The radiator in the third-floor office at RMBL365 made a sound like someone tapping a wrench against a pipe, which was, Mira had learned on Monday, exactly what it was: the building manager came through twice a day and bled the line. He waved at her through the door's small window now, on his way down, and she waved back without lifting her eyes from the screen.
"—the partition is cleaner if we drop the 2031 cohort," Lena was saying from State College, her voice thin through the laptop speakers. "I know. I know what you're going to say."
"I'm not going to say anything," Mira said. "I'm going to think for a second."
She'd been thinking for a second for about forty minutes. On the left screen the digitized phenology record sat open from 1934, the early years in a Cooper hand she'd come to recognize the way you recognize a friend's voice on the phone, the more recent years in clean keystrokes from observers whose names she also knew. On the right screen the common-garden output for Boechera stricta across four sites and eight years, with the Schofield plots in red because they'd been the first to go in, in 2028, and had the longest run. In the middle, the cross-tab the basin tools had assembled overnight while she slept in the loft of the apartment her PI kept for visiting lab people, the one with the broken blind that let the moon in.
"Drop 2031 and the heritability estimate for flowering time goes up by twelve percent," Mira said. "Which is what Reviewer 2 wants, basically. But then we can't say anything about the 2031–2032 snowmelt anomaly, which is the cleanest natural experiment we have for the plasticity contrast."
"Reviewer 2 doesn't care about the plasticity contrast."
"Reviewer 2 is wrong to not care about the plasticity contrast."
"Reviewer 2 is the one writing the review."
Mira laughed, which surprised her — she hadn't laughed since Tuesday — and then she pulled up the cross-tab and ran her finger down the column where the AI had flagged what it called coupled signal candidates, eleven of them, ranked. It had also written a short paragraph at the top explaining its ranking, the way it did, which Mira read with the mild annoyance she always felt when the tool's prose came out cleaner than her own drafts.
"Okay," she said. "What if we don't drop 2031. What if we use the gardens to show what the heritability estimate would have looked like without the 2031 cohort, and put that as a supplementary panel, and then in the main figure we keep the full data and explain why."
A pause from State College. Lena was the kind of collaborator who paused before she agreed; Mira had learned in her first year of the PhD that the pauses were not skepticism but a habit of actually thinking, which was rarer than it should have been.
"That's three figures," Lena said. "Reviewer 2 wanted one."
"Reviewer 2 wanted mechanism. We can give them mechanism in three figures or we can give them a clean number that's wrong."
"You're going to have to write the legend."
"I'm going to write the whole thing."
Outside, the snow was coming down in the absent-minded way it did in late March, more memory than weather. Mira had driven up from Boulder on Sunday in the truck the lab kept for basin trips, the one with the seat warmer that worked only on the passenger side, and she'd had to clear a foot of new powder off the windshield in the RMBL365 lot before she could see to back in. The plows had been through twice since. By the weekend the road to Gothic would be navigable on snowmobile but not much else. She wasn't going up this trip. The common-garden plots at Schofield were under three feet of snow and would be until the end of May; the questions she needed to answer about them were all already on her screen.
"I need to look at the heritability estimates for the East River population again," she said. "The one we have only six years on."
"That's the one I'm worried about."
"Me too."
She pulled the population-specific estimates into the cross-tab and asked the tool to flag any source population where the standard error was wider than the central estimate. Three flags came up immediately, which was about what she'd expected; the East River population was one of them. She'd known it would be. They had six years on it because the plot had gone in late, in 2032, after a long argument she had not been part of about whether the site was too low for the gradient they wanted. She'd inherited the data and the argument both. Six years was not enough. Six years was what she had.
"Can I ask you something not about the paper," Lena said.
"Sure."
"Are you coming to the wedding?"
It took Mira a second to remember which wedding. Lena's sister, late June, in Bucks County. She had been invited in December and had said yes in January and had then forgotten about it entirely under the weight of the revision.
"Yes," she said. "I am coming to the wedding. I bought the dress already."
"You did not."
"I did. It's green."
"Tom will be glad. He thinks you don't like him."
"I like Tom. I just don't talk to him because every time I see him I'm thinking about Boechera."
"That's what he thinks not liking him looks like."
Mira filed this away to think about later and pulled up the third figure draft. The AI had sketched a version overnight that she had asked it to sketch — the partition between plastic and evolutionary components of flowering-time change across the four garden sites, with the snowmelt covariate broken out — and she stared at it now with the half-recognition you have for a sentence someone else wrote that says what you were trying to say. It was not quite right. The y-axis was wrong; the tool always wanted to put effect size on a log scale and she always wanted it linear for this kind of thing because the audience was going to be evolutionary ecologists who thought in linear effects. She fixed the axis. The figure improved. She asked the tool to regenerate with the new specification and it came back in under a minute with three variants, and she picked the second one, and then she sat back in the office chair, which had a wonky lumbar, and looked at it.
"Lena," she said. "I think this is the figure."
"Send it."
She sent it. The little progress bar on the file transfer hung for a second on the building's slow uplink — RMBL365 had good wiring on the first two floors and patchy wiring on the third, the renovation had run out of money at the staircase — and then it went through.
A long pause. Mira could hear Lena's coffeemaker in State College, the one Lena had bought when she got tenure and was unreasonably proud of.
"Okay," Lena said. "Okay. This is the figure. Reviewer 2 is going to hate this."
"Reviewer 2 is going to love this. Reviewer 2 wanted mechanism."
"Reviewer 2 wanted one figure."
"Reviewer 2 is going to get over it."
They worked for another hour on the legend, which was the part Mira always found hardest, the compression of an actual argument into the eighty words that ran under a panel. At eleven-thirty she stood up and stretched and looked out the window. The snow had stopped. Across the street, in the upstairs window of the coffee shop, she could see two people she half-recognized from the basin community — a hydrologist she'd met at a barbecue last August, and someone she thought might be his teenage daughter — eating sandwiches.
"I have to go eat something," she said. "I haven't eaten since yesterday."
"Mira."
"I know."
"Eat something. Then start the response letter. We can do the response letter Monday."
"I'll start it tonight."
"Of course you will."
She closed the laptop and put on her coat, the one with the broken zipper she kept meaning to replace, and went down the stairs past the building manager, who was now bleeding the second-floor radiator, and who told her that the forecast for Sunday looked clear if she was driving back to Boulder. She thanked him. She crossed the street to the coffee shop. She ordered a sandwich and ate half of it standing up at the counter, thinking about the East River population and the six years of data, and whether she could get a seed-transfer pilot in this summer if she emailed the right person on Monday morning. The other half of the sandwich she wrapped in a napkin and took back across the street with her, because she was going to need it at three.