When they reached the first plot the plants were all dormant, their flowers closed. Agata glanced up at the sky; she knew from the positions of the stars that the sun was well above the horizon, but she would have had to forego artificial light for a few lapses to have any chance of picking out the faint disc. ‘I was hoping the petals might synchronise to the Esilian day,’ she said. ‘They give out photons, the sun accepts them: what could be more sensible than that?’

‘Except that eons of evolution has left them with no skill but waiting for an ordinary night, not a time-reversed day.’

‘Maybe the settlers could breed it into them,’ Agata suggested. If detecting the dawn for themselves was too hard, the plants could still be prodded with more conventional signals into following the new cycle. For now, the Esilian sun would be getting its due regardless – from the plants, the ground, and her own skin – but not in any useful way.

‘Can you do the heights and the stalk circumferences?’ Azelio asked her.

‘Sure.’ Agata knelt by the first plant and reached into her tool belt. In a perfect world some clever instrument builder would have added a data recorder directly to the tape measure, but instead she had to aim her coherer so that she could read the tape by eye, raise the figure on her skin, and have her corset record it. ‘Is one soil type racing ahead yet?’ she asked Azelio. He’d started from the other end of the row, making his own inspection to record the number and condition of the flowers.

‘No.’

‘So there’s not much difference? The settlers could farm anywhere?’

Azelio was silent. Agata regretted distracting him; she’d probably made him lose count.

As he stood to move on to the next plant, he said, ‘Actually, they’ve all stopped growing.’

Agata was startled; nothing in Azelio’s demeanour had prepared her for this news. ‘All of them? Every single one?’

‘Yes.’ Azelio spoke calmly. ‘At first it was only a few cases, and I put it down to transplantation shock. But the numbers just kept getting worse, and three days ago the last exceptions succumbed.’

Agata struggled to find the least dismaying interpretation of these facts. ‘Do you think it’s the wind?’ They could always improve the windbreaks, or even relocate the whole experiment.

‘No. They haven’t lost that many petals, or had roots dislodged.’

‘So it’s the soil,’ she concluded. ‘All four kinds are inhospitable.’

‘It’s looking that way.’

‘Have you told Ramiro?’

‘The trial isn’t finished yet,’ Azelio stressed. ‘There’s still a chance that this could be a temporary hiatus.’

‘Right.’ Agata understood now why he’d called on her to help him with the measurements: he was trying to keep the results from Ramiro for as long as possible, in the hope that something would change.