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Olmy is here to judge us or not, I expressly do not judge, and I have been sequestered from politics for
so long I am clearly out of touch."
Brion stared between us with a wild, despairing expression for long, painful seconds. Then his
expression returned to alert calm with a speed that could be explained only by great skill, or the presence
of a deep chasm in his emotions, a kind of fault-line through his being. I had seen the ability in other
leaders, to assume masks so often and with such conviction even they could not know their true feelings.
Self-truth is a luxury leaders can seldom afford, or perhaps tolerate. But in Brion, the talent had become
something more, even an illness.
I had Brion's measure now. He was not a great man, not even in the impure sense of prompting or
guiding great events. He was a man of small, specific talents. And he had been badly scarred. Whether
he told us the truth, I could not judge, but the pain was real.
"Lamarckia is about to flower," he said softly. "Caitla and I did that, at least. And when it does, what
place will _she_ give us, what place can we have?"
The countryside covered by thicket, the black or purplish edges of which rose along the sides of the
canal like topiary walls, came to an end as the boat pushed into morning. I awoke having dreamed of a
hall and the unpleasant door again, to the smell of cakes sizzling in a pan, and something else pungent and
herbal, like fresh hot tar mixed with black tea, molasses with roses, spruce gum with the scent of
new-mown grass -- a perfume I have not since been able to replicate either in life or memory: the smell of
the living palaces of the great seed-mothers of all Hsia.
We had come into a huge fresh-water inland sea or lake, the southern and eastern shores lost
beyond the horizon, the northern close by, perhaps two kilometers off. The waves lapped crystal blue
around the boat, and from the shore -- a brilliant green shore, low and flat, covered with immense
tapering green stalks like the shoots of young plants but without leaves -- came a windy, shooshing,
trilling sound, as alien as anything I ever heard on Lamarckia.
"_Earth was a green world,_" Nimzhian had said on Martha's Island. Nowhere on Lamarckia had
there ever been this immensity of green.
Brion stood on the bow, caught half-dressed and transfixed by the sight. Salap calmly washed his
face in the lake water, glancing up at me as I put on my shirt and accepted a cup of yeasty broth from the
steward.
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"Look at all she's done!" Brion called out. "It's been only three months, and how many thousands of
hectares she's changed!"
Salap stood beside me forward of the single metal tree and stared at the shore, eyes narrowed. The
steward brought a tray of cakes forward and offered them. Frick leaned on the canopy. A light wind
blew through his hair, his white shirt hung open beneath his faded rose-colored vest, and he grinned as if
drunk.
"How do you claim to have done this?" Salap asked Brion.
"I don't just _claim_ it," Brion said. "I know the truth, because after _she_ made the ones in our own
shape, and we showed her where she had gone wrong ... After _she_ made the food we could eat and
filtered from her ground the ores and placed them where we could gather them, I paid her back. I have
studied her for years, and I knew her weakness, her inefficiency." He stared at Salap, eyes blinking
rapidly.
"What did you give her?" Salap asked.
"What is _she?_" I asked simultaneously.
Brion shook his head, plainly awed and even a little frightened by what he saw on the shore. He
scrambled aft and grabbed a cake from Frick's tray, gobbling it like a hungry child.
"More than I could have imagined," he said. "Forget trying to replace our dead children. Forget
trying to teach her scions to speak. None of that meant anything to her. She did not understand. She
could imitate, but she could not understand. It was our bottle that she took and gloried in."
"_We_ don't understand," Salap said patiently.
"I distilled it and purified it from weeds in a pond outside our sleeping quarters. Decorative weeds
Lenk brought from Thistledown, lovely simple things. Easy to isolate what she needed and present it to
her in a bottle, concentrated, unmistakable."
"Chlorophyll," Salap said.
Brion smiled. "Lamarckia's weakness," he said, crumbs falling from his mouth. "Not just chlorophyll,
but the chloroplasts, the whole intricate photosynthetic structures of our plants, isolated and in context.
Starches and sugars and the entire cycle, all in a bottle. And she understood. She gave us the
experiments you saw in Naderville. Caitla's garden. The cleansing airborne phytids. More food. I could
have signaled Beys to return home, because I knew then that we had won. We would be able to feed our
people and make machines and create our little enclave ... We did not need anybody else."
"But you didn't call him back," I said.
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