Cathedral Mother

One little piggy dies and the whole crew goes soft.

Amelia saw things for the way they were. No bullshit. You had to see straight or The Machine would grind you down, leave you blind, fat, and confused. Stare at the hypnotic box. Have another slice of pizza. There’s cheese in the crust now!

She brushed aside a chest-high sword fern, feeling the cool beads of a just-passed rain soaking into her fingerless climbing gloves. The redwood forest was thicker here, and the gray dusk light barely penetrated the canopy. Amelia tried to force herself calm, taking in a deep breath through her nose, picking up the lemony tang of the forest floor, a hint of salt air from the Pacific, and the rich undercurrent of moist rot that fed the grand trees and untold species. She imagined herself in the time of the Yurok tribes, when man had a fearful respect for this land, before he formed the false God of the dollar and built McMansions of ravenous worship.

She found no calm. All thoughts trailed into spite. All long inhales exited as huffed sighs of disgust.

Goddamn fucking humans. The worst.

WHEN SHE JOINED THE Assemblage she had felt like they understood. They got it. They could see The Machine for what it was—a vast system established solely to allow the human virus to replicate and consume at any cost. And The Assemblage had formed to restore balance.

She’d only met one other member of The Assemblage, as a precursor to her redwoods mission. Their group thrived in the anonymity of a subnet supposedly facilitated by a sixteen-year-old kid who’d been vying for membership in a hacker group with a classy name—World Wide Stab. So instead of having a batch of finks and fuck-ups gather in somebody’s musty patchouli-patch living room with an inevitable COINTELPRO-variant mole, The Assemblage existed only as a loosely organized forum of people who understood The Machine and challenged each other to disassemble it in as many ways as possible.

Minks were liberated from a farm in northern Oregon, their pricey cages devastated after the exodus. Two Humvee dealerships in Washington got hit, one with well-placed Molotovs, the other with thousands of highly adhesive bumper stickers reading “NAMBLA Member and Proud of It!” Chimps were saved from HIV testing at a biotech development firm outside of San Diego, and subnet photos showed them being returned home to a preserve in Africa (where, Amelia guessed, their lack of survival skills probably got them torched as “bush meat” shortly thereafter). Every Wal-Mart in New Jersey arrived to glue-filled locks on the exact same morning.

Not everything The Assemblage pulled was to Amelia’s liking, but overall they seemed to be one of the only groups out there worth a damn.

That was until the Oregon tree spiking incident shook them up.

She’d been shocked too, initially, when she opened the forum thread. The title read, “97% of Oregon Old Growth Gone—Don’t Fuck With Our Last 3%.” Two quick clicks on the title and she was staring at a grainy, zoomed-in digital photo: a logger’s face turned meatloaf, head nearly bisected, left eye loose of its orbit. Text beneath that: No more warning signs for spikes! Let’s really put Earth first! Feed the worms another tree killer!

The Assemblage, for all its rhetoric and snarky misanthropy, was not prepared for murder. Buddhist members cried bad karma. Pacifists quoted Gandhi. Anarchist kids sweated clean through their black bandanas, wondering if eco-terrorist association charges would make Mom and Dad kill the college funds. Membership dwindled in anticipation of Fed heat.

Amelia, however, was applauding. The Oregon spikers got it right. Now The Machine was short a cog, and she knew any loggers working that territory had a new thought in their heads: Is this worth dying for?

She was inspired. She knew that acres of redwoods south of her home in Eureka were about to be offered up as a smorgasbord to a conglomerate of corporate interests, one of the final parting gifts from King George’s administration.

She had hiked those territories since her childhood, and even now she trekked there with her son Henry. The trees there were giants, vast even among redwoods, some topping thirty-five stories tall, with trunks over twenty feet around. To her they were great and ancient things, representatives from better times.

To grow for thousands of years only to be destroyed for the “cubic feet” needed to house more goddamned MOB’s (Morbidly Obese Breeders, Assemblage code for the common-folk) . . . Amelia couldn’t stomach the idea.

She planned. There were only a few months until the virgin forest was to be royally fucked by bulldozers and cat-tracks and chain-saws and cranes.

Despite being consumed with finding a way to stop The Machine from gaining penetration, she tried to stay balanced.

Nights were for plotting—surveying and copping gear and staying tuned to those few voices on The Assemblage that still raged and let her know she wasn’t alone.

Days were for Henry—homeschooling and hiking and lessons in doing no harm. Late summer heat let them swim in a pond near their property, sometimes until dusk brought out flurries of gnats and insect-chasing bats. These were the sorts of things she pointed out to Henry, to remind him that he needn’t be jealous of the TV shows his friends talked about.

Not that she let Henry see those friends too often. Their life was very contained, and she couldn’t risk outside influence turning her son into another one of . . . them.

She never intended to become a Breeder and had a hard time accepting the extra pressure she was creating for the taxed environment. But she reminded herself that she had not had Henry for selfish reasons. She’d been young and confused, and had made the mistake of being seduced by a gangly hippie boy named Grant, who was drifting through town with a few hundred other friends on their way to a Rainbow Family gathering.

She was pulled away from the boredom of her grocery store stock clerk gig in Eureka, and spent over a year wandering the US with the Family, dropping acid and shitting in woodland troughs, shoplifting steaks and air duster (for cooking and huffing, respectively). Free love gave her a nice case of genital warts and a disappearing period.

Grant, lover that he was, offered to sell off his Phish bootlegs to pay for an abortion, but by the time she’d really put the pieces together she was already in the second trimester, and the kicks in her belly had her feeling like this kid was closer to alive than not. She killed the LSD and nitrous habits and smoked a lot of weed and ate buckets of trail mix and waited for the Rainbow Family train to circumnavigate back toward Eureka.

The train didn’t quite chug fast enough and she ended up having Henry on the outskirts of a field in eastern Oregon, near the Blue Mountains. A girl named Hester, who claimed to be a midwife, shouted at Amelia to breathe. Then, once she confirmed Amelia was indeed breathing, she shared what she must have thought was comforting wisdom.

“The Armillaria mushroom that grows near here is the biggest living thing on Earth. It’s underground. It’s like three miles wide.”

Then she wandered off into the distance, perhaps to find this giant mushroom, leaving Amelia alone to have the most primal experience of her life.

She felt abandoned for a moment, cursing Grant for his carelessness, herself for being seduced by the irresponsibility dressed as freedom that brought her to this Third-World state. But loneliness was swiftly crushed by a series of contractions and a sense of animal purpose. Then everything was waves of pain, and a sudden release, and the sound of tiny lungs taking first air. Amelia collapsed with her boy, loneliness long forgotten.

She was cradling Henry in her arms when a dirt-bag named Armando wandered by and offered to help. He also, she later realized, wouldn’t stop looking at her crotch. Still, he had a Leatherman, and in cutting her umbilical, was the closest thing Henry had to an obstetrician.

With her infant son in her arms she’d found it easy to beg enough change to get a Greyhound Bus ride back to glorious Eureka.

Since then she’d done her best to raise Henry outside of an ever-sickening American culture. If she had to be a Breeder, she’d make damn sure that her contribution to the next generation gave back to the Earth in some way. Since she couldn’t trust Henry to the goddamned Rockefeller Worker Training Camp they called Public School she’d had to reconnect with her parents and beg enough of a stipend to support her and the kid.

It meant her parents got to visit Henry on occasion, but she was sure to let him know that these were Bad People. Industrialists. Plastic makers. Part of the Problem. They were piggies.

Still, they kept her and Henry in the food and clothes business, and Amelia took a secret joy in spending their money on the various laptops and servers that maintained her connection to the subnet and The Assemblage.

And lately she’d been spending their cash on climbing gear. It had taken her a precious couple of weeks to come up with her plan, but if she pulled it off she’d be able to protect the forest and keep it from being tied to her or her new associate.

She’d drafted “Cristoff” from another subnet board called Green Defense, where he’d developed a reputation for being too extreme. His avatar was a picture of Charles Whitman with the word HERO embossed at the bottom.

They vetted each other via subnet friends. “Cristoff” agreed to drive up from San Francisco so they could get to work. Real names, they agreed, would never be exchanged.

Posing as husband and wife—Mr. and Mrs. Heartwood, har har har—they hooked up with a local arborist named Denny who gave lessons in recreational tree climbing down by the Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Henry was allowed to spend a week with his friend Toby (whose family she found the least disgusting).

She and Cristoff were quick learners. They picked up “crack-jamming” on day one, which allowed them to free climb a redwood’s thick, gnarled bark by pinning hands and feet into the crevices. Day two taught them how to use mechanical Jumar ascenders, rope, and a tree-climbing saddle to get much higher. This was called “jugging,” a term which Cristoff found amusing.

“I’ll tell my buddies I spent all week crack-jamming and jugging with a new lady friend.”

Who was this guy? And he had friends? That was concerning.

Still, he could climb, and was willing to help her with the delicate work they needed to do up in the unprotected redwoods.

At night she wore a head-lamp in her tent and read up on great trees: Forest canopies held half of the living species in nature. The top of the tree was the crown, which could be its own ecosystem, several feet across, filled with canopy soil up to a meter deep, hosting hundreds of ferns, barbed salmonberry canes, even fruit-bearing huckleberry bushes. These crowns were miracles of fractal reiteration, with some sprouting hundreds of exacting smaller versions of the main tree, all of them reaching for the sun. The redwoods were one of the last homes for legions of unnamed prehistoric lichen and some canopies even inexplicably harbored worms and soil-mites previously thought to be extinct.

She was particularly happy to read that both HIV and Ebola were postulated to have come from human interaction with canopy-dwelling primates and bats. These trees were already fighting back. It gave her mission a sense of camaraderie. She would work with these noble giants as an advance warning system. Don’t fuck with our last 3%.

Amelia and Cristoff spent the last part of their lessons learning a technique for which they’d paid extra. Skywalking was a way of manipulating multiple ropes and knots in the upper canopy, allowing you to float from branch to branch without applying too much weight. Properly done you could even move from crown to crown.

They had to be able to do this, as the crowns they’d be leaving would be far too treacherous to allow return. They were going to create a logger’s nightmare up there.

That was the plan—To spend a week camped among the canopies, working to saw dozens of branches just short of the snapping point. The loggers and climbers call these hanging branches “widow-makers” and with good reason. Falling from stories above they could reach terminal velocity and they typically tore loose an armada of forest shrapnel on their way down. One turn-of-the-century account of a widow-maker dispatch simply read, “Wilson was ruined. Pieces were found five feet high in surrounding trees. The rest of him was already buried beneath the branch. Most could not be retrieved for proper interment.”

How many loggers would be splattered by her old growth nukes before they asked the crucial question?

Is this worth dying for?

THAT WAS THE PLAN, at least until Cristoff decided to get in a fight with gravity.

There are different types of branches on a redwood. The higher branches can be thick as most regular trees and are rooted deeply into the trunk. The lower branches are far narrower. Between hand-fuls of strawberry granola Denny had told them these lesser branches were called epicormics, or “dog’s hair” for slang. They were easily shed and not to be trusted.

Cristoff was getting comfortable in the trees, pleased with his progress. Denny told them not to be surprised if this felt strangely natural, since all other primates were at least partially arboreal.

Cristoff’s inner monkey had him gassed up and proud after a few strong ascents. Cristoff’s inner monkey started feeling an imaginary kinship with the tree. The kind of false trust that let him think a batch of epicormics would hold as well as a single trunk-rooted branch.

He was sixty feet up, ten feet past the climber’s “redline” cutoff for survivable falls. He ignored Denny’s request that he rope a higher branch. The last thing he said through the walkie talkie was, “I’ve got this.”

The redwood, clearly disagreeing, decided to shed some weight.

The sounds were as follows: a sharp crack as the branches separated, a shocked yell accompanied by a terrible whooshing sound as gravity got serious, and at last a chimerical whoomp-crunch as Cristoff created the first and only Cristoff Crater at Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

Technically, per Denny’s lessons, he was supposed to yell “Headache” if any object was falling, even himself. His neglect would be forgiven the moment Denny and Amelia approached his body.

Cristoff was breathing, but the crimson gurgles at each exhale screamed hemorrhage, and compound fractures at the femur and clavicle had happened so fast that the bone still jutted white and proud with little blood to emphasize how shattered the man was.

Still in shock, Denny informed Cristoff that he shouldn’t move.

As far as Amelia could see, this was a non-issue. Whoever this Cristoff was, she had a hard time imagining he’d ever move again.

Denny held out hope, lucking into a cell phone signal and getting Air Life dispatched.

Amelia tried to get Cristoff’s eyes to focus on hers, but his were glazed and the left had gone bright red. She could hear a helicopter in the distance.

She prayed for telepathy. She stared at the broken man and thought, “Don’t you say a motherfucking word.”

With that, she turned and walked to her rental Chrysler. Denny’s eyes stayed fixed on the injured man as “Mrs. Heartwood” gunned the car out of the park, leaving an odd impression, some cheap camping gear, and the crushed shell of a man she hoped would die, and fast.

WEAK MEN WERE SHAPING Amelia’s world. First Grant left her with an STD and a kid. Then the spiked logger’s greed and split skull became the catalyst that weakened the resolve of The Assemblage. Now the man she knew as “Cristoff” turned snitch.

It wasn’t intentional, but the bastard (real name: Richard Eggleston) had managed to make it to the hospital, and the opiate mix they pumped into him for pain management left him delirious. His night nurse picked up enough chatter about “tree bombs” to feel comfortable playing Dutiful Citizen and calling the Feds.

The Feds got to his computer gear. The subnet that hosted The Assemblage was fluid enough that they were able to block Fed access and re-route themselves, but speculation about what might have been on Eggleston’s hard drive had a variety of already-freaked underground groups on full black helicopter alarm.

Worse still, The Assemblage had gone even more limp-dicked. Even staunch hard-liners she’d once trusted were calling the glimmers of her plan that had gone public “monstrous and irresponsible.”

She put her stress in the wrong places, snapping at Henry for minor transgressions like leaving his crayons out. She was forgetting to eat.

Then a new voice joined The Assemblage—Mycoblastus Sanguinarius. Black bloody heart. She looked it up and discovered the namesake was a tiny lichen that revealed a single dot of blood-like fluid when ruptured.

He signed his posts as Myco. She assumed the member was a “he” since the writing had a masculine terseness, but there was no way to be sure.

Myco posted an open letter to anyone who might have been involved in the aborted “redwoods plan.” He begged them to contact him privately, saying that he might have a way to help them reach their goal without shedding any blood.

He had to be a mole, right?

She ignored Myco and tried to come up with her own new plan. Random spiking? Fire-bombing bulldozers?

The stress amped her self-loathing. You say you hate humans. Well, what do you think you are, bitch? What do you think Henry is? Chain yourself to a tree and starve out. Pull the media into this. How much explosive could you strap to your body? To Henry?

These were not safe thoughts. She pushed them away. She tried to stay focused on a real option. The loggers would gain access soon.

She sent a non-committal message to Myco. What’s your plan?

Two days later Myco sent a response, and it felt legit. He was government, and he was upfront about it. He held a position of some influence, and if he had the right information he could get it in front of someone who might have the power to halt the government’s release of the property.

The problem was that the property was in a weird transitory status, off limits for government-permitted climbs even for the research sector. He needed someone who knew the area to engage in a “ninja climb” and acquire a number of biological samples. Depending on what was found, the rarity of the species and its “viability for government use,” he might be able to prevent the destruction of those groves.

But who was this guy? This was a classic COINTELPRO move. He wrote like a professor, which could place him with DARPA or one of its extensions. Could just be an FBI grunt telling her what she wanted to hear. And would it be any better if the property was retained “for government use?”

Or was this some old hippie college teacher trying to regain his idealism after trading it for a BMW in the 80s? Maybe his son was in the California legislature? Maybe his nephew was the goddamned President?

Who knew? But she trusted this subnet, and if he promised they’d never have to meet then she felt there was enough safety in the agreement. There’s no way he’d be able to guess which trees she’d climb. The groves were too dense, the old timber too wide.

He assured her that all he needed were the samples, and she could leave them in a place of her choosing, as long as it was temperate and hidden. Then she just had to forward the location via GPS coordinates.

It would be a shame to waste her climbing lessons. And she’d been dreaming of these trees, somehow still standing proud for another thousand years, after all the little piggies had destroyed each other. In her dreams the skyscrapers fell and the redwoods swayed in the moonlight, returned to their post atop the world.

She responded to Myco—Please check Assemblage regularly. Location of samples to follow.

After sending was confirmed she crawled into bed with Henry and spooned him, despite a few sleepy grumbles. She pulled the blankets tight around the two of them and kissed the back of his head.

I’ll protect us, Henry, from these humans.

ALL OF HER GEAR was black, from boots to ropes to pack. Even her Treeboat, which would allow her to sleep in the tree hammock-style if needed, was damn near invisible at night.

Dusk had passed now, and her anger was shifting to nerves as she tried to recall climbing techniques. She moved quietly. The yielding forest floor, rich with decomposed needles and ferns, absorbed much of her noise. Where moonlight broke through the thickening canopy it revealed large clusters of redwood sorrel, the heart-shaped leaves still glowing emerald green in the slight illumination. It was beautiful.

I will save this place.

She picked a full moon night, thinking it would give her better natural light once she cleared the canopy and reached the crown. Until that point she’d have to stay to the shadows.

Myco told her that the older the tree was, the more likely it was to be biologically diverse. She searched for the base of a redwood that looked about three cars across, and briefly shone her headlamp to check the coloration of the bark. The “newer” trees, only a few hundred years old, would have reddish brown bark while the eldest would have shifted to a stony gray.

Her tree finally presented itself, after forty minutes of hiking deeper into the grove. Light had simply ceased to find a home. To her right she saw the outline of the blockage, a tree thick as a blue whale reaching up to heights she couldn’t perceive.

She ran her hands across the bark, imagining herself at the foot of some planet-traversing colossus who was standing still to allow her up for a visit.

She used a pair of night vision-equipped Zeiss binoculars to scan the base for a solid climbing branch on which to start. The best option was about one hundred and forty feet up, though several epicormics presented below that. She thought of “Cristoff’s” ruptured eye and wrong-angled bone shards and immediately canceled any thought of risking the lower points.

The best solution was to shoot a weighted fishing line over the good branch, then use that line to pull a rope back up and over. It was a patience game, and she set herself to it, unpacking a crossbow with a pre-threaded dull-tipped arrow.

Four tries and she found purchase. After that it seemed easy to rig up the rope and lock in her climbing saddle and Jumar ascenders.

She began her climb beyond the world of the humans, praying that the tree’s nightlife would yield something Myco needed. She stopped at each major branch and briefly flipped on her headlamp, extracting a plastic container with a microfiber lid as instructed by her mysterious correspondent. The lids allowed oxygen in, but nothing, even water, would find its way out.

At mid-height she managed to pry loose a tent spider entrenched in a bark pocket. Its eyes gleamed purple in her headlamp.

She scored fragments of lichens, some shaped like leaves of lettuce, others like tiny clothespins, and still others that looked like green beard hairs.

Just before breaking into the crown she spotted an inverted blackened chamber about three feet wide, the damage from some fire that likely burned before the birth of Christ. Tucked just inside the fire cave she found a blind salamander, its damp wet skin speckled with orange dots. She grabbed a chunk of moist canopy soil to include in its container so that it might survive the voyage.

The salamander wiggled in her fingers. She stared at it, wondering how the hell it got up here.

Speaking of which, how did I get up here?

Strung between two branches, hundreds of feet above the Earth, staring at some tree lizard. Way out of cell phone range and one mistake away from instant death. So far from home, from Henry.

Aside from the thought of her son, she was filled with exhilaration rather than fear. This was a world so few had ever seen. And she was going to save it from her terrible species.

Emboldened, she pushed upward to the crown. The moon was there to greet her, blindingly bright and so close she could touch it.

AMELIA WAS CONFUSED DURING her descent. Happy, ecstatic really, but confused. She felt as if her time in the crown was a dream. Beautiful to be sure, but . . . those things couldn’t have happened, right?

She’d been gathering more samples—a variety of berries, more lichen than she could count, even a bright white worm she spotted nosing out of the canopy soil. But then she’d . . . what?

Shimmers of light. She’d found the trunk pool. Dead center in the crown, the main trunk had collapsed inward and hollowed out, allowing water to collect there.

She’d reached in with a plastic sample container and immediately felt a sting in her exposed fingers. Was it the cold? But seconds later her hand filled with warmth. It spread up her arms and unfurled in her chest. She’d closed the sample container and tucked it into her pack.

Then she remembered feeling an overwhelming sense of joy, and safety. Thoughts of rotten Grant or all the pigs snorting around down on Earth turned to sand and were blown away. A dumb grin slid across her face and the moon blurred through her tears—a white puddle surrounded by oil.

But did she really unhitch her tree saddle and carabiners? Did she really let her body drop into the trunk pool, and float there, picturing herself as a tiny red hummingbird sitting in the palm of a kind and loving God.

It seemed insane. But when she reached up to feel her hair, it was still sopping wet.

“I had a moment of rapture,” she thought. And she didn’t care if it was real or not.

She descended carefully, methodically, and placed her cargo in a safe place before the sun cracked the horizon.

AFTER CLEANING UP AND communicating her drop spot to Myco, she drove to Toby’s parents’ house to pick up Henry. She still hadn’t slept, but she couldn’t wait to see her son. There was something so lovely about him. She smiled at the thought of him and her chest ached in his absence. She sped across Eureka, keeping an eye out for the erratic driving of the tweakers that inhabited early morning commutes like this. Not that she hated the tweakers. Everyone had their problems.

Jesus, what?

Amelia had been clean of the poison of drugs for a long time now, but she could swear she was being washed over by waves of euphoria. She wrote it off as sleep deprivation and adrenaline.

But when she got to Toby’s she found that instead of honking and waiting for Henry to come running out, she practically jumped out of her car and ran to the front door.

Shit. I’ll have to talk to the parents.

I love the parents.

Oh, God.

Thankfully only Henry emerged from the front door. Amelia saw him recoil as she crouched down to sweep him up. What a boy . . .

“Momma, you smell funny.”

“Well, kiddo, you smell, too. You smell great. God, I just love you SO MUCH!”

She kissed him full on the lips, a big wet smacker that she was sure would have embarrassed him if Toby were watching. Oh well, she’d slap one on adorable little Toby too.

She set Henry down. He looked up at her, his brow furrowed. “You okay, momma?”

“Yes, honey, I’m better than ever. You want to go get some pancakes?”

With that he nodded “Yes” and took off running for the car. He never got pancakes. High fructose corn syrup was a poison, one of the favorites of The Machine.

But it felt so right to make him happy. She wanted to hold him close and kiss him all over his little face.

He was already buckled when she got in the car. He was rubbing his sleeve back and forth on his lips.

“It tingles, momma.”

“Bad tingles, like burning?”

“No, like peppermint. It’s kind of nice, I guess.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yup. It’s really nice, actually. Really nice.”

SHE AND HENRY WERE barely eating anymore. They felt constantly tired, though they found they were happy just cuddling and drinking water. Lots of water, to the point where Henry would laugh at the sloshing sounds when either of them moved around.

Their temperatures ran hot, but never to the point where she started thinking Emergency Room.

Amelia did worry when the sores appeared on Henry’s chest and arms. They reminded her of the splotches on the tweakers that tried to shoplift at the grocery store she’d worked for. Her boss had told her that was caused by battery acid in the meth.

She applied A + D Ointment to Henry’s sores and got a cool washcloth for his forehead. That seemed to give him more energy. He asked her to tell the story again, about climbing the great tree and meeting the strange creatures and swimming in the sky pool and saving the woods.

He loved the story. He loved her and told her so, over and over again.

HE WAS DEAD WHEN she woke.

She could tell right away. She was so hot—sweating under the blankets—that his body was like ice against her chest.

And something was very wrong. Because his chest was not expanding, but his belly was. His abdomen was thrumming like it was filled with boiling water. Worse, while her animal instinct got her away from his body, she found herself back in front of the sink, refilling her favorite glass with tap water. Good God she was thirsty.

And happy.

Happy? Fucking Christ—Henry is dead. Something is moving in his belly.

They’d both been crying for days now, but they were tears of overwhelming joy, at their luck that they might be alive and filled with so much love.

Amelia wanted true tears. Part of her brain was screaming, begging to collapse to the floor, to crawl back to Henry and wail.

What was happening?

For days now, their lives were only bed/water/love. They’d heard helicopters roaring overhead last night, and it was a wonderful sound. That man should fly was so amazing.

No. Henry is dead. Nothing is amazing. Figure out what’s going on.

Drink some water.

No.

Go to bed.

No.

She hadn’t turned on her computer since sending her last email to Myco. What a beautiful name. What a great man! Amelia wanted to scrape all this love out of her skull, but it came at her in insistent waves.

Myco had responded: Your woods are saved. Your collection efforts provided us with not just one, but two viable interests. Rest assured that this grove will be protected for some time to come, though public access will be greatly reduced. However, the trees will be saved, and I would like to let you know, in the confidence afforded to Assemblage members of course, that one of the lichen you provided us may hold the key to boosting white blood cell counts in patients with severe immune deficiencies. The other sample of interest was a microscopic parasite found in the water sample you provided. We expected protozoa but actually discovered a never-before-seen type of copepod, a tiny shrimp-like creature. We can’t tell whether it has been self-sustaining in the tree for thousands of years, or if it was just recently dropped there by a wet-winged osprey, but we do know that it possesses an ovipositor for egg delivery and that the eggs have this miraculous viral coating that likely induces confusion in the host. It’s similar to how a parasitic wasp breeds, but it is so streamlined. You’ve done our group a great service and we believe that this little management tool may help us to control invasive fish species off Florida and elsewhere. Congratulations!

She deleted the message.

Henry’s body was twitching under the blankets.

Drink more water.

Get in bed. Love your son.

Protect him.

She refused the voice. It was a virus. Myco’s precious streamlined management tool had killed her son, and it would kill her too. And for the first time in her life, she could embrace her death.

But not Henry’s. Poor Henry.

Before she died she was going to send a message to some of the piggies. Somehow they’d led her to this terrible place. All these humans . . .

AMELIA CLEANED HERSELF, IGNORING the shifting in her own belly and the “love” that whipsawed around her brain.

She dried and put on her only perfume and spotted a few sores blooming on her skin. Nothing some foundation couldn’t cover up.

She slid on a short skirt and an old black T-shirt. It fit perfectly— the last few days’ fast had done right by her looks.

No underwear. None needed.

She would walk to the outskirts of the grove, where she guessed gun-sure soldiers and salivating businessmen were already setting up perimeter in anticipation of harvesting what she’d found.

There was an old redwood stump there which had refused to die. It was fifteen feet across and rimmed on all sides by new redwood trunks growing from its edges. The locals called these “fairy circles” and a few romantic visiting botanists had termed them “cathedrals.”

She would claim this cathedral as her own and would invite every last man to join her.

She licked her lips in anticipation. She was already wet. Her upper thighs tingled. Like peppermint. It was really nice.

Humanity needed a management tool. And she would give it to them.

With love.