perimeter. Positioning the saurian cherry picker into place and locking down its braces.
“You’ve made a mistake or something. The hearing’s in a few days. Read the poster.”
Some kind of crew head comes up to him. Not threatening, exactly. The word is authorized. “Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave before we start cutting.”
“You’re cutting? It’s pitch-dark.” But, of course, it isn’t. Not with twin banks of arc lights wheeled into place. There is no more pitch-dark. Then the civics-sized penny drops. “Hang on a sec.”
“City orders,” the foreman says. “You’re going to have to move to the other side of the tape.”
“City orders? What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means move out. Beyond the tape.”
Douglas breaks toward the doomed trees. The move stuns everyone. It takes a second before the hard hats give chase. He’s a few feet up one of the trunks before they reach him. They grab his feet. Somebody knocks him with the butt of a long pruning shaft. He smacks to the ground and lands on his bum leg.
“Don’t do this. This is fucked up!”
Two cutters pin him on the ground until the police show. It’s one in the morning. Just another crime against public property, executed while the city sleeps. This time the charges against him are public nuisance, obstructing official business, and resisting arrest. “You think this is funny?” demands the officer who handcuffs him.
“Believe me, you would, too.”
At the station on Second Street, they ask his name. “Prisoner 571.” It takes removing his wallet from his jeans by force to get his real ID. And they need to isolate him, to keep him from rabble-rousing the other criminals into an uprising.
SEVEN-THIRTY A.M. Mimi hits the office early. An Argentinian order of impellers for centrifugal pumps has gone awry. She sets down her coffee, flips on the overhead lights, powers up her machine, and waits to boot into the corporate LAN. She swivels for a glance outside, and howls. Where there should be foliage, there’s only an expanse of gray-blue cumulonimbus.
In two minutes, she’s standing on the bald patch, the trees she used to look out on for a moment’s remembering and peace. She hasn’t even changed out of her trainers into her slingbacks. The prim clearing denies that anything ever happened. Not a trunk or a branch left behind. Only sawdust and shed needles around the fresh, flat cuts flush with the ground. Yellow-orange wood exposed to the air, sap rising on the outmost edge of the rings—rings beyond rings, many more rings than she has years.
And the scent of it, the smell of anticipation and loss, of fresh-cut pine. The message, the drug that worked her brain, concentrated now, laid open in death. It starts to drizzle. She closes her eyes. Outrage floods into her, the sneakiness of man, a sense of injustice larger than her whole life, the old loss that will never, ever be answered. When her eyes open again, truths rush into her head. Like Enlightenment, but without the glow.
GERMINATION HAPPENS FAST. Neelay finishes his space opera. Some part of the elongated boy in the futuristic wheelchair still wants to give the game away for free. But there comes a moment, as there always does in the game itself, when you must turn your pretty backwater sector of the universe into a revenue stream.
Publishing the game requires a company, if only a fake one. Corporate HQ is his ground-floor efficiency with access ramp near El Camino in Redwood City. The business needs a name, even if the entire outfit is nothing but a crippled twenty-something Indian-American rolling around like a bundle of twigs in a dogcart. But naming a company turns out to be harder than coding up a planet. For three days, Neelay plays with portmanteaus and neologisms, all of which come up short or have already been taken. He’s sucking on his dinner—a cinnamon toothpick—and staring at some faked-up letterhead when the word Redwood pops out of his return address. It’s like someone whispers the obvious answer into his ear. Using a paint program, he mocks up a logo—a rip-off of Stanford’s fearsome tree. And Sempervirens is born.
He calls the company’s first release The Sylvan Prophecies. With state-of-the-art DTP software, he designs an ad. At the top of the page, he centers the words:
THERE’S A WHOLE NEW PLANET RIGHT NEXT DOOR
Then Neelay runs the ad in the back of comics and computer magazines across the country. A disc dupe outfit over in Menlo