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His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you’ve bought a novel in your pajamas, there’s no turning back.
The sight fills him with a horror inseparable from hope.
The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.
She has told him about the Judean date palm seed, two thousand years old, found in Herod the Great’s palace on Masada—a date pit from a tree that Jesus himself might have sampled, the kind of tree Muhammad said was made of the same stuff as Adam. It germinated, a few years ago. She tells him about the campion seeds, buried yards under the Siberian permafrost. Growing, after thirty thousand years.
“Yes! And what do all good stories do?” There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. “They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren’t.”
In a world of perfect utility, we, too, will be forced to vanish. “You’re sure this is a good idea?” She asks herself; she asks the dead man. The membrane between the two is thin. She knows she’ll never see him again in this or any life to come. Yet she sees him wherever she looks. That’s life; the dead keep the living alive. Every other night she asks her missing friend for words and phrases. For courage. For enough forbearance to keep from pitching her notes into the wood-burning stove. Now the asking is done.
Trees know when we’re close by. The chemistry of their roots and the perfumes their leaves pump out change when we’re near. . . . When you feel good after a walk in the woods, it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven’t yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.
With luck, some of those seeds will remain viable, inside controlled vaults in the side of a Colorado mountain, until the day when watchful people can return them to the ground. She purses her lips, and pens an addendum. If not, other experiments will go on running themselves, long after people are gone.
He and his people made the pet, and now it’s busy making him. He told it to watch for any news of his new obsession: tree communication, forest intelligence, fungal networks, Patricia Westerford, The Secret Forest. . . . The book is shot through with uncanny echoes of what he heard whispered, decades ago, by alien life-forms that now won’t give him the time of day.
Code—wildly branching code pruned back by failure—builds up this great spiraling column from out of instructions that Vishnu managed to cram into something smaller than a boy’s fingernail. When the tree is done with its century of unfolding, old chestnut words of extinct Transcendentalism scroll upward, line by line, on a sea of black: The gardener sees only the gardener’s garden. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. MAY WE NOT SEE GOD? And when Neelay looks up from the tiny screen, that’s exactly what he
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California means three days of lost work. Jesus spent less time cleaning out hell.
Two barred owls, lugubrious and beautiful, call across a great distance. Up the ridge, acorns and hickories hit the ground. Bears everywhere sleep off the day’s feast, two per square mile.
But the priestly tulip trees still boost her immune system, while beeches lift her mood and focus her thoughts. Under these giants, she’s smarter, clearer. She sees an alligator-barked persimmon. Sweet-gum balls, like tiny, medieval morning stars, crunch under her feet. She tears just the tip of a fallen gum leaf and sniffs—a child’s whiff of heaven. There’s a venerable red oak not far from the trail, twelve feet around if it’s a foot. It might soothe even the awful restlessness the invitation has inflicted on her. Sustainable future. They don’t want a tree woman to keynote their gathering.
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In another smiling blink, Appich’s dread gives way to its kissing cousin, the relief of completed predictions.
Today’s topic has been a simple one. When a person makes a choice, so much happens by night, underground, or just out of sight that the chooser is the last to know.
“You can’t see what you don’t understand. But what you think you already understand, you’ll fail to notice.”
She watches the limbs move for a while, then looks back down to the page and reads on out loud. “ ‘It’s sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it’s a million.”
Paper cup. Seedling. On the windowsill. The words come out excited, and they make her skin crawl. His crazed intensity, in the falling light, makes her think he’s having another cerebral accident. Her pulse spikes and she struggles to her feet. Then she understands. He’s entertaining her, turning Things as They Are into something better. Telling her a story, in return for the years of stories she has read to him. Planted it. The chestnut. Our daughter.
On the plane, she goes through her keynote one last time. “The Single Best Thing a Person Can Do for Tomorrow’s World.” Everything is written out. She hasn’t read a speech out loud for years. But she can’t trust herself to improvise this one.
“Where have you been? Why haven’t you answered your phone?” Patricia wants to say, My phone lives in Boulder, Colorado, plugged into the wall.
Every student must be drunk on the air’s intoxicants without even knowing. It’s a Christmas of lignin. Old, lost friends. Trees she has never seen. Pines spinning out cones in perfect Fibonacci swirls. Backwater genera—Maytenus, Syzygium, Ziziphus. She combs them and all the bedding plants beneath for extracts to replace the ones the TSA confiscated.
This morning he was a full professor of psychology at a great urban university. Now he’s held for ancient crimes involving several million dollars of property damage and the immolation of a woman.
He has forgotten even those things about her face that used to make him feel like he could suck in air and with a lazy sigh breathe out eternity.
“When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders!”
“A reporter once asked Rockefeller how much is enough. His answer: Just a little bit more. And that’s all we want: to eat and sleep, to stay dry and be loved, and acquire just a little bit more.”
A thorn acacia makes sugary protein treats to feed and enslave the ants who guard it. Fruit-bearing plants trick us into distributing their seeds, and ripening fruit led to color vision. In teaching us how to find their bait, trees taught us to see that the sky is blue. Our brains evolved to solve the forest. We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens.
Another click. “Trees are doing science. Running a billion field tests. They make their conjectures, and the living world tells them what works. Life is speculation, and speculation is life. What a marvelous word! It means to guess. It also means to mirror.
It strikes her that she envies him. His years of enforced tranquility, the patience of his slowed mind, the expansion of his blinkered senses. He can watch the dozen bare trees in the backyard for hours and see something intricate and surprising, sufficient to his desires, while she—she is still trapped in a hunger that rushes past everything.
The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.
Wilderness rushes down lower Broadway, the island as it was a thousand years back or a thousand years on.
What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.
Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.
NEELAY’S SHOUTS come too late to break the room’s spell. The speaker raises her glass, and the world splits. Down one branch, she lifts the glass to her lips, toasts the room—To Tachigali versicolor—and drinks. Down another branch, this one, she shouts, “Here’s to unsuicide,” and flings the cup of swirling green over the gasping audience. She bumps the podium, backs away, and stumbles into the wings, leaving the room to stare at an empty stage.
Her own second growth is even faster. Once, long ago, she jumped from airplanes, played a bloody-minded murderess, did terrible things to anyone who tried to confine her. Now she’s almost seventy, at war with the entire city. Jungle in an upscale suburb: it’s up there with child-molesting.
A flash of orange at the window catches her eye: American redstart, male, flushing insects from the thicket with its tail and wings. Twenty-two species of birds this last week alone. Two days ago, at twilight, she and Ray saw a fox. Civil disobedience may cost them thousands in compounding penalties, but the view from the house has been much improved.
She’s making fruit compote for Ray’s lunch when the awaited angry knock comes on the front door. She flushes with excitement. More than excitement: purpose. A touch of fear, but the most delicious kind. She rinses and dries her hands, thinking: Here I am, near the finish line, loving life again.
The law is simply human will, written down. The law must let every acre of living Earth be turned into tarmac, if such is the desire of people. But the law lets all parties have their say. The judge asks, “Would you care to address any final words to the court?” Thoughts ring Adam’s head. The verdicts have cut him loose, like windthrow or fire. “Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.” The court sentences Adam Appich to two consecutive terms of seventy years each. The lenience shocks him. He thinks: Seventy plus seventy is nothing. A black willow plus a wild cherry. He was thinking oak. He
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Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day. First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells. Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town. The day is two-thirds done when
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Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run. Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge
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Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
On this mountain, in such weather, Why stay here any longer? Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.
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?
Then she’s back at the original World Tree. Five times at least, she says, the tree has been dropped, and five times it has resprouted from the stump. Now it’s toppling again, and what will happen this time is anybody’s guess.
His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.” The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.”
In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things. The translations will be rough at first, like a child’s first guess. But soon the first sentences will start to come across, pouring out words made, like all living things, from rain and air and crumbled rock and light. Hello. Finally. Yes. Here. It’s us.
Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run. The branches click in the dark dry air above his head, and he hears them. Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?
MOAN comes out of Ray when Dorothy tells him how things end. Two life sentences, back to back. Too severe for arson, for destruction of public and private properties, even for involuntary manslaughter. But just harsh enough for that unforgivable crime: harming the safety and certainty of men.
He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
