On Sequoia Time | Page 8

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.
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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.