A Half-Built Garden

by Ruthanna Emrys

We can help you escape this world.” I pulled Dori close. “Escape it? Why?” Scenarios tumbled through my mind: an incoming comet missed by our scant satellites, methane reservoirs breaching their tenuous tissue of permafrost and geoengineered shields—or Cytosine’s people teleporting nine billion people to “safety” before appropriating Earth for their own purposes.

The watershed network will take care of the Ringers. The world won’t fall apart because you took a nap; that’s what networks are for.”

But I felt anxious. It was barely a year since Carol and I first met Dinar and Athëo, assured by our mutual shadchan that we had compatible parenting and negotiation styles, and complementary skills and interests, and that we’d like each other well enough to run a household together. All that was true. But it was also true that we’d been in a rush, that we still didn’t know each other as well as if we’d courted before the constant scrambling fatigue of childcare—and that outside of child-rearing, sometimes even within it, I didn’t have a sense of which way they’d jump on judgment calls. It was easier by far to trust the network, where everyone’s mistakes would cancel each other out, than to negotiate decisions in my own household.

Normally the neighborhood offered layers to be read: auras of discussion and commentary and history. I could dive into upcoming repairs, stories behind flags, whether trees were blooming early or late. I’d feed in my own observations and judgments, too. Without that interaction, the world felt oddly shallow. And the easy logistics of a well-run neighborhood, dependent on that feedback, could break down quickly. Would everyone stay on their current task rotations indefinitely? How would we handle resource distribution? Beyond that, there were normally two reasons to hold an unscheduled festival. The first was after a big storm: as a celebration of resilience, a kickoff for rebuilding, and the first growth of defiance and determination out of wind-borne mud. The second cause was less common: a welcome party for an influx of refugees. Watersheds competed to take in communities whose own lands fell to rising waters, to integrate the skills needed for everyone’s survival.

Cytosine squealed a hesitation. “Trade their francium for aluminum while it’s decaying? It doesn’t sound as good in English, does it?” “I can follow, I promise,” I said. “As for the corporations, eventually we didn’t allow it. People like my parents organized to stop them, and created the first watershed networks.” I didn’t look at St. Julien. “Everything from refusing to buy their ‘decaying francium,’ to setting limits on their carbon production to get warming under control, to blocking their shipping if they went over their carbon budgets. But they couldn’t bear the transformation, and eventually they barricaded themselves behind their own fencelines on a few artificial islands, scamming each other after no one else would fall for it.”

The corporations tried to do the same thing, but they’d create needs in order to fill them. It looked symbiotic, but it was one-sided, because most of the needs weren’t real. Or else they created artificial shortages of true needs, to make their goods worth more. They’re parasites.”

When I think of a tree, I think of moving between the branches, and how whenever I reach out I find a new branch that takes me where I need to go. The universe is the same way. If you reach out, you’ll eventually grasp the next branch. Sometimes people reach in the wrong direction, or miss their grip, or find a dead stick that cracks, but that’s not the tree’s fault. There’s always a next branch, you just need to find it.

I missed the medications that kept my biorhythms on track before I got pregnant; even after Dori was weaned, anything that made it hard to wake up off-cycle would probably be a bad idea for a while. At least old-fashioned sertraline was still okay—I might lie in the dark with my wheels spinning, but the wheels in question were mostly logistical and ethical quandaries rather than rehashes of all my imagined worst mistakes. Right now, for example, my brain was convinced that I’d missed something in the flood data. It was not, I realized, going to let go until I checked.

trust you to do what you think is right. That’s how I trust most people. I pondered that. Even the worst of the corporate staff were probably doing the right thing, by their own standards. They’d built whole ethical systems around the moral imperative for profit, the assumption that acting selfishly would eventually bite its own tail and be the best thing possible for humanity.

Adrien sighed. “As it happens, I think Jace di Sanya has a very poetic attitude toward business decisions. It’s not my responsibility to stop him from burning things, but personally I think the problem with the corporate age was that we tried to have it here. It’s obvious that our ideas were made for space. You could have mines the size of planets and skyscrapers the size of stars, and extract resources for centuries without breaking the systems you’re extracting from. The networks can keep Earth—it’ll be a backwater, but they can have it. We’ll take the rest of the universe in trade.”

There were so many things that went beyond our models and decision threads and system diagrams. I remembered reading an old paper, a classic of mitigation strategy that framed everything in terms of “ecological services” and the monetary value of forests. How queasy it had made me feel, like calculating the exact value of my time awake with the kids. In the aislands they still thought that way: everything had a price, and anything could be sold away if someone offered enough in exchange.

“The wandering sounds hard,” said Glycine. “We’ve done too much of it,” I said. Explanations came more easily tonight. “It’s good to live in a time when we have a home we can love. Someplace we can afford to grow attached to. To be forced to leave a place you love—as a people, we know exile far too well.” And the lesson of history was that it always happened, eventually. A paradox: you could always do something to hold off the bad times, but you could never hold them off forever. Maybe this time? Long enough, at least, to get the world to a point where it could survive the badness?

They say German has a long word for everything, but among the dandelion networks, plains-ache is the yearning for an evolutionary ecology you’ve never lived in yourself, the body’s bone-deep knowledge of things that would make it not healthiest but happiest, that would feel right and quiet the anxiety-monkey behind your civilized forebrain. Walking for hours till you can feel it from spine to sole, a picnic with people you’ve known your whole life, a fresh-picked berry, a midday nap—a tiny taste of what your brain thinks it’s good for.

it had still taken Viola St. Julien months to get the right people in the room. Months of feeling people out, not simply to secure agreement on immediate action, but to find kindred souls who sensed the logic behind those actions. Beyond this room, this meeting, they could play out the art of the possible, could build towers from the sordid little compromises that were the life and limitation of nation-states. But the heart of the work needed passion and ideals powerful enough to carry their goal over all those barriers. Otherwise the long game would play out like one of those cartoons where someone offers up a glorious idea, all golden gears and shining wheels, and passes it through grant applications and committees until it turns into a kid’s broken-down wagon.