wasteland of cut stone and concrete. There was not the slightest chance for such life to exploit him. But here he is, carrying this free rider. So it turned out for him, for all five of them, all of blinkered humankind, used by life as surely as this bur uses his jumpsuit cuff.
And in that moment, it starts up, the quiet torture worse than anything the state can inflict on Adam. A small voice so real it might come from the bunk above him whispers the start of a story that will plague him for longer than his imprisonment: You have been spared from death, to do a most important thing.
. . .
ACROSS THE BIOMES, at all altitudes, the learners come alive at last. They discover why a hawthorn never rots. They learn to tell apart the hundred kinds of oak. When and why the green ash split off from the white. How many generations live inside the hollow of a yew. When red maples start to turn at each elevation, and how much sooner they’re turning every year. They will come to think like rivers and forests and mountains. They will grasp how a leaf of grass encodes the journeywork of the stars. In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things. The translations will be rough at first, like a child’s first guess. But soon the first sentences will start to come across, pouring out words made, like all living things, from rain and air and crumbled rock and light. Hello. Finally. Yes. Here. It’s us.
NEELAY THINKS: This is how it must go. There will be catastrophes. Disastrous setbacks and slaughters. But life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them. He will not live to see it completed, this game played by countless people worldwide, a game that puts the players smack in the middle of a living, breathing planet filled with potential they can only dimly begin to imagine. But he has nudged it along.
He lifts his hands from the translating keys, hit by a radical amazement. His heart is beating too hard for what little meat is left on his skeleton, and his vision pulses. He pushes the joystick on the chair and rolls out of the lab into the mild night. The air is spiced with bay laurel and lemon eucalyptus and pepper trees. The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will. He breathes in for a long time. Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run. The branches click in the dark dry air above his head, and he hears them. Now, Neelay-ji. What might this little creature do?
. . .
A MOAN comes out of Ray when Dorothy tells him how things end. Two life sentences, back to back. Too severe for arson, for destruction of public and private properties, even for involuntary manslaughter. But just harsh enough for that unforgivable crime: harming the safety and certainty of men.
They lie against each other in his bed, looking out through the window on that place that they’ve discovered, just alongside this one. The place where the story came from. Outside, hidden in branches, an owl calls its kin. Who cooks for you-all? Who cooks for you? Tomorrow the city landscapers will come again, and bring with them machines and all the irresistible force of law. And still, that won’t be the end of the story.
Brinkman chokes on objections. A word comes up and out of his throat. “No. Not right.”
His wife shrugs, her shoulder nudging his. The shrug is not without sympathy, though it doesn’t apologize. It just says, Make your case.
His objections cascade into something wider. Tides of blood rise through his brain. “Self-defense.”
She turns on her side to face him. He has her attention. Her hands move a little in the air, as if punching the narrow, chorded keyboard of her old stenotype. “How?”
He tells her with his eyes. The onetime property lawyer must take over the defense’s appeal. He’s at a severe disadvantage. He knows none of the particulars. He has seen none of