



On Sequoia Time




 
                  Copyright 1996 by Daniel Keys Moran.
                            All rights reserved.

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DESCRIPTION: "On Sequoia Time", a short story first published in 
             Asimov's Science Fiction in September, 1996.



On 
Sequoia Time
Daniel Keys Moran



John Muir called it the "king of all the conifers of the world,
the noblest of a noble race." The trees were named for the
Cherokee chief Sequoyah, the man who invented the
Cherokee alphabet.


They are the largest and very nearly the oldest of all living
things.


- 1 -
WHEN MY GRANDFATHER Charles was seven years old he 
first saw the box canyon where he would spend most of his adult life, the 
canyon where he would plant the tree.
It was late afternoon on Wednesday, July 2, 1924, that Charles saw the 
entrance, and a little bit inside. They were driving a two-lane, poorly 
paved road through northern Arizona. (They were moving from Idaho to 
California. After twelve years of trying to make the same sixteen acres of 
Idaho farmland feed his family, with a little left over to sell, my 
great-grandfather had seen the writing on the wall, and packed it in.) 
Charles suspected they were lost, but from the way the muscles in his 
father's neck were standing out he knew better than to say anything about 
it.
Charles had very good eyes in those days, and when he pointed the 
canyon's entrance out to his older sister she could not see it.
They sat in the back seat of a battered old Model T, a car that had 
probably come off the assembly line looking old. It wouldn't go faster 
than forty miles an hour and it complained above thirty. Aside from their 
clothes and some boxes of kitchen utensils tied on top of the car it was 
the only thing their family owned.
His sister Abby peered out the dirty window at the place where two 
mesas came together, about four or five miles off. "Right there," 
Charles insisted. "There's a opening in there and you could go inside, 
maybe."
"I don't see it," said Abby crossly, and that was the end of the 
matter.
&nbsp;
WHEN HE WAS twenty-nine my grandfather came back looking for the 
canyon. It was the summer of 1946; World War II was over, and Charles had 
just gotten out of the Marine Corps.
His eyesight wasn't as good as it had been as a child. Four years of 
constant studying in college had damaged his vision, and it had gotten 
worse during the campaign to take Okinawa from the Japanese. He'd broken 
his glasses early on and had to work and fight without them for several 
months; it had nearly cost him his life.
He went hunting for the canyon with binoculars and a brand new pair of 
glasses, a parting gift from Uncle Sam.
It took him a good part of the summer just to find the road on which 
his family had come to California. He drove a black pre-war Packard that 
reminded him sometimes of the Model T in which his family had moved to 
California. It ran a bit faster but it was just as ugly and beat up.
The hunt for the road took up most of his time. There were a dozen 
roads his father might have come by, including several that were not even 
listed on the map he had. His father had died during the war (at home, of 
a heart attack) and his mother had verified, when Charles asked, that they 
had indeed been lost much of the time while driving through northern 
Arizona.
On a hot, dusty day in early August he finally found it.
The entrance was just as he remembered it across the span of twenty-two 
years; a small gap between two mesas, not quite five miles off the road. 
In 1924 the road had been about as good as roads in those parts got; by 
1946 it was rutted and worn away in places. By the time I first visited my 
grandfather's ranch in the mid-70's it was almost entirely gone.
Charles drove the Packard slowly off the road. The spare in back held 
air, but the tread was mostly gone and Charles did not want to take a 
chance on it. So he drove carefully, and made three miles before the 
terrain got so rough that he decided to hike the rest of the way. Driving 
across the desert floor like that raised up a cloud of dust that hung in 
the dry still air behind him like a long rope; when he got out of the car 
the dust trail was still visible all the way back out to the road.
He walked the last mile and stood at the entrance to the box canyon. 
The entrance was not wide, only about forty yards across. The way Grandpa 
told it to me years later, the instant he first stood there he knew he was 
home. A spring just inside poured up and over its borders, turning into a 
slow-moving thread of a creek that ran westward down the length of the 
canyon. Charles walked the canyon from end to end that first day, even 
though it was afternoon when he found it and after dark when he left. It 
ran over a mile and a half wide, and four miles long. Because of the 
spring, there were bushes and shrubs growing inside, and even a pair of 
small trees. He saw one rabbit that hid from him quickly.
He was a city boy, then, but he figured that if he saw one rabbit, 
there were probably twenty he didn't see, and he was right about that.
As he was hiking back up out of the canyon the wind hit him. It came up 
slow and gentle, a breeze that moved the warm, still desert air 
pleasantly. Then it got both stiffer and colder, and by the time Charles 
reached the entrance to the canyon he was leaning into it, shivering, 
pushing for each step he took.
When he left the canyon it stopped with remarkable abruptness.
After he looked at the lay of the land he realized what was happening. 
What was no more than a gentle breeze outside the canyon was being 
channeled and tightened by the converging walls of the two mesas, until 
the breeze, moving across several dozens of square miles, turned into a 
small hurricane at the entrance to the canyon.
That was why he planted the trees, of course--as a windbreak.
&nbsp;
HE NEVER COULD tell me, or anyone, why he'd come looking for the canyon 
in the first place. The one time I asked him why he'd spent an entire 
summer looking for something he'd seen just once, when he was only seven 
years old, Grandpa looked at me with those wise blue eyes, scratched his 
bald, leathery skull, and grinned at me. "Danny, damn if I know."
&nbsp;
CHARLES CAME BACK to the canyon permanently in 1951, with his wife 
Laurinda and their three children. One of them was my mother.
&nbsp;
I FIRST SPENT the summer with my grandfather in 1975, when I was twelve 
years old.
Grandpa was fifty-seven then, and Grandma was fifty-two. I don't 
believe I knew their first names then.
The only people at the ranch were my grandfather and grandmother; all 
the children had left long ago. The ranch, the desert surrounding it, the 
mountains rising up above it, were both fascinating and very foreign to a 
boy from Los Angeles.
There are two kinds of sequoias; I don't specifically remember having 
seen one of either kind before then, though surely I must have. The tree 
was not impressive, the first time I saw it; just about my height, and 
struggling.
Over the course of the years Grandpa had planted several rows of trees 
at the entrance to the box canyon, staggered to muffle the wind. It 
worked; the trees at the entrance to the canyon got shaken up every 
afternoon when it got cold and the wind came up, but the trees away from 
the entrance were barely stirred at all, and back at the ranch house the 
wind was never worse than a gentle breeze.
Five rows of trees had been planted when I stayed that first summer. 
Lots of them were fruit trees--apple trees mostly, because Grandpa liked 
apples and apple pie. There were a couple of citrus trees too, though 
because of the cold they never did so well. (It gets very cold in northern 
Arizona at night, and during the winter you get snow and ice.)
Grandpa ended up planting seven rows of trees before he died. There 
were orange trees and apple trees, oaks and a couple varieties of 
evergreen. There was even, for a while, a cherry tree, but as I recall it 
died the second or third summer I spent at the ranch.
The sequoia stood in the fifth row of trees, with scraggly orange trees 
on both sides of it, well back from the wind. Grandpa had just planted it 
that summer, and it was still small and thin, about five feet tall, but 
you could already tell it was going to do better than the citrus we had 
planted around it.
&nbsp;
I SPENT THREE summers at the ranch. When I was fifteen I stopped going, 
not because I wanted to, but because my parents got divorced and life spun 
out of control for a while.
The sequoia was nine feet tall then, in the summer of 1977.
&nbsp;
MY GRANDFATHER DIED almost twenty years later, in '96, of pancreatic 
cancer. It is one of the more unpleasant ways to die. Grandma lasted three 
more years, but after Grandpa died she was never really the same. She died 
in June of '99, and that summer was the last time I ever visited the 
ranch.
We flew to Arizona for Grandma's funeral. It was a small funeral; 
myself and my older sister Janet, my mother and her sister Beth, and half 
a dozen of my grandmother's friends, old folks of her generation who made 
the rounds at the funerals, waiting patiently and with not much fear for 
their turn to come.
After the funeral my mother and aunt and sister and I drove out to the 
ranch together. Janet had never been there before; we wandered around and 
looked at things while my mother and aunt went through my grandmother's 
few possessions.
The ranch had gone to seed. I'd done the work that had to be done on my 
visits, but no more, and it showed. The wood needed painting, and the pens 
where the cows and the one pig had been kept were falling apart.
A small colony of coyotes who didn't know they were supposed to be 
afraid of humans had taken up residence in the abandoned horse shed, about 
sixty yards from the main house. I suppose Grandma had never gone out to 
the shed after the horses were sold. The coyotes stared at us and we 
stared at them, and we all agreed to leave each other alone.
The creek kept along as it had since that day in '46 when my 
grandfather had first seen it. It was small enough a that a grown man 
could step entirely across it. Janet had to take a slight hop.
You could barely see where the garden had once been. It was a slightly 
empty spot, with a couple fewer weeds, in the midst of the general 
desolation.
&nbsp;
THE TREES WERE GORGEOUS: a small forest, shady and cool in late 
afternoon. The evergreens were all doing well, and the oaks, and the 
walnut tree. Only half of the citrus trees had survived, though, and none 
of the tropicals my grandfather had tried to plant. The corpse of a palm 
tree, about nine feet tall and virtually mummified, had managed to avoid 
falling over. I guessed it had been dead at least as long as Grandpa.
The sequoia was eighteen feet tall.
My sister and I stood together and admired it. It was worth admiring: 
the tallest tree in the small forest by a good bit, the thick bark was a 
healthy deep brown and the needles glistened a lustrous dark green in the 
late afternoon sunlight.
When we were done admiring it we left it alone and went back to the 
ranch house to pick up Mom and Aunt Beth. Aunt Beth was worried about 
Grandma's cats; she'd had four and they weren't in the house, and Aunt 
Beth couldn't find them. We looked briefly but it was getting late and I 
didn't want to drive back in the dark. We drove away from that canyon and 
I don't recall looking back.
No human ever saw that canyon again.
&nbsp;
THE TREE GREW.
In 1972, when my grandfather planted the sequoia, humans had wiped out 
most of a population of trees that had existed since before the coming of 
humans to the American continents. The only remaining native populations 
of Great Sequoias were found in an area about 280 miles long, and less 
than twenty wide, in California on the western slopes of the Sierra 
Nevada. They were almost never found at heights of less than a mile above 
sea level.
The summer I was thirteen I took two books on trees with me to visit my 
grandparents' ranch. I knew that the small tree was a redwood, but what 
type of redwood neither I nor my grandfather knew.
The books told me. It was a California big-tree, a Sequoiadendron 
Giganteum. Of the two kinds of sequoias, the giant sequoia is the one 
likeliest to survive in the cold, at high altitudes. My grandfather had 
planted wisely, at least this once. The Sequoia Sempervirens can grow 
taller than the sequoiadendron, but it's thinner and it handles the cold 
more poorly; and that canyon got cold.
The tree found itself in an environment that suited it. The other 
trees, particularly the thick-sapped pines, helped protect it from the 
wind; and it was closer to the water than most of the other trees, too.
By the time the tree had reached thirty-five feet the United States was 
fighting a "police action" in Brazil to preserve what was left of the rain 
forests. Without euphamisms it was a war, and a losing one. Too many 
people had a vested interest in the slash-and-burn beef-growing economy 
that was consuming the rain forests, starting with the desperately poor 
South American Indians who had no other way to survive, and working step 
by step up the economic ladder to McDonald's corporation stockholders.
While the rain forests died, life in the canyon flourished. The rabbit 
population, without my grandfather's .22 rifle to keep it in check, 
exploded. My grandmother's cats--tough farm cats, pushing twenty 
pounds--did well even without Grandma to take care of them. Shortly there 
were eight cats, and then eleven, and the cat population leveled off at 
around twenty. There would have been more except that the coyotes wanted 
the same food, the desert mice and squirrels and rabbits, and were tougher 
about going after it. The coyotes rarely hunted the cats; it happened at 
times, but it was always a fierce fight. For five years one tom, a big 
orange glandular monster who weighed thirty-three pounds, made it a 
riskier proposition than usual; he killed and ate two young coyotes before 
a rattler finally got him one night.
The rattlesnakes my grandfather had spent nearly four decades warring 
against outlasted him; they killed more of the cats than the coyotes ever 
did.
About the time the sequoia was nearing forty-eight feet, a couple of 
owls nested in its lower branches. The owls fed off the snakes, including 
the rattlers; baby owls were born the next summer.
The sequoia broke fifty feet the year the last of the rain forests went 
up in flames.
&nbsp;
LIFE IN THE canyon continued quietly. Water came up from the ground. 
The sun warmed the canyon during the day, and during the night the mammals 
retreated to their burrows, the owls tucked their wings beneath their 
heads, and the snakes and lizards and insects grew still. Tree sap turned 
sluggish; it would stay liquid, and keep the trees alive, well below the 
freezing point of water.
The sequoia's bark grew thicker as the tree grew taller. It was still 
very young, for a sequoia. Giant sequoias can live a very long time; 
nobody really knows how long. Humans had found giant sequoias as much as 
thirty-five hundred years old, and there was no reason to believe that 
they might not live longer.
The sequoia in my grandfather's canyon might have been expected to live 
a long time, even by sequoia standards. Though it had competition for soil 
and water, it grew fast, and got up into the sunlight, putting most of the 
other trees into its shade. By the time it was tall enough to take the 
brunt of the canyon's wind itself, there was no danger that the wind would 
kill it.
The giant sequoia was not the only thing that thrived in that canyon. 
So did the pines surrounding it, and the animals that lived among them, 
the owls and the snakes and the lizards, the coyotes and the rabbits and 
bees. There was water and there was sunlight and there was food enough for 
everything; and the wild creatures flourished.
Some days, when the sun came slanting down into the canyon just right, 
it was so beautiful that seeing it would have made you glad to be 
alive.
Fortunately the human race had forgotten about the place, and as a 
result no one came to admire the beauty, and incidentally to destroy 
it.
The cats, living in the wild where size was important, got bigger and 
bigger with the passage of the years, until most of them approached the 
size of the glandular monster who had once been such a freak. These were 
not mutants; the genes for size had been floating around in the cat 
population, but they had not been selected for. Now they were selected for 
and the cats got big, quickly, and gave the coyotes and owls some real 
competition for the rabbits and desert mice, snakes and lizards.
Quickly is a relative word: the sequoia continued to grow, too, at its 
own pace. It was young and beautiful, with dark brown branches laden with 
dusky green leaves, the branches radiating outward from its trunk in a 
conical pattern, all the way from the ground to the top of the tree. In 
later life the branches near the ground would wither away, leaving the 
tree with a smooth trunk reaching up as much as two hundred feet; but for 
now the tree was young, and its growth was everywhere. The tree drank the 
water, and dug down into the soil, and reached for the sun.
As adults, giant sequoias can reach heights of three hundred and fifty 
feet; by this time the sequoia in my grandfather's canyon had nearly 
reached a hundred.
--I was dead by then, of course, and so were you, and your 
grandchildren, and everyone your grandchildren had ever known or loved.
And still the tree grew.

- 2 -
WHEN THE TREE was a hundred and sixty-one feet tall 
the skies above it turned scarlet at midnight.
Two warring groups of humans had tossed nukes at each other, and 
everyone else.
(Who were these humans? I doubt it matters, but for what it's worth 
they were a group of people in what used to be India, and another group in 
what was once South America. Why did North America get nuked? The United 
States was gone a long time by then, and its remnants were of no threat to 
anyone--but everybody had extra nukes they didn't need, and there was not 
a continent on the planet that didn't receive a few dozen.)
The bombs fell, in a nuclear rain that lasted for days, through a 
peremptory first strike and a retaliatory second strike, 
through retaliatory second and third strikes, until only submarines and 
spaceships remained to launch weapons at one another. Through all of this, 
the bombs fell, and fell. The nuclear explosions were bad enough in and of 
themselves, and were succeeded by firestorms of epic size that burned to 
the ground every sequoia on the west coast of North America.
Worse was to follow. Vast clouds of dust and earth were blasted into 
the sky. Whole continents disappeared beneath them; and temperatures began 
to drop.
&nbsp;
IN THE CANYON, the sky was an angry orange color for two or three days, 
and then it got dark and started to get cold.
In the war, and the small Ice Age that followed, most of the living 
things on the planet's surface died, and a lot of those beneath the ocean. 
The canyon I had spent three months in, during the days when I was alive, 
survived better than most places. The canyon was not near any military 
targets, and most of the species living between its walls made it through. 
The rabbits had a very hard time of it, and as a result the coyotes died 
out. But six of the cats survived, four of them females, and in time 
kittens appeared, and the cats and rabbits struggled on.
It was worse almost everywhere else in the world; and worse in ways the 
world had never seen before. There had been die-offs before, to be sure. 
The great majority of the species that had ever existed on the surface of 
the planet were extinct by the time the last sequoia was planted by my 
grandfather.
Sixty-five million years ago an asteroid crashed into the Earth, near 
what is now Mexico. It blasted so much soot and smoke and dust into the 
sky that years passed in which the planet received no sunlight. Every 
species of land animal larger than a turtle died off.
This die-off was different, though. It was an orderly catastrophe, 
planned for and carried out by our children, twenty-five generations 
removed. This disaster is what finally killed the whales, who had hung on 
through the slaughter of humans who wanted to slice them up and use their 
fat as a lubricant or a fuel; who had hung on while those same humans bred 
new humans, billions upon billions upon billions, and with sheer numbers 
poisoned the water the whales lived in and the air they breathed. They had 
hung on through the rise and fall of empires, but they were the largest of 
all the animals and the ones most damaged when the radioactive debris was 
inevitably washed down to the sea. The Earth tried to cleanse itself, to 
wash away the poisons; and the water ended up where it always did. It 
destroyed the food chain the whales depended upon; and it is a good 
question whether the last whales died of radiation poisoning or 
starvation.
&nbsp;
THE TREE WAS not a complex thing, but it had a sort of awareness, a 
knowledge of when things were well and when they were not. For a very long 
time after that things were not well. Many of the trees that had provided 
it with a windbreak died off as the cold got worse. The spring that fed 
the stream slowed for several decades, and when it eventually resumed its 
flow, it was contaminated by radioactive isotopes that might have killed 
the tree, had it been younger or smaller. It did kill some of the other 
trees, among those that had survived the cold.
Slowly though, slowly even by the tree's standards, things began to get 
better. The winds that had nearly killed it, winter after brutal winter, 
stopped being so severe. The winters themselves grew warmer, as did the 
summers; and the radiation levels, still lethal elsewhere in the world, 
declined in the area around the canyon to the point where plants and 
animals stopped dying of it, much, and started mutating instead. Most of 
the mutants died too, of course; that's what mutants do.
&nbsp;
THINGS WERE A little simpler in the canyon, a little less complex; here 
as everywhere else the great war had knocked out some of the links in the 
elaborate chain that made life on Earth a viable affair.
Remember, remember, remember. Everything is connected.
But life in the canyon hung on. The tree pushed ahead with the serious 
business of growing. It broke two hundred feet just weeks before a human 
being staggered into the canyon to die.
The man came in off the desert, from the east where the fireball sun 
hung in the morning sky. He was half dead already. He was six generations 
removed from the men and women who had pulled the trigger and launched the 
nukes; but in six generations the fighting had not stopped. Instead it had 
spread, though with less dangerous weapons now, north and south and east 
and west. He wore combat armor that was supposed to protect him from 
incidental radiation, still high six generations after the great war, and 
it did that. What it did not do was protect him from the artillery that 
had destroyed the rest of his squad. I've said that my sister and I were 
the last human beings to see the canyon, and this is true. The soldier was 
flash-blinded and deafened. His right arm was shattered from the elbow 
down, and a stress fracture in his right leg slowed but did not stop him. 
Occasionally he called out, in a high cracked voice, words that may have 
meant something to someone who spoke his language.
He climbed up into the canyon, walked a few hundred 
yards and then sat down in the shade of an apple tree that was almost as 
bad off as he was.
It took two days before the lack of water killed him. He was only a 
dozen yards from the slow small stream that now curled its way around the 
sequoia's wide base, but he could neither hear nor see it, and so he 
suffered, screaming out occasionally to an audience of cats who were 
trying to decide what he was, and whether he was edible.
The tree took little enough notice of it. The man's dying was not 
affecting its sunlight or its water. Indirectly, after the cats ate him, 
he would end up fertilizing the ground in the great tree's vicinity, which 
was all to the good.
We might dwell upon that man, that soldier dying in pain in the desert 
beneath the harsh sun. We might, but we will not. He was only one man; and 
worse was coming.
&nbsp;
NOT ALL HUMANS died in that great war. Some of those who did not 
decided that, if the human race was to survive, the race itself needed to 
change. (Perhaps they were right about that. I don't know. The old design 
hadn't worked out very well, but then the new one didn't do much 
better--)
They remade themselves. With genetic engineering they created children 
who were stronger and faster, who thought more clearly and more quickly 
than you or I. They reinvented themselves from the ground up, generation 
after generation, to be the greatest warriors the world had ever seen. 
Before the tree had reached two hundred and twenty-five feet, the new 
humans had killed off the remnants of the old humans, the ones who looked 
more or less like you and me, and were therefore forced to turn their 
attentions to one another.
You might wonder if these humans were really human. They were. They 
were people, at least, more so than you and I in all the ways that count. 
They did not always look like us, but that does not matter. I do not know 
if you could say that they were better than us; but they were more than 
us.
When I was a boy I used to read sci-fi stories, or watch episodes of 
Star Trek, about how as humans evolved we would turn into something 
that was all brains and no hormones, all intellect and no emotions.
That isn't what happened. These people who were descended from us were 
capable of a range of experience that would have destroyed any of us, our 
best or our worst. They were more dangerous and more generous than us; 
they grew angrier and happier, grieved harder and rejoiced with more 
abandon. Love was an emotion so deep they could not lie about it, hatred a 
passion so black it was always lethal to someone.
The tree was three hundred and fourteen feet tall when the human race 
finally killed itself, and everything else too. They did it with 
nanotechnology. One group of humans, who were good people--they would tell 
you so--created a molecule-sized nanomachine that fed on living creatures, 
and that reproduced itself, using common materials, to make more such 
nanomachines. They intended to use the nanomachine on other humans, who 
were bad people and who they hated and wanted to kill.
Unfortunately something went wrong.
It was humanity's last mistake in a very long line--the Big One. The 
nanomachines got loose before the good humans who had created them 
completed the controls that would have let them protect themselves from 
their creation.
The nanomachines ate them and their children first. Poetic justice, you 
might say, if that sort of thing amuses you. The nanomachines did not stop 
after eating their creators; they were not designed to. They drifted out 
on the winds, to the oceans, to the furthest reaches of the planet. And 
where they found biomass, they ate it. They swarmed over living creatures, 
reproducing and eating. They ate indiscriminately, people and pets and 
leather and wood and rubber and plastic; and when they were done nothing 
remained but a gray sludge of dead nanomachines with nothing left to 
eat.
The tree was--well, I do not know if fortunate is the word. It was all 
the way around the planet from the spot where the world ended; and years 
passed before the first spores of the gray sludge came drifting in across 
the desert, born on the back of the wind.
&nbsp;
THE TREE WAS, in a sense, the last representative of the human race, 
the last thing that might have said to an uncaring universe, they were not 
so bad. My grandfather planted that tree, and he cared for it while it was 
young and needed the care. He planted that windbreak for himself, for his 
own reasons; but any orchard of trees might have served as a windbreak, 
and more effectively than the trees he planted and labored over. And he 
loved that sequoia. It was the first tree he showed me, the first summer I 
visited him; it was the only one I ever heard him mention, or worry over. 
He worried that it would survive the winters, worried that he had planted 
it in a location that would stunt its growth, or kill it. And partially 
because he worried about it, it did survive; and because of the location 
he picked, it lasted longer than anything.
There were other things created by the human race that stood in 
monument, despite the nanomachines that were busy turning the world, from 
the depths of the Mariani Trench to the heights of Everest, into a vast 
gray sludge. Between its wars and its building humanity had inflicted 
scars upon the planet that would be erased only in the course of geologic 
time. The nanomachines did not eat metal or stone or cement or glass; 
weapons and vehicles and buildings littered the surface of the planet when 
the nanomachines were done.
But of the good things the human race did, there was one thing that 
still survived; and that one thing was the tree.
Perhaps it's foolish to talk this way, for the tree was just a tree. So 
far as I know it had no emotions. It could not think or reason. And yet it 
could feel, and had a sort of awareness of itself, and it knew that 
something was wrong. The nanomachines first entered the canyon on the 
wind; and they made short work of almost everything. All the animals, the 
lizards and bees and snakes and cats and rabbits and owls and crows, died 
within hours. The smaller trees took days to die, and even the oaks, large 
though some of them had grown, were gone within a week.
But an adult California big-tree, a giant sequoia, is huge. The 
gray sludge ate away at the tree, stripped it of its leaves, but the tree was made of more than two million 
pounds of living hardwood. Its bark alone was two to three feet thick, and 
the bark served to slow the attack of the nanomachines. The bark protected 
the tree, as evolution had designed it to, significantly slowed the 
nanomachine attack.
Months passed while the tree struggled for life. It was the last living 
thing on the surface of the planet that humanity had killed.
&nbsp;
HERE ARE SOME of the things we killed:
Hawks and seaweed. Horses. Puppies and kittens and parrots. Lions and 
lizards, lobsters and clams. Sharks. Grass and crabgrass and all the 
flowers, every last one of them; a rose by any other name was just as 
dead. Bats and vultures and pigeons and bluebirds, boa constrictors and 
garden snakes and earthworms. Elephants and marijuana plants. Milkweed and 
tumbleweed and all the other plants humans named "weeds" and tried to 
destroy because they couldn't figure out a way to make use of them. Snails 
and frogs and raccoons and bears. We killed the dolphins and the seals and 
the squid and the starfish, jellyfish and sea anemones and sea horses and 
all the animals that made the beautiful shells humans treasured.
We killed everything--the air and the ground and the water, and 
everything that lived in those places.
&nbsp;
THE LAST THING we killed was the tree.
Half a year had passed since the gray sludge's arrival. The tree's 
leaves had gone first, and then its branches. The nanomachines ate inward, 
chewing away at the hardwood. They worked quickly enough, under the 
circumstances. The tree was twenty-five feet around, and it took the 
nanomachines a long time to eat their way through it. They got started at 
the base first, about ten feet above the ground. Other nanomachines 
attacked the tree along its length, but the invasion at the tree's base 
was the worst one.
If by some quirk of fate my grandfather had been able to see the canyon 
at that moment, he would not have recognized it as the place where he'd 
grown old and died. Every tree, except the great sequoia itself, had 
toppled to the ground and sunk into a sludge of gray dust. Where grass and 
shrubs had sprouted, bare rock stood forth. The wind that had always 
gathered at the mouth of the canyon once again had nothing to stop it, and 
each evening it blew the dirt and dust back into the canyon, leaving 
nothing but the exposed rock behind.
Only the one tree still stood above the expanse of pale rock, covered 
in a gray blanket of molecule-sized machines.
Only the one tree, in all the world, still maintained a flicker of 
life. Sap flowed sluggishly within the tree's core, even at the end. The 
gray sludge ate inexorably away at the tree's base, until the day the wind 
came up, the wind that had tried to knock my grandfather over almost two 
thousand years before--
And the tree my grandfather planted, fell.
The fall took quite a while, at least on the human scale. On sequoia 
time it was faster than the downstroke of a hummingbird's wings.
The fall lasted either a long time or an instant; it doesn't matter. 
When the tree's thousand tons of hardwood struck the bare stone surface of 
the canyon the tree shattered, and the sound of its death echoed up and 
down the length of the canyon for almost thirty seconds before it faded, 
and the canyon grew quiet again except for the wind. 



--For my grandfather, who was hit [in 1996] by both strokes and
Alzheimer's disease; who will never know I wrote this for him. I wish
I'd written faster.



