Noah Adeyemi

Noah Adeyemi is the only person on Eden's fold-approach side who has been seen to look at the hatch.

He was grown on Eden Space Habitat, is nineteen or twenty in the spring of 2828 UCSD, and works a shift somewhere on the Compact side of the ring that lets him off at the hour the fold-approach watch changes. The record does not say where the shift is or what it is for. He lives behind the door with the plant outside it — the door on one side of a hatch with a number and nothing else, between it and a door with a name on it — and for the years the plant has stood there it has been watered once a week, on the sixth day, by whoever lives behind that door — his mother, by his own account — and has done well on it.

The Plant

On the fourth day of Iklix Varn's posting he was crouched at the plant with a watering can when the hatch opened, and looked up, and said You're the hatch. The can was full. The plant did not need the whole can. He had looked up the tab before he said anything, so as not to get it wrong, and three bars was the nearest true thing to hand when the thing he had come to say did not come. On the fifth day he was there again, and asked what was behind the hatch, and was told a watch, and asked what it watched, and was told it doesn't, and laughed — not long, nothing in it anyone could have written down — and the Deputy took one step back.

He heard the step. He said Sorry, Deputy, and the word had changed shape between the two times he used it — the first time a rank he had looked up, the second a courtesy, the way the word is said on the Compact side of the ring — and he picked up the can, still nearly full, and went in at his own door. See The Door With the Plant (S09E01C02).

Zoe Smith read the whole of it through a hatch left on the latch, and read it correctly: the oldest signal on any ring, sent the ordinary way, by somebody who had never had a reason to learn what a tab meant on that side and had gone and found out. She also read what he had heard in the step, which was not what the step meant. She wrote none of it down.

On the eighth day he came back without the can. That was the whole of what he had come to say, and he said the rest of it in one sentence — it doesn't need watering, I know that — and the Deputy read the empty hands before the face, did not step back, did not step forward, and asked his name. He gave it. Nothing in the corridor changed and nobody said Deputy the other way. See Without the Can (S09E01C04).

What He Declines

He does not pretend not to have looked. Most of the ring walks past the hatch without seeing it, and has for years; he saw it, looked up what it was, and came back with a can rather than pretend otherwise.

He does not push. Two days at the plant, one question each, and when the answer to the second was a step back he took the step as the answer and went in. He did not argue with it and did not ask what it meant. When he came back it was to correct his own side of it, not to press the other.

He does not bring the can twice. Once he knew it had been a lie — a small one, the kind the ring tells every day — he left it inside, and came out with nothing in his hands rather than the wrong thing.

He does not get the rank wrong. He looked it up first, said it right, and then — having been told, as he understood it, that it was a rank after all — said it the other way, which was also right, on his side of the ring.

Character Notes

The record holds him from two rooms: a corridor, where he is the one person who looked, and a Field Officer's compartment, where he is a signal read correctly by someone who was not the person it was sent to. Neither of the two people in the corridor was wrong about what they saw. Each was wrong about what it meant, and he was the one who paid for the misreading, with a word said the courteous way and a full can carried back through his own door. For four days the Deputy did not know his name; the record did, because Smith knows most of the ring by small things and at a distance, and his was one of them. On the eighth day he gave it himself, too fast, and added that it was on the door, on the inside.

What he does next is not established. The plant is watered on the sixth day either way.

See also: The Door With the Plant (S09E01C02), Without the Can (S09E01C04), Iklix Varn, Zoe Smith, Eden Space Habitat.