No such luck. It slid away, revealing metal floors and walls. Everything would have been gleaming if it weren’t for the junk everywhere. Metal shelves reached up to the ceilings, but the books had begun to topple off them. Waterlogged papers spilled like leaves off a row of steel tables. And there were plants everywhere. Vines curled out of pots of soil and from planters overhead. Little trays of seedlings were stacked along the floor. Open bags of fertilizer steamed heat into the cool air.
The lab smelled like disinfectant, soil, and heady pollen. I wrinkled my nose.
“Hello?” I called as the door slid closed behind me. I walked carefully, doing my best not to trample any of the books that were set open on the floor. For a moment there was no answer. But then I heard movement near the rear of the lab. A woman hovered over one of the desks, behind a massive monitor. The computer terminal looked like it wasn’t often used. The keyboard was strewn with papers.
The woman was sharp eyed, with gray-threaded hair cropped close to her head, and a hook-shaped nose. And she was tiny—much shorter than I was, and slender, too, though her coat fit much better than mine. It had been taken in at the waist and sleeves, tailored to her. I watched as she squinted down into the long tube of a microscope, her expression a sort of grimaced wink. She didn’t acknowledge me standing there, waiting.
“Um, Rebbe Stone?” I said, clearing my throat. “I can come back later if you want.”
She waved a hand at me, but her gaze didn’t move from the microscope. “Don’t call me ‘Rebbe’! The Council might think they can make me teach you, but they can’t force me to be as formal as all that.”
I chewed my lip. “You didn’t request me?”
“Bah,” Mara said. “ ‘Request.’ They’ve been trying to strong-arm me into retiring for years. They think you’ll be my deathblow. Sit down!”
The only chair was behind her, and it was piled high with books. So I crouched in place between a stack of field guides and a prickly needled bush.
“On Earth there was a country called Iceland,” she began. She had a craggy, sort of froggish voice. It matched her nose. “Of course you haven’t heard of it. Their chief cultivars were potatoes, kale, cabbage. Hardy grasses. That sort of rubbish thing, and limited to the warmer lowlands. But with geothermally heated hothouses, they could add almost anything to their diet. Tomatoes for vitamin C. Grapes for wine. Small scale, mostly, but still. They’ve been an excellent model for us.” She finally looked up at me, one eye still squinted.
“Only problem is, for the last year, blight has been hitting our hothouse fruit trees. And Zehavan fruit salad’s going to be exceedingly bland if all we have is crab apples and figs. You know, when they told me they were sending me a girl, I was worried you’d be an addlebrained fool. But I’m glad to see they didn’t send me one of the pretty ones.”
I blanched. I’d long known that I was no Rachel—my frame was gawky, and my fair hair hung in a frizzy curtain down my shoulders—but I wasn’t used to people saying it so plainly. The woman scowled.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. You’re fine. It’s better off, anyway. You’ll be doing all sorts of digging around for me. Wouldn’t want you to be afraid to get your hands dirty.”
I didn’t say anything. The woman looked amused. She offered me her hand.
“I’m Mara Stone.”
Her knobby fingers were cold. “I know,” I said. “My father told me . . .” Then I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to share what my father had said.
“Terrible things, I’m sure.” Mara turned to her microscope. “Terra, isn’t it? It’s an interesting name, considering. Do you know what it means?”
“No,” I said, and then added: “Considering what?”
“Considering your new vocation. ‘Terra’ was another name for Earth. But also for the stuff on it. The land, the soil.”
“Oh,” I replied, not really sure what to say to that. “It’s a family name. My mother named me after some ancestor.”
“Your mother, yes.” With those words something about Mara’s expression changed. Her hard mouth didn’t exactly soften, but her frown sort of crumbled away. “You know, I’m sorry about that. Well, not sorry. I didn’t do it, you know. But sorry enough. The founders tried to safeguard us against that. But they couldn’t anticipate every eventuality.”
I was used to people apologizing for my mother’s death, but I wasn’t used to this. “It’s okay,” I said at last. And then we just stood there, staring at each other for a minute, the terrible silence stretching out.
“What do you know about plants?” she finally demanded. I opened my mouth, letting it form a helpless O.
“I know the names of some flowers,” I offered. “My mother taught me. Daffodils and cyclamens and—”
“Ha!” Mara said. “Lot of good daffodils’ll do us. Here.”
She strode over to the desk in the corner, where a heavy volume waited in a nest of papers. It was open, the pages yellow from water that had drained from the planters above. She fanned through it. There were illustrations of plants on every page, each one lavishly illustrated in shades of brown and green. I wanted to reach out and run my fingers over the images. But there was no time.
“I’ll take you into one of the greenhouses. You’ll find each of the marked plants and bring me a cutting.” She fished a pair of rusted shears out of her deep pocket. I took them from her and then glanced down at the book. Even looking at it sideways, I could see that almost a third of the pages were marked, the corners folded over.
“All of them?” I asked, doubt seeping into my voice. Mara showed me her teeth. It didn’t look so much like she was smiling as it did that she was hungry.
“Yes,” she said. “All of them.”
She led me to one of the adjacent greenhouses, where, beneath the condensation-dusted canopy, a jungle of green seemed to have exploded. A few workers milled about, tending the plants. But they didn’t even look up at us. It was like they were somewhere else entirely. Mara and I stood on the central path, where we listened to the steady alternating sound of the sprinklers coming on in different parts of the room. The air here was muggy. I began to regret the heavy sweater I’d put on that morning between my undershirt and lab coat.
Mara gestured to a few of the plants. “Cycads. Gnetophytes. Bryophytes. Pteridophytes,” she said, like that was supposed to help me. Maybe it was. Other than a few pea plants, none of them were marked. I stumbled over her last word, sounding out the syllables: “Pter-i-do-phytes?”
“Ferns.”
Mara wrested the shears from my hand, knelt down in front of some sort of scrubby bush, and showed me how to clip a branch off. She dropped the gnarled thing into my palm. “Start with that,” she said. Without another word she clomped down the path, leaving me there alone.
I turned to the first dog-eared page.
“Gnetum gnemon,” I mumbled to myself. “ ‘A midsized tree. Evergreen. Emerald leaves, with fruitlike st-strobilus.’ ” I tried to commit the image of the red, clustered nuts and green-fingered branches to memory and hustled off through the tangled mass of plants at the greenhouse’s center.
It took hours. By nineteen o’clock—a few hours after the other workers had departed, smiling apologetically at me—my sweater was soaked with sweat, my trousers caked with mud. I wandered in circles through the overgrown paths. When I finally dragged myself into the lab, I felt dizzy, waterlogged, and exhausted. But Mara didn’t say a word when I set the book on the desk in front of her. I watched as she typed something into her computer, carefully ignoring me.