Spin the Sky by Katy Stauber Page A

today, gringo ,” Penelope comments as she inspects him.
    Cesar gives her a wan smile.
    “You see? My soup,” Lupe pronounces triumphantly, poking Cesar like a steak of questionable tenderness.
    She beams at him approvingly until she sees he has not finished the cup of soup she left him the night before. Her face takes on a look of steely disapproval. He drinks it cold.
    “I am definitely on the mend, ma’am,” Cesar agrees quietly, glancing quickly at Penelope. “I would surely love to get cleaned up. I know I must smell like death on a cracker. My last stop before I came here was the Satsuma Silk Colony and two billion tons of silkworms leave a stench that takes days to get out.”
    “Well, good. We have a medibox if you’d like to get checked out, just to be sure?” Penelope offers.
    “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll skip it unless I’m still feeling poorly in a day or two,” Cesar answers as he gets up and stretches. Cesar will die before getting in a medibox again, but he doesn’t see the need to mention that right now.
    Penelope shrugs. “Fine by me. I will be gone most of the day, but Lupe will point you towards clean clothes and a shower.” And with that Penelope leaves without a backwards glance. Cesar frankly admires her retreating figure.
    When he left all those years ago, she was his fluffy little kitten. He knew the only reason he’d ever gotten her aboard the ship from Earth was by appealing to that insatiable dream of travel. A dream that apparently died on the shuttle up.
    Argos stopped by earlier to chat with Cesar and see if the new stranger would live or die. Argos had not recognized Cesar at all, but he did say that Penelope had not left Ithaca once since setting foot inside the orbital all those years ago.
    Cesar could not get over the difference in her. His little kitten may have hissed and shown her claws on occasion, but that Penelope was too gentle and sweet to ever cause harm. The woman he saw now was a panther—sleek, strong and ready to devour those that got in her way.
    What a woman , Cesar thinks appreciatively.
    He smiles to think that if she’d been this confident and unassailable when they’d met, he’d probably have run in fear. He is deeply uncomfortable with the man he used to be, a man who had all this and walked away without a second thought.
    Lupe helps him up, calling on various saints for strength.
    “A shower is not going to cut it. I am filling up the water trough. You get a bath, mister.”
    Cesar thinks this is a grand idea, but he protests the decadence of it. You don’t get a lot of baths in space. Water is at a premium. Most orbitals are designed with enough plants and culture vats to make air an easy commodity. They tend to err on the side of too much oxygen, building photosynthesis panels into the roofs of every building. Food is usually not a problem as the bacterial vats can supply enough to live on, even if bac-food tends to be mostly unappetizing. Yeast cakes smell like yeast cakes no matter how you culture them.
    Which is why the majority of colonies devote the largest amount of room for raising food. But water was a real issue until they perfected large-scale asteroid mining.
    Even now, nearly all orbitals try to clean their populace with the barest minimum of water. A bath is the ultimate luxury, even if it is in the trough used to water the mules. It was the greatest testament to how well Ithaca and this ranch were doing, that Lupe would offer a bath to a stranger. He thanks her profusely.
    “Well, a bath will at least take a few layers of the funk off of you. The trough needed cleaning anyway,” she says, brushing aside his thanks. “And don’t think I won’t make you scrub a mess of laundry while you’re in there.”
    He follows her slowly, still unsteady and weak.
    Lupe gives Cesar a cake of coarse homemade soap that he scours himself with. He washes his hair at least three times and then sits in the tub combing it. It is longer and