Ecolitan Prime (Ecolitan Matter)

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  As the two Ecolitans stepped outside, the driver bounded out of the car and stepped around the bonnet to greet them. “Sirs! I’m Glubb Bagot, and the chief sent me to be your driver.” The young man wore the white shorts, socks, and shoes of the port authority, but a green-and-white striped uniform shirt.

  “Nathaniel Whaler, and this is Ecolitan Sylvia Ferro-Maine.” Nathaniel tried not to wrinkle his nose at the pungency of the Artosan atmosphere—or was it because the Guest House was down-wind of some industrial or agricultural facility?

  “The chief said you were in charge, professors. Where do you want to go?” Bagot offered an open smile.

  “The synde bean fields, to see some in all stages, and from thence to the processing facility.”

  “Lots of bean fields, professor. They start over there, and they go for kilos in every direction.” The driver gestured out past the portico and in the general westward direction. Between the edge of the road and the field, less than a hundred meters from the west side of the Guest House, two men worked on a fuel-burning tractor in the clear morning light.

  Although his eyes followed Bagot’s gesture, Nathaniel was well aware that his belt detector pulsed. He and Sylvia exchanged glances. More surveillance, but who…and why? Those handling the spying had to be locals; they were too obvious to be anything else, and that meant the Prime had been right about the study not being entirely desired by New Avalon—or by someone.

  “Are there more toward Lanceville? Or are the majority farther out?”

  “Some in just about every direction, sir.” Glubb Bagot offered another guileless smile.

  “Start toward Lanceville.” Holding his datacase in his right hand, Nathaniel opened the rear door with his left, letting the detector scan the groundcar, but no energy flows beyond the normal registered.

  With a bored expression, Sylvia slipped inside, sliding across the worn plastic to seat herself behind the driver and letting her datacase rest on her lap. Nathaniel took the other side of the rear seat, closing the door.

  “Toward Lanceville it is, sirs.” Glubb Bagot closed his own door and started the antique internal combustion engine. Gray smoke puffed from behind the boot.

  The mechanical wheezing from under the bonnet, and the faint hint of air that was lukewarm as opposed to hot, indicated that the ground-car possessed some rudimentary cooling system. Despite the comparatively lightweight greens, Nathaniel blotted his forehead even before the vehicle was on the permacrete headed eastward.

  The low, dark green plants filled roughly half the fields on both sides of the narrow road. In those fields not filled with beans grew falfamut, the legumelike nitrogen-and soil-fixing plant that also doubled as animal fodder. The combination provided an effective two-crop rotation that continually strengthened the soil and the atmosphere—provided that the rotation was equal, not something that always happened.

  Ahead, Nathaniel could see a low and irregular skyline, shapes in various shades of gray—Lanceville.

  “If you would pull over and halt here?” Nathaniel ventured.

  “Sir?”

  “Over by the field side,” the sandy-haired Ecolitan said. “You halt the groundcar so I might inspect the beans.”

  “Yes, sir.” A faintly quizzical expression crossed the young driver’s face.

  Once the car rumbled to a stop, Nathaniel slipped out and walked over to the row of synde beans, bending and studying the narrow, dark green leaves and clusters of greenish purple globes. The globes seemed the same as those varieties he’d seen at the Institute in his training years. Still, with a quick motion he flicked the tiny vidimager from his sleeve and, as he touched a leaf or two gently, recorded a series of images for future study.

  Nathaniel walked back to the car, nodded to Sylvia, and then asked Bagot, “Are they harvesting anywhere?” He took out the large green kerchief and blotted his sweating forehead once more.

  “Up near the lower Reeves-Kenn spread, I heard. That’s a good hour.”

  “Fine. That will be fine.” The Ecolitan stuffed the overlarge kerchief back in his pocket.

  “You’re in charge.” With a quick look up and down the empty permacrete strip, Bagot eased the groundcar one hundred eighty degrees back in the direction that they had come, easing the speed up, enough so that Nathaniel could actually feel a greater flow of cool air from the overworked cooling unit.

  “How long have you been on Artos, Bagot?” asked Nathaniel.

  “All my life, sir. Father worked for the Port Authority, too.”

  “I imagine you’ve seen a great deal of change.”

  “Not really, sir. Most of the bare ground is gone…” The driver paused as the green bus from the landing field lumbered past and eastward toward Lanceville. “Fewer shuttle drops these days.”

  “That usually happens when a planet first comes out of planoforming,” Sylvia said.

  “Sure has happened here, miss…I mean, professor. Except for a few times a year, like last winter when the new ag stuff came in, it’s slow. Most times, it’s weeks between ships. Sometimes months.”

  “New seed types?” asked Sylvia, “Or technology-transfer templates?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Probably seed or clone stuff. We don’t have many manufacturing places that can take tech-templates. I heard Chief Walkerson talking about that once.”

  “They do on New Avalon,” Nathaniel prompted. “I would consider it only prudent to invest in a limited capacity on Artos.”

  “Limited is right, sir. We’re most limited here. The ocean fellows—the Evanston family—they’ve put in a small tech-forming facility in Lanceville, but it’s all for ocean farming. Lord, I’m tired of algaeburgers.”

  “I understand you do not sample the beef of the Reeves-Kenn establishment?” asked Nathaniel.

  “Sample? That beef is for them and for the aristos and any outsystem wealthy enough to pay for it.”

  “But they do not have a tech-transfer facility,” mused Sylvia.

  “Don’t want one, to my way of thinking. They still use horses on the wilder parts of their spread. That’d be what Jem is doing right about now.”

  “Jem?”

  “My older brother. He’s a rover for George Reeves-Kenn.” Bagot shook his head.

  For a time, Nathaniel just watched the fields blur past, noting that the vast majority were either synde beans or falfamut, although they did pass fields of other crops he did not immediately recognize, except for the ripening wheat. Then there were the tall green plants.

  “Is that corn?”

  “Maize? That’s the tall stuff. We don’t grow a lot of it. According to something I saw, it really upsets the water balance, and you’ve got to grow falfamut for three years out of four. Most of it’s for the export beef—Reeves-Kenn outfit.”

  “Chief Walkerson said there was a lot of that exported.”

  “Not so much as when my dad worked at the port. I guess transstellar rates have gone up or something. Jem told me that last Boxing Day.”

  A long groundlorry, its gray metal cab pitted and rusted, rumbled past them, headed back toward Lanceville, three hopper pods on its flat trailer. The car swayed in the rush of air from the ag-carrier.

  “Really moving, he is.” Bagot shrugged.

  “Haste, it makes waste,” pontificated Whaler.

  “They think they own the permacrete. I suppose they do. Not many groundcars left.”

  “Were there many when you were young?” asked Sylvia.

  “More than now, but I don’t guess there were ever a lot. My dad had one, because he was a checker, and he got called at odd hours. Maybe I thought everyone had one.”

  Nathaniel kept a pleasant smile on his face as they sped westward and as a second lorry whooshed past heading eastward and rocked the car once more.

  The dust rising over the fields indicated the harvest efforts long before the groundcar was close enough for the Ecolitans to see the actual machinery. Sicklelike blades cut the plants perhaps twenty centimeter
s above ground. Oil pods and greenery dropped into a hopper-sorter, and from the hopper-sorter dropped a dark powder, the residue of the vegetation, while the pods went into the cargo bin. Behind the harvester-sorter came a cultivator-shredder that turned the soil and shredded the bean roots and stalks into fragments then reburied them, and seeded the falfamut for the next growing cycle. The machinery looked as ancient as the groundcar from which they observed it.

  “Let us travel to those unharvested fields there.” Nathaniel gestured to the west.

  “We’re getting low on fuel, professor. I hadn’t thought we’d be traveling this far from Lanceville.”

  “A little farther, a kilo or so, that will not make much difference, I do not believe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Another kilo farther west, Nathaniel cleared his throat. “If you would halt again…?” Nathaniel offered a smile.

  “Of course.” Bagot slowed the groundcar gently.

  Nathaniel stepped out, still carrying the ubiquitous datacase, wishing he could have both hands free. Sylvia followed him as he walked from the shoulder of the road toward the nearest row of synde beans.

  The dull thwop thwop thwop of a high-flying flitter drew the Ecolitan’s eyes from the white permacrete to the eastern sky. Was the flitter tracking them? Why would someone on an energy-poor planoformed globe use a flitter? He shook his head slowly. Clearly, he hadn’t escaped from his indoctrination of paranoia from his months on Old Earth.

  Sylvia’s eyes followed his, but she smiled faintly. “It’s nice to have friends.” The word “friends” was gently stressed.

  Was she right—or even more paranoid than Nathaniel?

  He bent down and studied the closest row of beans. Were the globes more purple than the varieties he’d seen at the Institute years earlier? Again he slipped out the miniature vidimager and recorded a series of images for comparison and study.

  “I take it they’re not just beans?” murmured Sylvia.

  “Don’t know yet. I have some suspicions.” He laughed. “I always do—except about you.”

  “You had suspicions about me. You just didn’t listen to them—until you realized you could be in deep trouble.”

  “Good thing you were ethical.”

  “I wasn’t. If I’d been ethical…I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Ethical in a deeper sense,” he offered.

  “No. I wasn’t that either, dear professor, and I’m glad I wasn’t. Even after trying to make sense of your…morality…I’m not unhappy to be here.”

  “I am glad of that.” Nathaniel fingered the thin, dark green bladed bean leaf a last time, fixing the image in his mind, then straightened. He still felt Sylvia was far more ethical than she credited herself as being, but the continuing questions about his morality bothered him. How many other cultural and background conflicts were likely to surface as they worked together?

  The two walked back to the groundcar and Bagot.

  “The hydrocarb processing plant is where we should go next,” announced Nathaniel, flourishing the enormous kerchief and blotting his damp brow as he stood in the heat by the open door.

  “That’s back in Lanceville, sir.”

  “Is there anything of a transport nature here, or around here?” asked the sandy-haired Ecolitan.

  “Ah…no, sir.” Bagot shrugged. “You’re in charge, and the chief said not to worry about the fuel bill—but…oh, well, they’ll comp the tank at the plant.”

  Bagot almost flew the groundcar back eastward, passing two of the big lorries along the way. With the speed, the cooling system actually reduced the interior temperature to a semblance of comfort, although when Nathaniel touched the window, he could feel the exterior heat.

  The synde bean processing plant looked like a processing facility, with windowless and blotched ferrocrete walls. A thin line of steam swirled from one roof pipe, while a grayish mist seemed to wreath the entire building. Although the facility was set in the midst of level ground, fields alternating in synde beans and falfamut with infrequent swatches of maize, the whole facility seemed to descend eastward in blocky steps from the raised western end that appeared to hug an artificial mound.

  As Bagot slowed the groundcar, they passed a side road with a small sign bearing a single word: Haulers. Just beyond the permacrete, a groundlorry strained to climb a long inclined ramp toward a series of loading docks that protruded from the elevated west end of the facility.

  R-K Fuels—ConOne facility announced the sign by the main entrance.

  “I do not suppose that R-K stands for Reeves-Kenn, does it?” asked Nathaniel.

  “It probably does. They own most of ConOne.” The driver offered another of his guileless smiles. “Where might you want to go?”

  “Wherever the office or supervisor might be. It would be best to inform them.”

  “As you think best, sir.” Bagot eased the groundcar to a halt by a double door at the eastern end of the facility.

  “Thinking is far indeed from knowing, and he who knows nothing doubts nothing.”

  “What?” muttered Sylvia.

  “A proverb spoken is a proverb learned.” After considering for a moment, Nathaniel finally touched several points on his datacase, then left it on the floor of the rear seat. It would take more than Bagot had to open the case, and the Ecolitan didn’t like the idea of entering a strange building without both hands being free. Sylvia frowned momentarily, but followed his example.

  Several vehicles were clustered near a smaller side loading dock. One of the men who had been working on the tractor outside the Guest House stood by a small groundlorry, wearing a green deliveryman’s jumpsuit. Nathaniel checked his belt multitector. Besides the electronic gear in the equipment belt, the deliveryman carried at least one stunner and a needler, according to the Ecolitan’s belt detector.

  More interesting was the pseudodeliveryman’s focus.

  “He’s not watching us,” murmured Sylvia as they walked toward the double door. “He’s focused on the plant.”

  Nathaniel nodded, then held the left door for Sylvia.

  “Always the gentleman. I could hold it for you, you know.”

  “You could, but this impression works better.” His words were low, and he presented a faint smile. “Seeing an attractive woman first…”

  “And I thought you cared.”

  Nathaniel suppressed a wince, stepping inside and waiting a moment for his sun-adjusted vision to readjust to the comparative gloom of the building.

  “Sorry. That was a low blow, and…” Sylvia stopped as a blocky man in a maroon singlesuit marched down the dingy, half-lit corridor toward the two. The corridor smelled like diesel or some variant.

  “Greetings!” called Nathaniel. “We are here on behalf of the Ecolitan Institute. We’re doing an economic survey—”

  “This is a private facility, and we’re not open—where did you say you were from?” A frown crossed the black-haired man’s bronze face, and his eyes took in the green uniforms.

  “The Ecolitan Institute on Accord. We’re doing an infrastructure survey here on Artos. I am Nathaniel Firstborne Whaler, and this is Ecolitan Professor Sylvia Ferro-Maine.”

  “Marcus Stapleson-Mares, facility shift manager.” The dark brows furrowed. “Don’t suppose you’d be here from New Avalon?”

  “We arrived yesterday from Harmony, through a transship or two.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We had hoped for an informal tour of the facility. We are not interested in processes or anything proprietary,” said Nathaniel.

  “We’re detailing energy flows and how they impact the infrastructure economics,” added Sylvia.

  Stapleson-Mares glanced from one Ecolitan to the other. “Wait…follow me, please.”

  “Of course.” Nathaniel inclined his head.

  They walked silently down the corridor into a small office with little more than a desk, three utilitarian plastic chairs, and a row of antique filing cabinets that cover
ed the entire outside wall, except for the space for a single narrow floor-to-ceiling flexiplast window. The desk had only a narrow flat screen—blank—upon it.

  Stapleson-Mares tapped the screen and then several studs on the compact keyboard on the screen frame.

  “Yes?” came a crackly voice as an image swirled into place on the screen.

  “Boss…there’s two professors in green here. Claim they’re Ecolitans doing some sort of economic survey.”

  “Put them in front of the screen, Marcus, if you will.” The voice was hoarse, almost raspy.

  The shift manager nodded at the Ecolitans, and they stepped in front of the screen.

  “Nathaniel Whaler, and this is Sylvia Ferro-Maine.”

  For a moment, the thin gray-haired man studied the two, his eyes flicking sideways several times as if comparing the faces to a flat picture or solideo cube.

  “You look like the folks old Walk said were coming, and I can’t see as there’d be two sets of you running around in those strange greens. I’m George. What do you want at the facility?”

  “If it meets your approval, just a general tour, and some basic figures,” answered Nathaniel. “We would like to see the process flow, and how the hydrocarbon feedstocks are fed in, processed, and distributed. A general idea of the energy equivalence of the output would be appreciated, and the general sectoral usages of that output.”

  “In short, how the facility works, how much raw energy we take in, and how much of the fuel goes where?”

  “That would be the general idea,” Nathaniel admitted.

  “Where else might you be visiting?”

  “Every significant energy and transport producer and consumer on Artos, as we can. The wider the net, the better the information.”

  George’s weathered hand touched his chin, and the faint hiss of static mixed with what seemed a sigh.

  The two in greens waited.

  “Marcus?”

  “Sir?”

  “Tell Wystuh-MacDonald and Hensburg-Kewes that the Ecolitans are here, and have Jimmy give them the standard tour—the one that he gives the Empees when they come. You can give them the briefing packets. They’re in the red folders in the second—”