She sighed. "It might help if I knew what it was—geranium, or sunflower, or whatever."
He had told her, but apparently she didn't want to remember. "It isn't one plant. It's been made from hundreds; even I don't know what they were. One best feature from this, another strong feature from something else. We've taken plants apart and recombined them into something new. This is just—plant."
Larienne dropped her legs to a more comfortable if less esthetic position. "Hydroponics was simpler," she objected.
"It was," he said. "And if you want to know, old-fashioned dirt farming was even simpler. Our combination plant and machine is merely a step and a half ahead of hydroponics."
"Suppose you come out and tell me what I've done wrong," she said, getting up.
"One last thing," he said. "Remember that plants evolved on planets. No matter what we do, we can't convince the plant that it's still on a planet. Light's the easiest. As far as we know, it will grow indefinitely under our artificial light. Artificial gravity is different. I don't know the difference, and neither do the physicists, but the plant does. It can live in the ship just so long and then has to be taken out for a rest. There are other things that affect it, vibration, noise, and maybe more. You know how I have to keep after the pilot to dampen his drive. All these things change the cycle it has to have."
"Agreed," she said impatiently, meaning mostly that she didn't care. "Let's go out and look at it."
The plant was a machine and the machine was a plant. It occupied a large space in the center of the ship. And it wasn't wasted space; properly cared for, the plant could supply food for the crew indefinitely.
The plant machine evolved from earlier attempts to convert raw material and energy into food. Originally algae were used because they were hardy and simple to control. But the end product had to be processed and algae did not produce the full scale of nutrients in the proper proportion for the human diet.