The Pirates of Sufiro (Book 1) (Old Star New Earth) (9 page)

Floyd McClintlock sold hover transports from a tiny dealership near the center of the city-state of Iowa on Earth. He breathed in a sharp lung full of air, then coughed it out, holding his chest in pain. With watering eyes he looked around at the decayed concrete and steel that surrounded him. Leaning against a green hovercraft, he realized that he could not see his own shadow. The lofty buildings towering around cut off much of the sunlight. Hovers swarmed like gnats in the air above. Suddenly furious, he kicked the green hover he was leaning against. It was still early in the afternoon, but Floyd was fed up. He shook his head and turned on the force field protecting the lot from thieves and vandals and stalked home, leaving his own hover behind.

McClintlock only lived five miles from his lot, yet by the time he reached his one-bedroom apartment, he could barely breathe. He leaned against a graffiti-covered wall and let the retina scanner check his identity as he punched the number code on a well-worn computer pad. The steel door opened and Floyd stepped inside, closing the door behind him. Panting, he dropped to the patched and faded orange couch. His wife was furious that he simply closed the lot, but McClintlock waved her off. He turned on the teleholo to watch the news.

Static flickered and danced above the little dais. Floyd slammed his fist down on the table next to the ornery device. The hologram of a smartly dressed woman snapped into focus and told of an address by the Rd'dyggian Ambassador on Titan. The Rd'dyggian had announced that G.S.C. 47689329 III was open to human colonization. The ambassador told of the brave first settlers there and that they welcomed anyone else interested in farming and earning an honest living. The Rd'dyggian mentioned the name the humans had given the world. In her summary of the speech, the smartly dressed woman caressed the name with her glistening red lips: "Sufiro."

"Sufiro," repeated McClintlock, numbly. "Sufiro," he said again more loudly. Then he hit his knee with the palm of his hand. "That's it!"

"What's it?" asked his wife from the tiny kitchen. She fought with the old, stained food preparation unit. Sweat ran off her forehead.

McClintlock ran to the bedroom and found a cube. He grinned at it foolishly. It was his college history text. He put it in the laser reader of the teleholo and selected the crystal matrix coordinate he wanted. After a moment, the holo showed images of fields of corn. He sighed, thinking back to his ancestors.

His wife came in and dropped onto the couch next to him. She cocked her head at the image of the cornfield in the holograph. "What's that?" she asked.

"Our salvation from this cesspool." McClintlock wore a grin, his eyes fixed solidly on the image.
"What cesspool?" She pursed her lips.
"Earth," he said impatiently. She folded her arms and began tapping her foot. "They just opened up a planet for colonization by farmers," he explained dreamily.
"You're insane," she muttered. She stood and stormed off to the kitchen.
Floyd followed her. Just then, the apartment door swished open and in rushed his daughter and small son, home from school. They stopped in their tracks and looked at the holo of the corn. "What's that?" asked his daughter, Anne.
"It's corn, silly," said Clyde. He turned to look at his father. "Why do we have a holo of corn in the living room, Daddy?"
Floyd knelt down and brought both of his children close. "Have you ever seen real corn?"
Anne bounced up and down. "We went on a field trip to a farm dome in Lake Michigan," she said. "But it didn't look like that." She pointed at the holo.
"What would you do if I told you that it might be possible to not only
see
corn like that, but to
grow
it..." Floyd was cut short by his wife clearing her throat. Joyce McClintlock stood in the doorway mouthing the words, "Don't you dare."
Floyd hurried the children off to the bathroom. He stepped over and put his arm around his wife's shoulder. She started to shrug away, then stopped. She looked back at him. "I'm only thinking about them," he said, calmly. "Today, I stood in the lot and I was sick. I was sick of what this planet has become."
Joyce McClintlock's jaw was set. Yet, she saw the moisture building in her husband's blue eyes. He stood a little straighter and Joyce realized that he had hit upon a conviction. Floyd had never been a man of conviction before. However, he was a man who loved his children and would not dare see any harm come to them. "So," she began at last. "What would we need to do?"
"I don't know yet," sighed McClintlock. "I don't know, but we'll find a way. Our children will have a good life. They won't suffer the way we did."
"Suffer?" She looked into Floyd's eyes. "You make a good living. We don't suffer."
Floyd shook his head. "Maybe it's the wrong word, but what do they really have to look forward to? Shouldn't parents make sure that their children have a better life than they did?"
That night at dinner, Floyd told his family about how people once came to Iowa to farm the land and be free men. Anne asked how people could ever farm a city. Floyd and Joyce looked at each other, perplexed grins on their faces. While they both knew that Iowa hadn't always been one large city, they never, personally, knew it as anything else. Still, Floyd went on to tell the children about Sufiro.
That night, Floyd held Joyce in his thin arms. The children were asleep in the front room. Joyce shook her head. "Was it right to get the children's hopes up?"
"We'll find a way," said Floyd.
"Is it so important that we go to this alien planet?" she asked.
"Is it so important that we stay here?" he countered.
"No." Her finger turned spirals on the bed. "But I'm scared. It's different. It's not what I ever expected to do with life. It's sudden."
"It's an adventure," said Floyd, enthusiasm in his voice. "Like when we first got married." He slowly, lovingly removed her blouse. She caught her breath, caught off guard by an eagerness she hadn't sensed in years. They made love. It was slow and gentle at first becoming more and more passionate. For the first time in their lives, hope had come to the McClintlock family.
* * * *

The next day, McClintlock walked to work humming. His business partner, Mary Hill, stared at him with steel gray eyes. McClintlock told Hill about Sufiro and his dream of becoming a corn farmer just like the people who had come to Iowa over a thousand years before.

"You mean to tell me you just up and closed the dealership yesterday?" said Hill, her arms folded.
"I could barely breathe," said McClintlock, scuffling his foot on the pavement. "Besides we didn't have any customers."
"You know as well as I do that customers can show up at any time. You don't just walk away from business." Hill began pacing back and forth.
"Why not?" retorted McClintlock. "Why are we here day after day? Why do we break our backs in this dirty city? What do we hope to accomplish?"
Hill stopped pacing and stared straight at McClintlock. "We hope to make a lousy buck. How am I going to send Rocky off to college if you leave the lot unattended? What about your own kids?"
"College?" laughed McClintlock. "Hell, I'm not even sure I can pay next year's taxes for them." Floyd shook his head. "Look, Mary, I'm sorry I walked away, yesterday. But Sufiro may be a new hope for us. Who knows, on a new world, Rocky could grow up to be an important businessman or even governor. What would he be here? He'd bust his butt in school just to take this stupid hover lot over from us. If we don't leave, it'll be Clyde or Anne and Rocky standing right here in a city that's even larger than it is now. A city where there's even less hope that their lives will mean anything."
"A planet that's not crowded to the gills? It seems like a fantasy," sighed Mary.
"It's not fantasy. It used to be Earth," said Floyd. "There used to be farms right where we're standing." Floyd grinned. "They used to have an expression, 'my boy could grow up to be President of the United States.' They used to mean it. It meant that an individual could succeed on his own terms. It also implied pride in a person's home. Could Rocky ever achieve that kind of success here?"
Mary shook her head. She folded her arms, then let them drop back to her side. She bit her lip then looked at Floyd. After a moment, she turned away and looked at the hover lot filled with old vehicles and not a single customer. She thought of a planet where she'd be responsible to no one but her son. A picture formed in her mind of the old days, hard work but with freedom. The image was both enchanting and frightening.
Hill nodded. "Pretty dream, but we need to get there first."
McClintlock looked at her, startled. "We?"
"We're partners, aren't we?" She shuffled her feet on the pavement.
He nodded. "We are."
That day, they fielded several customers. Five of them bought new hovers. As the day quieted down, the two stood in the lot again and looked around. "You know," said Hill, "this dealership is worth quite a bit of money."
"Enough for starliner tickets to Sufiro?"
Hill scowled at her partner. "Starliners do not go to the frontier," she said tersely. "What we need is a star cruiser?"
"This lot won't buy us a star cruiser." McClintlock looked to the ground. He imagined the dream slipping away.
Hill shook her head. "No, but it'll make a good start." She explained to McClintlock how a farm would have a better chance if they had a large group of people go and not just the two families. Few individuals on Earth knew anything about farming. However a community of people who each knew a little could pool their knowledge and make the farm work. Secretly, Mary feared going into the wilderness alone. The idea of bringing along at least a small community comforted her. It would not be hard to get, say, a hundred other people to make the trip. Also, if all of them paid for part of the ship, it might be affordable. He agreed.
Hill and McClintlock began sharing their dream of settling Sufiro with a number of their friends. They encouraged their friends to pass along the dream. Soon, nearly two hundred people wanted to go to the frontier world.
McClintlock and Hill sold their hover dealership. The other people sold whatever they had that was of value. Between them, they bought an ancient spaceship and fuel to make an EQ jump to Sufiro. They checked their leftover cash and bought as much corn seed from Lake Michigan as the small cargo bay would hold.
The families gathered their possessions. The people around them shook their heads, not understanding why decent, hardworking people would be willing to give up everything they had to go on some crusade to the frontier.
As time approached to board the ship, they realized they had a problem. There was no one to pilot the ship. After an agonizing search, they finally found a pilot who would do the job as long as she got the ship after she dropped the people at the planet. They agreed.
"Somehow, I think we got took," Hill confessed to McClintlock that night. No star cruiser was especially beautiful. However, this one was downright ugly. Star cruisers were black, Erdonium cylinders. While Navy ships and privateers tended to be sleek and graceful, this ship was short and fat; the hull breached by privateers. The black patch added to its homely appearance.
The scruffy pilot turned out to be a careful, skillful woman. The only unsettling part of the trip was the EQ jump itself. As it was, though, almost no one went through that experience without being unsettled.
When they arrived at Sufiro, they discovered the small settlement on the Nuevo Rio Grande. Floyd McClintlock and Mary Hill descended in a battered launch with the ship's pilot. They were met by Espedie Raton, wearing a tall, widebrimmed straw hat. In his hand he held a metal tube. At the back of the tube was a carved piece of wood. Neither McClintlock nor Hill understood what the device was. At first, they thought it was a weapon, but it looked like no hand hepler either had seen before.
Raton eyed them skeptically. There were a number of people coming to Nova Granada. Unfortunately, many of them were pirates, and Raton had a small son to protect. McClintlock explained that they had come with their families. Raton examined their launch. Finally, he nodded and led them three miles to Ellison Firebrandt's homestead. McClintlock was amazed at how much easier it was to breathe on this world than on Earth.
Roberts sat outside, watching as Fire, now two years old, ran naked around the homestead. Roberts spent more of his time sitting than standing. The arthritis in his feet was spreading at an alarming rate. However, there seemed little he could do about it. Out on the frontier, the medical supplies that would provide some relief were next to impossible to come by. The captain and Roberts raised enough food to feed themselves, but not enough to sell or trade—even to pirates— for supplies.
Hill found herself scowling at the scene. She wondered if Fire was being taught proper morals. Her worst suspicions were confirmed when Firebrandt stepped out of the house, naked. Her prominent ears flushed bright red. Raton barely seemed to notice. Firebrandt had insisted that there be no moral judgements on Sufiro unless those morals physically or emotionally harmed someone. Also, textiles were almost as difficult to come by on the remote world as pain medication.
Firebrandt read the expressions in the faces of Hill and McClintlock and realized that his nudity was bothersome to them. He invited them in then quickly ducked inside ahead of the others. Roberts struggled to his feet and led them to the dining room. The captain stepped into the dining room a few moments later, wearing his uniform trousers, a dress shirt and an old red smoking jacket. "What can I do for you?" asked Firebrandt, tamping tobacco into his pipe.
"Mr. Firebrandt," began McClintlock. "We've come to start a farm. We've come to raise our children outside the corruption of Earth. We have not come to live on a world of decadence and hedonism."
Firebrandt sat and lit his pipe. "Decadence," he said, thinking about his farm and the hot sun. "Hedonism." He remembered holding the still warm, stiff body of his wife. The captain shook his head trying, unsuccessfully, to clear the bitter memory. "Believe it or not, you've come to the right place."
Roberts brought water for the two visitors. They drank thirstily. "Sufiro is a haven," explained Firebrandt. "It is a place where people can live as they want and express themselves as they want. If a man wants to live, he must work. But he doesn't work for money. He works for himself." The captain returned the pipe to his mouth, eyeing the two people who sat in his living room. "The galaxy hasn't seen a renaissance in over five centuries. If you want to survive here, you'll have to be renaissance people. Everyone helps each other and looks out for their neighbor, but you'll have to be self-sufficient."
"Am I to understand that you're the government here?" Hill cocked her head, watching gray smoke billow around the captain's head.
"Government is a relative term," said Firebrandt. "I do not govern anyone. However, my house is the gathering place for meetings that concern the community."
Hill scowled. McClintlock put his hand on Hill's shoulder. "All we want is some land so we can build a town and raise our corn," said McClintlock. "Leave us alone, we'll leave you alone."
"Fair enough," said Firebrandt. Roberts shot a cautioning glance toward his captain. "How many are there of you?"
"Two hundred twenty-three," replied Hill.
Ellison Firebrandt let out a slow, soft whistle. He put the pipe between his teeth and blew smoke rings. "That's quite a few people, but Nova Granada is a big continent. There's room for everyone."
"Nova Granada?" asked McClintlock. "What does this planet have to do with a nova?"
Roberts shook his head. "It's from the ancient Earth language, Latin. 'Nova' means new."
"Ah," said McClintlock. "Why didn't you just call it New Granada."
Roberts shrugged, not feeling inclined to explain the historical context. Firebrandt opened his mouth to say something about it, but let it slide. "There's good farm land some hundred miles to the north," explained Firebrandt after a while. "I think it could be good grain land, if you want to raise corn."
Hill and McClintlock looked at each other. "Thank you, sir," said Hill, nodding.
"No thanks needed." Firebrandt looked into the bowl of his pipe as if trying to ascertain the answer to a great mystery. "The land's not mine to give. Treat it well, and I won't have reason to take it." The captain returned the pipe to his mouth. Sucking on the pipe stem, he looked like the pirate captain of old. McClintlock and Hill nodded and left. They blasted off in the tiny silver launch and returned to the ship.
The sensors on the launch confirmed that there was indeed good land about a hundred miles north of Succor. The Iowans decided that would be the place they would build their town and begin their farm. The people from Iowa landed in small groups. Their early days were much the same as those of Firebrandt and Roberts. They spent much of the time camping out while houses were constructed. They built a town in record time, calling it New Des Moines in honor of a solitary city that used to be the capital of a state called Iowa.
New Des Moines became the first true city in Nova Granada. A writer named Nicholas moved to New Des Moines and wrote about life on the frontier. His writings inspired a number of people to come to "New Granada." However, most people looked at his writing as strangely compelling and simply to be debated in art circles.
Money was introduced for the first time in New Des Moines. A general store was opened. A woman from New Earth opened a hover dealership. Hill and McClintlock became partners with her. With the hovers, people began scouring the countryside, seeing the sights that only Ellison Firebrandt had seen two years before. Soon, it became a status symbol to have a stuffed griffin mounted in the living room.
* * * *