nudging fallen wood into the growing design. Some branches he can haul in his arms. Some trunks yield to dragging and rolling, via rope and a grappling hook. For other pieces, he needs a block and tackle, anchored to upright trees. Then there are the pieces too large for him to move. These must remain in place, dictating the design, its shape more discovered than invented.
With each rotted trunk he nudges into the pattern, the plan swells. He must keep the growing creature in his head, appraising the whole work as if from way on high. He learns, as he goes, how to lay the pieces out. There are so many ways to branch—more than infinite. He looks at the kinks and camber of each fallen limb and waits for it to tell him where, in the river of wood coursing across the ground, it wants to be.
Creatures let loose with cries, off in the woods and high above. Mosquitoes bloody his face and arms—the national bird, up here. Nick works for hours, neither stymied nor satisfied. He works until he’s hungry, then stops for lunch. There aren’t too many lunches left, and he hasn’t a clue how to forage for more. He sits on the spongy earth, shoveling handfuls of almonds and apricot into his mouth. Food from trees grown in California’s Central Valley on dwindling aquifers through years of drought.
He rises again and gets back to work. Wrestles with a log as thick as his thigh. A motion in the corner of his eye startles him. He cries out. There’s an audience for this piece—a man in a red plaid coat, jeans, and lumberjack boots, with a dog that must be three-quarters wolf. Both eye him with suspicion. “They said there was a crazy white man working out here.”
Nick fights to catch his breath. “That would be me.”
The visitor looks at Nicholas’s creation. The shape under construction unfolds in all directions. He shakes his head. Then he picks up a nearby fallen branch and fits it into the pattern.
THE LEARNERS can tell where the lines of poetry come from, even if Mimi can’t. Though the root grows old in the earth . . . She knows the words must go back, older even than the tree whose stump they eulogize. The bug boy, next to her, says something. She thinks he’s talking to his phone. “Everything okay?”
She tips her head and her face swells up. Her hands appear farther away than they ought to be. She’s sucking air. She tries to nod. She must try twice. “I’m fine. I’m good. . . .” Something in her wants to surrender and go to jail for the next two centuries.
PETABYTES OF AIRBORNE MESSAGES swarm all around in the air. They collect in sensors and bounce off satellites. They stream from the cameras now mounted in every building and on each intersection. They course in from pushpins all around her, up the great roots of population that split and spread at their intelligent tips: Sausalito, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Novato, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Leggett, Fortuna, Eureka . . . Tendrils of data swell and merge, up and down this coast and deeper inland. Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, Crockett, Vallejo, Cordelia, Fairfield, Davis, Sacramento . . . Deep inference sweeps through the ravines, filling the level land with human ingenuity: San Bruno, Millbrae, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Castroville, Marina, Monterey, Carmel, Los Gatos, Cupertino, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Madrone, Gilroy, Salinas, Soledad, Greenfield, King City, Paso Robles, Atascadero, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and on into the wilder fusing root masses of Los Angeles—a swelling clear-cut that only accelerates with each new slash. Bots watch and match, encode and see, gather and shape all the world’s data so quickly that the knowledge of humans stands still.
Neelay looks up from his code-filled screen. Grief washes over him, a grief youthful and full of expectation. He has felt grief before—that awful mix of hopes crushed and rising—but always for kin, colleagues, friends. It makes no sense, this grief for a place he won’t live long enough to see.
But he has glimpsed more than enough, and he would rather be here, launching the start of the rehabilitation, than live in the place that his learners will help repair. There’s a story he always loved, from the days when his legs still worked. Aliens land on Earth. They operate on