Future Americas

by John Helfers

  ‘‘It will change, just like everything else,’’ Sarah told him. ‘‘It will change into the flesh of the tree.’’

  ‘‘But if you can’t dream,’’ Jeanie said hesitantly, ‘‘how can you be in vegetable heaven?’’ Sarah knew that Jeanie didn’t really believe in vegetable heaven, but the dutiful ten year old probably thought that she ought to make an effort to conceive of it in terms of some kind of hallucinatory state, just in case her mother expected to arrive there.

  ‘‘If there is such a thing as vegetable heaven,’’ Sarah told her, choosing her words carefully, ‘‘it’s not something you have to dream. It’s just a matter of being.’’

  ‘‘How long will it take you to pay your carbon debt?’’ Mike asked. Even though the Ecocatastrophe was over, elementary school children were still taught about the carbon economics of everyday life as a matter of routine. Mike couldn’t put numbers into the equations—he didn’t know how much carbon dioxide a flight from Phoenix to Miami or a transatlantic trip by a container ship would pump out—but it had been drummed into him that his remoter ancestors had been villains because of the awful extent of their carbon footprints, while his more recent ones were heroes,by virtue of their tiptoed ingenuity, thus bringing the historical account books into a belated but triumphant balance.

  ‘‘It’s not as simple as that,’’ Sarah told her son. She wanted to explain him that it wasn’t sensible to divide carbon debt up into individual slices, because it was the economic activities of the whole society that produced the greenhouse gas surplus, and that distributing blame between different nations in the fashion that had made the USA the Great Green Satan of the twenty-first century was patently false accounting, because the economic activity of a particular nation had to be seen in the context of the global economy, but she couldn’t have done it, even if there had been any point. There was too much Balakirev going on. What she actually said was: ‘‘It isn’t a matter of one Tree paying off one person’s debt; it’s a matter of whole Human Forests making their contribution to the work that’s done by all the other Transfigured Forests in the world.’’

  Alan snorted, but when Sarah stared at him, he pretended that he had only been stifling a sneeze.

  ‘‘One day,’’ Jeanie said, abandoning questions in the interests of demonstrating her intellectual superiority over her younger brother, ‘‘there won’t be any other Transfigured Forests. All the world’s forests will be Human Forests, and then we’ll really be Responsible. Then we’ll have paid our carbon debt to the Earth.’’

  Sarah was glad that Alan hadn’t saved up his snort, because Jeanie was old enough not to be fooled by any kind of belated bluff and would have taken it personally. She resisted the temptation not to correct her daughter’s Utopian excess, even though she could see that her red-faced husband was biting his lip as he forced himself to maintain diplomatic silence.

  In her heart of hearts, Sarah hoped that Jeanie might be right, and that there would come a day—if not for thousands of years—when all the Transfigured Forests had been replaced by Human ones of every race and nationality, so that all the human beings alive throughout the world could live in the perpetual company of their ancestors, and the species really could consider itself Reverent and Responsible. It was not a dream that she would be able to maintain when she became a Tree, but it seemed to her a legitimate hope that she might live to see such an era, albeit not in her present frail and feeble form.

  ‘‘What kind of tree are you going to be?’’ Mike asked, his mind on more down-to-earth matters. ‘‘I don’t want you to be a Joshua tree or a monkey puzzle.’’

  ‘‘Mummy doesn’t get to choose,’’ Jeanie put in, getting slightly carried away with her own supposed expertise. ‘‘Human Trees are Human Trees, not any other sort. They’re evergreen, but not like Lollipop Pines. They’re just . . . themselves.’’

  Sarah didn’t want to complicate the issue by arguing that the present uniformity of Human Trees was probably just a phase, and that all kinds of choices might have opened up by the time Jeanie had to decide between planting and death. In any case, there was no choice at all for her. Her fate was sealed, to the soundtrack of Scheherazade.

  The Forester’s name was Jake. He was a little too smartly dressed, as if he were overcompensating for the image most people had of Foresters, but he wore his blond hair long and curly, obviously thinking of it as a precious asset not to be sacrificed on the altar of businesslike appearance. He arrived on time, but Sarah had made a late appointment so as to be sure that Jeanie and Mike would be in bed, so it was after dark. She still wasn’t absolutely sure that Alan would be able to contain himself in confrontation with Personified Temptation.

  To start with, though, Alan was on his best behavior. He meekly poured out a glassful of apple juice when Jake explained that he didn’t drink alcohol or coffee, and gave him the benefit of the better armchair.

  ‘‘I’ve brought you the standard literature,’’ Jake said, handing Sarah a sheaf of leaflets with which she was already perfectly familiar, ‘‘but I’d like to give you a brief verbal explanation of what will happen. It helps clarify matters, in my experience, and brings questions to the surface that each particular individual needs to ask.’’

  Sarah could read her husband’s mind well enough to know that the words pompous and asshole must be drifting through it, but Alan said nothing, and Sarah consented herself with an encouraging nod.

  Jake launched into his spiel. ‘‘The Association of Human Foresters,’’ he said, ‘‘is not a commercial organization. No one ever set out to exploit this particular corollary of Transfiguration technology for financial gain. No one ever tried to sell it to the public by advertising. The AHF was summoned into being by public demand.

  ‘‘The scientists who developed the metamorphic techniques that allowed living plants to be Transfigured realized almost immediately that animals might be Transfigured, too—only into plants, of course, not into other animals—but they thought of it as a technical challenge rather than a practical enterprise. The earliest animal Transfigurations were all done in a spirit of pure experiment; it was a big surprise that it worked so well, after all the disappointments of the past in respect of animal genetic engineering.

  ‘‘Once it became popular for people to preserve their pets by Transfiguration, the demand for Human Transfiguration became increasingly insistent and urgent. The legislation went through with extraordinary ease. The AHF was created and regulated by state governments working in association with HMOs and a number of existing charitable organizations. I won’t bore you with the bureaucratic details; suffice it to say that I’m not here as a salesperson or a social worker, but merely as someone answering a summons. Our services do have to be purchased, but a part of the care we give is reclaimable through health insurance, and the remainder compares favorably with the average costs of interment or cremation.

  ‘‘What will happen, Mrs. Whitney, if you decide to go ahead with the Transfiguration, is that when you and your supervising physician decided that the time is ripe—which shouldn’t be problematic in your case, given that the progress of your cancer can be accurately monitored—you’ll go into the hospice. The first injection is administered on the day following admission. You’ll slip into a coma almost immediately, and the Transfiguration will begin. The first injection contains the first of three suites of viral organelles that carry the extra genes you’ll require in order to complement your own DNA, but its main
components are the catalyst for the despecialization of your own cells and the trigger-proteins for the construction of the tuberochrysalis. The tuberochrysalis takes seven days to form; it will retain the basic outline of your bodily form, but many of the individual features will be lost. The second suite of supplementary DNA is injected on day eight, the third on day twelve, and the final batch of catalysts on day sixteen—by which time all your reblastularized cells should have been infected by the vectors. There’s a long lag phase thereafter, but planting out of the tuberochrysalis is usually practicable after forty-five to fifty days, if no complications set in.’’

  Alan’s patience finally snapped. ‘‘What complications?’’ he asked, sharply. ‘‘Your brochures don’t say anything about goddam complications.’’

  ‘‘There’s a good deal of detailed data available on-line, Mr. Whitney,’’ Jake replied imperturbably. ‘‘The complications so far observed are various, but uncommon. The worst-case scenarios involve the rejection or suppression of one or more of the supplementary DNA packages, which can prevent the completion of Transfiguration if the situation isn’t remediable. Usually, it is. To date, more than ninety per cent of our Transfigurations have been completed without any complications at all, and more than ninety-nine per cent have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. Given the improvements we’ve made in our techniques and our understanding, we expect those figures to rise in the future, steadily if not sharply.’’

  ‘‘I’ve studied the probabilities,’’ Sarah said, more to Alan than Jake, ‘‘I understand the risks. There’s something less than a one percent chance I’ll end up dead—as opposed to a hundred percent certainty that I’ll end up dead if I don’t opt for Transfiguration.’’

  ‘‘The figure is a hundred percent either way,’’ Alan retorted. ‘‘The difference is that if you opt for this travesty they kill you themselves instead of your dying a natural death, and then they turn your remains into protoplasmic mush before getting their ninety-nine-percent chance to turn that mush into a tree.’’

  Jake opened his mouth, but Sarah held up her left index finger to silence him from a distance. ‘‘You’re a servant of the law, Alan,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re no longer allowed, let alone obliged, to disapprove of assisted suicide in cases of terminal illness. Choice and painless injection beat natural death hands down, and there’s nothing scary or obscene about protoplasmic mush. What do you think decay does to a body? What do you think happens to its carbon atoms thereafter? Whether they travel via the guts of graveworms or dissipate into the air as crematorium smoke, they eventually wind up as the transitory flesh of plants. All the Foresters are doing is bringing some order and focus to the process, cutting out the middlemen and maintaining the continuity of cellular life.’’

  ‘‘The illusion of the continuity of life,’’ Alan objected.

  ‘‘It’s not an illusion, Mr. Whitney,’’ Jake said, quietly. ‘‘Nobody pretends that it’s any kind of continuity of consciousness, but it is a continuity of life, literally and materially. It’s not for me to say whether soul and spirit are illusory, or where they reside if they aren’t in the flesh—but there really is no doubt that a Human Tree really is an extrapolation of human life. Your wife’s Tree will include the full complements of her nuclear and mitochondrial cells, biochemically organized in exactly the same way. It’s just that different ones will be expressed, in different combinations, in different kinds of specialized cells.’’

  ‘‘That’s three dimensions of difference,’’ Alan pointed out, ‘‘and that’s all the difference in the world. This is just another scam, in the great tradition of cryonics, offering the shadow of a perverted hope where none really exists.’’

  ‘‘No, Alan, it’s not,’’ Sarah told him, pursing her lips and moving to the edge of the sofa because her intestines were being attacked by a gang of frenzied cellists. ‘‘There’s no promise of resurrection here, false or otherwise.’’

  ‘‘Becoming a Human Tree is a matter of moving on to a new phase,’’ Jake added, trying to catch the enemy in a pincer movement. ‘‘Of course there’s no way back, any more than there is from death—but the individual remains instead of being broken down into component molecules and redistributed as raw materials.’’

  ‘‘But that doesn’t mean that it won’t be me, Alan. It’ll just be a different sort of me, here on Earth and not in any kind of heaven. That’s where I want to be, Alan, That’s where I want to go.’’

  Jake had another leaflet about that, offering a choice of Human Forests, woods, and private plots. Sarah had already made up her mind. She wanted to be up on the Colorado Plateau, partly because the Grand Canyon Surround was further on the way to becoming a mature forest than most, and partly because there was more rain up on the plateau than there was in the reclaimed Mojave. The plateau was a little farther away, but it seemed to her to be the right sort of place for the kind of creature she was ambitious to become. The Halo of Phoenix Reborn was a fine place for humans to live, but Human Trees had different needs, and must have different delights. Even more than the Sierra Nevada, in Sarah’s opinion, the part of Colorado plateau that lay south of the Utah border foreshadowed the future of America— not the future of destiny, which really was a silly illusion, but the future to which the Foresters were attempting to act as midwives: the future in which civilized humans would live in the carefully-maintained interstices of an Eden of Human Trees that were both Trees of Knowledge and Trees of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

  Alan’s mind was on other things. ‘‘What about me, Sarah?’’ he complained. ‘‘What becomes of me, while you’re turning yourself into some vast lumpen tuber, and growing into something alien?’’

  ‘‘You have two children to bring up, Alan,’’ she said, more sharply than she intended, because she was hurting. ‘‘You have to hold yourself, and them, together. When that job’s done, you’re free. If you don’t want to be planted, that’s up to you. You can send your carbon atoms into the future along any trajectory you choose. The only thing you can’t do is abstract them from the great chain of being. One way or another, they’ll live again.’’

  ‘‘They don’t live at all,’’ Alan insisted. ‘‘Cogito, ergo sum; real life is made of thought.’’

  ‘‘Don’t be silly, Alan,’’ Sarah said. ‘‘There are countless plant and animal species that don’t think, but they’re all real life.’’

  ‘‘A lot of husbands and wives,’’ Jake put in, ‘‘are planning to be planted side by side. For the present, at least, Human Trees are monoecious; male and female flowers are borne on separate dendrites. Thus far, they’re all sterile, and their capacity for vegetative reproduction is minimal, but the science and technology aren’t standing still.’’ He stopped, apparently realizing that both his clients were staring at him, no longer divided.

  ‘‘Are you suggesting that we ought to be thinking about tree sex and tree children?’’ Alan asked stonily.

  ‘‘Some people do,’’ Jake said. ‘‘Some people seem to get quite a thrill out of the idea—but no, I’m not. Fruitful exchanges of pollen might some day be possible, but Mrs. Whitney’s Tree will be unable to produce fertile seed. What I do suggest you might think about
, though, is togetherness. Skeptics insist that love can’t transcend Transfiguration any more than it can transcend death, but there’s a sense in which it can. What I’m saying is that intimate contact can be reconfirmed and reconstituted within a Forest. Nor will Human Trees remain the end point of our potential existential journey for very long. As I said, the science and the technology aren’t standing still.’’

  Alan was silent for a few seconds before he looked at his wife and said: ‘‘I don’t know how far I can follow you down this road, Sarah. It’s your choice, and I have to go along with it, for the kids’ sake—but I can’t make you any promise about joining you when my time comes.’’

  ‘‘I never expected that you would,’’ Sarah said. ‘‘After all, you’ll still have a life to lead when I’m a Tree, and there’ll be other people in it.’’

  ‘‘In a Forest . . . ’’ Jake the Forester began—but this time, both his listeners raised their left hands, with the index fingers extended in exactly the same fashion.

  A further half minute passed while Sarah and Alan looked at one another. Then Sarah turned away, satisfied that everything that could be settled had been settled. ‘‘I’d like to get the paperwork done now,’’ she said to Jake, ‘‘and set the wheels in motion.’’ Mercifully, Mussorgsky was experimenting with one of his quieter movements.

  ‘‘Certainly,’’ said the man who wasn’t a salesperson, his blond hair rippling as he nodded his head.

  When Sarah could no longer get out of bed, her doctor increased the dosage of her painkillers to the point where the Russian symphony was transfigured into a French piano concerto, all the way to mere Debussy. She was still able to postpone her dosage if she wanted to retain a greater clarity of mind for a while, to make her final reckonings with her parents and former colleagues, but the Russians had gone for good; her most attentive times, during the last weeks of her life, were mostly Bach and Brahms, with only occasional interventions of the Blues.