But they must not have checked the file, or understood it if they did. If they knew about GROSS, he would never have been freed.
Early in the colony’s life, the East Five lava tube had been its major agricultural center. The yeast vats now produced only animal fodder, but the hydroponics rack farms still functioned, mostly for luxury items. The rote work of tending the racks fell to cousins who did not express ambition to do anything more challenging. They lived in the tube warrens on the colony’s Minimum Living Standard.
A stylized painting of a centaur graced the entrance of the East Five men’s warren. Since the artist had not likely ever studied a real horse, the stance of the creature looked deeply suspect to Erno. At the lobby interface Erno called up the AI attendant. The AI came on-screen as a dark brown woman wearing a glittery green shirt.
“I’m looking for Micah Avasson,” Erno asked it.
“Who is calling?”
“Erno Pamelasson.”
“He’s on shift right now.”
“Can I speak with him?”
“Knock yourself out.” The avatar pointed off-screen toward a dimly lit passageway across the room. She appeared on the wall near the doorway, and called out to Erno, “Over here. Follow this corridor, third exit left to the Ag tube.”
Outside of the lobby, the corridors and rooms here had the brutal utilitarian quality that marked the early colony, when survival had been the first concern and the idea of humane design had been to put a mirror at the end of a room to try to convince the eye that you weren’t living in a cramped burrow some meters below the surface of a dead world. An environmental social worker would shudder.
The third exit on the left was covered with a clear permeable barrier. From the time he was a boy Erno had disliked passing through these permeable barriers; he hated the feel of the electrostatics brushing his face. He took a mask from the dispenser, fitted it over his nose and mouth, closed his eyes and passed through into the Ag tube. Above, layers of gray mastic sealed the tube roof; below, a concrete floor supported long rows of racks under light transmitted fiberoptically from the heliostats. A number of workers wearing coveralls and oxygen masks moved up and down the rows tending the racks. The high CO 2 air was laden with humidity, and even through the mask smelled of phosphates.
Erno approached a man bent over a drawer of seedlings he had pulled out of a rack. The man held a meter from which wires dangled to a tube immersed in the hydroponics fluid. “Excuse me,” Erno said. “I’m looking for Micah Avasson.”
The man lifted his head, inspected Erno, then without speaking turned. “Micah!” He called down the row.
A tall man a little farther down the aisle looked up and peered at them. He had a full head of dark hair, a birdlike way of holding his shoulders. After a moment he said, “I’m Micah Avasson.”
Erno walked down toward him. Erno was nonplused-the man had pushed up his mask from his mouth and was smoking a cigarette, using real fire. No, not a cigarette-a joint.
“You can smoke in here? What about the fire regulations?”
“We in the depths are not held to as high a standard as you.” Micah said this absolutely deadpan, as if there were not a hint of a joke. “Not enough O 2 to make a decent fire anyway. It takes practice just to get a good buzz off this thing in here without passing out.”
Joint dangling from his lower lip, the man turned back to the rack. He wore yellow rubber gloves, and was pinching the buds off the tray of squat green leafy plants. Erno recognized them as a modified broadleaf sensamilla.
“You’re using the colony facilities to grow pot.”
“This is my personal crop. We each get a personal rack. Sparks initiative.” Micah kept pinching buds. “Want to try some?”
Erno gathered himself. “My name is Erno Pamelasson. I came to see you because-”
“You’re my son.” Micah said, not looking at him.
Erno stared, at a loss for words. Up close the lines at the corners of the man’s eyes were distinct, and there was a bit of sag to his chin. But the shape of Micah’s face reminded Erno of his own reflection in the mirror.
“What did you want to see me about?” Micah pushed the rack drawer closed and looked at Erno. When Erno stood there dumb, he wheeled the stainless steel cart beside him down to the next rack. He took a plastic bin from the cart, crouched, pulled open the bottom drawer of the rack and began harvesting cherry tomatoes.
Finally, words came to Erno. “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”
“Lots of boys never meet their fathers.”
“I’m not talking about other fathers. Why aren’t you and my mother together?”
“You assume we were together. How do you know that we didn’t meet in the sauna some night, one time only?”
“Is that how it was?”
Micah lifted a partially yellow tomato on his fingertips, then left it on the vine to ripen. He smiled. “No. Your mother and I were in love. We lived together for twenty-two months. And two days.”
“So why did you split?”
“That I don’t remember so well. We must have had our reasons. Everybody has reasons.”
Erno touched his shoulder. “Don’t give me that.”
Micah stood, overbalancing a little. Erno caught his arm to steady him. “Thanks,” Micah said. “The knees aren’t what they used to be.” He took a long drag on the joint, exhaled at the roof far overhead. “All right, then. The reason we broke up is that your mother is a cast-iron bitch. And I am a cast-iron bastard. The details of our breakup all derive from those simple facts, and I don’t recall them. I do recall that we had good fun making you, though. I remember that well.”
“I bet.”
“You were a good baby, as babies go. Didn’t cry too much. You had a sunny disposition.” He took a final toke on the joint, and then dropped the butt into the bin of tomatoes. “Doesn’t seem to have lasted.”
“Were you there when I was born?”
“So we’re going to have this conversation.” Micah exhaled the last cloud of smoke, slipped his mask down, and finally fixed his watery brown eyes on Erno. “I was there. I was there until you were maybe six or seven months. Then I left.”
“Did she make you leave?”
“Not really.” His voice was muffled now. “She was taken with me at first because of the glamor-I was an acrobat, the Cirque Jacinthe? But her sister was in the marriage, and her friends. She had her mentor, her support group. I was just the father. It was okay while it was fun, and maybe I thought it was something more when we first got together, but after a while it wasn’t fun anymore.”
“You just didn’t want the responsibility!”
“Erno, to tell you the truth, that didn’t have much to do with it. I liked holding you on my lap and rubbing you with my beard. You would giggle. I would toss you up into the air and catch you. You liked that. Drove your mother crazy-you’re going to hurt him, she kept saying.”
Erno had a sudden memory of being thrown high, floating, tumbling. Laughing.
“So why did you leave?”
“Pam and I just didn’t get along. I met another woman, that got hot, and Pam didn’t seem to need me around anymore. I had filled my purpose.”
Emotion worked in Erno. He shifted from foot to foot. “I don’t understand men like you. They’ve stuck you down here in a dorm! You’re old, and you’ve got nothing.”
“I’ve got everything I need. I have friends.”
“Women shit on you, and you don’t care.”
“There are women just like me. We have what we want. I work. I read. I grow my plants. I have no desire to change the world. The world works for me.
“The genius of the founders, Erno-” Micah opened another drawer and started on the next rack of tomatoes, “-was that they minimized the contact of males and females. They made it purely voluntary. Do you realize how many centuries men and women tore themselves to pieces through forced intimacy? In every marriage, the decades
