Art: Adi Kurniawan
The sun rose over the desert, catching the edges of the roof supports in a liquid russet glow and casting a grid of shadows over the cactus beds beneath. The angular geometric patterns made a stark contrast to the twisted, organic shapes thrown by the prickly pears planted in every second bed down the centre tunnel. Between them, the barrel cactuses squatted in their rows; gnarled, spiky, and indifferent.
I took a mouthful of water and hooked the bottle onto my belt before fishing a breakfast bar out of my pocket. I couldn’t bring myself to read the ingredients; the ‘new and improved’ recipe touted on the wrapper was almost guaranteed to be the same appetizing blend of pasteurized cactus pulp, powdered locust, fake fruit flavour, and just enough sweetener to make it palatable. I peeled back the wrapper and took a bite.
Check that. Almost palatable. Oh well.
The sun lifted clear of the horizon as I chewed on the rest of the bar. I shook myself out of my reverie, washed the sticky grittiness out of my mouth with another swig of water and sat down in front of the computer. I tossed the crumpled wrapper into the recycle bin, pulled up the previous night’s logs and began paging through them.
To the naked eye, each of Greenhouse One’s three tunnels looked much the same as any commercial glasshouse from the last fifty years or so, although their comparatively slender framework would probably have given the game away to an engineer. Like every other modern building, they were riddled with strain gauges, thermocouples, moisture sensors, and everything else that goes into a SmartSuite.
Humidity levels were on the curve, there hadn’t been any unexpected temperature fluctuations overnight, and the total collected water figures were squarely average. The pressure sensors told me that the southerly night breeze was beginning to swing around to the west. I tabbed over to the irrigation readouts for the centre tunnel and nodded in satisfaction.
In truth, most of the SmartSuite’s capabilities were overkill for a glasshouse, but the water monitoring systems most definitely were not. When every drop of water in the soil had to be accounted for because it was piped in from the local desalination plant, you quickly developed a fine appreciation for your recycling and smart irrigation systems. Forget about spraying water willy-nilly over the beds; each and every barrel or prickly pear in the centre tunnel had its own set of metered micro-dispensers buried next to its roots and hooked up to an electronic management system. Likewise for the dwarf saguaros and the other fruiting cactuses in the right-hand tunnel. The left-hand tunnel ran on a separate closed system – the propagation beds got their own tailored nutrient supply laced with auxins to speed up root development.
I flipped over to the master readouts for the right-hand tunnel and swore out loud. Half of the main schematic was outlined in pulsing red, indicating a blockage or other fault somewhere in the network. A few minutes work isolated the fault to the… oh great. It just had to be there, didn’t it?
Well, that was my morning gone. I could have waited for Deven, of course, but he wasn’t due in till the afternoon shift. According to the manual, I could have left the repairs to him as the senior engineer – the backup systems were there for a reason, and even if they were knocked offline too, the cactuses would survive just fine until we got everything working again. Whether I would survive a day’s worth of Deven’s patient-but-disappointed looks was another matter.
In Deven’s world, you depended on the backups for exactly as long as it took to get the primary systems up and running again, and not a moment longer. I’d never quite dared to ask him whether he learned that the hard way or whether he was just naturally cautious. Either way, he’d been living in this desert since before I was born, so I figured he was probably a good example to follow.
I sighed and hauled out a maintenance cart, dropped my tablet into the pouch on its side, and checked out the tools on the SmartSuite inventory system. I thought for a moment, then palmed open the food locker and retrieved a lunch pack before clipping a rebreather onto my belt. I didn’t think Greenhouse One had ever been breached, but there was always a first time and you don’t want to be breathing the air outside. Then I began the laborious task of trundling the cart out to the far end of Tunnel Three.
I squinted up at the roof, trying to estimate the time from the sun’s position before checking my watch. Another little trick that Deven taught me, although if I ever needed to use it for real then ‘running out fast’ was likely to be a pretty solid estimate of the time.
The cart wheels squeaked against polished concrete, rumbling over the pipe protectors and cable runs that crisscrossed Tunnel Three’s floor. Pushing a cart in here was harder than it looked; whichever way you went, the floor sloped towards a central drain. Great for catching and recycling any spillages; not so great for keeping anything wheeled moving in a straight line. By the time I reached the end of the tunnel, I was breathing heavily, and my arms were definitely beginning to feel the strain. I kicked the wheel locks into place before pulling the workbench out from its slot in the side of the cart and unfolding it. Then I set about isolating the affected cactus beds from the main water supply.
By lunchtime, I’d dug out all the micro-dispensers from beds A through H and had laid them out on the floor on a sheet of polythene. The primary pump sat on the workbench, ready for stripping down. I looked up at the sound of approaching footsteps, wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and waved at Deven. Before handing him my tablet, I cleaned my hands with a squirt of sanitizer gel and dried them on my already mud-streaked towel.
“I already saw the SmartSuite readouts, but thank you. A filter blockage?” It wasn’t quite a question.
“Uh-huh. Solid enough that the backflush cycle tripped a fault last night.” I watched him page through the system faults on my tablet.
“And you intend to clean the pump and dispensers as a precaution?” Another not-quite question.
“Yup. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them but…”
“You want to double check. Very good.” Deven’s lips twitched in amusement at my carefully neutral expression. “I may yet make an engineer of you, but for now, I believe it is lunchtime. Thorough work requires a…”
“Full stomach,” I finished, my own stomach suddenly growling in agreement. “I hear you, boss.” I put my tools back in their caddy, fished out my lunch pack, and sat down on the edge of one of the cactus beds. Deven arranged himself cross-legged on the floor, his movements stiffer than I remembered. I studied him for a moment, noting the age spots on the back of his hands and the deep-set wrinkles around his eyes. His short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair seemed greyer than I remembered, standing out against his leathery, dark brown skin.
Turning away before he noticed me staring, I tore open my lunch pack and regarded the oval loaf of pumpernickel-dark bread without enthusiasm. I broke off its top and inspected the lumpy, brownish-yellow contents, my nose wrinkling at the smell. Spooning up a mouthful of the slop with the loaf end, I waited for the inevitable chilli burn and was pleasantly surprised when my tongue failed to ignite. I read the list of ingredients on the wrapper, swallowing my mouthful before looking up. “They’re spoiling us this week. Soya, mushroom, and actual dehydrated potato.”
Deven raised his eyebrows. “A new and improved recipe?”
“Aren’t they always? This one is almost edible though.”
“A pleasant change.” Deven broke open his own ration pack and snapped the top off his own loaf. “Yes, indeed. Almost edible. No more than thirty percent crushed insect, I would say.”
We finished our lunch in companionable silence. Deven brushed the last few crumbs off his beard, climbed to his feet, and eyed the assorted components laid out on the floor. “How much progress have you made with the cleaning?”
I stood up and tossed my lunch wrapper in the recycler. “I hadn’t yet. The stripping down took me all morning.”
“In that case, if you don’t mind, I will dismantle and clean the pump and filters, while you attend to the micro-dispenser tubing. I’ll find it easier to work on my feet.”
“Sure.” I busied myself unclipping the air duster from the side of the cart, unwilling to meet his eyes. I plugged it in and began cleaning out the dispensers while Deven picked up a screwdriver and turned his attention to the pump casing.
The work was a frustrating combination of repetitive enough to be tedious but fiddly enough not to be relaxing. Dismantle dispenser, test sensors and valve, blow out tubing and nozzle head with air duster, hook up to water supply on cart, run flow test. Repeat with the next dispenser. I was most of the way through the pile when a peculiarly fetid smell rolled over me, almost making me gag. “Whew – you found the blockage then?”
Deven grunted. “And I’ll dispose of it through the macerator. I don’t believe this will benefit our grow beds.”
“Not if that smell is anything to go by. Man, but that’s a ripe one.” I heard the distinctive rustle of a compost bag, and the stench relented slightly. “No wonder the backflush wigged out.”
“Indeed. Have you found any blockages in the dispensers?”
“Nothing that the air duster couldn’t dislodge.”
“Good.” Deven walked over and inspected the pile of cleaned components. “I’ll have finished the last filter unit by the time you’re finished.” He glanced at the sky. “We should have enough time left to rebuild the system before the end of the shift.”
He was right – having two pairs of hands to re-plant the dispenser grids made everything else go a lot faster. The outside lights were just starting to come on as we ran the final diagnostics on the newly reinstalled pump. Deven nodded in satisfaction as, one by one, the red warning lights on my tablet blinked out. I watched him unlock the tool cart’s wheels and heave it around, trying to hide my concern at the trembling in his arms. I should have known better.
“It was difficult to maintain my exercise regime from a hospital bed.”
I stepped forward, one hand reaching out to help, only to pull up short at the expression on Deven’s face. The irregular squeaking of rubber on concrete broke the silence and I fell in beside him as he began pushing the cart back to its storage rack. I studied my tablet for a moment, unable to meet my mentor’s eyes. “So how was…”
“The hospital? They looked after me well and they don’t think I’ll need to go back again.”
I blew out my cheeks in relief. “That’s fantastic news!” A sudden chill ran down my spine. “Isn’t it? You don’t need to go back because the treatment worked, right?”
“My final scan was clear. The last T-cell infusion was a success, it seems.”
I grinned foolishly. “Score one for modern biotech!”
“Modern engineering,” Deven corrected me with a faint smile. “Genetic engineering is still engineering.”
I was too happy to argue. “A few weeks at the gym to get over the bed rest, and you can think about booking your ticket home!” I paused. “Maybe more than a few weeks. Recovering from cancer and all that.”
“Indeed.” Deven fell silent for a moment. “I asked about the journey home before I left the hospital. The doctors did not recommend it.” His voice took on the clipped tones that I associated with technical briefings. “The radiation risk is high given my age, and my oncology and immunology profiles are both lower-quartile. Hence there is a non-trivial likelihood that I will develop another cancer type. If I do so, then I am a less than optimal candidate for further T-cell treatments and will probably be reliant on medium specificity chemotherapy.”
Oh. I bit my lip, feeling the happiness draining out of me. “That’s rough, boss. Really rough, I mean.”
“Yes, I thought so too to begin with.” Deven stared up at the darkening, butterscotch-coloured sky, which was just beginning to fade into the blue of sunset. “But I’ve been thinking about it a lot. After all, it is not so long ago that people would have been envious of me spending the rest of my days here.” He pointed. “And even now, there are not so many people who have seen that.”
I looked up, my gaze following the direction of his finger. A line of three evening stars reached towards the horizon, two white and one azure. Phobos and Deimos – fear and terror – pointing the way to Earth. An all-too-apt metaphor, I thought, for my friend’s abandoned journey. I lowered my eyes and stared out across the Martian desert, lit by a last sliver of daylight. “No. There are worse places to spend the rest of your life.”
* * *
Richard Gregson lives in Bathgate, Scotland and works for a Scottish biotech company as an intellectual property manager. A previous job at a crop research facility provided inspiration for the setting of ‘The Cactus Farmers’.
This story was first published in Shoreline of Infinity 29