On Sequoia Time | Page 6

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.
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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.
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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.