Glass and Gardens

by Sarena Ulibarri

  His boots hit the baked soil at the foot of the turbine. He retrieved the wrench from the ground, and took a swig of Gatorade from the cooler in the back of the Jeep. A drone—one of his—whizzed through the air a hundred yards away, and a beep sounded from the smartpad on the driver’s seat.

  “Get your butt back up on the windmill, plowboy,” said the tinny voice from the pad.

  “Slave driver,” Ryan told Sadie, his wife.

  “I heard that. A nice tongue-lashing when you get back.”

  “Yes ma’am.” He grinned. “May be a while. This turbine is giving me fits.”

  “You keep saying you’re the brains of the family, dear. Prove it.”

  “With pleasure. While I’ve got you, can you run an FAA check on a drone?” He read off the model and serial number. Sadie made a kissing noise and promised to get on it.

  It took an hour for him to find the problem on the turbine. The yaw drive was out, meaning that the turbine was not receiving data from the wind vane, and would not rotate into the wind. The turbine would still run, but it would generate less power than usual. A quick check for parts on the pad told him that a replacement drive would cost a thousand dollars, which he could afford, but would take four days to arrive, which he couldn’t.

  Nothing to be done about it today, so he replaced the access panel and tossed the faulty drive into the back of his jeep.

  Halfway down the path to the dirt and gravel road, another vehicle turned in and blocked his path. He approached and stopped the jeep. Sadie jumped out and planted a big kiss on Ryan’s lips. She was a tall woman, with her hair in a ponytail and sparkling blue eyes, dressed in denim shorts and a white t-shirt.

  He kissed her back. No makeup today, but she didn’t need it. She had that pale blonde, freckled look that still made his heart skip—and the few small lines around her eyes made her all that much sexier.

  “Hey, babe,” she said. “Brought you some lunch.” She broke away and retrieved a blue cooler from her truck. “Got your favorite. Lupe’s tamales.”

  “I hope you brought about a dozen, ’cause that’s how hungry I am,” Ryan said. Lupe Mendoza, who ran the No Walls café in town, turned out authentic Mexican and Tex-Mex, famous all across southwest Kansas. He used real meat, not lab meat, and grew the spices used to flavor them.

  “Two dozen,” Sadie said, setting the cooler on the tailgate of Ryan’s Jeep. “I had a hankering for them, too.” She opened the cooler and they dug in.

  “Get a hit on that drone?” he asked between bites.

  “Yep. Registered to Vesta AgTek. No flight plan on file.”

  “Vesta? Why would they be snooping on us? They don’t have any holdings around here.”

  “Wrong-o, my love. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GCF Industries, which produces fertilizers, pesticides, and transgenic seed crops, including wheat. They’ve patented the new drought-resistant transgenic hard red winter wheat hybrid DX-107.”

  “You did your homework, honey,” Ryan said. Sadie gave him her of course I did look, one of cheerful accomplishment. They had met when he was majoring in Agronomy at K-State, and Sadie was majoring in Ag Tech, with minors in political science and computer science. It had proved a winning combination of talents. In their eight years of marriage, they had devised a division of labor. Ryan took care of the field operations and maintenance, which was why he was in a sweat-soaked shirt guzzling electrolyte replacements to prevent heat stroke. Sadie did the tech work—using a fleet of a half-dozen drones to check the condition of their three thousand acres, growing wheat and soybeans and milo. She also did the finances, figuring out what they could afford in the way of equipment, supplies and online services. It had made Ryan swallow some pride, but he had to admit she was far better at it than he was. On top of that, she was a hell of a cook. “So what’s that have to do with us?”

  “They’re pretty vigilant about patent infringement.”

  “And?” Ryan had a sick feeling where this was going.

  “They may think that we planted some of their wheat without permission.”

  “We didn’t. We bought this from the elevator.” The H112 hybrid was supposed to produce higher yields, up to 120 bushels per acre, and was drought-tolerant.

  “Which might have been playing fast and loose with the contracts,” Sadie said.

  “What it really is about is our land. We’re one of the few operators around here who haven’t sold out, and we’re trying to make a run at a sustainable green operation and succeed and it’s driving them nuts.”

  “You’re right. We’re not out of the woods yet,” she pointed out. “We need a couple more good harvests to get the machinery paid off, and then we can really expand.”

  “Still want the greenhouses for strawberries, huh?” It was her dream, a large greenhouse to grow fruits. Properly done, in a controlled climate, strawberries and blueberries and grapes could realize huge yields. What she didn’t eat outright or can, she could sell at the local farmer’s market or co-operative.

  “Mmm-hmmm. I looooove strawberries and chocolate,” Sadie said around a bite of the tamale. She winked at him. “And we can expand in other ways, too.” Unlike their grandparents and great-grandparents who needed big families as cheap labor, Ryan and Sadie hadn’t started popping out children at a young age. That hadn’t stopped Sadie from bringing up the subject with increasing frequency over the last year. He knew she was thirty-three, knew she was feeling a deadline looming, knew she felt awkward at the barbecues and fairs without children running around her and shouting and laughing. He knew she felt an emptiness in her life. And he knew she would be one hell of a great mother.

  But Ryan had a built-in conservatism about such things, a genetic trait that had ensured survival through the lean times and the fat. And part of it, he had to admit, came from his relationship with his own father. Troy Baumann had been a stern taskmaster who suffered fools lightly, including his own son. Having his wife die of cancer when Ryan was ten made his father permanently bitter. When he reached his teen years, they’d had shouting matches over matters that were trivial. And when his father died seven years ago, Ryan had a hard time summoning sorrow. He worried that he’d imbibed too much of the old man’s anger at the world to ever be parent material.

  There were times, though, when Ryan looked at the friends who had stayed here without a break for college, and he envied them. Don Barnes, his friend from high school, worked on computers at the local Navstar dealer, had two boys, ten and eight. On the visits to Don’s spread five miles on the other side of town, Ryan would get to thinking that it was time.

  “I reckon we could.” His reply was a little too quick. Not now. Not again, it said.

  “Paul thinks it’s about the land, too,” Sadie said, changing back to the business at hand. “Vesta has been buying up some small acreages here in Hodgeman County, and in Finney and Ford as well. He’ll be ready for them.” Paul Harmon was their attorney, who ran a practice in Wichita that specialized in agricultural law. He had also gone to high school with Ryan, and after passing the bar came back home to fight for the natives against distant agricultural combines.

  “I started one of the harvesters on our north half-section, since the moisture in the wheat was down. We’ll get a truckload and run it in to the co-op and see if they’ll take it.”

  “How’s the rest of it look?” He unwrapped another tamale, his fourth.

  “The spectral readouts from the drones say that our half-section to the east will be ready by the end of the week. The moisture sensors on the beans show soil temp and moisture are low-normal, so you may need to run the center pivot.” The huge arm of the irrigation system, anchored to and run from a well planted in the center of the field, used microdrip irrigation, with long hoses falling from the pipe to the ground, to conserve water.

  “Good,” Ryan said, sobered. “God, I always hate this time of year.”

  “I know,” his wife agreed. “I need to sleep for a week after it’s done.�
��

  They’d both grown up on farms in this area, two counties apart, and were used to the frenzied hard pace of harvest. Even with robot harvesters and semi-independent grain trucks, it was still a time full of 20-hour days and backbreaking labor. But that wasn’t what was bothering him. “No. A dozen things could go wrong and wipe out a crop.” He looked to the north horizon, where a hazy strip of clouds had formed.

  “We’ll be fine,” Sadie assured him, putting her chin on his shoulder. “We’ve made it this far.” She kissed him, slow and passionate.

  “If we didn’t have all this work…” Sadie treasured rural life, especially making love under the stars or a full moon. Babies hadn’t been part of the deal then, though.

  “I know.” She smiled seductively. “When we’ve got it all in the elevators. Promise.” She glanced at his pad. “I better run before you ravish me. Gotta check the weeders running on the soybeans.” She kissed him and got back in her truck, and he watched her drive off.

  He made a circuit that afternoon of the three half-sections of wheat they had planted. The moisture content was low enough they could begin harvesting; anything above 13 percent would be rejected, since moist wheat could spontaneously combust and a blow a grain elevator to the moon. The lone robot harvester had halted, its bin full, on the last field. Ryan headed back to their homestead to get the truck, keeping a worried eye on the sky. The hazy dark line had become a line of cottony thunderheads, with a dead-gray bottom that spelled trouble. The best they could hope for was some needed rain that might slow down the harvest a few days. The worst could be a tornado, or even worse, hail.

  A thick shelterbelt of cottonwood and cedar concealed the Baumann homestead. The original, a large two-story house, stood empty on an adjacent section of land. Built by Ryan’s great-grandfather in 1920, it had housed four generations that worked the land.

  The current Baumann farmhouse was visible only as a small hill covered in prairie grass, with a limestone-lined entrance. Ryan and Sadie had taken a page from early Great Plains history, and built two stories down. Nearby stood an old barn, built in the 1890s by a previous tenant driven out by drought and crop failures. George Baumann purchased the land around 1910, and kept the barn for extra storage. Ryan and Sadie had painted it red five years ago, and placed solar panels on the roof. Smaller equipment and tool sheds flanked the barn.

  He parked the Jeep in the large Quonset hut that housed the trucks and other equipment, tossed the faulty yaw drive on a workbench, and walked toward their house. Ryan descended the steps into the dugout, and felt a chill as he entered the large underground foyer.

  Sadie was frowning, hunched over the computer in the kitchen alcove, a cup of tea by her side. She looked up when he entered.

  “I’m going to take a truck out,” he said. “Harvester’s full, and we need to get the grain in.”

  “Better hurry,” she said, turning one of the three computer screens to him. It displayed a satellite image map of the area. A green line was advancing from the north, with red and orange and yellow splashed behind it. “Front’s moving in quick.”

  “I don’t need a computer to tell me that,” Ryan said, taking a pitcher of ice water from the refrigerator and swigging from it. “We got maybe two hours. Get everything tied down.”

  “NOAA says one and a half.”

  “I’ll trust my senses over a satellite,” Ryan said, heading out the door. The heat hit him like a sauna when he closed the door behind him.

  At least, he reflected, he didn’t have to worry about the house being damaged. The first homesteaders, confronted by a lack of timber and stone, had simply dug into hillsides, put a roof over the hole, and covered it with grass. It was cool in summer, warm in winter, and the only real drawback was keeping the cattle from grazing on the roof and falling inside and smashing the furniture. The Baumann dugout was bigger—about four thousand square feet, on two levels, with four bedrooms and two baths. Everything ran on the solar panels built on top, which he could see retracting as he drove the truck out of the shed. And he didn’t have to worry about the house blowing away in a tornado and winding up surrounded by Munchkins.

  He was almost to the field when he was stopped by a black pickup truck. Two men got out, giving him a quick view of white lettering on the doors that read GCF. It was a diesel model, not an electric. GCF was paying a pretty heavy carbon tax to impress the locals.

  The men were both dressed in khakis with black polo shirts, wearing sunglasses. One was taller with dark hair, the other shorter and stockier, with blonde hair, both done in a military-style crewcut. They looked like security guards. They definitely weren’t farmers. Everyone Ryan knew wore dirty jeans and pearl-buttoned shirts or t-shirts with ball caps this time of year. And the locals damned sure didn’t wear loafers.

  “You’re Ryan Baumann,” one said, walking up to the truck. A statement, not a question.

  “I am,” he said. “I’m pretty busy. Got a load of wheat to haul in before that hits.” He gestured to the storm clouds in the north.

  “This is about a drone registered to our company,” the taller man said. “About three hours ago one of our drones was shot down with what we think was an electron gun. We’d like it back.” The words were polite. The tone was not.

  “Come by tomorrow and talk to me.”

  “Mr. Baumann, under the Federal Drone Aviation Act of 2022, 49 U.S.C. section 407, it is a federal offense to destroy a properly registered drone while conducting—”

  “State law prevents you from conducting unauthorized surveillance.” He noticed the small packs clipped to their belts, with the body cameras on their collars. “And that’s all I’m saying. I’ve got a lot to do, and I don’t have time for this.” He put the truck in gear, and drove around the pickup, leaving the two behind in a cloud of dust.

  The anger was still there when he pulled up beside the harvester. Corporate agriculture wasn’t new—big mechanized farms had been around since the 1970s. Corporate goons were new. He called Sadie, who reported that the solar panels were retracted, and the wind turbines were also off. The turbines would descend into the ground partway, putting twenty-five feet of the tower out of harm’s way. If they were damaged, the blades and turbine could be replaced, and the tower would still be functional. He warned her about the GCF enforcers. She laughed it off. “I’ll take the Fifth. Besides, we’re better armed than they are.”

  The harvester was a large boxy machine, with huge tires in front, and a twenty-foot header that cut the grain. It had taken two passes up and down the length of the field to fill the bin.

  The control pad for the harvester was on the truck seat. Ryan swung out the auger, and wheat poured into the truck bed. He put on a bandanna to keep out the dust, took a shovel off the side of the truck, and climbed into the bed. He used the shovel to spread the grain evenly, pulling his feet up to keep them from being buried. After pulling a tarp over the grain and fastening it, he was done.

  A quick message to the elevator on his pad told him that there were at least ten other trucks in line waiting to unload. Adding in the trip, it was going to take two hours to dump the load and get back to the house. The storm clouds were moving in, and he admitted that maybe the satellite had been correct after all.

  He decided that the grain could stay in the truck overnight, and he would unload it tomorrow. There likely wouldn’t be much else he could do if the fields were muddy. Programming the harvester to head back to the house, he guided the truck over the bumpy field onto the dirt and gravel road.

  The storm clouds blocked out the sun as he pulled the door to the shed shut. The wind from the north picked up, blowing powdery dust from the fallow field north of the house.

  Sadie came running from the house. “Harvester died,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Two miles over and two north.” She was heading to her pickup truck, Ryan in tow. Right by the old house.

  “Batteries were fully charged this morning when I towed it ou
t,” Ryan said.

  “Yeah. There was a power surge, and then it went offline.”

  “Damn. We have to go get it.” It was a $100,000 piece of machinery, and they weren’t about to leave it to the mercies of a summer storm, even unloaded. And he had a pretty good idea what had happened to the harvester.

  Sadie climbed behind the wheel of her pickup. Ryan retrieved the EM gun from his Jeep, as well as a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. Sadie looked at him, questioning, but didn’t press it. She had figured out the cause, too. The pickup sped out of the compound, fishtailing as it hit the road.

  Halfway there, Ryan spotted a black pickup speeding north a mile distant. He could make out small lettering on the doors. Knew it, he thought. Ryan retrieved the EM gun from behind the bench seat. Standing beside the truck, resting his elbows on the bed of the pickup, he took aim.

  “I don’t think you have enough range,” she said.

  “We’ll see. If not, no harm.” He pressed the firing stud. An invisible electron beam leaped out, and hit the pickup. Even though it was diesel-powered, it had electronic systems which promptly died. The pickup slowed to a halt, and Ryan smiled. “Got him.” Sadie took the EM gun and stowed it in the cab, and made the gravel fly as she put the truck in gear and hit the accelerator.

  The harvester was stalled in the middle of the road just short of the crossroads. Halfway down stood his boyhood home. Sometimes he’d stop out here and imagine the arguments from the barn or the porch.

  The hell are you going?

  Into town. I’m gonna meet Kevin and Duane.

  We got work to do yet. Get those repairs on the tractor done.

  Been working all day, they ain’t got the parts in town, and the shop ain’t open.

  Think you can take off like this?

  I have a life.

  When we’re done, goddamnit.