Adam can’t answer. His head is still crushing him. Breathing makes him ill. He just wants to be back in Santa Cruz, analyzing the data from his questionnaires and drawing dubious conclusions from ironclad statistics.
“You’re more than welcome,” the woman tells him. “After all, we only volunteered for a few days, and here we are, almost a year later.”
Watchman smiles. “There’s a beautiful line of Muir’s. ‘I only went out for a walk . . .’ ”
The contents of Adam’s guts spill through the air, two hundred feet down to Earth.
THE SUBJECTS sit on the platform, gazing at the questionnaire and the pencils Adam gives them. Their hands are stained brown and green, with crusts of duff under their nails. They smell ripe and musty as redwood. The examiner has gotten himself above them in the lookout hammock, which won’t stop rocking. He studies their faces for the strains of paranoid salvationism he has seen in so many of the activists he has already interviewed. The man—capacious yet fatalistic. The woman—self-possessed in a way that no one getting hammered so badly has a right to be.
Maidenhair asks, “This is for your doctoral research?”
“It is.”
“What’s your hypothesis?”
Adam has been interviewing for so long the word sounds alien. “Anything I say might affect your answers.”
“You have a theory about people who . . . ?”
“No. No theories yet. I’m just gathering data.”
Watchman laughs, a brittle monosyllable. “That’s not how it works, is it?”
“How what works?”
“The scientific method. You can’t gather data without a guiding theory.”
“As I’ve told you. I’m studying the personality profiles of environmental activists.”
“Pathological conviction?” Watchman asks.
“Not at all. I just . . . I want to learn something about people who . . . people who believe that . . .”
“That plants are persons, too?”
Adam laughs, and wishes he hadn’t. It’s the altitude. “Yes.”
“You’re hoping that by adding up all these scores and doing some kind of regression analysis—”
The woman fingers her partner’s ankle. He hushes at once in a way that answers one of the two questions Adam wants to sneak into his questionnaire. The other question is how they shit in front of each other, seventy yards in the air.
Maidenhair’s smile makes Adam feel fraudulent. She’s years younger than he is, but decades more certain. “You’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people. You should be studying everyone who thinks that only people matter.”
Watchman laughs. “Talk about pathological.”
For an instant, above them, the sun pauses. Then it starts its slow drop westward, back into the waiting ocean. Noon light washes the landscape in gilt and watercolor. California, American Eden. These last pocket relics of Jurassic forest, a world like nothing else on Earth. Maidenhair flips through the booklet of questions, though Adam has asked her not to look ahead. She shakes her head at some naïveté on page three. “None of this is going to tell you anything important. If you want to know us, we should just talk.”
“Well.” The hammock is making Adam seasick. He can’t look anywhere but at the forty-nine-square-foot country below him. “The problem is—”
“He needs data. Simple quantities.” Watchman waves southwest, the saw-whine song of progress. “Complete this analogy: questionnaires are to complex personalities as skyline yarders are to . . .”
The woman stands with such spring Adam is sure she’ll pitch over the edge. She leans over one side, while Watchman tips back to compensate. Neither is conscious of their mixed-doubles maneuver. Maidenhair turns to Adam. He waits for her to plunge like Icarus. “I was about three credit hours short of a degree in actuarial science. Do you know what actuarial science is?”
“I . . . Is this a trick question?”
“It’s the science of replacing an entire human life with its cash value.”
Adam exhales. “Could you, you know, sit down or something?”
“There’s no wind at all! But fine. If I can ask you one thing.”
“Okay. Just, please . . .”
“What can you learn about us through an exam that you can’t learn by looking us in the eye and asking?”
“I want to know. . . .” It’ll ruin the questionnaire. He’ll cue them in ways that will invalidate any answers they might give. But somehow, atop this thousand-year-old beanstalk, he no longer cares. He wants to talk, a thing he hasn’t wanted to do for a while. “A lot of evidence suggests that group loyalty interferes with reason.”
Maidenhair and Watchman trade smirks, like he’s just told them that science has proven that the atmosphere is mostly air.
“People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that.”
Watchman smiles, tired. “We don’t make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won’t be able to pay.”
Adam can’t decide whether to smile or nod. He knows only that these people—the tiny few immune to consensual reality—have a secret he needs to understand.
Maidenhair inspects Adam, as through a lab’s two-way mirror. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Anything you want.”
“It’s a simple question. How long do you think we have?”
He doesn’t understand. He looks to Watchman, but the man, too, is waiting for his answer. “I don’t know.”
“In your heart of hearts. How long, before we pull the place down around us?”
Her words embarrass Adam. It’s a question for undergrad dorms. For barrooms late on a Saturday night. He has let the situation get away from him, and none of this—the trespass through private land, the ascent, this fuzzy conversation—can be worth the two extra data points. He looks away, out on the ravaged redwoods. “Really. I don’t know.”
“Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?”
The question seems so far beyond calculation it’s meaningless. Then some small jam in him dislodges, and it’s like an unblinding. “Yes.”
“Thank you!” She’s pleased with her overgrown pupil. He grins back. Maidenhair’s head bobs forward and her eyebrows flare. “And would you say that the rate is falling or rising?”
He has seen the graphs. Everyone has. Ignition has only just started.
“It’s so simple,” she says. “So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don’t see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.” Maidenhair fixes him with a look between interest and pity. Adam just wants the cradle to stop rocking. “Is the house on fire?”
A shrug. A sideways pull of the lips. “Yes.”
“And you want to observe the handful of people who’re screaming, Put it out, when everyone else is happy watching things burn.”
A minute ago, this woman was the subject of Adam’s observational study. Now he wants to confide in her. “It has a name. We call it the bystander effect. I once let my professor die because no one else in the lecture hall stood up. The larger the group . . .”
“. . . the harder it is to cry, Fire?”
“Because if there were a real problem, surely someone—”
“—lots of people would already have—”
“—with six billion other—”
“Six? Try seven. Fifteen, in a few years. We’ll soon be eating two-thirds of the planet’s net productivity. Demand for wood has tripled in our lifetime.”
“Can’t tap the brakes when you’re about to hit the wall.”
“Easier to poke your eyes out.”
The distant snarl breaks off, audible again in silence. The entire study begins to seem to Adam like a distraction. He needs to study illness on
an unimaginable scale, an illness no bystander could even see to recognize.
Maidenhair breaks the silence. “We aren’t alone. Others are trying to reach us. I can hear them.”
From Adam’s neck down to the small of his back, hairs rise. He’s huge with fur. But the signal is invisible, lost in evolution. “Hear who?”
“I don’t know. The trees. The life force.”
“You mean, talking? Out loud?”
She strokes a bough as if it’s a pet. “Not out loud. More like a Greek chorus in my head.” She looks at Adam, her face as clear as if she just asked him to stay for dinner. “I died. I was electrocuted in my bed. My heart stopped. I came back and started hearing them.”
Adam turns to Watchman for a sanity check. But the bearded prophet only arches his brows.
Maidenhair taps the questionnaire. “I suppose you have your answer now. About the psychology of world-savers?”
Watchman touches her shoulder. “What’s crazier—plants speaking, or humans listening?”
Adam doesn’t hear. He’s just now tuning in to something that has long been hiding in plain sight. He says, to no one, “I talk out loud sometimes. To my sister. She disappeared when I was little.”
“Well, okay, then. Can we study you?”
A truth bends near him, one that his discipline will never find. Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world. Adam puts out his hands to steady himself and touches only a swaying twig. Held high up above the vanishingly distant surface by a creature who should want him dead. His brain spins. The tree has drugged him. He’s twirling again by a cord the width of a vine. He fixes on the woman’s face as if some last desperate act of personality-reading might still protect him. “What . . . ? What are they saying? The trees?”
She tries to tell him.
. . .
AS THEY TALK, the war moves up the nearest drainage. The force of each new fall shatters Adam, even as it tears swaths through the remaining giants. He never imagined the violence, like a skyscraper coming down. Needle and pulverized wood cloud the air. “The fall zones are the killers,” Maidenhair says. “They bulldoze the hell out of each landing strip, so the trees won’t shatter when they drop. It murders the soil.”
A tree as thick as Adam is tall rips away and smashes down the slope below. The earth at the place of impact liquefies.
IN LATE AFTERNOON, they spot Loki at some distance, coming through the gutted forest, right on time to escort the psychologist back through Humboldt’s blockade. But something in his forward stumble says the mission has changed. At the base of the tree, he calls for them to drop the rope and harness.
“What’s wrong?” Watchman asks.
“I’ll tell you up there.”
They make room for him in the crowded nest. He’s pale and breathing hard, but not from the climb. “It’s Mother N and Moses.”
“Roughed up again?”
“Dead.”
Maidenhair cries out.
“Someone bombed the office. They were inside, writing a speech for the Board of Forestry action. The police are saying they blew themselves up with stockpiled explosives. Accusing the LDF of domestic terrorism.”
“No,” Maidenhair says. “No. Please not this.”
There’s a long silence that isn’t silent. Watchman speaks. “Mother N, a terrorist! She wouldn’t even let me spike a tree. She told me, ‘It might hurt the guy with the saw.’ ”
. . .
THEY TELL STORIES about the dead. How Mother N trained them. How Moses asked them to sit in Mimas. Memorial service, at two hundred feet. Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.
Loki descends, anxious to return to the mourners on the ground. “Nothing we can do. But at least we can do it together. You coming?” he asks Adam.
“You’re welcome to stay,” Maidenhair says.
The investigator lies in his swaying hammock, afraid to move a finger. “I’d like to see the darkness from up here.”
TONIGHT, the dark is ample and well worth seeing. Smelling, too: the stink of spores and rotting plants, of mosses creeping over all things, soil being made, even here, so many stories above the Earth. Maidenhair cooks white beans over the burner. It’s the finest meal Adam has tasted since coming into the field. The altitude doesn’t bother him as much, now that he can’t see the ground.
Flying squirrels show up to inspect the newcomer. He’s content, a stylite perched on top of the night sky. Watchman sketches by candlelight into a pocket notebook. At intervals he shows the sketches to Maidenhair. “Oh, yes. That’s them, exactly!”
Sounds at all distances, a thousand volumes, mezzo and softer. There’s a bird Adam can’t name, beating its wings on the blackness. Sharp scolds of invisible mammals. The wood of this high house, creaking. A branch falling to the ground. Another. A fly, walking across the hairs of his ear. His own breath echoing inside his collar. The breath of two others, absurdly close in this cloud village, holding their silent service. It surprises Adam, the proximity of coziness to terror. The woman clings to the artist, who works to use the last bit of candlelight. A patch of shoulder flesh catches the glow, naked and beautiful. It looks to be furred, feathered somehow. Then the inky script resolves into five distinct words.
. . .
THEY WAKE to snarls nearer by. Men prowl the ground beneath them and farther out through heaps of wasted log, linking up their efforts via walkie-talkie.
“Hey,” Maidenhair yells down. “What’s happening?”
A logger looks up. “You better get the hell out. Shit’s coming your way!”
“What shit?”
Static bursts through the walkie-talkie. The air tightens and hums. Even the daylight begins to vibrate. A pocking sound lifts over the horizon. “They aren’t,” Watchman says. “They can’t.”
A helicopter comes across the nearby rise. A toy at first, but half a minute more and the whole tree pounds like a tom-tom. The beast banks. Adam clings to his swaying hammock. A blast of air blows his whispered profanity back in his face as the maddened hornet rears up and strikes.
Wind slams the tree, a manic updraft, then its inversion. Tops of redwoods turn to rubber, and branches slash through the canopy. Watchman scrambles up into the storage roost to get the video camera, while Maidenhair grabs a broken branch the size of a baseball bat. She climbs out on the limb closest to the assault. Adam screams, “Get back!” His words are minced to motes in the rotors.
The woman locks bare feet onto the limb, which, massive as it is, flaps like rubber in this inside-out typhoon. The chopper tips and flares, and she’s face-to-face with the machine. It noses at her; she swings her branch with one wild hand. Watchman comes behind her, filming.
The chopper is big, with a bay like a bungalow. Big enough to hoist a tree older than America straight into the sky and haul it upright across the landscape. Its blades froth the air around the dangling girl. Two humans sit inside the fiberglass pod, cloaked in visors and chin-cupping helmets, chatting on tiny boom mics with some distant mission command.
Adam stares at the trick of blockbuster back projection. He has never been so close to a thing so huge and malevolent. He sees its million parts—shafts, cams, blades, plates, things for which he doesn’t even have a name—beyond the power of any human to assemble, let alone design. Yet there must be thousands of such craft, employed by industries on every continent. Tens of thousands more, armed and armored, in the globe’s many arsenals. World’s most common raptor.
Branches snap off and the air fills with chaff. Burnt fossil steams from the beast, stinking like a burning oil rig. The stench gags Adam. The roar pierces his eardrums, killing all thought. The woman flaps on her branch like a pennant, then drops her weapon and holds on. Her filming partner loses his grip in the artificial gale, and the camera, too, drops two hundred feet and plinks apart. A metallic voice, massively amplified, comes out of the helicopter. Exit the tree,
immediately.
The woman starts to shake. She can’t hold long. Mimas shudders. Against all judgment, Adam looks down. Bulldozers the color of bile are ramming the tree’s base. Men, saws, and machines prepare a fall bed right up to the edge of Mimas’s burls. He looks to Watchman, who points down at another crew, working the base of a redwood two hundred feet away. They mean to drop it next to Mimas. Maidenhair swings her leg back up and over the branch that bucks her. The chopper blares, Descend now!
Adam screams and waves his arms. He yells things that even he can’t hear above the insanity. “Stop. Back the fuck off!” He won’t be a bystander to this death.
The helicopter holds and then banks away. A voice comes from its speaker: You’re done?
“Yes,” Adam screams.
The syllable wakes Watchman from a trance. He looks toward Maidenhair, who clings to her branch, sobbing. No path is left but sanity. Watchman tips his head, and the occupation is over. Below, the fall-bed foreman confers by walkie-talkie with his invisible network. Another burst from the helicopter: Descent confirmed. Leave now. The flying thing rears in the air and spins away. Winds abate. Deafening noise dies back, leaving nothing but peace and defeat.
They drop by harness: the terrified psychologist, the stoic artist, then the prophetess, whose face, as she slips down the two hundred feet of rope, is befuddled. They’re taken into custody and led down the scarred hillside to the logging road, which has crept within a few hundred yards of Mimas’s base. They sit in the mud and wait hours for the police. Then brusque officers tuck them, three abreast, into the back of a squad car.
The logging road hairpins down the ravine. Three prisoners glance back up the denuded ridge at the outline of that great tree, half as old as Christianity. A voice lower than the pounding of the helicopter says something none of them hears, not even Maidenhair.
WHILE THE PRISONERS are being held, Patricia Westerford opens negotiations with a consortium of four universities to establish the Global Seedbed Germplasm Vault. A few filed papers and Seedbed becomes a legal person.
“It’s time,” Dr. Westerford tells her various audiences, from whom she must raise the funds for climate control, high-tech vaults, and trained staff, “well past time, for us to preserve those tens of thousands of tree species that will vanish in our lifetimes.” She gets to the point where such sentences roll off her lips. In two months, she’ll head south, for a first exploratory visit to the Amazon basin. One thousand more square miles of forest will vanish before she gets there. Dennis will have lunch waiting for her when she returns.