In the greenhouse, beneath the warmth of the amber growlights, I knelt and inserted the needle into the agave plant's head, the cabeza, to test the sugar content. After a moment came the result: twenty-seven percent. The harvest would begin.
       I flinched at a pop behind me. The breach alarm blared and got me to my feet. I took off leaping in the low-grav run toward the airlock fifty or so meters away. The air tasted normal, not super thin, and no breeze indicated a huge hole in the greenhouse glass that rose above the regolith of Callisto. I raced between rows of spiky blue agave in my thick work coveralls.
       I didn't carry emergency O2 because these things never happened. Statistically close to zero. This wasn't some cargo ship crossing interplanetary space, this was a family farm and tequila distillery. Our centuries-old ad tagline: "Quevedo Tequila. . .a little sunshine makes all the difference."
       I passed Ramita, a white and black greenhouse bot skittering on four legs, hopping over the row cricket-like to patch the leak.
       By the time I reached the airlock and slammed the EMERG CLOSE switch, I was panting, breathless. A short run like that shouldn't have winded me. The screen indicated the .25 atmospheric pressure in the greenhouse.
       The whole crop was in danger if Ramita couldn't quickly stop the leak. "Ramita, status!"
       She replied, "Leak discovered along south wall. Applying Liquid Patch."
       I squirmed into an emergency vacsuit. Ramita needed help. With a moment to think, the cause was obvious: my brother Tadeo.
       I screwed my helmet on, neck ring clicking.
       "Reduce interior pressure," came Ramita's voice. "The damaged window is at high risk of blowout."
       Shit. At the airlock console I tapped the ATM PRESS to 0.5.
       "Lower," said Ramita.
       Crop-damage range began below 0.25. The lack of air pressure would suck moisture from the leaves too rapidly. But a blowout would spell death for the whole crop in half an hour or so.
       Suited, I opened the airlock door and reentered the greenhouse. Being Callisto night, the dangling growlights cast their golden radiance. The convex windows above focused weak sunlight on the crop during the day.
       I power-walked to Ramita, perched two meters up the glass wall, slathering Liquid Patch on the spiderwebbed pane between us and the vacuum, since the outer two had completely shattered.
       "Well?" I asked.
       "I must engineer a tiny leak to minimize blowout risk, Ramita replied.
       I sighed and tapped into Father's coms. "Get the exterior bots for an emergency shield at Greenhouse Burgos!"
       He replied, "I just now noticed the alarm--"
       "We're about to blow!" I stood below Ramita, a spider the size of a Great Dane clinging, fixing. I stared, hoping.
       She touched her micro-drill against the damaged glass and it ruptured, sucking her tumbling outside. The wind burst threw me against the lower pane like a rugby tackle.
       Only me and dying agave were left in the greenhouse. The leaves would brown at the edges in minutes.
       My name is Orlin Quevedo of Quevado Agave and Tequila, inc., and I am leaving this record as a defense of what was done, and why it was necessary.

       My family traces its deep history to Old Earth. My forefathers settled to an arid place. They stole knowledge from a conquered culture and cultivated blue agave and distilled it into a liquor known as tequila.
       Centuries later, the weather on Old Earth had become permanently hostile to the crop. Underground farms were constructed with grow lamps. Supply dwindled. Quality deteriorated.
       Forefather Renaldo shuddered at the coming future and sold the land and bought a cluster of greenhouses in New Taichung, Callisto from a failed cannabis operation. He shipped the distillery in parts and rebuilt here. With genetically modified agave that matured in two years instead of eight or ten, the farm churned crop for the distillery.
       This was the only tequila operation in the Outer, and demand had filled the family coffers once again. The family operation thrived and expanded to this day.
       My elder half-brother, Tadeo, was a clone of my father, birthed to be the family heir. Naturally, who better than the literal iteration of Father's genes to run the business?
       But Tadeo did not possess the gentle nature of my father. The geneticists had warned that identical DNA did not equal his future copy. Physically, maybe. But half of the personality would be shaped by wholly different life events. And Tadeo was nothing like compassionate Father. Overconfident, reckless, narcissistic. A bully to me and my younger sister Nelia when we were children. Never receptive to father's education or discipline.
       After Tadeo's twenty-fifth birthday came The Annointing. Tadeo and Nelia flanked me on the sofa in father's den.
       Father sat at his heavy desk, a wooden relic delivered from Old Earth, ornate with the carved vines and leaves and the wildflower petals of Jalisco, Old Earth. "My sons, my daughter," he began, stroking his black beard shot with gray. "Today I anoint the heir to the family business and begin their training to take the centuries-old mantle of the Quevedo family."
       Tadeo smiled, expectant, confident.
       Nelia's finger idly twirled her long, dark hair. She held disdain for even the smallest of ceremonies.
       Father came around that formidable desk. "Orlin, please stand."
       I thought I was called to be commended as a good son, the second heir, to Tadeo.
       Father pressed the golden family sigil of an old castle into my palm and my jaw fell open. As did Tadeo's. "You have shown acumen and kindness. I pronounce you heir to the Quevedo family business."
       Tadeo shot up, hands trembling, eyes hard with a rage I knew well. Words did not come. He stomped from the room.
       "Father, I'm honored, but I'm studying mammalian genetics. I--"
       "I know," he said, softly. "I think it's best if you switch to plant genetics. Tadeo. He's. . .unfit. He has proven beyond any doubt that he is. . .regretably, not me."
       "He won't accept this," I said.
       "Tadeo will come around. He's a Quevedo, even if he is not me. And he respects you."
       Father's first line was the only stone of truth in that crop of blindness he'd cultivated my life entire. That night Tadeo cleared out his suite and disappeared.
       The next evening, Nelia, the family's most talented master blender (although Father would never admit it), asked me to meet her in the taste room--a small affair with walls lined in retired oak barrel staves, tables and chairs fashioned from other discarded barrel parts.
       She prepared a carafe drained fresh from the cellar, marked by hand with the barrel number, 221. "Something special I've been working on."
       She lifted her thick glass, the amber liquid sloshing languidly in the gentle grav, to clink mine and toasted, "Fuck you, Tadeo! Die penniless and furious!"
       "Salut!" Sweet with citrus, but a slightly sour, wood finish. I nodded. "Apples in the barrel again?"
       "Granny Smith variety."
       "Huh. Not blown away by the finish."
       "A work in progress," she sighed.

       Father wore a solemn expression and slowly stroked his beard in the hallway of natural taupe Callisto stone of the family home. I knew he had something important to say, so I waited. He cleared his throat. "Tadeo has been arrested. He beat Frederik badly. Nearly to death." His lover. They'd been together a year or so. Frederik clearly loved being bossed around, a man who needed someone else to give him purpose, his life meaning.
       Although I was never a witness, I knew Tadeo had struck him before, beyond the boundaries of play. "Is he okay?"
       "He will be. His new nose is being genetically regenerated. On my bill." Father shook his head. "To keep things quiet."
       "Good. I suppose. Did you send Tadeo the lawyers?"
       "No. I. . .publicly renounced him as my son."
       My eyebrows went up as nausea bubbled in my gut. This was huge.
       "We don't need this stain on our reputation. I reversed his accounts to myself. Although, he'd made off with quite a bit. Enough for his own lawyer. I have only one son now. "He shook his head again, patted me on the shoulder, the apex of his physical affection, and slowly walked into his den.

       A month later Greenhouse Burgos had been sabotaged with me inside. If Tadeo couldn't be the heir to the family business, he intended to lay waste to everything.
       The family treasury he had stolen netted him bail and access to a military-grade rifle. Since he'd been spying on the greenhouse he could've written my name on the bullet, but didn't.
       In the moments after the glass blowout, our lone digger bot extracted the agave plants as quickly as possible in the airless farm as the family and the bots ferried them to the airlock, and then through the pressurized tunnels to another greenhouse to be temporarily potted.
       As Father passed with an agave, dried dirt falling from its roots, Nelia said, "Maybe this was a trap to get the whole family into one greenhouse." She meant that as a joke, and a dark one, as was her style, but we all froze.
       Father said, "Ramita followed the rover tracks. Tadeo retreated back to the city."
       My sister and I shared a glance. Tadeo was cruel and clever, but how far would he go?

       I was not born to this, the mantle of heir. I never possessed the desire. Before, I was free to pursue a different path, a path of my heart. Now I was heir and a target of my brother's vengeance. Anxiety became a constant companion.
       I wasn't much of a drinker, despite the depth of my genetic vintage in the business. But I needed to get away for a night. And I needed a drink.
       At the Jammed Neck Ring I had quaffed several cocktails before someone plopped on the seat across from me, some miner out for an evening of love dolls and spicy spirits: a riot of bright glittery colors and polished black work boots. "How goes things, mi hermano?" he said. The voice stunned me: Tadeo.
       Tadeo had his face genetically altered, enough to fool me at a glance. His hair had grown out in long, purple dreads. But no doubt about that voice.
       My stomach turned to ice. I looked into his new azure eyes and shook my head. "You tried to kill me," I spat as I stood.
       Strong hands from behind pushed me down to my chair. The muscled gentleman with his head shaved to a gleaming sheen didn't look friendly.
       "Let's chat for a moment," said Tadeo. "That's my new lover making sure you're comfortable. He's not such a drama queen to call Security after a small quibble."
       The drinks imbued me with more bravery than usual. I thumbed to the man behind me, "Doesn't look like you can bully this guy like me or Nelia or Frederik."
       Tadeo placed his hand over his heart. "You wound me, hermano."
       Spanish was one of the several dominant languages in the Jove System. Generation to generation in the Quevedo family, Old Castilian, a medieval variant, lived on as tradition. Our secret language, very difficult for a contemporary Spanish speaker to understand. I narrowed my eyes. "Going to kill me in public, harmano?"
       Tadeo laughed. "Calm down. Of course not, overdramatic little brother!"
       "You shot the greenhouse when I was inside!"
       "You were off-schedule. I didn't know anyone was in there." He rolled his eyes as if I were hyperbolic. "Still can't believe all of this." He fingered his purple dreads. "Look at me, slumming about like a miner out for pussy. In disguise like a common criminal! Father took everything from me."
       "You nearly killed Frederik--"
       "Oh stop! He likes to be slapped around. It's not like he didn't get fixed up and was out and about and running his mouth to Security in a few days."
       Tadeo's eyes darted to the bald man and I flinched at a sting in my neck. Quickly everything went warm, tingly. I reached for the emergency call on my watch but Tadeo placed his hand over it, his grip iron.
       He smiled his predator smile. I tried to shout, but only weak breath issued.
       My head felt heavy, and the world blurred.

       I didn't expect to wake up, yet my eyes opened and focused on a battered sign faintly glowing red: LE.EL 9. I lay crumpled on a dusty stair landing, which looked like every stairwell behind and beneath the arcades of New Taichung. The unfortunate dwell here, as well as criminal elements after sacking the cameras.
       Grogginess made movement sluggish. I trawled my memory, but the last thing was Tadeo's new face. And ridiculous clothes. Fatigue and a strange unfamiliarity muddied everything. The sign LE.EL 9 stared back at me, the missing 'V' an annoyance. I groaned as I stood. My clothes were strange and unfamiliar: cheap worker's coveralls. Was this some sort of joke?
       Tadeo's pranks were always mean-spirited, cruel. I remembered when he laced my breakfast with ipecac syrup and I puked until I felt inside-out as he laughed and laughed.
       Nelia was my only friend in the nuclear family.
       Father had meted some useless punishment on his cloned son as I painfully recovered for several days.
       On unsteady feet I emerged into a typical New Taichung barrel-domed arcade. This neighborhood looked shabby, with swathes of the ceiling mosaic of Old Earth sea life missing, the landscaping mostly withered or browned or dead, the lights half dark. Chop shops, sketchy gene vendors, and fragrant food stalls dominated. Likely Tadeo haunted this area, the classy neighborhoods on the lookout for the criminal banished heir to the Quevedo business.
       With my watch gone, I oriented via the train station. A half-hour riding the maglevs and I'd be home. I switched trains twice. New Taichung was expansive enough for a criminal to hide.
       Father could have hired a private investigator to find Tadeo, but he didn't have the heart. He'll find that heart once I returned.
       Whatever Tadeo had doped me with still lingered. Brain fog impeded my every move and had me second-guessing every little decision. My body felt so odd, like I maneuvered on asymmetrical stilts. Smooth surfaces felt rough, and the exposed rock of our moon felt like glass. Damn him.
       The tunnel to the Quevedo farm and distillery was not served by a public train. As habit I looked to my wrist, yet I still possessed no watch. I tapped into the comms screen by the nexus that served the local family farms.
       My face with an arrogant grin answered the call. "Tadeo! Strange you'd come back here! Father wants to kill you!"
       My heart thumped and my knees felt weak, despite the light moon grav. I switched the cam view to myself. Tadeo stared back at me, disheveled, a sheen of sweat and grime, a mop of greasy hair. Neither I nor Tadeo would ever allow our hair to grow so unruly.
       "I just notified Security, mi hermano," he said with a wicked smile. Funny how someone else's emotion can screw your own face in a way that's alien.
       This explained why I felt so weird. My body had been gene-switched to Tadeo's DNA, and, obviously, his to mine. It wasn't the mickey his gene-tweaked overly-muscled lover had slipped me. My body and face had changed. They must have kept me drugged for weeks as my flesh transformed.
       Tadeo was the heir again. As me.
       And now I was on the run. As him.

       It took a whole day to digest what had happened. In a stairwell nest for the unfortunate, the outcasts, and the addicts, I could safely become idle and deal with my thoughts, with my situation. And my new body and face.
       I made friends with a guy with a functioning watch. After a long, hard think, I texted Nelia: Remember the time we hid in the barrel room when Tadeo was on a rampage after we salted his ice cream? You were seven. You were so scared he would find us. Ramita sneaked us food.
       Nelia: Why are you texting me from a strange watch?
       I sighed, relieved. This memory was ours alone. We never gave up our secret hiding spot to Tadeo. I began the next text with words I only spoke when were alone, when she was sad: Mi hermana, mi ángel, la Reina del agave: please listen closely. That's not me in your house. That's Tadeo. I explained the gene-switch and expressed my fears for her safety.
       Nelia: This explains why you've been weird since you got back. Father will never believe this. Do you have memories of you and Father alone?
       I reached back into the past and turned over every stone. No. He pretty much ignored me until recently. I need your help. And you need to keep your distance from Tadeo.

       Nelia left the house key with bot Ramita, who met me in the last arcade before the entrance to the family compound. "Are you Orlin?" she asked.
       "Yo soy Orlin, mi automata," I replied. I was the only one that referred to her like that. "Do you realize who's calling himself Orlin in the house?"
       "His speech patterns tell me it's Tadeo," Ramita said.
       "Did you mention this to Father?"
       "He hasn't asked."
       I nodded. Even if Father did ask, he had a habit of only believing the most convenient things. His anointing me family heir was the only time I could recall a significant departure.
       From the equipment bay on her back she produced a cash stick and a watch with a text from Nelia: Please be careful. Love.
       "Can you help me get inside Tadeo's suite tonight after Father leaves for his Freemason meeting?"
       "Of course."
       "Will you stand by if I need assistance?"
       "Of course. You and Nelia are kind. Tadeo is not."
       I programmed a transaction and tapped it to my homeless friend's watch.
       He replied with a pic of his lottery-winning grin.
       An hour later I stood at the family gate with Nelia's key, knowing Father was gone. I entered, quietly. Surely Tadeo occupied my suite of rooms, just like my body.
       I couldn't help myself. I paused in the kitchen for some leftovers I pulled from the cooler. Once several bites quelled my complaining belly, I took the bottle of Quevedo Tequila Reposado from the cabinet and pulled two shots.
       One for calm. One for courage.
       Through the main hall bored through the stone of Callisto's crust, I paused at the closed door to my suite of rooms. I listened.
       Moaning. Sexual moaning and breathing. I should have guessed he spent my money on a love doll for the evening. My current biometrics wouldn't open the door. So I knocked hard and loud.
       "Busy!" came Tadeo's reply in my voice.
       "I'm hurt, mi hermano! You don't want to see me?"
       All noise from within ceased. Angry-toned whispering followed.
       The door popped open and the love doll, naked and his clothes cradled in his arms, shot past. "You're an asshole!" he cried over his shoulder to Tadeo.
       I entered the foyer of the suite. The bedroom door stood open to my left. I entered with swagger endowed from the liquor. Or was it my new body?
       Tadeo hiked up his pants and glared.
       I crossed my arms. He looked so small. So skinny when shirtless. This how I appeared to him my entire life? A frail, waif of a man? As a boy I must have looked even weaker.
       His sly, overconfident smile looked so disconnected, so bizarre on my face. "Do you have a gun, mi harmano?" he asked. "Kill me and you'll be up for murder, not just attempted murder for that greenhouse business."
       I strode toward him.
       He threw a weak punch that I blocked easily. This new strength and reflex amazed me. I countered with a left cross and bloodied my own face as Tadeo stumbled back, eyes wide, cupping his nose.
       I felt a rush, despite the small flash of knuckle pain. That punch I'd dreamed about for years. Blood trickled between his fingers, down his chin.
       His eyes hardened and he came at me again with a growl.
       I grabbed his arm and twisted it behind him and he cried out through gritted teeth. He was mine to do with as I pleased. So easy. What was wrong with his psyche that he'd got so much pleasure from this when we were children? I could never, across several lifetimes, cause someone pain, not someone innocent. But this was Tadeo, and my hate boiled.
       I pulled his arm up high behind him, causing a girlish squeal. A titillating surge flooded my body. "Remember that time you tore my shoulder ligaments when I was ten and you made me tell Father I did it to myself?" I whispered.
       "We were just kids. . ." he choked out, tears of pain dripping.
       "And now we're not," I replied as I jerked his arm up high and I felt ligaments tear from bone as Tadeo's screams razed my eardrums.
       A fury took control. I'd never felt such power.
       Moments later I emerged from the fog of frenzied violence to see the bloodied body of my brother on the floor. So much blood. His broken and torn face, mine, no longer recognizable.
       My swollen fists ached. The rage receded slowly, like tide.
       When my breath steadied at last, I called for Ramita over the coms. "Find an empty reposado barrel and open the top."
       I waited the long minutes. My heartrate slowed as Tadeo's body pooled more blood.
       "Barrel #249 opened."
       After we laid my brother to rest in his coffin, I steadied my voice with the family nectar and told Ramita the story. The chip of the record was placed within, and the barrel sealed.

       Nelia arranged for a black-market gene doc to reverse the procedure.
       Father, again, had to endure my absence. But this time, I'd left a note that I went on a small sabbatical. I'd apologized and told him I needed to get a few things out of my system before taking the duties of Heir: a trip of debauchery to the Ganymede resort Lust.
       I had procured a blood sample from Tadeo so the gene doctor could right my body.
       After I looked like myself again, two-and-a-half weeks later, I returned home.
       Nelia greeted me with a small smile. A touch of guilt haunted her face. I knew her well enough. After our long hug she told me, "I'm the new heir. Father was so disappointed in you. You know, disappearing for a couple weeks, acting weird when 'you' came home, then heading off to Lust. . ."
       I laughed. The yoke of responsibility and worry had been lifted and tossed away. I was free. I didn't want this. I never did. "Congratulations. Let's toast."
       "Let's! I have something special. Meet me in the taste room." Her guilty smile morphed into a grin of relief as she turned to head to the cellar.
       The tray of her latest experiment soon lay at the center of the table in the taste room. She poured. I lifted my glass. "Mi hermana, mi ángel, la Reina del agave: To the next and greatest Quevado heir!"
       "Salut!"
       Odd. A hint of copper at the start, a meat finish. Not unkind to the palette, just. . .unique. "You hit something here. Truly. Snake?"
       Although she favored dark humor, Nelia possessed my kind heart for animals and would never drown a snake in liquor, a superstitious tradition from centuries past, performed to impart healing properties.
       "Yeah," she replied with a reptilian smile. "A snake."
       My eyes dropped to the barrel number marked by hand on the carafe.