The Future Library

by Peng Shepherd

  “For Claire,” I echoed.

  I had walked us to the far shady corner of the Future Library’s grove at dawn that morning, where the roots ran close together and the branches of the sibling spruce brushed against each other in the breeze. I had pointed out the tree they would cut, and Gunnar tied a little gold ribbon around one of the low branches, so they could find it again with all the press watching.

  They did not know this forest like I do.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked again.

  “I am,” I said, as the saws began.

  I was crying, and he squeezed my hand, and I saw that his eyes were shimmering, too.

  “You’ll get the first copy,” he told me as the trunk began to bend.

  It wasn’t until that first tree toppled, and we saw the exposed rings of its inner wood, that everything fell apart.

  * * *

  Here is the first thing they have hidden from you: the idea to plant the authors’ remains in the dirt under each tree was mine.

  The official Future Library website gives credit to Claire. Which is fine. She was the one who did the work to make the whole thing happen. We’d been together a few years by that time, and even though she’d just been diagnosed with her Crackles, she was busier than ever finishing her list of the remaining authors to ask to write a book for the Future Library, looking for new and interesting voices, and I was busy caring for the saplings. At first, I’d thought that one hundred books sounded like an impossible amount—I don’t think I’ve read even ten books in my life, let alone a hundred—but the longer I was with Claire, the more she opened my eyes. I began to understand that one hundred isn’t that big of a number at all, even for books, just the same way that she came to realize that a thousand trees is also hardly a large number. We were both tending to such small, precious things.

  “I wish there was some way they could come meet their trees too, like I did,” she sighed one evening as we sat on the porch after dinner, overlooking the forest as it grew dark and shadowed in the sunset. The last oil wars were at their peak then, and the aviation industry was completely grounded. Our staff who rode the train back and forth from Oslo had said a flight could take weeks to get, and cost more than a down payment on a small apartment somewhere in the outer exurban zones.

  I tried to muster a reply, and failed. Even though Claire’s Crackles was only Stage I and she was responding well to treatment, I was still reeling from her diagnosis.

  But Claire could always draw me out of a mood, no matter how dark. To comfort me, she started talking about books and immortality, about how she felt that an author and their art were one and the same. That an author’s works were not like children, but more like incarnations. They were their authors. And that as long as people continued to read them, they would live on. “When writers die, they become books,” one of her favorite authors was famously attributed as having said, she told me. Jorge Luis Borges had died far too long ago to be asked to be part of the Future Library, but it didn’t stop her from wishing she somehow could invite his ghost to write another novel for her.

  That was when I’d gotten the idea.

  “Maybe they could still visit their trees, in a way,” I said.

  Claire loved the symbolism of it. She set to work at once, calling the still-living authors who had submitted their work to the Future Library and the families of the ones who had already passed away. We already knew everyone was either planning to be cremated after death, or had already been cremated, because burial had been too expensive for decades. Ashes essentially last forever in their urns, and the authors and their families were surprisingly touched by the request. It wasn’t hard to convince them to send a small portion of each person’s remains to us, or promise to, once they passed away.

  In their undiluted state, human ash is incredibly harsh on plant life, even in small doses. Too much sodium, too high a pH level. I figured out how to mix it with a special soil blend of my own creation to neutralize the sodium and bring the acidic levels to base.

  After each little urn arrived and I combined it with our blend, Claire and I had gone to each chosen tree, where I dug a hole at the base of the trunks, careful not to damage the root systems or disrupt the ground cover too much. We “planted” the authors beneath them, and then smoothed the earth back out.

  “Now they will get to meet their trees,” I told her after we finished the first one, holding her close. It takes only a few months for a tree to leech such a small amount of nutrients from the dirt. In forest time, that was practically no time at all.

  She kissed me. “You have to do it for me too, when I’m gone,” she said. “I want my ashes to be buried beneath my tree.”

  I wanted to argue that it would be years, hopefully decades, before we had to consider that, but it wasn’t the time. “I will,” I replied, and kissed her back.

  As we stood there embracing, I thought about the cremation and soil mixture fading into the warm, moist darkness below, but I know Claire was imagining something spectacular, like the remains turning into letters as they decayed and then creeping in tendril sentences around the roots, absorbing into the trees.

  “Clear!” my deputy head arborist shouted, jolting me back to the moment. The creaking gave way to a rumble, then a whoosh, and the sky brightened and the world shook with a boom as the Future Library’s very first spruce fell to the earth.

  You can tell the age of a tree by the number of rings it has in its wood. Every year it grows another, an infinitesimal widening of its trunk. A tree could sort of be read not unlike a book, it occurred to me then as I watched it crash downward. Which years had drought. Which had fire. When water was plenty. When the sun was strong. The rings on this first tree were perfect. Impossible symmetry and grace. Love is not something that happens to a person, but something a person does for another person, every day, every moment. A labor, not a feeling. These rings were a record of my deeds.

  I went forward as soon as the ground stopped shaking, to put a hand on the tree. The smooth, round shape of the inside of its trunk looked back at me. Its rings circling and circling, one hundred times, a dizzying, mesmerizing spiral.

  No.

  Those arcing lines in the wood were not rings, I realized then.

  “What in God’s name…” Gunnar whispered.

  They were words.

  * * *

  Next, I was sitting in a chair in Claire’s old office, somehow. There was a mug of tea on the armrest, its tail of steam long dissipated. Gunnar was not with me, nor my deputy head arborist. Only Hsiu was there, our most junior arborist, nervously twisting their neck gaiter in their hands as they watched me. They were new, our last hire, just five years on the job.

  “Where is everyone?” I finally asked.

  “Outside, with the reporters,” Hsiu answered. “The prime minister is on her way up from Oslo to see.”

  To see what? I almost asked, but I already knew.

  “Do you believe in fate?” I could hear Claire’s voice in my mind, as crystal clear as it was the first day I’d met her, in that old, crumbling Vinmonopolet on the corner of Nordre gate and Markveien.

  “I need,” I said to Hsiu. I was trying to stand up. “I need.”

  “I know,” they said. They eased me back into the chair and went to the desk. On it was a perfect disc the size of a giant serving platter. A slice of peach-golden wood encircled by dark brown bark. “Gunnar had them cut a piece for you before they were swarmed by the crowd.”

  It was a cross section of the trunk of the tree we had just felled.

  “Claire’s tree,” Hsiu said. They held it out. “Her book.”

  The Song of Leaves, the title along the outermost ring read.

  I looked at Hsiu. “It’s not,” I tried to say. “It can’t be.” I couldn’t finish.

  Hsiu was still staring at the disc, eyes full of wonder. “I guess we don’t need to print and bind it as a book anymore. It’s already … it’s already done.”
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br />   * * *

  Over the rest of the day, Gunnar supervised the felling of four more of the authors’ spruce as I tried to collect myself, and all four were the same. Instead of mere growth rings inside the trees, there were words, impossibly small yet somehow still legible, in one long, spiraling trail from the center out to the very edge where the bark began. Poetry and shorter novels were large enough to read with the naked eye by squinting, such as The Song of the Leaves. Longer works required a magnifying glass. They were in all languages—Norwegian, Korean, Portuguese, Arabic—some changed midway through, the way that a ring might warp due to drought or flood. Some told stories so long, minor branches also had to be cut off the main trunk and sliced into discs themselves to reach the end.

  How was this possible? What did it mean? The media went wild with investigative articles, opinion pieces, personal essays. We let the same photographers we’d cleared for the opening ceremony continue to photograph the new trees, and they licensed some of their lesser shots to the open market. NewsLens was flooded with them. They were so ubiquitous, so inescapable, that I stopped using my device altogether. Put it in the drawer of Claire’s lonely nightstand and never got it out again.

  That first week, there were so many meetings. Meetings with the prime minister and the king, meetings with Operation Green—revived again at last, and with WWF, EDF, UNEP, every acronym possible. Gunnar went over and over the daily operation of the Future Library from the administrative side, and I detailed endlessly the care I and my arborists had provided to the trees. I gave them our logbooks, our weather records, our rainfall charts, everything. They grilled me about the planted cremated remains, made me explain our exact method again and again. The world had been charmed by the sentimentality of what we’d done with the ashes when Claire had put out the original press release, but now, they were obsessed with the plantings. Consumed.

  But there was no magic to it, I insisted. Just Claire and me, the night, some nutrient-dense soil mixture, and a little too much wine. It was romance, nothing more. Whatever had happened, it had not been because of us.

  They said they agreed with me. I believed them.

  The project continued forward, and the library still released the novels, but the entire process had to change. Instead of felling the trees and pulping their wood into paper to print the books, we simply took each trunk and cut it into thin discs, and sold each disc as the book. We made each disc about 1.25 cm thick, and thus could create approximately 1,500 to 2,000 copies of a book from each tree.

  Within a month, every one of the one hundred novels in the Future Library had been “published,” and sold for thousands of kroner. Millions even, sometimes.

  They were beautiful, I have to admit. I’ve never been one to particularly think books were beautiful, but these books were. Buyers hung them on their walls like art, and would sit or stand in front of them for hours with magnifying glasses, reading the stories. People felt connected to nature again. To trees. There were ShareLife videos of readers talking about how every time they passed by their book, they would touch the wood with their fingers, feel the words therein. There was something magical about them, they said. It reminded them of their closeness to the Earth.

  I don’t have my copy of The Song of Leaves anymore. It was confiscated from me when I was arrested. I don’t know what happened to it, but I’m sure the temptation to resell it was simply too great. I was languishing in purgatory, the courts too busy with Crackles lawsuits and climate refugee resettlement appeals to hear my case. And even if they had, I already knew I would be convicted. I would never see the light of day again. I imagine there was a quiet auction somewhere, a sum I wouldn’t even be able to comprehend for all the zeroes, and that was that. It was gone.

  It doesn’t matter. We’re almost to the part where I tell you why.

  * * *

  The day of my arrest—the day I tried to expose everything—was at the end of that first month. We’d just cut down the final, hundredth tree, and my arborists were hard at work measuring and dividing its trunk to produce its books. After this, there would be no more. That was what I foolishly believed. After all, Katie and Claire had only ever intended there to be one hundred books in the Future Library, and had only invited exactly that many authors.

  But could that really be it? NewsLens asked, constantly and through every device and screen and portal, impervious to all ad-blocks. The world was poised, breathless for what might happen next.

  “Technically, one thousand trees were planted in Nordmarka at the start of the Future Library project. But only one hundred actually were cut down,” Klima-og Miljøvernministeren Kristoffer Berg, the minister of climate and the environment, said to the rest of the room, leaning forward on the conference table so he could reach his microphone. Daily briefings had gone from being just the librarians and the arborists in Claire’s modest office to extremely formal things in a hulking, hideous temporary structure the government had assembled. They had created an official board to oversee us, full of their own people.

  “Exactly,” I said. “The other nine hundred weren’t meant to be additional inventory for the library. They were meant to make up for the one hundred we knew we would lose to this project. Nordmarka has the only trees remaining in the entire world.”

  “I’m not calling for a culling of the entire forest,” Minister Berg argued.

  “Any allowance is too much. The Future Library was not just supposed to publish a hundred books a century later, but also to protect the forest in which those books were grown,” I replied.

  “Just one more,” Director Pak suggested. “As an experiment.”

  I shook my head. “If we cut down the one-hundred-and-first tree, what’s to stop us from cutting down the one-hundred-and-second? The third? We’ve already destroyed every other forest on the planet. When will we stop?”

  They all said noncommittal things. That’s when I knew it would never stop. That this was not the completion of the Future Library, but rather, the beginning. The beginning of the end of our last forest in the world. Even if they were to plant a hundred more tomorrow in exchange for each one they cut down today, trees grow so slowly that we would never catch up to ourselves. The forest would be gone within our lifetimes.

  I had to do something. I had to show them.

  I had to tell the truth.

  Because I’d kept something from all of them, a secret, because I hadn’t known it would matter so much.

  That night, I took Claire’s keys from her nightstand drawer and let myself into her darkened, silent office, and then into the small, even darker, even more silent room at the end of it.

  Each book submitted by the one hundred authors of the Future Library was stored on an encrypted server somewhere for safekeeping until the project came to fruition, but originally, the plan also had been to print and display the manuscripts in an exhibit in the Deichman Library in downtown Oslo, until the trees were cut down and pulped into paper. The manuscripts were set into boxes and locked, so visitors could pick them up and hear their pages clack against the sides of their containers, but not read them. To enhance the mystery, Claire had told me with a wink. The outer layer of the boxes was made of wood, in keeping with the theme of the project, but Katie Paterson had possessed the foresight to line the inside of each of them with stainless steel. When closed, the boxes were watertight and airtight, so the manuscripts would never decay—at least not for a very, very long time. Long enough that visitors to the Deichman Library could handle them and spread the word about the project, anyway. It was a very clever publicity tactic.

  But after the power shortages in the early 2100s, the Deichman Library was turned into a homeless shelter, and the manuscripts cast aside, the exhibit scrapped. Their boxes were moved back here to our offices. The only place left for them.

  With all the surprise and the awe at the trees, it seemed that everyone had forgotten those original manuscripts were still here. Tucked away in a dank little closet that no o
ne had opened for decades, and now no longer had any need to.

  I counted fifty-seven boxes and slid the slim wooden shape out from its place in the middle of the collection. Claire’s book was slight, perhaps just two hundred pages or so. Trembling, I inserted the smallest gold key from her keyring into the lock, and turned. The lid eased open with a tired creak to reveal her manuscript inside. The book she had written decades ago—the story that was meant for her tree. My eyes were so blurry from the tears, I could hardly read the title across the yellowing, slightly faded cover page, but it didn’t matter.

  I already knew what it would say.

  Or rather, what it would not.

  Here is the second thing they have hidden from you: The Song of Leaves is not Claire’s book.

  I know this because the day the Future Library opened, when Gunnar and the rest of the staff told me they’d decided to honor Claire by publishing her book first, I made a choice. Perhaps it was the wrong one, but it was the only one I could have made. I couldn’t stop myself. I had to protect the last thing I had of her.

  The tree I took them to that morning—the tree we cut down and found those impossible words inside—was not the one I had marked in my mind as special, not the one I had tended to every single day with more care than I have ever tended anything else. That tree’s branches reached for the sky, its gnarled roots crept through the darkness below, with nothing but sun and rain and earth to sustain it. No cremated ashes, no Claire, had been planted there.

  Because it was not her tree.

  * * *

  The next day at the morning meeting, I raised my hand to speak before Prime Minister Sjur or Vice-Director Oliveira could begin with the minutes. I needed to tell them the whole story. To tell them the truth, before they destroyed the forest attempting to discover it.