She smiled. Maybe she was starting to like me, or maybe it was just a facial tic. “It’s communal. I like to share with my neighbors, not squabble. You should hear my nephew bitch about it, but hey, it ain’t his greenhouse.” She peered at me. “Maybe you ain’t so bad if you can enjoy a good toke.”

“I’m from Vancouver, ma’am. We all enjoy one of those up there.”

The smile turned into a shit-eating grin; not a tic after all. “Don’t I know it! My seeds were original B.C. Bud before I started hybridizing in some West African varieties.”

“You know your bud.” I pulled my toolkit out of my jacket. “Is your problem back there?”

She nodded. “I’m afraid so.” She frowned down at my toolkit. “Is that all you got?”

I couldn’t blame her. The kit looked like a flat pack of old-fashioned cigarettes and was about the same size. Not the most impressive-looking piece of equipment on the planet. “Don’t worry. It’ll do.”

She shrugged. “If you say so. Follow me. But watch your step.”

I followed her out back. Her trailer was at the front of a plastic tunnel that led to the greenhouse. We had to climb a ladder. The cliff had a bulbous, runny look, as if the rains that didn’t happen very often out here had once fallen for years and years. At the top, we loped over to the greenhouse. The thing must have stretched for half a kilometer.

“That’s some greenhouse,” I said, genuinely impressed. I heard humming inside. “You said you keep bees?”

After First Contact had established hive species retroactively as sentient, farmers had tried nanobugs to pollinate their crops and keep down pests. Nanobugs weren’t actually nanoscopic, more gnat-sized, but they had proved too susceptible to outside sabotage, so everyone had gone back to nature and started working out treaties with the bees.

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