.

“Why do you say that?”

Rabia blinked. “Because they take money that isn’t theirs?”

“Ah, but with that money they provide all of us with energy and water.”

“I guess it started that way,” Rabia said. The history of Barnacle Town was an oral tradition that varied widely depending on who was doing the telling. “The merchants who were a little more prolific than the rest elected themselves representatives between the people of Barnacle Town and the Chandi Corporation, and they collected the bribe money and negotiated on everyone’s behalf. But it’s bigger than that now. And I know they collect more than they’re spending; the stories I hear here and the stories I hear inside just don’t match up. I call that theft.”

“All right, Rabia. They are thieves by your definition. But they’re not just thieves.” He stopped at the end of the alley to fish out the enormous key from within his robes. The butcher’s shop and home were made from a collection of half-destroyed cargo pods all welded together with a ferocity that made the joins look like particularly brutal scars. Beyond the butcher’s was a cul-de-sac formed by the back ends of many other ships forming an extremely irregular space. Barnacle Town was very far from a planned community.

Si Fu reached his hand with the key inside the gap between the back of the butcher’s and the wall that was the end of Barnacle Town, a wall made entirely of welded-together scraps. There was a click, and a door twenty feet over their heads swung open.

Si Fu turned to her as he put the key back into his pocket. “Barnacle Town has grown since I first came here; it has grown a lot. People brought their families here to live within the protection of the space station’s magnetic radiation shield, to take advantage of the gravity to walk upright. This is a good thing. But too many people in one place create trouble. You need a way to agree on how to get along besides fighting with each other. That’s politics. The corporation has its own structure, but out here we have the dons.”

“They’re getting more powerful,” Rabia said.

“Yes.”

“Too powerful?”

Si Fu thought about this for a moment, and when he did speak, it was—as usual—not a direct answer.

“I’ve lived a long time. I’ve seen the human race decimated, the remains scattered across the solar system. We so nearly died out sixty years ago. Now we are beginning to get our strength back. I see people starting to move beyond just surviving the plague to really living for themselves.

“The corporations control the big space stations. They think that means they control humanity out in space. The dons are thieves of a sort, I will agree with your assessment there, but the dons are also the ones in a position to show the corporations just how untrue their assumptions are.

“Now, come. Let’s get upstairs and eat before the food gets cold.”

He may have walked on level walkways leaning heavily on a stick, but when it came to shimmying up that wall of welded joints and strange outcroppings of girder ends and enormous screws, Si Fu still moved like a young master. He lowered the hook, and Rabia hung the pot from it so he could slowly hoist up his dinner as Rabia made her own way up the wall.

Yes, Alain would be a fool if he thought her master was an easy target. She had no reason to worry for him. Any home that involved scaling a twenty-foot wall to get in the front door was very nearly ambush-proof.

So why was she so uneasy?

The doorway was narrow, as was the hall beyond, almost uncomfortably so, but its size was deceptive. From the lane below the door seemed to lead to a tiny crawlspace, but once inside and past that narrow hall it opened up into a tremendous amount of open space for Barnacle Town. It was extravagant even by Chandi Corporation standards, where most of the large spaces had been converted into many smaller units to house the refugees fleeing Earth decades ago. Once upon a time Si Fu had used his open space to teach kung fu, tai chi, and chi gang to anyone who wanted to learn. When Rabia had first come here, he had anywhere from twelve to twenty students practicing at any given time of the day, all spinning and punching, advancing and retreating, and still there had been room for more.

But Si Fu wasn’t teaching anymore, and only Rabia still came to see him. Some days he was so tired he just sat in his dangerous-looking rocking chair made of scrap metal, dozing and waking with little difference between the two. Other days he was as alert as ever, and on those days he was still Rabia’s teacher, watching her as she drilled forms over and over and correcting her technique.

Rabia followed Si Fu across the open practice yard, steaming vindaloo in her sleeved hands, to the rickety staircase that led up to the loft that was his living space. It looked out onto the practice space and was the usual Barnacle Town size: barely big enough for a table and two stools, and the stools had to be put up at night before he could lay out his bedroll. But for such a tiny space it was filled with wonders. Rabia set the vindaloo on the table and Si Fu opened the lacquered cabinet tucked under the table, taking out two gorgeous china bowls, matching round cups with no handles, and lacquered chopsticks.

Even after putting all the chilies in Si Fu’s bowl Rabia could barely manage the spiciness, and when she was done her eyes and nose were both streaming. Si Fu gobbled his down like it was so much porridge. When they were done and she had helped clean up and put everything back away, Si Fu sat back in his chair and looked at her intently.

“I know,” she said, hoping to circumvent this conversation.

“You threw the first punch,” Si Fu said.

“But didn’t you see what he was doing?”

“Yes, I did. He needed to be stopped; this I do not argue. But what you did, you didn’t do to stop him. You did it because you were angry.”

Rabia looked down at her hand, at the cuts and scrapes his teeth had left behind. She remembered that grin, that superior I’m-the-one-in-control-here grin. It made her blood boil all over again just remembering it. And, she was certain, if she had turned her head at that moment she would have seen Alain grinning at her in just the same way.

“I should have just pushed him away, I guess,” she said with a sigh.

“Perhaps. There were other options you could’ve tried before touching him at all.”

“But there is no talking to a guy like that. You don’t know him.”

“Perhaps this is true, perhaps not. The problem here is not his character, it’s yours. I want you to know, when you do something, that it is the best course of action for the circumstances. I want you to have this knowledge at the time you make the decision, not after.”

“How?”

“You need to remove the thing that is keeping you from seeing clearly. Your anger.”

Rabia laughed humorlessly. “I think that’s pretty much irremovable.”

“Nonsense,” Si Fu said. “You just need to focus. It is an opponent like any other. Figure out how it fights, when it will strike, and how it will attempt to counter you, then use that knowledge to flow around it.”

“That sounds kind of impossible, Si Fu,” she said.

“Luckily, I know some tricks,” he said with just a hint of a grin.

Rabia went back home that night with lists of book titles to search the corporate library for and breathing exercises to practice. It was only when her mother looked up from her computer to say hello that Rabia realized she had let another day go by without coming up with a plan for her future.

Surely she would remember to do something about that tomorrow.