He’d never been to New Burlton before—only fascinated by what he’d heard in the media—yet something about it struck Ben as familiar. Maybe it was the set of doors made to look like the gibbous moon. Or, rather, like the Earth rising above the horizon of the moon in an old photograph from the early days of space flight. The effect was heightened by the fact that the entire back wall of the Center was, in fact, a mural of the Earth as viewed from space.
Ben swung open a heavy door and they walked inside. Despite being underground, the Information Center was bright enough. Three skylights dropped natural light from above, augmenting the brightness that poured in from the great half circle arch of the front entry. The warm wood interior looked like a gift shop at any national park, monument, or museum.
The clerk behind the counter was a young woman dressed in simple, comfortable, earth-tone clothing. She rented Cherise and Ben augmented reality glasses programmed with audio-tour commentaries and overlay visuals. As the woman demonstrated the features of the AR glasses, Cherise struck Ben as uninterested in the extreme.
Walking to the back of the underground building, they exited by way of a long shallow ramp that sloped upward into the modified forest preserve that was New Burlton. Ben was stunned by the vista that greeted them as they came again into the open air. Before him stood something like a cross between a redwood grove and an apartment complex. Bulging tree-rooms grew out of the redwood trunks in great burls—at various heights, from the ground nearly to the treetops. Fronted with porthole windows and round doors, the arboreal living spaces were connected by long hempen bridges and causeways.
“Welcome to New Burlton,” the tour guide intoned from the speakers in their AR headsets, “where homes really do grow on trees! An experimental community of the Sempervirens Project, demonstrating an alternative way of life—”
Cherise rolled her eyes. The motion shut up the recorded tour guide and silenced the narrative on Ben’s glasses, too. He glanced at her with clear irritation.
“Oh, sorry,” Cherise said. “I didn’t realize we were linked.”
“That’s okay,” Ben said, relaxing and smiling in spite of himself. “No interest in touring an ‘experimental community’ today? It’s been getting a lot of media play lately.”
“I was here with Jaron once, on a University tour, even before it opened. It was his idea. One of the last things we did together. Didn’t you notice the entrance to the Information Center?”
“I thought it looked familiar,” Ben said, “but I couldn’t place it.”
“In his holo-cast, the vault doors beneath the Tree of Knowledge are based on it.”
“Oh. That explains it. On a tour, you said? Your campus is a sponsor, then?”
“Yes, but while I was serving in the academic senate, I opposed funding the project,” Cherise said, in what Ben thought was a haughty voice.
“Really? Why?”
“There are far more relevant projects for my campus to put its money into than an Ewok Ecotopia or Happy Hippy Hobbiton. But don’t mind me. I don’t claim to be objective about this place. I’ll just shut up and disconnect from the shared-view mode. Walk around and judge for yourself.”
Ben did so, moving among the forest alleys, staring up at the interconnected shops and residences of the treetop village. Cherise hung back a few paces behind him.
“—Sempervirens Project, headed by Doctor Robert Felton, purchased this privately owned stand of eighty-year-old redwoods, which was slated for timber harvest. As an alternative to felling the trees, Doctor Felton envisioned locating human habitats within the living trees themselves. Biotechnically extending the natural tendency of redwoods to form large growths called burls, Sempervirens bioengineers were able to coax the trees of this grove to produce, with unprecedented rapidity, uncommonly large, hollow burls suitable for human living spaces.”
Ben rolled his eyes upward to pause the commentary, and turned to Cherise.
“Are you up for hiking to the Treetop Craftshop? It looks like we get the best view of everything from up there.”
The two of them stared at a spiralling rope-ladder stairway. It wound its way up to and around huge burl-room bulges, before disappearing into the crown of a particularly tall and massive tree.
“Why not?” Cherise said. “I’ve managed it before—I can do it again. I thought you might be planning some kind of athletic adventure. Isn’t that why you had me buy this backpack, complete with a three-liter water reservoir and a slurp tube?”
“Not exactly.”
“Uh, oh. Why do I have a feeling I’m not going to like where this is headed?”
“No comment.”
Cherise frowned, then—seeming to get the idea—frowned still more deeply. She shook her head as they began climbing. Ben opted to continue the program as they climbed, so he flashed his eyes twice to the right and the narration resumed.
“—creating spaces in the cambium layer of the burls, Sempervirens bioengineers have been able to embed windows and doors into and among the tree-rooms, without significantly disrupting the food-transporting phloem and vascular xylem channels in the great trees. The result is the prototype community of New Burlton, a grove supporting two hundred residential and business units without requiring the removal of a single redwood. Here, you cannot see the town for the trees, because the town is the trees.”
The tour guide’s narrative paused. Idly, Ben switched channels with his eyes.
“—New Burlton’s resource sustainability—” Double-blink.
“—incorporates techniques ranging from compass rose to feng shui approaches—” Double-blink.
“—solar-powered composting toilets—” Double-blink. “—graywater and recycling loops for arboricultural and epiphytic hydroponic food production—” Double-blink.
Double-blink.
Double-blink.
“This biotechnically homegrown hometown,” the tour guide continued, “is actually three multi-tree ‘towns.’ Each one is essentially a temporary encampment. To prevent strain on individual trees or groups of trees, no tree town is occupied for more than four months at a time.”
“They’re seminomadic, then?” Ben asked, seeing that Cherise was eavesdropping now.
“I suppose so,” she said. They stopped atop a burl shaved and planed to make a platform, a rest station on their trek up the spiral stairway. “If that’s the case, then the entire population of this ‘community’ is probably less than one hundred people. This whole grove, so much money, all for so few people!”
She must have sensed that she was back on her soapbox again. She abruptly shut up and gestured for him to continue, which Ben gladly did.
“—vision, hazily foreshadowed in Rainbow Gatherings, Temporary Autonomous Zones, Burning Man festivals, and the like,” the tour guide said. Ben and Cherise moved onward and upward on their stairway into the heavens. “Doctor Felton’s work at New Burlton stands in stark contrast to the intensely urbanized and machine-identified future advocated by his staunchest opponents, the cyborg materialists.”
“Sounds like something out of bad science fiction,” Ben said with a roll of his eyes, pausing the narration.
“It does, doesn’t it?” Cherise said. “Actually, though, they’re a school of academic theorists—pretty important, too, especially in the humanities.”
Ben nodded and restarted the narration.
“The Sempervirens Project, however, is only one of many visionary organizations working toward the harmonizing of human culture with the needs and demands of nature’s wild-scape—”
Ben paused the program again as they reached the viewing platform atop the great final burl of the Treetop Craftshop.
“I’m sorry,” the proprietor, a red-haired, red-bearded, ponytailed giant of a man, said to Ben and Cherise. “You’ll have to check your backpacks if you’re going to come inside. Don’t worry. I can watch them from here.”
“I guess we’d better do as this burly fellow commands,” Ben said, ch
uckling as Cherise groaned at his pun. “Nothing to fear—I figured this would happen.”
Cherise looked at him with furrowed brow as he removed his pack, but followed his example and took her pack off, too, leaving it beside Ben’s on a burlwood bench just outside the door. But they lingered before entering the shop. Gazing out over the grove, they saw and felt the wind pick up, blowing through the trees, causing the observation platform to sway. Distant clouds, beginning to blow onshore, proclaimed the first big storm front of the winter rainy season. Standing in that wind, Ben could appreciate the hemp-rope “safety railings” that were strung about the platform.
“This place,” Cherise said, going into a fists-up fighter’s stance, then staggering as if punch-drunk, “always reminds me of a boxing ring.”
“I was thinking more of sailors in crow’s nests, myself,” Ben said. “Those guys in nineteenth-century clipper ships must have felt the whole world swaying like this. The ropes are like a ship’s rigging.”
“That’s the problem,” Cherise said, studying the undulating tree canopy around and below them. “There’s no clear guideline for what New Burlton means. For the tech-types it’s got bleeding-edge bioscience. For the eco-types, it’s a redwood grove that dodged the axe.”
Ben nodded. It was true: from up here it was hard to see any human habitation at all. Turning their backs to the wind, the two of them entered the shop.
“Clearly, you don’t believe in this place the way Jaron did….”
“No,” Cherise said, picking up a redwood tchotchke carved in the shape of a bear. Her expression was somewhere between a scowl and a thoughtful reminiscence. “Jaron was too naive to follow the concept through to its logical endpoint.”
Ben only half heard, and pretended not to have heard at all. He and Cherise wandered through the shop, picking up and putting down various carved and woven items. This quickly grew old, and they stepped back outside. Ben shoved aside the backpacks and took a seat on the bench.
“What do you mean, logical endpoint?”
“Jaron really thought what they’re doing here was viable,” Cherise said, sitting down, her gaze still focused outward among the crowns of the redwoods. “I don’t.”
“Why?”
“History. Politics. Economics. Religion. Look, there’s something I should have told you after I lit into you that day. Accused you of being a spy.”
“What?” Ben asked, cautious now. He didn’t want to have to endure the Wrath of Cherise again.
“In my evil younger days,” she said, “through various family connections, I served briefly as what the CIA calls a ‘casual.’”
“Which is…?” Ben asked, caution giving way to curiosity.
“An occasional field operative with a perfectly legitimate cover for wherever I happened to be,” she said, “for whatever I was supposedly there to do. It was easy money, and a chance to travel. I didn’t think writing a report or two would do any harm. Maybe I got so touchy about this whole mess because, in some ways, I’m as entangled as you or Jaron with the powers-that-be.” When she looked at him, Ben nodded, but said nothing. “I’m not proud of my ‘casual’ past, but it cured me of a good deal of my naivete. I’ve seen enough not to really trust anyone.”
“Including the people who run this place?”
“Yeah. Do you think for a minute that, if these Sempervirens people ever came to power, they’d be talking about ‘choosing’ this and ‘voluntarily’ doing that? Not a chance. They wouldn’t be happy until they had us all living in the trees—by any means necessary.”
Ben laughed, despite himself. “Still, I’d like to believe in what they’re doing here, too—”
“‘Belief’ is the problem!” Cherise said, looking into the distance, where skies were darkening rapidly. “You know how many people have killed and died as a result of believing? This country started out a constitutional republic, but now we’re the de facto Christian States of America, because some good religious folks put God in the Pledge of Allegiance and on the pennies. Well, I don’t want any part of it. I refuse to enslave myself to a belief in God, or Goddess, or Great Cthulhu. Or Nature, or ‘scientific objectivity,’ or ‘spirit,’ or ‘transcendence,’ for that matter.”
“Or Mind with a capital M?” Ben asked with a sidelong glance.
“Damned right. Once we get rid of all the old superstitions, we’ll realize that Nature is really just sex and death, and God is really just us. I don’t believe in any ‘grand narrative’ of what we’re all about.”
Ben looked out over the grove, feeling the tree creak and sway beneath his feet, thinking of the melange of religious references he had encountered in Jaron’s notes—everything from Buddhism and Taoism to Manchu shamanism and Kabbalism.
“I see your point, but I guess I’d say that the source of the killing, of the atrocities, isn’t God or Goddess, but organized religion.”
“It’s the same thing,” Cherise said with a shrug.
“But if there is no God,” Ben countered, sorting it out in his own mind as he went, “if God is really just us, then whatever religion has done wasn’t in the service of God, but in the service of Man. And materialism and atheism stand condemned by their own argument.”
“What do you mean?” Cherise asked, eyeing him skeptically.
“Materialism as a belief system has nowhere to go,” Ben said, “except to acknowledge that the atrocities it accuses religion of are in fact its own. You mentioned how many have died in the name of God, but how many die, or worse, as a result of the pursuit of material goods?”
“Nonsense! You’ve been reading too much from Jaron’s stuff. He suffered from the diseases of Western metaphysics—and apparently they’re catching.”
“Oh? And what are the symptoms?”
“The rhetoric of praise and blame and guilt,” Cherise replied, “and an especially unhealthy obsession with selfhood and the individual.”
Armed with Jaron’s notes, as well as his own thoughts, Ben was very much enjoying the chance to bandy big questions with an intelligent and—undeniably—physically attractive woman. Something dangerous about her, too. Suppressing idle speculations about what it might be like to make love with her, Ben launched what he thought was a good counterargument.
“But isn’t dissolving the individual ‘I’ into the social ‘We’ a form of self-hatred?” Ben asked.
“If the self is a social construct, a corporate illusion,” Cherise replied, “then there is no self to hate or be hated. No soul to be saved or condemned.”
He wondered at her contradictions and inconsistencies, and at his own. How did she manage to hate politics, yet venerate society? To hate the idea of individuality, yet continue to mourn the loss of an individual named Jaron Kwok?
Then he thought of his own mourning for Reyna, the guilt he felt at how much he enjoyed the company of Kimberly the stripper, and the fact that he was flirting, at least intellectually, with Cherise, much the same way that classics professor had at the memorial. Too clearly, the problems of contradiction and inconsistency weren’t exclusive to Cherise.
“So the world is a better place if we replace Divinity with Society?” he asked quizzically. “Substituting a TV set in the living room for the icon of the Blessed Virgin Mary that used to be there—that’s supposed to be our great leap forward?”
“I have long since stopped believing in ‘great leaps forward,’” she said, standing abruptly and looking away, beyond the trees. “You’ve got to free yourself from that kind of grand-narrative argument, if you don’t want to end up in disappointment and despair.”
Ben rose to his feet more slowly. “Isn’t the denial of grand narratives itself a grand narrative?”
“Fine, then,” she said, turning back to him sharply. “So how would you break the cycle of corruption and destruction?”
Ben looked out on the trees and thought a moment before answering. He found that some of what Cherise said reminded him of discussions he had had with Reyna. He
thought of Kwok’s holo-cast, too, with He and She and their philosophical discussions accentuated by eclipses and explosions. Maybe that said something about the kind of discussions Jaron and Cherise used to have when they were married. Ben was glad to note that nothing more apocalyptic than a rainstorm was working its way onshore.
“We need to escape from the religion of materialism which venerates the physical, but denigrates the intangible,” Ben said at last. “Escape, too, from the religion of antimaterialism which venerates the intangible, but denigrates the physical.”
“That’s just more compromising crap,” Cherise said, shaking her head. “Like Jaron in his last days. Half-assed Buddhist detachment applied to politics—‘The Left is too self-righteous, the Right is too smug about who gets left behind’—I loathe it more than ever.”
“Why?”
“Because Jaron’s dead. And where did his apolitical approach get him? Ground to nothing between the millstones of politics! And you’ll never have enough data, or information, or enough knowledge, or wisdom, to bring him back. So much for ‘intangibles’ and ‘religions’!”
Ben didn’t know what to say to that. He was surprised to find Cherise wiping tears from her eyes. He wanted to comfort her, but didn’t know how.
Remembering how hollow it had felt when friends tried to comfort him after Reyna died, he decided the best thing he could do would be to stand and witness to it in silence. As he stood and waited, though, he had the uncomfortable feeling that this whole time, when he thought they’d been discussing Big Religion, Big Science, and Big Government, they’d really been discussing something else, at least as far as Cherise was concerned.
“At the core,” he said quietly, reaching out to touch her shoulder, “religion, science, government, they’re all supposed to be searching for something. Jaron was searching, too. For truth, for justice—”
“—and the Middle-American Way?” Cherise asked bitterly. She shrugged off his hand, then snatched up the nearer of the two backpacks. “No thanks, Superman. I’ll carry as much as I can, but keep the rest of your kryptonite to yourself.”
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