Quarter Share attftgaotsc-1

by Nathan Lowell

  Diane squealed convincingly. “Ooh, that would be just so perfect. Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron. I’ll look forward to meeting you.”

  “Likewise Ms. Ardele…I mean D-Diane.”

  “Toodles until then.” Diane waved her fingers in the direction of the pickup before cutting the connection.

  I just stood there staring at her. “You know, you’re shameless.”

  She gave me a smug little grin. “Yes, and thank you for noticing. The nice thing about clichés is that they only can become one if enough people recognize them. Trust me, Ish, that man is a cliché.” She shook her head and sighed.

  Fifteen ticks later, the very busy Mr. Cameron was shaking our hands outside a private shuttle dock halfway around the station from the Lois. He wasted no time getting us into the ship and we boosted away from the station. It took less than half a stan for us to cruise to a nearby asteroid. We watched the approach through the shuttle’s ports.

  Diane dropped the cutie-pie routine when we settled on the shuttle. Mr. Cameron was too intent on her cleavage to notice, but he played the tour guide role well.

  “This is one of the larger residential rocks in the system.”

  “I thought we were going to visit a farm?” Diane turned from looking out of the port.

  “We are.” He beamed a self-satisfied smile. “Our farms are all in the residential areas.”

  “Really? Is it because you need labor?” She kept her face straight and I gained a new level of respect for her acting skills at that moment.

  Again, he made with the condescending smile. “Oh, no.” He reached over and patted her hand. “We need their-” He stopped in mid sentence realizing what he was about to say and casting about for some other way to say it.

  “Sludge?” I suggested.

  He seemed to notice for the first time that I was aboard. “Yes,” he said at last, “the…ah…sludge.”

  The shuttle docked in a fully enclosed landing bay and we walked into a processing area. It was all enclosed and automated but Cameron pointed out the salient parts. “This is where we harvest the mushrooms and freeze dry them for transport. We keep a few for fresh product, but the real money is in dried. Less mass, you know.”

  Diane nodded. “Oh really, how interesting.”

  He showed us to the next room, a large chamber with several noisy machines. Cameron shouted so we could hear him over the racket. “We get the growing medium in big cakes from the environmental sections. We run it through these mills to break it up to make it easier for the mushroom’s roots to grow.” He beckoned us through the next door and the noise level dropped. He showed us piles of flaked sludge being mixed with some kind of wet, green plant material. “We mix the byproducts from our hydroponics with the flaked medium here and form it into what we call logs.” He pointed out where a machine extruded the mixture into loose net tubes like sausages a quarter meter in diameter and a meter long. I could see Diane biting her lip to keep from laughing. The environmental crew had a rather literal view of their work. That view colored their perception of the world and tended to make them laugh at common euphemistic digressions.

  Cameron pointed to where a small diameter tube stuck each log before being clipped onto an overhead track and trundled down a long dark tunnel. “Here we inoculate the log with mushroom spawn. It takes about a month for the roots to spread through the log. After that the roots start pushing through the surface and forming mushrooms which we harvest.”

  Like some magician, he flung open a nearby door and showed us a nearly identical track bearing logs now studded thickly with fresh mushrooms out of another long dark tunnel. The track ran into a large machine. “We strip off the netting, shake out the medium, and separate the mushrooms from their roots.”

  “Mycelium.” Diane corrected him with a wry smile.

  “I beg your pardon?” Her comment took Cameron off guard.

  She gazed at him for a moment. “They’re not roots but mycelium, or probably more correctly, hyphae. Do you use the same growing medium for all your varieties?”

  Cameron blinked rapidly, trying to catch up with where he had been derailed. “Yes, basically. Some require temperature variations and other get different nutrient baths but I couldn’t tell you which gets what.”

  Diane nodded and held out her hand. “Thank you ever so much, Mr. Cameron.” She cooed and dropped smoothly into cutie-pie mode and let him get back on his internal script. “Do you think we could go back to the station now? All this excitement has made me a little dizzy.” She fanned herself with her free hand.

  Cameron became immediately solicitous. “Of course, my dear, of course. Please, right this way…”

  It took less than a stan for us to get back to Margary and bid our fond adieus to Mr. Cameron. The hard part was not laughing ourselves silly before we got out of sight and earshot.

  After the worst of the giggles tapered off, I turned to Diane. “So, what do you think?”

  “I think sludge just got a lot more interesting.”

  “Yeah, me too. If we were going to grow mushrooms on the Lois, what would we need?”

  “So that’s your game. I knew you were up to something. Changing the whole trading culture isn’t enough?”

  I just chuckled and shrugged. “What can I say, I’m frugal. My mom raised me not to waste anything and when I heard we were giving away sludge cakes as terraforming base, I got this wild idea that there must be something better we could do with it.”

  Diane laughed. “You want to make money on sewage?”

  I shrugged. “The more money the ship makes, the more money I make. I don’t care what it starts life as, so long as it ends as a cred in my account.”

  She looked me up and down before speaking, “Ishmael Wang, I like the way you think.”

  Chapter 24

  Margary Station

  2352-January-12

  When we got to the Lois’ lock, I turned to Diane. “Come on, I’ll buy ya a coffee.”

  “Coffee’s free, ya cheapskate.”

  “Okay, then you buy.”

  We went to the mess deck where Pip was setting up for lunch. He looked up when we entered. “Where have you two been?”

  “We took a tour of a mushroom farm,” I told Pip.

  Diane nodded. “Yeah, it actually was quite interesting.”

  We settled into a table just as Brill and Francis came in for lunch. Diane waved them over. “You’ll never guess where we’ve been.”

  Francis looked at her for a heartbeat. “Mushroom farm.”

  Diane started to say, “How-”

  Brill interrupted her, “We heard you as we were coming up the passage. I recognize the symptoms so you better spill your beans before your head explodes.”

  Diane tried to look innocent. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

  It didn’t work. Brill and Francis just looked at her.

  She shrugged. “Okay, we’ve been thinking about sludge.”

  “Sludge?” Francis repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  Brill looked at me. “Let’s try you. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, it’s just like Diane said…sludge.”

  Brill and Francis started chuckling. Brill looked back and forth between the two of us. “Can you give us a bit more of a clue?”

  I took pity on them. “Ever since I heard that we were giving away sludge cakes I’ve had this idea that we might be able to use it in some way. When I learned that Margary is a huge producer of mushrooms it occurred to me that the only thing they have out here is tunnels, dark, and sludge.”

  Diane nodded with a rueful grimace on her face. “Ain’t that the truth.”

  “So I called up the supplier who sold us the mushrooms for the galley and asked if we could see the facilities. He was nice enough to run us over in his shuttle this morning and we saw a mushroom farm.”

  Francis looked at Diane. “And you just went along for the ride?”

&nbs
p; She shrugged. “Mr. Cameron was a sweet man who was more than happy to show lil’ ol’ me his great big logs,” she said in her cutie-pie voice.

  Brill almost snorted coffee out of her nose laughing. “I wish you would warn me before you do that.”

  Francis ignored the performance and prompted me, “I still don’t get it.”

  “All their farms are in the residential asteroids. They get the sludge from their environmental sections and use it as the base for a growing medium for the mushrooms.”

  Brill frowned. “But it’s sterile.”

  I nodded. “That’s actually a good thing. There are plenty of nutrients left in the waste and they’re concentrated. What it is, is dense. They run the sludge cakes through a chipper and then mix it with hydroponics leftovers to add moisture and texture. That keeps the flakes from clumping up tight again. Cameron seemed to indicate it was for nutrients for the mushrooms, but he had a lot of misconceptions.”

  Francis and Brill both looked at Diane then.

  “What? Why are you lookin’ at lil’ ol’ me?”

  Francis snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  I continued without letting them get me off track, “Anyway, they extrude this chipped sludge mixture into loose netting. It looks like sausages only a lot bigger. They inoculate them with…what did he call it, Diane? Not spores.”

  “Spawn.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Then they send them into the tunnels to grow. When ready for harvest, the logs are brought back and run through a shaker to separate the mushrooms from the dross. Finally, they freeze dry the results.”

  Brill nodded and looked back and forth between Diane and I. “Okay, sounds interesting. But I still don’t see what that has to do with our sludge.”

  I shrugged and looked into my coffee mug. “I don’t know. But I just keep thinking there’s something we could do with it. Make it into compost and grow something. I don’t know.”

  Francis snorted a laugh. “Really? What would you compost it with? You need plant material, don’t you?”

  Diane and I looked at each other before Diane looked back at Francis. “Used algae matrix.”

  Brill sat her coffee cup down gently. I could see her and Francis lock eyes across the table and they were both nodding slowly, apparently following the same logic path.

  Finally Francis spoke, “That’s brilliant.”

  Despite my initial enthusiasm, I was shocked. “You mean it could work?”

  Francis shrugged. “I don’t know. We’d have to play with it to find the right mixture, but I can’t imagine why not. All the chemicals are there. The question is structure.”

  Brill said what we were all thinking, “Holy crap.”

  We all nodded.

  My tablet bipped to remind me about my plans for the flea market. “I’m going shopping with Bev. Anybody want to join us?”

  Brill shook her head. “Other plans.”

  Francis nodded. “You bet.”

  Diane popped up from her seat. “Count me in.”

  I followed her lead and stood. “Okay, let me see if Bev is ready. Meet you at the lock in what…fifteen ticks?”

  They all nodded and I left them there talking about sludge and algae while I headed to deck berthing.

  ***

  Bev was just buckling into her leathers when I got to the berthing area. “Hey, where have you been all morning?”

  “Checking out a mushroom farm.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” She shook her head and answered her own question. “No, you’re not. I’m getting to know you well enough by now.”

  “Right. I’m not kidding, but I’m ready to go shopping. Is it okay if some others join us.”

  She shrugged. “Sure, the more the merrier.”

  “Francis and Diane will meet us at the lock. They wanna stock up for St. Cloud.”

  She chuckled. “Let’s hope we have as good of luck here as we did in Gugara, eh?” She slammed her locker and we headed for the lock.

  The flea market was in full swing and the four of us caravanned through the aisles. There were a lot of stone and metal goods. It didn’t surprise me given the nature of the system. The trick would be to find stuff with low enough mass that we’d be able to get it aboard. As we strolled along, I really began to appreciate Pip’s idea of filling the empty container with freeze-dried mushrooms.

  We hadn’t been there long when we came to booth two-sixteen. I recognized the workmanship on display before I realized where we were. Bev introduced us to Ingo Reihtman the guy who made them. He had shocking red hair, redder even than Diane’s and a slight limp. There was no question he was a master of the belt buckle. The majority of them were the size and shape that Beverly had showed us but the variation in use of stone, polish, and pattern were amazing.

  I stepped up to him and shook his hand. “Mr. Reihtman, my friend, Philip Carstairs will be around tomorrow-”

  He nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes, Pip. I talked with him yesterday and I understand you have mass requirements that need to be satisfied. I look forward to doing business with you. This is a good opportunity for my work to get exposure beyond this system. I am quite excited.”

  As we talked one particular buckle caught my eye. It was cast in a gold colored metal with a rough, knobby finish. The stone was shaped into a black dragon’s head in silhouette with a red inlaid eye.

  “Well, I have a souvenir of my last port. I picked up an exquisite hand tooled leather belt and I need a buckle for it. Would you sell me one of yours?”

  “Mr. Wang, do you think I’m sitting here for my health? Please, save the haggling preparation. Do you see the buckle you wish?”

  I nodded.

  “Fifteen creds.”

  “A very generous price.”

  “In that case…” He took the dragon’s head buckle down from the wall without my pointing it out. He had a small smile on his face. “Would you like me to wrap it for you?”

  As we left the booth Beverly said, “I had to jaw him down from forty for mine.”

  “Well, Pip and I will be buying a bunch of them tomorrow. Maybe he thought he was priming the pump for the deal.”

  “Maybe. I thought you sold all your belts the other day.”

  “All but one that I left in my locker. Drus made it specially for me.”

  “Can I see it?”

  I realized suddenly that I had just painted myself into a corner and tried to change the subject. “We still need to find some trade goods to take to St. Cloud. So, keep your eyes open, okay?”

  She chuckled.

  Diane pointed out a display of ceramics at a booth coming up and we descended on the seller as a group. The goods were nice, but expensive. Clay had to be imported which drove up the price. I passed on it, but Francis bought a couple of small pieces.

  We continued through the flea market, eventually passing by slot four seventy-eight, empty since we hadn’t set up, and walked by Virgil’s wife with a nod, a smile, and a wave. Bev and I did our best not to crack up but we did admire her chair.

  A few booths farther down a display of necklaces caught my eye. The seller had pinned them to a fabric backing for display. Each was unique. Bev saw me looking and said, “I gotta give you credit, Ish. You’ve got one hell of an eye.” She turned back to look for Diane and Francis and nodded discreetly at the necklaces. I could see Diane’s eyes widen from where I was standing but she and Francis sauntered over nonchalantly. We all wandered over to the display.

  The fellow behind the counter introduced himself as we approached, “Good day, gentle people. My name is Franz Neubert. These fine necklaces were created by my wife, Nerile, from only the finest local materials. May I show you anything in particular?”

  The pieces consisted of small, highly polished beads with an accent stone or pendant hanging from each. Franz pointed out that they were strung on a slightly elastic thread that helped prevent breakage. He spent some time pointing out the durability of the workmanship. There was an excellent va
riety some were strung in a monochromatic pattern while others were brilliant explosions of color.

  Diane saw the one I was focusing on and shook her head slightly. “It’s pretty, but you would have to be wearing just white or black for that one.”

  I reconsidered the necklace and had to agree. Diane had style. If she said it was a problem, I wasn’t going to argue. There were enough other pieces in blacks, whites, blues, and soft yellows.

  I was standing there considering another one when I realized that I was being crazy. The prices were good, but I tried to think about selling these in a flea market on St. Cloud. The necklace I was focusing on was made of dozens of small black beads with a gold colored vein running through it. The accent bead was a natural nugget of a gold colored mineral that I assumed was iron pyrite. The price on the display said five hundred creds. Even assuming that I could talk Franz down to something like three hundred, I had a hard time imagining that I would find a flea market buyer on St. Cloud who’d pay the kind of money it would take for a decent margin. I sighed and put the necklace down.

  I bowed slightly to Franz and slipped from the booth to see what else I might be able to find. Beverly, Diane, and Francis followed. “What’s the matter?” Bev looked at me curiously when we had stepped out of earshot. Franz was busy with another set of customers at any rate.

  I shook my head. “Those were beautiful, no question. The prices were good and the mass was ok.”

  Francis raised an eyebrow. “I hear a but coming.”

  “But I can’t afford to buy more than one or two of them and the prices I’d have to charge on St. Cloud I’m not sure I would make a good profit.”

  We stood there, silent for a full tick. Diane finally spoke, “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  Bev sighed and shook her head. “Pity. He has some beautiful pieces.”

  Francis nodded. “I knew I heard a but in there.”

  We continued our shopping trip, eventually wandering to the loose gem dealers at the back of the hall. Francis, Diane, and Bev all bought a few things here and there.

  Soon we heard the signal for the end of day and we joined the throng leaving the market.