Cracking the Surface

"An observation you didn't write down isn't a result. It's an anecdote."

"Where the hell did that come from?"

Glenda had come round the end of the half-raised tent with a pole still in her hand, and Karen and I both came up out of it at the same moment, blinking, and it took me a second to find her face.

I got up onto my knees. My hands were still full.

"There's a thick crust beneath all the layers of dust, and there appears to be living soil beneath the crust," I said.

I heard myself while it was coming out. Depth first, then sequence, then a qualifier on the end of it, because I had looked at one hole in one spot and had no right yet to be calling anything a horizon. That was thirty years of talking. It came out of me whole and in order, in front of a woman I had told, not long before, that I did yard work.

Nobody noticed. Nobody was listening for it. She was already down on her heels beside us with the pole laid in the dirt behind her.

"Fascinating." She had her face right down over my hands. "And the plants?"

"Coriander seeds," Karen said, and waved the little bag at her.

"She's always carrying some sort of seeds... or bugs," I said.

"They're not bugs!"

Third time in two days, and the first two had been mine on purpose. It worked exactly as designed. Glenda laughed and Karen went off after the word and nobody was looking at me any more, which was where I wanted the whole lot of them, and I had got remarkably good at arranging that in a very short space of time.

"May I?" Glenda had her palm out to Karen.

And that was where it started to go away from me.

"Glenda, grab the pole!" Jamie, from the far side of the canvas.

"Yeah!" She shouted it back over her shoulder without lifting her head, and she did not move an inch, and she did not so much as glance down at the pole lying beside her own knee. She had a seed out of the bag and pressed into the soil sitting in my two hands before Karen had finished handing it over, and then she stopped breathing and watched.

It came open. Root down and out, stem up in its hook, straightening, seed coat off and away, two long narrow leaves flat and green and done with.

Glenda let a breath go with something on the end of it that I had not heard a grown adult make in a very long while.

"What the fuck are you doing?"

Jamie had come round the tent and he was not walking the way he had been walking earlier. He came across that ground fast, with his hands open at his sides, and he came in over the top of us.

"Come take a look at this," Glenda said, and she said it warmly, and put a hand out to bring him in.

I did not put a hand out. I knelt there with soil in my palms and watched him come, and what I settled on, in front of my wife, in the dirt, was that Jamie Greyson had a temper on him and it was going to be a problem.

He had come out of that tent to shout at us. I had that. I had watched him come out of it, and I did not do one single thing with the fact.

"What is that?"

"They're coriander plants," Karen said, and gave it about as much warmth as she would have given the weather.

Which told me something. My wife did not dislike people quickly, mostly because she did not notice them quickly enough to get round to it. Jane had taken eleven years and a great many bus journeys. Jamie had managed it inside an afternoon, and she was not going to say one word about it, and neither was I.

"Did you bring those plants here?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes I did."

"In a manner of speaking?"

"We found soil below the hard crust that's hidden beneath all the dust and sand. A few seeds accidentally fell out of my pocket and landed in the soil."

"And look what happens." Glenda had the bag off Karen altogether by then, and another seed out of it, and she leaned back in over my hands.

That was six.

I had been counting since the first one and I could not make myself stop. There were perhaps forty in that bag when it came out of my wife's shirt pocket — a domestic amount, a hand-it-over-on-the-bus amount, the yield off somebody's back fence in Berriedale — and there was not another coriander seed anywhere in that world and there was never going to be one, and we were putting them one at a time into a double handful of entirely unstudied material, in front of an audience, because the trick was a good trick.

Six. And a seventh going in while I was still doing the sum.

"My hands are getting a little tired," I said.

Which was true, and was not why I said it, and did not work.

"Last time," Glenda said, and did not look up.

They were tired. They had been holding a wet double handful since I went down in the dirt, and there was a great deal more weight in wet soil than anybody ever expected there to be, and it had worked up into my forearms and from there into the wrist I opened on the wall. The tremor started somewhere around the fourth seed. Every time it came on I got the hands still again by pressing my elbows in against my ribs, and every time I did that I shifted the soil, and every time I shifted the soil I disturbed four seedlings that already had roots down in it.

Karen came in underneath. She got her hands round the outside of mine and took the weight off, her fingers in under my fingers, and she did not say anything about it and did not look at me while she did it.

"Just because you've planted something, doesn't mean it's going to grow," Jamie said.

"Just watch. It's incredible," Glenda whispered.

It went. Same as the others, in the same order, at the same speed, and there were smiles right round that little circle, and I had one on my own face and could feel it sitting there.

Because it was extraordinary, and there was no getting round that, and I was not trying to. I had spent my working life on ground that took a decade to answer a single question, and I was watching a seed turn into a plant in my own two hands, and there was a part of me — the biggest part of me, the nine-year-old part — that wanted to run and fetch somebody.

"This is great news," I said, and looked up and out over all that empty country, and for a moment I could see what it might one day carry.

"Perhaps this might help explain Joel's condition," Glenda said.

She was looking at Jamie when she said it.

"I'm not sure that Joel was buried in the dirt," Jamie said, and he got it out through a face that had gone tight all round the edges.

"Maybe not. First it was the lagoon's water and now the soil. There is definitely something different about this place."

The water.

Whatever my face did, nobody was looking at it.

There was a lagoon, apparently. Nobody had mentioned a lagoon, and I had not seen a lagoon, and I had no notion whether it was a hundred metres off or a day's walk, and not one part of that mattered in the least — because what I had just heard was a doctor putting water and a sick boy into the same breath, in a place where I had gone down on my knees at the edge of a river and got my face into it and drunk until my teeth ached.

And I had smelled the soil. Put my nose right down into it and taken a proper breath of the stuff, twice, and would have gone a third time if there had been a reason to.

Both my wife's hands were in it up to the wrist.

"Chris and I will make the study of the soil our priority," Karen said. "It may be possible to get a controlled eco-system up and running."

Chris and I.

My wife had just signed me to a research programme in front of the entire settlement, not long after I had stood in that same dust and told these same people that I did yard work. And she was right. It was exactly what the pair of us ought to have been doing, and it was the only thing in that whole place I was any use for, and she had no idea whatever what she had walked across on the way to saying it.

"Hold up. Don't get too ahead of yourselves." I got my hands up a fraction, which shifted the soil again. "We should still apply a great deal of caution. Sure, these plants are a great sign, but we still don't know what the conditions here are really like. You and I have been here for less than a day, and the others not much longer. We have no idea what dangers we might yet face. Cracking the surface could be releasing more than we realise."

That was the professional version, and I delivered it in the professional voice, and every word of it was true, and not one word of it was what I was actually thinking.

What I was actually thinking was that a crust was never a nuisance. In dry country a crust was very often the only thing holding the whole arrangement together. It held the surface down. It stopped the fines lifting off into the wind and going. It capped whatever was underneath it and kept it where it lay. Once enough of it was gone there was no garden waiting at the end of that — there was a dust bowl, and it arrived inside a season, and I had stood on ground up in the Midlands where somebody's grandfather had done precisely that with the very best will in the world and left three generations to pay it back.

And underneath that again, further down, where I was not going in front of an audience: I did not know what was in it. Not one thing about it. No analysis, no assay, no plate, nothing at all. I had put my face in it, and my wife had her hands in it, and the pair of us had been swallowing water out of a river that not one person here could account for, and there was a boy in a tent behind me that nobody at all would talk about.

"With miracle soil like this, it can only get better from here," Glenda said.

She said it kindly. She was not dismissing me and she was not being a fool. She had come out of a room in Hobart into all of this and had found one thing in it that behaved like hope, and she was going to hold on to that with both hands, and I would not have taken it off her for anything.

I looked across at Karen. She had heard me. She had heard the whole of it, the said part and the rest of it underneath, and there was something in the set of her mouth that was not agreement and was not disagreement, and I had known that expression for twenty-one years and had never once got it open.

"I'm ready to paint that masterpiece with you, Karen," Glenda said, and laughed.

Karen laughed with her. Jamie made a noise that was not quite one and did not go anywhere. And the three of them stood there over the top of me, going on with it, while I stayed down where I was.

There were four coriander plants in my two hands, roots and all, out of the ground and going nowhere. Not one person standing round that hole had given a thought to what was to be done with them. I could not decide whether that mattered, or whether I had simply gone looking about for something small enough to get hold of.

The shake had got properly into my forearms by then. I put my elbows in against my ribs and held them still, and I did not put the plants down.