The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself. By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.

For there is hope of a tree, if it goes down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender branches will not cease. Though the root grows old in the earth,

and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs. But man, man wastes away and dies and gives up the ghost, and where is he?

The years ahead will run beyond anything he can imagine. The die-offs and disasters will make Bronze Age plagues seem quaint. Prison may become a hideaway from the sentence outside. Of all the waiting terrors, the one he fears most is time. He does the math, calculates how many futures he’ll have to live through, second by second, until his sentence ends. Futures where our ancestors vanish before we even name them. Futures where our robot descendants

use us for fuel, or keep us in infinitely entertaining zoos as secured as the one Adam now checks into. Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk. Vast, empty expanses with nothing to fill the hours but remembering how he and a handful of green-souled friends tried to save the world. But, of course, it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name. A man behind the impenetrable glass in a crisp white shirt emblazoned with a civic emblem asks him for something. Name, maybe, serial number, apology. Adam frowns, distracted, elsewhere. He looks down. There’s something on the cuff of his neon jumpsuit. Round, small, brown, a little globe covered with sticky burs. He has come directly from one bleak brick holding facility, been pressed into a van, driven and unloaded straight into this wasteland of cut stone and concrete. There was not the slightest chance for such life to exploit him. But here he is, carrying this free rider. So it turned out for him, for all five of them, all of blinkered humankind, used by life as surely as this bur uses his jumpsuit cuff. And in that moment, it starts up, the quiet torture worse than anything the state can inflict on Adam. A small voice so real it might come from the bunk above him whispers the start of a story that will plague him for longer than his imprisonment: You have been spared from death, to do a most important thing. .

Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .