Plants

Plants

James Baird, 3-30-2007

From the point of view of anyone in space, your body parts are sacred. In a universe that is rarely more than being surrounded by machines, anything organic has a sacred existence. The air is synthesized, the food is synthesized, the walls are metal and everything outside of the synthetic microcosm of a standard space ship is instant death. The only thing that keeps “Spacers” alive are the mechanical devices that they are surrounded by and the promise that they do not fail. Since a Spacer can only bring 25 kg for personal effects on board of most standard transports, you would be shocked at how may bring a plant. Pets of the living, breathing kind have, of course, never been allowed, but plants bring with them a scent of earth and that very special feeling of having something living next to you. The Company tolerates it because they are a way to keep the Spacers sane and they have the added benefit of adding new oxygen to the system. I have seen rugged veterans break down into blubbering, sloppy-drunk emotional wrecks over the loss of an African violet or cactus plant. I know of men murdering one another for throwing a plant into an airlock and spacing it.

I know because I have seen it.

Working 35 Earth Standard years as in transport security, you get to see things. Aboard transports, most of the crimes are smuggling, drugs, extortion, theft, illegal gambling and the occasional industrial stealing. The most insidious things you see in illegal trafficking involve human replacement parts, human limbs and organs sold on the black market to Spacers that have had a serious accident or illness. Medicine can keep people alive, but donors are hard to come by out there between the stars.

The reason for that, of course, is that the only other organic beings on a transport are people. Most of them are asleep, if the trip is a long one, but they are people nonetheless. They remind you of the relatives and friends that you left behind, and they are made of the same things that you are: bones, flesh and a soul. The only thing more personal, and more precious, is the very things that make up a Spacer’s own body. That is why Spacers look at people that traffic body parts as a violation of humanity itself. That is why Mark Carmel’s name is anathema to every Spacer that floats in the void.

The young Mark Carmel had a relatively ordinary life. He was the son of a middle class family, had decent grades through school, went to a community college and finally joined Trans-Worlds Specialties as a Junior Transport Officer. He was not anything special as a Spacer. He went through the bone strengthening drug regime, had his teeth replaced and scored in the middle range for his studies. When he graduated, he was assigned to the Promise for the Titan route. Since he scored well, he was brought up for promotion to the longer shipping routes. At 21, he signed up for the transport Fidelity for a haul to the Proxima Centauri station, and his life, as well as mine, was forever changed.

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Standard transports that run for Trans-Worlds generally work their crews in shifts for the longer journeys. This was a practice that was started after several transports never arrived at their scheduled destinations in the early days of ‘near-lightspeed’ technology. It seems that science can make the body ready for the tedious and uneventful chores needed to run a transport, but it cannot prepare the psyche. Now it is standard practice to run a crew of five for no longer than 13 earth-months at a time. This is well documented. It takes a good two week period to go into the freezer and a necessary two weeks to ‘thaw out’ and get your body ready to work again after being frozen.

What is not so well documented is how hard it is to keep your mind on your job for a twelve month cycle in an environment where, at the very best, absolutely nothing changes. Spacers are superstitious about sudden changes. All too often, a change means that their lives, their ship and everything else on board is in danger of instant death, or, worse, being hopelessly off course and therefore permanently missing. As a result, there is a certain comfort for us when our monitors show constant and healthy readings, and at the same time there is a nearly bone-crushing and numbing sameness to absolutely everything.

I do mean everything. Paint is not allowed on the walls because paints give off fumes and even the added weight of bringing paint on board would mean eliminating necessaries like water, food, our cargo, or the precious plants that nearly everyone brings on board. We have electronic books on board, of course, but who can read for twelve months at a time? We have cards, gaming tables and the equipment to distill liquor and beer, but after a while even these things become boring. The sheets and pillows are standard issue, the clothes are company issue, and the food, well, the food is the best the company can provide and still maintain weight standards. That does not mean that it is inedible, but the same monotonous meals for twelve months can make a person very ready to go back into the freezer. Spacers are not skinny because they are frugal, they are skinny because there is only so much a human can take of eating the same things day in and day out.

My job, as Security Manager, really does not mean that I am a cop in the way stationers or planet-siders understand it. I am trained in psychology, linguistics, hypnotherapy, and massage therapy. Because of the tendency of people to succumb to boredom, I am also trained in martial arts and weapons, as, occasionally, a crew member may decide to take out his or her frustrations on the other crew members, or, when going station-side, on stationers. That sounds exiting, doesn’t it? That was why I signed up. That has not been my experience, generally. Security Managers are just as susceptible to boredom as any other human being.

That is one reason my interest was piqued when Mark first came into my cell early on the fourth shift of the Proxima trip. I had been on several trips in the Sol system already, and I had learned to carefully read the profiles of the shift crew that I would be working with on each journey. Mark’s was not exceptional in any way, so it really was a surprise when he came into my cell demanding my attention.

“Dell,” he asked, “Can I come in for a minute?”

 “Sure,” I said, “What is going on?”

“I think”, he said, swallowing, and obviously nervous, “I think that someone on first crew tried to kill my plant.”

At this point, I think I should try to explain how we Spacers handle owning plants. Before the Transport leaves, the Spacers make arrangements with the other crew members that take up the other shifts to try and keep their plants alive. That is usually not that difficult, as the principle of ‘what goes around comes around’ generally applies, and the crews are quite meticulous about keeping the other crew’s plants alive because they do not want to deal with coming out of the ‘popsicle stand’ and finding their own plants dead. Since real dirt is a great difficulty to arrange, and the weight limits are a problem, most spacers have personal hydroponics systems and do their best to maintain them. They will save left-over food and any material that their plants drop to make small compost heaps to enhance plant growth, and many times several crew members will get together and combine their efforts. I have learned that violating that trust can be tantamount to murder.

“That is a very serious charge,” I said, “What makes you think that anyone would do something like that? You made the arrangements before you left, right?”

 “Well, sure I did,” he said, “Merc, Francis, Pete, Sil and Jackie all said they would take care of my Bonsai, but the damn thing has brown all over it and some of the leaves are falling off. I think it is dying.”

“Ok,” I said, “just take it easy. Some plants grow better than others in this environment, and it may be that it has a fungus or something else.”

“No!” he shouted, “I asked those goons for help and you ought to see my plant now!”

“Let’s go look,” I said.

Walking down to his cell, he hit the entrance button and his code and we went into his little room. His room smelled and looked like pretty much any other of the rooms I had visited over my years in transports. It is rare for any of the crew to enter someone else’s room, as that is just about the only place where there is the feeling of privacy. The toilets are shared, as well as the cleaning rooms and laundry, and everyone feels surrounded by even the small number of people that work each shift. Over in the corner I could see his small compost heap, and the earthy smells that it gave off was not unpleasant after the sterile smells of the transport’s halls and work areas.

Sure enough, his Bonsai looked pretty rough. Planet-siders and stationers will never understand the full extent of what that can mean to a crewman on a hauler, but they guard the health of these plants like their own.

“What the hell?” I said.

“Just look at it! Look! I asked those simple bastards to help me out and look what they have done to me!”

He was actually screaming at me.

“Now look,” I said, “You do not know that anyone has done anything deliberately.  You just need to calm down. My job is to help and that is what I am going to do. Let’s get together with the other crew members and see what we can do to work this situation out.”

“Ok,” he said, grinning a little, “I guess I do need to mellow out some.”

“That’s the spirit!” I said. Then I hit the intercom.

“Security manager needs to call a crew meeting!” I announced, using my most officious tone.

“Dell,” a voice came back, “I am not in the mood.”

I recognized the voice, of course. That was our Shift Captain, Sharon.

“Sorry,” I said, “This is my professional opinion and we need to meet.”

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All transports are large circular craft that spin so that at the outer edges, where the crews live and work, there is an artificial gravity just shy of one full earth gravity. The meeting room is usually at the center axis of rotation in the transport. It can be very disorienting to non-spacers, because the lack of gravity means that everybody is floating at any angle that seems comfortable at the time. When the room is not being used for meetings, it can be a fantastic place to play non-gravity games, do zero-gravity experiments, and, for the noobs, play with zero-gravity sex. The reason that transports have the meeting room there is simple. Rooms with artificial gravity are needed for much more important things than business meetings. That, at least, is something that even planet-siders can understand.

The crew began showing up. Sharon, our second-shift Captain, Phil, the medic, Jan, our ship’s techie, and, of course, Mark, the “Popsicle Man” were all present. The reason that he is called that is because all the techs that are in charge of the “popsicles” have been called that for generations. Evidently, there was an old Earth tradition of selling frozen treats from vehicles, and the name just stuck. Marks duties were to make sure that everyone stays stable in the freezer and to carefully maintain the equipment, so that when the medic begins to unfreeze the crews they actually wake up healthy. It is not the most entertaining job on a transport, but it is a position of trust that all Spacers look at with an almost religious deference.

Looking around at the room, it was a typical mixture of races, faces and mixed language groups that so typifies modern transports. And they were floating at every conceivable angle and position, which was also typical of spacer meetings.

Phil said, “This better be good. I was reading something that had my attention for once.”

“Of course it is good,” piped in Sharon, “If Dell called it you know it was VERY important.”

The sarcasm was not lost on me.

“I think you need to hear why I called this meeting from the person most affected.” I said, pointing at Mark, who was hanging at an angle facing slightly away from us, which was meant to show his anger to the rest of us.

“Those bastards in the first shift killed my plant!” he said, his voice rising to a yell.

“Hey,” said Phil,”how do you know that?” Phil was always a peacemaker among the other crew members. That was probably true for most medics.

“I left my Bonsai in the care of Merc, Francis, Pete, Sil and Jackie, and they have left me with a dead tree! Those morons!”

Phil said, “Look, Mark, calm down. Things happen sometimes. You can’t just assume that they had any bad feelings about you or your plant. If I can get a look at it with my equipment, then I can tell you more about this. I need permission to use company equipment for that. What about it, Sharon?”

Five faces, floating at strange angles from each other, stared at Sharon.

“Yea, go ahead,” she said. “We better see if we can find anything. End of meeting. Dell, see me after this.”

We all floated back to the stairs and began to climb back down into the gravity well. When we got to a place where the others could not hear, she grabbed my shoulder and looked me in the eye.

“Damn it, Dell! We have enough problems keeping this mad-house quiet, and now you want to create a crisis because Mark has brought a dead tree on this ship!”

“That is not why I called this,” I said, “and you know it. These things are important to the crew members and I thought…”

“Enough of what you thought,” she interrupted, “we are trying to make a profit in this ship. We need people to be calm, and we need you to do your job and keep them that way! Mark is the Popsicle Man on this shift, and the last thing we need is for him to make a mistake because he is worried about his Bonsai tree. You had better keep an eye on him.”

She walked on.

                                     *********************************

“Well,” said Phil, “That Bonsai tree is as dead as space. There is nothing I, or anyone else, can do about it. I am really sorry Mark, but the Centauri Proxima station has plants, and maybe….”

Mark bent over double on his chair and began to softly cry.

 “Dammit, Phil,” I said, “Is there nothing else you can say?”

Mark said, weeping, “That’s ok. It is not his fault. I am just going to have to get another friend sometime.”

Phil said, “Mark, I don’t mean to be cruel. I am just telling you what my machines are telling me. I am truly sorry. But there does not seem to be any reason that your Bonsai died. There are no pesticides, defoliants or any other kind of poisons that I can detect. It may be that the feed mixture was just not strong enough to maintain a tree. Maybe it was just the time for it to go.”

“Mark,” I said, “listen. These other guys did not kill your plant, and you still have the obligation to take care of theirs. Maybe instead of having bad feelings, you should think about what you can do to keep theirs healthy and alive, and spend your time on that.”

Mark gave me a strange look.

“Ok,” he said quietly, “Yea. That is a good idea. I am going to make sure that they have a good life while I am on shift.”

“That’s the way!” I said, “You have a good attitude and I am going to recommend you when we get to Proxima.”

“Thanks, Dell,” he said, “You have been a good friend to me.”

“Mark,” I touched his shoulder, “we have a long year ahead of us. Anytime you want to check in with me and talk…”

“You think I need a shrink after this, don’t you?” he interrupted, with a little smirk on his face. “It will be alright. I just need some time on my own to think.”

I thought that what he said made an end to the whole ordeal.

                                           ********************************

Over the next few months, as we approached Proxima and began the deceleration procedures, from time to time I would check in on Mark and see how he was doing. He was in high spirits and seemed to be over the death of his beloved Bonsai.

As a part of my rounds, I would occasionally look in to his projects, and I asked him to show me the plants he was taking care of. He had taken a personal interest in the plants of all five members of the first-shift crew, and, indeed, not only did they look healthy, the plants looked positively radiant. Bright and green, they had flourished. The compost he was using was very strong in smell, and combined with the smells of the plants themselves it gave their rooms an earthy smell that made us all think of home.

I joked with Mark from time to time.

“You need to get out of the spacers and get a job as a farmer. These plants look great!”

“Yea,” he would say, “I guess I have a talent for raising plants.”

He would grin at me with that strange look again, and I would laugh with him and figure that I was glad that he had not just gone to an airlock and “spaced” himself. I had seen that before, and I congratulated myself for having had such wisdom and foresight to ward off something like that on my own shift.

As we approached final dock with Proxima, the crew began to make the preparations needed to offload our cargo, which includes, of course, having the entire crew unfrozen and active.

I had been asleep, which does occupy a fair amount of any spacer’s time. I awoke to the intercom blaring with Sharon’s voice.

“Dell! Dell! God dammit! Dell! Get to the Popsicle room NOW! Dell! Answer me right now!”

I pounded my fist on the button. “Ok, ok! I am on the way! What the hell is going on?”

“Just shut up and just get here, will you?” she shouted.

When I got to the Popsicle room, I saw the Phil and Sharon standing in the corner, talking to each other and waving their hands around. Sharon was crying and Phil was standing there, pale, with a frightened look in his eyes.

“What, in the name of God, is going on? You guys were screaming…..”

“Just look!” She said, weeping.

I looked.

At first I could see nothing wrong. The monitors showed regular operations, and they looked, like all popsicles do behind the glass freezer doors, like life-size dolls, motionless and cold. Then I noticed that the ice around the freezer door did not look right. It was cracked, like the door had been opened at some point. Brushing some of the ice off of the door for a closer look I saw that the body proportions for First-Shift Captain Sil were all wrong. Then I realized why.

His legs were gone from mid-thigh down. Feeling lightheaded, my heart pounding, I ran over to the other popsicles and brushed off the ice and saw why Sharon and Phil had been so upset. None of them had their legs.

They were in the first stages of the thaw and none of them had their legs.

Only one person on the crew could have had the access, time and knowledge to do this.

“Oh…my ….GOD!” I screamed and started running for Mark’s room.

Mark was standing in front of his door, with that strange smirk on his face.

“I can’t let you in there, Dell.” He said.

I looked at him for a moment in disbelief, remembering what I had just seen. I hit him in the jaw so hard that my right hand still has a mark from where his teeth cut me and I broke two fingers. I hit him hard enough that I can still remember the blood flying onto the walls and his body flying back against his door. I grabbed his hair and kicked his body out of the way,

Pounding out the emergency entry code, I opened his door. I looked over at the corner and saw his compost heap, covered in a clear, plastic tarp. When I lifted the tarp, a nauseating wave of stench rolled over me and I gagged. I took a closer look: Human toes, human femurs, human shin bones and the healthiest compost that any gardener could ask for.

                                          ****************************

Mark Carmel is not the only one that was looked upon with hate, as I live my life out here in the Proxima space station. It was my job to watch Mark, and his crimes touched my life and career. Everywhere I apply, I am known as the guy that let Mark Carmel harvest a crew’s body parts. So, I live my life as a near leper, and Mark, well, Mark was tried, found guilty, shoved into an airlock and just spaced. Spacer justice is funny that way. They never wait long and it is usually final.

Me? I raise Bonsai trees and any other plants that dead spacers have left behind and then I sell them to noobs and other Spacers that have accidentally killed their own plants. It is a kindness that the Company and Proxima Station left me. Rather than join Mark in space, they figured that if no crew would have me after that, then at least I can raise plants.