On Sequoia Time | Page 7

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.
Ê
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,