by Steve Alten
With every slash, the serpent found itself deeper in a sticky quicksand of appendages, which held fast to its dying meal. I watched until the slurping sounds from the feeding centipede sickened me, then, distancing myself from the scene, I withdrew the serrated steak knife from my still-intact zippered pocket, intent on fashioning myself a weapon.
Ten minutes later, the lone survivor of the subspecies Petroleum Man emerged from the thicket armed with a pointed stick, ready to take on anything from a bag of marshmallows to perhaps a squirrel or small rodent.
Deciding against the latter, I returned to the river, hoping to spear the first fish that swam by.
My ears buzzed. I swatted and caught half a dozen grape-size flies in my palm, sprinkling their still-twitching remains along the calm surface of a pool of water formed by a horseshoe of rock, attempting to lure a fish out from beneath a submerged ledge.
Poised on an outcropping of rock above the floating bait, I held my breath as a pair of thin snakes emerged from beneath the slate. It took me a moment to realize the creatures were actually barbels — the tentaclelike protrusions connected to the dark flat head of a catfish. The surfacing creature was a big boy, its skull as large as a shovel, its girth five feet from its whiskered mouth to its lobe-shaped fins and tail.
Swimming to the surface, the fish bypassed the flies and suddenly launched itself atop the rock upon which I stood, perched with my pointed stick.
And then the damn thing snapped at me!
Backing away, I slammed the sharpened business end of my spear into its slimy back, but it merely bounced off the rubbery hide, the point splitting in half.
The enraged fish unfurled its seventy-pound eel-like body and lashed out again, its pair of twenty-inch barbels independently raking the air — an action that told me the fish was blind, though far from helpless. Jabbing the stick at the foul beast’s mouth, I distracted it long enough to withdraw the steak knife from my jumpsuit pocket. With one slice I hacked off its feelers, then stabbed at the animal’s soft white underbelly, quickly retracting the six-inch blade before the predatory amphibious fish could bite me with its finger-length stiletto-sharp teeth.
Fully engaged, I plunged my weapon repeatedly into the bleeding carcass, ranting my best Melville. “… to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!”
A dozen or so stabs and Moby Catfish was lying belly up, ready to be filleted.
For the briefest of moments I imagined skewered chunks of catfish cooking over an open fire, then reality hit: any potential firewood was wet. As a Cub Scout, I had been deemed “fire-challenged” by my den leader who joked that I couldn’t ignite a flame using a wad of newspaper and a book of matches.
Screw it. The scent of my fresh kill smoldering on an open spit could lure other predators.
Sushi it was.
Sawing long cuts into the catfish’s belly, I surgically removed a square of meat, washed it off in the stream, then chewed a bite. Despite being raw, the meat was surprisingly tender, but three mouthfuls were all my stomach could …
The sound stifled my mental dictation, my eyes scanning the treetops overhead. I had heard the pan flute acoustics seconds before the killer ants would have filleted me, only then the sound had been more of a diversionary tactic.
What I heard now seemed like a cry for help.
Leaving the stream, I headed off in the perceived direction of the sound, making my way through a grove of redwood trees that easily dwarfed the tallest sequoia of Northern California. Even the underbrush was elephantine, the ferns creating an umbrella effect five feet over my head. The forest floor was padded with rotting foliage, which combined with the massive redwood canopy to mute all sound, save for that of my eight-legged guardian.
The distressed pan flute sounds led me to a clearing between a tripod of five-hundred-foot trees, the trunks of which were wider than a two-car garage. Jousting between the columns were two thirty-inch-high praying mantises—Was everything bigger in this Omega dream? The insects were grappling over the fin end of a hairy severed octopus tentacle.
“Oscar…”
Brandishing my spear, I swatted away the insects, chasing the knee-high stick creatures into the foliage. The abandoned tentacle was bleeding a greenish blue goo from a wound slice too precise to have been rendered by nature.
A warm raindrop fell on my cheek. I wiped at it and saw it was cephalopod blood.
The sound of a moaning pan flute called out to me from above.
I looked up using the binoculars, only to find the view obstructed by a canopy whose lowest branches began a football field above my head, concealing a world unto itself.
I knew all about redwoods, having studied their unique genetic blueprint while searching for patterns in nature upon which to fashion GOLEM’s matrix. A young redwood reaches maturity when it sheds its top, which can be blown off during a storm or simply dies and falls off. This act triggers a bizarre process, known as “reiteration.” The tree’s DNA essentially goes haywire, replicating itself over and over again when a second redwood trunk sprouts from the first — not at ground level but high up in the crown, rooting itself in one of the larger limbs. A third, fourth, and fifth tree trunk soon appear, each identical tree growing parallel to the main trunk hundreds of feet above the forest floor, appearing like the fingers of an upraised palm. Each new trunk grows its own limbs, which in turn grew more trunks through its own crown. These runaway reiterations create a fractal structure — a tree that, in essence, is rooting exact clones of itself upon itself. In human terms, it would be the equivalent of sprouting a smaller yet fully formed adult Robert Eisenbraun from my right shoulder, then a second clone from my right biceps and a third from my forearm, each maturing Eisenbraun in turn rooting its own Eisenbraun harvest, continuing several generations not only on my right shoulder, but from other points on my upper torso as well.
Redwood DNA also has built-in defense systems. Over the centuries, a few of the reiterated trunks will grow into one another, creating a bloated labyrinth of wood known as a “buttress.” These gnarled masses often form horizontal bridges in the crowns of the largest redwoods, which act like highway off-ramps — struts that strengthen the tree while forging bizarre trunk caves. In essence, a redwood is not just a tree, it is a self-perpetuating vertical landscape that can alter the chemical nature of the soil, dam and redistribute vast amounts of water within its trunk, all while reshaping the forest climate to suit its needs.
So enamored was I with redwood DNA that I had patterned GOLEM’s matrix after it.
As such, it was no surprise to find myself lost within an Omega-generated forest of giant sequoia, forced to scale one of the titans in order to reach the strange creature that had rescued me earlier.
Or not.
If this was truly a dream, why bother? If humanity no longer existed in my imagined Omega existence, why be humane? There were two rules in my dreamscape that were now well established; the first being pain. If injured I would feel it, the sensations registering in my brain’s neural centers as real. The second rule — no matter what my subconscious threw at me, I still controlled my responses to each challenge — I still possessed free will. If I didn’t want to risk my life to save the cephaloped, I didn’t have to. So what if the creature had saved me? It was my movie, after all — it was supposed to save me. I was man, created in God’s image — superior of intellect. What king would jeopardize his fiefdom to save an eight-legged servant?
My internal game of devil’s advocate didn’t play well with me. Dream or no dream, I would not succumb to the criminal actions that had sentenced humanity to the Great Die-Off just because I could get away with it. I refused to be apathetic to the suffering of another. I would save the creature that had saved me, or die trying.
First, of course, I needed to reach it.
Climbing a cliff face and climbing a redwood are two different challenges. A slate wall has grooves and hand
holds and ledges; a sequoia is essentially a slippery pole for the first half of the assault, in this case its first three hundred feet. You don’t “free-climb” a redwood, you shoot an arrow attached to fishing line and an acre of nylon rope over an upper limb, then secure the loop and pull yourself up using a combination of rigs and carabiners.
I had a steak knife, binoculars, and a torn jumpsuit.
Mother Nature is far from benign, and among trees, the redwood is considered an apex predator. Towering above other species, it will dominate its ecosystem by controlling the sun, using its shade to stagnate the growth of a neighboring tree or even kill it. It will drop a ten-ton buttress of wood upon any perceived challenger, delivering a deathblow in a territorial action known to botanists as “redwood bombing.”
Circling the clearing, I soon found what I was looking for.
The Douglas fir had been dead for quite some time, its wood petrified, its trunk split open by a redwood bomb. Its remains were leaning against the massive trunk of its executioner. Though it was still a good distance from the redwood I needed to reach, I believed that, given access to the canopy, I could forge a route among the treetops and buttresses that would lead me to my cephaloped companion … assuming, of course, it was my cephaloped companion calling out to me.
Working my way onto the Douglas fir’s partially uprooted trunk, I balanced myself atop the dead tree’s rotted remains, the trunk of which was listing at a thirty-degree angle. Bending at the waist, I began walking up the tree like a chimpanzee, gripping limbs and vines to secure a handhold.
Eight minutes later, I had gone as high as I dared. Nearly two hundred feet off the forest floor, I had run out of dead tree to climb.
The redwood’s midsection creaked as its treetops swayed gently against the blue sky, its lowest branch — forty feet above my reach — mocking my assault.
Redwoods are monoecious, possessing both male and female parts. The male organs, called strobili, are small conelike features that grow near branch tips; the female organs being rounded cones that are fertilized through grains of pollen that contain sperm cells. Both provided me with a potential means to reach the canopy.
Carefully inching my way along the uppermost branch of the Douglas fir, I reached out to the redwood’s trunk and a rounded female cone, testing the strength of the protrusion. When part of it flaked away in my palm, it released butterflies of fear in my stomach and I looked down … a big mistake.
First, my quadriceps began shaking, then my arms. Paralyzed in fear, I remained in place, summoning the courage to retreat.
The pan flute cry reached out to me. The creature was dying.
I reached up to another conelike growth. Sinking my fingertips deep into the strobili, I swung my left leg away from its Douglas fir perch, my bare toes searching the redwood bark for something to grip … slipping on bark and mushrooms until my foot came to rest on a burl — a benign growth — the size of a watermelon.
Restricting my vision to the trunk, I stepped away from the Douglas fir, both feet sharing the burl — a risky move. I hugged the redwood, feeling with my free hand for another knot, discovering instead a coarse vine. Relief washed aside my fears as I gripped the woodlike liana with both hands and pulled myself up, my feet walking the trunk — the cursed vine suddenly uncoiling from its growth, dropping me thirty heart-pounding feet, my palms sliding the final splinter-collecting, flesh-scorching few seconds before the brakes held fast.
“Shit damn, that hurts!” I was dangling from the rigid vine, my jumpsuit covered with a white frosting from a patch of wart lichen. I reset my feet and continued the climb, my muscles fueled more by anger than a desire to save the damn squid. I was sick of being afraid, sick of being in pain, sick of being stuck in a never-ending, cryogenic nightmare of existence … sick of—
“Made it!” Giddy with adrenaline, I sat down on a tree limb so incredibly wide I could have driven three eighteen-wheeler trucks on it side by side had it not been supporting another forest of redwoods. There were six of them in a row — giant fingers that traced deep long slow sways, each movement independent of the next, as if purging a prolonged immersed breath. These silo-wide trunks were rooted upon a solitary limb that followed a twenty-degree incline before disappearing into an oasis of green. And that was just one limb!
How best to describe the canopy? Easier, I think to describe me. I was Jack, transported by a beanstalk into the land of the giants — a human bug that had wandered into a cloud forest that seemed to defy gravity. Before me loomed a towering metropolis of bark, its gothic redwood spires disappearing into the heavens, its tree trunk columns fused together at different levels by a never-ending network of branches, some of which twisted like taffy while others arched in magnificent curves that would have shamed any roller coaster. These avenues of gray forged a labyrinth skeleton — a seemingly endless maze that was cloaked in greenery that hung in five-story sheets — curtains of leaf as thick as my wrist, segregating countless domains of unbridled nature waiting to be discovered.
Pulling aside one sheath, I exposed a backyard of huckleberry bushes that were growing wild out of a crater-size hollowed stump. For five minutes I fed off a single purple berry cluster that was as large as a grapefruit and as sweet as a ripe mango. I stopped when the pan flute summoned me from my meal.
The sound seemed weaker, more desperate. I moved toward it, forging a path across a rainforest of alien gigantism. Butterflies as large as dinner plates attempted to light on me, the color of their wings changing with each fanning flap as I pushed my way through hanging gardens of epiphytes — plants growing atop plants, forged from fern mats that served as habitats for aquatic crustaceans known as copepods. Layers of rainwater-drenched soil had accumulated over eons in the redwoods’ crotches, supporting blueberry bushes and strawberry thickets and assorted fruit trees that had grown hundreds of feet tall.
I worked my way along a ninety-foot branch that served as a bridge between two ground-rooted redwoods. It looked like lightning had split the bark down the middle. The exposed center brimmed with turquoise-green moss as soft as goose down. Entering the next canopy, I was greeted by a rotted stump from a reiterated redwood that had fallen long ago. The crater-size remains had filled with rainwater to become a wading pool six feet deep and forty feet across. To my surprise, the redwood pond was filled with islands of pads and toads the size of a catcher’s mitt whose heads turned crimson whenever their throats expanded. Incredibly, there were also fish in the stump — at least I thought they were fish until they suddenly flew out of the redwood pond and flitted about like birds, shaking water from their rigid tropically colored pectoral wings, their barracudalike mouths coveting tadpoles the size of my foot. After a few passes overhead, the creatures perched on their tail fins on the rim of the hollowed out stump like crows on a fence.
The caves began on a different level of the redwood crown, six stories higher than my entry point onto the second tree. They had no doubt been created by lightning strikes, the fires burning for weeks, perhaps months. A redwood is too big and too wet to burn down. It simply isolates the fire by rerouting its internal water supply through a network of microscopic vessels known as the xylem. If a Northern California redwood could generate two million pascals of negative pressure to suck water from its roots up its trunk over tens of miles of branches, I could not imagine the forces necessary to redirect water throughout these behemoth tree forests.
There were three caves. Two were located in the roots of a harvest of reiterated redwoods that had sprouted from a massive U-shaped branch as wide as a highway off-ramp; the third had been burnt into the side of a three-story buttress.
Moving to the edge of the limb, I looked down upon the clearing where I had stood nearly an hour ago. I quickly approximated the drop to be in excess of three hundred feet and, feeling dizzy, backed away.
I had found my way to the source of the distress call, now I needed to find the distressed.
The opening to the first fire ca
ve resembled a ten-foot-high birth canal. Slipping inside, I was greeted by an off-putting blue-cheese smell. The interior walls were spongy and scorched black from the fire, the chamber as large as my family’s old living room. Brown salamanders tinged with golden specks scampered by my feet, the amphibians feeding off blind pink earthworms they had exposed in the cave soil.
No cephaloped.
Nor was there one in the second cave.
Then I heard it, and hurried to the third cave, a far larger hollow burnt into a buttress that could have been featured in a Grimm’s fairy tale.
“Oh, God…”
The trap, concealed within the spongy walls of the cave, had sprung the moment the cephaloped had entered. Clam-shaped, constructed of an aero gel polymer vented with quarter-size holes, the pod had slammed so quickly it had sliced off one of the cephaloped’s tentacles just above the fin.
My heart pounded with excitement. Someone … something had used a technology that rivaled my own to construct this trap.
Those thoughts were tempered as I regarded the caged squid. Terrified, it lay curled in a fetal position in a green pool of its own blood. Looking up at me, it appeared to panic.
“Don’t worry, Oscar. I’ll get you out of that thing.” I reached for its center seam — and suddenly my head burst in an explosion of purple lights as an electrical charge flung me outside the cave and nearly over the edge of the redwood’s main limb.
For several minutes I remained on my back, stunned. “What the hell was that?”
ELECTRICAL SHOCK. FIFTEEN THOUSAND VOLTS. RUNNING LEVEL THREE DIAGNOSTIC … RECALCULATING—
“ABE!”
CHRONOMETER … RECALCULATING. AMINO ACID LEVELS — OFF. BLOOD GLUCOSE LEVELS — OFF. SEROTONIN—
“Hold diagnostic.” Regaining my feet, I limped back to the cave. “ABE, analyze that specimen cage and determine how I can open it without harming the creature inside.”
CHRONOMETER … RECALCULATING.