I Won the Lottery and Went Back in Time!?!

The beans made pods, which Leon had stopped expecting somewhere around the seventieth day.

Nineteen plants had come up out of forty seeds. Four had died in the first fortnight. Two had been eaten by something small with a very specific appetite, which Aru had spent nine days trying to identify and had eventually caught, and which turned out to be a lizard-analogue the length of a hand that nobody in Retharu had ever bothered to name because until now it had never done anything of interest.

Thirteen plants had made it to the wet.

They had been miserable through most of it. Beans do not enjoy standing water and the ridge had drained badly for the first three weeks, and Asha Bloom-Hand — who was not there, who was three hundred kilometres away at First Garden, and whom Leon had never met — would have told him in about four seconds that he had chosen the wrong side of the slope.

Which he had, though he did not know it yet.

Eleven plants made pods. Green, flat, unremarkable, hanging in twos and threes off stems that were about two-thirds the height of anything he had ever seen in a photograph.

Leon counted the pods on the hundred and eleventh day and got seventy-four.

Then he went and got a trowel.

***

Leon dug up one plant. The worst one.

That had taken some working out. The whole point of the plot was seed, and every plant he destroyed was a fraction of next season, and he had spent two evenings arguing himself into it and had eventually gone and asked Nayra, who had listened to the entire thing and then asked him what he would do if he did not look.

Plant again next season and find out then.

"That is a year," Nayra said. "A year is a long time to spend not knowing a thing you could know today for the price of one poor plant."

Then, because she was Nayra: "That is the whole of my opinion. Do not put anything else in my mouth."

So he took the smallest of the eleven, worked around it with the trowel, lifted the root ball out whole, and carried it down to the water to wash the soil off it.

Then he crouched in the shallows with a wet root in his hands and sat down in the mud.

***

There were nodules.

Not many. Perhaps eleven, mostly on the lateral roots near the crown, round and pale and about the size of a peppercorn, and when he opened one with a thumbnail the inside was pink.

Pink is the whole thing. Pink means the nodule is fixing.

Leon sat in the shallows for some time.

The problem had gone into the register eighty-nine days ago, on a ridge, with a handful of seed and about four minutes of very unpleasant clarity. Beans do not fix nitrogen. Bacteria do. The plant builds the house and the bacteria pay rent in nitrogen and the bacteria have to already be in the soil, and they are specific, and there had been no reason whatsoever for the right ones to be in a dry ridge on a continent that had never seen a bean.

And here were eleven nodules with pink insides.

Leon worked out why in about ninety seconds and it took the pleasure out of it almost immediately.

The seed had been treated.

The laboratory came back to him whole, and with it the supplier’s specification sheet and the line on it he had read once, in a hurry, nine weeks before launch, while making a decision about forty candidate crops on the basis of protein and storage and drought tolerance. Commercial legume seed is sold pre-inoculated. A dry coating of the correct rhizobia, on the seed, applied before packing, standard practice, unremarkable, and Leon had ticked past it without a second’s thought because on Earth it does not matter.

Leon had not brought a crop. He had brought a crop and its bacteria, by accident, in a coating he had not chosen and had not paid attention to.

***

The problem arrived about a minute later and he took it back up the ridge with him.

The coating was on the seed. It was not in the soil.

Some of it would have come off into the ridge and would be living down there now around a dozen root systems, in a population of unknown size, in a soil chemistry nothing in its evolutionary history had prepared it for, in a wet season. Some of it would not survive that. Whatever did survive would be a tiny founding population in forty square metres of one ridge on one continent.

And next season he would plant seed grown here. Uncoated. Ordinary.

Those plants would have to find rhizobia already in the ground, and there would either be enough or there would not, and the difference between those two outcomes was the difference between a crop and a decoration, and he had no way at all to measure which he was going to get until it happened.

Writing it up that evening took him two hours because he made himself do it properly.

Seen: eleven nodules, one plant, pink on section, day 111.

Reasoned: the inoculant came on the seed coat and was not in this soil before day 22.

Reasoned: generation two will nodulate less, possibly much less, and the amount is not predictable from anything I have.

Told: nothing. There is nobody to tell me.

Tested: nothing yet.

Then the design went underneath it, because he could see it now and had not been able to see it four hours earlier.

Next season, two plots. One in fresh ground, planted with seed from this harvest. One in this ridge, in the same soil, with the same seed. Same day, same spacing, same everything.

If the ridge plot nodulates and the fresh plot does not, the bacteria are here and they are not travelling, and the answer is to carry soil.

Leon looked at that sentence for a while.

Carry soil. Take a handful of dirt from a place where it worked and put it on the seed for a place where it has not. It was the crudest possible intervention and it was, as far as he could reason it out with no microscope and no culture and no way to see the organism at all, almost certainly correct.

***

Aru found him on the ridge at dusk still holding the washed root.

Aru wanted to know what it was for. Leon had about a hundred and forty words now, and the past tense, and no word at all for bacteria.

So Leon did it with the root.

"Small houses," he said, and pointed at the nodules. "Very small. Something lives in them. Not the plant."

Aru waited.

"It came with the seed. From my world. It is in this ground now and there is not very much of it."

Aru turned the root over twice.

Then he asked whether the small things were alive.

Leon said yes.

Aru asked whether they had come all the way here the same way Leon had, and Leon said yes, and Aru thought about that for a long moment and then said the thing that Leon wrote down verbatim that night and looked at for a long time afterwards.

"You spent a whole season choosing what to bring," Aru said, "and you brought a thing you did not know you were bringing."

He handed the root back.

"That is the first thing about your world that has made any sense to me."