C by Tom McCarthy Page B

and avenues all laid out in plan view. Sophie, meanwhile, takes a leaf or branch with her and copies it in photographic detail.
    Sophie’s so advanced in natural science that Mr. Clair makes no pretence of knowing anything she doesn’t, or even half of what she does. When the three of them collect pollen samples from around the Crypt Park or Mosaic Garden, Sophie whisks the jars off to her “lab,” the smaller stable workshop (ceiling-beams stained by a burn-mark that the years have faded but not wiped away) she’s now made her own and from which Serge is more or less excluded, and emerges two days later with drawings of magnified slides and diagrams showing varying rates of cross-pollination which she’s correlated with her analysis of the constituent mixture of this season’s honey. It is she, not Clair, who leads the trio on walks through Bodner’s Kitchen Garden. While the mute servant trundles around shunting wheelbarrows of dead stems to the compost corner, she reels off the names of plants:
    “Portal Ruby, Jonker Van Tet, Symphony, Haphill, Royal Sovereign …”
    “A tautologism,” Mr. Clair says. “All sovereigns are royal.”
    “This one is Boskoop Giant,” Sophie continues. “And this, blackcurrant Ben Sarek.”
    “And most of them are illegitimate.”
    “Cherries: Stella, Morello. Pear: Doyenne du Comice. And here are apples: Charles Ross, Lord Lambourne, King of Pippin …”
    “A cavalier named all our fruits. Come the new Commonwealth we’ll name them after tradesmen: cobblers, bakers—”
    “Shh!” hisses Sophie. “Look.” She juts her finger at a stalk two or three inches from the ground, where a small spider clings almost vertically to its web. “A walnut orb-weaver,” she tells them. “And this,” she says, pointing at a tiny dark thing navigating its way over clumps of earth below the spider’s eyrie, “is a bloody-nosed beetle. It dribbles bright red fluid from its mouth …”
    Behind them, a fountain more than dribbles as its centrepiece, a wrought-iron swan, gurgles and vomits as though it had over-gorged itself on the garden’s aristocratic fruit. Sophie leads them round this, towards the lilies. As they pass the enormous poppy bed she exchanges finger-signs with Bodner, who’s half-lost among the swollen, bulbous heads.
    “Don’t ever let your father catch you doing that,” Clair warns her.
    Sophie shrugs. “These lilies,” she continues lecturing them as they arrive beside swathes of deep maroon, “are Sun Gods. Here—” she digs her hand into the ground to scoop and scrape earth away from the bulb—“is the basal plate, this round pyramid thing. At the top, the flowers: three outer sepals and three inner petals.” As her fingers gently separate the flower-parts, Serge gazes at the earth wedged beneath their nails, stark half-moon hemispheres of dark against pale white. “Six anthers and a three-lobed stigma.” She caresses the stamen, running her fingers right up to the end where white pistils stick out like antennae. “These ones are seventh generation, from a single parent flower.”
    “They can’t be from just one flower,” Clair says. “You need two to make baby flowers.”
    “Not with lilies,” Sophie corrects him. “They can fertilise themselves. And then their offspring fertilise each other.”
    “Endogamy,” tuts Clair. “Perversion of royal houses.”
    “What’s mahogany?” asks Serge.
    “You’re as bad as Mama,” Sophie tells him.
    “No I’m not!” he snaps back. She flicks small flecks of earth at him.
    “I think this conversation has gone far enough,” says Mr. Clair. “Back to the classroom.”
    Their tutor’s not averse to games. He even schedules in a “ludic session” every week. Excitedly unwrapping a parcel which arrives from London via Lydium several months into his tenure, he presents to them the Realtor’s Game, in which contestants must move object-avatars (a car, a ship, a dog) round squares which