Chapter 99: A Very Unimpressive Purchase

Chapter 99: A Very Unimpressive Purchase

Kerr’s reply came in while Silas was walking down to Lower Market Row: three possible dates, a short list of records Mara might send in advance, and a note that said She can write to me directly about any of it. He forwarded the whole thing to his mother without adding a word, which took more self-control than it should have.

Then he put the communicator away and looked at the shop.

Pell & Daughter occupied the end of the row, where the market’s paving gave way to packed earth. It had a wide door propped open with a sack of grit, a striped awning, and trays of seedlings set out on trestles along the front. Inside, it smelled of wet soil and cut stems. Sacks were stacked against the back wall with chalked labels: River sand. Bark. Old potting mix. Conservatory substrate, mixed lots. Along a side bench, rows of cuttings stood in jars with paper tags tied around them.

There were two other customers. A woman in a gardener’s apron was arguing pleasantly about the price of grit. A Silver Class student was holding a fern that was very obviously dying and asking the girl behind the counter whether it could be saved.

"You’ve drowned it," the girl told him. "Let it dry out. Then stop loving it so much."

Silas waited his turn and tried to look like a person who bought soil all the time.

The man who came out from the back was broad and gray-bearded, with dirt worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles. He wiped his hands on a cloth and looked Silas up and down without much interest.

"Something for a window box?" Pell asked.

"The Harrowglass substrate," Silas said. "The conservatory lots."

"Ah." Pell’s interest sharpened slightly. "Gardener, or collector?"

"Curious," Silas said.

"That’s the expensive kind of customer." Pell walked him to the back wall and slapped one of the sacks. "Licensed lots from the outer potting houses. Cleared under the academy’s salvage terms, sacked, and sold as found. It’s good grit. Drains well. People mix it into pots."

"Is there anything living in it?" Silas asked.

Pell studied him a moment, then untied the sack so he could see inside.

"Sometimes," he said. "Old seed. Spores. Bits of this and that. Every so often someone takes a bag home and something comes up they can’t name, and they bring it back in here wanting to know if they’re rich." He shrugged. "They’re usually not. Most of what’s in there has been dead a long time. Some of it’s only sleeping, and you can’t tell which without trying, and sorting through it properly takes longer than it’s worth. That’s why it’s priced as grit."

That was fair. It was also exactly what Silas had hoped someone would say.

"Where did this lot come from? Which part of the outer section?" Silas asked.

"East houses, mostly. Potting benches and the old propagation range." Pell squinted at the chalk. "This one’s been sacked about six months."

"Stored dry?" Silas asked.

"Dry and cool, in the shed out back. I don’t keep anything wet. Wet rots," Pell said.

Silas filed that away. "I’d like a small amount. The cheapest you’ll sell."

"Quarter-measure’s the smallest bag." Pell named a price in credits that was less than Silas had paid for lunch the day before. "You want trays with it? If you’re planning to grow anything, a saucer won’t do."

"Trays," Silas agreed.

Pell scooped substrate into a cloth bag with a tin cup, weighed it, and tied it off. He added two shallow seed trays from a stack by the door. The girl at the counter wrapped the lot in paper, took Silas’s money, and said, "Don’t drown it," as if she said that to everyone.

He walked back up the hill with the parcel under his arm, shedding grit into the crook of his elbow. On Earth he’d resented going out even for groceries after work. Apparently a possible cultivation ingredient was enough to send him down a hill for potting-shed sweepings.

This is the stupidest thing I’ve bought in this world, he thought.

He still thought it was worth doing.

***

Nim was on the desk when he came in. He watched Silas unwrap the parcel with great attention, then put his nose to the cloth bag and drew back.

"It smells like the bottom of a pot," Nim said.

"It is the bottom of a pot," Silas said.

"Why did you buy it?" Nim asked.

"To see if anything in it is alive," Silas said.

Nim considered this. "Is it?"

"I don’t know yet. That’s why I bought it," Silas said.

He set up the test on the floor by the kitchenette, where the light from the window didn’t reach directly. It wasn’t much. Two shallow trays, a sheet of old newspaper underneath to protect the floor, and a cup of water. He tipped the substrate out onto the paper and went through it slowly with his fingertips.

Most of it was exactly what Pell had said: grit, crumbled bark, bits of old root, something that might once have been a leaf. But here and there, pressed into the mix, were small mats of something flat, gray, and dry, like felt that had been left in the sun for a year. They crumbled a little at the edges when he touched them.

Dormant gray mats, the description had said. These fitted that much of it, though he couldn’t identify them yet.

He picked out every gray mat he could find, a small heap no bigger than his palm, and divided them between the two trays. He spread a thin layer of substrate under each. Then he did the obvious thing. Silver-thread moss grew in shaded stonework around old water channels, the reference said. So he wet both trays thoroughly, until the substrate was dark, and set them in the corner where the shade was deepest.

Nothing happened, which he had expected. He sat back on his heels and looked at two trays of wet dirt and felt slightly foolish anyway.

"Now what?" Nim asked.

"Now we wait," Silas said.

"How long?" Nim asked.

"I don’t know that either," Silas said.

Nim seemed to find this deeply unsatisfying and went to lie on the pillow.

***

The visitor came a little before dusk. The panel noted it, and Silas sat down on the floor near the trays, closed his eyes, and let his thread go out.

Nim first, warm and bright on the pillow. His own thread, set aside. Then the small cool place.

It was faint this time, much fainter than usual. Far, he decided at once. Up by the window.

He opened his eyes.

The pale speck sat on the rim of the nearer tray, almost close enough to touch. It hadn’t been far at all. It had simply been still, settled and quiet, and its stillness had made it feel faint.

Faint isn’t far, he told himself, annoyed. You keep doing that.

He closed his eyes again and waited for it to move. When it did, he didn’t judge by how strong it felt. He judged by Nim. Nim was on the pillow, which was four long steps from where Silas sat. The cool place drifted away from him, past Nim’s brightness, and stopped somewhere beyond it.

"Past the bed," he said aloud. "The shelf. Low."

He looked. It was on the lowest shelf, beside a stack of delivery slips. He’d been right.

Twice more he tried, and got it right once and wrong once. The wrong one was the same mistake again, on the windowsill, where it sat so quietly he thought it was further. It was better than yesterday. It still wasn’t reliable.

Territorial Awareness gave him the positions of the trays and furniture, but no usable location for the little visitor. Knowing exactly where the shelf stood hadn’t helped him judge which end of it the spirit had reached.

When he finished, the visitor drifted back down to the trays and settled on the damp rim again, as if it liked the cool wet edge.

Silas looked at it for a moment and refused to make anything of that. Spirits liked what they liked. It had liked his boot.

His communicator buzzed on the desk.

Are you in this evening? Elyra had written. I’ve had a stupid day. I would like to complain to someone who won’t write it down.

He found himself smiling at the screen before he’d decided to. Then he looked at the two trays of wet dirt in the corner and imagined her face when she saw them, and the smile got wider.

I’m in, he wrote. Come and eat. Seven? I have something very unimpressive to show you.