On Sequoia Time | Page 8

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.
Ê

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.
Ê
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.