filled with potential only dimly imaginable.
Tonight, the trees are tight-lipped, refusing to tell him anything. He drums his fingers on his shriveled thighs, waits, listening, for even longer than it took him to get here. No one’s around. The moon is a blazing telephone that anyone on Earth might call him on, simply by looking up and seeing what he sees. He wills the menagerie of trees to give him a sign. The extraterrestrial beings wave their bizarre branches. The collective tapping in the air nags at him. Memory rises inside, like sap. And now it’s as if the blowing, bending branches point him outward, behind the quad, out to Escondido, then down Panama Street, past Roble. . . .
He heads where the waving sends him. Off to the south, the rounded tops of the Santa Cruz Mountains rise above the campus roofs. And now he remembers: a day, half his life ago and more, walking a forest trail on that ridge with his father and coming across a spectacular, monstrous redwood, a lone Methuselah that somehow escaped the loggers. He sees, now: it’s the tree he must have named his company after. And without a second thought, he knows he must consult it.
The switchbacks up Sand Hill Road, harrowing at noon, are deadly in the dark. He tacks back and forth as if in one of those flying pods you can build at tech level 29 in the Sylvan Prophecies. The road is empty at this hour, no one to see the emaciated Ent with the worthless legs piloting a modified van with his freakish bony fingers. At the top of the ridge, on Skyline, a road named for the cableway that stripped these hills bare to build San Francisco, he turns right. That much he remembers. If memories change the pathways of the brain, then the trail must still be there. It’s just a matter of waiting for the wild things to emerge out of the understory.
He drives through the tunnel of second growth, which has returned enough in a hundred years to fool him, in this pitch-black, into thinking it’s virgin forest. A pull-off on the right triggers enough recognition to make him stop. There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. He rides the van’s lift down to the spongy earth and waits, unsure how to pilot the chair, however fat-tired and ruggedized, down the path in front of him. But that’s what this point-and-click adventure wants.
For a hundred yards of trail, he’s fine. Then his left tire hits a wet declivity and slips. He guns the joystick, trying to power through. He backs up and spins, hoping to pop out laterally. The tire kicks up mud and digs in. He waves the flashlight in front of him. Shadows rear up like lunging specters. Every snapped branch sounds like the work of extinct apex predators. A car engine crescendos up from nothing, far away down Skyline. Neelay screams at the top of his skinny lungs and waves the beam like a crazy man. But the car blasts past.
He sits in total darkness, wondering how mankind ever survived such a place. Some hiker will find him, once the sun comes up. Or the day after. Who knows how much traffic this trail gets? A screeching comes from behind. He whirls the flashlight, but can’t turn far enough. His heart takes a while to return to baseline. When it does, he must empty the filled catheter bag onto the ground, as far from his wheels as he can reach.
Then he sees it, woven into the other shadows less than a dozen yards in front of him. He knows how he missed it: It’s too big. Too big to make sense of. Too big to credit as a living thing. It’s a triple-wide door of darkness into the side of the night. The beam goes no more than the smallest way up the endless trunk. And up the trunk runs, straight up, beyond comprehension, an immortal, collective ecosystem—Sempervirens.
Underneath the stupendous life, a tiny man and his even tinier son look up. Together, they’re shorter than the buttress growing out of this thing’s root system. Neelay watches, knowing what’s to come. The memory is as dense as if it were just encoded in him. The father bends back and raises his hands to the sky. Vishnu’s fig, Neelay-ji. Come back to swallow us!
The standing boy must have laughed then, as the sitting one wants to now.
Pita? Don’t be crazy. It’s a