“Don’t read me the whole menu, sweetheart,” said Garrett. “Just tell me what’s for dessert.”
Everett looked skyward.
“Did you bring your own food with you?” Evna asked. “The bioprinters can reproduce almost anything they can sample, as long as we’ve got the raw materials for fabrication.”
Everett looked away from the artificial sky. “Trust me, no one’s gonna give us a medal for showing you how to make Vienna sausages.”
“Well, I’d still be very eager to sample what you have. Anything new is extremely welcome.”
“Who wouldn’t get tired of having the same thing over and over again?” said Garrett.
Everett made a pained face. “Maybe you should switch off full auto, Romeo,” he said.
Evna was pointing at the large rectangle of water surrounded by grass in the near distance. “In the marshes around the ocean we grow rice,” she said.
“Ocean?” said Garrett.
“Ocean biome,” she elaborated, unhelpfully. “Sea plants, algae, tide machine. It filters to fresh water on this end. We get water filtration, clean oxygen, nutrient yield for crop soil, humidification. There used to be fish stock for protein, but it died out a long time ago.”
“Can we get back to the farm?” asked Garrett. “I’m kinda getting seasick.”
Evna frowned but nodded. “Of course,” she said. “What would you like to know?”
“What’s giving you a pain?” said Everett.
She turned toward a field of plants a few feet high. “It’s my legumes,” she said mournfully.
“Gee,” Garrett said behind her, “your legumes look pretty good to me.”
Everett punched him on the shoulder. “Let’s take a look at them,” he told Evna when she looked back.
Garrett nodded eagerly, and Evna led them to the plot. Well before they got there the two men could see something was wrong. The majority of the bean crop was vibrant green and lush, but about twenty percent of the plants were a pale yellow-green. Stalks were desiccated and straw-like, leaves were drooping, bean pods were chalky and brittle-looking.
Evna knelt before one such plant and turned a leaf up. Everett and Garrett knelt beside her.
“These are pintos,” Garrett said.
Evna nodded. “High-yield pinto beans in dry-bred cultivation,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of genetic variation, so they’ve lost a lot of resistance over the years. We try to keep the Dome as closed and filtered as we can, but we still get problems from outside.”
“Present company excluded,” said Everett.
She flushed. “I didn’t mean to imply anything,” she said.
“He’s just ribbing you,” said Garrett.
Everett frowned at the sickly leaves. “I know rust is a problem with these,” he said. “But that’s not what it looks like.” He dug into the rich soil with his fingers and pulled up a wriggling purplish earthworm. He showed it to Garrett, who nodded.
“I haven’t seen any birds in here,” Garrett said.
“There haven’t been any for a very long time,” said Evna. “We use manual seed dispersion and some bee pollination.”
“A world with no birds,” said Garrett.
She shrugged. “They were gone before I was born.”
Everett held up the wriggling worm. “No early birds for you,” he told it. He put it back in the soil and covered it back over. Then he rubbed his fingers and sniffed them. He frowned and broke off a leaf and rubbed it and sniffed it. He asked Evna about watering, humidity, crop rotation, sun cycles, pests, temperature.
Evna told him how the rain forest biome, where the miniature cliffs were, generated water vapor to maintain humidity, how the ocean algae scrubbed the air and filtered water. Garrett managed to put the brakes on his blunt flirting, and both men listened and asked questions and did not wise off.
At one point Evna excused herself to make her rounds. She told them she’d be back in half an hour and left the two strange men kneeling among the diseased bean plants.
They watched her go, then Garrett turned to Everett.
“Did you understand a thing she said?” he asked.
“Some of it.”
“Brother, you’re one up on me. Genetic biome hydroponic cost-benefit cloned ecosystem molecular I don’t know what else.” He shook himself like a dog. “I’m just a dirt mechanic; I don’t know if these people are farming or making rockets.”
“At least you know you can love her for her brain, too,” said Everett.
“She never saw a cow. What kind of farmer never saw a cow?”
Everett grinned. “The farmer in the Dome, the farmer in the Dome,” he sang.
“Aren’t you the comedian.”
“Hi ho, the derry-oh.”
“Give it a rest already.”
Everett grinned. “The farmer takes a wife,” he half-sang.
“Yeah, yeah, and the wife cuts the cheese.” He didn’t laugh, which made Everett laugh.
Garrett broke off a withered seed pod. “This isn’t white mold,” he said. “But it’s still some kind of fungus. It’s powdery.”
“What would you do if this was happening back home?”
“For starters, I wouldn’t grow pinto beans.”
“Say, that’s helpful. Thanks for solving the problem, bud.”
“I already know how to fix the problem,” Garrett said. “You’d know, too, if you’d grown up on a real farm instead of that cabbage factory your dad works for.”
“He’s a general manager and it’s a combine.”
“Don’t get a run in your stocking. Now listen and learn.”
When Evna returned she saw both men propped up on their elbows between rows of bean plants, staring at the sky and passing a cigarette between them. Her face went hard and she quickened her pace. Garrett hastily stubbed out the butt and got up with his hands out as if he thought he’d have to ward off a tackle by a woman more than a foot shorter than him and half his weight.
“It helps us think,” he said before she could lay into him.
“How exciting that must be. What has it helped you think of?”
Everett stood up beside Garrett and brushed dirt from his hands. “What kind of soap do you people wash dishes with?” he asked.
SEVENTEEN
Broben and Martin trudged behind Farley and Wennda as they headed toward one of the larger buildings in the central cluster. The captain was engaged in animated conversation with the tall woman as they walked, both of them intent on each other, laughing sometimes, curious and questioning.
Broben frowned. Dreamgirl or not, he’d seen this movie a hundred times, and it rarely had a happy ending.
He glanced at Martin and waved at their surroundings. “I feel like I’m in one of those snow globes people put out at Christmas,” he said.
“It’s not exactly what the recruiting posters said I’d see when I joined up,” Martin said. “Where is it we’re going, again?”
“Fabrication.”
“Sounds like we’re gonna sew clothes.”
“They’re trying to find a use for us,” Broben replied. “I don’t know about you, brother, but I drive a truck when I’m not bombing Germans.”
“I push a pretty good idiot stick,” Martin said.
“Maybe we’re gonna turn screwdrivers. Shame we couldn’t bring Wen. That hillbilly’d be running this burg inside of a week.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to know him better,” said Martin.
Broben shrugged. “Truth is, he was like sandpaper when he didn’t agree with you. But I swear there’s nothing that damn yokel couldn’t fix. Wen didn’t repair things, he healed them.”