Kansas on another world: why Arne Lindh had to be a farmer
Jake Reilly has a line he uses on himself. He has been using it his whole life. When someone asks what he does, or what he's good for, or what he's planning to do about it, he says, out loud or in his head, I'm just a farmhand.
The book's job, in the broadest sense, is to get him to stop saying that.
The problem is that you can't talk a man out of a sentence he's been using since he was fourteen. Not through argument. Not through flattery. Certainly not peril. Jake is fully prepared to be expendable and will quote the reasoning if you ask. The sentence has load-bearing walls. You can't just remove it.
What you can do is put him somewhere the sentence doesn't work.
Arne Lindh is the somewhere.
Arne is an agricultural elder in the cluster of households that took Jake's ship in for quarantine on New Canaan. He is ninety-five years old in a society where ninety-five is a working age. His hands are calloused in a way Jake recognizes before anything else about him. He moves slowly, deliberately. His body could still hurry if he asked it to. He is a farmer, and on New Canaan, being a farmer is not the thing it is in Brown County, Kansas in 2029.
On the morning Jake and Arne meet, Arne asks him a professional question. What Jake was doing with a pressure differential across an irrigation valve at the Henderson place, and whether it ever resolved. Arne isn't making small talk. He wants to know because he has an irrigation problem of his own and has heard, from someone, that the stranger quarantined in the medical wing is a man who fixes things.
Jake doesn't know what to do with the question at first. Nobody has ever asked it of him like that. In Kansas, when a farmer talks to a farmhand about a pump, there's a status gradient in the conversation. Tilted only slightly. Tilted. Arne's question has no slope in it. Arne is asking as one person to another person, about a shared problem.
Jake answers. He answers well. Arne nods. Arne says something like I thought that might be it, and walks away to try something.
That is the first crack in the sentence.
Arne is an ally-as-partial-opponent, the structural shape you borrow from Truby. He's on Jake's side. He wants good things for him. Without meaning to, he also dismantles the whole foundation Jake has built his self-description on. In a community where farmers are respected, just a farmhand stops being a put-down. It stops being anything. Jake can't hide behind a sentence that no longer means what he wants it to mean.
This is why Arne had to be a farmer.
I tried, in an earlier draft, making him a scientist. A grandfatherly scientist. It was fine. It was fine in the way a scene is fine when it accomplishes its stated purpose and nothing else. The problem was that a scientist being kind to Jake is just another credentialed person being condescending. Arne being kind to Jake is another farmer treating him as a farmer. That's what the book needs. The claim the book is making is that the knowledge Jake has is knowledge, full stop, and belongs in the same category as any other body of expertise.
Arne is also a Nolan mirror. Nolan is Jake's father, dead before the book begins, who loved him but couldn't quite say so. Arne can. Arne does. Not with speeches. With a hand on the back of the chair he has saved for Jake at dinner, with the professional question, with the silent squeeze on the shoulder the night things have gone badly.
What Jake gets from Arne is not a new identity. It is the experience, for the first time, of being addressed as if his current one were enough. That turns out to be one of the very few things in the book Jake cannot explain away.
When Jake leaves New Canaan, Arne is the first person in the farewell sequence. That was a late-stage structural decision, and it is one of the very few I feel certain about. Arne goes first because he is the quietest of the losses, and because putting him first tells the reader what the rest of the farewell is going to cost.
You will meet him properly in Chapter 16. I hope, by Chapter 23, you'll miss him the way Jake does.
