Because that was the version of the argument she didn't have an answer for yet.
She could counter most of what Doss said with data, with a journal entry, with the logic of what she was attempting.
She couldn't counter the possibility that the field was simply indifferent, that it would take everything she put into it and return nothing, the way it had taken Earl's best efforts and returned 20 seasons of clay.
She parked at the farm.
She changed out of her wet jacket.
She went back out to the barn and kept working because it was the only response she'd ever trusted, but it felt thinner that evening than it usually did.
The upper two-thirds of the original planting continued to sit in ground that wasn't actively rotting them, which was not the same as progress, but was at least not further loss.
Ren watched those ridges through the rest of the rain, checking them twice a day, digging test holes every other morning.
The seed pieces in the higher, better-draining section had stopped the slide toward rot.
Some of them showed the faint white thread of early root development if she dug carefully enough not to damage it.
She found the survivor on the fourth evening after the rain stopped.
She almost missed it.
The light was going.
She'd been walking the worst section of the loss area to assess what could still be salvaged before replanting, her knees already aching from the clay.
Two rows over from where she was standing, in a section of the compost strip on a patch of ground that happened to sit on a small natural rise, stood a single sprout.
Three inches.
Pale green, the color of something that had been working toward this in the dark for weeks, finally arriving at light.
It had pushed up through the clay in the one spot on that section of ground where three things had aligned.
The compost strip had loosened the immediate root zone just enough.
The slight rise had kept the water table from climbing.
The ridge had held its height.
Ren stayed kneeling in the wet clay and looked at it for a long time.
One sprout from a section where 3,000 had failed wasn't evidence of a system working.
She understood that.
But it was evidence of something more specific than a general result.
It told her exactly where the system had partially worked, under what conditions, for what reasons.
The failure hadn't been random.
The survival wasn't random.
Both had logic, and the logic was readable if you were willing to read it without deciding in advance what it said.
She sat back on her heels in the mud with the last light going blue around her.
The field didn't care.
That was Doss's version.
But the field hadn't produced this sprout out of indifference.
It had produced it where she'd given it what the journal said it needed, in the one spot on that section where all three conditions had been adequately met.
The field cared exactly as much as the conditions warranted.
That wasn't poetry.
That was information.
She stood up stiff and cold, jeans ruined from the clay, the kind of wet that had long since passed through her boots to her socks.