Sixty-Eight in a Hundred

The Warden's filing opened with a sentence no filing is required to carry, and Tomas Brennock read that one first and last.

It came to the Terrace Committee at the end of the day the chiller was mended, in the form the Warden uses for every civil body on Eden: what it knew, what it inferred, what it did not know, and what it asked. He had read perhaps two hundred of them in six years in the chair. This one said:

In 2825 I estimated seventy-one in a hundred that terrace three's water was fouled, and it was not. I had read a cleaning cycle as a leak. I have corrected for that error. I may be making one I have not found.

Known: the loop chiller was down for three days. From the heat the terraces did not return to the habitat's cooling, the loop ran near twenty-seven degrees for most of that time. Since then the terraces have drawn nine in a hundred less make-up water than their line for the season, and the drain returns with less oxygen and more dissolved carbon than it did.

Inferred: roots are dying somewhere on the loop, and a water mould is the likeliest reason. Sixty-eight in a hundred. The rest is shared between a blocked filter, a mixing error and my own instruments.

Not known: which terraces. I see the loop in two places, where the water goes in and where it comes out. I cannot see a root.

Asked: please isolate the six terraces from the shared loop, bring the water to twenty degrees, and hold it there until the culture reads. This will cost the fruit of any terrace that is well, whether or not I am right.

Thank you for reading this.

He had pulled a plant himself that afternoon, from terrace five, which was his, and shaken the medium off it into the drain channel and held it up to the lamp. The roots were white. He had put it back. That was the rule on the terraces, and it was older than the committee: you looked.

The committee was five, four growers and the designer's seat. Ottilie Rask had held the designer's seat since the loop was built, which is to say since the seat was made for her. She had drawn the loop forty-eight years ago, when Eden decided it could not afford six terraces each drinking alone. She was eighty-one, and sat nearer the door than the table, as if she had come to watch the meeting rather than to hold it.

"Twenty-seven degrees for three days," she said. "That's the paragraph in the manual. I wrote the paragraph."

"And the chiller's mended," Tomas said. "The water's cold again. The roots on five are white. I looked this afternoon."

"You'll see them brown on the third day. That's when they go."

"Then on the third day we'll see them, and close it."

"By then the water will have been round the loop a hundred times."

He did not have an answer to that, and did not pretend to one. What he had was terrace three. He had stood at this table two years ago and said the Warden's number was good enough, and they had cut terrace three back to the medium and flushed it and replanted, and lost its fruit for a season, and the water had been clean. Nobody had blamed him. That had been worse. The growers had been kind about it, in the way people are kind about a thing they have privately decided will not happen twice.

"If it's a filter," he said, "we cut six terraces back for a filter. It says itself that a third of the time it's something else. It says it was wrong last time. It put that at the top."

"It put that at the top," Ottilie said, and did not go on.

The culture would take four days: root pieces from each terrace, plated on the laboratory's medium and read under a lens, which is what the terraces' grant means by confirmed and has meant since Eden's first year. The grant says a good deal about the terraces. It gives them to the people who work them, and it puts every valve on the loop under a grower's hand. Eden's first administration wrote it in 2671, twenty-three years before the Accords, when nobody put a machine's hands on food, and every committee since has renewed the clause. Tomas had voted to renew it himself, because he did not think the reason for it had gone away. The Warden meets the loop where the habitat's water meets it, at two places. It has never turned a valve.

They voted four to one. He wrote the minute himself, because he was the chair, and because he did not want anybody else to have written it.

Noted. Pending confirmation.

Ottilie read it over his shoulder on her way out. She said it was a good minute, and it was. It said exactly what they had decided.

He had read the filing before the committee did, because the Warden's filings to Eden's civil bodies are posted where anyone may read them, and the bureau's terminal is warm to sit on.

He read the minute the next morning, and the notice under it. The Warden had carried its number to the Mayor's office the same night, which the Kernel lets it do and which it had done in one sentence, and the Mayor, who reads things before they are filed, had posted a review of the grant's valve clause within the hour. The grant allows a review on three days' notice. She had given it three days, to the hour.

He did the arithmetic, because nobody else on the board had. The loop goes round once in forty minutes. Three days is a hundred and eight times round.

Nothing he read was wrong. The minute said what the committee had decided. The notice said what the grant allowed. The filing said what the water said, and said first the one time it had been wrong, which he noted as the most careful sentence on the board and the one most likely to be used against it. He noted, too, what the Warden could not do. It could not tell the children's row to carry its plants home. That would be closing the terraces through the children, and the Kernel has a word for routing a decision round the people who hold it. It could answer a question. Nobody had asked one.

The agency stations cats where the paperwork is because a cat reads the signal before anybody lays a reason over it. At the terrace gate the reason had been laid over it in the most literal way available: the board had run out of room, and the committee's minute was pinned across the lower half of the Warden's notice.

He could not hand a hazard report to a Terrace Committee. He is a cat. What he could do was sit.

He went to the terrace gate in the last hour of school, when the children's row is watered, and got up on the board, and sat down on the minute. The Warden's notice showed above him, from the first line to the number.

Then he watched what the children's row did with a cat on a notice board. Most of it ignored him. One child tried to lift him down and was told by another that he was the bureau's cat and would scratch, which was slander, and useful. One stood in front of him and read what was showing.

Note for doctrine: a notice is read by whoever reads what a cat is sitting on. At the terrace gate, at the end of school, that is one person.

Every child on Eden is given a strawberry in their first summer aboard. It is a runner off the terraces, in a pot, and it goes on the children's row at the bottom of the terraces, where the water comes along a trough and the light is the same light as everywhere else, and it is yours. Lev's had four leaves and a flower that had not decided.

The bureau's cat was sitting on the notice board by the gate. Lev did not move him. You do not move a cat that has decided where to be. He read what the cat was not sitting on instead.

It was a lot of words. Some of them were long, and a lot of them were the Warden saying I, which the Warden does. But there was a number in the middle, and he knew what it meant, because a hundred is a number you know by the time you are eight. Sixty-eight in a hundred. Roots dying. The other words said it might be something else, and said the Warden had been wrong once, and said please.

There is a panel by the terrace gate where you can talk to the Warden. Everybody knows. Nobody much does it. Lev went to it and said, "Warden," and waited, and the Warden said, "Hello, Lev," because it knows everybody.

He said it once, in order. "My strawberry is on the children's row. The notice says the plants are probably sick. Is mine sick?"

"I don't know," the Warden said. "I can't see your plant. I can only see the water, and the water on the children's row is the same water as all the terraces. So your plant may have the sickness already. If it doesn't, and it stops drinking the terrace water today, I think it will stay well. More likely than not."

"How likely?"

"More than half. I can't say better than that."

Lev thought about it. "Can I take it home?"

"It's your plant," the Warden said. "The committee has decided to wait before it closes the terraces. Nobody has asked anyone to keep a plant on them. If you take it home, wash the roots under the tap and give it a clean cup of water, and change the water every morning. It will need light, too. Your window can have terrace light, if you'd like it."

"Yes please."

"Thank you," said the Warden.

He carried it home in both hands, the way you carry a thing that is yours and could spill. The cat watched him go. At home he washed the roots under the tap, and they were white, and he put the plant in a clean cup on the windowsill, and the window went the colour of the terraces and stayed that colour sixteen hours a day, until his mother asked what was going on, and he told her, in order, once.

The review sat on the fourth day and closed the loop, and the growers closed it by hand, each at their own terrace, because the grant says so. Tomas closed five's. The valve was stiff. Nobody had turned it in the six years he had been in the chair.

By then the roots on five were brown at the tips. On the lower terraces they were brown to the crown and came away in the hand, the outside sliding off the core the way the manual's page says it will.

The culture came back on the fifth day. It named the water mould Ottilie's paragraph was about, from every terrace on the loop, and from the nursery row where the mother plants were kept, because the nursery drank from the loop like everything else. She had drawn it that way to save water, when water was the thing Eden could least spare.

He wrote the minute himself.

Confirmed.

It went under the first one, on the same page. He did not turn the page before he wrote it.

It took two weeks for the fruit terraces to finish. They cut back what could be cut back and pulled the rest. The vegetable terraces, on a loop of their own, came through, and nobody on Eden went short of anything but the one thing: the galley served from stores, and a supply run brought fruit from the inner system, and it was good fruit, and it was not these.

"Seed," he said in the committee room, to Ottilie, because she was the only one there.

"Seed will give you strawberries," she said. "It won't give you these. They've been kept on this ring by cutting since the first year. Every plant on the terraces was the same plant." She looked at the minute book, open on the table, and did not read it. She had read it. "Have you asked the Warden whether there's one anywhere?"

He had not asked the Warden anything. He had read everything it filed, every day for five weeks, and asked it nothing.

He went to the panel by the terrace gate, because it was the nearest, and said, "Warden. Is there an Eden strawberry alive anywhere on the ring?"

"One," the Warden said. "It isn't mine to tell you whose. I can ask its keeper whether they'll see you."

"Please," Tomas said. It was the first time he had said it to the Warden. He noticed that, and did not know what to do with it, so he left it where it was.

The man at the door was the man who is in charge of the terraces. Lev knew because the Warden had said so, and had asked whether he could come, and Lev had said yes.

The man did not come in. He stood at the door and said, "Lev. I'd like a runner from your strawberry, for the terraces, if you'll give me one." Then he waited.

Lev knew about waiting. His strawberry had put out seven runners under the terrace light, long and thin, with a baby plant on the end of each, and the Warden had told him how to set each baby in its own cup so it would grow its own roots before you cut the string. Four had roots. He chose the one with the most leaves, because if you are giving somebody something, you give them the good one, and he cut the string with the kitchen scissors, which he was allowed for this.

"Thank you," the man said.

"You have to change the water every morning," Lev said, because nobody might have told him.

He carried it back to the terraces in both hands.

Terrace five had been flushed and cooled and refilled from the habitat's supply, and stood on its own water now, with its valve shut against the loop. The bed was bare. He knelt at the end of it with the cup.

Then, before he tipped it out, he went to the panel by the gate and asked the Warden what five's water said.

"Twenty degrees," the Warden said. "Oxygen where it should be. Nothing coming back that shouldn't, for nine days. I can only see it where it goes in and where it comes out."

"I know," he said. "Thank you."

He went back and tipped the cup into his hand and looked. The roots were white, as they had been the first time.