Horizon Storms - Kevin J. Anderson [44]
They’d been latecomers here. The first families had arrived a hundred and ten years earlier and staked their claims. Many of them already acted like snobs, considering themselves genuine bluebloods after only a few generations. Her father had ignored the snobbery, however, accepted the available land, and made the best of it. He diligently forged ahead without much of a plan, but with a great deal of exuberance. For eight and a half years he had worked hard while insisting, “Next year will be better. We’ll make it then for sure, Orli.”
This year, though, the mushroom field was a disaster.
The ground was wet and mulchy, with standing pools of peaty brown water. Many of the giant mushrooms had been hacked down, the tender caps harvested, but most had opened their rills and dumped spores, which darkened the fungus meat with inky residue and lent it an unpleasant taste.
Now Jan shoved his spade into the soft, cold muck and flashed a bright smile at her. “We’ll salvage some of this, Orli. Fifteen percent at least.”
She smiled in response to his chipper attitude. “We can maybe push it to twenty percent if the weather holds.”
But on Dremen, the weather would not hold.
She wiped her forehead, pushing her dark bangs aside. Though she wanted to let her brown hair grow out like some of the colonists’ uppity daughters did, she knew that with her pointed chin, pert nose, and large eyes, long hair would make her look identical to pictures of her mother. Jan never talked about his faraway wife—she had left them long ago, after one of her husband’s previous schemes had failed. But Orli didn’t want to remind him, so she kept her hair short and simple.
She didn’t know why her father had chosen to come to Dremen, of all places. It was a cool world with dim skies. The variable sun waxed over the course of decades, warming the planet and making life nearly tolerable. Dremen had plenty of water; its continents were dotted with large shallow lakes that evaporated easily, keeping the air in a clammy equilibrium of fog and frequent rain showers. Woody plants had not evolved here, and the ground was covered with cold bogs, mossy groundcover, and sheets of leathery lichen.
But Orli and her father had arrived during the variable star’s waning phase, and year after year the climate had only grown colder until the variable-phase winter had set in hard. During previous waning cycles, the Dremen colonists had depended on relief supplies from Hansa merchant ships. This time around, though, the hydrogue embargo changed everything.
With great aspirations, Jan had studied Dremen’s climate and meteorology, and had convinced a few investors by insisting (quite rationally) that while green crops struggled in the damp and dim environment, genetically enhanced mushrooms were sure to be a bumper crop. The spores he imported to Dremen grew into broad toadstools that provided edible flesh, dense in nutrients, though they were chewy and bland. Once he’d prepared his open fields, Jan went overboard with the planting. Untempered optimism again.
The first harvest had been beyond her father’s wildest dreams—or plans, because he’d made no prior arrangements for large work crews or automated equipment to chop down and preserve the delicate mushroom meat. The fungi grew quickly, but withered just as fast. Timing was crucial.
He and Orli had worked around the clock until they were ready to drop, but half of the crop still rotted. Jan had rushed into town, asking for help, but he had nothing with which to pay the crew. In the end, he’d been forced just to open his land and let people come in and take what they wanted, hoping to earn goodwill, if not actual profits, from his fellow colonists.
The unharvested mushrooms in the fields had dumped their spores and slumped into the bog—and an even larger crop of chaotic mushrooms sprang forth the next season, ripened…and then rotted.
Though Jan and Orli had plenty to eat, they had overestimated