Hothouse Hours

Faro Lisvane touched every plant in the tiers and never her.

The deck told her before the alarm did.

Edda was wrist-deep in the dosing cabinet, a spanner on the second feed union and her shoulder braced against the frame of the manifold, when the return line changed pitch. She knew every sound the deck made the way she knew the sound of her own name. The dosing pumps hummed in threes. The aerators ticked like a clock that had never been wound. And the return line — the big loop that carried the spent solution back off the tiers to be dosed and sent round again — sang one low, even note that you felt through the soles of your boots more than heard. That note dropped. Not by much. A step, perhaps less, the way a voice drops when someone at the far end of a corridor has stopped walking to listen.

She took her shoulder off the manifold and stood still with the spanner in her hand.

The flow gauges were nearest, so she read them first. Feed pressure holding. Return pressure falling, slow and unhesitating, the needle coming down off its mark like something that had made a decision. No alarm yet. The board above the pumps sat smug and green, every light lit, because the board only knew what its sensors told it and the sensors were ten seconds behind the water.

Then the lamps went.

Through the dosing room door, down the whole long run of the deck, the tiers dimmed — not out but down, the working white of the grow lamps stepping to half in one clean motion, as if the deck had taken a breath and held it. The shadows of the tier frames doubled and blurred. The wet gleam on the leaves dulled from silver to pewter. Only then did the alarm come: a polite chime from the panel, a banner scrolling across the comm screen, ten full seconds after Edda had already pulled her arms out of the cabinet and knotted her overshirt sleeves round her waist.

"Aye, I know," she told it, and went to work.

The banner said it in station language: TRUNK 2 FAULT. DECK LOADS TO HALF. REPAIR CREW DISPATCHED. Nothing about how long. The nothing about how long was the part she read twice.

She worked the dosing room the way she always worked it, by ear and by hand, except that now she was choosing what got to keep breathing. The main feed stayed — that was not a question; every tier on the deck drank off it. The polish loop she shut down entirely, spun its valve home and felt the pipe give a small surprised shudder under her palm as the flow found its new path. The aerators she throttled rather than killed, one, two, three, listening to each in turn until the note of the manifold settled into something lower and rougher but steady. Low air in the line meant warm, thin water. Warm, thin water was a problem for another hour, not this one.

She put her flat palm against the return line and held it there. The vibration came up through the old thorn-scars at her wrist, pale crosshatch marks the bare-root channels had given her over two years of the trial. The line was labouring. Not failing. Labouring.

"Labour away, then," she said to it. "So are we."

She was out of the dosing room and into the tiers before the heat had even begun to build. It would build — she knew that the way she knew the pumps. With the ventilation cut back to save the load and the lamps still throwing what heat half power gave them, the deck would climb toward thirty degrees and stay there, wet as a held breath, until somebody fixed the trunk or the trunk fixed them. Her hair was already coming down from its knot in sympathy, fine honey-blonde strands sticking to her neck. She twisted it back up and drove the plant marker through it harder than it needed.

Leaf tier one first. She walked it fast, fingertips trailing the gutter edge, eyes on the leaf margins. The greens were a day off noticing anything; plants were stoics, they took the bad news on trust and showed it later, which was exactly why you had to read them before they knew. Tier two the same. Tier three — she stopped at tier three and put her knuckle against a stalk, out of habit older than the trial, and the stalk stood firm and cool and full of itself under her skin.

"Good," she said. "Hold."

She heard the hatch before she saw him, because Faro Lisvane could not come through any hatch on the deck quietly: there was the clang of the frame, then the careful dip and turn of seven foot three of Aurrin folding itself through a space built for humans, broad shoulders angled, one huge hand braced on the frame to take his weight as he ducked. He straightened up into the half-light and the half-light caught him the way it always did — the deep, even cornflower blue of him, a colour no human had ever been, going slate-dark where his shirt pulled across his chest, and brightest of all at the palms. His black hair was bound round with its plain cord, neat as ever, as though the trunk had failed politely and with notice.

He came down the tier toward her the way he always came down a tier: slowly, and touching everything. Fingertips along a stem. Two long fingers under a leaf, lifting it, reading its underside. A knuckle against a stalk, absently, the way another man might hum. The Aurrin touched plants the way humans touched their own faces — constantly, thoughtlessly, as though checking everything was still there. Edda had worked beside him for a year, and now, for the first time, she caught herself watching his hands instead of his face. They were enormous, long-fingered, delicate on a seedling and absurd on a spanner, and they were never still.

"Edda." His voice came the way his sentences always came, unhurried, every word given its full length, like something being set in soil. "The trunk is gone. I felt the lamps from the end bay."

"Fault," she said. "Not gone. Repair crew's dispatched."

"Fault," he agreed, as if she had said something interesting. He stopped at the gutter beside her and laid his palm flat on the leaf of the nearest green, reading it, and his eyes — almost black, unreadable at the best of times — went down the tier toward the dosing room. "The return line is singing low."

"Half power. I've throttled the aerators and killed the polish loop. Feed's holding."

"You will not hold the whole deck on half," he said. Not unkindly. That was the thing about Faro; he was never unkindly, and somehow that made it worse. "Half power is not a smaller version of the deck. It is a different deck. Some of the load has to come off."

"Some of the load can wait until the repair crew's looked at the trunk."

"It can wait an hour." His palm moved from the leaf to the growing medium beside it and rested there, flat, the brightest blue on the whole deck pressed into the dark mat. "It cannot wait a week, if it is a week. The lamps are already at half. The heat is the larger share, and heat is where the load lives. The herb tier, the root mats, the—" He stopped, and she watched him not say the next item on his list, and knew exactly what it was, because it was four lamp-lit channels at the far end of the deck with her two years growing in them.

"Go on," she said. "Say it."

"The end beds are the largest single load on the deck," he said, and said it plainly, the way he said everything, with no apology in it because he did not believe facts wanted apologising for. "Seven kilowatts with the mats running. I am not saying they come off. I am saying that when the list is written, everything on it will be somebody's."

"Then nobody writes a list until we know what the trunk costs."

He looked at her for a moment, and she had the sudden, familiar sense that he was reading her the way he read a leaf — checking the underside, not the face. "That is fair," he said. "How long do you give the repair crew before you start counting?"

"As long as it takes the foreman to give me a number."

The foreman gave her a number at ten past seven.

Teodor Ndiaye came through the hatch without ducking — he was stocky and human-sized and the deck fitted him fine — with his hi-vis vest already damp across the shoulders and his slate tucked under one arm where it lived. He was mid-fifties, deep brown skin, close-cropped grey hair, and he had the unhurried manner of a man who had delivered bad news professionally for thirty years and had long since stopped dressing it up. Edda liked him enormously. She had never once got him to change a figure.

"Holm. Lisvane." He nodded to each of them in turn, set the slate on the edge of the tier gutter, and turned it round so they could both see it, though he did not read from it. Teodor never read from it. "Trunk two is cooked through at the second joint, and the joint is not a part we carry. We're cutting a new trunk. Half power until cutover, and cutover is the morning of Day 15." He said it once. He looked from Edda to Faro and back, and his face was warm and completely immovable, both at once, which was a trick Edda had never learned. "That's the number. It's the same number I'll give the supervisor, and it'll be the same number on Day 15, so plan against it and not against me."

"A fortnight," Edda said.

"Fourteen days, and you're getting the good end of it, because my crew's on it round the clock." He picked the slate back up. "Backup heat loop's carrying you for now. Treat it gently; if it goes, every spare part on this station is going into the trunk, and that includes the part your loop would want." He nodded again, once, to both of them, unhurried and unsentimental and already halfway back to the hatch. "Anything you need from my side, ask early. I don't move numbers, but I do answer comms."

And he was gone, the hatch clanging behind him, leaving the number sitting in the middle of the deck where he had set it down.

Fourteen days. Edda did the sums the way she did everything, standing up, in her head: fourteen days at half power, ventilation cut, the deck climbing to thirty and wet, the aerators throttled, the line running warm and thin. The tiers would hold — the tiers were stoics — but holding and growing were different countries, and a fortnight was long enough to learn the difference expensively. Something would have to come off. Faro was right about that, and she hated the shape of how right he was, because she knew which load he would write first.

Beside her, Faro had gone quiet in the way he went quiet, which was not absence but a kind of settling, like a big stone coming to rest. His hand was still flat on the growing medium. She watched the fingers press, once, gently, as if he were telling the tier something.

"I will write up the load schedule," he said. "Today. Every load on the deck, with its draw and its yield, ranked honestly. The supervisor will want it in writing, and it should be written by someone who does not—" He stopped, and chose his words with visible care, the way he chose everything. "It should be written by someone whose own stock is not on it."

His stock. The pale-leaved Aurrin bank in the end bay, his people's plants, the reason he was on the Reach at all — the one load on the deck he would never have to rank, because it was not the deck's to cut. Edda looked at him: seven foot three of careful, honest alien, palm on the soil, already composing the document that was going to put her trial first on the list, and she felt the heat of the building deck crawl up her throat and into her cheeks, the flush she never could help, pink going red from collarbone to hairline.

"You can write whatever you like," she said.

It came out flat and even, and she was proud of how flat and even it came out, and she did not stay to see what he made of it. She turned and walked the long central aisle toward the far end of the deck, past the dimmed tiers and the dripping gutters, into the heat that was already rising around her like water.

At the far end, the end beds still glowed at full.

Four channels, lamp-lit, their own root-zone heating mats warm beneath the trays, untouched by the half-light that had taken the rest of the deck — her two years, her eighth generation, dark green and dense and utterly indifferent to trunks and numbers. The eights stood in their channels with their roots in the warm flow and their leaves held up to the lamps like faces to a window. Edda put her scarred wrists on the gutter edge and stood with them a while, listening to the return line labour at its lower note, fourteen days long.

Write the list, she thought. We'll see what the numbers say when it's written.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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