by John Helfers
What Sarah was thinking, in reflecting on her dead grandma’s foolish optimism was that because she was going to die so much younger than her aged relative, she didn’t yet have a single blood relative in any of the Human Forests. Two of her grandparents had missed out on the opportunity because they’d been late victims of the Ecocatastrophe; the other two were still alive, along with both her parents—who’d each passed on their dodgy genes to her without having to take the hit themselves. She would be the first—but she would be the first, no matter what Alan’s itchy trigger finger launched against her by way of oppositional bluster.
‘‘Planting is not an option!’’ Alan howled—at Dr. Harkness, not at Sarah, he being far the more convenient target. ‘‘You will not add insult to injury by trying to persuade my wife that she’ll feel better about dying if she buys into this crazy, stupid idea that people can live on as trees. It’s ecological mysticism of the worst possible sort, and of all the lunatics the Ecocatastrophe flushed out, the Foresters are absolutely the worst. You’re supposed to be a man of science, for God’s sake! How dare you pollute your pathetic, puerile, and pusillanimous advice with that kind of shit?’’
Sarah was able to take a certain perverse pride in the fact that her beloved husband could still find opportunities for the alliterative three-part lists that had such a fine rhetorical effect on juries, even while he was reacting to a sentence of death passed on his wife—although it was, of course, in mid-rant that he usually had to deploy such weaponry. What she tried to focus her green-steeped thoughts upon, however, was the first sentence of his tirade, which assumed and asserted that she couldn’t and wouldn’t feel any better about the inevitability of death if she opted to be planted.
Her internal jury wasn’t going to fall for that one. The simple fact was that she could and she would, and Sarah knew that what remained of her life’s work would be the task of persuading Alan to see, recognize, and understand that fact—not so much for his sake, but because she would need his support to ensure that the kids could take what comfort they could from her metamorphosis.
She didn’t say so in Dr. Harkness’ office, though; it wasn’t the time or the place. She saved herself for the journey home. She knew that she wouldn’t be any more comfortable in the car, but at least she’d have the benefit of temporary privacy, with no third parties at whom Alan would be tempted to make speeches.
The car’s sensors decided that Alan was too overadrenalinized to drive. Sarah was still under the automatic ban imposed on anyone taking diamorphine on a regular basis, although it seemed to her that her pain was nowadays so Rimsky-Korsakovian that the diamorphine had become impotent. It was the automatic pilot, therefore, that guided them out of the underground lot and on to the Neogymnosperm-lined highway that led back to the Halo. The fact that he didn’t have to watch the road freed up Alan’s attention, but it certainly didn’t improve his temper. He kept his hands on the wheel even thought it wasn’t under his control, gripping it so tightly it seemed that he was fighting every twitch and turn.
‘‘I’m going to do it, Alan,’’ she told him, in her best soothing tone. ‘‘I’m sorry that I haven’t talked to you about it before, but I knew how you’d react.’’
He did react, at some length. Sarah waited for the gale to blow itself out, while she endured a Mussorgskian night on a bare mountain.
‘‘It’s not up for discussion,’’ she said, eventually. ‘‘It’s my choice and it’s made. Your part is to reconcile yourself to it and make the best of it. I called the Foresters from the hospital when I went to the rest-room and made an appointment for someone to call tomorrow night.’’
The blast was feeble this time, the backlash no worse than Tchaikovsky.
‘‘It’s Jeanie and Mike we have to think of now,’’ Sarah insisted. ‘‘It’s going to be hard for them, and it’s up to both of us to do everything we can to make it better. You have to back me up, Alan. You have to give me your blessing, no matter how much you hate the idea, for their sake.’’
There was a lot of green around her now, but the Neogymnosperms were so tall and thick that the Forest path was shadowed and dark. The psychological trick she’d deployed in the doctor’s office was far too receptive to that kind of nuancing. Sarah tried to internalize the concept of the road instead, and the angelic orderliness of its white markings, continually reminding herself that she still had a future, and a journey to make, and other traffic to take into consideration.
‘‘I can’t believe that you’re giving up,’’ Alan said, when his brain had returned to something more like rational mode. His voice was hollow, though, as if serving as an echo chamber for his discordantly vibrant emotions, and that, too, was part of his court repertoire. ‘‘You were such a fighter before the chemo knocked the stuffing out of you. I can’t believe that you’re just going to lie down meekly and die—and I can’t believe that you’ve fallen for this mystical rubbish about vegetable heaven. It’s sick, Sarah—sick and stupid and sinister.’’ There was the alliteration again, intoned this time with expert plaintiveness.
‘‘I don’t believe in vegetable heaven,’’ Sarah told him. Actually, she wasn’t so sure, but she knew that was the aspect of Forester rhetoric he found most offensive, so she had to deemphasize it. ‘‘I prefer to think about it in accounting terms.’’ She’d worked as a public service accountant for thirteen years, save maternity leave, before the cancer and the chemo had invalided her out of financial affray forever.
‘‘All that crap about redeeming America’s carbon debt is no better,’’ Alan insisted. ‘‘It was American biotech that saved the world. If Neogymnosperms, Lollipop Pines, Polycotton, and Giant Corn haven’t already paid for our forefathers’ sins twice over, the goddam exports certainly have. If anything, the Human Forests are just getting in the goddam way.’’
Sarah didn’t bother to point out that the totemic Transfigured Trees developed and deployed in distant parts of the world hadn’t, strictly speaking, been American ‘‘exports.’’ The basic techniques had been exported, but their applications had been carefully leavened with other varieties of national pride. Transfigured Golden Oaks and Wych-Elms had played a major role in the repossession of Middle Europe; New Neem Trees had worked wonders in India, Polar Firs and Silky Spruces had swept across the warmed-up northern landscapes from Norway to Siberia, and most of southeast Asia had refused to settle for anything less than Confucian Rice, in spite of the fact that rice had never been grown on trees before. Even Mexico had decided that the Neogymnosperm tide should advance no further than the Rio Grande, and was nowadays proud to be a Banana Republic in the truest sense of the term.
Thus far, Human Forests were culturally limited, too; America was the world leader by a vast margin— but Sarah felt sure that the global pause for consideration would be momentary. Far from being a Californian craze, Human Forests were the future, not just for America but for all humankind. Sarah truly believed that they would change the world, and bring about a new Golden Age. It wouldn’t be the Age of Medical Miracles of which her dead grandma had dreamed, but it would be a world from which human death really had been exiled, after a fashion.
‘‘This is twenty-third century America,’’ Sarah reminded her husband, echoing his own cliché. ‘‘We don’t do accounting the way they used to before the Ecocatastrophe. The day of quick bucks and cooked books is over and done with. We calculate over the long term now. The true economic measure of the Hu
man Forests isn’t what they chipped in to the hectic restabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor but what they’ll contribute to the future well-being of the nation and the species. Redeeming carbon debt isn’t like paying back the fifty dollars you borrowed from your pal last week; it’s more like entering into a long-term contract to ensure business stability.’’ She gasped when she got to the end, but she did get to the end. Internalizing the road seemed to be working, for now. Not for the first time, she felt that the Firebird was in her flesh as well as her surroundings.
‘‘If you’re building up to using the words hedge fund,’’ Alan said, grimly, ‘‘I’d really rather you didn’t. There’s wordplay and there’s simply being silly.’’
‘‘Gallows humor is inherently silly,’’ Sarah said, trying to sound casual, although the fact that he had retreated to jokes of that caliber was as good as waving a white flag. ‘‘I really am serious, Alan. I’m sorry to be brutal, but I really don’t have the time to be subtle. I intend to do this, and I want you to be good about it—not just now, but afterwards and forever— because it’s no mere matter of making me feel as well as can be contrived while my brain still works. A Human Tree is forever; I’ll be part of your life, and Jeanie’s and Mike’s lives, until the day you and they die. Even if you were to dig your heels in and refuse to have anything to do with me, I’ll still be there.’’
‘‘No, you won’t, Sarah,’’ he said, his infernal stubbornness drawing a reluctant Parthian shot out of his determination to surrender and be kind. ‘‘They may be right, technically, about the continuity of cellular life and the preservation of the fundamental DNA-COMPLEX, but it won’t be you, any more than a corpse in a grave or an urnful of ashes in the trophy cabinet would be you. You’ll be dead, Sarah—if you don’t fight.’’
‘‘I’ll be dead whether I fight or not,’’ Sarah told him, gasping again as cymbals suddenly joined in with the climax of a crescendo of screeching violins and booming brass. ‘‘You know that. I have fought—but I didn’t win. That Age of Miracles never arrived.’’
He said nothing, but she went on, for her own sake, externalizing the prod of her imagination by way of paying back the debt she owed the trees and the road. ‘‘The human body simply isn’t built in such a way that we can stay in the prime of life, incapable of permanent violation by disease or injury, for centuries. Transfiguration is the only possible immortality. It’s not enough—nobody ever claimed that it is—but it’s what we’ve got, and all the evidence suggests that it’s the best we’ll have for quite some time.’’
The prosecution still had nothing to say.
‘‘Maybe you’re right,’’ Sarah continued, ‘‘and there’s no essential difference between being planted and being buried or cremated—but even if that’s so, the choice between the three is still a meaningful one. You have to respect my choice, Alan; you have to help Jeanie and Mike make the most of it. You have to preserve the meaning of what I’m doing, even if you do insist on thinking, in your heart of hearts, that I’m dead and gone and that the Tree is just an insult to my memory.’’
She knew that her voice had expressed her pain, in spite of the road and her best intentions. Alan put his hands up to his face, and covered his eyes with his fingers. It wasn’t the long straight tunnel through the Neogymnosperms that he was refusing to see, and it wasn’t the automatic pilot’s ultra-careful driving of which he was despairing.
After a couple of minutes he put the hands back on the wheel again, not because he wanted to pretend to steer but simply because he needed to get a grip on something. ‘‘I wish the highway weren’t so goddam boring,’’ he said. ‘‘I wish Transfigured trees weren’t so goddam orderly.’’
‘‘We’ll be back in the Halo in no time,’’ she told him. ‘‘Urban design is the etiquette of New Global Civilization. The days when cities and their suburbs just sprawled is gone forever.’’
‘‘You’ve never been to Denver or Chicago, let alone New York,’’ he retorted, for no particular reason. ‘‘We’re lucky, living way out west. Arizona’s still on the real frontier, you know, even if it’s been Transfigured out of all recognition. It’s one of those places where people get right on and do things. No inertia, lots of fight.’’
‘‘And where are the biggest Human Forests in the USA?’’ Sarah was quick to say. ‘‘California, inevitably. Oregon, of course. Montana and Wyoming are the third and fourth. All pioneer country: join up the dots and there’s the frontier of the future.’’
‘‘It’ll be a hell of a long time before anything bigger than a Human Copse sprouts up in Utah,’’ Alan opined.
‘‘No, it won’t,’’ Sarah insisted, as gently as she could. ‘‘Sacred Groves will be everywhere before you know it, linking up from sea to shining sea. It really will be a New World, Alan—and I’ll be part of it. I really will.’’
Jeanie and Mike were well past denial and anger by now. Unlike Alan, they’d already made their psychological adjustments to the verdict and sentence that their parents brought home. They backed Alan up when he said that Sarah really ought to go to bed, but she stood firm—or, to be strictly accurate, sat firm— on the living room sofa. The sofa was directly opposite the painting over the mantelpiece that displayed Old Arizona in all its ancient glory, all desert and bare rock, glowing sulky red in the setting sun. In Old Arizona, if its current iconography could be believed, the sun had always been setting.
The children weren’t in the least surprised or dismayed when Sarah told them that a Forester would be calling round to make arrangements; Jeanie was ten and Mike was seven, so they’d both grown up with Human Forests as a fact of life, and the fundamental notion didn’t seem in the least strange or alien to them. That didn’t mean, though, that everything went smoothly.
‘‘You have to be planted in the yard,’’ Jeanie said. ‘‘This is our home. You have to stay here, with us.’’
‘‘That’s not a good idea, my love,’’ Sarah told her. ‘‘Maybe if we were feudal barons living in English castles, we’d be able to think of our homes as longstanding family heirlooms, but we’re not tied down, and we shouldn’t want to be. This is the only home you’ve known, so far, but it certainly won’t be the only one you’ll ever know.’’ She had to stop then, but she fixed Alan with a commanding stare.
‘‘That’s true,’’ Alan admitted. ‘‘Ours is a land of opportunity, and you have to be free to take those opportunities when they arise. When you go to college, and get jobs, you need to be free to go where you want and need to be. Having your mother’s Tree in the backyard is an anchor you can do without.’’
He stopped there, leaving Sarah to add: ‘‘Besides which, Trees belong in Forests. They thrive in company and don’t do so well in isolation. It’s best if I’m somewhere where I can belong, where you can visit me when you want to, without ever getting to take me for granted.’’
‘‘You’ll still be able to talk to us when you’re a tree, won’t you?’’ Mike said. ‘‘You’ll still be able to listen to us.’’
‘‘No, Mike, I won’t,’’ Sarah told him,
taking him by the hand. ‘‘I know you’ve seen a lot of cartoons that represent Animal Trees as things with eyes and mouths, which wave their branches around as if they were arms, but it’s not like that. That’s just a joke. When I start the series of injections—by which time I’ll be in the hospice—I’ll go to sleep, and that’ll be the last time you see my eyes or hear my voice. Transfigurationtakes a long time. It’ll be months before I’m ready for planting, and more than a year before I begin to look much like a tree, but once I do, I’ll be a real tree. I won’t have a brain anymore, so I won’t be able to think, let alone talk or listen.’’
‘‘But you’ll be able to dream,’’ Jeanie put in.
‘‘No, I won’t,’’ Sarah said, determined to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as Alan would expect and was entitled to demand. ‘‘That’s . . . well, not a joke, more a myth. People like to imagine Human Trees being in a kind of dream state, but once my brain’s gone . . . ?’’
‘‘Where will it go?’’ Mike wanted to know. He was frowning; perhaps he had been taking it for granted that the human body was still contained within the Human Tree, like a mollusk within a shell.