"Good morning," he said. "Would you like your messages one at a time, or batched by priority?"

  "Let's start with the least important ones."

  "Least important," said Sefyn, leafing through a stack of notes. "That would be 'Tell Deere to call me right away or I'll have his left testicle—Sincerely, Chas.' "

  "I take it he escalated from there."

  "Didn't he just," said Sefyn, fanning himself with the memo pad.

  In the executive polyhedron, Chas sat beneath the portrait of a border collie named The Old Captain, flanked by a pair of young men who looked as though they might be out of prison on work-release.

  "Deere," said Chas, glancing up from his ThinkPad. "These are Bruce and Rocky. They're from Texas."

  The two young men nodded at Gene and went back to staring down across Chas's shoulder. Poor social development, Gene thought. An excellent sign.

  "Look," one of them said, pointing at something on the active-matrix display. "Anybody running Satan could have picked that up. Who handles your lockup around here?"

  "A guy named Eckhart," said Chas, distracted. "Did you say Satan?"

  "And that's just for shits and grins," said Expert #2. "We ain't even into the heavy lifting yet."

  Chas looked up at Gene as though appealing for mercy, or at any rate, human understanding. He found little. Gene was actually looking at the dog. The dog appeared highly intelligent; though that could, of course, have been a trick of the portraitist. Gene had read that dogs, on average, display communications skills on par with those of a human two-year-old.

  "Deere?" said Chas. "Are you there?"

  "Sorry," said Gene. "Did I miss something?"

  "The question is whether I am missing something, and the answer is yes. I am missing your report. It was due on my desk this morning."

  "It was?"

  "Do you know how to operate a calendar, Deere? By the way, I've been ringing you all day. Haven't you had your phone on?"

  "It kind of fell by the wayside."

  "Wonderful. That's simply wonderful. All right, don't let me waste any more of your valuable time. I assume I will have your report in one form or another by the time you leave the office."

  Gene mused. The fact of the matter was, his report was drafted and ready to zap through the office e-mail, as it had been for the past week. Some lingering uncertainty had kept his finger off the send button, though. The final section, Prioritized Recommendations, still seemed a bit undercooked. As he stood in Chas's office, his toes on the concrete floor less than a centimeter shy of the kilim rug, he got an inkling of what had been troubling him.

  "Actually," he said to Chas, "I could give you the gist of it right now, if you like."

  "Orally?" said Chas, in evident distaste.

  "Straight from the horse's mouth."

  Chas frowned. Then he opened his lone desk drawer and pulled out a small Sony DAT recorder. "Get Sefyn to transcribe this when you're done," he said, sliding the machine across the expanse of oiled walnut.

  Gene picked up the recorder and examined it. It is strange and wonderful, he thought, what technology can do. The two security experts were staring up at him, looking impatient, as though he were a web site they were speed-surfing through.

  "I've been thinking," said Gene, "about palm trees."

  "Cool," said Expert #2.

  Chas scarcely seemed to pay attention. Presumably he intended to let the transcript do the talking.

  "There's this Indian guy I met," said Gene, "and he's got this little palm tree growing—it's a saw palmetto, Rhapidophyllum hystrix, which used to be widespread in the Southeast until developers took care of it. Only this particular tree is growing in Maine, not all that far away from here."

  "Is your report," wondered Chas, courteously enough, "going to be all about this palm tree? Or can we expect vou to move on eventually to the subject of replanting the North Woods?"

  "I'm not sure there's any difference," said Gene. "See, my point is, I've been monitoring all these trial plots out here, and I've been doing extensive field surveys of patterns of tree growth and natural reforestation in the wild—but the whole time, I find that I've got this little palm tree stuck in my head. And finally it hits me what the palm tree is trying to tell me."

  "You've shifted into the present tense," said Chas. "Would you like the grammar checker to straighten this out for you?"

  Gene shrugged. He felt like a present-tense kind of guy. "It's a question," he said. "Here it is. If you can grow palm trees in a place like Applemont, Maine, then why grow nothing but a single variety of transgenic spruce? In other words, if local conditions are such that the forest is driven naturally toward complexity and diversification, then doesn't it seem misguided to override Nature and push the system back toward species reduction, and eventually monoculture? This is just a question, keep in mind. I'm not necessarily advocating a hands-off approach to the working forest. What I am saying is that one of the great lessons of science is that Nature does not operate in a casual or accidental fashion. Nature winnows and optimizes. So if Nature is casting a strong vote in favor of diversity and system complexity, then the only explanation is that millennia of evolution have demonstrated that this is the wisest long-range approach. And indeed, that seems to be borne out even in the limited field tests I've been running. In terms of simple productivity, for instance—which we can define in terms of vegetal tissue production per unit of area—the mixed-species plots have a clear edge over their single-species competitors. That's not even factoring in such things as heightened resiliency in the face of atypical meteorological events, fluctuations in the predation cycle, and so forth."

  "I'm sorry, Deere," said Chas, "but you seem to be speaking in very broad philosophical terms here. Is there any way you can boil your thoughts down to a set of definite recommendations?"

  Gene took a few steps across the concrete floor. He found himself in a corner of the office, from where the place looked large, impersonal, and barren. The two data guys had lost interest in all this plant talk and gone back to poking holes in the local-area network.

  "Okay," he said, "here's a recommendation. Shit-can the X dawkinsia 4.3.2. At least go back to an earlier version. Without the suckering rhizomes, for example."

  "No can do," said Chas. "I'm just telling you that parenthetically. You may, of course, make any recommendation you like. But I can tell you that the Company is not going to walk away from this significant investment, nor abandon this lucrative proprietary technology."

  "Well, fine. But we're not really talking about technology, are we? We're talking about a living forest. At least, that's what I'm talking about. And my concern is that the X dawkinsia will be two undesirable things at once: it will be unnaturally formidable, and it will be unnaturally vulnerable."

  "Say again?" said Chas—military radio talk, his Annapolis education cropping up.

  "In the short term it will be too strong and aggressive a competitor, bringing about a serious reduction in the complexity of the forest. This will, as I'm arguing, be accompanied by a loss of overall productivity, at the very least. But in the long run you encounter a deeper problem, which is that a system dominated by any single variety will be insufficiently flexible and dynamic to respond to changes in the environment. One serious insect problem or climate flip-over, or one virus the plant has never seen, and there goes your crop."

  "People have been predicting such a thing," Chas noted, "for 20 or 30 years now. Hasn't happened."

  "Just wait," said Gene. "Nature is opportunistic. You dangle a monocrop out there long enough and some critter I will figure out how to make a banquet out of it. You've got to keep in mind that X dawkinsia is something that we created in a laboratory. And of course, we did our usual fine job of anticipating the survival traits it will require. But our knowledge is necessarily limited. Even if we think of everything, we're only thinking of everything that exists today. Ten years from now, twenty years—not long at all, from the standpoint of a forest—this propriety supertree of ours may be the Edsel of transgenic cultivars."

  Chas leaned back in his chair and thumped his thumbs against each other. "This is the extent of your recommendation?" he said. "Scrap the 4.3.2?"

  "No," said Gene.

  But Chas evidently had done enough listening for one May. "Well, Deere, your wishes may have already been fulfilled. The lab techs have reported such a fall-off in heliotropic response and all the other parameters that I've ordered them yanked off life support."

  "You're ... killing them?"

  "No. I'm having several thousand of them potted up. Some others—a quantity I have yet to determine—I'm sending out to the field-test grounds around Applemont. It's a big job, and I'm still weighing options. My inclination is to run tissue cultures off the individuals in your trial plots. To the best of my knowledge that's the only source of unaltered genetic material we've got left. N'est ce pas?"

  Gene was flummoxed. He couldn't believe Chas would have done any of this without consulting him. On the other hand, he hadn't exactly been readily at hand to consult.

  "Now, Deere," said Chas, "for formality's sake, will you please go back to your office and sit down at your desk and not get up again until your report is finalized? Ask Sefyn to order a pizza if you become weak from hunger."

  "Suppose I need to go to the bathroom?" said Gene, still irked at having been run around.

  "Piss on one of the palm trees," Chas suggested.

  ESSENCE OF ROCKNESS

  On the Linear Bee, Ludi held a first reading of her latest script-in-progress. This time at least the sketchy, open-ended quality of the piece did not disturb her. Open-endedness had become the whole point of the performance. Her chief anxiety now was whether the audience would pick up the ball.

  Pippa Rede and Eben Creek and Deep Herb showed up, but for most of the time all they wanted to talk about was Guillermo.

  "He was so cool on the news," Pippa said. "You could tell it was him, even though they did that thing where they electronically scrambled his face up so the police couldn't use the tape as evidence."

  Ludi had thought this was stupid. Making himself out to be some kind of hero of a nonexistent Underground.

  "Yeah," said Herb. "His voice sounded like Dr. Spock."

  "You mean Mr. Spock," said Eben. "From Star Trek, right?"

  "Wow," said Herb. "Was he on there, too?"

  "Could we do the business part first?" implored Ludi.

  "I didn't get what he was saying, though," said Pippa, "about shifting the struggle from digital to analog."

  Eben said, "I think he meant like, it's time to get past the concept stage and really take the struggle to the streets."

  "What streets?" said Ludi—then she realized she was doing it, too.

  "What's this about a Corporate Executive?" Pippa Moss wanted to know. "Hello? Anybody home?"

  It took Ludi a second to get that they were back to talking about her script. "A Corporate Executive," she : repeated. "Right. That's a character. What about it?"

  "Well, do we really want somebody like that in the play? I mean, won't he start ranting about how he deserves a bigger tax cut and people who don't like it can go live in New York?"

  Ludi shrugged. "That's up to the character. I don't think we ought to leave anybody out. Anyway, aren't you stereotyping the guy? Maybe he's really okay and just happens to have a lot of money."

  "Ha," said Eben.

  "And what's this about a Rock?" said Deep Herb.

  "Why? Do you think it's too ... static?"

  "No, man," said Herb. "I was just wondering, like how you would do the makeup and all."

  "We're not going to use any makeup," Ludi explained, for the umpteenth time. "Just a sign that designates the character. And a mask, for anonymity. It's up to the person who plays the Rock to convey, you know—the essence of Rockness."

  "Suppose he just sits there?" said Eben.

  "Then he—or she—will contribute a solid Rocklike presence," Ludi said, feeling impatient, then feeling bad about her impatience. Maybe it was a boneheaded idea. But it was too late to back out now. Flyers were tacked up around town, and a p.s.a. was being read several times a day over WURS. Besides, the Midsummer Night performance was an annual event. It was like Easter mass for the rite-of-intensification set.

  "Tell me this, then," said Eben. "What are we going to do if the thing gets out of control? I mean, suppose this Radical Faerie should get into it with the Evangelical Protestant. Or suppose the Chamber of Commerce Type should start screaming at the Welfare Witch. Suppose a big fight breaks out."

  "That hasn't happened in real life," said Pippa, meekly.

  "At least, not around here. Why should it happen in a play?"

  "Because it's dark," said Deep Herb. His voice struck Ludi as odd—as though for once he had a grip on what he was talking about. "And people are wearing masks, so they feel like they can do anything. Some of them have had a few drinks with dinner. And others are on vacation, so they're like, set free. Anyway it's Midsummer, when the wild spirits come out. That's why."

  The Players exchanged glances. One at a time, they began to smile.

  "We can hope, anyway," said Pippa.

  "Yeah," said Eben. "Now that you put it that way. Maybe it will get out of control."

  Ludi wondered what Gene would say. Something about order and chaos: new forms emerging from the Void. Things appearing that no one has ever seen before.

  "It ought to be interesting," she said. She pronounced all four syllables distinctly.

  MUTATIS

  The song of a tree is not the tree.

  Still, a tree without a song is a pulp machine. Out of deep and distant folds in the aether (the akasha, the whome), Beale's fellow dryads (sentient form-fields, matrices of organization) drifted (became explicate, emerged into the Manifest) toward the morphic space generated by the millions of genetically identical tissue-cultured specimens of the tree known as X dawkinsia 4.3.2. From the dryads' standpoint (granting that they had a standpoint, despite being nonmaterial entities occupying a multidimensional phase-space), the 4.3.2 saplings appeared alien, unnatural, vaguely menacing, and tone-deaf. This is not anthropomorphizing. From a dryad's point of view, attributing consciousness to human beings is deimorphizing. Nonetheless it is evident from patient observation that human beings do behave in a purposive and loosely "organized" fashion—albeit not so organized or purposive as, say, a colony of termites. Let alone a healthy forest. So humans can be said to possess awareness of a certain, limited kind.

  But these are philosophical problems. There were practical matters at hand. In any case, dryads prefer to do their thinking in the winter, when things are calm.

  Hesitantly, the form-fields entered the morphic space of the young trees. It was (in human terms) like stepping into a cold and featureless room. There was the smell of recent construction about it. Proportions were bad. Lighting was inadequate. Who designed this thing—a chimpanzee with a draw program?

  Well, still, it was a place. (A room. A tree.) It was better, arguably, than floating around in the Implicate with nothing to do. It presented a certain aesthetic challenge.

  The dryads did what all sentient beings would do (and "thinking machines" would not) in such a situation. They relaxed. They began to make themselves at home. They set about decorating, renovating, sprucing the old spruce up. A displaced American chestnut dryad (one of many, many), homesick for great spreading branches, turned off a timing mechanism that would have caused its lower hmbs to fall. An elm dryad redesigned its canopy to widen into the shape of a vase. A fringe tree dryad developed showy flowers. A swamp maple dryad decided to go deciduous. The yew dryad made no changes at all, only hunkered down sullenly—possibly out of spite.

  Enterprising microbes opened a gene market. Insects swarmed in, eager to acquire some of the chemical resistance bred into the 4.3.2 tissues. Bacteria founded colonies, way stations, lonely outposts. Viruses shuttled back and forth, some leaving deposits, others making withdrawals. Fungi planted themselves like shrubbery around the trees' foundations. Some of the dryads welcomed the color and vivacity of the new arrivals; others tried to discourage them, making them biochemically unwelcome; a desperate few slaughtered them outright.

  It was all business as usual in Nature, though not in a large-scale commercial greenhouse.

  Last came the mites. They arrived first in small numbers: a cautious, exploratory delegation. Beale learned of their arrival through a pheromonic broadcast that flashed through the network of intertwined roots. He took it upon himself personally to see that the newcomers were properly welcomed. Mites are notoriously picky, overbred, refined and highly specialized creatures, and they are capable of doing as much harm as good, given sufficient provocation. Beale fussed over them, fed them, bedded them down. That was all you could do. After that, you could only sit back and hope.

  Somewhere, Beale knew, the Bishop of Worms was keeping himself apprised of all this. His agents were everywhere—in every fleck of water, every dust mote, every subtle current of air—and already in countless ways He was making His presence known. Decay, tissue necrosis, root predation, insects devouring microbes, microbes devouring smaller microbes, fungal blight striking tender stems, plant-generated toxins poisoning symbiotes—the Worm never rested; always hungered; ate and ate but never became full.

  Fuck him, Beale thought. Thinking this is what Tex might have said. Wondering if Tex would have been proud of him. Of how he and his fellow dryads had gotten themselves organized. Form a union, Tex had said. A political action committee.

  Make your voices heard, man.

  Beale laughed (insofar as sentient form-fields can be said to laugh). He raised his voice. He sang.