The Overstory

by Richard Powers

  “It’s theater. No one’s going to chain-saw an unarmed human being.” But as Mimi speaks the words, the driver of a loader with two women handcuffed to it kicks his rig into gear and drags them alongside. The protesters scream in disbelief.

  The loggers turn their attention from the hostage Cat. They set to work on a stand of grand fir, threatening to drop the trees into the midst of the handcuffed slackers. Doug mutters and tears free. Before Mimi can react, he’s running toward the unraveling action, rucksack in tow. He wades into the fray like a setter into the surf, dashing among the protesters, gripping one man then another by the shoulder. He points at the hand-fellers descending on the firs. “Get as many people as we can up into those trees.”

  Someone shouts, “Where the hell are the police? They’re always here to break things up when we’re winning.”

  “Okay,” Douglas barks. “Those trees are going to be history in ten minutes. Move!”

  Before Mimi can reach him, he springs off, heading for a fir with a skirt of branches low enough to hop up into. Once he’s off the ground, the limbs are practically a ladder eighty feet straight up. Two dozen flagging protesters revive and take off after him. The loggers see what’s happening on their flanks. They pursue, as fast as their nail-soled caulks allow.

  The first few protesters reach the stand and scramble up into the foliage. Mimi spots a fir with branches even she can reach. She’s twenty feet from the trunk when something vicious clips her legs. She falls headlong into a patch of devil’s club. Her shoulder hits a lichen-covered stone and bounces. Something heavy camps on the back of her calves. Douglas, from thirty feet up his tree, shrieks at her assailant. “I’ll kill you, so help me God. I’ll tear your head from your cretin neck.”

  The man sitting on the back of Mimi’s knees drawls, “You’re gonna have to come down for that, aren’t you?”

  Mimi spits mud from her mouth. Her assailant grinds his shins into the back of her thighs. She yells, despite herself. Doug scrambles down a branch. “No!” she shouts. “Stay!”

  A few tackled demonstrators lie on the ground. But some reach the trees and swing up into the branches. There, they keep their pursuers at bay. Shoes win out over reaching fingers.

  Mimi moans, “Get off me.”

  The logger who pins her wavers. His side is outnumbered, and he’s tied down, restraining an Asian woman too small to climb anything bigger than a shrub. “Promise to stay down.”

  The civility stuns her. “If your company kept your promises, this wouldn’t be happening.”

  “Promise.”

  Nothing but flimsy oaths, binding every living thing. She promises. The logger springs up and rejoins his stymied side. The loggers huddle up, trying to salvage the situation. They can’t cut the firs without killing someone.

  Mimi spies Douglas in his tree. She has seen that tree before. It takes her too long to recognize: the tree in the background behind the third arhat, in her father’s scroll. The loggers start up their saws again. They wave them in simplifying swipes through the air, cutting scrub, stacking it in fall zones in front of the firs. One of the fellers makes an undercut in a big tree. Mimi watches, too stupefied to cry out. They mean to bring it down through the branches of a squatter’s tree. The great fir cracks, and Mimi screams. She shuts her eyes to a tremendous crash. She opens them on downed timber tearing through the grove. The squatter clings to his mast, moaning in terror.

  Douglas rains abuse down on the cutters. “Have you lost your damn minds? You could kill him.”

  The crew boss shouts, “You’re trespassing.” The fellers prepare a new fall zone. Someone produces bolt cutters and starts clipping through the handcuffs of the Cat-chained protesters like he’s pruning a dogwood. Scuffles break out across the clearing; the luxury of nonviolence is over. In the fir grove, a feller tips his saw into the butter of the next doomed fir, aiming to drop it three feet from another squatter’s tree. The target squatter’s screams are lost over the saws, lost to the loggers, with their padded earmuffs. But they see his arms waving like mad and hold up just long enough for the terrified mark to scramble to the ground. It’s a full-out rout on both fronts. The blockaded vehicles begin to roll. Nine of the remaining squatters drop from their roosts. The loggers, triumphant, swing their saws. Protesters fall back, like deer from a fire.

  Mimi sits on the spot where she made her promise. The air behind her whoops. She turns to see flashing lights and thinks, The cavalry. Twenty officers in full armor disgorge from an armored truck. Black polycarbonate helmets with wraparound face guards. Kevlar jackets. Projectile-proof, high-impact riot shields. Police sweep across the clearing, rounding up the trespassers, snapping bracelets on the wrists even of those who already sport one severed cuff.

  Mimi rises. A hand comes down hard on her shoulder, pushing her back to the ground. She swings around to face a cop, scared and all of twenty years old. “Sit down! And don’t move.”

  “I wasn’t going anywhere.”

  “Mouth off again, and you’ll regret it.” Three Saturday forest warriors jog past, back toward the road and their cars. The child cop yells, “Stop where you are and sit down. Now, now, now!”

  They flinch, turn, and sit in place. Nearby loggers cheer. The kid cop spins and sprints toward another group of protesters trying to get away. A squad fans out under the trees. Pairs of them stand under the last treed protesters, smacking at their feet with nightsticks. The five remaining squatters give up, all except Douglas Pavlicek, who climbs higher. He takes his own cuffs from the rucksack and seals one wrist. Then he reaches around the trunk and locks the second wrist into place.

  Mimi grabs her head. “Douglas. Come down. It’s over.”

  “Can’t!” He rattles his cuffs, locked in the hug of the trunk. “Have to hold out until TV gets here.”

  The crazed holdout kicks at the logging ladders that the police position into the fir. He scores one fend-off so athletically that even the loggers cheer. But soon enough, four policemen swarm his lower regions. Chained in place, Douglas can’t move. The police reach their bolt cutters up to sever his cuffs. He pulls in his arms, snugging the chain against the trunk. The loggers hand axes up to the police. But Douglas laces his fingers in front of the chain. The police can reach no higher than his waist. A quick consult, and they cut into his pants with industrial shears. Two cops secure his legs. The third slices the ragged denim up to Douglas’s crotch.

  Mimi stares. She has never seen Douglas’s bare thighs. She has wondered, these months, whether she ever might. His desire is as open as the look of wonder on his face when they share a cold fudge shake. The only secret is what has kept him from anything more calamitous than putting his hand on the back of her neck. Weeks ago, she concluded it was some war wound. Now she watches him get stripped in public, in front of a stunned crowd. One leg is open to the air, bony and blanched, almost hairless, the furrowed thighs of a much older man. Then the other leg, and now the jeans hang open from the waist like a shredded banner. Out comes the triple-action pepper spray—capsaicin mixed with CS gas.

  The onlookers call out. “He’s chained in place, man. He can’t move!”

  “What do you want from him?”

  The officer puts the canister up into Douglas’s groin and sprays. Liquid fire spreads across his cock and balls—a cocktail amounting to a few million Scoville heat units. Douglas hangs, dangling from the cuffs, breathing in short little aspirated gasps. “Shi, shi, shit . . .”

  “For God’s sake. He can’t move. Leave him alone!”

  Mimi twists to see who yelled. It’s a logger, short and bearded, like an enraged dwarf from the pages of Grimm.

  “Unlock yourself,” one of the police orders. Words clog Douglas’s mouth. Nothing comes out but a low pitch, like the first half-second of an air raid. They spray him again. Protesters who’ve sat in place peacefully waiting to be booked start to revolt. Mimi rises in a rage. She’s shouting things she won’t remember even an hour from now. Others aroun
d her stand up, too. They converge on the prisoner’s tree. Police prod them back. The officers in the tree hit the naked groin with one more canister of spray. The soft, droned pitch in Douglas’s mouth begins a slow, awful rise.

  “Unlock your hands, and you can come down. It’s easy.”

  He tries to say something. Someone below shouts, “Let him talk, you animals.”

  The police lean in, close enough to hear him whisper, “I dropped the key.”

  The police cut Douglas free and carry him down from the tree like Jesus from the cross. They won’t let Mimi anywhere near him.

  WHEN THE ORDEAL of their processing is done, she drives him home. She tries to wash him, with every soothing emolument she can find. But his meat is a vibrant salmon, and he’s too ashamed to let her see.

  “I’ll be fine.” He lies in bed, reading the words off the ceiling. “I’ll be fine.”

  She checks in every evening. His skin stays orange for a week.

  MASTERY 2 RAKES IN as much as the annual income of whole states. Mastery 3 arrives just as its ancestor starts to grow stale. People from six continents pour into the upgraded place—frontiersmen, pilgrims, farmers, miners, warriors, priests. They form guilds and consortiums. They build buildings and fashion trade goods that the coders never anticipated.

  Mastery 4 is 3-D. It turns into a monumental undertaking, almost breaking the company, needing twice as many coders and artists as its parent. It offers four times the resolution, ten times more game area, and a dozen more quests. Thirty-six new techs. Six new resources. Three new cultures. More new world wonders and masterworks than a person could explore in years of play. Even with the constant doubling of processor speeds, it pushes the limits of the best consumer rigs for months.

  Everything unfolds as Neelay foresaw it years ago. Browsers appear—yet another nail in the coffin of time and space. A click, and you’re at CERN. Another, and you’re listening to underground music from Santa Cruz. One more, and you can read a newspaper at MIT. Fifty big servers at the start of year two, and five hundred by the end. Sites, search engines, gateways. The spent, filled-up cities of the industrialized planet have willed this thing into being, just in time: the savior of the gospel of endless growth. The Web goes from unimaginable to indispensable, weaving the world together in eighteen months. Mastery gets on board, goes online, and a million more lonely boys emigrate to the new and improved Neverland.

  The homesteading days are over. Games grow up; they join the ranks of the globe’s elite commodities. Mastery 5 surpasses whole operating systems for sheer complexity and total lines of code. The game’s best AIs are smarter than last year’s interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth.

  But none of that does much for Neelay, in his apartment above the company’s HQ. The room teems with screens and modems blinking like Christmas. His electronics range from matchbook-sized modules to rack mounts larger than a man. Each one of these devices is, as the prophet says, indistinguishable from magic. The wildest sci-fi of Neelay’s childhood failed to predict these miracles. And still, impatience doubles in him, with every doubling of specs. He hungers worse than ever—for one more breakthrough, the next one, something simple and elegant that will change everything again. He visits his oracle trees in their Martian botanical garden, to ask them what’s supposed to happen next. But the creatures stay mum.

  Bedsores plague him. His increasingly brittle bones make going outside dangerous. Two months ago he smashed a foot getting into the van—the hazard of not being able to feel where your limbs end. His arms are bruised black from whacking them on the bed bar getting in and out of bed. He has taken to eating, working, and sleeping in the chair. What he wants more than anything—what he’d trade the company for—is a chance to sit by a lake in the High Sierras, ten miles down a trail, and watch crossbills sweep up into the branches of the bordering spruces to pry seeds out of the cones with their grotesque beaks. He’ll never have that. Never. The only outing allowed him now is Mastery 6.

  In Mastery 6, a player’s colonies go on thriving while he’s away. Dynamic, concurrent economies. Cities full of actual people trading and making laws. Creation in all its extravagant waste. People pay monthly rent to live there. It’s a daring step, but in the world game, no daring is fatal. The only thing that will kill you is failing to leap.

  Neelay can no longer tell the difference between calm and desperate. He sits by the picture window for hours at a pop, then dashes off epic memos to the development team, nagging about the same thing he has pushed for years:

  We need more realism. . . . More life! The animals should start and stop, saunter and stare, just like their living models. . . . I want to see the way a wolf rocks back on its haunches, the green of their eyes as if lit from inside. I want to see a bear rake open an anthill with his claws. . . .

  Let’s build this place up in every detail, from stuff out there. Real savannas, real temperate forests, real wetlands. The Van Eyck brothers painted 75 different kinds of identifiable plant species into the Ghent Altarpiece. I want to be able to count 750 kinds of simulated plants in Mastery 7, each with its own behaviors. . . .

  As he composes the memo, employees knock and enter, with papers for him to sign, disputes for him to resolve. They show no revulsion or pity for the giant walking stick propped upright in the chair. They’re used to him, these young cybernauts. They don’t even notice the catheter anymore, where it empties into its reservoir on the chair’s frame. They know his net worth. Sempervirens common closed that afternoon at forty-one and a quarter, triple last year’s IPO. The twig-man in the chair owns twenty-three percent of the company. He has made them all wealthy, and he has made himself as rich as the game’s greatest emperors.

  He dispatches the latest pamphlet-sized memo, and, moments later, the shadow comes over him. Then he does what he always does whenever the bottom drops out: he phones his parents. His mother picks up. “Oh, Neelay. So, so happy it’s you!”

  “So happy, too, Moti. You good?” And it doesn’t matter what she’s saying. Pita taking too many naps. Planning a trip back to Ahmedabad. Ladybug invasion of the garage—very strong-smelling. Might be cutting hair very dramatically soon. He revels in whatever she wants to go on about. Life, in all the pitiful details that won’t fit yet into any simulation.

  But then the killing question, and so soon, this time. “Neelay, we are thinking again that it’s not impossible to find you someone. In the community.”

  They have been all up, down, around, and over this, for years. It would be socially enforced sadism toward any woman brought into such a match. “No, Moti. We’ve said.”

  “But Neelay.” He can hear in the way that she pronounces the words: You’re worth millions, tens of millions, maybe more—you won’t even tell your mother! What sacrifice, there? Who couldn’t learn to love?

  “Mom? I should have told you already. There’s a woman here. She’s actually one of my caregivers.” It sounds almost plausible. The hush on the other end crushes him with its tongue-biting hope. He needs a safe and reassuring name, one he’ll remember. Rupi. Rutu. “Her name’s Rupal.”

  A horrible suck of breath, and she’s crying. “Oh, Neelay. So, so happy!”

  “Me, too, Mom.”

  “You will know true joy! When do we meet her?”

  He wonders why his criminal mind failed to foresee this little difficulty. “Soon. I don’t want to scare her away!”

  “Your own family is going to scare her? What kind of girl is this?”

  “Maybe next month? Late next month?” Thinking, of course, that the world will end long before then. Already feeling his mother’s bottomless grief at his simulated breakup, just days before the women were to meet. But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now. It’s all good, and by the time the call ends, he’s promising people in both Gujarat and Rajasthan at least fourteen months’ notice to clear calendars, buy airplane tickets, and get saris made,
prior to any wedding.

  “Goodness. These things take time, Neelay.”

  When they hang up, he raises his hand in the air and slams it down onto the desk’s front edge. There’s a very wrong sound, and a sharp white pain, and he knows he has broken at least one bone.

  In blinding pain, he rides his private elevator down into the opulent lobby, the beautiful redwood trim paid for by millions of people’s desire to live anywhere else but here. His eyes stream with tears and rage. But quietly, politely, to the terrified receptionist, he holds up his swollen, snapped claw and says, “I’m going to have to get to the hospital.”

  He knows what’s waiting for him there, after they mend his hand. They will scold him. They’ll put him on a drip and make him swear to eat properly. As the receptionist makes her frantic calls, Neelay glances up at the wall where he has hung those words of Borges, still the guiding principle of his young life:

  Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be.

  PORTLAND SOUNDS TOXIC to Patricia. Expert educating witness, even worse. Dr. Westerford lies in bed on the morning of the preliminary hearing, feeling like she’s had a stroke. “Can’t do it, Den.”

  “Can’t not, babe.”

  “Do you mean that morally or legally?”

  “It’s your life’s work. You can’t walk away now.”

  “It’s not my life’s work. My life’s work is listening to trees!”

  “No. That’s your life’s play. The work part is telling people what they’re saying.”

  “An injunction to halt logging on sensitive federal land. That’s a question for lawyers. What do I know about the law?”

  “They want to know what you know about trees.”

  “Expert witness? I’m going to be ill.”

  “Just tell them what you know.”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know anything.”

  “It’ll be just like stepping in front of a class.”

  “Except instead of idealistic twenty-year-olds who want to learn things, it’ll be a bunch of lawyers fighting over millions of dollars.”