The planetary reading this year is 17.3. Cete is 52, and he has worked at the botanical garden for nineteen years, and his reading, measured in the spring, is 84.
He has never found a satisfying word for what this means to live with. The Consortium calls people like him Persistent Frequency Outliers. His colleagues who know say nothing, or they say lucky, which Cete doesn't think is exactly right, though he doesn't have a better word for it either.
Iva's reading, when she was last tested, was 8. This is above the planetary average for her age cohort. He knows this.
For the past three weeks, the garden has had a corpse flower in the final stage of approach. Cete has been monitoring the spathe's unfurling since it began. He has told Iva about it in the evenings. He has shown her photographs. Today, on her day off, she came to see it.
She stood in front of it for a while. The plant is nearly three meters tall and a deep reddish maroon, and the smell on this day was still building, not yet at peak. Cete stood beside her. She said: "It looks the same as last week."
She was not wrong. It does look very like it did last week in certain lights. The visible change since last Tuesday is measurable but not obvious to a casual observer. He knows this too.
They walked to the café on the other side of the garden. She ordered tea. They talked about the broken shutter latch and whether the kitchen was worth repainting before winter. It was a good conversation. He was not unhappy.
When she had to leave for an appointment, he said he'd stay a bit longer. He went back through the conservatory.
The spathe was where he had left it. The smell had advanced, he estimated, about nine percent since the morning. Something in the base structure had changed overnight in a way that suggested two more days to full peak. He stood in front of it in the warm wet air of the conservatory. The garden was going to close in twenty minutes.