What the Soybean Said

The damage started in the middle.

That was the part Maya couldn't stop looking at. She had walked three rows already, counting chewed leaves the way Maya's aunt had showed them, marking the damage on a clipboard with tally marks. Mostly the damage was light, scattered, random. But in the middle of row seven there was a patch where almost every leaf on every plant had been eaten down to the stem. Thirty, maybe forty plants. Then the damage just stopped. Clean edge. Normal plants on either side.

"Soren," she said.

He came around from row six. She pointed at the eaten plants and then at the plants on either side. He crouched down and looked at the closest undamaged leaf. Then the next one. He turned the leaf over, looking at the underside.

"No beetles," he said. "On these."

"There were beetles on those, though." Maya gestured at the eaten patch. "Or something. That damage is old. They're gone now."

Soren moved to the edge of the patch and counted steps outward. He stopped at twelve plants away from the damage and crouched again. "These leaves are different," he said.

Maya came over. The leaves looked the same to her at first. Same color, same shape. Then she saw it. The leaf surface was slightly rougher. And the edges had a faint curl inward, just barely.

"All of them?" she asked.

Soren checked four plants, stepping carefully between the rows. "All of them."

Maya's aunt was at the far end of the field with her graduate student, arguing about something on a laptop. Maya watched her for a moment, then looked back at the curled leaves.

"Something happened to these plants," Maya said. "And the ones near the eaten ones are different from the ones further away."

"But nothing ate them."

"I know."

Soren pulled out his notebook and drew a quick diagram. The eaten patch in the center. The ring around it where the leaves were curled and rough. The outer plants where the leaves looked ordinary. He labeled the zones one, two, and three without deciding yet what one, two, and three meant.

Maya was counting. She walked the outer edge of the affected ring, counting plants, looking at leaf edges. "It's not even," she said. "The weird leaves go further in the direction the wind was blowing."

Soren looked up from his notebook.

"Which direction?"

"Southwest to northeast," she said. "It's always southwest this time of year. The ring is stretched northeast. Like something traveled."

Soren stood up and looked at the shape of it. She was right. The patch of altered plants wasn't a circle. It was an oval, pulled northeast.

He wrote down: travels with wind. Then he stopped writing because he wasn't sure travels was right. He crossed it out. He wrote: moves with wind.

Maya had gone to find her aunt.

She came back two minutes later. Her aunt was not with her.

"She said she's in the middle of something," Maya said. "She said look up herbivore defense." She held up her phone. She had already started.

Soren waited. Maya read, and her face did a thing it did sometimes, where it went completely still because she was moving fast on the inside.

"Okay," she said. She looked up at the plants. She looked back at the phone. "Okay."

"What?"

"When beetles eat the soybeans," she said, "the soybeans release chemicals into the air. Not like a smell exactly. Compounds. And the plants next to them pick up the compounds and start making their leaves harder to digest. Tougher. More bitter. Before anything eats them."

Soren looked at his diagram. Zone two, the plants with the curled rough leaves. The plants that nothing had touched.

"They got the signal," he said.

"Before the beetles got there. The plants in zone two, the beetles never reached them, but they had already started changing." Maya turned to look northeast down the row. "And the wind carried it further that direction, so more plants out there changed too."

Soren said, slowly, "The eaten plants told the other plants."

"Through the air. Without touching them."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

A small brown beetle landed on Soren's sleeve and he looked at it and then at the plant nearest to him and then at the sky, which was the blue of late summer, completely ordinary.

"They don't have brains," Soren said.

"No."

"They don't have anything. They're plants."

"I know."

"So what is it," he said, and he wasn't asking Maya, he was asking the air, or the field, or whatever category of thing this was supposed to fit into. "What is it if it's not thinking but it does the thing that thinking would do?"

Maya looked at her phone again. Then she set the phone down in her pocket and just looked at the field. At the three hundred rows of soybean plants stretching toward the tree line, rustling slightly in the southwest wind, each one holding whatever it was holding.

"My aunt said there are trees that do it too," Maya said. "And some of them signal underground at the same time. Roots and air, both at once."

Soren wrote something in his notebook. He looked at it. Then he looked up at the tree line.

The trees stood there as they always stood, the way trees did, not appearing to do anything. The wind moved through them from southwest to northeast.

Soren watched a leaf turn in the wind, and then watched the leaf on the next branch turn a half second later, and then the next, the movement traveling through the canopy in a long slow wave he had looked at ten thousand times in his life and never wondered about.