The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  Her finger wags in the air, then touches her lips. “Everything will be fine.”

  His mother doesn’t say such things.

  The nurses ease him by degrees off the pain drip. Anguish sets in as the drugs dry up. People come to see him. His father’s boss. His mother’s card-playing friends. They smile like they’re doing calisthenics. Their comfort scares the crap out of him.

  “You’ve been through a lot,” the doctor says. But Neelay has been through nothing. His body, perhaps. His avatar. But he? Nothing important in the code has changed.

  The doctor is kind, with a tremor when his hand drops to his side, and eyes that fix on a blank spot high up on the walls. Neelay asks, “Can you take the vise-things off my legs?”

  The doctor nods, but not in agreement. “You have some mending to do.”

  “It’s bugging me, not to be able to move them.”

  “You concentrate on healing. Then we’ll talk about what happens next.”

  “Can you at least take off the boots? I can’t even wriggle my toes.”

  Then he understands. He’s not yet twelve. He has lived for years in a place of his own devising. The thought of countless good things passing out of his life doesn’t quite occur to him. He still has that other place, the heaven in embryo.

  But his mother and father: they fall apart. Awful hours set in, days of disbelief and desperate bargaining that he won’t remember. There will be years of supernatural solutions, alternative practices, and miracle cures. For a long time, his parents’ love will make his sentence worse, until they finally put their faith in moksha and accept that their son is a cripple.

  HE’S STILL LYING in the traction bed, days on. His mother has stepped away on an errand. Maybe not by chance. His teacher comes through the doorway, all warmth and energy, prettier than he remembers.

  “Ms. Gilpin. Whoa!”

  Something goes wrong with her face. But then, people’s faces always look wrong, from his new vantage place, underneath them. She comes near and touches his shoulder. It freaks him.

  “Neelay. I’m glad to see you.”

  “I’m glad to see you, too.”

  Her whole torso trembles. He thinks: She knows about my legs. The whole school knows. He wants to tell her: It’s not the end of the world. No crucial world, anyway. She talks about the class and what they’re reading now. Flowers for Algernon. He promises to read it by himself.

  “Everyone misses you, Neelay.”

  “Look.” He points to the wall, where his mother has taped the giant fold-out card signed by the entire ninth grade. She breaks down. He’s helpless to do anything. “It’s okay,” he tells her.

  Her head jerks up, crazy with hope. “Neelay. You know I never meant . . . I never thought . . .”

  “I know,” he says, and wants her gone.

  She pushes her face back with two splayed palms. Then she reaches into her satchel and retrieves his notebook. The kite program for his father. “This belongs to you. I should never . . .”

  He’s so happy he doesn’t even hear the words she keeps on mouthing. He thought the notebook was gone forever, another thing he’d never get back from his life before the tree dropped him.

  “Thank you. Oh, thank you so much!”

  A moan comes out of her. When he looks up, she turns and runs. Distress lasts only until he opens the notebook. Then he lies flipping through the recovered pages, remembering everything. So much work, so many good ideas—saved.

  Six years pass. Puberty transforms Neelay Mehta. The boy shoots up into a fantastic creature: Seventeen years old, six-foot-six, 150 pounds, and fused to his wheelchair. His torso stretches out. Even his legs, shriveled to thick twigs, grow stupidly long. His cheeks shift like continental plates and his face spawns shoals of pimples. Black wires sprout from his once-pristine privates. He drops from soprano to high tenor. His hair grows as long as a Kesh-practicing Sikh’s, though he doesn’t tie it up into a rishi knot. He lets it flow in thick vines that fall all around his elongated face and down his bony shoulders.

  He lives in his rolling metal rig—captain’s chair on a starship forever voyaging through strange regions of thought. Some people who can no longer walk grow fat. But those people eat. He gets through the day on fifty cents of sunflower seeds and two caffeinated sodas. Of course, he rarely spends a pointless calorie. Once he rolls up to his custom desk in the morning, his CPU tower and CRT need more power than he does. His fingers graze the keyboard and his eyes scan the screen, but his brain burns considerable glucose as he fashions his prototype creations, in eighteen-hour increments, command by careful command.

  Stanford accepts him, two years early. The campus is just up El Camino. Its CS department flourishes, fertilized by extravagant gifts from the founders of his father’s company. Neelay has haunted the campus since the age of twelve. Long before he starts school as an official freshman, he’s a de facto mascot of the computer science set. You know: the ectomorph Indian kid, in the fancy chair.

  Something is being born in the bowels of half a dozen different buildings across the Farm. Magic beanstalks erupt everywhere, overnight. It comes up in conversation with friends, in the basement computer lab where Neelay hangs out and codes. They can be a taciturn bunch, but on Sunday nights, the coders lift their heads from their do-loops long enough to dole out the liter soda bottles and break pizza crusts together, while shooting a little philosophical shit.

  Someone says, “We’re evolution’s third act.” Sauce dribbles from his gaping mouth.

  It’s like they all have the idea together. Biology was phase one, unfolding over epochs. Then culture throttled up the rate of transformation to mere centuries. Now there’s another digital generation every twenty weeks, each subroutine speeding up the next.

  “Chips doubling their transistor count every eighteen months . . . ? I mean, take Moore’s law seriously, man.”

  “Say it holds for the rest of our lives. We could live another sixty years.”

  A giggle passes through them at the insane math. Forty doubling periods. Stratosphere-high piles of rice on the fabled chessboard.

  “A trillionfold increase. Programs a million million times deeper and richer than the best thing anybody’s yet written.”

  They pause for sober marveling. Neelay hangs his head over his untouched pizza, staring at the wedge as if it’s a problem in analytic geometry. “Living things,” he says, almost to himself. “Self-learning. Self-creating.” The whole room laughs, but he doubles down. “So fast, they’ll think we’re not even here.”

  AT FIRST, the point of coding is to give everything away. Pure philanthropy. He’ll find a marvelous seed program in the public domain. Then he’ll flesh it out, add new features, switch on his 1,200-baud modem, dial in to a local bulletin board, and upload the source for anyone who wants to grow it some more. Soon his creatures propagate on hosts across the planet. Every day people around the globe add new species to the repositories. It’s the Cambrian Explosion all over again, only a billion times faster.

  Neelay gives away his first masterpiece, a turn-based romp where you play a Japanese movie monster eating its way across the world’s metropolises. Hundreds of people in a dozen countries grab it, even at forty-five minutes per download. So what if playing it does to your free time what the monsters do to Tokyo? His second game—conquistadores ravaging the virgin Americas—is another freeware hit. A Usenet group forms just to trade game strategies. The program generates a new, geologically realistic New World each time you play. It turns any grocery store bag boy into stout Cortez.

  His games spawn imitations. The more people steal from him, the better Neelay feels about his chair-bound life. The more he gives away, the more he has. From his vantage, stranded in his wheelchair in a basement lab, whole new continents swing into view. The gift economy—free duplication of well-shaped commands—promises to solve scarcity at last and cure the hunger at the heart’s core. The name Neelay Mehta grows mini-legendary among the pioneers. People tha
nk him on dial-up boards and in game news groups. College kids talk about him in chat rooms as if he’s some Tolkien character. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines.

  But by his eighteenth birthday, paradise is sprouting fences. Former philanthropists of free code start taking out copyrights and making actual coin. They even have the nerve to form private companies. Granted, they’re still just peddling floppy discs in baggies, but it’s clear how things will go. The commons are getting enclosed. The gift culture will be throttled in the cradle.

  Neelay blasts the betrayal at each week’s meeting of the Home-Rolled Club. He spends his free time re-creating one of the most famous commercial offerings, improving on it, then releasing the clone into the public domain. Infringement? Maybe. But every one of the so-called copyrighted properties relies on decades of prior unpaid art. For a year, Neelay plays Robin Hood, camped out in the anarchic forest with his merry men, under a massive oak older than the deed to the land it grows on.

  HE WORKS FOR MONTHS on a role-playing space opera slated to be his greatest giveaway yet. The graphics are sixteen-bit high-res sprites, come to life in sixty-four glorious colors. He heads out on a hunt for surreal bestiaries to populate his planets. Late one spring evening he winds up in the Stanford main library, poring over the covers of golden age pulp sci-fi magazines and flipping through the pages of Dr. Seuss. The pictures resemble the mad vegetation in those cheap Vishnu and Krishna comics from his childhood.

  Needing a break, he rolls across campus down Serra Mall to see what’s cooking in the labs. It’s near dusk, in that soft perfection that flavors this place for nine months of the year. He heads toward his cubicle in the networked lab, navigating as through a first-person adventure. The Oval’s grandiose palm arcade snakes away to his right. To his left, the Santa Cruz Mountains peek out from behind the fake Spanish Romanesque cloisters. Once, in another life, he walked the trails up near Skyline under the redwoods with his father and mother. Behind the mountains, half an hour away by wheelchair-ready van, lies the sea. The beaches and bays are not forbidden him. He visited them only three months ago. Several friends had to carry him down near the shore and set him in the sand. He sat and stared at the waves and watched the diving shorebirds and listened to their spectral complaints. Hours later, when his friends were done swimming and throwing Frisbees and chasing each other up and down the sand, he was the only one who hadn’t had enough.

  He turns up the ramp to Memorial Court into the main quad, past Rodin’s life-sized Burghers of Calais. The night will be long, and he needs to stock up on snacks to power him through. He motors straight into the inner court, toward the back exit to the Union and all the best vending machines. Lost in his intergalactic plans, he almost mows down a group of Japanese tourists photographing the chapel. Backing away, apologizing, he runs over the toes of an elderly woman on her first trip abroad. She bows, mortified. Neelay extricates himself, slams the chair into a hard left, and looks up. There, in a car-sized planter, just to the side of the chapel entrance, bulbous and elephantine, is the most mind-boggling organism he has ever seen. It’s the thing he has been searching for, for his intergalactic opera. A living hallucination from a nearby star system at the other end of a wormhole in space. The groundskeepers must have snuck it in last night under cover of dark. Either that, or he has rolled past it every evening for months, without once seeing.

  He wheels up to the tree and laughs. The trunk looks like a giant upside-down turkey baster. The branches skew and spike out at foolish angles. He reaches out to touch the bark. It’s perfect. Absurd. Up to something. A tiny placard reads: BRACHYCHITON RUPESTRIS. QUEENSLAND BOTTLE TREE. The name excuses nothing and explains even less. It’s an alien invader, as surely as Neelay.

  He can’t decide which is more incredible: the tree, or the fact that he’s never noticed it. Shapes flicker on the edge of his vision. Something is happening behind his back. He has the overwhelming feeling of being watched. A silent chorus in his head sings: Turn and look. Turn around and see! He spins the chair in place. Nothing is right. The whole cloister courtyard has changed. One hyper-jump, and he has landed in an intergalactic arboretum. On all sides, furious green speculations wave at him. Creatures built for otherworldly climates. Crazies of every habit and profile. Things from epochs so old they make dinosaurs look like upstarts. All these signaling, sentient beings knock him back in his seat. He has never done drugs, but this must be what it’s like. Plumes of cream and yellow; a purple waterfall that evaporates before it touches the ground. Trees like freak experiments beckon from out of eight large planters, each one a miniature starship ark on its way to some other system.

  Neelay sweeps the chair around the courtyard. His paraplegic body tenses as the council shimmers in their standing circle, watching him make the circuit. He rolls past another Seussian monster as alien as the first. He reads the tag: a silk floss tree, from Brazilian forests even now shrinking by a hundred thousand acres a day. Sharp-tipped warty cones cover the trunk, spines that evolved to fend off grazing beasts that went extinct tens of millions of years ago.

  He rolls from planter to planter, touching the beings, smelling them, listening to their rustles. They have come from hot islands and desiccated outback, from remote valleys in Central Asia breached only recently. Dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor tree, flame tree, empress tree, kurrajong, red mulberry: unearthly life, waiting to waylay him in this courtyard while he was searching for them on distant planets. He touches their bark and feels, just beneath their skins, the teeming assemblies of cells, like whole planetary civilizations, pulse and hum.

  The Japanese tourists disappear back to their bus on Galvez. Neelay holds still in the emptied space, like a rabbit evading a raptor. He’s alone for no more than a few seconds. But in that interval, the alien invaders insert a thought directly into his limbic system. There will be a game, a billion times richer than anything yet made, to be played by countless people around the world at the same time. And Neelay must bring it into being. He’ll unfold the creation in gradual, evolutionary stages, over the course of decades. The game will put its players smack in the middle of a living, breathing, seething, animist world filled with millions of different species, a world desperately in need of the players’ help. And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

  The vision ends, depositing him again in Stanford’s inner quad. The vision, religious and dark green, fades back into its Platonic shadow, wood. Neelay holds still, clinging to what he has just seen, the thing his brain has somehow apprehended, lurking out at the end of the curve of Moore’s law. He’ll have to drop out of school. No time for more classes now. He must pace himself for the long run. He’ll finish the quaint little role-playing space opera he’s working on, then put it up for sale. Real money, earth dollars. His fans will howl. They’ll smear him on the country’s dial-up bulletin boards as the worst traitor. But at fifteen bucks for thirty parsecs, the game will be a steal. The profits from his first foray into alien life will pay for the sequel, a game to surpass the original in ambition many times over. And by such small steps, he’ll get to the place he has just seen.

  He rolls out of the cloister just as the light vanishes behind the mountains. The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.

  PATRICIA WESTERFORD

  IT’S 1950, and like the boy Cyparissus, whom she’ll soon discover, little Patty Westerford falls in love with her pet deer. Hers is made of twigs, though i
t’s every bit alive. Also: squirrels from pairs of glued walnut shells, bears made of sweetgum balls, dragons from the pods of Kentucky coffee trees, fairies donning acorn caps, and an angel whose pine-cone body needs only two holly leaves for wings.

  She builds these creatures elaborate homes with pebbled front walks and mushroom furniture. She sleeps them in beds fitted with magnolia-petal comforters. She watches over them, the guiding spirit of a kingdom whose towns nestle behind closed doors in the burls of trees. Knotholes turn into louvered windows, through which, squinting, she can see the inviting parlors of woody citizens, the lost kin of humans. She lives there with her creatures in the minuscule architecture of imagination, so much richer than the offerings of full-sized life. When her tiny wooden doll’s head twists off, she plants it in the garden, certain it will grow another body.

  All her twig creatures can talk, though most, like Patty, have no need of words. She herself said nothing until past the age of three. Her two older brothers interpreted her secret language for their frightened parents, who began to think she must be mentally deficient. They brought Patty into the clinic in Chillicothe for tests that revealed a deformation of the inner ear. The clinic fitted her with fist-sized hearing aids, which she hated. When her own speech started to flow at last, it hid her thoughts behind a slurry hard for the uninitiated to comprehend. It didn’t help that her face was sloped and ursine. The neighbors’ kids ran from her, this thing only borderline human. Acorn people are so much more forgiving.

  Her father alone understands her woodlands world, as he always understands her every thickened word. She has a pride of place with him that the two boys accept. With them, Dad may throw softballs and tell bubble-gum wrapper jokes and play tag. But he reserves his best gifts for his little plant-girl, Patty.

  Their closeness bothers her mother. “I ask you. Has there ever been such a little nation of two?”