On Sequoia Time | Page 6

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.
Ê
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.

Ê
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