How Far It Spreads

"Nothing natural is ever the same all the way across. Variation is how you know a thing grew instead of being put there."

I worked upstream with the river on my right and put a hole in every ten paces.

Ten was arbitrary and I knew it was arbitrary, and I held to it anyway, because I would get a great deal more out of an arbitrary interval held to properly than out of a clever one abandoned halfway. Ten paces, stop, clear the surface off with the side of the hand, get the peg down through the loose stuff until it stopped, then work at the crust until it went.

It went differently every time. That was the first thing.

At the second hole the loose layer was up past my wrist before the peg found anything. At the fourth it was barely a hand deep and I broke through on the second push. At the seventh I could not break through at all — I knelt over that one a good while with both hands on the head of the peg and my whole weight above it, and it took the point and did nothing else, and in the end I gave it up and moved on and marked it in my head as a failure rather than a boundary, because those were two different things and I was not going to start confusing them on the first afternoon.

And there was no pattern in any of it.

I looked for one. Of course I looked for one. Depth to crust ought to have had something behind it — distance from the water, or the fall of the ground, or a change in the material underneath, or the wind coming across and stripping the fines off the rises and dropping them into the hollows. I had four candidates and I tested every one of them as I went, and that ground refused all four. Deep on a rise. Shallow in a hollow. Deep again ten paces on with nothing whatever in between to account for it.

Ground was allowed to be difficult. Ground had been difficult everywhere I had ever put a spade into it. But it was difficult for reasons, and given enough holes the reasons came out of it, and these came out of nothing at all.

What was underneath, though. That was the other of it, and it was a good deal worse.

It was the same. Every single time.

Same colour. Same cool against the fingers. Same crumb when I closed my fist on it and opened it again. Same fine channels running away through the body of a lump when I broke one in half. Same smell — and I put my nose into every one of them, and it never once let me down and never once varied by so much as a note.

Which was wrong.

I had never in my working life walked a paddock and found the soil the same at both ends of it. It was better down in the hollows where the water sat and the organic matter gathered. It was thinner over the rises where it had been walking downhill since the last ice age. It changed where the parent material underneath it changed, and it changed where a fence line had held stock off one side for eighty years, and it changed again at the drip line of every tree standing on it. A soil map of two hundred metres of Owens Hollow would have carried four units, and I could have argued the boundaries of all four with anybody who fancied their chances.

Two hundred metres of that riverbank was one single thing from end to end, with a lid on it.

I came up off the eleventh hole with that arriving in me and I did not care for the shape of it at all. Because variation was never a nuisance in a soil. Variation was the evidence. Variation was how I knew a soil had got where it was by being rained on and frozen and rooted through and worked over by ten thousand years of small animals — rather than by some other means entirely.

I did not finish that thought. I put the peg back into the dirt and went on to the twelfth.

And I was losing all of it.

That was what ate at me the whole way up that river. Hole one: loose two hundred, crust thirty, dark, good structure, strong smell. Hole two: loose four fifty, crust twenty, dark, good structure, strong smell. Hole three. Hole four. I said them over to myself as I walked, out loud after a while, the way I would have gone up the aisle at the co-op with a list I had not bothered to write down — and by about the ninth I could feel the early ones going soft at the edges and swapping places with one another.

There was nothing to write on and nothing to write with. I turned it over a dozen times and it came out the same every time. I could have scratched the figures into the crust plates with the peg, except the plates were back at the tent where I had stacked them. I could have written in the dust, and the breeze would have had it inside a minute. I could have stopped and spent the whole afternoon solving the problem instead of collecting the numbers the method existed to collect, and then I would have had a beautiful method and nothing whatever to put into it.

So I went on, and said the numbers over, and knew perfectly well that what I was doing was not measurement. It was a man remembering things. There was a word for the difference and the word was data, and I did not have any, and I had not felt that much like an amateur since I was nineteen years old.

My hands went at about the eighth hole.

The peg was steel with a bent-over head on it, and the head was what did the damage. It sat square across the base of the fingers and every push drove it into the same three centimetres of skin. I felt the first hot spot early and knew exactly what it meant and kept going, because there was no glove within a world and stopping was not going to grow me one.

By the eleventh there was fluid under the skin at the base of my thumb. By the fourteenth one of them had gone, and the roof of it had folded back on itself, and the raw underneath had dirt worked into it, and it stung in a bright clean way every time I closed my hand.

I did not stop. That was not bravery of any kind. It was that the holes were the only thing in the whole of that world I knew how to do.

"I've been testing your holes."

Karen. Directly behind me, close enough that I came up off my heels.

My hands went straight down into the soft soil of the hole I was working, both of them, up to the wrist, before I had decided anything at all about it. And I stayed like that — crouched over, arms buried to the elbow, looking back over my shoulder at my own wife.

She had come up the line behind me with the seed bag out.

I turned and looked back the way I had come, and there it was. The whole run of them, every hole I had opened, going away downstream in a line with the river alongside. And out of the nearest one, a few paces back, something green was standing up.

"We don't want to waste them," I said.

"There's plenty to go around." She waved the bag at me. "I'll ask Luke to bring me some more."

I let that go past without touching it.

Because she was going to ask Luke. Standing on the bank of a river in a world with four tents in it, my wife had a man on a list, and the man on that list was not coming, and I had said so out loud myself and she had not disagreed with me at the time. She had simply gone on having a supplier.

There was nothing to be gained by saying it and it would have cost her something.

"Maybe ask for a broader range of seeds," I said instead.

"Yeah. I will." She crouched in beside me and pressed a seed down into the hole I had just opened.

And the two of us watched it.

It took a moment. Then the split, and the root turning down and going in, and the hook coming up and straightening, and the coat off and away, and two long narrow leaves out flat and finished.

"I've watched this over a dozen times now," Karen said, and her eyes went off down the line to all the others. "Yet I still feel the miraculousness of it every time."

She would. That was her, entirely and always. Twenty-one years of a case of pinned insects on the wall beside the kitchen window, and I never once saw her walk past it without stopping.

"Go move them to the other seedlings near the tent," I said, and pushed up onto my feet, which my thighs had opinions about.

Karen did not move. Her eyes came in narrow at me.

"We can't be certain that these tiny plants will survive if we leave them exposed like this."

She put her fingertips down and worked the topsoil in round the base of the little coriander, very gently, which was how she handled everything smaller than herself.

"We really should be recording the location data if we are going to be experimenting like this."

That went into me like a splinter.

Because she was right, and she was a good deal more right than she knew, and she said it in the mild reproving voice she kept for a thing that had slipped somebody's mind. And I had been carrying it up that riverbank for hours with my teeth in it, and had been saying numbers out loud to myself to stop them getting away, and had already lost the first four.

"We can do the real experimenting later," I said. "Let's just dig a few more holes. It'll give us an idea whether this is an isolated phenomenon or potentially has a much greater spread."

Karen's mouth opened and shut two or three times. Her forehead came down hard in the middle of it.

"What is it?"

"We need something better to dig with."

And she reached across and took hold of my wrist and turned my hand up and opened the fingers out, one at a time, and there it all was.

Two under the pad below the thumb, standing full and shining. One gone already, the roof folded back and the raw skin under it dark with dirt. And a long one right across the base of the fingers where the head of that peg had been sitting all afternoon.

She did not say a word about it, which was a great deal worse than if she had.

Then she put one finger down beside the open one and moved it very slowly, from the heel of my thumb across the whole width of my hand, brushing the grit off my skin as it went.

And something went through me.

It had been something over three years since my body had done that of its own accord. A good deal longer since it had done it when it was wanted, which was not the same thing at all and was a great deal worse.

Nobody ever gave it a name. We saw a doctor, and then a different doctor, and there were tests, and the tests came back saying I was a healthy man in his forties with nothing whatever the matter with him. Which Karen, being Karen, took as a starting point rather than as an answer.

She read. Of course she read. She read about it the way she read about beetles, which meant the entirety of it, and then she began running the experiments. Diet. Sleep. Alcohol out, then a little back in, then out again for good. Exercise, and then a different sort of exercise. Two lots of tablets from two different doctors, and a third lot she came by some other way that I never asked about. Timing. Deliberately not timing. Weekends away where the whole weekend had been built round the one thing and neither of us said so out loud. And a stretch of about eight months where we were not permitted to try at all, which was a specialist's idea of a treatment, and which I would not wish on anybody living.

Through the whole of it she took it personally. I could not talk her out of it and I tried for years. She had an enormous mind on her and it could not get round the plain fact that I might love her that much and have my body decline to say so.

We got past it in the end, and we got past it properly, and not by pretending. She stopped taking it to heart and I stopped apologising for it, and we arrived somewhere that worked. A hand flat on a back. A mouth against a shoulder blade. Four in and eight out on the back step in the middle of the night.

It was a good marriage. It went on being a good marriage the whole way through, which nobody had ever told either of us was possible.

But in the last two or three years she had stopped coming home with the next one. No printout on the kitchen table. No bottle of something in the bathroom cupboard with a chemist's sticker on it. No name of somebody in Melbourne written on the back of an envelope.

I had been relieved about that. I had also minded it a very great deal more than I ever let her see, because a woman who has stopped running the experiments has finished her analysis.

So when my wife ran one finger across my filthy palm on the bank of a river in another world, and I felt it come up my arm and into my chest and keep going down into my belly, I had no idea in the world what to do with it, and I did not say one word.

She lifted the hand and put her lips against the heel of it, below the blisters, and held them there.

Her mouth was dry and split at one corner. So was mine. There was grit between her lips and my skin and she did not appear to mind it.

"I'll be back soon," she said, and let go, and held my eye a moment. She was not checking on me. That was what she usually did when she looked at me for that long, and it was not what she was doing.

Then she went off down the line of holes toward the camp, stepping over each one as she came to it, getting smaller against all that orange.

And it arrived properly.

Everything low in me pulled tight, and let go, and pulled tight again. My thighs went hard and then loose. Both palms started up tingling, blisters and all, as though somebody had drawn a feather back and forth across them a dozen times over.

And I was getting hard. Standing on a riverbank in filthy trousers with a tent peg in my fist, for the first time in three years without having gone out hunting for it, and there was not the smallest doubt in my mind about what was happening to me.

I looked down at my hands. Then down at the coriander standing in the hole beside my boot with its two leaves out flat and the dust already settling on them.

Not long before, that had been a dry seed in a bag in my wife's shirt pocket.

And the thought came up whole, without being sent for.

If it can do that to a seed, what has it just done to me?

I had had my hands in it to the wrist the entire afternoon. I had put my face down into it and taken it right into my chest, twice. I had lain on my belly at the edge of that river and drunk until my teeth hurt.

And I let myself have it. Four seconds, maybe five, standing in the dust of a dead world with my heart going, thinking that three years of it might be over. Properly. Greedily. Stupidly. There had not been many of those and I took the whole of it.

Then I put it away, because I had done this before. Not here. But I had done it.

I had stood in our own bathroom at two in the morning with a blister pack in my hand and the foil already pushed through, waiting on a tablet in exactly the way I had stood waiting on that seed, and telling myself that this was going to be the one that worked. Twenty minutes. Half an hour. Then I had walked back down the hall and got as far as the end of our own bed with nothing whatever to show for it, and watched my wife take the disappointment off her face before I could see it land.

"You'll only disappoint her again," I said, out loud, on my own, to nobody at all.

And I rubbed both hands down the front of my trousers, hard, until the tingling stopped.