QUOTE : Just here.’ Ramiro squatted and placed the pot on the ground, then swung his beam around the site. ‘You already dug twelve holes!’ he observed. ‘And I thought you were messing around with Agata all morning.’ Azelio made a noncommittal sound. Ramiro suddenly felt queasy. ‘My plan is to dig up all these plants at the end of the trial and take them back to the Peerless for my colleagues to analyse,’ Azelio mused. ‘So I guess that’s when I’ll see the transition between cultivated and truly pristine ground. But right now, in Esilio’s terms, we’ve just dug the plants up – so on our terms, we’re about to do that. Backwards.’ Ramiro said, ‘You make it sound as if you’ve been practising time-reversed agronomy all your life.’ ‘It’s not that hard to see what’s going on, if you think it through,’ Azelio replied lightly. ‘But you don’t mind following markers like this? Evidence of acts you haven’t performed yet?’ ‘It’s a little disconcerting,’ Azelio conceded. ‘But I can’t say that it fills me with claustrophobia to know that I’ll carry out the experimental protocols I always planned to carry out.