Analog Science Fiction and Fact - June 2013

much clearer entreaty, he rubbed her soft bark
in turn. In reward, a sweet, flowery warmth
suffused him within minutes; ensconced in a
latticework of bracing limbs, Farmer nuzzled
closer to his MudderTree and nodded off.
There had been terror in Farmer when he
was first dropped into the sphere—minutes,
then hours, when he struggled just to remember
how to breathe as the water was dumped
in after him and the enclosure fully sealed. It
would be months before Farmer began to relate
his feelings then to how the colonists
must have felt—the ones he’d frozen, the ones
he’d suffocated, the ones he’d left swimming
in their own blood. In the meantime, Farmer
was neck-deep in warm water, surrounded by
the facility’s lackluster version of a clear and
starry night; if he wanted to, Farmer could certainly
have drowned himself then and there,
and one part of him was very much inclined
to—but the other part was just too scared. He
leaned instead against the glass and studied
the long, narrow pole of composite materials
that protruded from the other side of the
pool—this was MudderTree? It seemed at
once a monstrous cosmic joke.
And sure enough, he knew someone, somewhere
was laughing at him; even in near-total
darkness, Farmer could make out figures in
the spheres to either side—haggard, shaggy
men peering at him, leering, their teeth bared
in hungry grins. Farmer made a go at the glass
with his fist and found his flesh and bones
wanting. He clapped his hands to his ears at
the heavy sound that followed, a resonance
that struck him to the quick and seemed to
make his whole sphere lurch. As it did, Farmer
despaired to see the narrow pole of MudderTree
slip beneath the surface of the pool;
he did not yet comprehend its power, but he
knew that pole was all now that he had. He
lunged after it with sluggish, throbbing hands.
Still, his first contact with the substance
was all wrong—wrong enough to haunt him
even months after he’d got the hang of it. As
he gripped the strange, rough pole that first
time, he recalled the first panel in the triptych
and imagined snapping the length in two,
since the enclosure itself would not give way
instead to excesses of his fear, and rage. But
the MudderTree beat him to it—dissolved itself
at the merest thought of violence. An-
HYDROPONICS 101
JUNE 2013
gered all the more by its escape, Farmer dove
after it—again and again in the darkening water.
But though the substance routinely reformed
into floating solids, it never held
shape long enough for him in his mood to
latch on, and so Farmer stood a wretched,
seething, starving resident inside his spheroid
home for days on end before it occurred to
him to be sorry for his anger—and then, if
possible, to try to make amends.
“—Sorry for the wait, Farmer. I needed to
consult with the rest of the team before I
could go any further. You are, you must understand,
a real rarity here. A light in the perfect
darkness of a difficult new field. There’s a
case study of you on its way as we speak to
The Modern Review of—”
But Farmer did not catch all that the good
doctor had said or was saying—MudderTree
rousing him as much as he roused himself at
the return of such prattling reverberations
from outside the sphere. He rubbed his eyes
and blinked vaguely through the glass. There
were five men and women on the observation
deck now—four with bright, keen expressions;
the fifth, the director, with something
still tempered by conscious affect in his smile.
“Farmer,” said Dr. Chang. “Do you understand
what we’re trying to tell you? You have
exceeded all our expectations. There is nothing
left in the program for you. We’re ready to
make you our first ever graduate—to transfer
you to medium security for the rest of your
sentence, with a chance of parole if you reach
your fifteenth year without incident.”
When Farmer did not reply, he caught the
tail end of another doctor murmuring “He’s
still in shock—” before the comm system shut
off, and he was left to observe the group conferring
amongst themselves. Before long, one
of the other doctors was sent out and returned
with her hand on the arm of a much
younger woman—a teen at best, with long
sleek hair and eyes much older than the rest.
“Farmer,” said Dr. Chang, switching the
comm back on. “We’ve brought a visitor for
you. Do you remember your little sister?
Well—not quite your little sister anymore.”
The young woman exchanged a nervous
smile with the doctor and stepped forward.
Farmer needed no such prompting to recognize
his kin, strange and far-off as she now
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