Martian Vegetables

Eric had risen and beckoned me sit at his kitchen table while he put something on his stove.  He hadn’t done more than chop a few items from his fridge and add them to a pot he had pulled from his fridge.  After our lengthy discussion on the finer points of nanite technology and terraforming I found myself hungry.  As I scrawled notes, Eric tended to his cooking.

“Soup should be about ready now,” Eric said in reply to the loud growl from my stomach.  “Care for a bowl?”  He reached into a cupboard to the left of the stove and pulled out two oversized mugs labeled, in equally oversized letters, SOUP.  I decided that after the ordeal Eric had put me through that if he was offering me food, I had better take it.

“Sure.  What are we having?” I asked.

“Simple vegetable soup.  Here,” Eric handed me a bowl, plunking a soup spoon and torn-off hunk of bread into the bowl.  “Let me know what you think.  It’s a recipe I’ve been working on a while.”

I almost feared the question, but asked anyway.  “How long of a while?”

“About seventy-three years come Earth-standard August,” he replied.  I knew I would regret the question.  I began eating, trying to figure out what all he had put in the soup.

“Enjoying the soup?” Eric asked as I continued to sip at it.

“Yes,” I said, still focusing on the cornucopia of flavors.  Pepper and garlic were definitely present.  I could plainly see leafy parts floating around the bowl as well as cuts of celery and onion.  There was more depth, though, to the soup than just that

 “No, you’re not,” Eric said around a mouthful of soup-soaked bread.  “You’re analyzing it.  You’re losing some of the flavors when you do that!  Treat it like a magic show.  Don’t try to figure it out. Just enjoy it and leave the worrying to the chef.”

Eric did have a point; the soup was delicious. And if I were to keep focusing on its taste the whole time, I would be done with it before I could enjoy it.  I took a moment, closed my eyes, exhaled slowly then inhaled the aroma wafting from my bowl.

“There ya go,” Eric said.  “Don’t try to figure it out.  Just welcome it in and let the smell happen.”  It was delightful.  Somehow I suddenly caught myself remembering the kitchen back home when I was a kid.  Mom tried to add her own flair to dishes, but normally ended up ruining the dish in the process.  Synth food had everything it needed in it anyway.  At least so I had thought.

Even a steaming bowl of synth-miso couldn’t hold a flame to the rapture of scents my nose was experiencing.  Faintly again there was the pepper, garlic, some rosemary, a hint of parsley.  I opened my eyes, surprised.

“Found more when you weren’t looking for it, right?” Eric asked.

“Yeah, I did,” I replied.

“That’s always how Meng tried to describe his prescience to us.  If he tried to force it he would lose focus on the very thing he sought.  If, however, he just let prescient thought waft over him, he found what he was looking for every time.  Took me a long time to understand that and build the same sort of discipline.  Soup helps, though, doesn’t it?” Eric asked, taking another spoonful. “Don’t let me stop you,” he added around another bite of bread.  “Keep going.  Let go and taste it.” Obediently I closed my eyes, dunked my spoon and brought it to my mouth.  The aroma again wafted before me, bringing to mind some of the plants I had seen in Eric’s living room.

I took in the soup, letting it sit on my tongue before chewing slowly.  Celery, onions, broccoli, , some mushroom slices as well as a taste of potato.  Swallowing, I felt the soup warm my throat, then stomach.

“Sometimes the simple act of letting go, of living in the moment, is all that is needed to sustain and recharge us,” Eric said. “Soup itself is quite a thing.  Doesn’t have much substance to it really,” Eric said to some dripping and splashing.  Opening my eyes I found him ladling his soup with his spoon, watching as it fell back into the bowl. “There are larger chunks, smaller chunks, spices, dissolved bits and then the water that makes up the bulk of it. And yet, lacking such substance as this,” he said, holding up what remained of his bread, “it is still vitally re-energizing, isn’t it?”

He expected no reply, so I didn’t try to give one.  Eric quietly finished the rest of his soup and bread as he had admonished me to do.  The presence this man exuded was completely unique to me.  Something about him engendered a whole host of emotions and empathies.  Watching him eat, though, one came through stronger than the rest: loneliness.

We finished our soup in silence and continued so for a few minutes.  Eric had turned to look out his back windows into his yard.  There I could see his small garden alongside some fruit trees.  “Ever think about those?” Eric motioned toward his garden.  “How they got here, I mean?”

I actually hadn’t.  People, after all, hadn’t come to Mars with much.  And nowhere in the historical records was there ever mentioned a want for sustenance.

“I guess that I just always assumed they were brought with colony missions.”  My mind traced back to Eric’s comments about the terraforming process.  Such would have been done with plants meant for harsh environs, not such temperamental plants as crops.

“I’m sorry to say it this way, but do you really think the first settlers, construction workers and the like, would generally have had the know-how to breed plants native to Earth to survive here on Mars?  Between the differences in soil, gravity and season length, Earth crops just didn’t do well.  Sure, when you get summer here it lasts twice as long and so you have double the growing season.  What do you think that does to crops, though?  They’re still used to a set season length.  They grow, produce, then die.”

“Martian varieties have double seasons, though,” I commented.

“Naturally.  We engineered them that way.  Twice as long a year here, twice as much food needed to get you through that year.  So why not take advantage of the extended summer seasons?”

“So it was your people who modified the crop strains?” I asked.

“Yup.  Didn’t have time to do it in the old fashioned way, though,” Eric replied. “So we went a different route.  We used nanites to go in and forcibly reprogram the plants to produce twice in a season.  Took a little bit of trial and error, I’ll admit.  Pesky bugger, that switch in their genome.  For being such well-understood organisms, plants are still annoyingly complex.”

“So what you’re saying,” I said, suddenly wishing I hadn’t put my notetab to sleep while eating, “is you basically created those,” pointing to the plants in Eric’s back yard.

“Yup.  That was us.”

“What about the Martian-Terran hybrids on Earth?” I asked.

“The immortal strains?  Those were a product of our tinkering, once again, with nanites here on Mars at the University.  Ironically, we were just looking to create new strains of crops that could withstand larger temperature swings, increasing their growing season further.  We quickly figured out, though, that on Earth they would just keep producing all year round whereas their elder cousins would not.  I will admit, though, that immortal apples do taste a bit off.  Never able to work that out before our research was shut down.  Again.”  I remembered Eric talking about their attempt to revive nanite technology on Mars.

“So, are there still nanites guiding plant growth?” I queried.

Eric shifted his eyes back to me, a glint appearing in them to accompany his smirk.  “Good question.  We thought about it, but the result would have been introduction of nanites into the general human population, an eventuality we didn’t want to deal with at the time.  So, rather than doing so, we had the nanites self-terminate once the plant genomes were successfully reprogrammed.  They’ve been out of any type of Martian crop for 200 years, hybrids for about 150. ”

“Eric,” I said delicately. “You keep mentioning the other exiles and Elites. And after your comment about Laura and Hank, I have to ask: are there any others left?”  Eric’s eyes took on a panged look before he quickly squeezed them shut, opening them to look longingly again out the window.

“No,” came the slow, flat answer filled with the same loneliness I had felt minutes before. “After our attempt to revive the tech was silenced the few of us that remained decided to give up.  The nanites prolong life, to be sure, but only if you allow them to.”

“So you can, what, turn them off?” I asked.

“Essentially, yes. Over centuries of living with them we gained deeper understanding of and control over them than we ever could have imagined in the beginning.  Instead of needing an external interface to re-write their base code, we figured out how to set up the same thing mentally.  From there self-adaptation of nanites was easy, including the ability to insert a kill-switch.”

“So not to open a wound further, but why are you still here, Eric?”

“Because I still have one last mission to complete.  Once that is done, then I can rest,” he replied.

“Why not pass it on to someone else?” I asked. Eric again turned his gaze back to me, a quirky, wry smile on his face.

“The nanitic life within me, the mission I have yet to complete, or both?” he asked.  I hadn’t thought about the nanites yet within him. If none existed in the modified plants and no more of the original Nanitics of the TDF yet lived, then those still active within Eric should be the last of their kind in the universe.

“Both, I guess,” I replied.

“Soon enough,” Eric answered, turning his focus back to his garden.  “When the time is right.”

My mind once again caught a passing thought.  The introduction of immortal Martian-Terran hybrids to Earth had been in emergency response to the Great Crop Extinction of the 2420s and 2430s, the very event that had precipitated the Great Martian Migration of the same period.  These days, of course, Terran farmers were once again growing healthy crops, diversifying their strains against another such event.

“Eric, did you and your people have a hand, in helping to save Earth from the Crop Extinction?”

“Behind the scenes, yes.  When we first came here we brought as many crop species as we could, not knowing which one or which parts would be best suited for Martian life.  Darn good thing, too, considering how dumb the Terran crop monitors had become,” he replied.

I felt a pang of disgust and self-loathing.  My great-grandfather had been one of those crop monitors whose reliance on a single species staple crops had led to the near-instant death of all food crops on Earth.  Not even the swift action of continental governments could stop the spread of necrotic disease that swept all corners of the globe.  Such a lesson in crop diversity had come at nearly too high a price.

“So then you had a hand in the Vegetable Ark?” I added.

“Sure did.  Ironic, isn’t it, how the exiles from Earth once a?  Kinda like the cast-out child coming back home to care for his parents. Every human on Earth and Luna could have starved to death. And what a shame that would have been.”  Eric said, an undercurrent of sudden cynicism working its way into his voice as he turned back to face me. In his face something had changed.  Something was now there that hadn’t been before.  Not even during the odd episode where he had talked as a chorus had Eric’s face held what it did now.  Nearly dark foreboding, his countenance somehow seemed to dim his features.  It was as if an overhead light had been turned off.  “What I mean is that humanity is growing soft,” he practically growled.  “For years someone has always been there to hold up its weak and decrepit form.  Ever on the razor’s edge humanity has, for a long time, had a steadying hand.  It has weakened a once great people.  One that was capable, under the right leadership, of taking on even those who were nearly superhuman.  But the years have been less than kind to we evolved apes.  What has humanity done in times of crisis?  Stood and fought it?  Or rather ran off to safe havens among the stars?  Only the weak flee their home under duress.  The strong-willed stand and fight to the last man.” Yet glowering he said, “I recognize you, faintly.  As though I once saw you in a dream.”  Then, once more, he was silent. A light seemed to come on over his head, again illuminating his face.  His countenance changed and once again he had an expression of trying to remember a dream.  He looked at me questioningly, realization dawning on his face.  “I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s part of what’s going on inside you?” I asked probatively.

“Yes. It is,” he confirmed.

“Can you tell me?” I said.

“It is not yet time for that,” he replied.  “I need a few moments to think.  Would you mind waiting for me in the living room?” he asked. Not waiting for a reply, he rose and headed out his back door.  I could feel a warm spring breeze filter into the kitchen.

“Sure thing,” I barely managed before the door closed.  Grateful for the chance to try and put to memory what had just happened, I sat in my chair in Eric’s living room.  It was quite odd, two different abnormalities as I had now seen.  I suppose Schizophrenia would be the closest approximation.  Though somewhere within me I understood that what was going on, what was happening to Eric, had a deeper meaning than I could possibly fathom.  And after all, one’s countenance may change with alternative personalities but not the color of one’s eyes.  And after very careful reflection I decided that while the seeming dimming of Eric’s face surely must have been a cloud blocking the sun.  After all, how could light actually retreat from around a person?

After getting my thoughts down I found myself focused on his small shelf of house plants and herbs.  Some were just beginning to flower along with the change in season.  Others had new buds forming, showing signs of growth yet to come.  Even on the edges of the shelf there stood sprigs of plants suspended in water, root systems beginning to grow.  The plants outside in Eric’s garden, with their greater tolerance for temperature extremes, were already growing small sprouts that would become vegetables and fruits.  These, though, had to be domestic varieties, a variant of Terran heirloom strains, which had been tuned to the double-long Martian seasons.  Suddenly I realized something about the plants: they were all drooping.  With as much care and attention as Eric had been paying them earlier, this seemed quite odd.

As I stared at them, though, they seemed to begin to strengthen, stalks seemed to straighten and leaves to stiffen.  I heard the back door slowly open and close as Eric entered his kitchen, poured two glasses of water and rejoined me.

“So,” he said, handing me a glass, “are you okay to keep going?”

“Sure I am.  Are you?” I asked him gently.

“Yeah.  I’m fine now.  Just needed a minute to center myself.”  The plants on Eric’s stand once more had their healthy pink-green glow.

“Do you have anything you need to attend to at the University?  I wouldn’t want to keep you from students,” I mentioned.

“Actually, my time there is over.  Shall we continue?”