The next morning, Liam was woken by the roar of machinery outside.
He rubbed his head and stepped out onto the balcony to look down, where he found Benjamin driving an excavator in circles while Isabella drove a plough, turning over the soil in the area marked out under the reclamation plan.
She was probably intending to churn up all the weed roots with the plough and then run a screening machine to sift them out of the soil.
These two, who had gone green in the face over the word "manure" only the night before, were this morning more fired up than anyone.
Liam washed his face and went downstairs. On the dining table were two boiled eggs and a bowl of rib soup left over from the night before. He ate the lot and even scraped out the broth, and only then put on his hat and went outside.
"Brother! You can’t dig there!"
Benjamin braked hard and stuck his head out of the cabin: "Why not? It’s close to the house, it’s convenient."
"Do you want to smell manure everywhere you go?" Liam pointed toward the boundary between the eastern and western districts, well away from the residential area: "Dig over there. The further from the house the better."
Benjamin obediently drove the machine away.
Under Liam’s direction, three days later the first high-technology composting system of the interstellar age was complete.
The bed had been dug as three long compartments, each three meters wide and one meter twenty deep, with waterproof alloy sheeting lining the floor and walls, which Liam had bought from a building materials shop.
Isabella stood at the edge and asked dubiously: "Why does it need lining? Can’t we just tip it straight onto the ground?"
"No, we can’t." Liam shook his head: "If the liquid in the heap runs down into the soil, we lose everything of value in it. And our ground is dead ground anyway, so anything that soaks in is wasted."
He pointed at the three compartments: "Compartment one is for composting, compartment two is where we turn it into, compartment three is where it finishes. Rotate them like that and there’s always compost ready to use, with no waiting."
After that, the three of them started dragging out the pile of machinery that Liam had left sitting in the storeroom since the day he bought it.
Benjamin and Isabella opened the crates, and the looks on their faces grew steadily harder to describe, because they were realizing that fully two thirds of the machinery Liam had bought had nothing to do with farming or land reclamation.
"Liam, this machine..."
"Ore crusher." Liam patted the housing: "The smallest model there is, meant for private mines."
"And that enormous tank?"
"A fermentation tank out of a distillery."
"And... and these pipes?"
"Air-blower pipes from a mine ventilation system." Liam turned to his brother with a smile: "Nobody composts in our era anymore, so of course there are no composting machines. But the principles are all the same. Anything that can grind stone can grind rotted wood, and anything that can blow air down a mineshaft can blow air into a compost heap."
"All right, talking won’t make either of you understand." He stood up and brushed the dust off his clothes: "Set these machines up for me over at the composting site. After lunch, eldest brother, take me to Altair. I want to collect a delivery from a storage locker."
"Hm? What delivery?"
"The composting materials."
LS had sent him the locker number and the collection code the night before, so that afternoon he only had to go to the Polaris star system shipping company’s collection area on Altair, enter the code into the system, and take the goods home.
At midday, Liam took the chance to cook several dishes out of grass worms, keeping some for the family and packing the rest into a time-freeze storage box of the kind used for preserving food. He wanted to use the opportunity to leave it in a storage locker for that top gifter of his.
...
The Polaris shipping company’s collection area sat on the edge of Altair Port, so vast that you had to ride an electric cart to get around it.
Liam entered the collection code into the system. The screen displayed a locker number along with a line of warning text in red:
[Note: this parcel contains unprocessed biological material. Please do not open it in a public area.]
Benjamin read that line and his face began to go green again.
The locker opened, and inside there were only two spatial bracelets sitting neatly in a padded box. Liam slipped one onto his wrist and swept it once with his mental power.
Five hundred tons sat there, perfectly still. The manure had been pressed into neat cubes and stacked in orderly rows in one bracelet on its own, while the rotted leaves and wood were in the other, sifted clean of soil and grit besides.
Liam raised an eyebrow. Whoever had done this took real care over their business, so much care that he guessed this had not been scraped together sack by sack by mercenaries, but shovelled straight out of somebody’s farm.
He didn’t ask for details, and simply transferred payment for the consignment to LS, then sent him a message: "Payment sent. In half a month I’ll take another thousand tons. I’ll leave the spatial bracelets in a locker and send you the collection code then."
The reply came back suspiciously fast: [Deal!]
Before leaving the shipping area, Liam stopped by the row of storage lockers, put the time-freeze box into one of the small compartments, and sent the collection code to the top gifter along with a line of text: "There are three dishes inside. If you don’t dare eat them, pack them up and send them back to me untouched."
The other side answered at once: [I’ll go and get it right now. Don’t worry, there’ll be no sending anything back!]
Liam pressed his lips together to hold in a laugh and messaged back: "Those are your words, mind. Don’t go crying for a refund later."
That done, he climbed aboard the ship and went home with Benjamin.
The two brothers got back to Cygnus just as the sun was going down. Liam brought out the high-grade nutrient fluid and handed his brother and sister a tube each: "Drink first, and wait until you’ve digested it before we start work, or the whole lot will go to waste."
Benjamin and Isabella swallowed, drained their tubes, and then sat in silence for half an hour.
Half an hour later the three of them were at the composting site. Liam handed each of them a gas mask and put one on himself, saying: "We’re doing the first batch today. Watch closely, because when I’m busy later the two of you will be doing this yourselves."
He opened the spatial bracelet and tipped a heap of rotted wood down in front of the crusher’s intake.
"Step one is crushing. The leaves you can leave as they are, but the rotted wood absolutely has to be crushed, because the bigger the pieces the longer the composting takes, and some of them wouldn’t break down inside a year."
He switched the crusher on. A rattling grind rose from it, and out of the far end poured a stream of dark brown wood mulch.
"Have a look at this." Liam scooped up a handful to inspect and nodded: "Crushed down to about the size of a finger joint like this is just right. Too fine isn’t good either, because too fine means it packs tight and can’t breathe."
Isabella looked blank at that: "Rotted wood needs to breathe?"
"Of course it does." Liam answered it perfectly naturally: "The whole thing is full of living creatures. Living creatures have to breathe."
"Now that the crushing is done, we start step two, which is mixing the materials." Liam pointed at the two heaps: "This wood mulch and the rotted leaves are what we call browns. That manure over there is what we call greens. Three parts brown to one part green."
Benjamin did the sum in his head at once: "Then two hundred tons of manure against three hundred tons of leaves doesn’t give us the right ratio, does it?"
Liam gave his brother a thumbs up: "Exactly right. But we’ve got materials of our own on this planet as well."
He pointed out toward the fields, where Isabella had stacked a heap of thorny weeds that had been left to dry.
"Fresh thorny weeds are greens. Dried thorny weeds are browns. The weeds I had the two of you top and dry out two days ago are just about enough for today."
Isabella let out an astonished sound. No wonder her brother hadn’t let her burn the weeds they had ploughed up these last two days; this was what they had been for.
"Step three, and the most important one, is watering."
Liam took the hose and watered the freshly mixed material evenly. After a while he scooped up a handful, squeezed it tight in his palm and then opened his hand to show them: "Look here. Squeeze it like this and moisture seeps between your fingers, but it doesn’t drip. That’s the target. Any drier and the microorganisms in the material go dormant. Any wetter and they suffocate and die, and the stink that comes off it is worse than the manure itself."
Benjamin and Isabella imagined that smell, then looked at the sodden mess in their brother’s hand, and both their throats worked several times.
Small wonder he had made them digest their nutrient fluid before coming out to work. This was more than enough to make anyone gag.
With the input materials prepared, the next stage was the most laborious of all, which was building the bed.
Liam started at the bottom with a layer of coarse mulch for drainage, and only then began laying the alternating layers, one brown, one green, a watering, then another brown.
The air-blower pipes were threaded along the floor of the bed with their outlets facing upward, drilled evenly with holes along both sides.
"This takes the place of turning the heap by hand." Liam explained: "With the old method you had to turn it every three days, and turning several dozen tons will break your back. Now we just blow air up from underneath, so they always have enough to breathe and work several times as fast."
Only when the heap stood higher than a man’s head did Liam stop.
"That’s enough. The heap has to be at least a meter and a half so the core can hold its heat, because too low means it goes cold, and cold means ruined."
Finally he pushed three sensors into three different points in the heap and opened his smart watch.
"Sunflower."
[Here, master.]
"Connect to these three sensors. Hold the core temperature between fifty-five and sixty-five degrees. Above seventy, increase the airflow. Below fifty, tell me. If the moisture drops, turn the sprinklers on automatically."
[Understood. Setting up monitoring mode...]
The palm-sized holographic sprite girl appeared, planted her hands on her hips and stood on the lid of the bed with all the presence of a garrison holding a fortress.
Isabella watched this and couldn’t help laughing, because a smart unit generally learns its master’s personality, and both her younger brother and this little Sunflower were adorable well past the legal limit.
She couldn’t stop herself going over to him and ruffling his chestnut-brown hair.
Liam went still, and then said in a dark voice: "Isabella, you were just handling manure with that hand."
Isabella: "..."
How embarrassing. She’d completely forgotten.