Chapter 31: The Allergy

Chapter 31: Chapter 31: The Allergy

Liam had only just pressed the order button when Isabella’s voice came up from downstairs.

"Liam! Come down and eat!"

He switched off the system screen, stretched once and then went down. On the table were three bowls of porridge and a plate of Sawtooth greens stir-fried with star-beast meat, and beside them was a plate of fried Grass Worms for Isabella and Benjamin.

Liam sat down, and lifted a spoonful of porridge to taste. The grains hadn’t swelled evenly, some parts were mushy and some still hard, and the seasoning was a little heavy-handed. But the rib meat had been stripped clean of bone, cut into small bite-sized pieces, and laid out neatly on the surface of the bowl.

He chewed thoroughly, and then nodded: "For a first attempt this is very good indeed."

Isabella’s eyes lit up at once: "Really? I watched the heat the whole time and it still kept boiling over."

"With a stewing pot you have to release some of the pressure once partway through." Liam explained as he ate: "And season it twice, only a little the first time, then season again near the end. Season it all at the start and the porridge will turn salty as the water boils down."

Benjamin sat opposite, nodding hard like a pupil listening to a lesson. Half a bowl in, he remembered the main thing, and put his spoon down to say:

"Oh, that’s right, we’ve soaked some of the seeds in undiluted restoration fluid."

"How long do they need to soak?"

"Thirty-six hours." Isabella answered: "I split it into two batches, and only soaked half of each kind of seed, and left the other half alone. That way when we sow them we’ll know which ones it works on and which it doesn’t."

Liam lifted his head to look at his sister, and privately gave her a word of praise. He hadn’t even had time to tell her to keep a control sample, and she had worked it out herself. People who had farmed for years really did have an instinct of their own, and needed nobody to teach them.

"You did it exactly right." Liam said: "Remember to record the figures, because later on we’ll be applying this to other kinds of seed."

Isabella’s eyes crinkled at the praise, and she drank down her whole bowl of porridge in one go. Benjamin, though, was puzzled:

"Other kinds of seed? Don’t tell me you can find yet more undiscovered seed?"

Liam nodded: "You already know I have an information channel of my own. I’ve been in contact with this person since I was thirteen, and as long as there’s money in it, even if the thing you want is inside the belly of an insectoid queen he can get it out."

Isabella’s and Benjamin’s mouths fell open: "There are people that formidable?"

Liam nodded: "Mm, he’s a hacker. There’s certainly a large intelligence organization behind him." He swallowed a spoonful of porridge, and then went on: "Last time I asked him to find information about the two of you, he dug the Martinez family up right down to the ancestral graves. Among those documents there’s evidence that our eldest and second uncles on Daddy’s side seized our property, along with evidence of the crimes those two cousins committed."

The two Martinez siblings were stunned, and grew rather restless: "So can we get the property back?"

Liam said firmly: "Of course we can. But not now. The three of us have no power backing us at the moment, and even if we got the property back it would only be taken from us again. First we need to have something to show for ourselves, and then make peace with Grandfather Vance and our uncles on Papa’s side. Only then can we get back what our two fathers worked so hard for."

At the mention of Papa’s family, Benjamin’s and Isabella’s faces turned rather unnatural. Liam glanced at them, and said:

"Everyone gets something wrong sometimes. And you can’t leave one mistake unmended for a whole lifetime. Do the two of you want to disown Grandfather Vance and the Vance uncles for the rest of your lives?"

Benjamin and Isabella shook their heads. Naturally, neither of them wanted that.

Liam said nothing more, and only concentrated on eating his own portion, while in his head he worked out how best to make use of these connections.

The original owner had been nothing but an Omega raised indoors, while he was a forty-year-old man who had been throwing himself at the world since he was twenty-one, and naturally he knew what would serve him best.

As he saw it, the relationship between the Martinez family and the Vance family was not beyond saving, it was simply that neither side was willing to back down first. Elijah, who had been the source of the whole thing, was no longer here, and untying the knot in both sides’ hearts had become a great deal easier.

Once the meal was over, Liam was chased upstairs for a nap. He slept straight through until past three in the afternoon. Outside the window, the rain had eased, and only a few drops still gathered on the eaves and fell in a soft patter.

Liam opened the door meaning to go out for some air, and his foot had barely crossed the threshold before Benjamin came hurtling from somewhere to block him.

"It’s still wet, the ground is slippery. You sit inside."

"Brother, I’m only going to stand on the porch..."

"Sit."

Liam helplessly dragged a chair out and set it right in front of the door, and dropped into it. From here he could see the whole field, which counted as being outside.

Sitting doing nothing was dull, so he opened the system storage bag, and pulled out the knitting and crochet course.

The set of tools was carefully packed in a wooden box. Inside were knitting needles, crochet hooks in every size arranged from small to large, yarn needles, scissors, a tape measure, and seventeen balls of yarn in different colors, every one of them as smooth as silk.

The blue cat said these seventeen small balls were only for practice, and that the real reward, once opened, would fill his entire room. It also kept praising the system shop for being so generous. Liam declined to comment.

He put on the first tutorial video.

In the video, a pair of hands nimbly crocheted a small flower in under two minutes. Every stitch ran perfectly even, fast and beautiful at once, and simply watching was entertaining.

"That looks easy enough." Liam mumbled, and picked up a crochet hook to copy it.

Ten minutes later, he looked at the lump of yarn in his hand, tangled like a crow’s nest, and silently rewound the video to the beginning.

Thirty minutes later, he had rewound it for the seventh time.

An hour later, the yarn in his hand had tied itself into a knot that could not possibly be undone, and the ball at his feet had wound around the chair legs into a matted heap.

Liam looked at that disaster, drew a deep breath, and then quietly stuffed every needle, every ball of yarn and the course back into the wooden box, closed the lid, and pushed it into a corner.

The blue cat lay on the arm of the chair, laughing hard enough to shake its whiskers: "Ha ha ha ha! Host, a man who earns his living with his hands, and you’re beaten by a ball of yarn?"

Liam was steaming: "There are hands and there are hands, not everyone who can draw and cook has to know how to crochet!"

The blue cat laughed itself out before saying: "All right, stop trying. Let me load this course into your smart unit, and then you can send it to your sister. Women are usually better at fiddly work like this."

Liam thought it over, and found it reasonable enough. Isabella farmed all year round, but her handwriting was very beautiful, every stroke distinct, which proved her hands were deft.

"Fine. But tell me again, where is this course supposed to have come from? And where was all that yarn bought? Nobody wears knitted clothes anymore, they all wear those climate-control clothes you called hideous."

The blue cat yawned: "You do ask pointless questions. That secret information channel of yours is very convenient, you can blame anything on it."

Liam: "..." That did seem to be true.

[Master, would you like to hear the progress report on the composting site?]

Sunflower’s voice came from the smart watch. The holographic sprite girl appeared on the back of his hand, holding a tiny data panel.

"Mm, read it out."

[Reporting, master. Core temperature has held steady at sixty-two degrees for the past forty-eight hours, humidity fifty-six percent. The air-blower system automatically increased output twice at dawn when the temperature touched sixty-eight degrees.]

Sunflower turned the page, and her tone brightened considerably:

[In addition, the volume of the heap has dropped by about fifteen percent compared with the first day. The color of the material in the middle layer has turned dark brown. The acrid smell has fallen noticeably, and the sensors record a seventy percent drop in ammonia concentration.]

Hearing that, Liam nodded in satisfaction.

The heap sinking, changing color, losing the acrid smell; all three signs were exactly by the book. If it held this pace then fourteen days would see it finished, not a day out.

"Good. Keep it as it is. Tell me on the eighth day, I’ll go out and check it by hand."

[Understood!]

Liam sat a while longer, and suddenly found his mouth utterly bland. He glanced out into the yard. Benjamin and Isabella were bent over their work at the far end of the field, a good two hundred meters from the house.

Very good.

Liam reached into the spatial bracelet, and furtively fished out a mango. He had meant to save these mangoes for pudding, but ever since that morning the sweet-sour taste had kept surfacing in his head, and he couldn’t get free of it.

"Just one. Nobody will know about one."

He peeled it, and took an enormous bite.

The mango juice welled out sweet as honey, and ran cool down his throat. Liam narrowed his eyes in enjoyment, took a second bite, a third, and in under two minutes had eaten the whole thing.

When he had finished he licked his fingers clean, and let out a contented breath. But only about five minutes later, the rim of his lips began to prickle and itch.

Liam froze. He put a hand to his mouth, and the itch spread gradually out to both corners, and then crawled down his throat.

"What on earth is this..."

The blue cat sprang up, leaned in to take a look at his face, and then pronounced calmly: "Ah, host, you’re allergic to mango."

"Allergic?" Liam went pale, and clutched his stomach anxiously: "Oh no, is it serious?"

The blue cat ran a quick scan, and then said: "I can only scan your body. At this level, all you have is OAS (oral allergy syndrome), which isn’t very serious. Drink a little warm water and it’ll clear up on its own shortly. But as for the baby, I can’t scan that. It would be best if you lay down in the medical pod to be sure."

Liam hurriedly crawled into the medical pod to lie down. Fifteen minutes passed, and Liam felt nothing bad happening with the baby, so he gritted his teeth and lay there ten minutes more before crawling out.

The blue cat teased: "It seems you’re rather fond of this child."

Liam glared at it: "If I don’t love my own child, am I supposed to love you instead?"

The blue cat hissed, and paid Liam no further attention.

Liam got out of the medical pod. The layer of emergency treatment fluid slid off his body automatically, and he was dry all over as though he had never been submerged. He sat slumped in the chair, and looking at the mangoes left in the spatial bracelet his heart ached as if cut.

"Two whole tubes of low-grade medicine gone on a heap of fruit I can’t eat, what a waste of heaven’s bounty."

The blue cat clicked its tongue: "If you can’t eat them, other people can. Bear in mind that in a place overflowing with fruit the mango is still revered as a king, so in a place like this where vegetables and fruit are as rare as diamonds in sand, it will certainly be hunted after. You could improve it and grow it to sell."

Liam rubbed his chin, and nodded: "That’s true enough."

The blue cat flicked its tail in irritation. It kept feeling that its host was vacant somehow. One moment plainly clever, the next as naive as a boy who had never seen the world. It genuinely couldn’t work out what sort of environment raised a person like that.