he has rolled past it every evening for months, without once seeing.
He wheels up to the tree and laughs. The trunk looks like a giant upside-down turkey baster. The branches skew and spike out at foolish angles. He reaches out to touch the bark. It’s perfect. Absurd. Up to something. A tiny placard reads: BRACHYCHITON RUPESTRIS. QUEENSLAND BOTTLE TREE. The name excuses nothing and explains even less. It’s an alien invader, as surely as Neelay.
He can’t decide which is more incredible: the tree, or the fact that he’s never noticed it. Shapes flicker on the edge of his vision. Something is happening behind his back. He has the overwhelming feeling of being watched. A silent chorus in his head sings: Turn and look. Turn around and see! He spins the chair in place. Nothing is right. The whole cloister courtyard has changed. One hyper-jump, and he has landed in an intergalactic arboretum. On all sides, furious green speculations wave at him. Creatures built for otherworldly climates. Crazies of every habit and profile. Things from epochs so old they make dinosaurs look like upstarts. All these signaling, sentient beings knock him back in his seat. He has never done drugs, but this must be what it’s like. Plumes of cream and yellow; a purple waterfall that evaporates before it touches the ground. Trees like freak experiments beckon from out of eight large planters, each one a miniature starship ark on its way to some other system.
Neelay sweeps the chair around the courtyard. His paraplegic body tenses as the council shimmers in their standing circle, watching him make the circuit. He rolls past another Seussian monster as alien as the first. He reads the tag: a silk floss tree, from Brazilian forests even now shrinking by a hundred thousand acres a day. Sharp-tipped warty cones cover the trunk, spines that evolved to fend off grazing beasts that went extinct tens of millions of years ago.
He rolls from planter to planter, touching the beings, smelling them, listening to their rustles. They have come from hot islands and desiccated outback, from remote valleys in Central Asia breached only recently. Dove tree, jacaranda, desert spoon, camphor tree, flame tree, empress tree, kurrajong, red mulberry: unearthly life, waiting to waylay him in this courtyard while he was searching for them on distant planets. He touches their bark and feels, just beneath their skins, the teeming assemblies of cells, like whole planetary civilizations, pulse and hum.
The Japanese tourists disappear back to their bus on Galvez. Neelay holds still in the emptied space, like a rabbit evading a raptor. He’s alone for no more than a few seconds. But in that interval, the alien invaders insert a thought directly into his limbic system. There will be a game, a billion times richer than anything yet made, to be played by countless people around the world at the same time. And Neelay must bring it into being. He’ll unfold the creation in gradual, evolutionary stages, over the course of decades. The game will put its players smack in the middle of a living, breathing, seething, animist world filled with millions of different species, a world desperately in need of the players’ help. And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.
The vision ends, depositing him again in Stanford’s inner quad. The vision, religious and dark green, fades back into its Platonic shadow, wood. Neelay holds still, clinging to what he has just seen, the thing his brain has somehow apprehended, lurking out at the end of the curve of Moore’s law. He’ll have to drop out of school. No time for more classes now. He must pace himself for the long run. He’ll finish the quaint little role-playing space opera he’s working on, then put it up for sale. Real money, earth dollars. His fans will howl. They’ll smear him on the country’s dial-up bulletin boards as the worst traitor. But at fifteen bucks for thirty parsecs, the game will be a steal. The profits from his first foray into alien life will pay for the sequel, a game to surpass the original in ambition many times over. And by such small steps, he’ll get to the place he has just seen.
He rolls out of the cloister just as the light vanishes behind the mountains. The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding