by Devin Hanson
Leila sighed. “You’ll ruin the mattress doing that. Haven’t you ever… never mind. Let’s go buy some sheets!” She tried to put some enthusiasm into it, but tiredness dragged at her. Was it too much to ask that she have furnished living quarters? At the rate she was paying, she expected more.
Jackson’s energy wore on Leila. Part of it was his naivete, his almost childish enthusiasm and his neglect of consequences. That didn’t mean he was stupid. The longer she spent with him as they went about their shopping expedition, the more she came to realize his apparent short-sightedness was simply lack of experience.
He had never slept on a mattress before, so just didn’t know that sheets were necessary for comfort. He had never prepared a meal himself before, so it hadn’t occurred to him that they shouldn’t buy raw produce without a way to cook it. He had never owned more than a single change of clothing, so didn’t know how to store clothes you weren’t wearing.
Leila lost herself in the process of shopping and furnishing their cramped room. Jackson was an agreeable companion, and he was quick to understand what she explained to him. It helped that he didn’t ask any personal questions or inquire about her past. All his thoughts were for the future, and he seemed an endless font of optimism.
For her part, Leila kept the conversation limited to the immediate demands of their physical needs. Sheets for the beds. Hygiene supplies. Blankets, pillows—another convention that Jackson had never experienced before—and other sleeping requirements. She steered him away from furnishing their little kitchenette for now, knowing she would have to see what kinds of food were available before purchasing preparation appliances and eating utensils.
By the time they got back to their room, burdened under the weight of their purchases, Leila barely had the energy to stay on her feet. She was ravenously hungry again but was too embarrassed to eat with Jackson. No doubt he would eagerly eat even the most basic yeast preparations, and the thought turned her stomach. She didn’t want to see his reaction when she was disgusted by the food he took for granted.
She demonstrated how to properly make a bed and showed him how the murphy bed had straps to hold the mattress and coverings in place when it was folded up. Then there was nothing else to do but brush their teeth and crawl into bed.
The cool crispness of the new sheets was comforting. Leila lay, exhausted, but her mind racing. They had accidentally left the light on over the sink, but she didn’t want to get up to turn it off. A few feet away, Jackson was already snoring slightly, having fallen asleep practically the moment his head hit the pillow.
Her stomach ached with hunger. The hum of the ventilation and the distant, muffled voices heard through the walls, combined with the new bed to keep her from falling asleep. Every sense she had told her she wasn’t home, and that forcibly reminded her of the life she had lost.
Silent tears tracked down her cheeks, chilled by the vent positioned over her head.
It took her a long time to fall asleep.
Leila woke, and for a long moment, couldn’t figure out where she was. She panicked, climbed off the mattress, and stubbed her toe on the frame of the murphy bed. Memory came crashing back and she slumped back onto the bed. Jackson was gone, already up for his day’s work.
Her tablet blinked at her from its charging dock, irritably alerting her to a missed notification. She rolled over to reach it and tapped the icon. It was a message from Jackson, asking her if she wanted to meet for lunch.
She checked the time, realized that there was only half an hour before his proposed meeting time, and hurriedly tapped out a message, begging off for now.
Leila felt almost hungry enough to eat yeast paste straight from the culture vat, but she forced herself to go through her morning hygiene routine. Brushing out her hair didn’t take as long as her mother’s hair did, but by the time she had finished the hundred strokes with each hand, her wrists were tired. She put her hair up in its customary braid and finally set out to break her fast.
Having learned her lesson the previous day, she found a restaurant that served vegetarian meals and finally sated her hunger without the slightest cheesy tang of yeast. The urgent, almost painful gnawing at her stomach was gone, but she still craved proper meat. It would have to do for now.
Next up, the aquaponic farms.
Leila cycled her way through the humidity lock and paused in the entryway, taking in the aquaponic farm. Moisture formed on her skin and flooded into her lungs as she took a deep breath. Unexpectedly, the uncertainty and crushing despair of the last forty-eight hours drained away, to be replaced with a freeing sense of purpose and belonging. She had missed working in a farm.
This section of the aquaponic farm was focused on raising leafy green vegetables. Lettuces, broccoli, kale, spinach, and a dozen other types of plants formed a solid mat of verdant life, stretching out in long rows. Fiber optics piped sunlight from the surface of the habitat and blazed down on the plants through diffusers.
Workers moved along the floating rafts of plants, pulling mature plants from the water, dripping roots and all, and replacing them with fresh seedlings. The farm had an industrious bustle about it, silent under the roaring ventilation fans.
A burly man holding a tablet noticed her and hurried over, holding out his hand expectantly.
Uncertain of what he was hoping for, Leila shook his proffered hand. He pulled back and looked at her in surprise, as if seeing her for the first time. He jerked his head toward a door off to the side and headed that way without waiting to see if Leila would follow.
Leila hurried after him, and relaxed as the door shut behind her, sealing the cacophony of the ventilation behind soundproofing.
“What do you want?” he asked brusquely.
Leila handed him her tablet, which she belatedly realized was what he had been asking for in the first place. “I’m looking for a job,” she said.
The man glanced at her tablet and handed it back to her without really looking at it. “Go through the central computer,” he said irritably. “It will assign you introductory work when we have openings available.”
“Sorry,” Leila said, and didn’t move when he went to brush past her. “I’m not looking for menial labor. I’ve a journeyman rating in aquaponic farming, and five years’ experience working in an aquaculture laboratory.”
He snorted in disbelief and snatched the tablet back from her hand. “You’re not old enough to have five years’ experience in anything, let alone a…” he trailed off as he saw her credentials.
Leila smiled politely. If anything, she had undersold her experience.
“You aren’t from here,” he said with certainty. “I would know your face otherwise. Where did you train?”
“New Galway.”
He chuckled. “Right. And I’m an ainlif. Well, there’s one way to tell for sure.” He took a pair of padded headphones from a wall rack and fit them onto his head, gesturing for her to do the same.
Leila complied, and the man opened the door and stepped out. “I need to be able to hear you,” he said. The headphones canceled out the roar of the fans and his voice came through clearly, if a little blurry. “I’ve got a few minutes of downtime. If you are who you say you are, we could sure use you.”
She nodded politely, but he was already turning away.
“I’m Chief Olan, by the way. Why’d you leave New Galway? Boy trouble?” He chortled at his joke and kept talking without giving her a chance to respond. “Never mind. Tell me what’s wrong with this batch.”
He had stopped by the edge of a trough. Water gurgled past, all but obscured by the floating mats. Spaced every six inches, mature basil plants stood up from the mats, nearly up to Leila’s waist. The plants looked listless, with the tops sagging over and the larger leaves at the bottom wilting around the edges.
“Can I check the roots?” Leila asked, and got a wordless nod from Chief Olan.
Carefully she pulled out one of the plants and examined the trailing roots before reseating it. She check
ed under the leaves, looking for pests, and found none.
“What species of fish are you using?” she finally asked.
“Tilapia,” he grunted.
“Why are you keeping them in the plant bays? You’ll never get good growth with the fish nibbling on the roots.”
A slow grin spread across Olan’s face. “And what would you suggest?”
“Fish should be kept separate,” Leila said. She couldn’t keep all the scandalized horror from her voice. That was practically rule number one! “Don’t you have aquaculture pools?”
“We do. The pumps were jamming from the waste buildup.”
“Why are you…” Leila rubbed her forehead. “The pumps go after the plant bays. The water flowing back to the aquaculture pools should be crystal clear. You shouldn’t need to perform maintenance on the pumps more than once a year.”
“How would you suggest keeping the water from the pools free of debris then?”
“You should be using swirl filters, with the…” she took in the broad smile on the chief’s face. “You know all this. Who set up your systems?”
Olan laid a finger alongside his nose. “Later. So, you know your basic systems, I’ll grant you that. And you’ve no shyness about making your opinions known.”
Leila flushed. “That’s not an opinion, accepted practice—”
“Peace, Leila.” Olan turned away from the plant bay and led Leila further into the farm. “What would you proscribe to handle yellowing leaves?”
“Nothing,” she said waspishly, still bothered by the cycle layout. “But I would test for calcium levels and nitrogen percentages, and supplement accordingly.”
“And what for fruiting crops that don’t produce flowers?”
“Phosphorous and potassium. But you shouldn’t have any problem with phosphorous if your fish are healthy.”
“What’s the proper nutritional balance for fingerling tilapia?”
“High protein, eighty percent or more, with the rest made up of green material,” she replied promptly. Everyone knew this. It was basic aquaculture.
“What’s the growth-mass index for tilapia over perch?”
“Tilapia is nearly one for two,” Leila shrugged. “Perch is closer to one for five or six, depending on water temperature and quality.”
“And trout?”
“Don’t even bother with trout. You might as well grow cattle.”
Olan chuckled. “But trout take well to an insect-protein diet.”
“So do tilapia. Are you honestly growing trout here?” That would explain the lack of real fish in the restaurants.
“I’m merely playing the devil’s advocate, Leila. Testing your knowledge. Come through here.”
Olan led her through another humidity door and Leila almost gagged on the heavy brown odor that rolled over her. To the left and right, stainless steel V-shaped troughs two meters wide and twenty meters long marched in ranks to the distant far side of the room. The rows repeated to Leila’s right, countless troughs filled to the brim with writhing masses of maggots.
“Soldier fly larvae,” she said. It was an operation hundreds of times larger than what New Galway needed.
At the end of their row, an articulated arm with a thick, flexible pipe swung over a trough and pumped out a river of thick, brown sludge.
“It’s sterilized,” Olan noted. “There are no pathogens present.”
“You’re way overloaded,” Leila said hoarsely. Sterilized or not, the stench was overwhelming. The waste treatment facilities in New Galway smelled more like rich earth than raw sewage.
“Welcome to Nueva Angela,” Olan said sourly. “Any suggestions for increasing speed of production?”
Leila stopped breathing through her nose and walked down the line of troughs until she reached the one that had just received a heavy load of fresh waste. The trough was filled to within an inch of the top, and maggots swarmed through the slop, writhing at the surface.
“It’s far too wet,” she said, remembering how it looked on New Galway. “I’m surprised you aren’t getting a high-percentage die-off from drowning. Smaller, thicker inclusions will give the maggots time to consume the waste. You’ll get a faster growth rate, a higher survival percentage, and your harvesting windows will be easier to predict. If you cease inclusions twenty-four hours before your harvest schedule, you won’t even need to wash the harvest before processing.”
Olan harrumphed. “Hmm, it wouldn’t hurt to test your theory on a sample batch. So, you’re really from New Galway?”
Leila nodded.
“Well. I believe you. Come on, let’s get out of here. As far as I’m concerned, you’re hired.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
In a society that constantly expands and in which the individuals never perish, the inevitable burden of population will grow beyond the ability of a closed system to support. There is a great deal of habitable space on Venus, yet even if the entire sun-side surface of the planet were to be a single, solid habitat, eventually the human population would outgrow it.
This is an eventuality that Annette Everard took into consideration, and set her society on track to develop the necessary technologies to expand the reaches of human experience to space beyond the orbits of Sol. Indeed, the habitats themselves were prototypes of eventual self-sustaining arks that could carry the matriarchs to our nearest solar neighbors and beyond.
What burden the required centuries of travel to an immortal?
Jackson braced himself against the safety line and leaned forward into the wind. The storm was all but over, but the residual winds still pushed along, strong enough to knock him off balance. There was no point in trying to perform repairs yet; they would have to wait for calmer skies to start replacing damaged panels. For now, before repairs could be performed, a thorough survey of the damage had to be done.
It was dull work. Compared to the hectic chaos of the storm on New Galway, the steady wind was tame and predictable. Still, he was glad for the relatively mundane tasks. He remembered the excitement and adrenaline of the emergency repairs, but also remember how absolutely terrified he had been.
Dull was just fine.
Millicent’s voice crackled through his headset. “Harding, what’s the holdup?”
“Just reaching the seam now, Chief.”
“Get your shot and return to the airlock. You’re nearing twenty percent on your air tank.”
“I know. Wind will be at my back on the return trip. I’ll be fine.”
Jackson wasn’t worried. He had his three Fs well in hand. He had memorized the safety cable routes he could take back to the two closest airlocks and knew how fast he could make those trips while safely fastened to the cable. He still had a solid ten minutes before he had to start heading back.
He reached the seam in question, the part of the habitat roof where Stack E joined to Stack D. The plates of sheathing resin met in a herringbone pattern where the two curves intersected. It was a notorious weak point, where heavy winds had a tendency to catch the edge of the seam and tear out plates.
There didn’t seem to be any damage this time, though. Still, he got out his tablet and held it up, narrating the video as he panned it slowly around, giving his location and the time. They would review all the footage they had taken later and look for damage that had slipped their notice the first time.
Task complete, Jackson turned about and started heading back toward the airlock. “Shot taken, Chief. I’m on route to the airlock now.”
“How’d it look?”
“Undamaged, but I took video anyway.”
“Well that’s something at least. Get back here and we’ll wrap this up.”
“Roger that. I’ll be there in three minutes.”
With the wind pushing at his back Jackson made good time, but he made no attempt to speed up his progress. Yes, the wind might be reliable. Yes, he could walk easily enough without relying on the safety cable. Yes, using only a single carabiner as he went woul
d have doubled his speed. But all it would take would be a freak pocket of low pressure and he could be swept off his feet in an instant.
He got back to the airlock with fifteen minutes left in his air tank. Millicent was waiting for him, and they cycled through the airlock together.
“Well, that’s a day’s job well done,” the chief said once they were back inside the habitat.
“Is the day over? It’s barely three in the afternoon.”
Millicent wobbled a hand. “Eh. We’ve already done the recommended hours extra in a single day. You can work the next two hours reviewing footage if you like, but the pay for it is lousy. I usually just farm it out and let some desk jockey document my footage.”
Jackson thought of the rent on the room he had just moved into and sighed. “Yeah. I think I’ll grind it out. It’s only two hours, and I’d like to see how the process is done.”
“Okay, have fun then. Me? I’m out.” Millicent threw him a sloppy salute and waved, before jogging for the lift.
It was tempting to follow suit. Jackson sighed. Once the month was out and he had an idea how much money he’d actually be making, then he might be able to judge how much of the menial labor he could skip.
He made his way down three levels and crossed over to Stack A. Ever since seeing the damage to Nova Aeria, he couldn’t help but notice the bulkheads built into the hallways with their shutters ready to slam closed at the first sign of a hull breach. Seeing the bulkheads gave him a frisson of remembered tension. His gaze lingered on the emergency lockers next to each bulkhead. How long would it be before he didn’t constantly hold the location of the nearest locker in mind?
The Department of External Maintenance had an array of workstations set up to act as a central headquarters for organizing the post-storm repair efforts. Jackson found an empty workstation and hooked it up to his tablet. He added his recordings to the growing stack of surface reports and started the tedious task of indexing his footage.