Good Omens

Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn’t want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn’t a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn’t dreamed of. His grandfather hadn’t dreamed of any money at all. He hadn’t even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.

But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that’s how it went.

He hid his trolley behind the newspaper stand, sat down furtively, and opened his lunchbox.

It was then that he became aware of the rustling, and a movement of shadows across the floor. He looked around.

The tree was moving. He watched it with interest. Jaime had never seen a tree growing before.

The soil, which was nothing more than a scree of some sort of artificial chippings, was actually crawling as the roots moved around under the surface. Jaime saw a thin white shoot creep down the side of the raised garden area and prod blindly at the concrete of the floor.

Without knowing why, without ever knowing why, he nudged it gently with his foot until it was close to the crack between the slabs. It found it, and bored down.

The branches were twisting into different shapes.

Jaime heard the screech of traffic outside the building, but didn’t pay it any attention. Someone was yelling something, but someone was always yelling in Jaime’s vicinity, often at him.

The questing root must have found the buried soil. It changed color and thickened, like a fire hose when the water is turned on. The artificial waterfall stopped running; Jaime visualized fractured pipes blocked with sucking fibers.

Now he could see what was happening outside. The street surface was heaving like a sea. Saplings were pushing up between the cracks.

Of course, he reasoned; they had sunlight. His tree didn’t. All it had was the muted gray light that came through the dome four stories up. Dead light.

But what could you do?

You could do this:

The elevators had stopped running because the power was off, but it was only four flights of stairs. Jaime carefully shut his lunchbox and padded back to his cart, where he selected his longest broom.

People were pouring out of the building, yelling. Jaime moved amiably against the flow like a salmon going upstream.

A white framework of girders, which the architect had presumably thought made a dynamic statement about something or other, held up the smoked glass dome. In fact it was some sort of plastic, and it took Jaime, perched on a convenient strip of girder, all his strength and the full leverage of the broom’s length to crack it. A couple more swings brought it down in lethal shards.

The light poured in, lighting up the dust in the plaza so that the air looked as though it was full of fireflies.

Far below, the tree burst the walls of its brushed concrete prison and rose like an express train. Jaime had never realized that trees made a sound when they grew, and no one else had realized it either, because the sound is made over hundreds of years in waves twenty-four hours from peak to peak.

Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vroooom.

Jaime watched it come toward him like a green mushroom cloud. Steam was billowing out from around its roots.

The girders never stood a chance. The remnant of the dome went up like a ping-pong ball on a water spray.

It was the same over all the city, except that you couldn’t see the city any more. All you could see was the canopy of green. It stretched from horizon to horizon.

Jaime sat on his branch, clung to a liana, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

Presently, it began to rain.

THE KAPPAMAKI, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?

Except that, today, there weren’t any whales. The crew stared at the screens, which by the application of ingenious technology could spot anything larger than a sardine and calculate its net value on the international oil market, and found them blank. The occasional fish that did show up was barreling through the water as if in a great hurry to get elsewhere.

The captain drummed his fingers on the console. He was afraid that he might soon be conducting his own research project to find out what happened to a statistically small sample of whaler captains who came back without a factory ship full of research material. He wondered what they did to you. Maybe they locked you in a room with a harpoon gun and expected you to do the honorable thing.

This was unreal. There ought to be something.

The navigator punched up a chart and stared at it.