Meat Ladder to Mars by Eugenio Negro

Author:Eugenio Negro [Negro, Eugenio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Editorial Éxitos Gnosis
Published: 2016-04-05T22:00:00+00:00

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Tomorrow night, with its vague leaves, disappeared in a windy torrent and came out of the tempest stripped down to tonight. The weird greenish tropical glare was back in the silo's air, and the shuttle stack looked like an unexplainable stone carving hidden in some Guatemalan jungle. Zosime spent the day puttering, preparing, polishing the silo, preparing it for what visitors and celebrations may come. The grunt work didn’t bother her, and she wore the greasy work polo that she hadn’t washed in days; she might as well’ve worn a kerchief over her hair, a chaste hijab, a French maid’s lace ruffle. Salary and social respect notwithstanding, there was never shame in cleaning. She monitored how her new foreman Clayton wobbled around the silo, when he left his user side open on the laptop, where he laid things. She clocked out for her mandatory, unnecessary breaks when he told her to, as he faked Rodríguez until he made it. She stared up the concrete tunnel to the surface in the cafeteria and formulated how she’d use him first, as much as she could, for as much as the system would let her.

She finally thought to investigate the work orders she’d received that morning. Surely enough Clayton’s email address was included on the mail string. She carefully exited her work email, entered her personal account, and sent Clayton’s address to Iyiola. Then the first cargo cylinder came back from storage and she set it up to be loaded by the computer-guided crane, into the scaly old shuttle's chest cavity, without incident.

When he was away on his break, she took Iyiola's note out of her pocket and installed the programs and adjusted the settings he'd told her to. In the fifteenth sweaty minute of doing so, she cursed herself for not taking the programming class that some of her girlfriends took in Utrecht. But her panic was unfounded. He came back from his break and looked right at her and the computer, with no idea of what she was doing. She wondered if they even had internet in Dickinson, North Dakota. She tore the part of the notepaper off with the instructions she'd carried out, and destroyed it.

She barely felt a temptation to go see the pigs. There was nothing more to see. Once again logged into her work email, she found that she’d need to show the courtesy, after all, of escorting Martha Glass to dinner. She’d have to sneak her meeting with Iyiola into the trip back down to the southern end of the city, between ferrying Martha and arriving in time for dinner. She didn’t try to call her mother yet, or find out about Behrouz, just hoped that the hospital tied her down for a few more days. She was now in her most alert posture, listening, her muscles light as hairs. The flush of purpose, of resistance, glowed in her heart like a newly-opened rose.

The weather cleared up midafternoon and soon the smog reascended its throne.

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