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in over-abundance on this planet thanks to the neo-ironwood trees. Shipping fertilizer to other worlds by spaceship wasn’t a profitable business because the freight charges cost more than any money earned.
    He knew that somewhere deep inside the machine the plant was stripped down to the stalk and the blossom. The agricultural-processing unit ground the blossom down and processed the powder for spice. Humans at another location manually slit the stalk open and carefully extracted two or three seeds. Collecting the seeds was too complicated and delicate an operation for a machine to manage without damaging them. He knew this because everyone knew this. Grandpa said everyone also knew the processing facility was barely operating at a profit.
    One year, he and Grandpa processed some spice manually. They tried it on some potato soup. Tasso couldn’t understand why anyone would want to buy the stuff. Although they thought they had processed the spice correctly, it didn’t seem to do anything to improve the taste of the soup. They decided they would continue to grow chiamra as long as the processing facility bought their crop. They would switch to another crop if the processing facility closed or quit buying chiamra.
    Another tractor-trailer was floating along at a creeping pace as it entered the building as the first tractor-trailer slowly left the building at the other end. There was a row of signs above the exit doorway. Each sign displayed pricing for a different commodity. A large sign directly over the doorway displayed the current price of chiamra plants and blossoms. Tasso shook his head. The price had dropped again, reaching a point that was slightly less than a credit per acre. Unless the price went up before he brought in his harvest, he wouldn’t get enough money out of his whole crop to pay the land tax and buy the seeds he would need for the next planting.
    “Price dropped again!” a voice said at his elbow.
    He turned and saw an older man standing next to him. “I noticed,” Tasso replied.
    “Y’all bringin’ in chiamra today?”
    Tasso shook his head, “No, sir. I’m just visiting. Our crop is barely pushing up seedlings. I hope the price goes up before we get blooms.”
    “We can always hope. I was going to switch to corn and cane sugar. Me and the missus can get six crops of corn to one of chiamra.” The man pointed at the price board. “At that price, it don’t hardly pay to plant. Do you see the number in the bottom right corner? That is the price of seeds. It dropped this week, falling low enough to keep us planting.”
    “Yes, sir. Why corn and cane sugar, if I may ask?”
    The man laughed, “If I don’t make enough profit sellin’ my crop, I can at least eat it. And what I don’t eat I can use to make my own corn liquor. Instead of starvin’ to death growing chiamra, I can die fat and drunk.”
    The man walked away, laughing at his own joke.
    “Hey, kid!” a voice said.
    Tasso turned. Two large men stood behind him. The front of their shirts said ‘security’. Tasso wondered why they didn’t buy shirts big enough so the sleeves didn’t squeeze their arms so tight.
    “What are you doing here? Show me your badge.”
    Tasso wasn’t sure what badge he needed. He pointed at the old man walking away. “I was with my uncle, sorry.” He started to edge away.
    “Uncle? I doubt that. Grab him, Stu.”
    Stu reached to grab Tasso, but Tasso ducked under his arms and raced back the way he’d come. Two other security men were coming from that way and they blocked his exit. He leaped over the conveyor belt. The other side dropped away. He landed on a large metal cargo storage unit. He dropped off the box to the top of another container, and jumped down to the floor. He ducked under a moving shipping container and dodged through a series of little hallways made by stacks of big metal boxes.
    Tasso would have marveled at the manmade canyon, but a hooting alarm began blaring, cutting through