Tomas Brennock (Human)

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.