Nathan Lowell - Quarter Share

Diane smiled when she saw what I was doing. “Hmm, there’s a comm-link right over there. Think we can get an appointment?”

“All they can say is no.”

We crossed the deck and I keyed the contact number from the invoice. “Margary Mushrooms, Helen speaking. How can I help you?” The woman answered on the first ring. She looked like a typical front door greeter on the screen.

“Hi. My name is Wang. I work in the galley on the freighter Lois McKendrick . You sold us a quantity of mushrooms day before yesterday…?”

“Yes, Mr. Wang, is there a problem?”

“No, they’re excellent, but my colleague and I are interested in how they’re grown out here in the Deep Dark. It must be fascinating. We were wondering if we could talk to someone about it?”

“Let me connect you with Mr. Cameron. He’s in charge of our field operations.”

A moment later a red, pudgy face filled the screen. “Cameron, here. How can I help you?”

“Hello, Mr. Cameron, My name is Wang and I’m from the freighter Lois McKendrick . Your company has sold us some mushrooms and my colleague and I would like to learn more about how they’re grown out here.”

“Well, Mr. Wang, we grow them in tunnels in the mined-out asteroids. Thank you for your interest.”

“Is there a chance we might visit one of these asteroids this morning?

“I’m really sorry, kid, but we’re terribly busy here, and I don’t know how we’d find the time…”

Diane, who had been off camera for the conversation, sighed and shook her head. She unbuttoned the top of her blouse and elbowed me out of the way. She practically cooed into the comm, “Mr. Cameron, is it? I’m Diane Ardele. We’re sorry to be such a bother but we’ll be leaving tomorrow and this is our last chance to come and see your excellent operation up close.” She leaned into the pickup so the breathy voice she used would carry clearly. “Don’t you think you could find some errand boy to take us on a tour of just one little mushroom farm?”

I thought he was going to turn purple as Diane idly stroked one finger up and down the edge of her collar. “Well, yes, that is, I think my next meeting was just canceled. Let me check. Yes, I’m free after all. I could take you, Ms. Ardele-”

“Oh, please call me Diane,” she interrupted, breathily.

“D-Diane, yes. I could take you over to see a farm. Oh, and Mr. Wang, too, of course. Could you meet me at lock forty-two on the dock level in say, twenty ticks?”

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 by-products 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?”