Improbable Botany

by Wayward

  They landed on Shard Island, a place ragged with green hair, with the sun a barely discernable disk behind dark smog. The heat made them sweat. Manta rays patrolled beneath the waves, and there were great swarms of monster jellyfish.

  So began the task of planting.

  Their silver birch and ash trees rivalled the Shard in height, blocking the roof of the building, so that a person could squeeze between the algae-covered trunks and the island shore, but nothing else could pass. Chervil, his bandana green-stained, stepped back to consider their handiwork.

  “Good morning betula,” he said. “There will be more of you now that dawn has come. Fraxinus, quercus, ilex, sorbus, ulmus… all you bringers of oxygen! Rise up and eat.”

  He turned around.

  Their plan was at last in motion.

  Huw watched as the smoke cleared and the waters receded. In due course the streets of London were exposed, albeit now choked with a multitude of trees, bushes and shrubs, with Thamesia reduced to its normal level and freed of weeds. The heat diminished, as though the sun was setting after a hot summer day. Fae pulled on a cardigan, and Huw rolled down the sleeves of his shirt.

  Later the rest of Kewpol arrived, assembling at St Giles Circus to hear what next they had to do. Soon everyone was building vats from the remains of old houses and vehicles, covering them with sod from the now sky-high green islands. Then began the work of chopping down the trees and bushes, all of which were fed into the vats and set alight. With each vat full and burning, it only remained to close all ingress points for oxygen and ensure the sod lids were airtight, so that the wood inside could convert into charcoal.

  At length, great piles of frost-limned charcoal began to amass at the entrances to the underground stations, transported there in horse-pulled carts. Across the city every tube entrance was a blur of activity, as people hauled the charcoal into the underground itself, sequestering it where once trains had run, packing it into the tunnels as tightly as they could. And so a network of charcoal seams was created, following the exact plan of the London Underground. In this way the smoke was taken out of London’s active cycle and put beyond use.

  Huw pulled a scarf around his neck and put on his gloves. Fae and Chervil, both grinning, followed suit, their breath pluming white in the air. They ascended the Shard by way of vines, climbing, resting, then continuing their ascent until they neared the top. So high, the verdancy had changed to stunted pines, hardy thistles and other tough plants. The bitter wind excoriated their skin, turned Huw’s beard white.

  Fae turned to face north west.

  “What’s that coming down the Chilterns?” she asked.

  Huw looked. He could not be sure in the fading light, but it appeared to be a gigantic wall of ice.

  TRICIA SULLIVAN

  Who Lived in a Tree

  I expected my new owner to be young, sprouting vines from her shoulders and elbows. Sometimes the new generation have flowers in their hair. Not this one. Her aura was devoid of cogs and her boiler suit was plain, mindless cloth.

  She was carrying a tool box.

  I sensed her as far off as the road. The box bumped her thigh as she struggled along the hedge rampant with blackbirds, past the church spire and through the rusted gate that would seem old to her but not to me — it had only been around for 500 years. When she came upon me she set the tool box down and put her hands on her hips. We took stock of one another.

  The tool box was made of dead birch and it contained instruments of the sort that people once employed to kill us and make us into the bones of dead houses. I remembered the builders, their tools, the sawdust. I remembered the children born in the dead wood contrivances of brick and wattle and artificial light. Builders had taken the oaks but they left me unharmed because I was the guardian of their own dead. Even now my roots milked the bones in the churchyard; my leaves had been turning light into sweetness for two thousand years.

  My owner squinted up at me, sharp little waves of chestnut skin lifting into folds around her eyes. Her lips peeled back to form a clean protuberant smile as she brushed my foliage aside, stepping in among the exposed knobs of my root system. She laid her sturdy hand on my bark.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” she said. “I’m Chika. Your new tenant. Well, freeholder, actually. I hope this won’t be too awkward. I know you can’t understand me, but I feel I should talk to you all the same. You may not be smart now, but you will be.”

  Hmm.

  “The thing is, I’m just going to Join you up, yeah?”

  Join me? A familiar refrain.

  She climbed inside my cleft and settled down on my new bench with a weary air. With an effort, she dragged up a set of cogs so outdated I barely recognised them. She pulled her personal reality around her like an invisible blanket. The obsolete cogs strained as she leaned into the Green and checked her messages, most of which seemed to come from her grandchildren. It was clear from the messages that she was not supposed to be here, but in Lambeth. She didn’t let that faze her. She had a hot pack full of tea and while she was drinking she noticed the signature code that Orvil had left in my wood, last time the council tried to Join me.

  Of course she called Orvil up. He was working in Richmond, settling a dispute between the Green and an avenue of willows seeking political autonomy. He didn’t have flowers in his hair, either; he had veins of silvery cog traffic splayed across his clay-red skull advertising his skill as a Joiner. They seemed to know each other.

  “I just bought the Totteridge Yew at auction,” Chika said. “I see you tried to Join her. What went wrong?”

  “Everything,” answered Orvil. “She’s a stubborn old root. When the congregation relocated to a smart building they wanted her Joined, but we couldn’t do nothing with her. They were disappointed. Still, it’s odd. I never thought they’d sell a relic like that.”

  Chika angled her head, noticing the church and the graves as though for the first time.

  “The auction people didn’t mention the church. Just said the yew was a fixer-upper.”

  He laughed. “Never trust an estate agent, darling! That old yew is no fixer-upper. I tried, believe me. She’s just too old to change. She’ll never make a smart house for anything but birds.”

  Chika’s lips trembled; she was suffering from some age-related palsy or other.

  “I hope you didn’t pay too much,” Orvil said.

  She ran her fingertips over my bark in a consolatory fashion. “She was a steal.”

  “Good. Chalk it up, then, and move on, love.”

  “Rather I should live here than someone who doesn’t care.”

  “Darling. Don’t forget who you’re talking to. I seen your stats. I know how old you are.”

  Chika made a sour face. “The grandchildren want to put me in one of those new vine-houses, down in Lambeth. Medical surveillance. The ones as monitor your every fart for your own protection.”

  “Kids worry for you,” Orvil said.

  “They want me out of their hair,” Chika answered. “And I will be, out here. I just want to keep my independence. I thought I’d do one last Join, and then I’d have my own little habitat, nothing fancy but when you look up you can see the stars. When the time comes, that’s how I’d like to go.”

  Orvil swung his head from side to side in regret.

  “Why didn’t you check with me first?” he said. “Do you want me to contact the agent and get them to refund you?”

  She seemed to wilt at his assumption. She was old. He thought she couldn’t look after herself. Thought her mind was going. And what if it was?

  “Don’t write me off just yet,” she said, and clipped the connection while he was still bothering to look chagrined.

  ~

  From The Ficus Joiners Handbook, Introduction

  The Joining of buildings using growth accelerators allows the mother Ficus to use their structure and reconfigure their function to provide a networked, intelligent version of the desired habitat. Within urban en
vironments this can be achieved with minimal collateral damage to local vegetation provided that existing commons, greenwalls, and other first-generation pollution control measures are strictly conserved (see Section 7.4). However, as the Ficus mother-daughter system spreads concentrically into Outer London where plant life exists side by side with architecture there are often difficult judgement calls to be made.

  Joining of a living tree requires germination in the branches and hollows of the existing site. Engineered wasps may be used to facilitate this process. Alternatively, planting of Ficus seeds can be performed manually by a skilled Joiner. This is usually effective and sometimes results in a symbiosis between the original tree and the mother Ficus.

  Rarely, Joinlings fail to establish even after persistent efforts. This is thought to be an indication of problems with the host. A dying tree that resists Joining to the Green may be removed or converted to other uses. Other uses may be defined as: storage; structural materials harvesting; interim housing; scientific study; or other high-priority needs to be determined.

  ~

  Chika’s weight in my branches was a joke. There was nothing to her. She made herself busy trying to find a way to make me Join the Green.

  “So they think you’re dying and that’s why you can’t Join. Who wouldn’t want to Join? It’s such a big enhancement, right? So if you’re not Joining then by definition you must be dying.” Chika snorted. Then she said, “Where have I heard that logic before?”

  She’d pitched a tent among the gravestones. She was energetic, but kept forgetting what she was doing and having to start over. Sometimes she’d be seized by anxiety. She’d run to the gate and shout imprecations into the empty road, beyond. Warning off imaginary people.

  At least half the time she was all right. And she knew what she was about better than Orvil ever had. She inserted additional Joining shoots because she hoped in her heart of hearts that she could succeed where so many had failed. And she talked to me as she worked.

  “I been doing this a lot of years but I never tried Joining new wood to old,” she said. “I usually work with brick. With the right accelerators, Mama Ficus and her daughters can take over a building in a couple of years, but you... well, if you grew that fast you’d have taken over most of the country by now.”

  Chika put her hand on my bark as though reassured by the fact that I couldn’t move.

  “As an apprentice I worked on Canary Wharf,” she told me. “All them mirrored panels. That tower used to stand there like it was waiting for a spaceship to land. It came from a future that’s never going to happen. Just a fantasy — what did they used to call them? A folly. All that steel and glass, just follies. And we had to go up on ropes like window-washers to put the Joining seeds in place, because they need to sprout up in the canopy of the urban jungle. We had to find little cracks in the edges of the panels. I was scared witless at those heights, and people were mad at us for what we did. They heckled us for wasting resources. They said the Green couldn’t take over a building that big. But the Ficus rooted down in the concrete, she did. She put out her shoots and she grew and week by week the windows went dark and her stems curled round the building. Hand in glove it was, by the end. Have you seen it, Canary Wharf… ? What am I saying — course you haven’t. Well, the place looks odd now. Half-plant, half skyscraper. Clever as they come, though, hooked into the Green.”

  She squinted up through my branches and added, “That’s supposed to be a sales pitch, by the way.”

  She was talking to me as if she expected a reply. She was right up in among my branches, crawling around on and under me, feeling my bark, smelling my leaves, noticing me. Birds objected, sometimes.

  “You’re something else, you are,” she told me. “Look at all these little twigs, sprouting out of you every which way. The way your bark seems to flow like the ocean; how many years did it take to make those waves? You’re a patient one. Why would you quit now? You’re not dying. But you won’t Join. So what’s it all about, then?”

  What is it all about, indeed?

  I’ve lost track of my seasons and my seed. The cloud tracks on the sky are different every moment of every year. In one way or another every photon the sun sheds on me accrues in my wood. I turn dying sunlight into living bloom. I make it solid.

  What else does it have to be about, apart from that. I ask you.

  ~

  Chika’s grandchild came on Green transport, looking aggravated at the effort. People used to walk everywhere; then they built conveyances and got fat. Lately they’ve taken to swinging from branch to branch like their distant ancestors, gliding on ziplines, sleek and graceful. They get tetchy when confronted with motors and dumb fields and buckled pavements. Surrounded by living sentience, they lose patience with the stupid blindness of the Earth. So the granddaughter stood in the churchyard bunching her fingers and rocking from foot to foot. It wasn’t the grave stones that made her uneasy, but the absence of the Green with its intelligent surround. Without her social relationships and information feeds, the constant handclasp of belonging, she was naked and alone.

  Chika embraced the young woman with great enthusiasm. She wanted to show her “progress” on me. She had built a sleeping platform in my branches; she was a decent carpenter and her work placed no strain on my boughs. I’d let her do it, ignoring the plaintive calls of the Joinlings that Chika laid on me like prayers, just as I ignored the litter of forgotten tea bags that accumulated in my hollows. I had no intention of Joining to the Green.

  “Look,” Chika said to the girl. “Here’s my power supply. Here’s my rainwater catch. These are my feeds.”

  “But Gran, how are you going to live in a house with no Green?”

  “Hadya, you got to remember when I grew up there was no Green. Mama Ficus was a concept on somebody’s screen. A citywide, intelligent tree didn’t exist.”

  The young woman recoiled a little, her beautiful plump mouth twisting for a moment. She knew very well there had been a London before the Green. She knew about the grey town with its Underground and its stone edifices. But that London had never been real to her. A little desperately, she said, “Who will take care of you? In Lambeth there are specialized communities. Homes that are alive. The plants sense you. Even the walls and floors are intelligent. It’s like being in a big friendly house that talks back.”

  “It’s all right for some,” said the old woman, “But I don’t have enough cogs to make the most of that kind of set up.”

  “We could get you cogs, maybe not all of them, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a few, would it?”

  I could see the strain around Hadya’s eyes, the tension that said she really wanted to pick her grandmother up and shake her. Wanted Chika to be someone else; someone sweet; someone pliant. Someone not so bloody old.

  “When your mother was small I was the whole world to her,” Chika said. “And you, too, when you came along. We were a total surround, just like the Green around and within and above and below London. Now you’ve grown a bit, you forget this. You just have to improve everybody and fix them. I’m not perfect but I am doing all right. I didn’t ask you to interfere.”

  “We don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Then I may as well be dead,” Chika snapped. Her smile was gone. I felt the wood of her heart, thumping. She was hard on the inside, her cogs jammed and sticking, and all the sunlight in the world couldn’t help with that.

  “Get out of here,” she said suddenly. “Don’t bother coming if you’re going to talk like that to me. Ungrateful. Inconsiderate. You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know.”

  Hadya’s tail was between her legs as she went. If her tail is real, which it may or may not be. You never can tell, these days.

  ~

  I remember the Green when it was modest, unassuming. It began in the canyons of CO2-eating walls and rooftop gardens, in smudges of botany on the grey face of the stubborn town. It began as a brave flicker because people still tho
ught plants were mindless.

  The Green has crept over London like the smoke of industry once did. Instead of soot it leaves intelligence seeded in the cracks left by architecture and afterthought. Engineers think they created Mama Ficus and her cohort, fools for causality that they are. We could just as easily say that She was destined to come into being, that humans have done no more for the Green than wasps did for Her primal ancestors, carrying pollen like good workers. Like their wasp counterparts humans reap their rewards blind to the larger implications of Her being.

  I am not blind. I was here before the first engine. I chat with the Sun. And I see where this whole affair is going. There is a reason why the Green coddles people in buildings permeable to their wishes and contrived around their dreams. Multiple choice quiz: a) It is because the Green was built to do this. (b) It is because the Green loves them. (c) It is because the Green is using them for its own ends. (d) All of the above.

  Mama Ficus is a mystery. She is growing consciousness out into the unknown. She has no idea what she really is.

  ~

  The next morning brought a familiar drizzle. Wet spiderwebs glittered between tilted gravestones and long grass. Chika had a cold. She hunched over a mug of tea in her sleeping bag.

  “There’s no milk,” she grumbled. “If you were a smart tree you could’ve ordered me some.”

  She was watching the Joining readouts out of the edges of her eyes, hoping I would respond. Baiting me. She’d already laid every kind of incentive into my wood, places where all I had to do was admit a little bit of the Green into my tissue, and I’d be rewarded with higher consciousness. I never went for it. Not once.

  “You are a stubborn one,” she sighed. Then her head came up. She’d heard the footsteps.