The Vessel

8. Bisulca

One of the goats was missing.

Cornelia pushed her hat up on her head, wiping the sweat from her brow. The artificial sun was still beating down fairly strong considering the forecast had called for rain. Any minute now, Sunn's weather program would turn down the sunlight and engage the sprinklers high above, making her hurry inside before she got soaked. It would be helpful to know exactly when that was supposed to happen so she didn't wander too far from shelter, but that was the downside of a ship that operated on entropy- it relied on a strong dose of randomness. The Ark had wet seasons and dry seasons. It had surges in insect populations followed by unexpected upticks in crop output. And it had rain. Real rain, the kind with no exact start or finish. The moment it all became too predictable, too programmed, the whole system fell apart.

Still, a heads-up would be nice.

Then there was the missing goat to worry about. One of them had escaped from its pen, and she needed to find it before the rain started. She already knew exactly which one it was. Clara, the runt of the herd, a female with a distinctive patch of white fur on the top of her head. Walking past the cornfield, where the green ears were so plump the yellow kernels inside were bursting out, Cornelia waved to Aaron. Her younger co-worker was tending to a patch of broken ears on the east side of the field. She'd first known him as a moody apprentice who showed little interest in farming, but somehow in the time since their Cryo cycles overlapped he'd developed into a handsome young man with strong arms, a healthy tan, and pride in his Vocation. It was amazing what a little time could do for a person.

"The crop's looking good," she noted. Aaron threw a half-eaten ear into his cart and pushed his sleeves up.

"Too good. Something got in here and had a feast."

She stopped walking. "It might be one of mine. Have you seen a goat around here by any chance?"

"Can't say that I have. But if I do, me and that goat are having words."

Cornelia chuckled and moved on, though a bit more worried than before. The goats had been temperamental the last week. They'd been staying in their pens instead of roaming the grounds, their usual days spent grazing on patches of grass and brush. But today they were much worse. They'd spent the morning pacing and kicking at the walls of their pens, bleating incessantly. Two of the males had gotten into a fight, leaving the smaller of the two with a cracked horn.

Whatever it was that was making them act this way, it had them spooked worse than Cornelia had ever seen.

She headed to the barn to see if Clara had wandered back in her absence, but a grating mechanical sound came to her ears as she neared the pens, like someone dragging a crowbar across a steel wall. Inside the barn she found the source of the noise.

Apparently the goats weren't the only ones on the farm acting up, the milk processor had decided join in on the fun. On any given day, the blue machine pasteurized and packaged between fifty and eighty gallons of goat's milk, boiling, sanitizing and dividing it into individual containers before whisking it up the freight system to the food banks on Five and Six, as well as the Cafeteria on Two. The processor had been working at full capacity, quiet as a kitten's purr, but the sound coming from it now was awful. The last thing the goats needed was another reason to be nervous. Cornelia shut the machine down, reminding herself to put in a service call for a Mechanic to come see what was wrong with it. If she had any luck at all, the defective unit was what was bothering the herd in the first place.

With the processor silenced, another sound became obvious to Cornelia. An odd shuffling and fumbling was coming from behind the feed distributor. It wasn't a machine sound at all but something living, organic. She approached slowly, choosing her steps carefully, not knowing what she would find on the other side of the device.