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,