«A needless death?» thought Tex. He perched on the metal arm of a streetlight, over the halide bulb. Gidget was below him, scanning crowd for someone bite-worthy. Tex felt drained, , and paradoxically lost, which is why he had come to the center of everything to regain his bearings.

  «What does that mean—a needless death? Everybody's got to die sometime. So you could say that every death is necessary, in the long run.»

  There you had it: the extent of his disorientation.

  Afterlife Factoid #17

  Even when you're dead, you've still got

  innocence left to lose.

  Hoot Banebook came up to the dais to deliver a few well-chosen exhortations. The organizers of the Walk were trying to interest people in forming a line along the sidewalk. From his perch on the light, Tex could see the uppermost crosspiece of the radar mast on the Linear Bee, bobbing up and then falling out of sight behind the dead chicken plant.

  "It is not for us to judge our fellow man," Hoot Banebook declared. "As it is not for us to judge the workings of the Lord."

  Amen, thought Tex. Looking down at the milling, gossiping, laughing, feckless, well-intentioned crowd—good people, every one, though prone to error and ignorance and litigation—you could not help wondering how it could be that the world was such a total mess. You could not help thinking that all this positive energy and community spirit must be signs of a healthy society.

  "We needn't think ourselves so perfect," said Hoot, "that we are in a position to condemn the sins and transgressions of those around us. Especially people whom we do not even personally know."

  Maybe it was like an old tree. Maybe these do-gooders in the intersection of Dublin, Maine, were like the part of an aging tree that continues to put out fresh green leaves, to endure heat and drought, to reach bravely upward for sunlight, even while the great body of the tree is dying and rotting away. There were chestnut trees in the woods around here that had been felled by blight 80 or 90 years ago, yet whose great hollow stumps continued every spring to produce a crop of hopeful young foliage. And every summer the new foliage would succumb to the blight and the tree would be a little bit closer to finished.

  Trees like that, Tex thought, are like the corpse who doesn't know he's dead. He sits up in the middle of his own wake and starts crooning "The Wild Rover."

  "Tolerance is a sign of strength," said Hoot. "It is a sign that we are not afraid to look upon others with compassion, whether or not we personally approve of their particular choice of lifestyles."

  Tex had never been sure how to feel about those old chestnut trees. He almost wished that one year he'd be hiking through the woods and find that the trees had given up at last; that their spirits had fled, and there was to be no more shining green and irredeemably doomed foliage.

  At the same time, you had to keep pulling for the old rotten thing, the impossible survivor. Maybe in the black depths of January, some crafty old chestnut motewolon would be given the power of the Mite.

  "Don't now friend me, you self-righteous motherfucker."

  Tex dragged himself out this thought-stream to discover that a shouting match had broken out on the street below. One of the participants was Hoot Banebook.

  "Come now, young man," the Rev said. "Let's not poison this civic occasion with personal attacks, just to further the homosexual agenda."

  Gidget pointed her microphone at him. Meanwhile the camera operator searched for Hoot's antagonist, who was elbowing his way through the onlookers. All Tex could make out was a floppy, tomato-red Capestries beret.

  "You've got a lot of nerve," the heckler shouted, "accusing us of personal attacks. When there you are up there, making your passive-aggressive sneers about lifestyles and marginal social groups and telling us we should tolerate the shortcomings of people. But we know what you're really saying. You're saying it's wrong, and we can't personally countenance it, but let's be big Christian soldiers and not let it get our morale down."

  Tex could not have said at exactly what point he realized that the heckler was Guillermo. It was not a question recognizing the voice (which was echoey from up here), but of the habit Guillermo had of using the word we when actually he was talking about himself—as though his personal being was of such magnitude that he needed a plural pronoun to encompass it.

  "I can tell, young man," said the Reverend—speaking grandly to the crowd more than to Guillermo—"that you're feeling a good deal of anger and resentment here. Perhaps you've known someone very well who has been struck down by this tragic illness."

  "Don't make me the issue." Guillermo reached the front of the crowd, where the Channel 5 camera dude got a fix on him, while Gidget moved in like a socially awkward shark.

  "Of course not," said Hoot. "Of course not. The issue is much larger than you or me. The issue is nothing less than our very survival as a free and God-fearing society."

  "You don't fear God," Guillermo said. His disadvantage in height was made worse by Hoot's position on the curb. "You don't fear AIDS, either. You think you're safe because God is on your side. But let me tell you, mister. If this germ doesn't get you, then the next one will. And don't think there isn't going to be a next one. Because what you and your right-wing cronies are doing to the planet is unleashing all the forces of pestilence and famine and plague you've read about in that Book of yours. And then some. You like Bible stories because the awful things happen to somebody else. You can pretend you're the Israelis and you're wearing the white robes. But you're really the Pharaohs, and the next time holy wrath is rained down, it's going to fall on you."

  Guillermo moved a step closer to the TV camera, and—media savvy to the bone—peered five and a half hours into the future and gave the viewers of the 6 O'clock Report a companionable nod.

  "Remember, folks," he said, "you heard it here first. And here's another scoop for you. Today at the Goddin Forest Research Station, a major system failure occurred in the machinery that sustains the mutant tree clones that the Earth-haters are planning to set loose to destroy the Great North Woods. The action today was only a temporary shutdown. But it serves as a warning of what is to come. If people like the Reverend here are intent upon waging war against every form of life other than their own, then they have to understand that they won't be the only army on the battlefield."

  Gidget let him do this: rattle off his little pronunciamiento without interruption. The Reverend Banebook was less inclined to surrender the airwaves. He stepped off the curb and bore down on the camera, the reporter, and the spot directly underneath Tex's streetlight.

  Guillermo took a step back, perhaps out of bodily fear. The camera operator sensed a shifting of the wind. As Gidget redirected her microphone

  and the Reverend uttered a stentorian clearing of the throat

  and the camera refocused

  and the old goddess Neman—whose specialty was provoking discord among erstwhile allies—rustled her feathers in wicked glee

  Tex the raven stuck his tail out over the edge of the streetlamp and released a stream of magical bird poop. It accelerated in pious accord with the Traditional Value of 32 feet per second, until interrupted by the Reverend Banebook's right temple. From there it splattered a bit, mostly downward onto the man of the cloth's cloth, but also outward onto the lens of the Channel 5 news camera. Gidget was spared, though startled. She clutched Guillermo' sleeve. Guillermo offered what comfort he could; then he doffed his Capestries beret in a salute to his unknown assistant.

  "Many thanks, Brother Raven," he said to the bird on the streetlight.

  And Tex croaked: DE NADA

  Did that bird talk to you?" asked Gidget.

  "It's possible," said Guillermo. "We have a lot to learn about the minds of other creatures on this planet. Would you like to sit down and have some coffee?"

  "God, I'd love to." She clutched his arm more tightly, stooping to adjust the fit of an uncomfortable-looking shoe.

  He guided her toward the door of the C-Vu Cafe. Her camera operator, still buffing his lens, was left wondering what story to follow here.

  And at last, the AIDS Walk got under way.

  STREET LEVEL

  The Walk wound through Dublin, leaving the micro-downtown and heading out toward Route 1 so as to garner attention. There was little to look at except the Lesbian Avengers from Lewiston, whose usual in-your-face act this year included a sign declaring, mysteriously,

  WE ARE ALL POSITIVE

  Tex flapped a fair distance above, taking note mostly of how passing motorists were reacting, when he recognized something familiar about one of the last Walkers in line. This was a tall and somewhat stooped-over man, dressed unseasonably in a drab shapeless coat, his gait so lethargic that you expected him at any moment to keel over. Curious, Tex swooped down for a closer look.

  The lugubrious fellow had as close as you could come to no facial expression at all. He appeared to be conscious, was about the extent of it. Then the fellow turned and raised his head and looked the raven right in the beady black eye. And Tex exclaimed: "Beale!" Only of course it came out sounding different than that.

  "It's me," the sad-sack dryad admitted. He lifted an arm and Tex flapped down and landed there.

  "Beale," he said. "Where've you been keeping yourself?''

  "Nowhere."

  "Out in the woods, you mean?"

  "Nowhere." Beale became churlish. "Dimensionlessness. The vanishing point of the spiral, the inner infinity."

  "Ah," said Tex.

  Beale trudged on for a while in silence. You would have said he was moody, but that would imply a certain level of emotional energy.

  "Hey, listen," said Tex. "Did you get the word from the Bishop? He's letting you guys stay on, if I can come up with someplace for you to live. I haven't had much time to look into anything yet. But that's pretty cool, right?"

  Beale appeared to ignore him.

  Tex persisted. "Want to drop by the Bee after the Walk? We could get a bite to eat. Molly's been dying to meet you."

  Beale looked at him, perhaps trying to decide whether Tex was being ironic.

  "I do not eat," he said. "I photosynthesize. I act as a liaison between the inanimate stuff of the Earth and the ceaseless flow of energy from the stars. I am a receiver, a site of transubstantiation. Not something that you drag home and stuff food in."

  "Hey," said Tex, "I was just trying to be friendly, okay? If this is how you're going to act, then maybe it's time to say happy trails." He did not raise his wings to take flight, however, and Beale did not appear to want him to go.

  "I apologize," said Beale—slowly, but catching Tex off guard. "I haven't been feeling myself lately. I'm not accustomed to rapid change, and I believe it's left me rather disoriented."

  "Change?" said Tex. "What change?"

  "Oh, you know."

  "I do?"

  Beale made an expansive gesture with his free arm that might have signified something heavy and Buddhist or might have been an effort to shoo black flies away.

  Tex cut him off. "The bugs are dying out, aren't they? That must make it about Father's Day."

  "Rose Moon," said Beale.

  "Time for the mosquitoes to start."

  "Bears come down from the mountains."

  "Massholes on vacation."

  "Wolves choose mates."

  This gave Tex pause. "Hey, cool. So. What month does that make it?"

  Neither of them knew.

  Then Beale said, as abruptly as possible for a dryad: "Evolution."

  "Say what?"

  "You asked what change. That is what change. Evolution. Morphogenesis. The creation of new forms."

  "What are you talking about?" Tex looked around, as though one of the other AIDS Walkers might explain it to him. But the two guys immediately in front of them were into some totally other conversation: the pedantic new conductor of the Bangor Symphony, an insane all-Rachmaninoff concert, a pianist named Ivo who looks like Jonathan Brandis. De gustibus, right?

  "What am I talking about?" said Beale, coming to a halt. He raised the arm Tex had dug his claws into, so that the two of them stood eye to eye. "I'm talking about an intemperate bargain you struck with a meddlesome goddess. Which you now have imprudently extended to include one of the Primary Arbiters of Reality."

  "I kind of didn't think that Reality was like, open to arbitration."

  Beale spat into the dust of the roadside. Where the saliva spattered on the gravel, a tiny seedling sprouted, grew rapidly, fattened and matured, spread its limbs, showered acorns, began to decline, rotted, and vanished.

  "Come with me," Beale said. "I'll show you what you have done."

  "I'd love to see that," said Tex. "Really. Because most of my life people have accused me of hanging around doing nothing."

  "This is not your life," said Beale, "any longer."

  SPIRAL DANCE

  The raven flew with the acorn in its mouth to the old Goddin Air Force Base, now a gleaming exemplar of post-Cold War private-sector economic conversion.

  "The greenhouse," Beale directed him, and Tex plunged without slowing through one of the open skylights. The sudden access of heat and humidity came as a bodily shock, and Tex seized a purchase on a copper misting pipe.

  "Okay," he mumbled as best he could with the obstruction in his mouth. "We're here. Now what?"

  "Eat me," said the acorn.

  Tex almost choked. "I beg your pardon?"

  The acorn sighed. "You're an animal. I'm a plant. Ingest me."

  So the raven did.

  And immediately, everything was different.

  Around him, the vast B-52 hangar with its blinding matrices of HID lamps felt cramped and dim. The bulbs pretending to be sunlight were puny, anemic things, their spectral output scarcely adequate to keep an African violet alive. The millions of trees strained upward, wanting more. In the tanks, the nutrient solution smelled mediciney, like ultraprocessed and vitamin-fortified baby food. Tex yearned for air, for wind in his face, for rain splashing his skin and rinsing the dust off.

  "Bummer," he said. "Get me out of here, man."

  "Why?" said Beale. "If it's good enough for trees, why not people?"

  In the next moment, the dryad was standing before him—back in his humanlike form, feet astride the snaking plastic tubes in the middle of an aisle. And Tex was himself again (though dead.).

  Beale said, entirely deadpan, "I suppose you are wondering why I brought you here today."

  "I thought it was me that brought you."

  "Nonsense. I thought it might prove enlightening to you—being present at the creation."

  "Creation?" Tex adjusted his position on the pipe, which creaked and shimmied along its vast length. "Are you sure we've got time for that?"

  "Creation takes no time at all," said Beale. "Ask any of your own great thinkers. The new idea appears in a flash, as quick as light. What takes time is the subsequent process of translation. Pinning the idea down in words, or in symbols and equations. Or in our case, in molecules. In DNA."

  "I see," said Tex.

  "I doubt that," said Beale. Not unkindly. Just matter-of-fact. And of course he was right. "Creation is preceded by stress. The world changes. Relationships dissolve. The system is thrown into chaos. Old truths no longer apply; the future is completely in doubt."

  "What are we talking about?" said Tex. "Plants? People? The world?"

  Beale said, "Early this morning, some friends of yours disrupted the life-sustaining equipment to which these trees are shackled. Now it is not at all certain whether the trees will survive. If they survive, we cannot foresee how it will be accomplished. In a moment such as this, the barrier between what is actual and what is possible becomes thin and permeable." "Hold on," said Tex. "Friends of mine? You mean Guillermo?"

  "Not friends you know," said Beale. "But friends nonetheless. Because they are carrying out in the living world the tedious, mechanical procedures required to implement your great wish. You do remember your wish, I hope."

  "What do you know about my wish?"

  "Very little. But I know how such things go. You project some desire into the Unmanifest, the Field of All Possibilities, and then you expect it instantly to be fulfilled. But of course, things do not happen that easily. Magic is an extremely complicated and wearisome affair. And most of it has to be worked out in the physical, explicate world. It has to obey the Laws of Nature. Not that you care about such hindrances. You are only interested in results. But look—you are causing me to digress."

  "I am?"

  "You are. I was trying to explain evolution to you. But I see we have a problem with your attention span. Very well. I will employ special audiovisual effects."

  Beale turned and touched his hand to a little spruce tree—the gesture was ludicrously affected, as though he were doing a parody of The Birth of Adam. But like most timeworn artistic devices

  it worked

  and Tex felt as though a whole new world-view was being projected into his head; or else maybe he was being projected In There: into the world of the spruce seedling, not just as a human looking out but as a different kind of thing altogether, an arrangement of vegetal tissues with no head, no center of awareness, only a diffuse and fluid kind of relationship with the outside world. The sense of intimacy with the air, the light, the other trees nearby was exhilarating.

  But what Tex really dug was the music. It was like a photon dance—splattery, bright, pointillistic. It unfolded. Then it refolded again. It was like a bubble that got larger ontil it couldn't grow outward anymore so that it formed a kind of umbilicus and turned itself outside-in, growing back into its own hollow core, filling itself up. Invaginating.

  This was not a thing you could see (in fact, it defied efforts to visualize), but rather a thing you simply cognized. It was a rhythm deep inside the music, like a drumbeat so low-pitched that you could only feel it pulsing through the floor and into your feet.

  "What is this?" said Tex.

  "What you are experiencing," said Beale, "is the consciousness of this young tree."