second row, transfixed by something the tree woman just said. Patricia Westerford: The five of them shared her discoveries over campfires, back when the Free Bioregion of Cascadia was still a place. Her words made them real, those alien agents doing things beyond the narrow consciousness of humans. The woman is older than Mimi imagined. Frightened and faltering, and there’s something wrong with her speech. But she has just delivered this fine, sane, but somehow taboo rule: What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.
What the forest makes of the mountain is better than the mountain. What people might make of the forest . . . The thought barely germinates when Dr. Westerford jolts Mimi back.
“I’ve asked myself the question you brought me here to answer.”
Mimi’s first thought is that she’s mistaken. A distinguished researcher and author—someone who has spent decades saving seeds from the world’s endangered trees. . . . It can’t be happening. She must be wrong.
“I’ve thought about it based on all the evidence available. I’ve tried not to let my feelings protect me from the facts.”
The whole soliloquy is a piece of theater, heading toward some last-minute reverse or reveal.
“I’ve tried not to let hope and vanity blind me. I’ve tried to see this matter from the standpoint of trees.”
Mimi looks down her aisle. People sit in disbelief, pinned in their seats with the full weight of shame.
“What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?”
Another woman once asked Mimi this. And the answer, so obvious, so reason-driven: burn down a luxury ski resort before it could be built.
The plant extracts hit the glass. Green spreads through the water, snaking like a time-lapse bud sped up a hundred-thousandfold. Mimi, forty feet from the podium, can’t move. Dr. Westerford lifts the glass like a priest raising a sacrament. Her speech thickens to a paste. “Many living things choose their own season. Maybe most of them.”
It’s happening. It’s real. But hundreds of the world’s smartest people hold still.
“You asked me here to talk about home repair. We’re the ones who need repairing. Trees remember what we’ve forgotten. Every speculation must make room for another. Dying is life, too.”
Dr. Westerford glances down, and Mimi is waiting for her. She locks on to the tree woman’s gaze and won’t let go. Long ago, in another life, she was an engineer and could make matter do so many things. Now she knows only this one skill: how to look at another being until it looks back.
Mimi pleads, her eyes burning. No. Don’t. Please.
The speaker frowns. Everything else is hypocrisy.
You’re needed.
Needed for this. We are too many.
That’s not for you to decide.
A new city the size of Des Moines every day.
What about your work? Your seed vault?
It has run itself for years.
There’s so much more to do.
I’m an old woman. What better work than this is left?
People won’t understand. They’ll hate you. It’s too theatrical.
It will get a moment of attention, amid all the screaming.
It’s immature. Not worthy of you.
We need to remember how to die.
You’ll die horribly.
No. I know my plants. This one will be easier than most.
I can’t watch this again.
Watch. Again. It’s all there is.
The glance lasts no longer than it takes a leaf to eat a chunk of light. Mimi fights to hold the speaker’s gaze, but with a last act of will, the tree-woman breaks away. Patricia Westerford lifts her gaze back onto the cavernous room. Her smile insists that this isn’t defeat. It’s use by another name. A small thing, a way to buy a little more time, a few more resources. She glances back down at a horrified Mimi. The things we might see, the things we could still give!
THERE’S A BEECH in Ohio Patricia would like to see again. Of all the trees she’ll miss like breathing, a simple, smooth-boled beech with nothing special to it except a notch on its trunk four feet up from the ground. Maybe it has thrived. Maybe the sun and rain and air have been good to it. She thinks: Maybe we want to hurt trees so much because they live so much longer than we do.
Plant-Patty raises her glass. She scans her speech for the last line on the last page. To Tachigali versicolor. She looks up. Three hundred brilliant people watch her, awed. The sound track is silent except for muffled shouting by the lip of the stage. She glances over at the