endless eulogies, who runs forever through the canopies of a giant ghost forest from here to the Mississippi, without ever touching paws to the ground. It’s all island-hopping now, through scattered fragments of second growth subtended by highways littered with roadkill. But the men stop to look, as if the endless forest still starts there, in front of them.
They turn to one another and hug goodbye, like bears testing their strength against each other. Like they’ll never see each other again in this life. Like even then, it would be too soon.
THE TREES REFUSE to say a thing. Neelay sits in Stanford’s inner quad—the intergalactic botanical garden—waiting for an explanation. The lifelong calling has gone wrong. He’s lost the trail they set him on. What now?
But the trees snub him. The bulging water sack of the bottle tree, the spiked armor of the silk floss: not even a rustle of leaves. It’s as if his soul mate—in the only galaxy that ever offered him one—has plunged from bliss to panic at the first ripple and cut him dead. He’s ruining tourists’ photographs. No one wants a shot of a nice, fake Spanish Romanesque cloister with a crippled freak in the foreground. He spins to go, as furious as any jilted lover. But go where? Even returning to his apartment above the Sempervirens headquarters is a humiliation.
He’d call his mother, but it’s the middle of the night in Banswara, where she now spends most of her year, getting ready to die. She knows now, ten years too late, that there will never be any Rupal for him, that science will never reactivate his legs, and that the best way to love her son is to release him to his isolation. She comes back now only whenever he’s hospitalized, when the doctors must debride his epic bedsores or cut away parts of his necrotic feet and ass. Boarding a plane has become an exercise in pain. He won’t tell her, the next time he goes in.
He rolls down into the Oval toward the grandiose line of palms. The sky is too clear, the day too hot, and all the trunks have turned to synchronized sundials. He finds a shady spot—an increasingly popular sport, worldwide. Then he sits still, trying to be only where he is, here, home. No good. In a minute, he’s agitated, checking his phone for messages not yet posted to him. Where can people live? His elves must be right: only in symbols, in simulation.
As he puts the device back in its wheelchair pouch, it buzzes like a fistful of cicadas. It’s a message from his personal AI. The thing is alive, cagey, teasing him with the clickbait game of humanity. Since childhood, even before his fall, he has dreamed of such a robot pet. This one is better than anything the prophets of his childhood sci-fi predicted—faster, sleeker, and suppler. It goes out at all hours and scours humankind’s entire activity, then reports back to him. It’s obedient and untiring, and like the only creatures that he trusts these days, it has no legs. Legs, Neelay suspects, may be where evolution went berserk.
He and his people made the pet, and now it’s busy making him. He told it to watch for any news of his new obsession: tree communication, forest intelligence, fungal networks, Patricia Westerford, The Secret Forest. . . . The book is shot through with uncanny echoes of what he heard whispered, decades ago, by alien life-forms that now won’t give him the time of day. It has cost him his role as the creative head of his company. It wants more from him, more payment, more salvage. But what?
He opens the message from the bot. It contains a link and a title: Words of Air and Light. The recommendation strength is as high as his pet gives. Even in his spot of shade, Neelay can’t read the screen. He rolls to the van, parked not far away. Back inside his emptied-out interstellar ship, he clicks on the link and watches in confusion. Shadows and sun burst forth. A hundred years of chestnut erupt in twenty seconds, like a scene in a hand-cranked kinetoscope. It’s over before Neely makes it out. He starts the clip again. The tree fountains up once more into a crown. The upward-wavering twigs reach for the light, for things hidden in plain sight. Branches fork and thicken in the air. At this speed, he sees the tree’s central aim, the math