They split and replicate, these master algorithms that Neelay lofts into the air. They’re just starting out, like simplest cells back in the Earth’s morning. But already they’ve learned, in a few short decades, what it took molecules a billion years to learn to do. Now they need only learn what life wants from humans. It’s a big question, to be sure. Too big for people alone. But people aren’t alone, and they never have been.
MIMI SITS baking in the grass, even in the shade of her pine. The hottest year on record will soon be followed by an even hotter one. Every year a new world champion. She sits cross-legged, hands on knees, a small person making herself smaller. Her head is light. Her thoughts won’t cohere. There’s nothing else to her now but eyes. She has practiced, for years, on humans, holding still, doing nothing but letting herself be looked at. Now she takes the skill outside.
Below her, past the knots of sunbathers, down a shallow auditorium slope, an asphalt path meanders in a gentle S. And just beyond the path, a zoo of trees. A voice up close in her ear says, Look the color! More shades than there are names, as many shades as there are numbers, and all of them green. There are squat date palms that predate the dinosaurs. Towering Washingtonia with their fan fringes and dense inflorescence. Through the palms, a whole spectrum of broadleaves run from purple to yellow. Coast live oaks, for certain. Shameless naked eucalypts. Those specimens with the odd, warty bark and exuberant compound leaves she could never find in any guidebook.
Beyond the trees, the pastel project of the city piles up in cubes of white, peach, and ocher. It builds over the hills toward the towering center, where the buildings rise skyward and turn denser. The raw force of this self-feeding engine, the countless lives that power the enterprise down at ground level, come clear to her. Across the horizon, stands of building cranes break and remake the skyline. All the spreading, urging, testing, splitting, and regenerating course of history, the rings within rings, paid for at every step with fuel and shade and fruit, oxygen and wood. . . . Nothing in this city is older than a century. In seventy plus seventy years, San Francisco will be saintly at last, or gone.
The afternoon fades. She goes on staring at the city, waiting for the city to stare back. The knots of people around her put their clothes back on. They shift and fuss and finish eating, laugh and stand, raise their bikes and scatter too quickly, as if in a film fast-forwarded to comic effect. She leans back against the trunk behind her and closes her eyes. Tries to summon the ponytailed boy-man and make him appear, as he did when local government cut down her magic grove outside her office window. A red thread once tied them together, the shared work of trying to care and see more. She tugs on the thread. It’s still taut.
The fact plows into her, what should have been obvious: why there has been no knock on her door. She slams backward, her spine against the pine. Another gift, even worse than Adam’s. That hapless boy-man has sold two lives for hers. Turn herself in now, and she’ll kill him, destroy the point of his awful sacrifice. Keep hidden, and she must live with the fact that two lives have paid for her freedom. A wail starts in the base of her lungs, but traps there and swells. She’s not strong enough, not generous enough for either path. She wants to rage at him; she wants to rush him a message of absolute forgiveness. In the absence of any word from her, he’ll torture himself without limit. He’ll think she despises him. His betrayal will bore into him and fester, fatal. He’ll die of some simple, stupid, preventable thing—a rotten tooth, an infected cut he fails to treat. He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong. He’ll die without knowing what she’s powerless to tell him—that he has helped her. That his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.
DOUGLAS, BENEATH THE WINDOW, palpates the lump in his side. When that fascination fades, he sits back down at the desk. He starts up the audio, puts his buds back in. The course resumes. The prof gets rambling about forest fires. Some metaphor, apparently. The way that fire creates new life. She mentions a word that she really ought to spell for the listeners at home. A name for cones that open only in heat. For trees that will spread and grow only through fire.
The prof returns to her one great theme: the massive tree of life, spreading, branching, flowering. That’s all it seems to want to do. To keep making guesses. To go on changing, rolling with the punches. She says, “Let me sing to you, about how creatures become other things.” He’s not sure what the lady is going on about. She describes an explosion of living forms, a hundred million new stems and twigs from one prodigious trunk. She talks about Ta-ne Mahuta, Yggdrasil, Jian-Mu, the Tree of Good and Evil, the indestructible Asvattha with roots above and branches below. Then she’s back at the original World Tree. Five times at least, she says, the tree has been dropped, and five times it has resprouted from the stump. Now it’s toppling again, and what will happen this time is anybody’s guess.
Why didn’t you do something? the tape asks Douggie. You, who were there?
And what is he supposed to say? What the fuck is he supposed to say? We tried? We tried?
He stops the audio and lies down. He’s going to have to graduate from college in ten-minute intervals. He fingers the walnut in his side. It’s something he should get checked out. But he has time to wait and see how things unfold.
He closes his eyes and lets his head loll. He’s a traitor. He has sent a man to prison for the rest of his life. A man with a wife and little boy, just like the wife and kid Douglas never had. Guilt presses down on his chest as it always does at this hour, like a car driving over him. He’s glad, again, that this prison has taken all sharp things away. He cries out like an animal that has just sprung a trap. The guard doesn’t even bother to check on him this time.
Above him, through the window too high to see, the World Tree rises, four billion years old. And next to it rises that tiny imitation he tried to climb once, long ago—spruce, fir, pine?—the time he got maced in the balls and Mimi watched them cut his jeans away. Again he steps up into the branches, like a ladder leading someplace above the blind and terrified.
He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, “I’m sorry.” No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here’s the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can’t see them, even when he can’t get near, even when he can’t remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat says a few words to the dog in a language so old it sounds like stones tossed in a brook, like needles in a breeze, humming. The dog sulks a little, but trots away through the woods. The visitor waves his hand to direct Nick to a different grappling spot on the heavy log. Together, in short, fierce spurts, they roll it into its only possible place.
“Thank you,” Nick says.
“Sure. What’s next?”
They don’t trade names. Names can’t help them any more than spruce or fir can help these beings all around them. They move logs that Nick was powerless to move alone. They execute each other’s ideas with almost no words at all. The man in the plaid coat, too, can see the snaking shapes as if from above. Soon enough, he starts refining them.
A distant branch snaps, and the crack shoots through the understory. There are mink nearby, in these same woods, and lynx. Bear, caribou, even wolverines, though they never let people glimpse them. The birds, though, give themselves as gifts. And everywhere there is scat, tracks, the evidence of things unseen. As they work, Nick hears voices. One voice, really. It repeats what it has been saying to him for decades now, ever since the speaker died. He has never known what to do with them, words of everything and nothing. Words that he has never fully grasped. Wounds that won’t heal. What we have will never end. Right? What we have will never end.
He and his companion work together as the light fades. They stop for dinner. It’s the same as lunch. Although he should just shut up, so much time has passed since Nick has had the luxury of saying anything to anyone that he can’t resist. His hand goes out
, gesturing toward the conifers. “It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They’re not that hard to hear.”
The man chuckles. “We’ve been trying to tell you that since 1492.”
The man has jerked meat. Nick doles out the last of his fruit and nuts. “I’m going to have to think about restocking soon.”
For some reason, his colleague finds this funny, too. The man swivels his head around the woods as if there were forage everywhere. As if people could live here, and die, with just a little looking and listening. From nowhere, in a heartbeat, Nick understands what Maidenhair’s voices must always have meant. The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.
Not them; us. Help from all quarters.
HIGH ABOVE Adam’s prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet’s surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands—look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There’s no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.
And so Neelay gets out and sees the world. His children comb the Earth tonight with one command: Absorb everything. Eat every scrap of data you can find. Sort and compare more measurements than all of humanity in all of history has yet managed.
Soon enough, his learners will see across the planet. They’ll watch the vast boreal forests from space and read the species-teeming tropics from eye level. They’ll study rivers and measure what’s in them. They’ll collate the data of every wild creature ever tagged and map their wanderings. They’ll read every sentence in every article that every field scientist ever published. They’ll binge-watch every landscape that anyone has pointed a camera at. They’ll listen to all the sounds of the streaming Earth. They’ll do what the genes of their ancestors shaped them to do, what all their forebears have ever done themselves. They’ll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they’ll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.
ON A LEAD-GRAY AFTERNOON in the brutal hinterlands upstate, an armored van brings Adam back to school. Psych 101. He who understands nothing about people except their innate confusion is driven through the triple-depth, razor-mesh fences of his new digs for continuing education. A squat, concrete observation tower stands to the left of the entrance, three times taller than his boyhood maple. Inside the perimeter, a jumble of slab-walled bunkers waits for him, like something his son might make out of all-gray Legos. Off in the distance, surrounded by more razor-wire moats, men in bright orange—his new nation—play basketball in the aggressive, aggrieved way his brother Emmett always did, trying to scream the ball into the hoop. These men will beat him senseless many times, not for being a terrorist, but for siding with the enemies of human progress. For being a traitor to the race.
The warden riding shotgun in the van turns to smile, watching Adam’s face as they drive down the camera-lined chute of fences. Adam pictures Lois dragging little Charlie here, for hour-long visits, once a month at first, then a couple of times a year, if he’s lucky. Adam watches his son grow up in time-lapse intervals. He sees himself listening greedily to the boy’s staggered reports, hanging on every word. Maybe they’ll become friends at last. Maybe little Charlie will explain banking to him.
They pull up in the unload zone, just down from the set-back, guarded entrance. The warden and driver extract him from the van and escort him through the detectors. Glass the thickness of a Bible. Banks of monitors and electronically locked grates. Through the armored arch behind the checkpoint, a cell-subtended hallway disappears lengthwise down an optical illusion into forever.
The years ahead will run beyond anything he can imagine. The die-offs and disasters will make Bronze Age plagues seem quaint. Prison may become a hideaway from the sentence outside.
Of all the waiting terrors, the one he fears most is time. He does the math, calculates how many futures he’ll have to live through, second by second, until his sentence ends. Futures where our ancestors vanish before we even name them. Futures where our robot descendants use us for fuel, or keep us in infinitely entertaining zoos as secured as the one Adam now checks into. Futures where humanity goes to its mass grave swearing it’s the only thing in creation that can talk. Vast, empty expanses with nothing to fill the hours but remembering how he and a handful of green-souled friends tried to save the world. But, of course, it’s not the world that needs saving. Only the thing that people call by the same name.
A man behind the impenetrable glass in a crisp white shirt emblazoned with a civic emblem asks him for something. Name, maybe, serial number, apology. Adam frowns, distracted, elsewhere. He looks down. There’s something on the cuff of his neon jumpsuit. Round, small, brown, a little globe covered with sticky burs. He has come directly from one bleak brick holding facility, been pressed into a van, driven and unloaded straight into this wasteland of cut stone and concrete. There was not the slightest chance for such life to exploit him. But here he is, carrying this free rider. So it turned out for him, for all five of them, all of blinkered humankind, used by life as surely as this bur uses his jumpsuit cuff.
And in that moment, it starts up, the quiet torture worse than anything the state can inflict on Adam. A small voice so real it might come from the bunk above him whispers the start of a story that will plague him for longer than his imprisonment: You have been spared from death, to do a most important thing.
. . .
ACROSS THE BIOMES, at all altitudes, the learners come alive at last. They discover why a hawthorn never rots. They learn to tell apart the hundred kinds of oak. When and why the green ash split off from the white. How many generations live inside the hollow of a yew. When red maples start to turn at each elevation, and how much sooner they’re turning every year. They will come to think like rivers and forests and mountains. They will grasp how a leaf of grass encodes the journeywork of the stars. In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things. The translations will be rough at first, like a child’s first guess. But soon the first sentences will start to come across, pouring out words made, like all living things, from rain and air and crumbled rock and light. Hello. Finally. Yes. Here. It’s us.
NEELAY THINKS: This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them. He will not live to see it completed, this game played by countless people worldwide, a game that puts the players smack in the middle of a living, breathing planet filled with potential they can only dimly begin to imagine. But he has nudged it along.
He lifts his hands from the translating keys, hit by a radical amazement. His heart is beating too hard for what little meat is left on his skeleton, and his vision pulses. He pushes the joystick on the chair and rolls out of the lab into the mild night. The air is spiced with bay laurel and lemon eucalyptus and pepper trees. The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will. He breathes in for a long time. Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run. The branches click in the dark dry air above his head, and he hears them. Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?
. . .
A MOAN comes out of Ray when Dorothy tells him how things end. Two life sentences, back to back. Too severe for arson, for destruction of public and private properties, even for involuntary manslaughter. But just harsh enough for that unforgivable crime: harming the safety and certainty of men.
They lie against each other in his bed, looking out through th
e window on that place that they’ve discovered, just alongside this one. The place where the story came from. Outside, hidden in branches, an owl calls its kin. Who cooks for you-all? Who cooks for you? Tomorrow the city landscapers will come again, and bring with them machines and all the irresistible force of law. And still, that won’t be the end of the story.
Brinkman chokes on objections. A word comes up and out of his throat. “No. Not right.”
His wife shrugs, her shoulder nudging his. The shrug is not without sympathy, though it doesn’t apologize. It just says, Make your case.
His objections cascade into something wider. Tides of blood rise through his brain. “Self-defense.”
She turns on her side to face him. He has her attention. Her hands move a little in the air, as if punching the narrow, chorded keyboard of her old stenotype. “How?”
He tells her with his eyes. The onetime property lawyer must take over the defense’s appeal. He’s at a severe disadvantage. He knows none of the particulars. He has seen none of the evidence produced in discovery. He has no court experience to speak of, and criminal law was always his worst subject. But the argument he lays out before the jury is as clear as a row of Lombardy poplars. In silence, he walks his lifelong partner through old and central principles of jurisprudence, one syllable at a time. Stand your ground. The castle doctrine. Self-help.
If you could save yourself, your wife, your child, or even a stranger by burning something down, the law allows you. If someone breaks into your home and starts destroying it, you may stop them however you need to.
His few syllables are mangled and worthless. She shakes her head. “I can’t get you, Ray. Say it some other way.”
He can find no way to say what so badly needs saying. Our home has been broken into. Our lives are being endangered. The law allows for all necessary force against unlawful and imminent harm.
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