Work Text:
Daneel becomes a botanist on Baleyworld.
It’s not a hard-science, hard-mathematics field. He can deal with what’s involved. The science of it can be largely practical: accumulating knowledge and observing. Routine and care. And the applications are directly, hugely beneficial to humans: nourishment, oxygen, part in the water cycle, nutrient fixing. He knows, too, that flourishing plant life leads to growing echoes of good things for future generations. It’s so important. And the skill will give him a purpose on many worlds to come.
Daneel cares for plots and plots of plants in the growing settlement. He makes a place for himself to be taught by a few botanists who want the help. He takes apprenticeship under a plant historian (a forensic botanist, she calls herself!) and a few hesitant but happy gardeners. Through the work, Daneel learns basic nutrition for different kinds of plants. Learns the reasons to adjust their water and humidity levels, and how often it makes sense to change things. What to look for in healthy plants. Signs of stress. He finds a routine that expands and varies, becomes more complex and simultaneously more comprehensible as the year goes on. Water, light, air. Pruning and picking and planting. Reaping.
Daneel comes home sometimes and Elijah sees the soil on his clothing and on him and feels so much. He swells with pride in what Daneel does for every life in their settlement. He softens with relief, that Daneel has found a place and a work that he does so particularly well. He startles sometimes with nostalgia for the smells and labors of the good parts of his own culture. And sometimes, when Daneel has brought home a small basket of new potatoes or a little box of strawberries, Elijah looks at the little fruits of Daneel’s hands and must take hold of those hands. He looks intently at them, at their new residues, and Daneel watches him do this.
Elijah, in times like this, quotes the poetry of the Bible to Daneel again, passages which are still cropping up as new to Daneel. Neither of them feel a need to seek out time to sit and read the book as one piece, as words on paper. Instead they delight in forming a quilt of it from Elijah’s memory, sparked unbidden in safe, steady moments like this. Elijah feels his way through the verses like recovering patches of a barely-remembered map in his head. Part images of text, part memories of a voice - sometimes his own, sometimes family’s - murmuring in cadence, part metaphor and visualization of the passages’ meaning itself.
Elijah finds himself filled with the most vibrant language at times like these. Verses about the importance of the time and turn of seasons, yes, classic quotations. But he also tells stories about gardens and crops as celebrations of trust rewarded, as symbols of hope and of legacy. Promises of new safety and new homes and newly thriving vineyards, of homes returned to in jubilation. Plants and water as the signals of an end to wandering.
Elijah follows the lines in Daneel’s palms, the notches underneath his nails, the creases in the curves of his fingers, where soil has made its temporary home. He remembers the first time he felt astonishment, followed quickly by understanding, at the idea that Daneel must wash his hands like a human must, for his hands too grew dirty. Looking at the soil which Daneel carries home with him, Elijah finds himself overcome by firm belief in the change that their toil has wrought, the landscape -- the line of time -- that will never forget their presence, even if history itself may well let them fade.
Long afterward, when Daneel can bring himself to search for copies of the book in various translations, he does read it, alone, from start to finish. He has to break it up into pieces, still, just to allow himself to soak in all the realizations that only then hit him. How much Elijah internalized these stories. How significant they were to portions of old Earth culture when the book was heavily circulated. How marked these pieces of poetry are by their context: an aura of divinity intended by their writers.
Still, after he reads and memorizes the entire text, the form it takes most often in his memory is Elijah’s voice, halting, finding the right frame for each new story or careful quotation. Elijah’s voice, intermingled with his own, as they talked around the stories and made them make sense in their own quiet days. Through those memories, he relives the days. The nurturing of seeds.