Sax looked surprised. “That’s never true. Or else, true of every math. Depends on what you mean by understand. But I know a bit of that one. You can use it to model some of this stuff. But not predict. And I don’t know how to use it to suggest any— reactions on our part. I’m not sure it can be used that way.” He talked for a while about Vlad’s notion of holons, which were organic units that had subunits and also were subunits of greater holons, each level combining to create the next one up in emergent fashion, all the way up and down the great chain of being. Vlad had worked out mathematical descriptions of these emergences, which turned out to come in more than one kind, with different families of properties for each kind; so if they could get enough information about the behavior of a level of holons and the next level up, they could try to fit them into these mathematical formulae, and see what kind of emergence they had; then perhaps find ways to disrupt it. “That’s the best approach we can take for things this little.”

The next day they called up greenhouses in Xanthe, to ask for shipments of new starts, and flats of a new strain of Himalayan-based grass. By the time they arrived, Nirgal had pulled out all the grass in the basin, and much of the moss. The work made him sick, he couldn’t help it; once, seeing a concerned marmot patriarch chattering at him, he sat down and burst into tears. Sax had retreated into his customary silence, which only made things worse, as it always reminded Nirgal of Simon, and of death generally. He needed Maya or some other courageous expressive speaker of the inner life, of anguish and fortitude; but here was Sax, lost in thoughts that seemed to happen in some kind of foreign language, in a private idiolect he was now unwilling to translate.

They went to work planting new starts of Himalayan grasses throughout the basin, concentrating on the stream banks and their veinlike tracery under the trickles and ice. A hard freeze actually helped, as it killed the infected plants faster than the ones free of infection. They incinerated the infected plants in a kiln down the massif. People came from the surrounding basins to help, bringing replacement starts for planting later.