The Signature of All Things

the previous twenty-six years, she had published two others— The Complete Mosses of Pennsylvania and The Complete Mosses of the Northeastern United States— both of which were long, exhaustive, and handsomely produced by her old friend George Hawkes.
    Alma’s first two books had been warmly received within the botanical community. She had been flatteringly reviewed in a few of the more respectable journals, and was generally acknowledged as a wizard of bryophytic taxonomy. She had mastered the subject not only by studying the mosses of White Acre and its surroundings, but also by purchasing, trading, and cajoling samples from other botanical collectors all over the country and the world. These transactions had been easily enough executed. Alma already knew how to import botanicals, and moss was effortless to transport. All one had to do was dry it, box it up, and put it on a ship, and it would survive its journey without the slightest trouble. It took up little space and weighed virtually nothing, so ships’ captains did not mind having it as extra cargo. It never rotted. Dried moss was so perfectly designed for transport, in fact, that people had already been using it as packing material for centuries. Indeed, early in her explorations, Alma had discovered that her father’s dockside warehouses were already filled with several hundredvarieties of mosses from across the planet, all tucked into neglected corners and crates, all ignored and unexamined—until Alma had gotten them under her microscope.
    Through such explorations and imports, Alma had been able, over the past twenty-six years, to collect nearly eight thousand species of mosses, which she had preserved in a special herbarium, stored in the driest hayloft of the carriage house. Her body of knowledge in the field of global bryology, then, was almost excruciatingly dense, despite the fact that she herself had never traveled outside Pennsylvania. She kept up correspondence with botanists from Tierra del Fuego to Switzerland, and carefully watched the complex taxonomical debates that raged in the more obscure scientific journals as to whether this or that sprig of Neckera or Pogonatum constituted a new species, or was merely a modified variation of an already documented species. Sometimes she chimed in with her own opinions, with her own meticulously argued papers.
    What’s more, she now published under her own full name. She was no longer “A. Whittaker,” but simply “Alma Whittaker.” No initials were appended to the name—no evidence of degrees, no membership in distinguished gentlemanly scientific organizations. Nor was she even a “Mrs.,” with the dignity that such a title affords a lady. By now, quite obviously, everyone knew she was a woman. It mattered little. Moss was not a competitive domain, and that is the reason, perhaps, that she had been allowed to enter the field with so little resistance. That, and her own dogged perseverance.
    As Alma came to know the world of moss over the years, she better understood why nobody had properly studied it before: to the innocent eye, there appeared to be so little to study. Mosses were typically defined by what they lacked , not by what they were, and, indeed, they lacked much. Mosses bore no fruit. Mosses had no roots. Mosses could grow no more than a few inches tall, for they contained no internal cellular skeleton with which to support themselves. Mosses could not transport water within their bodies. Mosses did not even engage in sex. (Or at least they did not engage in sex in any obvious manner, unlike lilies or apple blossoms—or any other flower, in fact—with their overt displays of male and female organs.) Mosses kept their propagation a mystery to the naked human eye. For that reason, they were also known by the evocative name Cryptogamae—“hidden marriage.”
    In every way mosses could seem plain, dull, modest, even primitive. The simplest weed sprouting from the humblest city sidewalk appeared infinitely more sophisticated by comparison. But here is what few people understood, and what Alma came to learn: Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil. Under shelves of exposed limestone, moss colonies create dripping, living sponges that hold on tight and