Chapter 33: Seeds [II]

The compartment Camila picked sat on the starboard flank of the mid-deck, tucked between the secondary atmospheric manifold and the auxiliary water scrubbers.

It was a plain rectangular room of cold Graventhal plating, bare ribs and empty lockers that had been swept clean in the upgrade with the overhead runners throwing the same pale blue glow across the vacant deck as the rest of the ship.

To anyone else it looked like a glorified storage closet however to Camila, standing in the doorway with a damp napkin of tomato seeds cradled against her chest, it was a blank canvas.

"The air duct has a dedicated return line to the main scrubbers," she murmured, her eyes darting across the ceiling as she mapped the airflow. "If we put the high-transpiration beds right under the vents, the fresh oxygen won’t get trapped in the corners... It’ll cycle straight into the circulation bus."

"A sound aerodynamic premise," Jin-Ah’s voice clipped in from the threshold.

She stepped in with a datapad under one arm and a thick bundle of high-voltage conduit in the other, her eyes on the schematics glowing across her screen.

"However," she went on, tapping the terminal with a blunt fingertip, "your proposed placement sits directly over the coolant line for the secondary thrusters... If the engines fire at full burn, thermal bleed along that bulkhead will raise local temperatures by 8.4 degrees Celsius. Your seedlings will desiccate before they achieve cell division."

Camila puffed out her cheeks and blew an exasperated breath through her curls.

"Plants aren’t microchips, Jin-Ah. A little warmth is good for them! It makes the soil think it’s spring!"

"Excessive thermal spikes cause cellular stress and vascular collapse," Jin-Ah countered flatly, kneeling by the baseboard and popping an access panel.

CLACK!

"Biology is merely complex organic chemistry governed by thermodynamics... It is not magic."

’She’s so rigid it makes my teeth hurt,’ Camila thought, shaking her head with a rueful fond grin. ’Everything’s a math problem with her... Even a tomato.’

"Clear the doorway, please," a soft quiet voice whispered behind them.

Chloe stepped through the hatch with a three-meter industrial growing rack tucked under each arm... heavy reinforced shelving meant to hold hundreds of kilos of wet gravel and water tanks, carried like dry cardboard.

Her dark bangs hung low over her eyes.

"Where... where do you want these, Camila?" she asked, keeping her eyes on the floor.

"Along the port wall, please, Chloe!" Camila smiled warmly and stepped aside. "Away from Jin-Ah’s scary thruster pipe so my babies don’t get a fever."

THUD! THUD!

Chloe set the racks down with surgical precision as the magnetic feet locked into the deck, then stepped straight back with her hands tucked into her pockets, lingering by the door like a shadow.

Leo came in right behind her, hauling a pressurized water drum on a dolly and three sacks of volcanic gravel from the lower hold.

His sleeves were rolled past his forearms and a faint sheen of sweat ran along his jaw.

"Where do you need the reservoir, farmer?" he asked, wiping his brow with the back of his wrist.

Camila pointed to the corner beside the manifold.

"Right there, Leo! Close to the intake pump. If Jin-Ah can route the graywater from the kitchen and the showers into the beds, the plants will filter the runoff before it ever hits the main tanks!"

CLANG!

Leo wrestled the drum into place, locked the floor clamps and tested the seal with a firm kick of his boot. "Reservoir’s anchored... Gravel’s by the racks. What else?"

"Power for the full-spectrum grow lamps," Camila said, looking over at Jin-Ah. "And a steady five liters an hour from the secondary water bus."

Jin-Ah didn’t look up.

"The load will draw approximately 1.8% of the auxiliary core’s standby trickle... An acceptable expenditure, provided the caloric return justifies the thermodynamic deficit."

"It will," Camila said firmly, kneeling down beside her on the cold deck.

For the next hour the room fell into a steady rhythm of work.

Leo worked a socket wrench, bolting the tiered trays to the frames and tilting the drainage so water wouldn’t pool in the corners during hard maneuvers.

Chloe moved in silence, fetching tools and lifting sixty-kilo sacks of gravel with one hand, pouring the porous grey stone into the beds wherever Camila pointed.

Every time Leo reached for a wrench, Chloe was already holding it out to him.

Every time their fingers brushed, she went pink and looked at the floor... and the next time, she was still the one holding it out.

Camila stayed on her knees beside Jin-Ah.

While Jin-Ah spliced thick blue and red cables into the wall junctions, Camila measured out flexible silicone drip-lines and threaded them through the channels of every bed.

"No, Jin-Ah, wait." Camila reached over and tapped her wrist as she went to clamp a harsh blue strip right above the top tray. "That’s too blue... The wavelength’s too short. It’ll scorch the baby leaves before the first true ones even come out."

Jin-Ah frowned with her wire strippers pausing. "The documentation for standard hydroponic arrays states that blue spectrum light maximizes chlorophyll absorption."

"On grown plants, yes," Camila said, her voice turning soft and sure and almost motherly. "When they’re big and strong they love blue. It makes their stalks thick but when they’re babies, when they’re just breaking out of the seed...? They need red... Warm gentle red, like a sunset. It tells them it’s safe to reach up."

Jin-Ah stared at the empty tray, then at the small red module in Camila’s hand.

"You speak of them as though they possess emotional states," she murmured... but she adjusted the controller on her slate anyway, shifting the output from harsh azure to a soft warm amber-rose.

"Everything alive has a feeling, Jin," Camila said softly, smiling as the rose-gold light washed over the beds. "Even a tiny seed. It knows when it’s cold and when it’s dark... and it knows when someone’s taking care of it."

Jin-Ah went quiet for a long moment, the strippers clicking steadily in her hands.

The rigid line of her back eased by a millimeter.

"In Incheon," she said quietly, so low Camila had to lean in over the hum of the scrubbers, "I lived on the thirty-second floor... There was no balcony and no garden... My father believed that caring for decorative plants was an inefficient use of time and domestic resources."

Camila’s eyes softened.

"Did you ever have one?"

Jin-Ah hesitated, her fingers tightening on the cable.

"When I was nine, I found a sprout growing in the concrete seams of the transit station parking lot... A dandelion, I scooped it into a paper cup with a little gravel and hid it behind the cooling exhaust of the computer in my bedroom."

"Did it grow?" Camila asked gently.

"It survived for fourteen days." The barest ghost of a memory flickered across her sharp face before she clamped it down. "I miscalculated the water retention of the gravel, and the roots rotted... I threw the cup into the incinerator chute so my father would not find it."

She looked away and tested the spliced cable with a sharp jerk.

"It was an irrational sentiment, The plant served no logistical purpose."

Camila’s heart squeezed.

Without thinking, she reached out and wrapped both of her warm hands around Jin-Ah’s cold wire-calloused fingers.

Jin-Ah stiffened, her breath catching as she stared down at their hands in sheer bewildered shock.

"It wasn’t irrational, Jin," Camila said, warm and earnest. "You wanted to see something green in a world full of grey concrete. That’s the most human thing there is..."

Jin-Ah searched her face for mockery and found only that bright open endless kindness, and a faint dusty pink crept over her cheekbones.

She didn’t pull her hand away right away.

For three seconds she let the warmth soak into her knuckles... then she cleared her throat and shifted awkwardly.

"The... the water pump is primed," she muttered, sliding her hand back to her terminal. "If you are going to plant your specimens, the moisture cycle is ready."

"Right!" Camila smiled, wiping a smear of grey dust off her nose as she scrambled up.

’She acts like an ice cube,’ she thought, watching Jin-Ah double-check the pump relays with frantic precision. ’But she has a heart... She just keeps it locked in an iron box.’

Leo stepped back and leaned against the doorframe beside Chloe, wiping his hands on a clean rag.

Chloe’s shoulder ended up a centimeter from his arm but she didn’t move it away.

’Look at them,’ Leo thought as a quiet deep pride settled into his chest. ’An engineer and a gardener, rebuilding the world on a steel shelf...’

Camila laid the napkin flat on the ledge beside the first tray.

With a sterile spatula she separated the damp cream-colored tomato seeds from their gel, poked twenty shallow holes into the wet volcanic gravel and placed one seed in each with delicate reverent care before smoothing the stone back over the top.

She did the same with the potato eyes in the second tray and the pepper seeds in the third.

The soft rose-gold lamps bathed the three tiers of wet stone in a warm artificial dawn.

The room went quiet, the gentle trickle-trickle of water through the drip-lines was the only sound under the hum of the ship.

Camila closed her eyes.

She stood in front of the first tray, took a slow deep breath into her belly and stretched out both hands with her palms down, hovering eight centimeters over the damp gravel.

"Okay, babies," she whispered. "You’re safe now... Wake up."

HUMMMMM.

From deep in her core, the Biosphere Harmonizer answered.

It flowed out of her like liquid sunlight.

A vibrant incandescent emerald aura flared up her forearms and wrapped around her fingers in swirling ribbons of living light, so rich it made the grow lamps look pale.

The ozone smell of the room vanished in a fraction of a second, replaced by the overwhelming smell of summer loam, crushed clover and warm morning rain.

Beneath the wet gravel, the buried seeds shuddered.

She didn’t just feel them... she heard them as the microscopic spark of sleeping life locked inside every dry husk.

She poured herself into them, whispering the warmth of the sun with the memory of black Earth soil and the promise of open sky into every waking embryo.

CRACK.

It was a microscopic sound, but in the dead silence it rang out like a tiny bell.

Under the grey stone, the first husk split open.

A pale ivory root shot downward and anchored itself into the gravel with terrifying beautiful speed, drinking from the drip-lines, and then, pushing up against the weight of the stone...

RUSTLE.

The gravel shifted.

A tiny delicate loop of pale green stem broke the surface.

Under the pouring light of Camila’s hands the loop straightened and reached for the light, unfurling two tiny oval leaves in real time... not over days, not over hours, but in thirty breathless seconds!

The pale yellow-green darkened into a deep glossy emerald as the chlorophyll flared to life and started drinking the carbon dioxide out of the room.

Right beside it, a second sprout broke the stone.

Then a third... A fourth... A fifth...

Within three minutes the whole tray was a miniature forest of quivering green sprouts, their tiny serrated leaves spreading wide and practically trembling with the rush of life.

In the second tray, thick pale-purple shoots erupted from the potato eyes and split into sturdy leafy vines that curled around the trellises with creeping visible momentum...

The green glow slowly faded from Camila’s fingers back into her skin.

She stood staring down at the bed of living green and her breath hitched as her shoulders started to shake.

Big hot tears welled over her lashes and slid down her cheeks, dripping off her jaw onto the dark leaves of the nearest sprout like tiny drops of rain.

"They’re alive..." she choked, a ragged sobbing laugh tearing out of her as she pressed both hands over her mouth. "They’re really alive... Look at them, Leo... look at them..."

She sank to her knees beside the tray and wept openly, the nightmare of the dead moon and the cold black washing out of her in one great flood of relief.

In the middle of an iron tomb drifting through infinite black nothing, there was green.

Beside her, Jin-Ah stood frozen with her slate hanging loose in one hand, staring at a forest that hadn’t existed ten minutes ago while her brain, which spent every waking second counting death clocks and fuel burn, quietly short-circuited.

Slowly, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a clean folded linen cloth.

Without a word, her face stiff with clumsy embarrassment, she shoved it straight into Camila’s shaking hands.

"Your... your ocular discharge is contaminating the bed," she muttered, turning her face forty-five degrees away as her ears burned pink. "It has excessive sodium content... Dry your face."

Camila let out a wet breathless laugh and pressed the cloth to her cheek.

"Thank you, Jin-Ah... thank you."

In the doorway, Chloe hadn’t moved.

The green leaves glowed in her wide eyes under the rose-gold lamps... and a small sharp sting tightened behind her breastbone as she looked down at her own pale hands.

She would never be able to eat a single one of them.