The Greenhouse

         Joseph couldn’t smell the thick, earthy aroma of heavy leaves and dark soil anymore. He must have been in the greenhouse for a while now, he figured. Bent over one of the long, deep troughs full of dark earth, he looked over his shoulder to see out of the side of the glass dome in which he and his plants were enclosed. Sunset was coming, though there was still some time. The greenhouse’s UV lights would turn on in a few minutes, making up for how little daylight the plants were exposed to this far from the sun. That would be his cue to leave, Joseph decided.
         
         He took another soil sample, this time making sure the tomato plants weren’t growing in ground that was too alkaline. It was tedious and thankless work, work that many will forget to do even after it’s been routine for years. Work people feel most at ease with when they can shift the responsibility to someone with far less on their mind. Young-people work, and Joseph was young.
         
         He stuffed a clump of dirt into a vial mixing it with the solution one of the farmers had given him. It would be another few moments before he could get a reading, so he slumped forward to rest his back, elbows on the edge of the trough, half an expression on his face as he looked lazily at the vial.

“Better straighten up your posture there, boy. Else you could end up with a hunch like the old overseer one of these days,” said a voice like grinding boulders. Joseph shot up, startled. He looked confusedly around the plants that surrounded him until he saw an old mechanic standing a few paces away down the aisle of troughs. He hadn’t noticed the man approach, but it was a big greenhouse. Perhaps he just didn’t hear the door at the other end open.
         
         Now that Joseph was standing up straight, the mechanic went on, “That’s better. Got to keep in the best shape you can if you’re gonna be working these fields. Damn hard work some days.”

“Oh. No, I’m just helping out for a while. The sharecroppers needed someone to check out the soil and said they’d give me a couple credits,” Joseph said.

“I see.” The mechanic looked at Joseph for a bit, then hoisted a pack of tools over his shoulder, “A bit jumpy, aren’t you, though. I just took a look at the air filter, so you at least don’t have to worry about suffocating in here if that’s what’s got you strung up.” Joseph wasn’t sure whether this was a joke or not, but he laughed a little, politely, hoping the mechanic would leave.

         And the mechanic did turn a bit as if to go back down the aisle, but he stopped. He shifted the bag of tools on his shoulders, the various little instruments hanging from pockets on its side clanking around loudly.  “You aren’t Harris’ boy are you?” he said.

Joseph had turned back to his vial, but looked up again, “I’m Joe Harris, yeah.”

“You are, aren’t you. Joe, is it,” the mechanic scratched the stubble on his hard, leather face. “I thought so, you have his nose don’t you.”

“Sure.” Joseph turned again to his vial, discretely scratching his face as well.

“I knew your dad a long while ago. Went on a trip with him and a few others to drill some more water out of the caps. The shower time limit went up to two minutes after we got back. You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Uh, thanks, or whatever,” Joseph tilted the vial trying to get the miniscule notches on the glass in a good light.

“I don’t suppose you know where you got that name, do you, Joe?”

         Joseph hardly answered with a noncommittal sound from his throat. The mechanic let out a slow chuckle, “Indulge an aging man, we have all sorts of stories to tell.”

“I’m not stopping you.”

“Let’s see, it was fifteen years ago now, I guess. That how old you are?”

Joseph was indignant, “Fifteen? No way, I just turned eight a couple months ago.”

“Eight? I guess that’s about right. I’ve never gotten used to the calendar all the way out here. You’d think I would after all this time, but old habits die hard.”

“Sure. Well, I’ve never gotten used to the calendar you homeworlders use.”

“Some of us are still fond of Earth. We like to keep it around as a reminder I guess.”

Jopseph sighed a little, “You were telling a story, you know.”

“Alright, we’ll do it your way then,” the mechanic set down his bag and leaned against the trough. “Eight years back was when the first of us settlers died. She was fifty or maybe sixty years old, Earth years, when she got here. A good engineer. We ran into more than a few problems when we started taking the ship down from orbit piece by piece to build this place, and she sorted them out real quick. You better know that was a woman who knew her shit.”

“Yeah?” Joseph was looking back at the vial. The soil was a little too alkaline. He looked through his equipment for the acidic solution.

“Yeah,” the mechanic laughed his slow chuckle at Joseph. “We finally got this place finished and everyone worked on starting a life here. Or, at least, as much a life as you can start when you’re stuck in a metal can sitting on a rock like this.” The mechanic stopped, trying to clear the gravel from his throat before he went on talking, “After a while people started to think about having babies and all, and your parents were the first ones to get on that idea, I suppose. So happens that you were born not more than twenty-four hours after she died. Everyone agreed it would be fitting to name you after her. Problem was that you came out a boy.”

“Mhm,” Joseph began collecting a second sample.

“She came from an old Catholic family. Named her Mary. No one could think of the boy version of a name like that so your dad figured Joseph was the next best thing. And here we are. The first settler born in the colony named after the first settler to pass on.”

“And that’s supposed to make me special somehow, I guess.”

The mechanic eyed Joseph, “Almost sounds like you resent it. But I suppose there’s something to that. ‘The world’s first Martian’ everyone called you.”

“Yeah, well there are a lot of Martians now.”

“True. Last I heard there’s at least a few dozen more running around. I guess it goes to show that you’re only as special as you make yourself, doesn’t it.”

“I guess so,” the soil was a little too acidic now. Joseph started to put his equipment away anyway. The tomatoes could manage.

         The mechanic stood up from the trough and walked around to the glass wall of the greenhouse. He left his bag where he had just stood. “I guess about a dozen have died since then too.” Joseph could hear him scratching his stubble again. “You can almost see the plots from here,” the mechanic continued. “Just outside the wing with the little chapel, buried in the real soil, not this stuff we hauled from the plains back home. Do you know why we do that, Joe?”

“Hm?” Joseph picked up his own bag of equipment and turned to the mechanic, looking at him through the leaves and stalks between them.

“Whenever one of the settlers dies we bury them out there, outside the walls in all that dry, tawny red ground. You know why we do that?”

“No, why?” Joseph walked around the troughs to see the mechanic clearly.

“Same reason all this glass and steel and aluminum is sealed as tight as a door to the bedroom of a mob boss’s virgin daughter.” The mechanic glanced over at Joseph and sighed a little, “Don’t worry about it. Watch some old movies and you’ll figure it out.”
         
         Joseph looked out the glass walls at the sun. It was getting pretty low now. The mechanic rapped his knuckles on the glass making a dull clinking noise muted by the wall’s thickness. “Just a crack in here, or a break in the walls when one of those nasty storms comes through and it’s all gone. The storm might as well blow it all away. We’d all be just as dead as those old settlers out there with not even a microbe left to decompose our bodies, and the air and dust and all would keep us nice and preserved with the rest of the ruins. That’s what they’re like out there, and they’ll be like that for a long time.”
         
         Joseph didn’t say anything, but his feet shifted along with the bag hung over his shoulder. The mechanic turned to him full-on this time. “Hell of a tin can we built here, isn’t it? It was a good thirty years, Earth years again, between when they first started talking about making this place and when it was finally done. I wasn’t even born yet when they started thinking about it back home and now I’m here living out the rest of my life. But now I’m just getting back to where I started.” He stopped for a moment. Joseph wondered if he should go, but the mechanic began to reach into his pocket. “Here, I have something to show you,” he said and pulled out something long and colored like the dirt in the troughs. He held it straight up in front of himself, “Know what this is?”

Joseph shook his head, “I’ve never seen anything like that. What is it?”

“Here,” the mechanic threw it to Joseph who clumsily caught it against his chest. “Give it a whiff.”

“A what?”

“A whiff. Smell it. With your nose.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure. You old people always say weird things.”

“Do we now?” the mechanic laughed.

“I dunno. It's musty. It’s weird.”

“You like it?”

“Yeah, it’s alright.”

“This here is a cigar. Brought a big box of them with me on the trip from Earth and have been smoking one or two a year since then, on special occasions and all.”

Joseph shook his head, “Smoking? What do you mean?”

“Here,” the mechanic took a small silver box out of another pocket and opened its little hinged top. Walking over to lean against the trough nearest the wall of the greenhouse, he slid a tiny blade out of the side of the silver box and cleanly cut the end off the cigar. He held the raw end of the cigar over the opened top, and with one quick movement of his thumb, a small flame ignited it.

“Are you stupid? You can’t have fire in here,” Joseph said, his eyed widened.

“Relax. I just did the vent system, remember?” the mechanic tapped his temple with a finger. “This’ll be fine. Just don’t tell any of the croppers or they’ll be pretty pissed at me.” The mechanic inhaled through the cigar closing his eyes. The tip flared up and miniature sparks of ash flew up from the end disappearing instantaneously.

“Is this a special occasion then?” Joseph asked.

“Sure. Got to meet the world’s first Martian, after all. To be honest, I’ve been too careful with them. Lots of extras to get rid of before I’m put out there with Mary,” Grey-blue smoke floated out of his mouth as he talked. “I was hoping we would grow some tobacco in these farms, but I guess people figured we couldn’t spare room for anything other than the food,” he took another long drag. Joseph could smell the smoke in the air now—like the aroma he tasted from the cigar itself made into vaporous cream.

“Can I try?” Joseph asked.

The mechanic laughed through the gravel in his throat, “No, you don’t want to do that. People used to do this all the time way back on Earth till they found out how bad this stuff kills you.” He emptied his lungs and breathed in the smoke lingering in the air around him. “You know how they found this stuff?”

Joseph shook his head again, “No. I never knew there was stuff like that.”

“Neither did all those Europeans back on Earth. Thousands of years of civilization and all that and no idea what it was or how big it was ever gonna be. Hell, they didn’t even know about the continent it grew on until one day a bunch of guys looked at the old world and said, ‘you know what, fuck this. The old world is dying. All these men, corrupted, killing each other. We all stay here and soon there’s gonna be nothing left of humanity. We’ll have torn it all apart trapped together in this little world like neurotic animals in a circus.’ Then they gave Europe the finger and sailed across an ocean they weren’t even sure would end in a couple of wooden boats. And here we are.” The mechanic gestured with the hand delicately holding his lit cigar.

Joseph smirked letting out a brief, exasperated sigh, “You people really do say weird stuff.”

The mechanic took a long, deep breath through a cigar, “Yup. I suppose we do. I guess when you get old you start to run out of things to say that haven’t been said before and the weird stuff is all you have left. You just wait though. I’m sure you’ll sound as weird as I do one of these days."

         After he spoke, the UV lights that hung above the troughs flickered on.