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.
WHILE THE PRISONERS mimic sleep, Neelay Mehta enjoys the prime hours of creation. From his office bed, he issues a directive to Sempervirens’s elves regarding the nature of Mastery 8:
What will keep several million players unable to sign off? The place must be fuller and more promising than the lives they return to, offline. . . . Imagine millions of users enriching the world together with their every action. Help them build a culture so beautiful it would break their hearts to lose.
HALFWAY ACROSS THE COUNTRY, another woman starts a jail term all her own. The flooding in her husband’s brain floods her as well. She calls 911. She rides along in the ambulance through the warm night. At the hospital she signs the informed consent, though she’ll never feel informed again. She goes in to the man after the first operation. What’s left of Ray Brinkman lies slack in the adjustable bed. Half his skull has been removed and his brain has been papered back over by a flap of scalp. Hoses spring from him. His face is frozen in terror.
No one can tell Dorothy Cazaly Brinkman how long he might be like this. A week. Another half century. Thoughts go through her head those first nights, during her ER vigil. Terrible things. She’ll stay until he’s stabilized. After that, she must save herself.
Again and again she hears the words she shouted at him, just hours before his brain caved in. It’s over, Ray. It’s over. The two of us are over. You aren’t my responsibility. We don’t belong to each other, and we never did.
IN JAIL, fitful in his upper bunk, Adam sees great redwoods explode like rockets on their launchpads. His research is intact—all the precious questionnaire data gathered over months—but he is not. He has begun