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Sugarbush Soul




Lindy Bradmer, plenipotentiary inspector for the Bureau of Narcotics on Earth, walked across the receiving area of Madrasta's InterWorld Spaceport, with its towering columns and broad arches that fairly screamed "colonial architecture."

Outside the wide gates of the Spaceport, she blinked in surprise.

"Is it always like this?" she asked me, as her shocked gaze swept around the dirt street, the gaggles of begging children who clustered around her, the grown beggars — all of them looking old — who sat by the street-side, barely out of the path of the speeding, smoking ground cars, and all too close to the overflowing open gutters. 

She'd given me the same disbelieving look when I'd introduced myself as Eustacio Reis, superintendent and representative of the Horticultural Cooperative of Aguas Quentes.

She'd stared at me as if I were not what she expected; as if I were, in fact, some strange alien being. Of course, it was too early to tell the source of her surprise: my mocha complexion, my straight black hair — both rare in an Earth from which all non-Caucasians had emigrated or been deported — or the fact that I wore an impeccable white suit, of good cut. Perhaps she expected colonials to go about dressed in fur and tatters.

I also couldn't tell which way she meant her question about this scene, her first exposure to Madrasta. Immediately outside the spaceport lay a large street, busy with speeding traffic, but shaded by tall buildings with elaborate and colorful -- if decrepit -- tile facades. Peddlers swarmed the space between road and gutter, stepping gingerly amid seated beggars, and offering everything and anything for sale, from lynkcoms to handfuls of dusty grapes. 

At midday, it was a good ninety degrees in the shade, and clouds of flies swarmed all around, forming a moving curtain that hid the worst details of the scene: the sores on the beggars' faces, the suppurating ulcers on the legs of unemployed farm workers. Above the buildings, fat letters formed ephemeral skysigns, their neon-colors advertising all manner of products, most of them imports from Earth. They cast an eerily colorful glow over the dirt of the street and the speeding cars.

"No," I said, curtly as I picked up Lindy's suitcase that she'd set on the ground, beside herself, and that a half-naked urchin had started lifting. I waved away the rest of the pack of little human scavengers. "It's not always like this. Sometimes it's worse.” 

I spoke curtly because she was not what I'd expected. To begin with, there was the gender thing. Every other inspector we'd endured in our lifetime had been male. Then there was the fact that this particular woman was exotically blond, slim, fragile, and very pretty, with a face like a china doll's and wide, enamel-blue eyes. 

Sometimes one wondered what the government of Earth played at, and what they thought the colonies were. A recreation camp for the bored daughters of diplomats? Didn't they know there were revolutionaries, wild-eyed idealists planning all sorts of things in these far-flung colonies? Didn't they know that every once in a while an envoy from Earth -- inspector, ambassador, missionary -- got killed, just because he came from Earth? Didn't they know they were endangering her?

I thought of Miguel and Paulo, and the rest of our little band, and the careful, secret plans we'd made, and looked at this woman, who wore a knee-length dress in some shimmery pink fabric and matching thin-strap sandals. 

I felt my mouth go dry.

Dragging Lindy, I carried her suitcase across the street at a trot, just after a dusty grey ground car had passed and before the next mad speeder could run us over.

The car I'd driven into the city was a farm worker transport vehicle. Large enough to seat twelve, the boxy, squarish contraption sat on six much-too-high wheels. This brand had a deserved reputation for rolling over, but they were Madrastan-made, and, therefore, affordable. At least affordable to the Cooperatives, of course, not to any particular individual.

Even I, a middle-aged and relatively well-off manager of a twenty-farm Cooperative, couldn't hope to own one. But I got to drive my plantation's third-hand model. Wouldn't want to bring a prettier or more modern car into the city, anyway. It would have been stripped in no time. Even this old can had to be protected with repulsion fields, alarms and automated theft taggers.

I turned off the car's repulsion fields with the command I wore on my watchband, and, working fast, before any of the ever-present beggars and hoodlums could push in and steal it, opened the door to my passenger and then clambered in, squeezing past her, as she flinched away, into the ratty brown seat. I closed the door, threw her suitcase in the back, turned on the repulsion shields again and watched them push the crowding masses away with the violence of a good shove. Even then, one or two burly unemployed, young, able-bodied men who, for whatever reason, couldn't or wouldn't work, pushed forward, against the fields, with persistence that would overcome them, given enough time. One, burlier than the others, with pitch black eyes and greasy black hair, reached for the door handle.

"Buckle up," I said, as I dropped onto the dusty brown seat, feeling the give of the broken springs. The seatbelt on the driver's side had been cut by some idiot who'd owned the car previously, so I made do with a length of rope that held to the seat with hooks.

The woman, though she had a perfectly good seat belt, seemed to have trouble buckling it, as if she'd never seen anything similar. I supposed on Earth they used anti-grav fields, or whatever, no doubt more comfortable and activated effortlessly when needed. Hard to tell.

All I had to go on about Earth was the word of my great-grandparents who'd been transported and who, at any rate, had never come close to state-of-the-art technology. They'd told me over and over how Earth had only one moon, and contented themselves with this one wonder, to capture my Madrasta-born imagination.

I took off at full speed, the only way to ensure that no hijackers could get hold of the car. It was getting so that it simply wasn't safe to drive in the city at all. One heard about people murdered — murdered — at stop lights. Murdered for the few car parts and pocket change their attackers could grab before the Colonial Police arrived — and took the remainder.

As we drove in a cloud of dust down the shady streets, hemmed in by the very tall, stone buildings, the Earther said, "Why such tall constructions? Porto Novo has a population of what? A hundred thousand people?”                              

I nodded. Porto Novo, capital and largest city of the world of Madrasta, did, indeed, have only a hundred thousand souls. "It was the colonization bureau," I told her, as I swerved to avoid a kid in a ragged shirt who crossed the street in front of us without looking. Not that the little beggar would have much to live for, but then again, maybe he would, if the Liberation succeeded. I thought of Miguel again. I would have to tell him the inspector was a woman and pretty, and I could almost hear him laugh at me. But she was a woman and she was pretty and I didn't think we could get the sympathy of any of our colonial brothers by killing pretty blonde women. We'd have to keep our secret some other way.

I came perilously close to the gutters and the line of beggars along them, then swerved again to the main stream of traffic. "When Madrasta was first colonized, the officials in charge of the project had only so much money to prepare advance accommodations for the first colonists. They could either build a thousand small farmhouses, out in the middle of land that had yet to be cleared of alien plants, or they could build a couple hundred really tall buildings in the city. They thought the buildings were better. They showed better to their superiors. Encouraged tourism."

Lindy took my irony without smiling. Her hair shone, a startling white-gold, even under the attenuated light coming through the refracting windows. She smelled of something light and flowery. "Oh," she said. "Do you have much tourism?"

"No," I said, and my voice almost tasted the bitterness in the word, a taste of unripe fruit and the ashes of long lost dreams.

She looked at me, her enamel-blue eyes immense, then she twisted her lips in a funny way and sat in silence until we got out of the city. 

Most changes in landscape came abruptly in this colony that had existed for less than a hundred years. Between one breath and the next, at the turn of a curve, we left streets hemmed in by walls, destitute beggars, dirty children and glowing skysigns, and emerged into unconfined wilderness. The street below our wheels showed as the only sign of human occupation. On either side of that black strip of dimatough paving, the primeval jungle of this world reigned. Out here, dimatough had to be used; it was the only material that held jungle growth at bay.

We'd never understood much about the local flora — of course, neither we, the natives, nor our ancestors who had unwillingly been shipped to this world, were paid to study the environment. Instead, our livelihood depended on slashing it and burning it so that vineyards and coffee plantations could flourish instead.

Most of the native plants seemed to be some odd sort of fungoid. They came in all the colors of the rainbow, from baby blue to bright, screaming red, and in a multitude of forms ranging from your classic mushroom to an odd bush composed of tentacles.

My passenger came to life, and leaned towards the wide, refracting side window, staring out with something akin to hunger. She laid both her hands flat, palm out, on the windows. "Do you think there's sugarbush out there?" she asked.

"No, ma'am," I told her, and added, for the sake of verisimilitude, "Sugarbush is an Earth plant."

And to her wide, unbelieving eyes, I sighed. "Some sort of bush that someone brought, either by accident, like they brought the flies and the rats, or because they thought it was pretty."

"But we don't have sugarbush on Earth," she said.

"Um...look it up. Bet you do. They'd just have changed the name, now that sugarbush from Madrasta is causing that much trouble.” She still looked disbelieving. Oh, Lord. You'd think an inspector come to make sure that the farmers in Madrasta weren't cultivating sugarbush would know something of the history of the plant. "It mutated in Madrasta," I said. "Some things do. I don't know what Sugarbush was like on Earth, but the fruit here is poisonous. Can be used to make a hallucinogen."

She looked at me long and hard, as if suspecting me of fibbing, and I sighed and concentrated on driving. No use to anybody my showing her that I knew a lot about sugarbush. No use my showing her I knew a lot about anything. Had I already said too much?

As abruptly as we had left the city, we left the native jungle behind. The riotous profusion of pastel colors and wild forms gave way to bare black Earth planted with row upon neat row of vines. Amid the vines, the workers of the cooperative worked -- the women in their colorful blouses and head scarves, the men in bright embroidered vests, each carrying a tall basket for the grape harvest.

Lindy leaned towards the window. "How pretty," she said, and inhaled deeply. "Nothing like... nothing at all like Porto Novo."

I kept my mouth shut. Sometimes starvation was just not quite so obvious. But let her keep her illusions. They hurt nobody.

***

"How long till the harvest?" I asked Miguel.

We walked in a field tall with sugarbush, row upon row upon row of it, the berries glowing fat and red against the dark green leaves.

Miguel, thirty years old but looking fifty, small and brown and almost completely bald, pulled one of the berries off the branch, smashed it between his thumb and forefinger. Red juice stained his fingers like blood. "Another two days," he said. "Should be another two days. If you can keep Long-legs out of here long enough, she won't find no sugarbush to incriminate us."

I nodded. For all that I had a higher post in the Cooperative, Miguel was the soul of the movement of Liberation in this area. His thirty years had been hard lived, since he'd started as the son of an indentured worker, almost a slave. Without ever getting enough to eat — always difficult in Madrasta but even more difficult in the lower classes — or education of any kind, he'd taught himself to read and, somewhere, stumbled on enough ideas on economy and politics to know that Madrasta would be poor as long as Earth controlled us and fed upon us.

Like fat leeches, he'd said, feeding on a wounded animal.

Now he looked at me, by the reddish light of the twin moons. "You're not afraid, are you?" he asked.

I shook my head. Not afraid. Worried. We needed money to start our revolution, so that an independent Madrasta could one day feed its own children. But if the inspector found the sugarbush, Earth would refuse the stipend that Madrasta counted on to keep its people from starving.

***

Lindy laughed as we drove down the road, taking in the vineyards, the people picking grapes, the far-distant dots of white stone plantation houses. "I do believe you wish to spend time with me, superintendent."

She had on a white dress, and looked now at the landscape, now at me, with a small smile.

I smiled back, wondering if my smile looked natural. I felt as if the tension lines in my face would make my skin crack. "Why do you say that?" I asked, in my best tone of light-hearted flirting. Not a very good light-hearted tone, I was afraid. I hadn't courted anyone since I'd courted Ana, and won her, when we were both just seventeen. I'd been married for fifteen years, before I'd lost Ana, two years ago. She'd died in childbirth with our tenth child. Third living one. Her family had taken the children to raise. My small house echoed, too empty and seemingly too large without her.

I was too old to flirt. But let the Earther think I was a lecherous old man.

"Oh," she said. "Just because.” The tone of her voice made my stomach contract. Who had she talked to? What had she done? I'd spent the night at home, in one of the outbuildings of the plantation. She'd spent the night in the plantation main house — a large foursquare stone building, a good half a mile from the employee lodgings. When I'd got there in the morning, I'd found that she'd gotten up earlier and had been wandering about the plantation yards and the grape pressing warehouses, talking to people.

But I couldn't afford to ask her what she suspected. So I chuckled and shook my head. "You Earthers. Too sophisticated for me."

She'd asked to go up in a flycar, of course. The cooperative owned one flycar, and we had to offer it to her. But if she went up in the flycar, she would see the sugarbush plantation ensconced between the vineyards and the forest. I'd fed her some line about the flycar being out of order. Just another couple of days. Another couple of days.

"Do you know why I became an inspector with the controlled substances bureau, Eustacio?" she asked, looking at the landscape, the workers waving at her from the fields.

I shook my head.

"I'm the older of two sisters," she said. "Or used to be. I was the outgoing party girl. My sister was quiet, shy. She never had many friends. When she was fifteen, she started doing Madrastan sugar. We never found out until it was too late. She died at eighteen. I was in college then, and I chose diplomacy, immediately. I graduated last year and applied to the CSB."

"I am sorry," I said, "about your sister.” Did she know how many fifteen-year-olds died everyday in Madrastan streets, because they just couldn't get enough to eat? Or how many lived on, having done unthinkable things to stay alive — begging, prostitution, robbery, murder? How many lived on with tainted souls, more tainted than a body could be, by sugarbush? All because Earth controlled the price at which we could sell our products and which products we cultivated — mainly coffee and wine — while everything else had to come from Earth at a prohibitive price?

We'd reached the inhabited end of Aguas Quentes and, before reaching the forest, I turned around.

"Do you ever go into the forest?" she asked, her eyes on the distant blur of pink and blue tentacles and fungoids.

I felt hair rise at the back of my neck. "No. Nobody does. No one ventures into the jungle here. Leastwise not without a flame thrower ahead of him. Some of those plants are carnivorous and most of them just plain poisonous to humans."

All of which was true, but with the right clothing you could cross a small strip of the forest, and — with a flame thrower — clear a space within the forest for sugarbush.

She raised her pale eyebrow, but only said, "It seems such a waste," she said. "To live in an alien world and know nothing of it."

I smiled, despite myself. "My grandparents weren't sent here as botanists or xenobiologists. And the rest of us are much too busy surviving."

She smiled, in return, but her smile hid something else, something brittle, odd. "You speak like an educated man.” Her smile hesitated, flickered off, flickered back on, in an appeasing mode, "Don't misunderstand me. I meant, considering that the people deported here were not educated people.” Her face was all soft planes covered in rosy-fair skin shining with something like peach fuzz. Like the fine peaches the rich imported from Earth, once a year as a special treat. I'd had one, once, as a child, at my uncle's house.

They were especially treated, of course, so they couldn't be planted in Madrasta. Wouldn't grow. Earth said it was to prevent ecological damage to Madrasta. Wine and coffee plantations, apparently, caused no harm at all.

"We have a library," I said. "And all the writings of mankind on gem. We can learn. If we're willing to."

"If you're willing to learn...” She spoke in a dreamy tone, and she smelled of peach, too, a warm, fruity smell.

***

Miguel and Pedro and I wore our heavy clothing, three layers of it, the outer layer the ceramic weave we wore when spraying insecticide on the vineyards.

Miguel felt the sugarbush berry between his thumb and forefinger, and squashed it, red juice flowing.

"Is it ripe?" I asked.

"Yes, yes.” He frowned.

"But..."

He shook his head. "Just one more day and it would be perfect."

"Not one more day," I said. "Not one more hour. Now, now. The woman suspects, I tell you."

Miguel looked at me, his eyes hard as pebbles. "You like the woman, do you?"

Did I like the woman? I looked at Miguel and at Pedro, who looked much like Miguel, and who, like him, had been born to indentured servants, though he'd paid off his indenture and was now a free farmer. Well... as free as anyone who worked for the cooperative, which is to say, for Earth.

"She doesn't matter," Miguel said. "She'll be gone. Only Madrasta matters."

"She says her sister died from sugarbush.” I knew it was stupid before I said it, and the stupidity of it just echoed back to my own ears.

"Her sister died of being too wealthy," Pedro said. "It is the wealthy Earthers that keep up the demand for sugarbush. We just supply the demand. If we didn't, someone else would."

We harvested the sugarbush through the night. By dawn, we'd collected every single berry, set it in a deep pit at the edge of the forest.

"Who collects it?" I asked Miguel.

He shrugged. "You don't know, I don't know. Someone does. Someone else working for the liberation of Madrasta. That's all you need to know. That way, they question you, you don't babble."

"Those berries," I said. "So many basketfuls. How much... how many dosages does it make, you think?"

He shrugged. "I don't make the Madrastan sugar," he said. "Someone else does.” He looked at me with curious, wondering eyes. "But it would make a lot, I think. I think a dosage is just a drop."

I slept for an hour or two, after going home and washing. In my too-large bed, in the coolness of dawn, I dreamed of many, many pretty golden-haired Earth girls, each dead from a drop of sugarbush.

***

"Have you ever seen a long-time addict?" Lindy asked.

I still stalled on the flycar. One more day. Let someone collect the berries in peace. We wouldn't want them observed. So, she'd insisted on going out, amid the vineyards, and taking random samples of the soil. She said her tests could tell her if there were sugarbush growing nearby. She wore tight black pants, a loose white top and a broad-brimmed hat and looked like something in an antique illustration from a book about Earth. She carried a large bag with vials and, every time she stopped, she took a sample of dirt into her vial. Her arms, exposed to the sun, were turning a deep shade of pink, and sweat beaded her small nose.

"No," I said. "There are no addicts in Madrasta. Madrastans can't afford to use sugar.” I wondered how accurate those tests would be. The sugarbush grew a good three miles down the road. Surely, she couldn't detect it from this far.

"At first it's imperceptible," she said. She squatted to get a soil sample into a vial and corked it. "Then you start ... fading. Madrastan sugar eats away at the muscles, the major organs. In the end you're nothing but a shell, eaten away.” She spoke in a distant voice, like someone reading an obituary.

I remembered my dreams in the night, and I shook. So many pretty, golden-haired Earth girls, with small breasts and skin that burned easily in the sun — and they would all die from the sugarbush berries we'd harvested last night. But the revolution needed the money, the liberation did. Without the liberation, my sons would be prisoners forever. They'd grow up to be slaves to Earth, to grow wine and coffee for the elites of Earth, but never to enjoy any of it themselves.

Lindy stood up, and stared at me, as though reading my thoughts, then sighed. "After seeing all those beggars in Porto Novo, you know what I thought?"

I shook my head, slowly.

"I thought, it is the revenge of Madrasta on Earth. Madrastan sugar is. I didn't know Madrasta was so poor."

"Few people do," I said, and looked away, unable to bear the intent scrutiny of those intense enamel-blue eyes.

***

"She's been to the field, I tell you," Miguel said. We met at his house, in his living room. Like me, he lived alone. Unlike me, he'd never married. The liberation was his only spouse, his only love. His house was spare, as all of our houses were, the walls made of native stone, the floor paved with fine sheets of a clay-like material, also local. It all glowed golden by the light of the fire in the fireplace.

"How?" I asked. "I was with her, all day."

"Then she went at night.” Miguel said, and his mouth closed hard, like a trapdoor. 

"You're asking me to believe that an Earth woman went traipsing around an alien planet at night, that she crossed the forest, for no reason, that she—"

"Idiot," Miguel said. "Idiot. You believe she's innocent because she's female and young and pretty. She's an inspector. They have equipment that tells them where the sugarbush is. They know...."

I thought of how innocent she'd looked when I'd told her that sugarbush had originated on Earth. Had she been faking? Why? To make me feel confident?

"And besides, there were marks on the field," Miguel said. His hard, black eyes looked like pebbles, hard and dead. "The marks of her shoes. No one on Madrasta owns shoes with sculpted soles like that."

"What does it matter?" I almost shouted. The idea that I might have been taken for a dupe stung. She looked so innocent. She seemed to like me. She had flirted with me. "I thought you said that your friends would torch the field, in the night."

"Yes," Miguel said. "And that would be fine to prevent it being seen from the air. But not if she came down and took samples of the ash. Then she'll know. She'll have evidence."

Evidence. Evidence enough to put Miguel and Pedro and me, too, away for a good many years. Evidence enough to deny the money that Madrasta desperately needed, to keep its population alive. They called it cultural development subsidies, but most of it went to medicine and childcare, and milk for babies whose mothers died giving birth.

***

"Thank you for finally showing me Aguas Quentes from the air, supervisor," she said. She sat in my office, holding a cup of tea in her small, almost transparent fingers.

The bone-white cup was one of the few luxuries Ana had ever bought — a porcelain tea set for my office. Tea was another of my luxuries, a vice, an indulgence.

Lindy's fingers shone against the cup, just a shade darker than it.

She hadn't mentioned sugarbush. If she knew about it, she said nothing. She just drank my tea, and looked gravely at me across my old, cluttered desk — a large wooden desk, imported from Earth by who knows whom, to serve one of my predecessors.

"When I get back to Earth...," she said, and hesitated. She sat on an antique white canvas folding chair, smeared and grey from many years of use.

"Yes?" My heart beat near my throat. She left the next day, early morning. What was she about to say? That our trade was ended? I shifted on my own chair, an old plastic chair that shifted oddly on legs that had worn unevenly.

"When I get back to Earth, I might...I'd like to use my contacts, make the plight of Madrasta known. Perhaps...a charitable organization could...."

"We don't want charity.” My own vehemence astonished me. I sounded like Miguel in one of his mad moments. "Madrasta doesn't need charity. We have good black soil, and we produce good coffee, good wine. If Earth allowed us to trade with the other colonies...if all the ships didn't go to Earth first...if we were allowed to grow our own food, we wouldn't need Earth's charity."

She looked at me a long time, her enamel-blue eyes showing nothing, no offense at my outburst, no shock at being yelled at.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She shook her head. "You might want to know," she said, "that the Madrastan sugar trade on Earth has increased five times in the last five years. Analysts have tracked it to the spread of the movement of liberation in Madrasta. The pattern seems to be that the movement penetrates into a new area, recruits a few idealistic souls, gets them to aid and abet the growing of sugarbush for the good of the liberation. And then the head traffickers in Madrasta cash out on the crop, and send it to Earth, with the aid of their secret network, and put the money in secret bank accounts, presumably on Earth. Not a cent of it goes to the liberation movement, which is always the same, always a grassroots movement struggling for money. And none of the locals can get revenge or turn the swindlers in, because of the structure of the movement, where no one knows all the principals, no one knows who they really work for."

"Why are you telling me this?"

She looked at me over the rim of her porcelain cup, intently grave, then suddenly lowered the cup and smiled. "Oh, because you talked of having spaceships, establishing your own trading contracts. Don't you see that Madrastan sugar sells for astronomical amounts on Earth, that a harvest basket full of sugarbush berries would be enough to buy a spaceship? If that was intended....” She nodded to me. "I thought you'd want to know, because you're a good man, and idealistic.” She stood up, set the cup down on the edge of my desk, stretched. "I'll go up to bed now. Tomorrow I'll leave early to go to the city. Will you be driving me?"

"No. I have to stay in the plantation. Someone else will drive you.” Miguel had insisted on it, insisted on driving her. So he could interrogate her, he said, and find out how much she really knew. I was an idiot, he said, and blinded by the woman's charms.

For just a moment, watching her walk out of my office, I thought to warn her, to tell her that Miguel was idealistic, too, but more of a fanatic than I'd ever be. That I worked for the liberation because of my sons, but Miguel worked for the liberation for its own sake, and it was the first thing to excite his interest, ever, like no human being ever had.

I almost told her that Miguel was dangerous.

But she turned, at the door, and smiled at me. "I'm sure you wouldn't get involved with something like that anyway. Not you, Eustacio. You have too good a heart to live with the sacrifice of anonymous Earthers, even for a good cause.” She wore a tight red dress, and her blonde hair, pulled back, gave her face slightly severe lines, that made her look like an eternal icon, something not quite human.

On Earth, they took prisoners accused of drug trafficking and brain-washed them, with a combination of drugs that erased all memory, all knowledge. And then they sent them to a different colony, adult babies who could only do the dullest manual labor.

If I spoke, she would know I knew.

"You're right," I said. "Good night, Lindy."

***

It wasn't so much of a surprise when the car overturned, on the way to Porto Novo. The damn things overturned all the time. Earth didn't even bat an eye at the news. They wouldn't, anyway, since Miguel, the native driver, died with Lindy, and Earthers, with their soft ways, their self-serving culture, have trouble envisioning sacrifice for a cause.

I never saw Lindy after death. Functionaries from Porto Novo came and took her away, back to Earth, presumably back to her family.

Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if she had any brothers or if, in losing her, her parents lost their last child.

And sometimes, in my office, laboring over accounts, I look across the paper-strewn desk and could swear I see her there, on the dirty folding chair, holding a porcelain cup between her too-white fingers.

For many months I waited for some big event, something important to be done by the liberation movement. Something that would justify all those Earth girls dying of Madrastan sugar. I was never sure what the big action would be, but I would have settled for anything: armed fighting, demonstrations, alternative space ports operating from the country side, food and learning materials secretly distributed to the starving children of indentured servants.

After a year I stopped waiting.

Life goes on, but I feel curiously dried up. My boys are growing, but I'm not raising them, and they don't have much future to look forward to. If they're lucky and smart and hard working they'll be like me, white collar workers in the hierarchy of the wine-growing cooperatives of Madrasta, serving the bureaucracy of Earth.

But none of it matters much. Perhaps it's all as it should be. Nothing seems to matter anymore.

I remember what Lindy said about the effects of sugarbush. I feel as if I, too, wasted away from that sugarbush I helped grow. But it was not my body or my muscles that it ate. It was my soul.


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