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Chapter 34: Six Point One Kilograms

Chapter 34: Six Point One Kilograms

The seed module came out of the store on the twenty-second morning, and Leon lost the argument before he had finished making it.

He knew that within about four minutes. He kept going for another forty, which was, in hindsight, the least dignified stretch of his life on this continent.

Veya had called the circle at dawn. Everybody knew why. The party had come back with half of what it went for, the far bed was stripped, and there were seven days of nothing standing between the settlement and the fish.

And under a ceramic cover on the archive platform there were six point one kilograms of seed.

He had put them there himself. That was the part he would think about afterwards.

On the twenty-first day he had stood on a mat with the whole village watching and said wait, and Nayra had understood the word, and Veya had put a knot in the cord, and Leon had felt the specific satisfaction of a man who has made a responsible decision in public.

Now the same knot was being read back to him.

Doran read it. He did not have to look at it while he did.

"You said wait," Luma rendered. "Council asks: wait for what?"

Leon had the answer ready. He had been assembling it for three weeks.

Quarantine. Test plots. Isolation distance. A full season of observation before anything went near the river. He did not know what an Earth cultivar did in soil that had never met it, in an atmosphere at twenty-three point four percent oxygen, among pollinators that had not coevolved with any of it and pests that had never learned to find it. He did not know whether the seed carried anything. He did not know whether it would fail, or grow, or grow too well, and the third one frightened him more than the other two combined.

He said all of that in seventy-odd words and a great deal of drawing, and it took him twenty minutes, and it was true.

Nayra let him finish.

Then she asked what mark it carried.

The whole circle knew what she was doing. He watched it go round the mat.

"Reasoned," Leon said.

"Ei." She held up one finger. "Tested?"

"Na."

"Seen?"

"Na."

"Told?"

He stopped.

Told. By a discipline that had spent two centuries learning what happens when you move a plant across an ocean, on a planet where every one of those experiments had already been run at enormous cost by people who had not meant to run them.

But he could not produce any of that here. He could not produce a single case. He had no archive entry he could show them that was not a photograph of a place none of them would recognise, and the story of the rabbits and the story of the cane toad were, in this circle, on this mat, exactly what Tala had made him admit two weeks ago.

Names his world gave to things that other people had watched.

"Told," he said.

Nayra put the two-line mark beside it.

Then she went to the other side of the mat and made her own claim, and it was one sentence long.

In seven days, people here will not eat.

And she put the cross beside it, because she had counted the stores herself, twice, with Doran, and the count was the count.

Reasoned against tested.

Leon looked at the two marks and understood that he had built the instrument that was currently taking him apart, and that it was working exactly as designed.

He argued anyway. That was the forty minutes.

He argued that a bad outcome here was permanent in a way that seven hungry days was not. He argued that they could not undo a seed. He argued that the settlement had a granary now, and a method, and could survive lean and could not survive a crop failure that spread.

Some of it landed. Oren shifted. One of the fishing crew asked a question about how far a seed travels that was better than anything Leon had raised himself.

And then Doran said the thing that ended it, and he said it without any heat at all.

"Whose seed?"

Leon opened his mouth.

The module was in the public record. Marked pottery, borrower’s token, Veya’s cord. He had put it there on the third day, in front of everybody, deliberately, because he had wanted a system that made him accountable and had been very pleased with himself for building one.

He had made the same discovery in front of Kharun eleven days ago about a folding saw, and had apparently learned nothing from it, which was its own kind of data.

"Retharu," Leon said.

"Ei," said Doran, and sat down.

The vote was not a vote. Veya asked each part of the settlement in turn and counted the shape of the answers, and the shape was clear before she was halfway round.

They would plant.

And then, because this council had spent three weeks becoming something, they spent the next two hours deciding how, and every condition they attached was one Leon would have written himself if he had been arguing the other side.

Not near the river. Two ridges north, in the dry ground nobody used, where the runoff went away from the settlement and away from the beds.

Fenced. Marked. Nobody eats from it.

One jar. Not six. One jar of one kind, and the other five stay under the cover with the cross cut into the shard.

Every observation recorded in Nayra’s marks, by two people, on separate days.

And if anything came up that nobody recognised growing outside the fence, the whole plot burned, no council, no discussion, whoever saw it first.

Leon sat and listened to a pre-industrial village on a river invent field-trial protocol from first principles because a stranger had spent three weeks teaching them to distrust confident men, and could not decide whether he was proud or appalled, and eventually concluded that those were the same feeling arriving in a different order.

He asked for one thing.

It took him a while to find the words, and he got them wrong twice, and Luma had to build the sentence with him in front of everybody, which was humiliating and probably necessary.

He wanted his objection recorded.

Not the decision. The objection. He wanted a knot in the cord that said a man had said no, and had said why, and had been outvoted, and had helped anyway — so that if in twenty summers something was growing in the wrong place, nobody would have to reconstruct from memory whether anybody had seen it coming.

Veya did not answer immediately.

She turned the cord over, and found a place near the end, and held it there with her thumb the way she had on the day she had gone looking for a fishing weight.

Then she asked Luma a question. Luma answered. Veya asked another one, longer, and Luma had to think about that one.

Leon caught two words of it and one of them was first.

There was no knot for this. In sixty years of cord there had never been a knot for a person who lost and stayed, because until three weeks ago every decision this settlement made had been made by people who all had to keep living beside each other afterwards, and the disagreement had gone into the room and not into the record.

Veya tied one.

It took her some time. It was a shape Leon had not seen on that cord before, and she made it slowly, and Luma watched her hands the entire way without blinking, which was Luma taking it.

Then Veya put Leon’s hand on the knot so he could feel where it sat.

"Now," she said, in his language, badly, and with a very slight edge that he chose to interpret as affection, "you plant."

He planted it himself.

That was not a punishment and nobody offered it as one. He asked, and Oren looked at Veya, and Veya made the sign for ei, and that was the end of it.

Two ridges north, in dry ground, with Sila fencing behind him and Pel cutting the marker posts and Aru supervising from a rock with his leg stretched out and opinions about the spacing.

Leon opened the jar.

Common bean. He had chosen it in a laboratory under a hill in Bavaria out of forty candidates, for nitrogen fixation and protein and because it would grow in poor soil, and he had sealed it with his own hands on a morning when the largest problem in his life had been whether ninety-six kilograms was going to be enough.

He had been sitting on the ridge for some time before the other thing arrived.

Beans do not fix nitrogen. Bacteria do. The plant builds the nodule and the bacteria live in it and hand over the nitrogen, and the bacteria come out of the soil, and they are specific, and they have to already be there.

There was no reason whatsoever for them to be here.

Leon sat with a handful of seed and worked through what that meant, which was that half his reason for choosing this crop over the other thirty-nine had evaporated, and that if anything came up at all it would come up on whatever nitrogen this dry ridge happened to contain and nothing more.

He wrote it in the book before he planted, with the reasoned-mark, because he had not tested it and he was not going to pretend otherwise on the same morning he had lost an argument about exactly that.

Then he planted anyway, because the council had decided, and because a plant that grows badly is still information.

The seeds were pale and slightly wrinkled and looked like nothing at all.

He put them in at the depth the reference card said, in rows, at the spacing the card said, and marked the rows, and wrote it in the book with the seen-mark and the date.

Then he stood up and looked at forty square metres of turned dry earth two ridges north of a river on a continent that had never seen a bean.

"Please be boring," he said, in English, to nobody.

Behind him, Aru asked what he had said.

Leon thought about the seventy-five words he had, and about the fact that in eleven days these plants would either be up or they would not, and that either way somebody would write it down.

"I said a prayer," he told him.

Aru, who had never once let anything go, wanted to know to what.