At that point, there were two possibilities for leadership. One was Chen MingWei, Chen GangHai’s eldest son. The other was Matthew Chen-Jasic, who had changed his last name when Chen GangHai had married Betsy Reynolds and united the families.
Matt had married PingLi’s eldest daughter, Chen YanXia, after Peggy Reynolds died in childbirth with their sixth child. YanXia’s husband had died in a farm accident on Arcadia, and they had five children of their own. Matt and YanXia had combined their families, and had a total of eleven children: five pure American, four pure Chinese, and two ‘bank babies’ – children sired with donations from a sperm bank to increase the genetic diversity of the colony – one half-Indian/half-American, and one half-African/half-Chinese. All were Chen-Jasic, with no differentiations made in their household by either the parents or the other clan members.
Despite Peggy’s death, Betsy Reynolds – Chen Zumu – was still Matt’s mother-in-law. In Chinese tradition, such relationships did not cease when the link that forged them was broken, and Reynolds was still grandmother to Matt’s children.
When it came down to selecting leadership on the retirement of Chen GangHai, MingWei stepped aside in favor of Matt, and, in the fortieth year of the colony, fifty-nine-year-old Matthew Chen-Jasic became Chen Zufu.
The Chen.
Matt Chen-Jasic had always been tall and heavy-boned. He seemed simply to be built on a larger scale than most people. A lifetime of manual labor on the colony – including construction of the buildings and stone walls of the Chen compound and gardening of the Chen’s extensive herb and tea garden – had made him well-muscled as well.
At the time of his becoming Chen Zufu, Matt had a developing bald spot on the crown of his head as well as a receding hairline. He had solved both issues by shaving his head. He kept the mustache and goatee, which became white as he aged. He let them both grow long, and waxed the mustache to the sides and down
Of course, Kendall’s questionnaire had made it to the Chen. Matt read it, initially with interest, then with alarm. Here it was, what he had worried about over the years, as the chairmanship and then the council had become increasingly oriented around the government and less around the people.
Matt laughed at the questions about nudity. It was his sister Amy who had first gotten tired of the halter tops. Her first child had been born a little early, and was hungry all the time. Half the time the halter top was pulled up around her neck so she could breastfeed the newborn, and then she had finally dispensed with it entirely. Several others of the American colonists in the Chen-Jasic group, including the twins, followed her lead.
With newborns in arms, work in the gardens wasn’t possible. Instead, Amy and the twins and the other young mothers had staffed the stalls in the market, relieving others to work the gardens. Matt couldn’t say for sure that sales in the market increased because of the half-naked teenage sales clerks, but it surely didn’t hurt.
And many more of their customers were couples, instead of just women. Apparently their husbands no longer objected to shopping. In the luxurious climate, the practice had spread. Jasic himself used to shower outside in the gardens whenever it rained, and sometimes still did, even as he approached seventy years old.
The questions about guns were another matter. When locally manufactured guns came on the market, the Uptown Market sold them. The family quietly started acquiring the better Earth-manufactured guns for themselves. They also traded new locally manufactured guns for Earth-manufactured ones, with a premium thrown in. As most people weren’t good enough marksmen for it to make a difference, they were eager to trade for extra cash.
The Chen-Jasic family then made it a policy to quietly go out into the country and train with the weapons, as well as with the bows and arrows the colony had brought along, and even with some crossbows of their own manufacture. The best marksmen among them got extra training. They found a true expert rifleman among the other colonists and hired him as an instructor. They trained with locally manufactured ammo, saving the Earth-manufactured ammo against future need.
Now it looked like that future need was fast approaching.
As for the black market, much of Uptown Market’s sales now were in cash, especially for guns and ammo. And they always gave cash as the premium on a gun swap. Many of their suppliers, too, preferred cash, hiding the transactions from the government and its watchful eye on their bank accounts.
The government programs Kendall proposed were also problematic. Most of the services he planned to offer through the government were much cheaper when provided through the private sector. How did he plan to pay for such wasteful programs? With higher taxes, of course.
There were taxes on many things. Not just increased taxes on transactions, but taxes on wealth. Taxes on property. Taxes on bank accounts. All of these were explicitly aimed squarely at the citizens who were ‘better off than their peers.’
Never mind that the colonists had all arrived on Arcadia fifty years before with exactly the same thing: whatever they could carry in their cubic and the coveralls on their backs. Of course, some people, like the Chens and the Carolina group under Maureen Griffith and Bob Jasic had used their cubic better than others. But the difference in their situations was determined more by their willingness to work and plan and save than any other factor.
And now Kendall wanted to tax work and planning and saving in order to reward laziness and profligacy.
To enforce this regime, his budget proposals included ever-increasing amounts for ‘security forces,’ both to protect him and his cronies and to enforce their regulations and taxes.
Matt sighed. He looked out across the gardens through the large teak-beamed doorway
