What was the wood, what the tree out of which heaven and earth were fashioned?
—RIG VEDA, 10.31.7
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, “What may this be?” And it was answered generally thus, “It is all that is made.”
—JULIAN OF NORWICH
Say the planet is born at midnight and it runs for one day.
First there is nothing. Two hours are lost to lava and meteors. Life doesn’t show up until three or four a.m. Even then, it’s just the barest self-copying bits and pieces. From dawn to late morning—a million million years of branching—nothing more exists than lean and simple cells.
Then there is everything. Something wild happens, not long after noon. One kind of simple cell enslaves a couple of others. Nuclei get membranes. Cells evolve organelles. What was once a solo campsite grows into a town.
The day is two-thirds done when animals and plants part ways. And still life is only single cells. Dusk falls before compound life takes hold. Every large living thing is a latecomer, showing up after dark. Nine p.m. brings jellyfish and worms. Later that hour comes the breakout—backbones, cartilage, an explosion of body forms. From one instant to the next, countless new stems and twigs in the spreading crown burst open and run.
Plants make it up on land just before ten. Then insects, who instantly take to the air. Moments later, tetrapods crawl up from the tidal muck, carrying around on their skin and in their guts whole worlds of earlier creatures. By eleven, dinosaurs have shot their bolt, leaving the mammals and birds in charge for an hour.
Somewhere in that last sixty minutes, high up in the phylogenetic canopy, life grows aware. Creatures start to speculate. Animals start teaching their children about the past and the future. Animals learn to hold rituals.
Anatomically modern man shows up four seconds before midnight. The first cave paintings appear three seconds later. And in a thousandth of a click of the second hand, life solves the mystery of DNA and starts to map the tree of life itself.
By midnight, most of the globe is converted to row crops for the care and feeding of one species. And that’s when the tree of life becomes something else again. That’s when the giant trunk starts to teeter.
NICK WAKES IN THE TENT with his head against the ground. But the earth is soft, as soft as any pillow. The soil beneath is several feet deep with needles, so many dropping, dying needles turning to microscopic life again, under his ear.
The birds wake him. They always do, the daily prophets of forgetting and remembering, deep into their songs even before the light starts to break. He’s grateful to them. They give him, each day, an early start. He lies still in the dark, hungry, listening to the birds discuss life in a thousand ancient dialects: bickering, turf war, recollection, praise, joy. It’s cold this morning, fogged in with gloom, and he doesn’t want to get out of the bag. Breakfast will be meager. There’s not much food left. He has been north for days, and he’ll have to find a town and resupply before long. There’s a road within earshot, with trucks shuttling, but the sound is abstract, muffled, far away.
He crawls from the nylon egg and looks. The first faint suggestion of dawn outlines the trees. The trees are smaller here, slender to the skirts, shaped for heavy snowfalls. But it happens to him again, as it always does now. The look of the waving trunks, the cones rustling, the way the branch tips feel each other out, the astringent, citrus scent of the needles all restore him to the crystalline reason he forever keeps forgetting.
“Up in the morning!”
His crazy singing adds to the dawn chorus.
“Out on the job!”
The nearest birds fall silent and listen.
“Work like the devil for my pay!”
A small fire suffices to boil the water, drawn from a generous stream. Pinch of coffee crystals, a fist of oats in a wooden cup, and he’s ready.
MIMI IN MISSION DOLORES PARK, San Francisco, many miles south. She sits in the grass surrounded by picnickers, under a knobcone pine, tapping at her phone. The news is a nightmare she can’t wake from. An accomplished social scientist with a wife and young son—a man she once trusted with her life—is going away for two lifetimes, for something she helped do. Convicted of domestic terrorism. Little or no attempt at defense. Found guilty of fires she can’t believe he set. “Eco-Radical Sentenced to 140 Years.” And another man, a man she loved for his earnest cartoon innocence, has sold him out.
Cross-legged on the ground, her back against the bark, she feeds key words into her phone. Adam Appich. Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act. She no longer cares what bread-crumb trails she’s leaving. Getting caught would solve so many things. Pages swell and link faster than she can skim them—expert analysis and angry amateur conjecture.
She should be in prison. She should be tried and sentenced to life. Two lives. Guilt comes up her throat, and she tastes it. Her sick legs want to stand and take her into the nearest police station. But she doesn’t even know where that might be. That’s how law-abiding she has been, for two decades. Nearby sunbathers turn to look at her. She has said something out loud. She thinks it might have been, Help me.
OTHER EYES, invisible, read alongside hers. In the time it takes Mimi to scan ten paragraphs, the bodiless eyes read ten million. She retains no more than half a dozen details that fade as soon as she flips to a new page, but the invisible learners preserve every single word and fit them into branching networks of sense that grow stronger with each addition. The more she reads, the more the facts evade her. The more the learners read, the more patterns they find.
. . .
DOUGLAS SITS at a student desk in the room his captors call a cell. It’s the nicest accommodation he’s had for two decades. He’s listening to an audio course—Introduction to Dendrology. He can get college credit for it. Maybe he’ll earn a degree. Maybe that would make her proud, the woman he knows he hasn’t a chance in hell of ever seeing again.
The professor on the tapes is great. She’s like the grandmother and mother and spiritual guidance counselor Douglas never had. He loves how they’re using people with speech impediments, these days. For audio lectures. This woman is hearing other voices altogether. He listens and takes notes. At the top of the page, he writes, The Day of Life. It’s crazy, what the woman on the tape is saying. He had no idea. Life—flatlined for a billion years or more. Unbelievable. The whole escapade might never have happened. The tree of life might have stayed a shrub forever. And the day of life might have been a very quiet day.
He listens as she clicks off the hours. And when the brutes show up in the last seconds to turn the whole planet into a factory farm, he yanks out the buds, gets up, and lets loose. Maybe a little too long and loud. The duty guard looks in on him. “The hell’s going on in there?”
“Nothing, man. All good. Just . . . a little screaming, is all.”
THE WORST PART is the photo. Mimi wouldn’t recognize the man if she passed him on the street. Maple. How could they ever have called him that? Bristlecone now, the narrowest strips of living bark on a withered piece of driftwood that has been dying for five thousand years.
She looks up. People sprawl near her in small clans. Some sit on blankets. Others lie down right in the patchy grass. Shoes, shirts, bags, bicycles, and food spread around them. Lunch is on; the sky cooperates. No judgments can touch them, and all futures remain reachable.
She has performed Judith Hanson for so many years that it shocks her now, to remember the crimes she committed as Mimi Ma and the punishments that wait for her in that name. To get to this park, she has walked, hopped a bus, and taken the train, ludicrous serpentine evasion. But they’ll find her, wherever she is, whatever trail she leaves. She’s a multiple felon. A manslaughterer. Domestic terrorist. Seventy plus seventy years.
Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.
Near Mimi in the grass, a boy in chitin-looking clothing says, into his hand, “Where’s the nearest place I can buy some sunscreen?” A pleasant woman answers, “Here’s what I found for you!” Mimi holds her phone close to her face. She bounces from news to pictures, analysis to video. Somewhere in this tiny black monolith is a bit of her father. Pieces of his brain and soul. She whispers into her own phone’s mic, “Where’s the nearest police station?” A map appears, showing the fastest route and how many minutes it would take her to walk. Five-point-three. The boy in the bug-skeleton apparel tells his phone, “Play me some cowpunk,” and disappears into his wireless buds.
ADAM LIES in his bunk in a transfer facility, while the overflowing federal system searches for space to house him. There will be no appeal. He’s watching a film on the phosphenes inside his closed eyelids of a bearded man confronting the court. The lack of remorse or bargaining. The wife, two rows behind him, going to pieces. Soon we’ll know if we were right or wrong.
He wonders how he found it in him to use the word we. But he’s glad he did. Everything was we, back then. A surrender to cooperative existence. We, the five of us. No separate trees in a forest. What had they hoped to win? Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that’s where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.
The coming massacre was their authority—a cataclysm large enough to pardon every fire the five of them lit. That cataclysm will still come, he’s sure of it, long before his seventy plus seventy years are up. But not soon enough to exonerate him.
THE WINDOW in Douggie’s cell is too high up to see through. He stands underneath, pretending. The audio course has made him crazy to see a tree. Any anemic, stunted thing—the one thing from free-range life aside from Mimi he misses most, despite the shit they got him in. But the weird thing is, he can’t remember how they go. How a noble fir looks in profile. How the parts of an ironwood connect, the way the branches run. He’s even getting shaky about Engelmanns and hemlocks—trees he saw so damn many of, for so damn long. An elm, a tupelo, a buckeye: forget it. If he drew one now, it would be like some five-year-old’s crude crayon sketch. Cotton candy on a stick.
He didn’t look hard enough. He loved too little. More than enough to jail him, too little to get him through today. But he has hour after empty hour, with no great obligation but to keep from going apeshit crazy. His eyes close and he thrashes around for calm. He tries to summon the details that the audiotape reels off. The straight, bronze spears of beech buds. The buds of a red oak, massed on the branch tips like maces. The hollow end of a sycamore’s leaf stem, cupped over next year’s start. The taste of a black walnut and the look of its monkey-faced leaf scars.
After a while, they start to solidify—simple at first, but gaining grain. The way a maple in spring flushes red from the top. The polite applause of aspens. A yew reaching out, like a parent taking a child’s hand. Whiffs of scratched hickory nut. Dams break and memories flood him, like the million keyholes of light coming down through the palms of a horse chestnut. The angle between locust thorns. The turbulence in a piece of turned olive wood. Sprays of a mimosa’s foliage, like the tails of tropical birds. The secret writing on peeled-back birch bark, its words blurred and cryptic. Walking under Lombardy poplars where the calm was so heavy that even inhaling seemed a crime. Scraping against a cypress and thinking, This is what the afterlife should smell like.
He may be the richest man who ever lived. So rich he can lose it all and still turn a profit. He stands next to the green cinder-block wall, its paint like shiny, hardened flesh. He looks up into the fall of light and tries to recall. His hand presses where it always does, against the walnut in the side of his belly, just above his belt. Something is in there, a sizable seed, impossible to picture, not an ally, but life just the same.
ANOTHER RICH MAN—the sixty-third richest in Santa Clara County—sits in his own confinement, typing into a screen. Does it matter where? The words Neelay writes add to a growing organism, one that has just now begun to add to itself. At other screens in other cities, all the best coders that several hundred million dollars can hire contribute to the work in progress. Their brand-new venture into cooperation is off to the most remarkable beginning. Already their creatures swallow up whole continents of data, finding in them the most surprising patterns. Nothing needs to start from scratch. There’s so much digital germplasm already in the public domain.
The coders tell the listeners nothing except how to look. Then the new creations head off to scout the globe, and the code spreads outward. New theories, new offspring, and more evolving species, all of them sharing a single goal: to find out how big life is, how connected, and what it would take for people to unsuicide. The Earth has become again the deepest, finest game, and the learners just its latest players. Wild in their diversity, they fly up, flock into the datasphere like origami birds. Some will thrive for a while, then fall away. The ones that hit on something right will increase and multiply. As Neelay has learned with the greatest pain: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory.
. . .
OTHER LEARNERS, born yesterday, study every button Judith Hanson clicks. They follow her to the gargantuan film archive, where thirteen more years of new video have sprouted so far today. Learners have already watched billions of these clips and begin to make their inferences. They can identify faces now, and landmarks, books, paintings, buildings, and commercial products. Soon enough they’ll start guessing at what the films mean. Life is speculation, and these new speculations strain to come alive.
Mimi clicks. Videos line up beneath the headline clips, gathered by invisible agents smart enough to know that if Judith Hanson watched that she will surely want to watch these. Life Defense Force. Forest Wars. Redwood Summer.
Mimi binges. Each six-minute clip takes forever, and she rarely lasts more than a few dozen seconds. She clicks on a clip called ArBoReal. It was posted months ago and has already acquired thousands of thumbs up and down. The opening shot fades in from black on a clear-cut as far as the eye can see. Ancient wooden instruments play a resigned chorale prelude that unfolds so slowly, the whole intricate mechanism of its inner lines might as well be stopped. She doesn’t know the piece; the learners could tell her what it is. The learners can already name ten million tunes in a few notes.
The camera zooms in on a massive stump as big as a pocket theater. In one quick jump cut, three gas burners appear on top of the butte, belching fire. One more cut, and a tentlike circlet of fabric materializes, draped over the burners. The camera pans; the lens refocuses. The burners disgorge again. The circlet inflates into a brown and green tube. The tent lifts in time-lapse. Ten seconds, and Mimi realizes just which stump this must be. The learners don’t know, yet, but it won’t be long. They’ll understand everything she does, soon enough, and orders of magnitude more.
On her phone in a crowded park, Mimi watches the ghost tree materialize. It rises above the felled grove. It flaps in the breeze, a redwood leviathan come back to life. As the trunk grows, the camera pulls back to reveal it as the only thing standing in a landscape of stumps as level as a geometric proof. Fabulous, surreal, the hot-air tree billows up into gauzy apotheosis. Its dozen immense and sewn-together limbs probe around for secret compartments, for messages in the air.
She knows who made this tree. Filled out now, the plates of cinnamon bark streak black where fires burned them, centuries ago. Something encircles the great bole at its base. The sight freezes her. She thinks she’s hallucinating. But a close-up confirms the sight, even on a five-inch screen. All around the circumference, facing outward, knee to knee in a campfire ring, a ring of figures sits on the brink of enlightenment. It’s her arhats, in the exact postures from the scroll—their robes, their hunched shoulders, their protruding ribs, the smiles across their sardonic faces. She sets the device down on the grass. She doesn’t understand. The film keeps going. Chinese characters run down the side of the floating tree. Even illiterate, she recognizes them from years of long looking:
On this mountain, in such weather,
Why stay here any longer?
Three trees wave to me with urgent arms.
Then she remembers the long hours Nicholas Hoel spent in her house. She can see him, sitting at the table and sketching, while the rest of them studied maps and planned attacks. It always bothered her, as if he were a courtroom artist documenting their trial in advance. Now she sees what he was sketching.
The tree on the screen of Mimi’s phone bucks in the air. Its limbs thrash. Smoke rises from the bottom of the shot. One of the burners ignites the base of the huge fabric column. Fire licks up the trunk, the way centuries of flames once lapped at Mimas. But this bark isn’t fire-resistant. In a moment, the column of heated silk both vaporizes upward and falls back toward the Earth like a failed space shot. Flaming limbs wave and drop. The ring of arhats glows yellow, then bright orange, then black as cinder.
Another few moments, and the entire sewn redwood smolders into ash. The chorale prelude stumbles through its last deceptive cadence and resolves to tonic. Then the shot itself blinks out in a trickle of smoke over the stumped hillside. As badly as she ever did, Mimi Ma wants to bomb something.
Through the blackness, words form again. The letters are made of autumn-tinted leaves, laid out with absurd patience in swaths across long tracts of forest floor:
For there is hope of a tree, if it
goes down, that it will sprout again,
and that its tender branches will not cease.
Though the root grows old in the earth,
and the stock dies in the ground, at the scent
of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs.
But man, man wastes away and dies
and gives up the ghost, and where is he?
The leaves blow away by twos and threes, vanishing in a stiff breeze. The film ends and asks her to rate it. She looks up on a hillside full of picnickers enjoying themselves on a perfect day.
NO CAMERA NOW. Nick is done with cameras. This piece must be its own and only record. He doesn’t know exactly where he is. North. In the woods. In other words, he’s lost. But sure enough, the trees around him aren’t. To the birds that woke him, every crook in every branch of each of these spruces and tamaracks and balsam firs has a name. He’s getting used to the idea that wherever he is, that’s where his largest and longest-lasting sculpture will be, until time and living creatures come to transform it.
The woods are blue-gray and covered in lichen. He works methodically, as he has for several days. He uses only those materials already on the ground, nudging fallen wood into the growing design. Some branches he can haul in his arms. Some trunks yield to dragging and rolling, via rope and a grappling hook. For other pieces, he needs a block and tackle, anchored to upright trees. Then there are the pieces too large for him to move. These must remain in place, dictating the design, its shape more discovered than invented.
With each rotted trunk he nudges into the pattern, the plan swells. He must keep the growing creature in his head, appraising the whole work as if from way on high. He learns, as he goes, how to lay the pieces out. There are so many ways to branch—more than infinite. He looks at the kinks and camber of each fallen limb and waits for it to tell him where, in the river of wood coursing across the ground, it wants to be.
Creatures let loose with cries, off in the woods and high above. Mosquitoes bloody his face and arms—the national bird, up here. Nick works for hours, neither stymied nor satisfied. He works until he’s hungry, then stops for lunch. There aren’t too many lunches left, and he hasn’t a clue how to forage for more. He sits on the spongy earth, shoveling handfuls of almonds and apricot into his mouth. Food from trees grown in California’s Central Valley on dwindling aquifers through years of drought.
He rises again and gets back to work. Wrestles with a log as thick as his thigh. A motion in the corner of his eye startles him. He cries out. There’s an audience for this piece—a man in a red plaid coat, jeans, and lumberjack boots, with a dog that must be three-quarters wolf. Both eye him with suspicion. “They said there was a crazy white man working out here.”
Nick fights to catch his breath. “That would be me.”
The visitor looks at Nicholas’s creation. The shape under construction unfolds in all directions. He shakes his head. Then he picks up a nearby fallen branch and fits it into the pattern.
THE LEARNERS can tell where the lines of poetry come from, even if Mimi can’t. Though the root grows old in the earth . . . She knows the words must go back, older even than the tree whose stump they eulogize. The bug boy, next to her, says something. She thinks he’s talking to his phone. “Everything okay?”
She tips her head and her face swells up. Her hands appear farther away than they ought to be. She’s sucking air. She tries to nod. She must try twice. “I’m fine. I’m good. . . .” Something in her wants to surrender and go to jail for the next two centuries.
PETABYTES OF AIRBORNE MESSAGES swarm all around in the air. They collect in sensors and bounce off satellites. They stream from the cameras now mounted in every building and on each intersection. They course in from pushpins all around her, up the great roots of population that split and spread at their intelligent tips: Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Novato, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Leggett, Fortuna, Eureka . . . Tendrils of data swell and merge, up and down this coast and deeper inland. Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, Crockett, Vallejo, Cordelia, Fairfield, Davis, Sacramento . . . Deep inference sweeps through the ravines, filling the level land with human ingenuity: San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Castroville, Marina, Monterey, Carmel, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Madrone, Gilroy, Salinas, Soledad, Greenfield, King City, Paso Robles, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and on into the wilder fusing root masses of Los Angeles—a swelling clear-cut that only accelerates with each new slash. Bots watch and match, encode and see, gather and shape all the world’s data so quickly that the knowledge of humans stands still.
Neelay looks up from his code-filled screen. Grief washes over him, a grief youthful and full of expectation. He has felt grief before—that awful mix of hopes crushed and rising—but always for kin, colleagues, friends. It makes no sense, this grief for a place he won’t live long enough to see.
But he has glimpsed more than enough, and he would rather be here, launching the start of the rehabilitation, than live in the place that his learners will help repair. There’s a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans. He can’t remember how the story ends. It doesn’t matter. Every branch’s tip has its own new bud.
. . .
MIMI SITS under those branches whose supple strength no engineer could improve upon. She tucks her feet up under her legs. Her head bows and her eyes close. The fingers of her left hand twist the band of jade around her right ring finger. She needs her sisters, but she can’t reach them. A call would be worthless. Even traveling to see them would do nothing. Mimi needs them as little girls, dangling their feet from the branches of a nonexistent tree.
The jade mulberry spins under her fingers: Fusang, this magic continent, the country of the future. A new Earth now. She pulls at the ring, but her fingers have swollen, or the green band has grown too narrow to remove. The skin on the back of her hand is as papery and dry as birch bark. Somehow, she has become an old woman.
The length of her accomplice’s sentence spreads out in front of her, one day after the other. Seventy plus seventy years. Then Maple is there again, behind the log fortress wall they built to defend Deep Creek. The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.
The hair stands up all over her papery skin. That’s what he has tried to make. That’s why he let the state put him away for two lifetimes and still incriminated no one. He has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of strangers. One that refuses the judgment of the world and all its blindness. One that tells her to hold still, take his gift, and go on living.
ADAM LIES bound in his prison bed, replaying those words he spoke to his wife a week before trial, the ones that turned whatever residual feelings she still had for him into rage and hate. If I save myself, I lose something else.
What? Lois hissed. What else is there, Adam?
The learners can’t tell, yet, what the fight is over. They can’t yet tell the difference between remorse and defiance, hope and fear, blindness and wisdom. But they’ll learn soon enough. A human can feel only so many things, and once you enumerate them all, once you sample seven billion examples from each of seven billion humans and fit them together in their trillion trillion contexts, all things begin to come clear.
Adam himself is still learning what he meant. Still trying to figure out the uses of a useless choice. All day long now, in this holding cell, he reviews the evidence. He can’t say, yet, what his life was worth or what branch it should have followed. He still isn’t sure what else besides the self there is to save or lose. He has some time to think about this. Seventy plus seventy years.
WHILE THE PRISONER THINKS, innovations surge over his head, across the flyover from Portland and Seattle to Boston and New York and back again. In the time it takes the man to form one self-judging thought, a billion packets of program pass over. They course under the sea in great cables—buzzing between Tokyo, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Bangalore, Chicago, Dublin, Dallas, and Berlin. And the learners begin to turn all this data into sense.
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 the 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.
His face turns the color of sunset, scaring her. Her arm goes out to calm him. “No worries, Ray. It’s just words. Everything’s fine.”
In mounting excitement, he sees how he must win the case. Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.
At that thought, the vessels in his brain give way, the way that earth does when roots no longer hold it together. The flood of blood brings a revelation. He lifts his eyes to the window, to the mysterious outside. There, two life sentences pass in a few heartbeats. The seedlings race upward toward the sun. The varied trunks thicken, shed, fall, and rise again. Their branches rush to enclose the house and punch through its windows. At the stand’s center, the chestnut folds and unfolds, girthing out, spiraling upward, patting the air for new paths, new places, further possibilities. Great-rooted blossomer.
“Ray?” Dorothy’s arms reach out to keep him from convulsing. “Ray!”
She’s on her feet, knocking the stack of books on the bedside table to the floor. But in another moment, another look, emergency turns into its opposite. Her throat clamps shut and her eyes sting, as if the air were full of pollen. She thinks: How can it happen now? We still had books to read. There was something the two of us were supposed to do. We were just beginning to understand each other.
At her feet, on the floor, is The New Metamorphosis, by the author of The Secret Forest. It was on the top of the pile of read-alouds, waiting for the readers who’ll never get to it:
The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .
Dorothy touches the corpse’s bewildered face. Already it has started to soften, even as it grows cold. “Ray?” she says. “I’ll be right there.” Not fast enough, at the speed of her own need. But at the speed of trees, very soon.
DARKNESS SETTLES IN. Mission Dolores Park’s inhabitants change, as do their purposes. But even these night visitors cut a path around Mimi. She leans forward, hands in her lap like two tender figs. She bows her head, weighed down by liberty. The lights blaze in front of her. The skyline turns into sublime allegory. She dozes and wakes, many times.
Her left hand starts up again, tugging at the ring finger of her right. She’s like a dog unable to stop gnawing at its own foot. But this time, it yields. The jade band slips over her age-swollen knuckle and pops free. A weight flies up and out of her, and she cracks open. She sets the green circle in the grass, the one round thing amid a bedlam of growth and splitting. She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet.
The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again.
They say: The air is a mix we must keep making.
They say: There’s as much belowground as above.
They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life.
There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate.
A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.
She sees and hears this by direct gathering, through her limbs. The fires will come, despite all efforts, the blight and windthrow and floods. Then the Earth will become another thing, and people will learn it all over again. The vaults of seed banks will be thrown open. Second growth will rush back in, supple, loud, and testing all possibilities. Webs of forest will swell with species shot through in shadow and dappled by new design. Each streak of color on the carpeted Earth will rebuild its pollinators. Fish will surge again up all the watersheds, stacking themselves as thick as cordwood through the rivers, thousands per mile. Once the real world ends.
The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman.
Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.”
The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry.
“I’m thirsty.”
Be thirsty.
“I hurt.”
Be still and feel.
She lifts her eyes onto a trouser cuff of blackish blue. She follows the blue upward along the creases, past the belt with its radio and cuffs and gun and oak baton, up the blue-black pressed shirt and badge and on to the face—a man, a boy, a blood relation—whose eyes find hers. The man stares back at her, alerted by what he has just seen: an old woman talking to a thing whose answers are all mute, wooden, and spreading. “Are you all right?”
She tries to move, but can’t. Her voice won’t work. Her limbs stiffen. Only her fingers can wave a little. She holds the man’s gaze, open to every charge. Guilty, her eyes say. Innocent. Wrong. Right. Alive.
THE MAN in the red plaid coat comes back the next day, accompanied by two strapping twenty-year-old twins in sheepskin and a giant man with a raven profile and the girth of a middle linebacker. They pack in a hefty gas chain saw, two small dollies, and another block and tackle. That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world.
The ad hoc crew works for many hours, reading each other with little need for words. Together, they drag the last carcasses of pine and spruce, pain-killing willow and astringent birch, into place. Then they stand in silence and regard the design they’ve laid out across the forest floor. The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.
The man in plaid stands with his arms at his side and gazes on the message the five of them have just written. “It’s good,” he says, and his boys agree by saying nothing. Nick stands next to them, leaning on a staff of spruce, the kind of thing that might spring into bloom if you plunged it into the ground. His friends begin to chant in a very old language. It strikes Nick as strange, how few languages he understands. One and a half human ones. Not a single word of all the other living, speaking things. But what these men chant Nick half grasps, and when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true. In fact, he read once, back in Iowa, the night the woman came to trouble him into life, that the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.
The transported pieces of downed wood snake through the standing trees. Satellites high up above this work already take pictures from orbit. The shapes turn into letters complete with tendril flourishes, and the letters spell out a gigantic word legible from space:
STILL
The learners will puzzle over the message that springs up there, so near to the methane-belching tundra. But in the blink of a human eye, the learners will grow connections. Already, this word is greening. Already, the mosses surge over, the beetles and lichen and fungi turning the logs to soil. Already, seedlings root in the nurse logs’ crevices, nourished by the rot. Soon new trunks will form the word in their growing wood, following the cursive of these decaying mounds. Two centuries more, and these five living letters, too, will fade back into the swirling patterns, the changing rain and air and light. And yet—but still—they’ll spell out, for a while, the word life has been saying, since the beginning.
“I’ll be getting back now,” Nick says.
“Back where?”
“Good question.”
He stares off into the north woods, where the next project beckons. Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.