Awareness spreads through them, slow and certain as death. The boss is playing another game now, one that would have no trouble burning their game as fuel. Boehm asks, “What are you saying we should do?”
Neelay holds up the book, like it’s divine dictation. They can read the title on the cover, under the rising web of leaves. The Secret Forest. Robinson groans. “Not more plants, boss. You can’t make a game out of plants. Unless you give them bazookas.”
“Let’s put an atmosphere into the model. Add water quality. Nutrient cycles. Finite material resources. Let’s make prairies and wetlands and forests that capture the richness and complexity of the real deals.”
“And then what? Bleaching reefs and rising seas and drought-driven wildfires?”
“If that’s how people play it.”
“Why on Earth? Our players want to get away from all that shit.”
“The game wants its players. That’s the great mystery.”
“How would you win that?” Kaltov taunts.
“By finding out what works. By pushing the way truth pushes.”
“You’re saying no new continents.”
“No new continents. No sudden spawning of new mineral deposits. Regeneration only at realistic rates. No rising from the grave. A wrong choice in the game should lead to permadeath.”
The elves catch each other’s eyes. The boss is out of control. He’s willing to crash the franchise, to trash the endless moneymaker that will keep them all in junkets forever just to solve the problem of too much satisfaction.
“How . . . ?” Nguyen says. “How are limits and shortages and perma-death going to be fun?”
For a moment the sunken face turns rubbery, and the boss is a little kid again, learning how to program, his code branching outward in all directions. “Seven million users will need to discover the rules of a dangerous new place. To learn what the world will bear, how life really works, what it wants from a player in exchange for continuing to play. Now, that’s a game. A whole new Age of Exploration. What more adventure could you ask for?”
Kaltov says, “Better sell your Sempervirens stock, then. Because every player we have is going to quit. They’ll walk!”
“Walk where? There’s too much on the line. Most of our players have invested years. They’ve built up fortunes of in-game worth. They’ll figure out how to rehabilitate the place. They’ll surprise us, like they’ve always done.”
The elves sit dumbfounded, calculating the fortunes vanishing before their eyes. But the boss—the boss is glowing like he hasn’t since he fell from his childhood tree. He lifts the book in the air, opens it, and reads. “Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just starting to learn how to see.” He snaps the book shut for dramatic effect. “There’s nothing out there even remotely like it. We’d be the first. Imagine: a game with the goal of growing the world, instead of yourself.”
The silence thickens with the proposed madness. Kaltov says, “Not broke, boss. Don’t fix. I vote no.”
The skeletal saint goes around the table, one by one. Rasha? Nguyen? Robinson? Boehm? No, No, No, and No. Unanimous palace coup. Neelay feels nothing, not even surprise. Sempervirens, with its five divisions and countless employees, its massive annual revenues from subscriptions and media, hasn’t been under anyone’s control for some time. The tens of thousands of fans posting to online forums have more control over what happens next than any of the upper brass. Complex adaptive system. A god game that has escaped its god.
It’s clear to him: The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape. And the sixty-third richest man in Santa Clara County—founder of Sempervirens, Inc., creator of The Sylvan Prophecies, only child, devotee of distant worlds, lover of Hindi comics, avid fan of all rule-breaking stories, flier of digital kites, timid curser of teachers, faller from coast live oaks—learns what it means to be eaten alive by his own insatiable offspring.
IT’S ANCIENT HISTORY NOW, a decade-old story Douglas Pavlicek keeps in his arsenal to spring on unsuspecting summer visitors who wander into the erstwhile whorehouse that serves as the ghost town visitor center. He’ll lay it on anyone who holds still long enough to hear.
“Then I had to crab-walk backward, uphill, on my ass, kicking off from tree trunks with my good leg. Switchbacked up an eighty-foot bluff in the snow, while my dislocated shoulder stabbed me like the Holy Ghost with a hot poker. Crawled in and out of consciousness, as far as that old silver-mine headframe not a hundred yards from here. And there I lay as good as dead for who knows how long, seeing visions and hearing the forest talk, while wolverines and such probably licked my face for the salts on my skin. By miracle, I reached the office, called in the medivacs, and got a lift to Missoula in a chopper. Felt like I was back in ’Nam, about to ’chute out of my old Herky Bird and start the whole Wheel of Eternal Return over again.”
He tells the story a lot, and the tourists mostly put up with it. Then one evening, ten minutes after quitting time, he tells it to a woman across the display case who digs it. Youngish, kind of, in bandanna and backpack, with a cute-as-hell Eastern European accent, a little ripe-scented, but friendly as a retriever covered with ticks. She’s all on the balls of her feet, waiting to hear if he survives or not. Deep into the rising action, he starts improvising a little. Let’s face it: there’s only so much that the arc of his story will hold. Yet she’s eating it up, like he’s one of those epileptic Russian novelists, and all she wants is to find out what happens next, and next after that.
When the story ends, she watches him close up the office. Outside, in the lot, there’s nothing but his white BLM Ford anywhere in sight. All the day’s visitors have headed back down the washboard road in their Expeditions and Pathfinders. The woman, Alena, asks, “There is someplace nearby I can camp, do you think?”
He’s been there himself, a long haul with no campsite ahead. He spreads his palms—all the abandoned buildings he’s supposed to check and clear each night. No camping allowed, but who’s to know? “Take your pick.”
She bows her head. “Do you maybe have crackers or something?”
It occurs to him that it may not be his storytelling skill that held her saucer-eyed. But he brings her up to the cabin and feeds her. Pulls out all the stops: the rabbit fillet he’s been saving for no reason, fried mushrooms and onions, a decent coffee cake made of Grape-Nuts, and a couple of shots of fermented thimbleberry.
She tells him about her adventures walking across the Garnet Range. “We started out four people. No idea where those three went.”
“Kinda dangerous out this way. You shouldn’t be out here by yourself, looking like you do.”
“How I look?” She blows a raspberry and whisks her palm. “Like an ill monkey who needs washing.”
She looks, to Douglas, good enough to be some mail-order bride scam. “Really. A young woman by herself. Not a patentable idea.”
“Young? Who is that? Beside. This is the greatest country. Americans are the friendliest people in the world. Always want to help. Like you. Look! You made this great meal. You didn’t need.”
“You liked it? Really?”
She holds out her glass for more thimbleberry wine.
“Well,” he says, when the silence gets weird, even by his standards, “you’re welcome to the water from the pump. Take your pick of any building down there. I’d keep out of the barbershop. Something must have died in there recently.”
“This house is nice.”
“Oh. Well. Listen. You don’t owe me anything. It was just food.”
“Who’s making a business?” Then she’s straddling his chair, scrutinizing his face, trying it out with her periscope lips. She breaks off. “Hey! You’re crying. Strange man!”
There’s no good reason why any species would ever have evolved so useless a behavior. “I’m an old guy.”
“You’re sure? Let’s see!”
She tries again. The first wo
man’s flesh to warm his for years. It’s like a lockpick scratching around a bunged-up keyhole in his chest. He pins her wrists. “I don’t love you.”
“Okay, mister. No problem. I don’t love you, either.” She tugs at his chin. “People don’t have to love, to enjoy!”
He gives her back her hands. “Trust me. They do.” His arms go slack, like they’re chained through a pipe to a concrete slab buried in the ground.
“Okay,” she says again, sullen. She pushes against his chest and stands. “You are a sad little mammal.”
“I am that.” He stands and brings the remains of the feast to the basin. “You take the bed. I’ll sleep in the bag, out here. The facilities are in the yard. Careful of the stinging nettle.”
The sight of the bed thrills her. American Christmas. “You are a good old guy.”
“Not especially.”
He shows her how to work the lantern. Lying on the floor in the front room, he sees the light under the door. Someone’s reading late. He doesn’t realize until later just what she’s reading.
In the morning, there’s more Grape-Nut coffee cake, and actual coffee. No further adventures in cross-cultural misunderstanding. She leaves before the first tourists come up the mountain. Soon enough, the visitor isn’t even a story he tells himself at night, to feed his regrets and beat up on himself for nostalgia.
But America, it turns out, really is the greatest country. The people are so kind, the land is rich beyond imagining, and the authorities will cut a deal for useful information, even after booking you for multiple crimes. In two more months, when the men with the initials on their jackets make their way up the mountain, Douglas has all but forgotten his overnight guest. Not until the Freddies pin him in the driveway, tear up the cabin, and remove his handwritten journal in a sealed plastic box does he remember her. He fights to keep from smiling as they hog-tie him and get him into the government Land Cruiser.
You think this is funny?
No. No, of course not. Well, maybe a little. It has all happened before, and as far as Douglas Pavlicek can make out, it will keep happening forever. Prisoner 571, reporting for duty, four decades on.
They don’t ask him much. They don’t have to. He has written it all down, in painstaking detail, in a nightly ritual of memory and explanation. Signed, sealed, delivered. All the crimes the five of them committed: Maidenhair, Watchman, Mulberry, Doug-fir, and Maple. But it’s a funny thing: his captors aren’t all that interested in forest names.
DOROTHY SHOWS UP in the doorway, the eternally recurring breakfast tray in her arms. “Morning, RayRay. Hungry?”
He’s awake, tranquil, looking out through the window onto the acre and a half of Brinkmanland. He has grown so calm these days. There have been stretches, terrible days that she was sure would kill him. Last winter was the worst. One February afternoon she spent minutes trying to hear what he was wailing. When she finally made him out, it was as if he were reading her mind: I’m done. It’s hemlock time.
But spring brought him back to himself, and in these days near the summer solstice, she’d swear she has never seen him happier. She puts the tray down on the bedside table. “How about some peach-banana cobbler?”
He tries to raise his hand, perhaps to point, but the hand has other ideas. When he at last gets his mouth to work, he comes at her out of the blue. “There. That.” The words slur, as pulpy as the hot fruit mush she has made for breakfast. He leads with his eyes. “That. Tree.”
She looks out, her features eager, trying to pretend that the request makes perfect sense. Still the consummate amateur thespian. “Y-yes?”
His mouth opens and he launches a syllable midway between what and who.
Her voice stays bright. “What kind? Ray, you know I’m hopeless at that. Some evergreen?”
“From . . . when?” Two words, like biking uphill on a muddy mountain trail.
She gazes at the tree as if she has never laid eyes on it. “Good question.” For a moment, she can’t remember how long they’ve lived in this place or what they’ve planted. He flails a little, but not in distress. “Let’s. See!”
Then she’s standing in front of a wall of books. Ceiling to floor: their lifetime hoard of print. She puts her palm on a shoulder-high shelf, wood she can’t name. Her finger flicks the dusty spines, looking for a thing she’s not sure is there. The past tries to kill her—all the people they were or had hoped to be. She skips by A Hundred Hikes in the Yellowstone. She pauses on A Field Guide to Eastern Songbirds as something bright and red in her head flies off, unidentified. The slender thing, almost a pamphlet, skulks near the end of the shelf. Easy Tree IDs. She takes down the book. An inscription on the title page ambushes her:
For my dear first dimension,
My sole and only Dot.
Care to see which trees are clear
And which are clearly knot?
She has never seen the words before. Not even a vague memory of any attempt to learn the names of trees together. But the poem brings back the poet intact. The best worst poet in the world.
She flips the pages. Way more oaks than good taste would recommend. Red, yellow, white, black, gray, scarlet, iron, live, bur, valley, and water, with leaves that deny all relation to each other. She remembers now why she never had the patience for nature. No drama, no development, no colliding hopes and fears. Branching, tangled, messy plots. And she could never keep the characters straight.
She reads the inscription again. How old was the jingle-writer? Best worst poet. Best worst actor. Patent and copyright lawyer who drove cheats into bankruptcy, then spent a tenth of each year doing pro bono. He wanted a large family, for the all-night Crazy Eights marathons and the four-part novelty songs on long car trips. Instead, it was only him and his dear first dimension.
She carries the booklet back to his room. “Ray!” Look what I found!” The howling mask of his face seems almost pleased. “When did you give this to me? Nice we held on to it, huh? Just what we need now. Ready?”
He’s worse than ready. He’s a kid on his way to camp.
“Start Here. If you live east of the Rocky Mountains, go to entry 1. If you live west of the Rocky Mountains, go to entry 116.”
She looks at him. His eyes are damp but traveling.
“If your tree produces cones and has needle-like leaves, go to entry 11.c.”
They both look out the window, as if the answer hasn’t been staring at them for the last quarter century. In the noonday light, the whirled boughs—stout and layered at wide intervals—shine a funny bluish silver she has never noticed. The tapered, narrow spire shimmers in the overhead sun.
“Definite yes on the needles. Cones up top, too. Raymond? I believe we may be on to something.” She flips through the pages to the treasure hunt’s next way station. “Are the needles evergreen and arranged in sheathed bundles of two to five needles each? If yes, go to . . .”
She looks up. His mask smirks now, more than it should be able to. The eyes are alight. Adventure. Excitement. Goodbye—travel well!
“Be right back.” The smallest packet of surprise lodges at the top of her chest. Like that, she’s off. She retreats through the kitchen into the back pantry—a warren of cubbies cluttered with decades of set-it-and-forget-it. Some weekend she’ll sort through the ancient junk, pitch it all, lighten the lifeboat for the last few nautical miles. The back door opens, and she smells the waves of grassy summer rolling over her. She has no shoes. The neighbors will think she has lost her mind, caring for her brain-damaged husband. And if she has, well then, that’s the story.
She crosses the lawn, takes the lowest branch in her hand, bends it toward her, and counts. There’s a song about this, she thinks. A song or a prayer or a story or a film. The branch slips upward from her hand. She drifts back to the house over the sun-ghosted grass, humming the tune that is about exactly this moment.
He’s waiting for her, hanging on the denouement. “Five in a sheath. We’re on a roll.” She flips through the
book to the next unfolding branch. “Are the cones long with thin scales?”
This splitting and choosing: she recognizes it. It’s like the law, those cases she transcribed during all those years when she played a court stenographer: the evidence, the cross-examinations, messy negotiations and manufactured facts, the path narrowing in on a sole allowable verdict. It’s like evolution’s decision tree: If the winters are tough and the water scarce, try scales or needles. It’s even weirdly like acting: If you need to respond with fear, go to gesture 21c; If wonder, 17a. Otherwise . . . It’s a programmed telephone support system for living on Earth. It’s the mind moving through mysteries, their explanations forever one more choice away. More than anything, it’s like the tree itself, with one central questioning stem splitting into dozens of probing ones, and each of those forking into hundreds, then thousands of green and independent answers. “Stay tuned,” Dorothy says, and disappears again.
Once more, the back door’s black enamel knob protests, squeaking in her hand. She makes her way across the yard to the tree. A short journey, repeated ad nauseam, more times than anyone ever signs on for, across the same patch of familiar ground: the path of love. If you want to keep fighting, turn to entry 1001. If you want to break loose and save yourself . . .
She stands under the tree and studies the cones. They cover the ground, spores that crashed to earth from some remote asteroid. Then back to the house with her answer. The way across the wet grass in stocking feet is long enough for her to wonder how she can still be here, buried alive, tied to this frozen man year after year, when all she ever wanted in this life was to find her freedom. But back in the prison doorway, waving the book in triumph, she knows. This is her freedom. This one. The freedom to be equal to the terrors of the day.
“Victory. Eastern white pine.”
She’d swear a great wave of contentment sweeps across the rigid face. She can read him now, with a telepathy honed by years of having to guess at his clotted syllables. He’s thinking: A good day’s work. A very good day.
The Overstory Page 45