The Improvement of Ossery

I went up to Ossery to write four hundred words on the anniversary, and I came away with this instead.

Sowerby's was the last of the old Commission bungalows still lived in, at the end of the eastern terrace: double doors, perished rubber seals, and a brass plate beside the bell that read SOWERBY, C. — ATMOSPHERIC. He answered at the second knock. He was smaller than his photographs, his eyes were bad, and he took my hand in both of his the way a man greets a doctor who has come a long way.

"You'll want tea first," he said. "It takes the better part of an hour to boil at this pressure. I began at noon."

The front room held a cot, a shelf of ring binders, and one chair set square to the window, and the window looked four hundred meters down into the Vale. I had seen it from the shuttle and it had not seemed real then either. Green from the eastern scarp to the horizon, unbroken, faintly luminous where the low light came through it at an angle, like shallow water over pale sand. And it moved. Not with wind — there is very little wind now — but with a slow interior stirring, the way milk turns when you pour it into tea.

"It's beautiful," I said, because it was, and because I was young and believed the polite thing was also the safe one.

"Yes," he said. "That is the entire difficulty."

He asked what the paper had sent me for, and I told him: the fiftieth anniversary of the Seeding, four hundred words, a photograph if he was willing. The Governor's office had already issued a statement. He asked me to read it to him, and I did, and when I got to the phrase a bold endeavour whose lessons continue to instruct us, he made a small noise like a man setting down something heavy.

"Sit," he said. "The tea will be an hour. You may as well have the rest."

"When I came out, Ossery had a sky you could not breathe and a crust you could not farm. All that nitrogen locked up in the rock — nitrates, a plain of them a hundred meters deep — and not a gram of free oxygen in the air above it. Nobody was going to ship us an atmosphere. Freight from home was eleven years and the price of a small city. So we did the only sensible thing. We grew one.

"You will have been taught it was a lichen. It was not, but lichen is the word that got into the newspapers, and the newspapers generally win. Karrow's organism was a partnership: something that ate stone and something that ate light, bred to keep house together. The one cracked the silicate and freed the oxygen bound in it. The other took the light and the waste and laid down a millimeter of black soil a year. A millimeter. You cannot imagine what a millimeter meant to us."

He described the Seeding as he had watched it, at twenty-four, from a stand of scaffolding on this same terrace: the public subscription, oversubscribed in a fortnight; the barrage balloons going up in their hundreds over the Vale with the spore canisters slung beneath them; four thousand schoolchildren singing in a wind that would have killed them without their masks; the Governor's address, in which the phrase the improvement of Ossery was used eleven times and thereby entered the language for good. There was a coin. He still had it. He would not show it to me.

"And it worked," he said. "That is what nobody your age believes. It worked magnificently. Everything they promised, on the schedule they promised it, and I have never since seen human beings so happy. Eleven years of the gauges climbing. In year six a man could stand outside for four minutes on a warm afternoon. In year nine we had wheat — bad wheat, sour and thin, and they carried the first loaf along the terrace on a board like a saint's relic. In year eleven the schools stopped issuing masks to the children and there was a holiday, and my wife and I walked down into the Vale at dusk and lay in the soil, which was warm, and smelled of cut hay and rust, and I want you to understand that I have not, in the fifty years since, had a better day."

Then the arithmetic.

He had been moved to the modelling desk at twenty-six, the lowest chair on it. The work was dull: projecting the mat's spread and its yield out to a century, mostly to keep the bond-holders quiet. And in the third month he found a term he did not like.

"The organism respires at night," he said. "Naturally. Everything does. It takes back some fraction of what it makes when the light is on it. And while the mat is thin, that fraction is nothing, and the ledger is splendid. But the mat does not stay thin. It thickens. And a thick mat shades itself — the layer that eats light is smothered by the body of its own success, and production falls, and respiration does not fall at all, because respiration does not care about light. There is a density at which the two curves cross. After that the green sea stops making air and begins to eat it."

"You calculated the density," I said.

"Anyone could have. It was four lines of algebra and a coefficient we already had. I calculated the density, and then I calculated the year, and the year was thirty-one, and I was twenty-six years old and my hands were shaking, and I wrote a memorandum."

Here he stopped for a while. In the window the light had gone the colour of weak tea, and below us the Vale had begun to do the thing I had come, without knowing it, to see.

"The memorandum was received," he said at last. "You must appreciate the exactness of that word. It was received. A committee was convened to consider it. The committee convened a subcommittee to settle its terms of reference. I was asked, in session, whether I could be certain. I said that no one could be certain, that certainty was not a property a projection could have, and that answer was written down, and it was that answer, and not my arithmetic, that appeared in the report. I was promoted. Sideways, to survey. There is no better way to be rid of a man than upward and to the left.

"And I want to be fair to them, because everyone here has spent fifty years being unfair to them and it has bought nobody a single breath. They did not disbelieve me. It is worse than that. They had no arrangement for believing me. There was no office to which the thing could be sent. A Commission is a machine for producing improvements — its rooms, its forms, its coins, its songs, all of it — and I had brought it a disimprovement, and there was simply no aperture of the right shape."

The gauges stopped climbing in year thirty-three. He had been two years out, and he told me so twice, in the tone of a man confessing to something. They began to fall in year thirty-five: slowly at first, then less slowly, because by then there was so very much of it.

I asked why it could not be killed. He was patient with me.

"It covers a continent. You cannot burn it: the fire would cost us more air than the mat has taken in a decade, and we would still be standing in the ash of the only soil we have. They tried a pathogen in the forties. Understand that the mat is not an organism, it is a marriage — kill one partner and the other sits in the dark and waits, and something else arrives, and the marriage is made again, and in nine years it came back thicker than before. We have gone back indoors. That is the whole of the policy. That is what the Governor's statement means by lessons."

Dusk had come while he talked. He got up with difficulty and stood at the window, and I stood beside him, and below us the Vale began to glow — a low green fluorescence, patchy at first, then joining, running out from the foot of the scarp to the horizon like something poured. It is the respiration; the light is a waste product; there is a paper explaining it that I have since read four times. None of that is any use. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I say that having grown up in a city with a sea.

"Every evening," he said. "Fifty million hectares taking a breath."

"Doctor Sowerby, are you telling me the colony is going to die?"

"No. No, the domes hold, we are indoors, we are very good at indoors — we had eleven years of outdoors and forty of practice at everything else. Children are born here who think the Vale is scenery." He put a finger to the cold glass. "And it will find its limit. Everything does. In two hundred years, or four hundred, something will learn to eat it, and there will be a balance, and it may even be a kinder world than the one we meant to make. I shan't see it and neither will you, and that is not an argument against it.

"We are not being punished. That is the part they cannot bear, here — they would all so much rather be punished. There is no one to appeal to and nothing to forgive. There is only a thing we made, doing precisely what we asked it to do, for rather longer than we asked."

Then he looked at the clock, and excused himself, and did the odd small thing I had really climbed four hundred meters of terrace to find, though I did not know it until I saw it.

There is a gauge on his wall by the door, an old brass one, Commission issue. At eighteen hundred exactly he read it, took the topmost binder from the shelf, and wrote the figure in a ruled column in a small, upright, entirely steady hand. I could see the column. The figure he wrote was lower than the one above it.

"Thirty-one years," he said, catching me looking. "Every evening at six."

"Who is it for?"

"I have no idea." He closed the binder and put it back with its brothers, and there were a great many of them. "Somebody, eventually, will want the numbers. That is generally the way of it. Nobody wants the numbers, and nobody wants the numbers, and then one morning everybody wants the numbers, and by then the man who kept them is fifty years dead and his handwriting is the whole of what is left of him."

Then he poured the tea, which was ready, and which was very good.

I did not write the four hundred words. At the terrace gate I turned back once. Below me the Vale was in full light, breathing, mile upon luminous mile of it, the great and patient garden they had planted in an afternoon of singing; and I stood there a long while in the cold, drawing air from a tank that a company on another world had filled and freighted and sold to me, and I could not for the life of me decide what it was that I was looking at.