Ecolitan Prime (Ecolitan Matter) (36 page)

“We’ll head out to the end of the ridge,” announced Jem, turning the gray to the southeast.

Sylvia lifted her reins, and lurched in the saddle as Happy slow-trotted after the rover. Nathaniel gingerly flicked the brown horse’s reins, and Pokey lumbered after the other two, losing ground with every step.

Jem reined up and waited with Sylvia until Nathaniel’s gelding carried the Ecolitan to the end of the rise. Grass-covered hills stretched southward, and a line of trees to the west of the ridge that held the house and buildings outlined the course of the river.

“The spread runs another two hundred kays south along the river. Most is like this, grass and hills, but we got a couple stands of woods, and a few more set. ’Course, it’ll take another thirty years before they’re much.”

Horned cattle—nearly a hundred—grazed beside the pond below.

“What kind of animals are those?” asked Sylvia.

“Cattle—modified Tee-type longhorns. They did something to their genes—George told me, but I don’t recall. It allows them to digest the grass better. They’re tamer, too. Don’t have big predators here.” Jem started the gray downhill toward the cattle.

Around the pond, the grass had been churned into a muddy mass, an area that Jem gave a wide berth.

Nathaniel suppressed a frown. “What feeds the pond?”

“It’s pumped from the river. We’ve got ponds across the spread. That way, we can rotate where they graze. Got a bunch of herds. Someday, we’ll get natural ponds. Till then…”

Up close, the cattle were larger than they had seemed—monsters whose shoulders were level with Nathaniel’s waist on horseback and whose horns spread more than two meters.

“You’re certain that they’re tame?” the Ecolitan asked, noting the pointed horn tips.

“So long as you don’t whack their nostrils. Even then, they’d just knock you aside.”

Just being knocked aside by something that weighed nearly a tonne would be painful, if not worse.

“We’ll ride out to the river, if you can hang on that long.”

“As long as we don’t gallop,” said Sylvia.

“No hurry. This beats riding fences or herding strays out of the sand. Gets hotter out there.”

Nathaniel felt for the big kerchief, blotting his forehead. “Rather hot here already.”

“This is cool compared to that.” Jem laughed. “We can’t go too far into the desert anyway.”

“Is that because of the heat?”

“The heat’s part of it, but the ground’s unstable, too. George or Terril could explain that better than me. I’m just a dumb rover.”

The three rode abreast across the flat expanse of grass, leaving the herd behind.

“No beans—that sort of thing?” asked Whaler.

“Got to have some hydrocarb source, I guess, but George says that it won’t be on this spread, not ever. Feels strong, he does. Even the maize for fattening the steers comes from the boss’s commercial lands closer to Lanceville.”

A series of flies buzzed around the horses and riders as they neared the river, but Nathaniel would have bet that the planoforming had left out mosquitoes.

The river was about a hundred meters wide, smooth-flowing dark gray water, bounded by willowlike trees and taller grasses on either side.

“Marsh grasses,” said Nathaniel, glad to recognize something that fit ecologically.

“Yeah…George doesn’t like it much, but he says we got to leave the grass and trees. Dr. Oconnor says we’d have the river ripping up all the grasslands without them. Used to be straighter, I’m told, but it’ll find its own path over time, and there’s no good way to change that.” Jem turned in the saddle. “You’re ecologic folks. That true?”

“Pretty much,” admitted Whaler. “The optimum is to work with natural flows and not to combat them.” He managed not to wince at the pedantry of the words.

“Got some fish in there, but we can’t catch ’em yet. Too many heavy metals to eat. Some day, they say.”

The two Ecolitans nodded.

“Seen enough?” asked Jem. “We ought to head back.”

Sylvia and Nathaniel exchanged glances. He nodded. “Fine with us.”

As they rode back toward the rise that held the ranch house and the flitter, Nathaniel studied the cropped grass, noting the absence of bushes and competing vegetation, trying not to shake his head.

The air was still, and the sun hotter yet. Nathaniel blotted his forehead several times more as Pokey followed the other two mounts back.

“I haven’t seen anything like a cattle processing plant.” The Ecolitan glanced at the stone walls of the ranch house and then at the long stone barn that finally appeared above them. “Is that in Lanceville?”

“Hardly. George doesn’t like things outside the spread, not unless it’s crops.”

“But…”

“George likes his views.” Jem laughed. “Everyone knows that. Not much to the plant, but I can show you. We’ll go this way.” He turned his mount westward.

The three circled the base of the rise that held the main house until they entered a swale between the long ridgelike rise and a much smaller hill.

“That’s it.” Jem gestured to his left and grinned.

A permacrete strip, wide enough for a lorry, if not much wider, ran down from the top of the rise and through the swale where Jem had reined up and then to a heavy lorry dock set in the side of the lower hill.

“Under the hill?” asked Nathaniel.

“It makes sense,” said Sylvia. “George likes his views. So he built the processing plant under an artificial hill.”

“Not just the plant, professor,” Jem added. “The slaughterhouse and everything.”

Sylvia grasped the antique saddle horn, leaned toward Nathaniel, and murmured. “Not another word about underground stuff.”

“All right,” he said amiably.

She lurched in the saddle for a moment before managing to straighten up.

“Careful there, miss…I mean, professor.” Jem shrugged. “That’s pretty much it. I mean, the grasslands go forever, but all you’ll see is more grass and more steers and the river. ’Sides, I need to get you back to the main house.” The rover flicked the gray’s reins.

After a moment, with a last look at the hill that concealed a processing plant, the two Ecolitans followed.

George Reeves-Kenn was waiting as the three rode up to the barn area from where they had started.

Nathaniel eased himself out of the saddle, wondering if he might not have been in better shape if he’d walked or run. Sylvia descended with more grace and less obvious stiffness.

“How did you like it?” Reeves-Kenn grinned.

“It’s awesome,” admitted Sylvia.

“Impressive. Most impressive,” added Nathaniel, massaging his backside slightly. “Most impressive is the skill to ride horses.”

“It takes some doing, but you can learn. Jem there—he’d never seen a horse up close, and he rides like he was born to it.” The rancher nodded. “Ready to eat?”

“I could manage that,” said Sylvia.

“I also.”

The dining room was at one end of the long stone house, with the entire north wall comprised of tinted glass. A single table was set for three people, all three places on one side, facing northward and looking out.

Reeves-Kenn nodded toward the center place. “The rose between two thorns.”

“Sometimes I feel thorny…but thank you.” Sylvia took the center place, and all three sat.

“We don’t get outworlders here at Connaught that often. They take a look at Lanceville, the fusactor system, the harbor, and the hydrocarb processing plant, maybe Sebastion’s marine farms and assimilators, and they think they’ve seen Artos.” The white-haired rancher handed the basket of still-warm bread to Sylvia. “This is Artos.” He gestured toward the hillside below the expansive glass windows, toward the grass-covered ground, and the river, and the desert in the distance to the northeast.

“It’s beautiful in a stark way.” Sylvia took a chunk of bread and passed the basket to Whaler.

“Your family had much to do with creating Artos as it is now, I understand,” offered Nathaniel, breaking off a chunk of the crusty bread.

“Most folks choose to forget that, Ecolitan. We’re just inconvenient leftovers now that the synde beans and the marine projects have taken off. Blood-mare! It was the credits from luxury beef that kept us going. Now, they talk as if beef…” George shook his head. “They don’t know what sort of gene-tinkering it took. Too much arsenic and other stuff in the land and grass. How do you get steers that can ingest it and still produce edible beef?”

“It took some doing, I’m sure,” Nathaniel offered, taking some of the warm bread. He had the feeling he was going to be sunburned, maybe brightly burned. He reached for the water.

“Doing? The gene-plan alone was more than ten million.”

An older woman stepped across the dining room with a green platter that she eased onto the center of the green linen.

“Thank you, Estelle.”

Estelle nodded.

“Try these. Marinated beef. Guarantee you’ve never tasted better—even if I raised the steers.”

Nathaniel waited for Sylvia, then helped himself. He cut a piece, then chewed slowly. If anything, the marinated beef strips were even more tender and tasty than the steaks and stew served at the Guest House. “They represent the best I have tasted.”

“Me, too.”

“Told you so. Can’t raise this in a tank.” The rancher took another mouthful before speaking. “What did you think of the Unformed Desert?”

Nathaniel looked at Reeves-Kenn’s weathered face.

“That’s what they call the badlands between here and Lanceville.” The grower shook his head. “My grandsire—he said he could recall when most of Artos looked like that.”

Nathaniel thought the rancher was stretching. Planoforming was a far longer and more arduous process. But he nodded. “It makes you think.”

“Think? No one thinks anymore.” The rancher snorted. “The environauts in Camelot think that ranching takes too much land, and that all of this should be left and allowed to develop naturally. Naturally—there’s not a damned thing natural about any of it. We built it. The redistributionists think we’re dinosaurs, and want us to become extinct quietly, so they can give every soul in the commonwealth his thirty hectares. No one remembers that we’re the ones whose fathers and forefathers lived in domes and choked on ammonia and…” He stopped and offered a sheepish grin. “I get too upset about this. I’m sure you don’t want to hear a diatribe.”

“It’s interesting, and part of Artos,” Sylvia answered.

The three ate quietly for a time, the only interruption that of Estelle replacing the empty basket with another one—again full of hot and fresh bread.

“According to your rover, you have a well-integrated facility here,” said Nathaniel. “It appears most modern, yet there are those who find you less than enthused about technology.”

“Folks think that technology means change, that you have to do something just because you can or because it’s a shade cheaper.” Reeves-Kenn shook his head. “Look at Jem. He’s a first-class rover, and a horse is better than any flitter or scooter for what he does. But we put high-tech survival packs on every horse, and we use the latest technology in slaughtering and packing. I believe in being the master of technology, not its slave. Those idiots in Camelot—all they want to know is what sort of tech-transfers you can develop and what kind of transstellar credit you can develop. I was talking about Jem. He rides a horse, and his brother pilots flitters and groundcars. Ought to be room for both, but you can’t have both if you break up the big spreads.”

“Why not?” asked Sylvia. “Doesn’t everyone say you can?”

“They don’t know what they’re talking about. Smaller bean growers—take them—they have to share mechs, pool transport—all that means more technology. That means a bigger tech base. To support a bigger tech base means growing more hydrocarb sources and more tech-transfers. More hydrocarb crops means plowing under the grasslands, because no one wants to go through what my grandfather did—they just want to take the results. They’ll do that over my dead body.” The rancher snorted. “Not that it will come to that. But all those tech-transfers mean more metal drops, or deep coring, and those cost. To pay those off requires more emphasis on technology—and then Artos’ll be trapped, just like New Avalon is. Once you get on that spiral, you never get off.”

“Such has occurred on more than a few planets—that the Institute has seen.” Nathaniel sipped the cold water, realizing that he’d effectively stuffed himself, and pushed back his plate fractionally, to remind himself not to eat more than anything. He probably felt stuffed because there hadn’t been any vegetables or greens either.

“How did you folks escape that?” George refilled his water glass.

“Luck—and isolation—and a war that left most systems reluctant to trade high-tech concepts.” The Ecolitan shrugged. “We had to limit technology to interstellar transport and the directly related infrastructure. By the time we escaped that need, the cultural patterns were established.”

“We haven’t had that kind of luck. Doesn’t look like we will, but I guess we’re the type of folks that have always had to make their own.” He paused. “Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” said Whaler. “Not another item could I eat. It was all delicious…but…”

“Absolutely,” added Sylvia. “If I ate like this every day, I’d look like your steers.”

“Never, professor. Never.” The rancher’s leathery face cracked in a grin.

“I think not either,” said Nathaniel.

Sylvia shook her head. “You’re both kind, but I know better.”

“I suppose you need to go, and I need to get back to checking on a few things.” The rancher glanced at Sylvia, then rose.

So did the Ecolitans.

“Lovely view,” said Sylvia as they walked from the dining room.

“It is. I’d like to keep it.”

“Do you think changes are occurring that rapidly?” asked Whaler.

“Quicker than that. That Landis-Nicarchos fellow is buying up Lanceville faster than folks can sell, and they’re moving to ConTrio. But what will they do there when their money runs out? Come back and work in whatever tech-slavery he’s got set up? Or push for more welfare? That means you run a tech surplus, and you can’t do that without metals mining and more hydrocarb growth.” The rancher shook his head as he held the outside door.