Chapter 70: Two in Five Were White
On the two hundred and thirty-first day Leon knelt on the ridge with a wet root in his hands and a small sharp flake, and cut nodules in half for two hours, and got an answer he had wanted for four months and did not entirely believe.
He had counted at flowering, on the hundred and ninetieth, and then every tenth day since, because a single count is a number and five counts are a shape.
The shape was this.
On the ridge, where the first crop had grown, generation two came up out of uncoated seed and nodulated. Six a root at flowering, against the eleven he had found on that one plant in the spring. Not as good. Good enough that the question was answered.
Four hundred metres east, on ground that had never grown a bean, in the plot he had put there precisely because it had never grown a bean, generation two nodulated on nothing. He had pulled eleven plants over five visits and split every root he found and there was not one nodule in any of them, and the plants were pale and short and were going to give him about a third of what the ridge gave.
Which meant the bacteria were in the ridge and not in the ground generally, and had got into the ridge off the seed coat of the first crop, and had lived through a wet season and a dry one in the soil where that crop had stood.
Which meant: carry soil.
A handful of dirt from a place where it worked, put on a place where it did not. That is the whole method, it is four thousand years old on Earth, it costs nothing, and a man can teach it in one afternoon to somebody who cannot write.
He sat back on the ridge and let himself have about a minute of it.
Then he went back to cutting.
The thing he did not have a use for was the colour.
A working nodule is pink inside. Not on the outside — you have to open it — and the pink is a pigment the plant and the bacteria make together to keep the air away from the part of the process that air destroys. Pink means it is doing the work. White means it is not, and green means it has stopped.
At flowering, on the ridge, he had opened forty-one nodules and thirty-six had been pink.
At the two hundred and thirty-first day he opened thirty-eight and twenty-three were pink and fifteen were white.
Two in five.
He sat with it for a long time, because he knew perfectly well what the honest reading was and the honest reading was that he could not tell.
Nodules die. They are supposed to. A bean fills its pods and then stops paying for the bacteria and lets the whole apparatus go, and by a hundred days after sowing a certain amount of white is exactly what a healthy plant looks like on its way to being finished. He had no way to say whether fifteen out of thirty-eight was the normal end of a good season or the beginning of something.
There was a time when he would have written the good part down.
He wrote both, on facing pages, and put Nayra’s marks against them — the tested-mark on carry soil, because five counts across two plots is a test, and on the other page nothing at all except the reasoned-mark and, beneath it, in his own shorthand, the thing he could not resolve: senescence or failure. count at flowering next season, not at the end. if the number at flowering falls, it is not senescence.
It was the most useful sentence he wrote that year and he did not know it.
***
Tala came out to the eastern plot with him on the two hundred and thirty-sixth day because he had asked her to look at something else entirely, which was a run of small burrows along the northern edge that were taking seed out of the pods.
She looked at the burrows for about four seconds and then stopped looking at them.
Then she walked the whole boundary of the plot, slowly, at a distance of about six metres from the crop, and went round it twice, and on the second circuit she stopped crouching and simply walked, which was worse.
She came back and squatted down beside him and drew in the dust.
The burrows. Then a line of little marks coming up out of the grass toward the burrows, which he took to mean the small things that eat small things, and which was already more traffic than he had thought was out here.
Then she put three fingers in the dust, apart, and pressed.
Two toes forward. The third held clear.
"Sethkar," Tala said.
Leon had been looking at that print since his first day on this planet and had never once had a name for it, and got a name for it now, in the dust, at four hundred metres from the wall, from a woman who was not being dramatic about it.
Then she held up three fingers.
"Three?"
"Ei." She turned her hand over — not certain — and then put it back the other way, which meant she was, and had marked it as a guess out of habit and did not believe her own hedge. She showed him why in the dust: three sets, different lengths, and a difference in how deep the third toe went in. Then she made the sign for turn, twice, in a circle.
Not passing through. Working it in rotation.
***
On the walk back he understood the whole of it, and did not enjoy any of it.
He had put a novel food crop in open ground four hundred metres outside a wall. The seed brought small animals. The small animals brought the things that eat small animals. And somewhere in the last forty days, three of the largest predators on this reach had worked out that a particular rectangle of grass reliably contained lunch, and had started coming back to it.
I built a bait station. I built it out of an experiment and I have been walking to it alone every ten days for six weeks because it is a plot of beans and a plot of beans is not dangerous.
He had broken Kharun’s rule about forty times without once noticing that he was doing it, because the rule was about nights and about distance and he had been going out in daylight to look at plants.
At the gate he stopped walking. "Give it up."
Tala stopped.
"The east plot. Give it up. Plant it inside." He did not have the vocabulary and used the register, drawing while he talked, which by now nobody found strange. "The answer is finished. I have the answer. There is nothing left out there to learn that is worth two people standing in a field."
She looked at the drawing for a while.
"Na," Tala said.
Then she took the charcoal off him, which she had never done, and drew a second thing beside his: the rectangle of the plot, and the three sets of prints, and an arrow going in and an arrow coming out.
She had no words for the argument and did not need many.
He had built a place where the Sethkar came, on a schedule, to a known rectangle, in open ground with a clear view in every direction and a wall four hundred metres behind it.
Nobody had ever had that before. Everything the Retha knew about that animal, they knew from tracks it left while doing something else.
"You want to watch it."
"Ei."
"It is a field of beans."
Tala handed the charcoal back and said the longest sentence he had ever heard her say, slowly, so he would get all of it.
"It was a field of beans. Now it is the only place on this river where we know where it will be."