The-Thing-That-Grows
He did not lecture her about biodiversity, or statutes, or the founders' charter. Tomas had tried all of that on the Council and watched their eyes slide off it like water off glass. Instead he took a single wheat seed, no bigger than a tear, and he made Della plant it.
He gave her a tray of the ship's grey reclaimed soil and showed her how deep, and how much water, and then — this was the part that mattered — he made her wait.
"Nothing's happening," she reported the next day.
"Good," he said. "Come back."
For nine days nothing happened, and he made her come and look at the nothing each time, until she was so annoyed that he knew she had begun, against her will, to *expect* something. And on the tenth day there was a green thread in the grey, thinner than a hair, bent like a question, reaching up toward a light that had not asked it to.
Della went very still. She had never in her life watched a thing decide to live.
"It doesn't know we're on a ship," Tomas said quietly. "It doesn't know there's no sky for a hundred years. It just does the only thing it has ever known how to do, which is to *keep going toward the light it hasn't reached yet.*" He let that sit. "That's the whole vault, Della. Two hundred thousand drawers of patience. We are not carrying seeds. We are carrying the proof that it is sane to work for a morning you will never wake up to."
She looked at the