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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?”

“So that’s your game. I knew you were up to something. Changing the whole trading culture isn’t enough?”

I just chuckled and shrugged. “What can I say, I’m frugal. My mom raised me not to waste anything and when I heard we were giving away sludge cakes as terraforming base, I got this wild idea that there must be something better we could do with it.”

Diane laughed. “You want to make money on sewage?”

I shrugged. “The more money the ship makes, the more money I make. I don’t care what it starts life as, so long as it ends as a cred in my account.”

She looked me up and down before speaking, “Ishmael Wang, I like the way you think.”

Chapter 24

Margary Station

2352-January-12

When we got to the Lois’ lock, I turned to Diane. “Come on, I’ll buy ya a coffee.”

“Coffee’s free, ya cheapskate.”

“Okay, then you buy.”

We went to the mess deck where Pip was setting up for lunch. He looked up when we entered. “Where have you two been?”

“We took a tour of a mushroom farm,” I told Pip.

Diane nodded. “Yeah, it actually was quite interesting.”

We settled into a table just as Brill and Francis came in for lunch. Diane waved them over. “You’ll never guess where we’ve been.”

Francis looked at her for a heartbeat. “Mushroom farm.”

Diane started to say, “How-”

Brill interrupted her, “We heard you as we were coming up the passage. I recognize the symptoms so you better spill your beans before your head explodes.”

Diane tried to look innocent. “I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

It didn’t work. Brill and Francis just looked at her.