Quarter Share

by Nathan Lowell

  She looked me straight in the eye and grinned at the realization. “Sludge.”

  “That’s my thought, too. Fancy a little exploration?”

  “Ten minutes. Main lock.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  I waved at Pip and Francis as I bussed my tray and headed to change into my civvies.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes later, Diane and I were standing on the docks. She gave a half shrug. “So, how do we find a mushroom farm?”

  “Look for someplace dark?”

  “That’s most places here, I would think.”

  I smacked myself on the forehead. “I’m so stupid,” I said as I grabbed my tablet and pulled up the ship’s stores records. The invoice for what looked like a huge amount of mushrooms was on file along with the name of the supplier and their information. Their office was on deck twelve and there was a contact number.

  Diane smiled when she saw what I was doing. “Hmm, there’s a comm-link right over there. Think we can get an appointment?”

  “All they can say is no.”

  We crossed the deck and I keyed the contact number from the invoice. “Margary Mushrooms, Helen speaking. How can I help you?” The woman answered on the first ring. She looked like a typical front door greeter on the screen.

  “Hi. My name is Wang. I work in the galley on the freighter Lois McKendrick. You sold us a quantity of mushrooms day before yesterday…?”

  “Yes, Mr. Wang, is there a problem?”

  “No, they’re excellent, but my colleague and I are interested in how they’re grown out here in the Deep Dark. It must be fascinating. We were wondering if we could talk to someone about it?”

  “Let me connect you with Mr. Cameron. He’s in charge of our field operations.”

  A moment later a red, pudgy face filled the screen. “Cameron, here. How can I help you?”

  “Hello, Mr. Cameron, My name is Wang and I’m from the freighter Lois McKendrick. Your company has sold us some mushrooms and my colleague and I would like to learn more about how they’re grown out here.”

  “Well, Mr. Wang, we grow them in tunnels in the mined-out asteroids. Thank you for your interest.”

  “Is there a chance we might visit one of these asteroids this morning?

  “I’m really sorry, kid, but we’re terribly busy here, and I don’t know how we’d find the time…”

  Diane, who had been off camera for the conversation, sighed and shook her head. She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and elbowed me out of the way. She practically cooed into the comm, “Mr. Cameron, is it? I’m Diane Ardele. We’re sorry to be such a bother but we’ll be leaving tomorrow and this is our last chance to come and see your excellent operation up close.” She leaned into the pickup so the breathy voice she used would carry clearly. “Don’t you think you could find some errand boy to take us on a tour of just one little mushroom farm?”

  I thought he was going to turn purple as Diane idly stroked one finger up and down the edge of her collar. “Well, yes, that is, I think my next meeting was just canceled. Let me check. Yes, I’m free after all. I could take you, Ms. Ardele—”

  “Oh, please call me Diane,” she interrupted, breathily.

  “D-Diane, yes. I could take you over to see a farm. Oh, and Mr. Wang, too, of course. Could you meet me at lock forty-two on the dock level in say, twenty ticks?”

  Diane squealed convincingly. “Ooh, that would be just so perfect. Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

  “Likewise Ms. Ardele…I mean D-Diane.”

  “Toodles until then.” Diane waved her fingers in the direction of the pickup before cutting the connection.

  I just stood there staring at her. “You know, you’re shameless.”

  She gave me a smug little grin. “Yes, and thank you for noticing. The nice thing about clichés is that they only can become one if enough people recognize them. Trust me, Ish, that man is a cliché.” She shook her head and sighed.

  Fifteen ticks later, the very busy Mr. Cameron was shaking our hands outside a private shuttle dock halfway around the station from the Lois. He wasted no time getting us into the ship and we boosted away from the station. It took less than half a stan for us to cruise to a nearby asteroid. We watched the approach through the shuttle’s ports.

  Diane dropped the cutie-pie routine when we settled on the shuttle. Mr. Cameron was too intent on her cleavage to notice, but he played the tour guide role well.

  “This is one of the larger residential rocks in the system.”

  “I thought we were going to visit a farm?” Diane turned from looking out of the port.

  “We are.” He beamed a self-satisfied smile. “Our farms are all in the residential areas.”

  “Really? Is it because you need labor?” She kept her face straight and I gained a new level of respect for her acting skills at that moment.

  Again, he made with the condescending smile. “Oh, no.” He reached over and patted her hand. “We need their—” He stopped in mid sentence realizing what he was about to say and casting about for some other way to say it.

  “Sludge?” I suggested.

  He seemed to notice for the first time that I was aboard. “Yes,” he said at last, “the…ah…sludge.”

  The shuttle docked in a fully enclosed landing bay and we walked into a processing area. It was all enclosed and automated but Cameron pointed out the salient parts. “This is where we harvest the mushrooms and freeze dry them for transport. We keep a few for fresh product, but the real money is in dried. Less mass, you know.”

  Diane nodded. “Oh really, how interesting.”

  He showed us to the next room, a large chamber with several noisy machines. Cameron shouted so we could hear him over the racket. “We get the growing medium in big cakes from the environmental sections. We run it through these mills to break it up to make it easier for the mushroom’s roots to grow.” He beckoned us through the next door and the noise level dropped. He showed us piles of flaked sludge being mixed with some kind of wet, green plant material. “We mix the by-products from our hydroponics with the flaked medium here and form it into what we call logs.” He pointed out where a machine extruded the mixture into loose net tubes like sausages a quarter meter in diameter and a meter long. I could see Diane biting her lip to keep from laughing. The environmental crew had a rather literal view of their work. That view colored their perception of the world and tended to make them laugh at common euphemistic digressions.

  Cameron pointed to where a small diameter tube stuck each log before being clipped onto an overhead track and trundled down a long dark tunnel. “Here we inoculate the log with mushroom spawn. It takes about a month for the roots to spread through the log. After that the roots start pushing through the surface and forming mushrooms which we harvest.”

  Like some magician, he flung open a nearby door and showed us a nearly identical track bearing logs now studded thickly with fresh mushrooms out of another long dark tunnel. The track ran into a large machine. “We strip off the netting, shake out the medium, and separate the mushrooms from their roots.”

  “Mycelium.” Diane corrected him with a wry smile.

  “I beg your pardon?” Her comment took Cameron off guard.

  She gazed at him for a moment. “They’re not roots but mycelium, or probably more correctly, hyphae. Do you use the same growing medium for all your varieties?”

  Cameron blinked rapidly, trying to catch up with where he had been derailed. “Yes, basically. Some require temperature variations and other get different nutrient baths but I couldn’t tell you which gets what.”

  Diane nodded and held out her hand. “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron.” She cooed and dropped smoothly into cutie-pie mode and let him get back on his internal script. “Do you think we could go back to the station now? All this excitement has made me a little dizzy.” She fanned herself with her free hand.

  Cameron became immediately solicitous. “O
f course, my dear, of course. Please, right this way…”

  It took less than a stan for us to get back to Margary and bid our fond adieus to Mr. Cameron. The hard part was not laughing ourselves silly before we got out of sight and earshot.

  After the worst of the giggles tapered off, I turned to Diane. “So, what do you think?”

  “I think sludge just got a lot more interesting.”

  “Yeah, me too. If we were going to grow mushrooms on the Lois, what would we need?”

  “So that’s your game. I knew you were up to something. Changing the whole trading culture isn’t enough?”

  I just chuckled and shrugged. “What can I say, I’m frugal. My mom raised me not to waste anything and when I heard we were giving away sludge cakes as terraforming base, I got this wild idea that there must be something better we could do with it.”

  Diane laughed. “You want to make money on sewage?”

  I shrugged. “The more money the ship makes, the more money I make. I don’t care what it starts life as, so long as it ends as a cred in my account.”

  She looked me up and down before speaking, “Ishmael Wang, I like the way you think.”

  Chapter 24

  Margary Station

  2352-January-12

  When we got to the Lois’ lock, I turned to Diane. “Come on, I’ll buy ya a coffee.”

  “Coffee’s free, ya cheapskate.”

  “Okay, then you buy.”

  We went to the mess deck where Pip was setting up for lunch. He looked up when we entered. “Where have you two been?”

  “We took a tour of a mushroom farm,” I told Pip.

  Diane nodded. “Yeah, it actually was quite interesting.”

  We settled into a table just as Brill and Francis came in for lunch. Diane waved them over. “You’ll never guess where we’ve been.”

  Francis looked at her for a heartbeat. “Mushroom farm.”

  Diane started to say, “How—”

  Brill interrupted her, “We heard you as we were coming up the passage. I recognize the symptoms so you better spill your beans before your head explodes.”

  Diane tried to look innocent. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  It didn’t work. Brill and Francis just looked at her.

  She shrugged. “Okay, we’ve been thinking about sludge.”

  “Sludge?” Francis repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  Brill looked at me. “Let’s try you. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s just like Diane said…sludge.”

  Brill and Francis started chuckling. Brill looked back and forth between the two of us. “Can you give us a bit more of a clue?”

  I took pity on them. “Ever since I heard that we were giving away sludge cakes I’ve had this idea that we might be able to use it in some way. When I learned that Margary is a huge producer of mushrooms it occurred to me that the only thing they have out here is tunnels, dark, and sludge.”

  Diane nodded with a rueful grimace on her face. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “So I called up the supplier who sold us the mushrooms for the galley and asked if we could see the facilities. He was nice enough to run us over in his shuttle this morning and we saw a mushroom farm.”

  Francis looked at Diane. “And you just went along for the ride?”

  She shrugged. “Mr. Cameron was a sweet man who was more than happy to show lil’ ol’ me his great big logs,” she said in her cutie-pie voice.

  Brill almost snorted coffee out of her nose laughing. “I wish you would warn me before you do that.”

  Francis ignored the performance and prompted me, “I still don’t get it.”

  “All their farms are in the residential asteroids. They get the sludge from their environmental sections and use it as the base for a growing medium for the mushrooms.”

  Brill frowned. “But it’s sterile.”

  I nodded. “That’s actually a good thing. There are plenty of nutrients left in the waste and they’re concentrated. What it is, is dense. They run the sludge cakes through a chipper and then mix it with hydroponics leftovers to add moisture and texture. That keeps the flakes from clumping up tight again. Cameron seemed to indicate it was for nutrients for the mushrooms, but he had a lot of misconceptions.”

  Francis and Brill both looked at Diane then.

  “What? Why are you lookin’ at lil’ ol’ me?”

  Francis snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  I continued without letting them get me off track, “Anyway, they extrude this chipped sludge mixture into loose netting. It looks like sausages only a lot bigger. They inoculate them with…what did he call it, Diane? Not spores.”

  “Spawn.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Then they send them into the tunnels to grow. When ready for harvest, the logs are brought back and run through a shaker to separate the mushrooms from the dross. Finally, they freeze dry the results.”

  Brill nodded and looked back and forth between Diane and I. “Okay, sounds interesting. But I still don’t see what that has to do with our sludge.”

  I shrugged and looked into my coffee mug. “I don’t know. But I just keep thinking there’s something we could do with it. Make it into compost and grow something. I don’t know.”

  Francis snorted a laugh. “Really? What would you compost it with? You need plant material, don’t you?”

  Diane and I looked at each other before Diane looked back at Francis. “Used algae matrix.”

  Brill sat her coffee cup down gently. I could see her and Francis lock eyes across the table and they were both nodding slowly, apparently following the same logic path.

  Finally Francis spoke, “That’s brilliant.”

  Despite my initial enthusiasm, I was shocked. “You mean it could work?”

  Francis shrugged. “I don’t know. We’d have to play with it to find the right mixture, but I can’t imagine why not. All the chemicals are there. The question is structure.”

  Brill said what we were all thinking, “Holy crap.”

  We all nodded.

  My tablet bipped to remind me about my plans for the flea market. “I’m going shopping with Bev. Anybody want to join us?”

  Brill shook her head. “Other plans.”

  Francis nodded. “You bet.”

  Diane popped up from her seat. “Count me in.”

  I followed her lead and stood. “Okay, let me see if Bev is ready. Meet you at the lock in what…fifteen ticks?”

  They all nodded and I left them there talking about sludge and algae while I headed to deck berthing.

  ***

  Bev was just buckling into her leathers when I got to the berthing area. “Hey, where have you been all morning?”

  “Checking out a mushroom farm.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” She shook her head and answered her own question. “No, you’re not. I’m getting to know you well enough by now.”

  “Right. I’m not kidding, but I’m ready to go shopping. Is it okay if some others join us.”

  She shrugged. “Sure, the more the merrier.”

  “Francis and Diane will meet us at the lock. They wanna stock up for St. Cloud.”

  She chuckled. “Let’s hope we have as good of luck here as we did in Gugara, eh?” She slammed her locker and we headed for the lock.

  The flea market was in full swing and the four of us caravanned through the aisles. There were a lot of stone and metal goods. It didn’t surprise me given the nature of the system. The trick would be to find stuff with low enough mass that we’d be able to get it aboard. As we strolled along, I really began to appreciate Pip’s idea of filling the empty container with freeze-dried mushrooms.

  We hadn’t been there long when we came to booth two-sixteen. I recognized the workmanship on display before I realized where we were. Bev introduced us to Ingo Reihtman the guy who made them. He had shocking red hair, redder even than Diane’s and a slight limp. There was no ques
tion he was a master of the belt buckle. The majority of them were the size and shape that Beverly had showed us but the variation in use of stone, polish, and pattern were amazing.

  I stepped up to him and shook his hand. “Mr. Reihtman, my friend, Philip Carstairs will be around tomorrow—”

  He nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes, Pip. I talked with him yesterday and I understand you have mass requirements that need to be satisfied. I look forward to doing business with you. This is a good opportunity for my work to get exposure beyond this system. I am quite excited.”

  As we talked one particular buckle caught my eye. It was cast in a gold colored metal with a rough, knobby finish. The stone was shaped into a black dragon’s head in silhouette with a red inlaid eye.

  “Well, I have a souvenir of my last port. I picked up an exquisite hand tooled leather belt and I need a buckle for it. Would you sell me one of yours?”

  “Mr. Wang, do you think I’m sitting here for my health? Please, save the haggling preparation. Do you see the buckle you wish?”

  I nodded.

  “Fifteen creds.”

  “A very generous price.”

  “In that case…” He took the dragon’s head buckle down from the wall without my pointing it out. He had a small smile on his face. “Would you like me to wrap it for you?”

  As we left the booth Beverly said, “I had to jaw him down from forty for mine.”

  “Well, Pip and I will be buying a bunch of them tomorrow. Maybe he thought he was priming the pump for the deal.”

  “Maybe. I thought you sold all your belts the other day.”

  “All but one that I left in my locker. Drus made it specially for me.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I realized suddenly that I had just painted myself into a corner and tried to change the subject. “We still need to find some trade goods to take to St. Cloud. So, keep your eyes open, okay?”

  She chuckled.

  Diane pointed out a display of ceramics at a booth coming up and we descended on the seller as a group. The goods were nice, but expensive. Clay had to be imported which drove up the price. I passed on it, but Francis bought a couple of small pieces.