Garden Stakes
In which Esteban encounters a woman, a garden, and a very strong opinion.
Nobody knew exactly where Louisette had come from.
“Oh, she’s French,” people said at first, because it seemed obvious.
Then she pronounced about in a way that sounded suspiciously Canadian, spent an entire communal dinner arguing hockey with an engineer from Montréal, and referred to the habitat trail as “the corridor, tabarnak,” with such effortless fluency that everyone reconsidered.
After that the theories multiplied.
“Provence,” said Dr. Singh firmly.
“Québec,” insisted Paolo from Hydroponics.
“Belgium,” offered someone from Maintenance.
Louisette herself refused to clarify. She considered this hysterically funny.
What she would clarify, repeatedly and at escalating volume, was that they were courgettes.
Not zucchini.
Never zucchini.
* * *
Esteban had arrived on Mars eleven days ago.
The recruitment materials had described the colony as humanity’s bold new future. They had included photographs of the habitat trails — bright, orderly, promising. They had not mentioned the smell: damp soil and tomato vines and basil threatening a hostile takeover.
They had not mentioned the mineral dust, red Martian grit working through the filtration membranes like a reminder that the planet itself was still out there and had opinions.
They had absolutely not mentioned Louisette.
He found her in the middle of Habitat Trail C with both hands planted on her hips while three colony children argued around her.
“They’re zucchini,” declared Matteo, age nine, whose parents had emigrated from New Chicago Station and believed every vegetable required an aggressively American name.
“Courgettes,” Louisette repeated.
“They’re squash,” said Hannah pragmatically.
“Squash is a category,” Louisette said, with the precision of a woman who has had this argument in four languages. “Courgette is a specific thing.”
Matteo crossed his arms. “The inventory system says zucchini.”
“The inventory system,” Louisette announced, “was designed by idiots.”
From somewhere farther down the corridor somebody yelled, “She’s fighting the produce database again!”
Esteban looked at the woman — small, unhurried, absolutely certain — and then at the children, who were clearly running some kind of long game around her. He had a feeling this was not an unusual Tuesday.
“Say courgette,” Hannah whispered to Matteo. “She gives you extra dessert if you say courgette.”
“I heard that,” Louisette snapped.
“You were supposed to,” Hannah replied serenely.
Louisette narrowed her eyes.
Then, with great visible reluctance that fooled nobody, she produced a bundled kitchen towel from her apron pocket and revealed a still-warm fruit tart. One piece. The children divided it with the practiced efficiency of a long-standing arrangement and retreated down the corridor.
Louisette watched them go with the expression of someone who has lost a battle they were always going to lose and found this entirely acceptable.
Then she turned and looked directly at Esteban.
He had the distinct impression she had known he was there the whole time.
“You,” she said. “Come here.”
He came. It didn’t occur to him not to.
She pressed a courgette into his hands. It was heavier than he expected, dark and glossy, faintly warm from the growing lights. He looked down at it and then up at her.
“You will learn the garden,” she said. “This is where everything begins on Mars. The food. The air. The reason to get up in the morning.” She looked at him with the calm patience of someone who has said this before and will say it again and is not in any hurry. “You will learn it.”
“I’m in engineering,” Esteban said.
“Good. Engineers are useful in a garden. They do not argue about the names of vegetables.”
He looked down at the courgette.
“The database does call it zucchini,” Esteban said carefully.
Louisette regarded him for a long moment.
Then she smiled, and something in him recalibrated.
“You will do,” she said.
She picked up her basket and walked back to her seedlings, leaving him standing in the middle of Habitat Trail C holding a courgette, reconsidering everything the recruitment materials had told him about his role here.
Above him, the transparent shielding arched overhead. Beyond it, the late Martian afternoon stretched rust and amber across the horizon.
The tomato vines needed checking.
Louisette got back to work.