“They knew good!” cried Chapman. “They were so . . .”

  “Happy.”

  “I’ve never been happy,” he said. “Not for more than a few minutes at a time. I make a wonderful blending of two apples and I feel good and then I think, this is the sin of pride, I’m such a wicked man to be proud of the workmanship of mine own hands. So I leave the nursery behind me and go on to another place and try again, but my sins follow me everywhere.”

  “You have those moments, though,” said Alvin. “These Piperbury folks, they’ve got none. No taste of goodness any more. No speck of joy.”

  “They die from accidents,” said Chapman. “I’ve asked. All those suicides, they’re just accidents or illnesses.”

  “And yet there are so many dead,” said Alvin. “Because their hopeless friends and family members don’t help them, don’t heal them, don’t even feed them in their extremity, because they know that death will come to them as a relief.”

  Chapman dropped to the ground, curled up, and wept.

  “I don’t know about evil,” said Alvin, “but right now you’re pretty useless.”

  “I can’t fix it,” said Chapman. “Even if I cut down every tree in Piperbury, the pollen has already spread into the world. Bees have carried it to other towns. The crossbreeds aren’t as powerful—not as delicious, not as sturdy, not as . . .”

  “Pernicious.”

  “Effective,” said Chapman. “But it’s loose in the world and there’s no calling it back.”

  “Well, we can stop sending out the pure pollen, can’t we?” asked Alvin.

  Chapman groaned in agony at the very thought, and Alvin realized: even this Tree of the Certainty of Evil, he can’t bear the thought of cutting it down.

  “You love even the wicked trees,” said Alvin.

  “They’re the only children I have in the world,” said Chapman.

  “You could have married and had the flesh and blood kind,” Alvin said.

  “The only woman I ever wanted to ask, I got there and she had agreed to marry someone else the day before.”

  “And all other women were monstrous?”

  “They all become monstrous after you marry them. I’ve seen how married people are. I don’t know why I ever thought even one would be different. They’re always . . . telling you things. Demanding things from their husbands. Having opinions. Being disappointed or angry or crying in order to make you do things.”

  Alvin could see now why John Chapman wandered the world. Like everybody, he needed the company of other people, but only for a short time. He had to leave before people began expecting things from him.

  “You can’t leave this one behind,” Alvin said to him. “We’ve got to kill those trees.”

  “I come back here to try new pollens on them. Pollens to undo what I did. I look at happy people out in the world and I try to find that place in them and make a pollen that will grow an apple that will give them that—”

  “No,” said Alvin. “That’s wrong. An apple that makes you happy? Then all that people would do all day is eat those apples.”

  “So you agree that misery is a necessary—”

  “I agree that happiness and misery ought to be earned. You’ve forced guilt on people who don’t deserve it. How will it make it better to force an equal certainty of the goodness of everything they do on people who also don’t deserve it? A body should feel good because he did good, and feel bad because he did bad. Your tree isn’t giving anybody knowledge, it’s giving them certainty.”

  “That’s the same thing,” said Chapman, surprised.

  “Certainty is how you feel about your opinions. Knowledge implies that you’re pretty sure, but that you’re also right. Certainty doesn’t require that you be right.”

  “That’s more philosophy than I can handle,” said Chapman.

  “It’s not philosophy, it’s common sense,” said Alvin. “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil isn’t about making people sure they’re wicked whether they are or not, nor about making them feel bad. It’s about letting them see clear. What’s really good. What’s really evil. To know what each of them is when they see it. To help them make choices, and understand the choices they made.”

  “Well I don’t know how to make a fruit that can do that.”

  “That’s because you don’t have to,” said Alvin. “Eve and Adam already ate that fruit, and passed the knowledge on down to us. We’re born with it, all but a few sad and broken people.”

  “Like me,” said Chapman.

  “That’s foxfeathers, my friend,” said Alvin. “You know what good and evil are. You just got the mistaken notion that it’s evil to be proud of accomplishing something good.”

  “Pride is a sin!”

  “Pride in a good thing is a good thing,” said Alvin. “The sin is when you’re proud of stupid things. Like being born to rich parents. Or figuring out how to cheat other people of more than your right share of money. Making other people ashamed of themselves so you can feel proud of being better. Those are sinful kinds of pride. Being proud of worthlessness. But being proud of having worth. Of bringing apple trees to farmers who need them—for cider, for pies, or for proving out their claim—that’s something to be righteously proud of.”

  “And why should I believe you?” demanded John Chapman.

  “Because you have the knowledge of good and evil inside you,” said Alvin, “and you know I’m right. Even if the Unmaker whispers to you that it isn’t so, your first response to what I said—your heartfire leapt up when I said it. You recognized Good when you heard it.”

  “I recognize it,” said Chapman. “But it’s still out of my reach. I put this tree into the world and it’s killing people, and making them so unhappy that they’re grateful to die.”

  “Well, we can’t stop it,” said Alvin. “And we’re sure not going to make an opposite tree, that forces people to be proud and happy for no reason. And there’s no way to make a Tree of Good Sense.”

  “Well now,” said John Chapman. “Maybe . . .”

  “John Appleseed,” said Alvin, “if you had any sense inside you, you’d never have made this tree in the first place.”

  “No, no, there’s no way to put good sense into an apple,” said Chapman. “Or if there is, only God can make that tree. But good sense isn’t what we need here.”

  “It’s hard to think of a time when that statement is even slightly true,” said Alvin.

  “I meant only that a tree of good sense isn’t—”

  “I knew what you meant,” said Alvin. “I’m just a wicked man and I’m ashamed of myself for making a joke.”

  “What my tree makes them feel is despair,” said Chapman. “It’s the tree of despair. The certainty that nothing is good and it will never be good. So the tree I need to make is the Tree of Hope.”

  “Well, now, that’s a thought. Can you do it?”

  “I’m not a hopeful man.”

  “When you set out to crossbreed two apples, don’t you hope you’ll come up with something useful?”

  “Usually I don’t.”

  “But sometimes you do. So you hope that at least now and then you’ll get a good result.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “You don’t feel much hope,” said Alvin, “but you act on your hope. You have enough hope to go on trying. To go on living. To leave this town and go on to the next. To plant these seeds and hope they’ll grow, even though you leave them behind in another man’s care.”

  John Chapman closed his eyes. After a while he shook his head. “I don’t feel it.”

  “It’s not a feeling,” said Alvin. “It’s a decision. It’s the part of you that decides to try again. Not the part that gave up on all women ever. The part that made you once go to ask a girl to marry you.”

  “The foolish part.”

  “The part that acted in spite of fear. The part that dared.”

  They got back to town well before dark. I asked Alvin myself whether he took John Chapman by the hand and ran with the greensong through the wood, but he just shook his head and laughed and told me that he wouldn’t remember a thing like that. “You don’t remember the greensong,” he said. “While you’re in it, you’re someone else, and when you’re back from such a journey, it passes away like a dream.”

  But he’s taken me into the greensong and I remember it. Each time I ran with him like that, I remember it. I don’t think he’s lying. I think it’s that he’s always just on the edge of the woodland, in his heart. So stepping over into the greensong isn’t such a wrenching change for him as it is for other folks.

  However they did it, by greensong or with a footsore wornout Appleseed, they were back in Piperbury by dark, and Alvin watched as John Chapman called them out of their homes and said, “Don’t you eat any more apples from these trees I gave you.”

  Not understanding how the fruit of those trees was killing everyone they loved and any chance of happiness, they refused. “It’s the one good thing left in our lives!”

  “If you won’t stop eating them I’ll burn them all and chop them down,” cried Appleseed, “or the other way around!”

  “Then you’ll just have to do that,” said Mrs. Turnbull, “because them apples is the only thing that makes my cooking any good at all.”

  Chapman turned to Alvin, sitting on a bench at the edge of the public square. “What can I do?” he asked.

  “Eat from the Tree of Good Sense,” Alvin replied, which meant nothing at all to the people gathered there, but it made John Chapman smile just a little.

  “How about this,” said Chapman. “The apples you’ve got stored up from this fall, destroy those the way you’d shoot diseased cattle, to save the rest of the herd. But the new apples that come this year, they should be all right.”

  “What’s wrong with them?” asked a man.

  “They make you believe things that ain’t so,” said Chapman.

  “Like what?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Chapman. “Because you’re a fallen, sinful man.”

  Since that was what everyone in town already believed about themselves, nobody gave Chapman any more argument.

  They brought out their apples and had a fire. Smelled like an apple roast. Smelled like a party. But Alvin and Appleseed watched to make sure that nobody ate any of the cooked apples. If mice got into the mess that night or next morning, and then in despair went out for the hawks or the owls to get them, Alvin couldn’t begin to guess. He warned the mice not to eat those apples, but if they couldn’t resist the smell, he couldn’t very well change their nature, which was all appetites, even stronger than their fears.

  When the fire was down, Alvin and Appleseed went around from tree to tree. They weren’t in blossom yet, but that’s where Alvin’s knack came in handy. Appleseed had made the pollen for apples filled with hope—not a crazy hope when there was no reason for it, but the hope that makes a man act to do something good even when he thinks it probably won’t work. A measured hope. A teaspoon of hope to counteract a bucket of despair.

  Alvin looked inside that pollen and saw the deepest seed at its heart, and then took that pattern and reproduced it in the tree. Tree after tree, working as fast as he could, it took him an hour with every tree, or maybe a little more or maybe a little less. Alvin didn’t carry a watch and time passed differently for him when his doodlebug was out working in the world.

  In three days he was done. There weren’t that many trees. Or maybe it took less time than he thought, per tree.

  I know what you’re thinking. If he could change the trees to add hope to the pollen they’d produce in their blossoms in the spring, why not change them to take away what Appleseed had done to fill them with despair?

  “I once took away something from a boy with a powerful knack,” said Alvin. “I took it away from the deepest seed inside him, because that was the part that the Finders tracked. I did it to save his life. But it killed a part of him. It killed his knack, or weakened it, or broke it. When you take something out of a man, you take something out of his soul.”

  “I can tell you that this boy you’re talking about, whatever you took, he doesn’t miss it,” that’s what I told him.

  And he said, “Just because he doesn’t miss it doesn’t mean it isn’t gone.”

  “A tree’s not a man,” I said to him.

  “Trees were John Chapman’s children. I wasn’t going to kill them. I just added something to them. A gift. That pollen still spread out into the world. A lot of people feel guilty for things that aren’t bad. But a lot of people feel guilty for things that are bad, and it helps them stop from doing such things. What matters though is that with that pollen, with those apples, they also get them a dose of hope. So whatever they might feel guilty of, it doesn’t take away their hope. It gives them more.”

  “I don’t know that I’ve ever eaten such an apple,” I said to him.

  “That was years ago, and the bees’ve been busy,” said Alvin. “In the past five years you’ve never eaten an apple that didn’t have that pollen in it, his first change and then the second one. Not a new tree rises from the ground without those blessings in the fruit.”

  “Blessings,” I said to him, thinking of the graves in the Piperbury cemetery.

  “They started having babies in Piperbury again,” said Alvin. “They started bringing children into the world.”

  “Well I suppose that is hope,” I said. “What about John Chapman?”

  “He kept on planting apple nurseries with seed of his own making,” said Alvin. “But I don’t believe he ever again tried to make an apple that would change human nature. I think he decided to leave that up to God.”

  “So you’re saying he despaired of such a thing,” I said, trying to goad him a little.

  “I’m saying he put his hopes in God, and set about making fruit that was delicious to the taste, but left a man his freedom.”

  So yes, I had it from the mouth of Alvin Maker himself, in the happy days in Crystal City. He didn’t make a copy of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the way some folks say, and he certainly never made a Tree of Life. But he made it so every apple in America, by now maybe every apple in the world, comes from a Tree of Hope and Despair, and so we all swing back and forth between the two.

  Visitors, Chapter 1

  Chapter 1

  The Place:

  From the surface of the planet Garden, it looks like a plateau surrounded by a steep cliff, with a mountain in the middle. But from space, it is plain that the plateau is a huge crater, and the mountain is its center point.

  Buried deep beneath that central mountain is a starship. It crashed into the planet Garden 11,203 years ago.

  Yet the starship was launched from near-Earth orbit only nineteen years ago. It journeyed seven years, then made the jump that was meant to create an anomaly in spacetime and appear near Garden instantaneously.

  It was as instantaneous to Ram Odin, the pilot of the starship—the only living person awake on the starship.

  But compared to the surrounding universe, the ship arrived 11,191 years before it made the jump.

  In the process, it divided into nineteen ships, one for each of the onboard computers that calculated the jump. All those ships contained a duplicate of Ram Odin, along with all the other humans lying in stasis, waiting to arrive at the world they would colonize.

  All nineteen ships were deliberately crashed into the surface of the planet Garden. The simultaneous impact slowed the rotation of the planet, lengthening the day. Each impact formed a crater. Protected by anti-inertial and anti-collision fields, all the starships and their colonists survived.

  Nineteen colonies were created, each separated from the others by a psychoactive field called “the Wall.”

  This starship is in the middle of the wallfold called Vadeshfold.

  The People:

  In the conetrol room of the starship, there are either four men, or three, or two, or one, depending on how you count them.

  One of them is the sole surviving Ram Odin. If you say that there is only one man in the control room, he is that man. He has survived all these centuries by rising out of stasis for only one day in each fifty years, or sometimes for one week after a hundred years—whatever is needed in order to make the decisions that the ship’s computers are not competent to make without him.

  Another of them looks like an adult man, and speaks like one, but he is really a machine, an expendable. He is called Vadeshex. All the humans in his colony were wiped out in terrible warfare more than ten thousand years before. In the years since then, he has devoted himself to creating a version of a native parasite that might be a suitable symbiotic partner for humans, if they ever came to Vadeshfold again.

  The two other men were born as a single human being named Rigg Sessamekesh, fifteen years before the present day. Arguably they are not men but boys.

  Both of them wear upon their heads, half-covering their faces, the symbiotic facemask created by Vadeshex. The facemask penetrates their brains and bodies, enhancing their senses, quickening their movements, strengthening their bodies, so that some might consider them no longer to be human at all, but rather some strange new hybrid, only half human at best.

  The Situation:

  A half hour ago, Ram Odin attempted to murder Rigg, but with his faster reflexes, Rigg avoided him. Then, using the time-shifting power he was born with, he went back half an hour in time and preventively killed Ram Odin. It was not just a matter of self-defense. Rigg believed that it was Ram Odin whose actions were destined to destroy the world.

  Then Rigg went forward two years and saw that eliminating Ram Odin had done nothing to prevent the complete destruction of the human race on Garden. Far from being the worst menace to the humans of Garden, Ram Odin was the only source of information Rigg would need to figure out how to save Garden. So he went back in time and prevented himself from killing Ram Odin, and Ram Odin from killing the earlier version of Rigg.

  The result was that now there were two copies of Rigg—the one who had done the killing, then learned it had done no good and returned; and the one who had been prevented from doing the killing or being killed, who had not experienced the inevitable coming of the Destroyers, and who now called himself Noxon, recognizing that he could never be the same person as the other Rigg.