The Overstory

  His dream, when it comes, is more vivid than it has been for years. This time, the plane goes down in the Khmer jungle. Captain Straub is impaled on some malignant undergrowth Douglas can’t see. Levine and Bragg land nearby, but Douglas can’t reach them, and in a while they stop answering his shouts. He’s alone again, in what he realizes is a Bizarro Portland, swallowed entirely by a single banyan. He wakes to the sound of helicopters scouring the canopy, shining floodlights and looking for him.

  Tonight the helicopters turn into trucks. Men pile out of them, with gear. For a minute, they’re still grunts, coming to immolate Douggie’s village in a final firefight. Then he wakes up enough to see chain saws. He checks his watch: a little after midnight. At first he thinks he has fallen asleep for four days. He gets himself vertical and heads out on recon.

  “Hey!” He draws near the gear drop. “Hello!” The hard hats recoil, as from a crazy person. “You’re not setting up, are you?”

  They keep working, gassing up the hardware. Running a tape corral around the perimeter. Positioning the saurian cherry picker into place and locking down its braces.

  “You’ve made a mistake or something. The hearing’s in a few days. Read the poster.”

  Some kind of crew head comes up to him. Not threatening, exactly. The word is authorized. “Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave before we start cutting.”

  “You’re cutting? It’s pitch-dark.” But, of course, it isn’t. Not with twin banks of arc lights wheeled into place. There is no more pitch-dark. Then the civics-sized penny drops. “Hang on a sec.”

  “City orders,” the foreman says. “You’re going to have to move to the other side of the tape.”

  “City orders? What the hell does that even mean?”

  “It means move out. Beyond the tape.”

  Douglas breaks toward the doomed trees. The move stuns everyone. It takes a second before the hard hats give chase. He’s a few feet up one of the trunks before they reach him. They grab his feet. Somebody knocks him with the butt of a long pruning shaft. He smacks to the ground and lands on his bum leg.

  “Don’t do this. This is fucked up!”

  Two cutters pin him on the ground until the police show. It’s one in the morning. Just another crime against public property, executed while the city sleeps. This time the charges against him are public nuisance, obstructing official business, and resisting arrest. “You think this is funny?” demands the officer who handcuffs him.

  “Believe me, you would, too.”

  At the station on Second Street, they ask his name. “Prisoner 571.” It takes removing his wallet from his jeans by force to get his real ID. And they need to isolate him, to keep him from rabble-rousing the other criminals into an uprising.

  SEVEN-THIRTY A.M. Mimi hits the office early. An Argentinian order of impellers for centrifugal pumps has gone awry. She sets down her coffee, flips on the overhead lights, powers up her machine, and waits to boot into the corporate LAN. She swivels for a glance outside, and howls. Where there should be foliage, there’s only an expanse of gray-blue cumulonimbus.

  In two minutes, she’s standing on the bald patch, the trees she used to look out on for a moment’s remembering and peace. She hasn’t even changed out of her trainers into her slingbacks. The prim clearing denies that anything ever happened. Not a trunk or a branch left behind. Only sawdust and shed needles around the fresh, flat cuts flush with the ground. Yellow-orange wood exposed to the air, sap rising on the outmost edge of the rings—rings beyond rings, many more rings than she has years.

  And the scent of it, the smell of anticipation and loss, of fresh-cut pine. The message, the drug that worked her brain, concentrated now, laid open in death. It starts to drizzle. She closes her eyes. Outrage floods into her, the sneakiness of man, a sense of injustice larger than her whole life, the old loss that will never, ever be answered. When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.

  GERMINATION HAPPENS FAST. Neelay finishes his space opera. Some part of the elongated boy in the futuristic wheelchair still wants to give the game away for free. But there comes a moment, as there always does in the game itself, when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.

  Publishing the game requires a company, if only a fake one. Corporate HQ is his ground-floor efficiency with access ramp near El Camino in Redwood City. The business needs a name, even if the entire outfit is nothing but a crippled twenty-something Indian-American rolling around like a bundle of twigs in a dogcart. But naming a company turns out to be harder than coding up a planet. For three days, Neelay plays with portmanteaus and neologisms, all of which come up short or have already been taken. He’s sucking on his dinner—a cinnamon toothpick—and staring at some faked-up letterhead when the word Redwood pops out of his return address. It’s like someone whispers the obvious answer into his ear. Using a paint program, he mocks up a logo—a rip-off of Stanford’s fearsome tree. And Sempervirens is born.

  He calls the company’s first release The Sylvan Prophecies. With state-of-the-art DTP software, he designs an ad. At the top of the page, he centers the words:

  THERE’S A WHOLE NEW PLANET RIGHT NEXT DOOR

  Then Neelay runs the ad in the back of comics and computer magazines across the country. A disc dupe outfit over in Menlo Park pumps out three thousand floppies. He hires two ex-Stanford friends to get the game into stores up and down both coasts. Within a month, The Sylvan Prophecies sells out. Neelay dupes more discs. They sell out again. He’s stunned that so many rigs out there meet the game’s minimum specs. Word of mouth keeps spreading. Revenues flow in, and soon there’s too much work for him to handle alone.

  He signs a five-year lease on a former dentist’s suite. He hires a secretary and calls her the office manager. He hires a hacker and calls him the lead programmer. He signs a guy with an accounting degree who metamorphoses into a business manager. Assembling the team feels like building up the home planet in The Sylvan Prophecies. From scores of applicants, he hires the ones who flinch the least when they see his stick-figure body sprouting from the motorized chair.

  Astonishingly, the new employees prefer cash up front to shares in the future. It’s a total failure of imagination. They haven’t a clue where their species is headed. He tries to talk them around, but they all elect for safety and cash.

  Soon the business manager breaks it to Neelay: it’s not enough to pretend he’s a company. He has to incorporate for real. Sempervirens becomes a legal person. Neelay goes to bed at night dreaming of branching and spreading. It’s a brand-new industry with an unlimited growth curve. He needs only a few market hits, each one compounding the success of the previous. Then he’ll make the world over, the way it was shown to him, in a flash, by alien life-forms in the wild terrarium of Stanford’s inner court.

  By day, when he isn’t learning how to run a company, Neelay keeps on coding. Programming still amazes him. Declare a variable. Specify a procedure. Call each well-formed routine to do its part, inside larger, cleverer, more capable structures, like organelles building up a cell. And up from simple instructions emerges an entity with autonomous behavior. Words into action: it’s the planet’s Next New Thing. Coding, he’s still a boy of seven, with the whole world of living possibilities coming up the stairs in his father’s arms.

  The first game is still selling at a healthy clip when Sempervirens releases the sequel. The New Sylvan Prophecies employs unbelievable verisimilitude in an astonishing 256 colors. There’s real packaging now, with professional artwork, though the gameplay is the same old exploration and trading set in a glorious new higher-res galaxy. The public doesn’t care that it’s a rehash. The public can’t get enough. They love the world’s open-ended nature. There’s no real way to win the game. As with running a business, the point is to keep playing for as long as possible.

  The New Sylvan Prophecies tops the charts, even before its ancestor falls out of the to
p ten. Players post messages in online bulletin boards about wild creatures they find on backwater planets, odd, unpredictable combinations of animal, vegetable, and mineral. Lots of people find baiting the game’s flora and fauna more entertaining than finding the treasure at the galaxy’s core.

  Together, the two games make more money than many Hollywood movies, on a much lower outlay. Neelay plows all profits back into the third installment, already more ambitious than the previous two games combined. When The Sylvan Revelation appears nine months later, it lists for an outrageous fifty bucks. But for growing numbers of people, that’s a small price to pay for a transformative experience that didn’t even exist two years ago.

  A big publisher called Digit-Arts offers to purchase the brand. The arrangement makes all kinds of sense. Professionals would take over sales and distribution of all future products, freeing Sempervirens to devote itself to development. Neelay doesn’t want to run a company; he wants to make worlds. The Digit-Arts offer would guarantee his freedom and keep him in state-of-the-art wheelchairs forever.

  The night he agrees in principle to the deal, Neelay can’t sleep. He lies in his adjustable bed, trimmed by his mother’s runner of quilted storage pockets and arched over by a steel grab-bar wrapped in foam padding. Around midnight, his legs start spasming like an ambulatory person’s. He needs to get up. That would be easier with the caregiver, but Gena doesn’t come for another several hours. A button press brings the bed’s head all the way upright. He wraps his arm around the right-hand vertical post and flings his left up in front of the horizontal bar. Muscle wastage has left his forearms looking like paired pieces of driftwood. His elbows flare out in swollen knots. It takes all his strength to lever himself into a seated position. His shoulders shake, and he squeezes past that moment when he always threatens to flop back onto the bed. He rocks for a while, to tilt his torso forward enough to fling both arms behind him and buttress himself upright. Step one. Of fifty-two or so, depending on how you count.

  His sweatpants are down around his knees in the ready position, where he keeps them when the cath is in. He leans as far as he can, bends almost double, so that the weight of his head and shoulders stays put long enough for him to plant his hands forward near his butt. His right arm slips under his left thigh. There’s precious little meat left there as well—none, really—but it testifies to the baggage of his legs that they’re still anchor enough to brace against and keep his shriveled torso upright.

  He grapples at the sweats and falls back onto his left elbow. Up swings the limp drawbridge of the leg. His butt lifts enough for him to fumble the seat of the pants over himself. Success is a while in coming. The leg drops, he falls back on his protruding shoulder blades, and he’s prostrate all over again. Craning himself up once more with the bar-hung stirrup, he repeats the process on his right until the sweats are drawn tight squarely over his waist. Smoothing out the leggings on both sides takes time, but time, in the middle of the night, is an ample resource. Then a grab of the overhead bar, and, stabilized again, reaching out to one of the many hanging hooks filled with gear, he snags the U-shaped canvas sling and, in a hundred small increments, spreads it out on the bed around his body’s upright stem. Each leg gets wrapped underneath in a strap pulled up through the middle.

  He stabs out again and spears the head of the winch, drags it across its own horizontal brace beam until it’s positioned directly above. All four sling loops go over the winch’s latches, two per side. He pops the remote in his mouth and, holding the straps in place, bites down on the power button until the winch lifts him upright. He affixes the remote to the sling and detaches the catheter’s urine sack from the side of the bed. Holding the hose in his teeth to free both hands, he attaches the bag to the satchel he has wrapped himself in. Then he presses the winch button again, holds on, and goes airborne.

  There’s always that moment, as he scooches sideways through the air from bed to waiting chair, when the whole precarious system wavers. He has shifted wrong before and come down hard, smacking metal struts and crashing to the floor in pain and urine. Tonight’s ride, though, is error-free. The seat of the wheelchair must be adjusted, the wheels repositioned, but he sticks the landing. There, in the chair, he reverses all the steps, detaches the winch, hangs the bag, and like Houdini, slips free of the sling underneath him without ever lifting. Donning the cassock is easy. The shoes, though slip-on and big as a clown’s, are less so. But he’s mobile now, zipping about by joystick and throttle as easily as doing Immelmanns in a flight simulator. The whole ordeal has taken only a little over thirty minutes.

  Another ten, and he’s out by the van, waiting for the hydraulic floor of the lift to lower to the ground. He rolls his chair onto the steel square and rides it up. He rolls through the open hull into the emptied-out cabin. The lift retracts, the doors slide shut, and he positions his chair in front of a console where pedal and brake are levers at waist level that even wasted arms can operate.

  Several dozen more commands in this algorithm of liberty, and he parks the van, exits, and rolls into the Stanford inner quad. He spins 360, surveying, surrounded again by those otherworldly life-forms the way he was six years earlier. All those creatures from another galaxy, far, far away: dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor, flame, empress, kurrajong, red mulberry. He remembers how they whispered to him about a game he was destined to make—a game played by countless people worldwide, a game that puts the players smack in the middle of a living, breathing jungle filled with potential only dimly imaginable.

  Tonight, the trees are tight-lipped, refusing to tell him anything. He drums his fingers on his shriveled thighs, waits, listening, for even longer than it took him to get here. No one’s around. The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees. He wills the menagerie of trees to give him a sign. The extraterrestrial beings wave their bizarre branches. The collective tapping in the air nags at him. Memory rises inside, like sap. And now it’s as if the blowing, bending branches point him outward, behind the quad, out to Escondido, then down Panama Street, past Roble. . . .

  He heads where the waving sends him. Off to the south, the rounded tops of the Santa Cruz Mountains rise above the campus roofs. And now he remembers: a day, half his life ago and more, walking a forest trail on that ridge with his father and coming across a spectacular, monstrous redwood, a lone Methuselah that somehow escaped the loggers. He sees, now: it’s the tree he must have named his company after. And without a second thought, he knows he must consult it.

  The switchbacks up Sand Hill Road, harrowing at noon, are deadly in the dark. He tacks back and forth as if in one of those flying pods you can build at tech level 29 in the Sylvan Prophecies. The road is empty at this hour, no one to see the emaciated Ent with the worthless legs piloting a modified van with his freakish bony fingers. At the top of the ridge, on Skyline, a road named for the cableway that stripped these hills bare to build San Francisco, he turns right. That much he remembers. If memories change the pathways of the brain, then the trail must still be there. It’s just a matter of waiting for the wild things to emerge out of the understory.

  He drives through the tunnel of second growth, which has returned enough in a hundred years to fool him, in this pitch-black, into thinking it’s virgin forest. A pull-off on the right triggers enough recognition to make him stop. There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. He rides the van’s lift down to the spongy earth and waits, unsure how to pilot the chair, however fat-tired and ruggedized, down the path in front of him. But that’s what this point-and-click adventure wants.

  For a hundred yards of trail, he’s fine. Then his left tire hits a wet declivity and slips. He guns the joystick, trying to power through. He backs up and spins, hoping to pop out laterally. The tire kicks up mud and digs in. He waves the flashlight in front of him. Shadows rear up like lunging specters. Every snapped branch sounds like the work of extinct apex predators. A car engine cres
cendos up from nothing, far away down Skyline. Neelay screams at the top of his skinny lungs and waves the beam like a crazy man. But the car blasts past.

  He sits in total darkness, wondering how mankind ever survived such a place. Some hiker will find him, once the sun comes up. Or the day after. Who knows how much traffic this trail gets? A screeching comes from behind. He whirls the flashlight, but can’t turn far enough. His heart takes a while to return to baseline. When it does, he must empty the filled catheter bag onto the ground, as far from his wheels as he can reach.

  Then he sees it, woven into the other shadows less than a dozen yards in front of him. He knows how he missed it: It’s too big. Too big to make sense of. Too big to credit as a living thing. It’s a triple-wide door of darkness into the side of the night. The beam goes no more than the smallest way up the endless trunk. And up the trunk runs, straight up, beyond comprehension, an immortal, collective ecosystem—Sempervirens.

  Underneath the stupendous life, a tiny man and his even tinier son look up. Together, they’re shorter than the buttress growing out of this thing’s root system. Neelay watches, knowing what’s to come. The memory is as dense as if it were just encoded in him. The father bends back and raises his hands to the sky. Vishnu’s fig, Neelay-ji. Come back to swallow us!