Variable Star (19 page)

The hydroponic farm operation was as intricately choreographed, complexly layered, and densely packed as any terrestrial jungle, with trays of assorted growing things stacked up to four high in places on frail-looking frames, and a bewildering variety of different lighting, watering, drainage and airflow systems, each tailored to a different variety of crops. The longest uninterrupted sight line on that deck was about three meters—and the lighting was so weird, with LEDs, metal halides, and sodium bulbs of assorted colors and intensities competing and clashing in odd ways at different places that you wouldn’t have wanted to see much farther than a few meters in any direction anyway. The air circulation was so intense, in order to carry away the heat from all those lights, that there was a constant wash of white noise muffling all other sounds.

The farm immediately overhead, on the other hand, was basically a huge heap of somewhat modified dirt, above which a few seedlings, sprouts, and shoots should just be starting to become visible. If the Zog was on that deck, I could probably pick him out by eye very quickly. It was definitely the place to start looking. And I had a hunch it was where I would find him: where green things grew up out of soil you could plunge your hands into.

It wasn’t quite that easy, in fact. But close. The Destination Farm was designed to be as close as possible to one enormous deck, with
long
sight lines in nearly all directions. But it was also designed to be kept at destination-normal conditions. That meant, among other things—at least at the moment—air that was half again as rich in oxygen, slightly denser, a
lot
more humid, and a bit warmer than ship-normal (Terran Sealevel Standard). All of which meant, among other things,
weather
—specifically, fog. It was controlled somewhat by air circulation, but less than it could have been, obviously by intent. Apparently we were all going to spend our golden years on a planet that was prone to low-lying fogs and mists for at least part of the year. Brasil Novo would be a kind of Jungle World, a steamy hothouse of a place.

(It began to dawn on me that there was a
lot
I did not know about our destination planet—my new home-to-be. I had more or less presumed that if a whole lot of people were willing to go there, forever, it must be a nice place. It might, I thought, be well to delve into that just a little deeper.)

Another problem facing me was that since this was the deck with the most open space and the most experimental food, this was the deck where the majority of the livestock was quartered and processed. Not to put too fine a point on it, the fog
stank
, and rude noises seemed to come distantly from all directions, as if some mad ventriloquist had descended to fart jokes.

And finally, it was blinkin’ dark in there. Brasil Novo had a day just a hair
over
twenty-four Terran Standard hours long—thirty-six minutes longer. Therefore so did this deck, which meant that its day and ours diverged. And had been diverging since whenever the Zog had started its clock. It was the beginning of the morning shift everywhere else in the
Sheffield
, but here it appeared to be at least an hour before dawn.

Despite all these handicaps I found the Zog within a minute or two of my arrival. I had heard him laugh once before, and heard him now from a few hundred meters away. That got me started in the right direction, and luck took me the rest of the way. If that’s the word I want: he was at the goat quarters, one of the riper of the animal enclaves. Goats just are not happy unless you give them some equivalent of a cave or shed to hide in at night, even though there’s nothing to hide
from
…and then it concentrates the smell wonderfully. Maybe that’s what they like about it.

Admittedly they are worth a bit of smell. A goat eats ten percent as much as a cow, but produces twenty-five percent as much milk. And many, among them me, say it tastes better than cow’s milk. It’s also easier to digest.

“Ah, Joel.” He looked up from a hoof he was trimming and gave me a slow once-over, beginning and ending at my eyes. He had done that the first time we’d met, too. I wondered why I didn’t find it offensive. When he was done, he smiled with his whole face. “I’m very glad to see you’re in better spirits.”

“Director Zogby, I want—”

“Zog, please.”

“Zog, I appreciate your understanding and patience, this last week. I needed to work some things out, and I have.”

“I can see that. You’re ready to come to work.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is Kathy—she’s a Marsman like me, new to farming.”

Intent on my new boss, I had almost completely tuned out the companion holding the goat for him. She was about my age, slim, fit, and extremely uncomfortable holding a goat. We exchanged polite noises.

“Kathy, Joel’s from Ganymede. He has a lot of farming experience, dirt and hydro both. You’ll be his assistant.” She nodded, too busy to keep eye contact.

I took a deep breath. I was not looking forward to this next bit, but there was no sense putting it off any longer. “Uh, Zog, perhaps I should correct one small mis—oh, shit.”

The sentence aborted in that odd way because I had just seen what she was about to do. There was no time for me to say anything to stop her—and it wouldn’t have helped anyway, because there was nothing she could do about it. She couldn’t have gotten a hand free without being kicked. There was just time for me to drop to my knees, cup one hand behind her head, place my other index finger just below her nose, and press hard. She let out a yelp and tried to shake free, but I wouldn’t let her until I was sure the job was done. Then I released her at once and backed away.

“I’m very sorry, Kathy,” I said. “I had to do that.”

She was staring at me as if I’d grown fangs. “
Why
?”

“It’s the only sure way I know to stop someone from sneezing.”

“What?”

“Excuse me just a minute, Kathy,” Zog interrupted. “Joel, what was it you were just about to say?”

“Oh. Uh…”

“You were going to correct something?”

“Why shouldn’t I sneeze if I want to?”

“You
really
don’t want to sneeze in a goat shed,” I told her. “Look, Zog, I—”

“Why the hell not?”

“Kathy, please, he’ll explain in a minute. Go on, Joel. Correct what?”

“No, wait a minute, Zog,” she insisted. “That hurt.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m really very sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

I started to argue, and stopped. “You’re right. I kind of feel like you had it coming, for not knowing what you’re doing. And now I’m also a little annoyed at you for presuming that
I
don’t. If you’d—”

“Joel,” Zog cut in firmly, “I understand that you’d rather have that conversation. First, though, we’re going to have the one where you tell me just what misunderstanding on my part needs to be corrected. Kathy, pipe down and let her go.”

She sighed in exasperation and released her hold on the goat, which sprang up and trotted to the far end of the small shed, limping slightly on its half-trimmed hoof. I turned to meet the Zog’s eyes. Irritation was in them, but compassion as well. “Well, look, what you have to understand—”

Kathy sneezed.

I think it was at least half deliberate, a gesture of defiance. Her hands were now free; she could have done as I’d just shown her. Instead she sneezed. And not just a ladylike little
choof
, either, but a breathquake that might have snuffed out a blowtorch.

Unfortunately, a human sneeze apparently sounds very much like the word for “
Run for your life!
” in Goat.

So we all got very busy there for a while.

W
hen things
settled down a bit, I poked my head up and found that I was in the corner of the shed farthest from the exit. The original exit. I had begun to congratulate myself on my good instincts when I realized there were now several brand-new exits, one of them less than a meter from my head. A goat hoof can be a weapon of terrifying power, and a partially trimmed goat hoof could only be worse.

Then I discovered Kathy, underneath me. Maybe my instincts were okay after all.

I rolled off her, intending to ask if she was all right. Instead I let out a squeal and kept on rolling. Killer monkeys—

But, no. Within a revolution or two I had seen that what was dangling from the ceiling was not the huge ape my brain had first decided it was seeing, but someone with considerably better instincts than mine. Only by luck had Kathy and I managed not to be in the path of a fleeing goat—but
none
of them had been running
up
. Zog let go of the rafter and dropped back to the floor. He landed just beside Kathy, and lifted her to her feet with one big hand. “Are you all right?” he asked, and she ran a quick inventory and assured him she was.

“I’m sorry if I squashed you,” I said, getting to my own feet.

She shook her head. “No problem. You know how to use your elbows.”

I found myself blushing.

And her blushing back. “Besides,” she went on quickly, “if I’d only listened to what you were trying to tell me—”

“No harm done,” Zog said. “Except to the shed.” He glanced around at the damage and sighed. “It was guaranteed goat-proof.”

“I’ll bring it back to the store,” she said.

He shook his head. “Traveling at relativistic speeds voids the warrantee.”

“Figures.”

“I’ll go round them up,” I said.

“We all will,” Zog said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m the new guy. And I really should have taken the time to explain to Kathy why—”

“We all will,” Zog insisted. “Once we patch this shed together well enough to hold them again.”

And of course he was right. Catching a goat is just barely possible for three people working together; I doubt any two of us could have caught even one. The hairy little bastards led us a merry chase. A goat can leap pretty well even in terrestrial gravity; in one-third gee they begin to seem more like large birds than mammals. Large smart birds, with offensive armament.

By the time we were done, I was thoroughly exhausted, and quite understood why many cultures have used goats to represent Satan. I left the shed and flopped down not far from the entrance, with my back against an intact section of wall. Zog took a seat beside me—with noticeably less effort, even though he had nearly twenty years on me—and Kathy dropped into a tailor’s seat facing us. The three of us sat in silence for a while, Kathy and I because we were getting our breath back, and Zog because he had nothing to say.

Finally Kathy frowned, shifted position slightly, reached beneath her, and removed something. She held it out on her palm to examine it. A slightly squashed goat berry. I managed to choke off the giggle and to slap on my poker face, but it took me a few seconds, and I was sure she’d heard me at it. She looked up, our eyes met, I waited to see if she would flare up at me—

It so happens that the average goat turd is just the size, shape, and color of the data beads used to hold video or audio programming. When she took it between thumb and forefinger, and pretended to be trying to insert it into the docking slot on her wrist CPU, it wasn’t what you could call a hilarious jest. But it was excuse enough for a tension-releasing blurt of laughter from both of us.

“That music sounds like shit,” Zog said, and we laughed harder.

After a while we went back inside, and Zog had Kathy and me finish hooving that goat together, and pass out treats to all of them, to calm them down and by way of apology for our carelessness. Then we left, and Zog said, “Joel, I believe you were about to correct a small misunderstanding on my part about your background.”

Ah yes. “Well…” His eyes met mine, and I heard myself say, “Not a misunderstanding. I lied, Zog. Not about dirt farming—but pretty much everything I put down about my experience in hydroponics is pure goat berries. I’ll come in real handy in twenty years, when we all start doing this kind of farming on a large scale, at our new home. But right now, you’re going to need short words and long patience.”

He just nodded. “Why did you lie?”

“It was the only way I had to get a berth aboard the
Sheffield
. And I
really
wanted one.”

I’d been sweating this moment for days now. He nodded again, and that was the end of it. “We’ll begin your education in hydroponics tomorrow. For now follow me,” he said, and took us on a grand tour of that deck.

It really was a wonder, a Garden of Eden such as no planet had ever seen, designed and constructed so that the local light intensity of any given square meter of that vast area could be varied from zero to noon in Baghdad, with equivalent control of humidity, airflow, O
₂
and CO
₂
content, and some other factors I forget. Those crops that were able to thrive on a twenty-four-hour light cycle (or other variant) could do so, without disturbing the slumber of the ones nearby who liked things the old-fashioned way. Those that were reasonably happy in the different conditions that obtained on our destination planet were already enjoying them, and all the rest would, hopeably, be successfully reconditioned to enjoy them over the course of the next two decades.

The goats notwithstanding, the staple meat aboard the
Sheffield
besides chickens was not chevon but rabbit—low fat, a milder taste than chevon, and easier to cook. (You couldn’t subsist on rabbit alone—not enough vitamins A or C—but we weren’t trying to.) They’re less fussy eaters themselves, too, happy to live on alfalfa with a pinch of salt, which both upper and lower farms produced in plenty. Each doe and her litter took up about a square meter of living space—but a stackable square meter—and about twelve times that in alfalfa; the yield works out to about 150 kilos of boneless meat per hectare per day.

What was left of the rabbits was fed, along with each day’s dining-hall waste, to chickens. They too insist on a dark stinky home, like goats. But it’s safe to enter it even with a head cold, and the reward is four or more eggs per colonist per week, plus fried chicken.

And finally there was fish—the last stop on the tour. Mars-bred fish, as productive as the rabbits in terms of protein, and less trouble to care for. As we were strolling there from the chicken run, Zog told us that one of the very few stabs at genetic manipulation the Prophets had ever approved was an attempt to breed a chicken that would reliably lay an egg a day—the Holy Ones
liked
eggs. “The Church’s breeders were successful, technically,” Zog said, “but unfortunately the resulting chicken was literally too dumb to eat. If you want to take that as a metaphor for the True Church’s whole approach to science, you’re pretty astute in my opinion.”