Up Against It - M. J. Locke [47]
GEOFF, WHY YOU WAS INTERESTED IN ME I’LL NEVER KNOW BUT YOU BEEN A GOOD FRIEND AND I’M LEAVING EVERYTHING TO YOU. HERES THE DEED. THERE AINT MUCH ORE LEFT IN THAT OLD STROID BUT NICKLE AND IRON, AND AN ASS FULL OF SILICATES. I TOOK MOST OF THE GOOD STUFF BUT WHATS THERE IS YOURS. TAKE THE DEED TO THE LAND OFFICE. AND DON’T SHED TEARS, I HAD A GOOD LIFE AND I BEEN READY TO DEPART THIS “MORTAL COIL” FOR A WHILE NOW.
JOEY SPUD
Last year, Ouroboros had crept to within a few hours’ ride of the treeways, which meant Geoff and his buddies could afford to go out there occasionally. They had ridden their bikes out to check it out, used the maps to do some exploring, and that was when Geoff learned that Joey Spud had plugged his tapped-out tunnels with ice. Not enough to save the cluster; Geoff figured it would take a lot more than a few old tunnels’ worth of water and methane to bail the cluster out of this mess they were in. Still, there was quite a bit—maybe even enough, they figured, for a round-trip ticket Downside for all four of them.
Every four years, in Martian or Venetian orbit or Earth’s LaGrange Five, the Orbital Olympics were held. The next Olympics were going to be in Earth orbit, and they were coming up in two years. Geoff and the others had been saving their ice shipment nettings, adding them to the stockpile, instead of selling them on the exchange. They had hoped to get all four of them to Earthspace several months ahead of time—hire a professional trainer and enter some of the interplanetary competitions that led up to the big event. With Joey Spud’s ice, they had a real shot at it.
They had all been thinking about the ice. They were supposed to notify someone. But he wasn’t going to bring it up if nobody else did.
They landed at the mine entrance, near the big mining equipment. They drove their rocketbikes inside the lock and entered the main chamber. The machine shop was huge—a tall-ceilinged chamber dug out by Joey Spud’s big tunneler long ago. It had to be big, to handle the machines. Most of the big, planetoid-chewing equipment stayed outdoors, outside the airlock, but the machine shop was littered with gears, cranks, and conveyors so big that standing near them made you feel about as tall as a toy action figure.
“Chiisu—” Ian said. “Anybody want to go launch some spuds?” They’d picked up a few words of Japanese slang from Amaya, who had immigrated Upward with her mom from Earth when she was little.
Kam and Amaya said no, but Geoff thought it over and said, “Sure, I guess.”
That was the other mystery they had solved when they had first flown out to Ouroboros: the mystery of Joey Spud’s nickname. He had a dozen caves piled high with potatoes, dozens of varieties. And other tubers, too: yams, turnips, radishes, carrots, onions, arrowroot, tapioca—just about every kind of root vegetable you could imagine. He had grown them in lighted chambers full of topsoil, and had little robots to tend and harvest them. The maintenance robots were still working—Geoff and his friends had made sure of that—but the garden robots did not work anymore, they just sat around in the tunnels and cul-de-sacs like mechanistic gnomes. The tunnels also housed several varieties of winter squashes, pumpkin, and gourds. He had grown greens, too, but those had long since died. The lights had powered down and the temperatures had dropped when Joey had not returned after a while. All that was left of Joey Spud’s vegetable legacy was mounds and mounds of tubers. Enough to feed a small army.
Plenty of the tubers and roots were still good. Geoff and his friends, by virtue of being hungry all the time, not to mention broke, and disinclined to ship their favorite snacks out from Zekeston, had developed a taste for the bounty of the gourd and tuber. They had taken turns fixing chips, fries, mashed potatoes,