Chapter 4 - Hydroponics

Nathaniel heard the footsteps before he registered that they were footsteps. His body registered first, the way it registered the floor grating earlier: something is happening and you should react to it. He grabbed Eric's arm and pulled him flat against the wall.

His forearm went across Eric's chest. He pressed them both into the housing of a pipe bundle and went still.

A maintenance worker came around the junction three meters away: coveralls, tool belt, a handheld diagnostics unit she was reading while she walked. She was completely unconcerned with anything in the tunnel because why would she be, this was her tunnel, she worked here, there was nothing in it worth looking at because nothing in it was ever wrong. She did not look up.

She passed them at three meters and turned a corner and was gone.

Neither of them moved.

Eric's breathing was audible. Nathaniel could feel it, the shallow controlled quality of it, Eric being careful about the sound of his own lungs in a dark corridor. Nathaniel's arm was still across his chest. The pipe housing was warm at his shoulder blades and the wall was warm behind that and Eric was warm where they were pressed together, the heat of twenty minutes in a maintenance tunnel with no climate management sitting on both of them.

He held the arm there one beat past the point of necessity.

Then he let go.

"Forward," he said, barely voiced.

Eric said nothing. They went forward.

---

The floor hatch opened onto green.

Nathaniel had been to the upper-deck botanical section twice, for events: the Reyes family had a viewing terrace adjacent to one of the ornamental gardens, and there had been a governance reception in there when he was seventeen where he had spent forty minutes hiding behind a cultivated citrus tree and talking to Eric about whether they could slip out through the maintenance access. The botanical section was clean and smelled of controlled humidity and nothing was allowed to grow past a particular height. It was plants as architecture.

This was not that.

He came through the floor hatch first, head up, and his vision went: green. Not one green. Many greens, the messy biological fact of actual variety, row after row of crop plants in different stages of growth, some of them taller than he was, the ones at the far end with their leaves reaching toward the overhead panels that pulsed the growth spectrum. The smell hit him at the same time as the green: soil, actual soil, damp and dark and faintly fermented, the smell of things decomposing into other things in the dark, the smell of something genuinely alive rather than maintained.

He just stood there.

Eric came up through the hatch beside him and stood there too.

The hydroponics bay was the size of six upper-deck corridors laid end to end and half again as tall, the ceiling lost in the canopy of whatever was growing at the back. Workers moved between the crop rows, maybe ten of them visible from this end, checking growth stages and adjusting drip feeds and doing things Nathaniel did not have the vocabulary for. Nobody looked up. He was not used to nobody looking up. On Deck 2, people looked up when someone entered a space. There was a whole social calculus around who entered a space and how they were received. Down here the plants needed checking and so the plants were being checked and two men emerging from a floor hatch were, apparently, other people's problem.

He straightened his shirt. The cover story was ready, rehearsed twice in the tunnel: voluntary efficiency audit, liaising with infrastructure sections as a function of the governance review his father's adjacent department was conducting. The specific committee title he had left vague on purpose, because vague authority was harder to challenge than specific authority.

"Right," he said, mostly to himself, and started toward the nearest worker.

Eric was not with him.

He looked back. Eric was crouched beside the tomato plants at the end of the nearest row, one hand extended toward a cluster of fruit that was so deeply and improbably red that Nathaniel almost understood the problem. They were actual tomatoes. He had eaten tomatoes on the upper deck, processed through whatever the food systems did to food before it reached a Deck 2 meal cycle, and they had tasted like tomatoes. These looked like the thing tomatoes were referencing. Eric's face was doing the open thing.

"Eric," Nathaniel said.

Eric looked at him. Then back at the tomato. "It's warm," he said.

"Yes."

"From the growth lamp. It's warm like a window." He was quiet for a moment. "We don't have windows."

Nathaniel opened his mouth and then closed it, because that was not actually a sentence he could improve on.

He turned back to the workers. Nearest one was twelve meters away, a woman moving between a row of leafy greens with a tablet, making marks and adjusting the drip flow at each station with the ease of someone who had done this ten thousand times and would do it ten thousand more without needing to think about it. He was close enough to see her braids: elaborate, black, threaded through with small pieces of colored tubing and what looked like wire ends, a personal project done carefully. Her hands were moving with the practical sureness of someone who knew exactly what they were doing at all times.

She glanced up.

Not at him, not immediately. At the middle distance, the general area of where he was standing: a full perimeter read dressed as a casual glance. He was fluent with that move because he ran it himself at parties. He recognized it twelve meters away and before he had finished recognizing it she had already looked back at her tablet.

She had already, he understood distantly, seen everything she needed to see.

He started his cover story anyway. He was good at this. People liked him; he had the data.

"Environmental systems," he said as she came within speaking range, pitching his voice in the register he used at governance events: capable and slightly bored, the tone of someone who has places to be after this. "We're conducting a voluntary efficiency audit, cross-referencing the atmospheric readings from the upper distribution network against the source outputs in the lower agricultural sectors. Routine liaison, nothing —"

"Your collar's sweat-ringed," she said.

Nathaniel stopped.

She was not looking at his collar. She was looking at her tablet. She made another mark on whatever plant she was assessing and moved one step down the row.

"That particular shirt," she continued, very pleasantly, "would cost approximately four months of my income in the textile markets on Deck 9, and it is currently wet at the collar and the small of the back in the pattern you get from twenty minutes in a hot tunnel." She looked up. Her eyes were amber. They were doing what his eyes did at parties, the full rapid inventory, except that what hers were cataloging was apparently his entire situation rather than which approach to take to a conversation. "The other one is looking at the tomatoes like he's never seen a tomato before."

"He's seen tomatoes," Nathaniel said.

"Not like those."

"No," he admitted. "Not like those."

She looked at him for a long moment the way a person looks when they are finishing a calculation and want to be accurate about the answer before they commit to it. He was used to calculating people, and he was used to finishing the calculation first. She finished hers before he had gotten started.

Her expression settled into something warm and unhurried and about forty percent amused.

Whatever she had decided, she had decided it, and it was done, and his cover story had not been a factor.

Eric appeared at his shoulder, apparently done with the tomatoes. A small mark on the back of his hand, either plant residue or soil, and his hair was, impossibly, in more chaos than when they had entered, which was saying something given the state of his hair during the descent.

She looked at Eric. At the mark on his hand. Back at Nathaniel.

"Come with me," she said. "And don't talk until I tell you to."

She was already walking.

Nathaniel looked at Eric. Eric looked back. Nathaniel couldn't read the expression, exactly. He didn't try.

They followed her.