Farmers in the Sky by Rob Chilson
Illustration by Tom Kidd
* * * *
New abilities create new opportunities--and new barriers.
1: It's Good to be Back
The wheat field that had once been an asteroid hung off to the side of the boat.
"Log," Shanda Konigsberg said, releasing the throttles. "Date-time. Floating free, about fifty meters off the pole of field North Seven."
"Logged," said the boat in its toneless voice.
The field was a dark green blob of elephant-ear leaves, smothering the slowly wheeling rock. Each leaf was a quarter of a hectare in area and a hundred meters from the surface. They were the dark green of plants that grow slowly in subarctic climates.
"Not bad," said Shanda's older brother, Latimer. "Almost as good as Emrys can do." Emrys was her younger brother.
"Hey!" she said. "I've only been on Earth five years--"
"Hey yourself, Shandy," said Emrys. "I'm seventeen now, you know."
She sighed. "I know, and I've been home from college every year, but I still remember you as the twelve-year-old I left behind. How's it look, Latt?"
Latimer looked up from the doppler. "Close enough to zero. Emrys, shoot a line."
"Let me," Shanda cried, unbelting.
"Too late!" Emrys swiveled the line-throwing gun around. "White whale in sight. Take that, Moby Dick!" The boat thumped to the recoil, and Emrys grabbed the joystick. The harpoon hit the center of the field. "Bull's-eye!"
"All right," Latimer said. "Let's go bring in the sheaves." He turned to the com. "K-boat Three to Konigsberg Home," he said. "We're off North Seven and anchored."
"Konigsberg Home Farm acknowledges," the computer replied. "One moment."
While they waited for a human to get to the com, they started "putting on their clothes." They were already wearing their skinsuits and coveralls, and Shanda's feet had been hurting ever since they left Konigsberg--the skinsuit's socks squished her toes together. Now they put on helmets and tanks, boots and overgloves.
Their grandmother's voice came: "Shandy, you got company. The Dietzes dropped off a feller from Earth. Met you in college. Says his name's Charles Durant."
Charles! Shanda thought.
Gran continued, very dry: "Wants to talk to you. I told him it'll keep."
Shanda kept her voice steady. "Yes, tell 'im I'll see him tonight."
"Yeah, we got work to do," Latimer said. "K-boat Three off."
"K-berg Home off."
Charles Durant! she thought, banging her helmet down and jumping for the airlock. She had thought she'd never see Charles again. It had broken her heart to leave him on Earth. And now here he was, in the middle of the asteroid belt--she'd see him tonight!
"Charles?" Emrys asked, crowding into the airlock, making room for Latimer. "You never mentioned him."
"Oh, I'm sure I did," she said; to her surprise the joy surging through her wasn't audible.
"So what's he like?" Latimer asked, with elaborate casualness, pumping the lock.
"He's all right," Shanda said. "Tall and good-looking--and being tall means more on Earth, where you see people parallel. Charming and friendly, very bright."
"Can't complain about that," Latimer said, noncommittal.
The lock door opened, not soon enough for Shanda. She needed to be alone, to get a grip. You don't know he's immigrating, she told herself. But why else would he have come Out? He loved her, wanted to be with her, she'd told him she would live nowhere but in the Belt. So he had come.
She followed Latimer, swung out onto the hull, gripped a handhold. As third-generation farmers, they could afford a pressurized "boat" that was actually a rotund harvester ship. It was the shape of two pears joined together at the big end. Shanda snapped her safety line, gripped a hold.
Immense in the sky was the field, a dark green Presence.
"But what's this bright charming Charles doing in the Belt?" Emrys asked.
"You know as much as I do," she said.
"But what about Ozzy Takahashi?" Emrys asked, plaintive.
Shanda had intended to marry Osborn Takahashi since she was fourteen. "I like Ozzy very much."
"But you like this Charles guy more?" Emrys instantly said. "Did you arrange for him to come Out?"
"I would've said, idiot!" Shanda said.
Latimer had brachiated to the harvester's pod, swinging from handhold to handhold. "Go on, you two, we're burnin' daylight," he said. His tone, as had Shanda's, told Emrys he had asked too many questions.
"Sorry," Emrys said. Shanda thumped his shoulder in forgiveness.
"Chaytor coming out," Latimer warned them, and sprang the pod open. The harvester unfolded its long spidery legs, clambered out, and attached a line to the boat. It gave off a brief jet of steam--jumping would have pushed the boat--and soared toward the field.
Emrys gave the harpoon line a couple of experimental tugs, and snapped his belt loop around it. Detaching his safety line, he pulled on the line with casual skill, swooped away.
Shanda waited till Emrys vanished amid the leaves and reported the harpoon tight, lest their repeated tugs pull the anchor loose. Tugging the line, she soared toward the field. Presently leaves closed over her head. Tough, bamboo-like stems bent under her boots, soaking up her momentum. She touched down with a slight shock and snapped her safety to a stem.
Here at the pole there was little undergrowth; not enough light. The surface was a brown mat, generations of top-dressing over shattered rock, covered with moss adapted to space. It was all tightly bundled by the tough roots of the spatiophytes or "spytes."
Latimer and Emrys were busy. Latimer clutched the boat's gyros to set it spinning at the same stately pace as North Seven, lest their lines foul. Emrys checked the anchor set by the harvester.
Shanda stretched herself parallel to the surface and began a desultory search of the ground for previous anchors. The spytes were coarse and tough; they rasped at the fiberglass canvas of her coveralls. Gloves and boots further protected her. The boots each had a single claw curving down from the toe, for further traction. She pulled herself between stems, digging her toe-claws in, scanning the broken surface.
Charles.
She'd stayed free of men and other distractions during most of her five years on Earth. The Grange had financed her education beyond the normal two years, on condition that she teach what she'd learned--genetic engineering--at the college on Nerdstrom. All had gone well until she'd met Charles Durant at Texas A&M in her fifth year.
Falling in love wasn't something she'd planned on.
But Charles dismissed the whole notion of space, including her intention of coming home to K-berg. In his confident view of the future, she would marry him and settle down on Earth. Emigration? He'd never considered it.
Shanda had refused to move in with him or make any other commitment. That had not discouraged him as it should. How could it, when any fool could see she loved him? Stupid, stupid; everyone knew you shouldn't get encumbered with an Earthman, unless he was willing to move Out to the Belt.
He had proposed to her the night they graduated.
"Here's one!" Emrys cried.
Shanda came back to her task, saw a rusty spike sticking out of the shattered surface, and said, "Here's another!" She thumped it a couple of times. There was enough oxygen leakage to corrode it, but it was still sound.
"Bringing a line," Latimer said, and in a few moments, he crashed down in silence between the leaves. They pulled on the line, drawing the telpher cables down, and made them fast to three anchors.
Landing the boat on the field would mean crushing the spytes. While the space-adapted plants were hardy, they had limits and grew slowly. Latimer leaped again for the boat, and shortly the telpher began to move. It was not unlike an endless clothesline, hung with sacks of compost enriched with nitrates, lime, phosphates, and ice.
Emrys and Shanda were kept busy detaching and piling the bags in a circle between the spyte stems, a dreamy slow-motion dance that taxed every muscle. Shanda was soon panting and sweating through her skinsuit; she'd gotten soft on Earth. Her calves and the arches of her feet ached. But this was normal; it didn't distract her.
It had been raining in Texas Station on the evening of graduation, though that hadn't damped anyone's pleasure. There was still a mist in the air when she stepped out for a breath during the dance. Charles followed her. She should have been on guard, she thought. Then: no, he intended to propose; better to have gotten it over with.
And so she'd had to turn him down. She could still see the incomprehension in his face. "Why?" he'd asked.
"Because I'm going home, day after tomorrow. You've made it plain that you will never emigrate. So this is goodbye." She'd touched his cheek, spoke sadly through her ache: "Goodbye, Charles."
She hadn't returned to the dance.
And now, three months later, when home had, she thought, begun to heal her heart, he was back in her life again.
She'd see him tonight. Joy filled her; she felt like singing. Then she thought of Ozzy.
"That's all," said Latimer. "I'm coming down."
Shanda began to tie bags of enriched compost together into a kite tail. Poor Ozzy. She'd only seen him once since she got back, at the homecoming party, though Takahashi Home Farm currently wasn't far from K-berg. Now her joy was mixed with sadness. And guilt.
Trailing a line of sacks behind her, Shanda pulled herself into the thicket, and into a dim, warm, green world. Here, away from the poles, rotation permitted glances of light to filter down. Thousands of vines sought it, thrusting their small leaves into every gleam. She pushed through something like a stand of grass or reeds with palm-like clusters at the top. It wasn't tangled; each stem pointed relentlessly up. Every meter or so she passed one of the trunks, thick as her wrist, that supported the huge outer leaves.
Here at the bottom, there was no break between undergrowth and upper; every level was jammed with life; she swam through a pool of green. From above, shaken leaves marked her passage.
Disorienting: a dark green curtain of leaves before her, a hint of mist, the glimmer of water condensed on stems. Disorienting, but familiar. Shanda had first started working in the fields when she was nine, and had been in vacuum since she was six. She'd been in free fall, inside, as long as she could remember. This was home, and it was good to be back.
Charles, she thought; Ozzy. Poor Ozzy. He deserved better than this. He'd always been there, steady as a brother. She loved him, too and had always meant to marry him. He knew it. Now Charles was here.
Shanda paused to orient herself, brushing damp leaves off her helmet. The asteroid had been no bigger than a large Earth house, but the plants had subjected it to a slow explosion. The roots of the spytes went to the very center of the former rock. The field was now a pile of boulders, rocks, gravel, sand, clay--and humus--bound together by roots and gravity. It had a living soil, composed of shattered rock, top-dressing, moss, and the soil bacteria that first began the breakdown of the rock.
Shanda disentangled her train of fertilizer sacks and pulled herself on.
It got darker as she approached the other pole, where no gleams penetrated. Pulling up the compost bags, Shanda unzipped the first one and spilled the top-dressing with practiced ease into the aerial roots. No fear of the compost freezing; the spytes pumped heat down from the big outer leaves.
And then the next sack, and so on back to the other pole, where Shanda loaded up with another pile of fertilizer bags. She concentrated on her work, trying to put Charles Durant and Osborn Takahashi out of her mind.
Over her head, the Chaytor clambered among the stems, harvesting the meter-long pods, choosing only the brown ripe ones. The pods were jammed full of kernels that would have been instantly familiar to an Earthly wheat farmer.
They worked and rested, spreading fertilizer, checking the health of the leaves, climbing the trunks to harvest ripe pods. On Earth, at the University of Iowa, and again at Texas A&M, she'd seen Earthly farms. After coming home she realized that only in space, supported by cutting-edge technology, did farmers do so much hard manual labor. Earthly harvesters were simple machines; theirs were complex, fragile, and expensive.
Six hours it took them to service this small field, but they'd telphered tons of wheat aboard. Back in the boat, Shanda was exhausted and her hair sprayed out in damp ribbons.
"I'm racked," she said, and was glad to see that her brothers were just as spent.
"A good day's work," Latimer said, and turned to the com. "K-boat Three to K-berg Home," he said. "Coming in--and ready for supper."
Presently Gran's voice: "K-berg to K-boat Three. Supper'll be ready when you are. That feller wants to talk to you real bad, Shandy."
2: A Menace from Earth
Their blunt bow pointed toward Konigsberg Light: blue red blue, the brightest light in the universe, except for the Sun. It drowned the faint stars that were the rocks of home.
"An hour to Home," Latimer said. "So, you like this Charles?"
Emrys looked at her eagerly; ready, she saw, to grin.
Shanda was ready for this question. "Well enough, but I never thought he'd follow me Out."
"You must've made a bigger hit than you realized," Latimer mused. "You were studying pretty hard all the time."
"That's true." Her grant from the Grange was conditional on her maintaining a high GPA, as well as on her teaching what she'd learned.
To Emrys's visible disappointment, Latimer dropped it, turning to the computer. Shanda tried not to let her relief show. Work helped. They went over the records of North Seven: tons of wheat harvested, tons of fertilizer spread, the field's instrument readings--rotation, insolation, the strain gauges, their general impressions of the field's health.
Shanda worked automatically, thinking of Charles.
Konigsberg grew before them, from a dim constellation to a cluster.
K-berg Home was a tight swarm: the Wheel, the older Little Wheel, the original tumbling Rock; also, five small fields, the algae composting bubble, a couple of small metallic asteroids, numerous stony ones of various size. The Ship, two small boats, frames of steel beams, gangway cables, and nets of assorted stuff. The big harvester boat wasn't in, so Caldi and her crew weren't back yet. Shanda saw it all as if for the first time, wondering how it had looked to Charles Durant.
Rocks, docks, and socks, all in a complex slow pavane around K-berg's unseen center of gravity.
There was a working party at the warehouse, making up capsules for Earth. They offered to unload the boat--probably had heard about Charles. Emrys brought them nearly to zero at the hub, and she and Latimer stepped across into the lock. When the lock pressurized, they took their helmets off. First to her room for a quick shower and shampoo--what to wear?
Shanda swung herself out of the lock and against the bulkhead, gripping the handhold. She was immediately tackled.
"Shanda! It's so good to see you--"
Charles--he'd met them at the airlock--
"Ow!" The impact banged her against the bulkhead hard enough to start tears. "Hey! No free-fall wrestling!"
"Oh, sorry, I'm still not used to microgravity," Charles said, flailing around with one hand for a hold.
Shanda twisted out of his grip, pushing him against the bulkhead. Damn, better to have had Emrys grinning like a goof than Latt's steady assessing stare.
"Shanda! I'm so glad to see you! It's been months!" He was smiling, looking happy and self-satisfied.
She looked like a witch. She knew she did. "Good to see you, too, Charles. And a bit of a surprise."
"I should've called ahead? I wanted to surprise you. I counted on Spacer hospitality." He turned to Latimer, held out a hand. "Charles Durant. You'd be--Latimer? Shanda's brother?"
"Yeah," said Latt. He nodded at the hand. "Shaking in free fall is a jig, so we don't bother."
"I see your point. Pleasure to meet you, anyway. You've been out harvesting, Caitlin tells me."
Shanda, smoothing her sweaty hair, froze at this casual mention of Gran's name.
"Yes," Latt said, imperturbable. He nodded at Shanda. "It's not good etiquette to meet someone at the hub, especially if they've been working in free fall. Give the girl time to take a shower and fix her hair."
Charles laughed, and Shanda's heart thumped. She forgave him everything. He was good-looking, but he was also so--so boyish, so unoffended and inoffensive--as eager as a kitten.
"All right, I get it. It'll take me a while to get the hang of Spacer ways." He turned to Shanda, did an absurd bend that brought his knees up--a bow, she realized. Covering his eyes, he said, "Sorry to have seen you in dishabille. Fortunately I didn't get a good look. I'll soon forget everything; I have a very bad memory--"
Shanda smiled but cut him off. "All right, all right, don't trip on your tongue. Come on, let's get down."
Latimer and she got off on the third deck. "See you in a few," she said, and hurried down the corridor to her room.
She was panting as if she'd been working hard. My hair! she thought, wishing she could have washed and dried it on the boat. What he must think! Then she thought, well, it's probably just as well that he see me at my worst. I thought that time I was out in the rain was bad enough--but now I smell as well as look bad.
She dived into the shower, rinsed off her skinsuit, unzipped it and peeled out of it with a moan of relief. Then a hasty shower; she washed her hair. Peering into the mirror as she dried and brushed it, Shanda groaned. It was going to look fluffy, as if she was still in free fall.
At the end of the corridor, beside the elevator, a door gave onto the third-level terrace. Each of the three levels of the building block was smaller than the one below, giving two terraces. Shanda peered over the rail at the terrace below. The family was already gathering. She hurried down the stairs, smiling, feeling a surge of pure joy.
Charles was among the group at the kitchen hatch. Shanda felt that about a thousand of the two hundred K-bergers were staring at her as she joined them.
Charles smiled at her. "It was worth the wait," he said.
They all grabbed bowls and platters and carried them to the tables that overlooked the fields below. This took a couple of trips. Shanda realized that only about fifty K-bergers were here--they worked three shifts.
"Sit here, Charles," Gran said, indicating the chair at her right hand. "You here, Shanda," at her left.
Charles turned and bowed to her. "Thank you, Caitlin." Already he'd learned to handle himself in the one-third Standard gravity.
"This afternoon I bored your grandmother," he said to Shanda. "I don't know exactly what I expected, but Konigsberg is much bigger and, well, more comfortable, than I expected. I know, don't believe what you see on video, but it's hard to overcome all that childish conditioning. The heroic space miners in their rude habitats, ignorant but shrewd."
"Well, we're farmers, and third-generation ones; we have a big capital investment," Gran said. "Beginners do struggle, though not as much as in the old days. It's not the kind of investment where you get rich. Farming's a way of life."
"So is mining and prospecting," Latimer said. "But modern miners live in the smelter habitats. Very comfortable."
Charles looked down out at the fields and ponds, up at the blue translucent ceiling that aped the sky of Earth. "I expected melt-stone walls and bare pipes. Log cabins in space."
"Nowadays there are space companies who'll build you a rough wheel pretty cheaply," Gran said. "Thousands of immigrant farm companies setting up."
"The Wheel's cheaper than it looks," Latimer told him. "It's just a tube of melt-stone with an inside diameter of twenty meters. Braced with a microsteel net, in a steel frame with four elevators to the hub. Most of it, in other words, was made in the Belt."
"But even those parts cost money, and the parts that are imported cost even more," Gran said. "It's ten years old now, and we'll be paying for it for the next twenty."
The family fell silent, subdued: Shanda's father had died during the building of the Wheel.
"But even Home Rock was not as uncomfortable as in Earthly videos," Shanda said, after a moment. "Maybe you saw it on your way in--the one that looks like a long potato with a big lump on each end. It tumbles end over end, and the two lumps are the habitats--about a tenth gee. Even in the old days, it was fixed up quite comfortably. Nowadays it's mainly used for offices, storage, and by ... newlyweds."
He smiled at that but, she noted gratefully, forbore to comment. He turned to Gran. "Your capital investment must make Konigsberg Farm a valuable property."
"Couple of hundred million." Gran shrugged. "It's the same as on Earth. Farmers have a lot of capital, so you'd call them rich. But their income above outgo makes them poor, and they don't work any eight-hour day to get it, nor any four-day week. We sell wholesale and buy retail, you know."
"Yes, but you've set up buyers' co-ops, so you're not doing so badly as all that, surely?"
Everybody stared at him. "Son," Gran said, "only the Grange keeps our heads above water. Most of the price of asteroid foods on Earth is the shipping, handling, and processing."
Charles looked at the table, smiling. "You do eat well, for po' folks."
Gran nodded, looked down the table with some pride. There were four kinds of vat-grown meat, fish, fresh fruit, three kinds of bread, and scads of vegetable dishes. All their own produce. Also a half-grown cat, prowling from dish to dish.
"Deloise," Latimer said. "Get your cat off the table."
"K-berg has always been able to feed itself," Shanda said, as her niece pursued the kitten. "Only our strenuous lives keep us in shape. I was getting soft on Earth."
Charles laughed. "Here I thought I'd be the strong guy because of my Earthly muscles. But do you have some way to offset the price of goods you must buy from Earth?"
Gran chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. "Well, it's no secret that the Belt is trying to industrialize itself. We're building our own ships, processing plants, and so on. Lots of good investment opportunities there. Upwards of sixty percent of the grain we ship to Earth is milled--flour, meal. Soon we'll be selling meat; already some farms are selling fish. And we've been building tug hulls for a long time, just buying the fusion rockets and instruments from Earth."
"Tugs?"
Gran gave him a look; surely everybody knew about the canisters of grain, chemicals, and metal that were at all times falling toward Earth?
Shanda explained briefly.
"Oh, I remember seeing something about 'The Pipeline from Space.'"
Gran turned to Latimer. "How was the field?"
"Good," he said, and gave a few details about soil condition and production. "It's put by for, say, a year. Next harvest, three or four months."
Gran nodded and turned to Shanda. "You remember Outer Nine? One of your earliest fields, back when you were, what, ten? Well, it's drifted so far out that we're selling it to the Takahashi family. I've invited Nogalese Devander over to discuss it. And Ozzy."
"G-good," Shanda said, and quickly took a sip of coffee.
"You're selling one of your fields?" Charles asked, showing nothing but polite interest, but looking at her alertly.
Shanda felt alarm, guilt, and confusion. She had no idea what her face showed.
"Yes," said Gran. "We don't have a planet for our fields to orbit around, so the outer ones wander, and over the years they get so far away that it doesn't pay to work them. We'll make a deal with the Takahashis. We'll take turns working the field for a few years; then it'll drift farther into their zone, and they'll own it."
To Shanda: "Ozzy'll be here tomorrow. You haven't seen him since your homecoming, have you?"
"No, I haven't," she said, managing to sound normal, you conniving old woman.
Charles's expression was thoughtful.
3: The Green, Green Hills of Earth
After supper Gran got Shanda aside. The old woman led the way slowly down the stairs to the lawn that edged the fields here.
"Gran," Shanda said, as soon as they were out of hearing. "What did you mean by inviting Ozzy Takahashi over? You could've waited--"
"You know this Charles a lot better than you ever let on, right?"
"Ye-es."
"I knew before I ever saw you two together. Well, one of those young men is going to get a hell of a disappointment. You can't marry them both."
They descended in silence.
"Think Ozzy'll get over it?" Gran asked.
"He-he's able to t-take care of himself. I mean, he's not romantic." Weakly she added, "He'll be all right."
Gran grunted in skepticism. "So, what are this young feller's prospects?"
Shanda was aghast. "Gran, he hasn't said anything about immigrating yet."
"Well, marrying in is the classic way of joining the company." Konigsberg, Inc. was a closed corporation.
They were on the grass now. Shanda frowned. "Well. He's--or his family--is mildly wealthy. A chain of hardware stores in the American Midwest. Obviously he can afford a long trip into space."
"On a wild goose chase, if he never proposed to you before starting."
Shanda was silent, guilty.
...
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