The time after dinner was usually the family’s time to talk.
Liam went up to the roof terrace with his brother and sister, each of them holding a cup of the synthetic tea he had bought that afternoon. The fragrance was lovely, but Liam took one sip, frowned and set the cup down.
This stuff... it was no different from stale tea water.
And yet Isabella and Benjamin were drinking it with relish, eyes narrowed in enjoyment. Liam thought that if they ever tasted top-grade Thai Nguyen bud tea, they would probably fly straight up into the sky.
The thought had his salivary glands working. He had never liked coffee, only fresh green tea brewed from the leaves. Later, when he was too busy to brew it himself, he had switched to dried tea. He tried every kind of dried tea there was and in the end pledged his loyalty to Dinh tea, the finest single-bud grade. Expensive, but worth it.
Isabella and Benjamin closed their eyes to savor the aftertaste, and when they opened them they found their younger brother resting his head against the back of his chair, looking up at the starry sky. There was a distance in Liam’s eyes, as though he were looking back into the past. They held both nostalgia and a shade of sorrow that did not belong on a face that young.
The two of them looked at each other. Benjamin tightened his grip on his teacup and decided to cut in.
"Liam. This morning you said you’d tell us everything about yourself tonight. You can tell us now."
Liam was pulled out of his memories, his eyes slightly unfocused for a moment. Then he straightened up and looked at the two of them, something complicated in his gaze.
"Brother, sister. What I’m going to tell you involves our family. I hope you’re both prepared for it."
Isabella said flatly, "Since Daddy died, what haven’t we been through? Say it. We can take it."
Liam rubbed his face and went through it slowly, one thing at a time, starting from Elijah’s arrival in the Solaris star system to claim his relatives, through to everything the original owner had endured before he made up his mind to leave the Hall house. For every detail, Liam opened the relevant document to prove that every word he said was true.
Isabella and Benjamin listened in silence, and with each piece of evidence the storm inside them built higher. Isabella’s tears were already running, and Benjamin’s eyes had gone red. Their faces held anger, and disappointment, and a hollow sort of shock. But more than any of it, they held pain.
Pain at the betrayal of the child they had raised, and pain for the younger brother they had only just found. When Liam stopped speaking, the silence stretched a long time.
As the stars brightened overhead, Benjamin finally spoke. His voice was hoarse, as though he had a cold, and thick through the nose:
"So... what do you mean to do? Just let that Alpha go, like that?"
Liam said, uncomfortably, "It wasn’t a permanent mark, and he wasn’t in his right mind either. I’ve stopped caring about it."
Isabella’s expression cooled, and there was anger in her voice she made no attempt to hide:
"Anyone in that state would have locked their door, and yet that door was open, and then you just happened to walk in? You’ll never convince me there was no scheme behind it."
Liam touched his gland awkwardly. The searing heat of that day was gone, but the memories of what had happened were still there in his head. He went red and said:
"Actually... actually he’d shut himself in the bathroom under cold water. It was me bursting in that did it. The pheromones that came off me right then made him lose control completely..."
Benjamin snorted coldly: "Even so, he doesn’t get to pull his trousers up and run once he’s finished. Liam, forget that man. I’ll find you the most outstanding Alpha in the whole Lumina galaxy!"
Liam: "..."
Wrong! Why did it have to be an Alpha at all? Was staying single not an option?
Seeing that his brother and sister meant to carry on with the subject of finding him a partner, Liam hurriedly changed it:
"That pile of equipment I bought today is for biological composting. Tomorrow I’d like the two of you to help me dig a compost pit."
Benjamin and Isabella were promptly dragged off their original topic. Isabella asked curiously:
"Composting? Liam, what’s composting?"
Liam tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, working out how best to explain it.
"Put simply, we take star-beast droppings, rotted leaves and rotted wood, mix them together, heap them up and let them sit. Leave the heap long enough and it turns into a loose black soil. Mix that black soil into the fields, and dead ground comes back to life."
Three seconds of silence on the roof terrace.
Isabella reacted first. She looked at the cup of tea in her hand, then at Liam, her face slowly turning green.
"Did you... did you just say droppings? Droppings meaning actual droppings?"
"That’s right."
Benjamin set his cup down hard on the table, his voice unsteady: "Three hundred million silver stars... you spent three hundred million silver stars on machines to compost manure? And then smear it on our fields? And then grow vegetables in it? And then we eat them?"
"We can sell them too," Liam added.
Benjamin turned his face up to the sky and felt his heart bleed for the third time that day.
Liam held back a laugh and tapped the table to bring their attention back.
"Hear me out first. Have either of you ever asked yourselves why our soil died in the first place?"
Isabella was blank: "Because the thorny weeds sucked all the nutrition out of it."
"That’s only half right." Liam shook his head: "As for nutrition, pour in restoration fluid and there it is. But the two of you have farmed for years, so you know perfectly well that a while after you pour the fluid in, the soil goes chalky white again. And then you have to pour it all over from the beginning. Think how much that costs."
The question left the two Martinez siblings with nothing to say.
Because Liam had said the plain truth. Even on a fertile planet, each cycle of soil restoration only held for three to five years before it had to be done again. On a planet like Cygnus, a year at the very most.
"Because the soil is dead," Liam said: "Living soil has living things in it. Bacteria, fungi, worms, things too small for the naked eye. They’re what hold the nutrition in place, what make the soil loose enough for roots to breathe. In ancient times people overused chemical fertilizer so badly that the life in the soil died off little by little, until by now it’s all but extinct."
Liam spread his hand open: "Would you believe me if I said that if you took vegetable seeds and planted them where star-beast droppings are dumped, or in a forest carpeted with rotted leaves, even Sawtooth greens with their awful flavor would come out tasting like Jade greens?"
He shrugged: "Our soil now is nothing but sand and grit. Pouring restoration fluid into it is like pouring soup into a sieve. It won’t be long before every drop has run out the bottom."
Benjamin opened his mouth, and it was a long moment before anything came out: "So... so this thing you’re planning to make is to feed them?"
"Not to feed them." Liam smiled: "To bring them here. They’re already in the droppings and the rotted leaves, there just aren’t many of them. My job is to feed them well and let them breed. Once one batch is finished, I only need to keep a little back as a starter, then throw in the thorny weeds and rotted wood from this planet and out comes the next batch."
Isabella frowned, calculating: "Thorny weeds we have... beyond counting."
"Exactly." Liam nodded: "But what’s here is only enough to restore our own land. If we want to sell it, we’ll still need to collect star-beast droppings and rotted leaves. Once things settle down later, we can arrange to buy droppings from farms, or hire people to gather rotted leaves and wood across the various planets."
Something went ’click’ in Benjamin’s head, as though a light bulb had just come on.
"But..." Isabella still hesitated: "How long does the composting take?"
Liam stretched: "Three months."
"That long? Then when will we ever have enough to restore all fifteen hundred hectares?"
"That’s doing it the old way, the ancient method." Liam said it perfectly calmly: "As it is, the first batch will take me fourteen days. Every batch after that, one week each. Fifteen hundred hectares is nothing. Give me a little more time and I can turn this entire dead planet into a first-class agricultural world."