Chapter 43 The Rival Botany

The Institute for Long-Range Study filed its motion in July, and it was not the first time a corporation had tried to take the garden, and it was not the first time the garden had refused, but it was the first time the refusal had been a matter of law. The motion sought an order transferring custody of the plant, the pod, and the crystal to the Institute's laboratory facility in Maryland, on the grounds that the plant constituted an archaeological and scientific asset of national significance and that the community garden was not equipped to preserve it. It was, Mira said, reading the motion on the steps of the courthouse with the summer heat beating down, the same argument that every empire had ever made about the things it wanted: that the thing belonged in the hands of the people who could understand it, and that the hands that had grown it were not those hands. Mrs. Okoro's bench became the rallying point. That was not planned — it simply happened, the way everything in the garden simply happened, by the slow accumulation of people deciding to be somewhere. The bench had been Mrs. Okoro's since the beginning, and after Mrs. Okoro died, the bench stayed, and the garden kept it, and it became the place where decisions were made and arguments were settled and food was shared. Now it became the place where the garden decided what it was. The lawyers for the Institute came and stood in the dirt and explained, very reasonably, that the plant was a resource, that the resource had a value, that the value could only be realised in a laboratory, and that the garden's feelings, however sincere, were not a legal argument. The neighbours came and stood on the other side of the raised bed and explained, in the plain language of people who had grown things in rubble, that the plant had grown because it was grown, and that it had been grown where it was grown because that was where people had decided to grow it, and that no laboratory in Maryland had ever grown anything in rubble. The court heard the argument in August. The judge was a patient woman who had spent thirty years deciding which of two reasonable-sounding parties was telling the truth, and she heard the Institute's case for preservation and the garden's case for partnership, and she asked a single question at the end of the second day. She asked Dr. Torres whether the plant would continue to grow in a laboratory — whether it would continue to grow, and continue to bear fruit, and continue to do the thing it had been doing, which was not being preserved but growing. Dr. Torres was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "I do not know." The garden's case had been prepared in the garden, and it showed. The neighbours had brought photographs — eleven years of photographs, of the shoot and the flower and the fruit and the pod, of the children who had been born and grown, of the benches and the paths and the compost bins, of every ordinary act of tending that had made the impossible possible. They had brought the crystal's first readings, and the Chorus's first submissions, and the transcript of the broadcast that had reached twelve billion people. They had brought, most of all, the thing that no lawyer had thought to bring: the garden itself, in the form of the people who had grown it, sitting in the courtroom in their work clothes, with dirt under their nails and the hum running through them, the way it ran through the plant, the way it ran through everything that had been grown and was still growing. The judge looked at the garden's representatives, and she looked at the crystal, humming on the evidence table in its sealed case, and she said: "Then the plant stays in the ground. The law does not yet have a category for a thing that grows better in a community than in a laboratory, but I am not required to give it one. The motion is denied. The garden will continue to tend what it has grown. And I would ask the Institute to consider whether it has spent eleven years studying a plant or a people — because I have spent two days listening, and I can tell you which of the two I would rather preserve." The garden celebrated. The Institute appealed. And Elias, who had been sitting through the whole of the hearing with the folder of printouts on his lap, went home and decoded the pattern properly, and what he found was not a map at all — or rather, it was a map, but not the map they had thought. It was not a map of the sky. It was a map of the ground, drawn in the language of the sky, and it pointed, with the same impossible precision that had pointed the telescope at Westbridge eleven years before, at a location in the Atacama Desert, at the coordinates of an observatory that had been abandoned for forty years, at a place where the sky was so clear that the stars had no competition, and where a vine had been growing around a circle for eleven years without anyone knowing what it was. "The plant is not the seed," Elias said, spreading the decoded coordinates across the kitchen table. "The seed is the pattern. The pattern is the map. And the map leads to the second garden — the garden that was planted before the first, the garden that the object made when it made the telescope, the garden that has been growing in the dark for eleven years while we were growing ours in the light. The object did not give us a library, Mira. It gave us a nursery. And we have been tending one of the beds." Mira looked at the coordinates. She looked at the crystal, humming on the windowsill. And she understood that the conversation had never been about what the object could give them. It had always been about what they could grow together — and that the garden in the Bronx, the garden she had tended for eleven years, the garden she had married Elias in, under the stars, on the roof of the observatory, was only the first bed in a garden that stretched across the whole of the Earth. "We have to go," she said. "The Atacama. We have to go, and we have to see it, and we have to learn what it has been growing." Elias looked at her, and he saw the girl who had pointed a telescope at a science building, and the woman who had grown a library out of rubble, and the partner who had stood beside him through every shift of the ground beneath their feet. "Pack for the desert," he said. "We leave tomorrow." ---