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Harvest the Stars

By Mar Vincent

The summer Sif turned one, the starships were ripe on the vine.

They hulked in fields ringing the town where Tuja had always lived. A place far from big cities, where the starlight they fed on came pure and bright.

“The seeds start out like any seeds; small, unassuming. Until we fertilize them, tend them. Give them space to grow,” Tuja said to the infant on her lap, who must have been more focused on the fingers stuffed in her mouth than the sight of the field crew moving amongst hulls like insects scrambling over gourds. They started in the early afternoon to harvest with the dusk.

The rooftop porch of their small home was the perfect place to watch as buyers checked and finalized purchases, as fielders netted and pinned the craft, drained most of the gases from lift chambers, checked their structural integrity one last time before cutting away the shriveled vestiges of vines with cautery tools.

“When they can cut through the vines that easy, it’s time for the ships to go,” Tuja said, as one of the craft demonstrated. Multiple vines came together, from the same plant or different ones, in order to form the bud that would become a node that would burgeon into a full fledged starship after roughly two decades of development; at this point, they snaked from all sides of the ship’s underbelly in the churned mud of the field and were snipped, one at a time, by skilled hands.

With its vines cut, the starship rose to the top of its net; a massive balloon with inner galleries and spaces large enough for human habitation, a rind-skin impervious to the void between life-sustaining worlds. A few pieces of technology and the processes and rhythms of the starship could be made manageable, directable.

Sif made a sound somewhere between amazed and amused; so hard to tell where the line was at her age, if there was one at all.

Another ship followed the first, rising with silent grace to the top of its net. Sif’s arms pumped, mimicking the ship. Encouraging it, perhaps.

“And then, when they’re all harvested, and the field’s all tilled up, they take more of those tiny little seeds and put them in the ground and start all over,” Tuja said.

She’d seen the full process, from seeding to harvest, only once in her life, having been born in the midst of a crop rotation, but she was eager to watch the next crop grow with her daughter. She pulled Sif close in crossed arms and breathed deep of the strawy, star-warmed scent of the fields.

---

New seeds were planted, and for years the fields looked like any fields; they might contain melons or squashes, from a distance. Ones that grew quickly, that were allowed to get concerningly large, but still, the potential they contained was well concealed to the untrained eye.

Sif grew as well, through a childhood punctuated by more scraped knees and tree climbing than any of her agemates. More mended seams and plucked slivers than Tuja had, frankly, been prepared for when the swell of her belly gave way to the squall of her only child.

As years passed, it grew harder and harder to keep her daughter still long enough to pin her in a hug; Sif couldn’t tolerate not being in constant motion.

At certain times of year the various farms pulled field hands from the young people in the nearby towns; different tasks for different age groups. Different levels of responsibility. Tuja fondly recalled fielding from her childhood and encouraged Sif to help out once she was old enough. It was a good outlet for that boundless energy, even if she came home as filthy as ever, bursting at the seams with twice as much enthusiasm as any school subject inspired.

“Even when we’re not there working the fields the ships are still growing—well, they’re always growing, we’re just helping them along with the things we can, like the rind leeches, or giving them fertilizer,” Sif said between bites of seed cake as they sat on the rooftop in the mild, straw-scented evening. “They sing to each other and that’s how they know to keep growing. Because they hear the others.”

“Singing starships,” Tuja said, amused. Sif was thirteen, so it was easy to imagine she might believe it as something more than metaphor. “I suppose it keeps them from getting lonely? Do you join in when you know the words?”

“Not like that,” Sif replied, words blunted by distraction rather than rudeness. “They talk to each other, all the way from one field to another, in their roots and the chemicals they release in the air, to share about how the seasons are changing, or the soil when we fertilize it. That’s why the vines die off when it’s time to harvest—because the ships tell each other it’s time.”

Tuja considered. It had been more than thirty years since she’d helped with the fielding, when she was roughly Sif’s age herself. She vaguely remembered mention of singing between the ships, though she’d considered it a fielders’ joke on the younger fieldhands. “Well. I suppose we don’t need to understand what they’re saying, as long as we can tell they’re happy.”

Sif nodded, slow and wise, and watched the slumbering hulls, motionless in starlight, as she chewed.

---

It was Sif’s fifteenth year when the winter took a sharp swerve into chill; a cold so deep and long, Tuja didn’t recall the last time it happened. Not when she’d done the fielding, that was certain.

It wasn’t the season for fields to call up extra help, but Sif went anyway. For long hours after school she worked with the crews to wrap vascular vines with insulating material that dyed her skin orange-red wherever it got through layers of cold gear. They started with the largest craft since those ones were most likely to turn a good profit when harvest time came around. Sif worried aloud that the littler ones wouldn’t be tended in time to avoid damage. Tuja didn’t know what to say in response; she didn’t understand the financial logic of starship agriculture, but surely the owners and fielders had their reasons.

For one week of long nights that became two, Tuja became accustomed to bring dinner up to the field, curling steam in the chill air, as the sun retreated behind low hills. In a small way, at least, she could help her daughter as Sif sought to help the starships.

Sending the food with a carrier would have only made her lonely every night. It was good to have an excuse to check on Sif, to slip her own loneliness under a mask of maternal worry.

“That kid of yours would crawl inside and sleep aboard, if the craft allowed it,” Boln, one of the senior technicians, said as they waited for Sif to finish wrapping the ship-side end of a vine and come in from the burgeoning starlight to eat.

Even the smaller decade-ships were nearly half the size of a house, so it wasn’t an unreasonable prospect—except, like Boln said, the rinds wouldn’t develop access points for many more years.

Tuja laced fingers around a cup of hot, slightly salted tea. “How often do junior hands transition to become fielders like yourself?”

Boln made a sound in his throat; he’d been thinking it too, maybe. The fields must always be on the lookout for prospects among the hands who pitched in during the busy season. “Not as often as you’d think. A lot of them start at that age, with a certain crop, and stick with the work to see it through. Once their crop’s flown, they lose interest.”

“Hm.” Tuja hadn’t lasted even that many years as a fielder; tutoring and tending younger children earned money without weaving mud and the smell of fertilizer into her clothes.

“There are others, by then, to take their place,” he said, and chuckled. “Kids who don’t yet realize all the places field dirt can get into. Who haven’t worn out their knees marching through mud and their backs climbing up vines.”

A rite of passage; she’d always thought of it as such. Something every generation contributed to because the generation before had done so, and because the generation after would follow their example. Sif was an outlier in the way she loved the mud in her boots, the exhausted satisfaction of a job well done.

“Not that I blame them. It’s a lot of work to put into something, to see it all just … go. Never to return.” Boln raised a hand, opened it, to suggest dispersal into the sky. It was rare that starships passed over their town; the important cities in their corner of the system were far away. For the first time, Tuja wondered if that had something to do with why fielders worked at night; it was the only time they’d see lights moving in the sky that might have once come from their own fields. “Harvest is tough, but replanting … you have to do it. Start all over again, knowing you’re going to let go at the last. Never gets easier.”

As Sif approached the barn, stripping off layers of cold gear with an eager smile, Boln strolled away to let mother and daughter share their meal. Tuja put down her tea, closed Sif up in a hug that lasted all of a half second before she wormed free to see what there was to eat.

---

Nearly forty percent of the crop died. Despite long nights of careful wrapping and tying with gloved or cold-numbed fingers, frost had infiltrated the vines beforehand, damaged their structures in ways that were only apparent when ice crystals thawed, torn and split tissues left in their wake.

Losses were to be expected, especially over a growing period of decades, but this was a devastating percentage. Fields once full of shapes large enough to appear as a neighborhood of strange homes now read like a quilt with half its pattern torn away.

From the roof patio, Sif watched crews pull up root networks with digging machines, cut half-formed starships into pieces to be hauled away. To be ground down into compost or animal feed. Most of the lost craft were smaller, since they were the last to be insulated from the cold.

Tuja watched Sif and her heart twisted like a newformed rind caught up in its own vines. Sif hadn’t been asked to help with the removal process—no children were, due to the machines—but Tuja doubted she would have gone if offered the chance.

Through the damp of early spring, the greenery and unfurling buds of its second half, Tuja watched her daughter and waited. Had she, like Boln suggested, already put so much of her heart into the fields that she’d refuse to go back? She’d been too young to help with the first stages of thinning and culling—those happened when the ships were four, five, six years old—and so hadn’t experienced the pragmatic reality of the fields until now.

Sif dug a curved flute out of the concretion of junk under her bed, dusted it off, and took up practice, though she hadn’t touched the obnoxious, trilling thing since last required in school. Tuja was relieved when the piping died out after a few weeks, to be replaced by kits of paint and small figurines. And yet, close beneath the relief sat an awareness that her daughter was made up of large gestures and sweeping energy that was unlikely to scale down so drastically.

The surviving starships changed from frosted gray-blue to a deeper gloss as field season came on, and Tuja resisted the urge to comment on them even in passing, just as she’d learned to resist the desire to enfold her once-little girl in her arms in public.

Nights grew warmer and Sif went out with friends. Half painted models, a flute abandoned beside the bed. She was supposed to come home before sunset but every night became later and later, a first grit of sand in Tuja’s perceptions of their comfortable, easy relationship. A first challenge to maternal authority.

She debated with herself how to respond. One night three weeks in, she waited up. In the deep of night, Sif slipped through the front door, arms and trousers streaked with the yellow-umber of field soil, the scent of starships like an aura. Sif froze in the doorway at the sight of her; a field vole caught in the unexpected sights of a vine hawk.

“They needed some help is all. Scaffolding the ships. It’s only for a couple days,” Sif said, shifting her weight in the doorway as though debating whether to flee into the night or to her room.

“Scaffolding? Isn’t that for reshaping?”

“A bunch of the undersized craft are starting to grow uneven because of the freeze. Because they’ve lost some of their vines.”

“Ah. That’s all right,” Tuja said, even-toned, attentive to the cup of tea before her. In truth, it was a greater relief than her daughter giving up flute for painting, but she refrained from showing it on her face. It may, truly, be only for a short time; a performance of duty or something of the sort. At least, it should be Sif’s choice whether that was the case or not.

“Guess I’ll wash up then,” Sif said, undoing the straps that tightened the tops of her boots and causing a small shower of yellow earth on the kitchen tiles.

“And walk those filthy clothes all the way through my house?”

Sif blinked, chastened, then spread her arms to take in the kitchen and the rooms beyond it. “If you were in bed I wouldn’t have to walk them there, I’d just take it all off here, wrap it up, carry it—”

Tuja was laughing before she finished, unable to resist in the face of her daughter’s mix of practical annoyance and righteous indignation. Of course she’d had every step of her illicit return home planned out, or how would she have kept her field work—only a few days’ worth—a secret for nearly three weeks?

Sif laughed too, a sound looser and more deeply born than Tuja had heard in some time.

“All right, I’ll go.” Tuja pushed up from the table and stepped toward her daughter to go to her room. “But only if you will, too. As soon as you’re done with the washing.”

“I know,” Sif said, high-toned, annoyed-yet-relieved at her reprieve.

The desire to wrap her arms around Sif’s shoulders welled, sharp and urgent, and Tuja pressed her palms together to resist it. Only a few days, she reminded herself.

A few days lasted through the rest of the season, and the smell of starlight filled the house again.

---

Field seasons passed, and Tuja wished that starships grew more slowly.

In a way, the die-off of nearly half the crop became a boon to those that remained; ships had more space and took advantage as though ravenous to grow. She swore their growth was noticeable from one day to the next: stand on the porch and hold a thumb out over one of the shapes, see it go from a bit smaller to roughly equal in size to surely that dark blue halo around my thumb is a trick of the eye?

At this rate, the ships might be ready for harvest a few years ahead of the curve.

Whether Sif was or ever would be prepared for the impending second loss was hard to say. She used school projects as an excuse to research growth patterns and development in starships, methods for improving nutrient uptake, for encouraging greater pliability in the rinds. Things that would need to be implemented at the seeding phase and that, perhaps, they could try when the time came?

“On Hirustan Beta they grow starships just like ours—a slightly different strain, but almost identical, except theirs are hardier. Better in the cold,” Sif said as she heaped sweet tubers on her plate, then spun vegetable threads on top of them. “And it’s not a matter of the strain, not really, but the nutrient mix they give the seeds, and the fact that they start it even before planting.”

Tuja scooped a bite onto her spoon. After Sif, she might be the most knowledgeable person on starship strains and agriculture theory in their small town—she had to be, to hold a conversation with her daughter. “And is it something we could import here?”

“We could.” Sif weighed one more ladle of vegetable threads, then piled them on her plate. “If anyone would listen we’d have ordered it already, but what do I know, just a fieldhand, just passing all my theoreticals with highest honors.” She shrugged with frustration bordering on melodrama.

“And Boln and the others have worked the fields all their lives, since they were as young and soft-hulled as you,” Tuja said, adopting a falsely patronizing tone to imitate the technicians.

“Not that any of them have seen more than one or two plantings themselves.” Sif sliced through a tuber with the edge of her spoon. “Not that we’ve ever heard of field rotation out here, either. Could just stagger the fields, try different treatments with one crop as opposed to another, document any variation. Then I might buy it when they say they know better.”

“And they’d blame whatever changes they see on the planting year. The weather. The amount of shade on that side of the hill,” Tuja said. When Sif gave her an exasperated look, Tuja waved the arguments aside. “Didn’t you once tell me they plant all the fields at once because they believe the starships sing to one another? They tell each other when the seasons change, when it’s time to harvest.”

“I mean, they do, in a way; they use chemical signals to communicate environmental conditions and life stages to those around them, all of them to each other. But staggering the fields isn’t going to get one crop confused by another, or stop them from growing right. It doesn’t happen that way anywhere else.”

“Right,” Tuja agreed. She didn’t know enough to truly agree or not, but Sif had done the research. She was right that there was no harm in trying something new.

“If the crops had been staggered when we had that cold snap, more might have survived because more would have been old and hardy enough,” Sif said. “And the losses—however many we’d have had—would’ve been mostly younger and easier to replace. And maybe we wouldn’t have had to replace that many of them because we would’ve got around to insulating them faster if they weren’t all in the same season. Even if that didn’t work, we could have a whole new crop on the way by now instead of all that empty field space.” She flattened vegetable threads with a spoon. “But all any of them can say is maybe, maybe, we’ll think about it when the next seeding comes, no need to talk about it until then.” Sif’s eyes rose to hers, challenging. “But we need to talk about it now if they’re going to really come around to thinking about it. They just don’t want to.”

“That’s how it was when I was your age, too. Not just the fields but the schools, the medical practices. There could be better ways—there are—but some people prefer the familiar to the untested. What they don’t know scares them.”

“But the research is out there, we do know—”

“The ones who want to know, like you, make an effort to do exactly that. It’s rarely appreciated as it should be by our elders. It’s just one of those things.”

The challenge refused to leave Sif’s eye; if anything, it sharpened. “Then why did you stay in this town, in the middle of nowhere, if you see it, too?”

Tuja smiled. She’d expected that question sooner or later—in truth, much sooner. When Sif lost interest in every childhood sport on offer, when she realized the size of her school classes meant only one or two good friends, when her free time activities became so repetitive she opted to trudge through the mud of starship fields because the work gave her not just a way to use her energy, but a purpose for it. “I could have raised you in a big city full of big ideas. But I preferred starlight and starships.”

“Of course I love the ships, it’s just the people…” Sif muttered.

Tuja laughed. Sif stuck a spoonful in her mouth and, reluctantly, laughed along.

And yet, there was something about the way she paused before joining in that made Tuja wish things could be different in their small town. At least this once.

---

In her daughter’s nineteenth year, the starships were ready to harvest. The feeling of vines squeezing her heart returned and remained with her every day, imminent, drowsing until her attention wandered to the fields, or to Sif, in order to contract once again. It seemed unfair that Sif was still so young.

The future could be so much more than their small town contained. Tuja had always known that, always been content with what it offered despite this. It had seemed like a daughter who loved starships would be, too, but even though she talked of the next seeding, the next crop, if the technicians didn’t see the same future she did, life would restrict her, like a starship trapped in scaffolding it had outgrown.

Some were meant to stay and some were meant for other things. It had always been true.

For a few days before harvest, their small town filled up with long, flat haulcraft, with people who asked fast, sharp questions about how the weather had been for the last so many years. How clear the night sky. Buyers wanted the best ships for the best prices, either to resell or to keep for their own fleets. Tuja had observed these interactions with amusement in the past; this time, though, she approached one of the buyers with a question of her own.

This time, Sif was at the edge of the fields, watching, when Tuja came to find her. She caught her daughter’s far shoulder and squeezed Sif against her side, the best compromise she could manage.

“You’re not helping?” she asked, and let go.

“Just watching,” Sif said, her tone distant as though all her emotions were out there, too. “Learning the technique.”

Coming from her hands-on daughter, it felt like an excuse.

Tuja shifted, jamming hands in the pockets of her wrap. “Do you know where they’re all going?”

“Someone from Casleta bought that lot over there.” Sif pointed at a cluster of mid-sized ships sprawling across a hillside. She’d mentioned a reason why all those ones had come out so close in size and shape, but Tuja couldn’t recall it right now. “Those squat, solid ones, the ones we scaffolded after the frost, are headed to Ifreu. The deep, glossy ones all got bought up by a shipper who’s going back to Vren.” She laughed in her throat. “Guess they match the fleet she’s already got.”

Tuja knew the answer before she’d asked the question. At least where it mattered to her. Her right hand closed on the solid shape in her pocket. “Ifreu. They have a research university there, don’t they?”

Sif nodded, then paused. Turned to eye the uncharacteristic way Tuja stood with her hands in her pockets. “One of the best on this side of the galaxy.”

Tuja blinked, surprised at the tingle in her nose. Anywhere else on this side of the galaxy was still far, so very far away. But starships were made to fly, up and away, where they couldn’t be held in a cross-armed embrace anymore.

She withdrew the travel permit chip from her pocket mutely and held it out to Sif.

Even in the dusk light, Sif understood what it was. Tears sprang to her eyes like stars.

“They take new students every half year,” Tuja managed around the tangle of emotion that had become her voice. “And … well, their half years are shorter than ours, but you won’t have to study that hard to take the exams. I know that. The ships’ captain is happy to take you along, to have a starship-savvy helper on the way.”

Sif made a wordless, undignified sound. Gratitude and joy and shock all channeled together, all pouring out of her at once as she flung herself at Tuja and nearly toppled her.

Tuja laughed despite the tears as she held her daughter, loose in her arms and firm in her heart.

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was Harvest the Stars, by Mar Vincent, narrated by Cherrae L. Stuart.

About this story, Mar says: This story is inspired by the small agricultural community where I currently live, the daughter I was, and the mother I hope to be.

And about this story, I say: Oh, I loved this charming story. I could really see the fields of growing starships. I could also completely imagine our protagonist’s boundless enthusiasm for the whole farming process, see her coming home, covered in dirt, and understand how she wants to get right back out to the fields again.

You know, It’s easy to imagine this story being told from the daughter’s point of view, and that could have been a lovely story, too. See the daughter’s love for the starships through her eyes, and her making some kind of choice to leave home and follow them. But I liked that this story took us in through the mother’s point of view. We watch her slight bewilderment that this muddy career is the one calling to her child–we see her understanding when her child starts to realize the limitations of where she lives–and finally, we see her choice to let her daughter go, just like a starship rising into the sky.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Barbara Kingsolver, who said: “But kids don’t stay with you if you do it right. It’s the one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won’t be needed in the long run.”

 

Thanks for listening! And have fun.