Chapter 130: Something Here Must Do It

Leon spent four days being miserable about it and then Vethra asked him a question that reorganised the whole problem.

"Why is there anything growing?"

He did not follow, and said so.

"You have been telling us for four days that the thing your beans need is not here. And I have been standing next to a river with a valley on either side of it and about nine hundred kinds of green in it." She had a basket on her hip and was not being clever; she genuinely wanted to know. "So either your thing is here, or these do it another way, or they do not need it. Which?"

Leon sat down on the edge of the works and did not answer her for about a minute and a half.

***

The answer, when he got it in order, is that she had walked straight past him to the only useful thing anybody has said about this in four years.

Everything alive needs that substance. Not just beans. Every leaf, every animal that eats a leaf, every person on that terrace.

There is a great deal of it in the air and it is useless there. Something has to take it out and put it into the ground in a form a plant can use, and no plant can do that for itself; on Earth it is done by a handful of small living things in the soil.

There are nine hundred kinds of green in that valley. There are herds out there that weigh as much as a shelter. There is a wet season that grows a hand of new leaf in eleven days.

That does not happen without it.

Something on this planet does this. It has to. I have been asking whether it can be done, and the whole valley has been standing here for four years answering that question, and I did not hear it because I was asking about my own seed.

He found Vethra at the racks and told her she had done the most useful piece of thinking anybody had done since the germination test, and she gave him the look she gives people who over-praise things and went back to work.

***

The second question is where to look and it took the four of them an evening.

Not the good ground. Good ground is good because four thousand years of things have died into it, and whatever you find there is standing in a crowd.

Look where the ground is poor. Look where there is nothing but sand or bare stone or fresh spoil, and there is a plant growing on it anyway.

Because a plant growing on ground with nothing in it is a plant that has brought its own.

"Then I know four places," Tala said, and named them in order without pausing, because she is the only person there who has looked at that country as country and not as a route.

The spoil bank below the granary cut, which is nine years of turned clay with nothing in it.

The gravel bar below the landing that goes under every year and comes back bare.

The burn on the northern slope where the fire went through in the second year and the shale under it is about a hand deep.

And the mineral seep, where nothing grows at all except three things, and always the same three.

***

The survey took twenty-nine days and it was not Leon's.

He can pull a plant up. He cannot tell one from another, has never been able to, and gave up pretending about it a year ago and has been better company since.

So Vethra chose what to pull and named it. Ket-li drew it — badly at first and then rather well, because she has been drawing for two years and nobody had noticed. Kiri wrote the description. Kel ruled the page: where it came from, what the ground was, whether it was wet, and the one column that mattered.

Anything on the roots?

They pulled up four hundred and six plants.

Three hundred and ninety-one of them had nothing.

Eleven had a swelling that turned out on the fourth day to be an ordinary thing most of that family has, which does nothing. Leon spent a whole evening excited about it in front of witnesses and wrote it up afterwards as a mistake, with his name and the day.

Four had lumps.

***

All four are the same low creeping thing with a small grey-green leaf.

It grows on the spoil bank. It grows on the burn. It grows on the gravel bar. It does not grow anywhere with good ground, and Vethra has known it her whole life, and there is a word for it, and the word means the one that comes first.

Every camp on this river has known for four generations that where that plant is, the ground will be worth something in a few years.

Nobody has ever asked why.

"It is not a secret," Vethra said, when Leon had stopped making a noise. "It is not even interesting. It is what you say to a child so they do not clear a slope too early."

***

Leon has written down exactly what this is and exactly what it is not, and he made Kiri copy the second half twice.

What it is: four plants, of one kind, with lumps on the roots, growing on bad ground, in a valley where the biggest herbivores on the planet walk through the same grass every spring.

What it is not: proof of anything at all.

He cannot look inside a lump. There is no way to see what is in there, no way to tell whether it is the same arrangement or something that merely looks similar, and no reason a thing that works for a local plant would work for a seed from another world.

The gap between something does this here and something does this for my beans is enormous, and I have spent four days walking round it because I wanted the first one to be the second one.

So what goes in the register is a trial, and it is Nayra's design and not his, and it takes four years.

Four plots on the eastern ground. One with beans alone, as they have always been sown. One with beans and the one that comes first growing between the rows. One with the creeping plant alone for two years and then beans after it. And one with nothing on it at all, turned the same and left, because you cannot say a plot did well unless you have a plot that did nothing.

Yield counted every year, in the same unit, by the same method, and written on the same page.

Four years before there is anything to say.

***

Kel gave Ket-li the plots and did not ask anybody.

She is ten. She drew four hundred and six plants over twenty-nine days without complaining once and she found the swelling that fooled Leon and said so to his face in front of Vethra.

He gave her the page, and the four plots, and the rule, which is his and which Doran copied into the master the same evening.

The person who keeps this page does not decide what it says.

If she is wrong, she writes it down and it stays. If the Varu is wrong, she writes that down too, and it stays.

And in four years, whoever is holding it will not be the person who started it, and that is the point, and it is why it is being given to a child.