Tomas Brennock (Human)

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.