The Overstory

by Richard Powers

Her left hand starts up again, tugging at the ring finger of her right. She’s like a dog unable to stop gnawing at its own foot. But this time, it yields. The jade band slips over her age-swollen knuckle and pops free. A weight flies up and out of her, and she cracks open. She sets the green circle in the grass, the one round thing amid a bedlam of growth and splitting. She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate,