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with your own producers, paying above the Co-Op’s rates, getting your own certification… what’s the point of being in the Co-Op if you’re not going to look out for its interests?” His face softened. “Why are you here?”
    “You mean, right now, or in a general, existential sense?”
    He shook his head, then slid out of sight. I heard more weeping.
    I walked around the desk and dragged Vikram out. I turned him on his side and held him in place. He protested, but it was token resistance. The rum and his despair had done their work. “Vikram, did you try and push an Article Thirty-Three on my foreman?”
    He laughed. “You would have been compensated. Two and a half million, easily, just from the cane alone. Throw in the actual product, and three is a fair offer.”
    “Why would you try to buy my perfectly profitable distillery?”
    He moaned. “Because we’re fucked.”
    I flipped him on his back. “I think you need to explain that. Right now.”
    He flailed his head from side to side. “I feel sick.”
    “Vikram, I’m recording this. You can either explain it to me or in front of the entire Co-Op.”
    “They won’t care,” said Vikram, turning his head away from me. “They want your cane because all of ours isn’t coming in.”
    I grabbed his cheeks and squeezed his head into place. “You just said the problem is with WalWa.”
    “It is,” he said through squished cheeks. “Part of it.”
    “Tell me what’s going on. All of it. Right now.”
    He laughed, the sound tight in his mouth. “No one wants to work for us anymore.”
    I let go of his face. “What, at the distilleries?”
    He shook his head. “In the fields. There’s no cane coming in because the farms are being abandoned. Haven’t you heard?”
    I sat in his chair. “I spend ten hours a day in a hole in the ground, Vikram. I’m lucky to know what week it is. How long has this been going on?”
    “Three months.” He curled up into a ball and rocked onto his side. “No one’s cutting cane. No one’s bringing it to cure. No one’s bringing it to the presses. Millions of hectares are just growing wild, and no one’s around to take care of them.”
    “How do you know?”
    Vikram rose to face me. “Because I’ve been out there! I spent the past week touring cane farms, and all of them are abandoned. And I’m not talking about the little ones. I mean outfits like Royo’s and Shar’s. Big producers.” He waved a hand in the air. “All empty. Like the people were plucked into the sky.”
    “And you haven’t asked around?”
    “Who?” He sank back to the carpet. “Who is there to ask? We went to the police, and they said there’s been no crime, no reports of missing persons, nothing they can do. It’s a big planet. People move around all the time.” He moaned. “I just wish they all hadn’t moved at once.”
    “So you thought the best way to fix this was to scare my employees into leaving, all so my distillery could fall apart and you could snap it up?”
    “It sounded better when we planned it out.” Vikram started to turn green. I nudged a waste basket near his face.
    “You could have asked ,” I said. “That’s what adults do when they’re in business together.”
    Vikram pulled himself up the basket, clutching it like a life preserver. “And would you have given it all up? Because that’s what we need, Padma. If the Co-Op’s going to keep producing enough rum to meet our obligations, we need eight hundred thousand kilotons of certified cane by next month.”
    I did some quick mental math. “Vikram, that’s more cane than I grow in a year . What the hell is going on?”
    “We have obligations.”
    “You said that. I have the feeling they’re not orders for rum.”
    He made a face like he’d just swallowed a whole, live, and very pissed-off frog. “People want to start cashing in their Mutual certificates. We need to back them up. The only way to do that is to sell more rum, so we need more