Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 17
Guillermo backed the hell up.
"You Frank?" Jesse asked him.
"Not anymore. I'm called Guillermo Goban now."
"What I thought." Jesse turned to Syzygy. "This is Frank," he explained. "The one Tex doesn't like."
Syzygy nodded. She lowered the container of miso.
"Where's Tex at, anyway?" Jesse asked, of nobody in particular.
Guillermo shrugged. Syzygy muttered in colloquial Irish.
"Hope not," said Jesse. He crossed the living room and sat down on a crudely built deacon's bench, which creaked under him. Gus the wolf came over to get his ears scratched.
Ari said, "Look"—pointing at the computer disk lying on the floor.
At last Guillermo noticed his cloak. He whisked it into his arms and plucked up the disk and made as though to slip away.
"Whoa," said Jesse.
"Rrrrr," said Gus.
Syzygy opened the lid of the Tupperware. The room filled with the ripe smell of Aspergillus hatcho, a strain of free-floating mold cultivated since the 14th century in the small Japanese city of Okazaki.
"Sweet Jesus," said Guillermo, "what is that?"
"Jesus had nothing to do with it," said Syzygy. And she turned and—poof—vanished into her kitchen.
"Excuse me," said Jesse, "if I don't use much etiquette. It's how you get, living out in the woods. Tell me what the hell you're doing here."
"Now take it easy," said Guillermo, dividing his gaze between Jesse and the wolf. "Look, this disk was stolen from me, that's all. It's got some important information on it. Evidence, you might say. And I just need to get it back."
Jesse said, "Who'd you steal it from?"
Guillermo flinched. "Nobody. I didn't steal it. I got it, from a friend. One of the guys in my men's group. Who brought it home from his office."
"Men's group?" said Jesse. "You mean like, go out in the woods and beat tom-toms and hop around the fire like a bunch of wild Indians?"
"Well. Kind of. We say Native Americans, though."
Jesse frowned. "I'm Passamaquoddy, and we say Indians."
"Oh," said Guillermo.
"Or we keep our mouths shut," said Jesse. "That's the best course, lots of times. So what's on the disk that's so important to you? What'd you do to get Tex riled up at you, anyway? He's not usually like that."
Guillermo glanced at the timber wolf, apparently weighing the likelihood of being swallowed up like Little Red's grandmother. "It's a pretty long story," he said.
Jesse smiled. As though long stories were his favorite kind.
Ari said, "Let's plug it in Mom's computer and take a look."
"That won't do any good," said Guillermo. "I've tried. They've got some kind of access lock on it. This friend of mine, the one who took it for me, was going to help me break into it."
"Access lock?" said Jesse. "You talking personal key or password protection or what?"
"I, um, don't really—I'm not all that computer-literate, actually."
"Neither am I," sighed Jesse. He pushed himself to his feet. Gus the wolf sprang up beside him. They made for the door with Ari scampering behind. Jesse said, "Time to bring in the Pod."
WILD IN THE WOODS
Pod was an acronym, actually. Prophets of Delirium: part of a chain of acronyms beginning with Legion of Doom and Masters of Destruction—lod and mod—and continuing, at last count, through the Republic of Desire, though that was pure sci-fi. "Delirium" referred not to the mental state but to a character in a comic book by Neil Gaiman. "D" had originally been for "Death" (another comic heroine), which later had been rejected because the alt.fan.death thing was getting a little overdone, wasn't it? Also, "Prophets" had been "Priests," which was cool inasmuch as it elevated Delirium to a sort of goddess standing, but then a girl showed up. Anyway: things evolve.
There was one way to join the Pod, and it was not easy, but on the other hand it was democratic. You had to follow a trail of clues dropped like Hansel's white rocks in various online hidey-holes, and eventually, having collected them all, you had to hit the nonvirtual road and make it up to Maine, thence to the ghost town of Applemont, and ultimately to this supremely scrambled-brain operation known as Da Turtle's Hostel. Where you had to be cleared by Jesse and Syzygy, whose heads operated according to some algorithm not understood by the Goddess Delirium Herself. More fundamentally you had to be the sort of person who would want to do all this. All of which kind of winnowed it down. This is pretty highly confidential information, by the way, being revealed on the assumption that you will not fuck severely up and go mouthing off to the likes of, say, the Concerned Madres of Amerikkka. Capiche?
So anyhow. On the day of Guillermo's visit, the Pods in actual residence at the Hostel numbered three, and they were:
Saintstephen Bax, a Fresh Air kid gone native
Thistle Herne, a Wasp in flight
Shadow Malqvist, a heavy-metal Viking
And they all bunked together in the fixed-up but still radically run-down hunting lodge. And they did pretty much whatever they felt like doing. Though they had to hustle occasionally to find something to eat. And they bathed by swimming in the pond when weather permitted, and by sweating in the sauna and rolling in the snow when it did not. And they all lived happily ever after.
So far.
Jesse and Ari and Gus came down the trail noisily toward the Pod lodge, followed by a considerably discomfited Guillermo. There they were greeted by Saintstephen, who sat on the porch in an attitude of contemplation. On closer inspection he turned out to be watching a spiderweb getting woven between his kneecap and the armrest of a bentwood rocker. His greeting consisted of a rude-sounding noise directed at the timber wolf.
Gus raced ahead and jumped onto the porch and knocked the sturdily built black kid onto his back. So much for the spiderweb. Saintstephen slapped him lightly on the jowls, one side and then the other. Ari called: "Eat him!"
And Jesse held up the computer disk.
"Ho," said Saintstephen, heaving Gus off his chest. "What up, O Father of Us All?"
Jesse Frisbeed the disk and Saintstephen snagged it. Gus tried to take it away from him, but the big kid fended him off.
Saintstephen, who had lived here since before the Pod had been officially incarnated, perused the disk for clues. "This, I take it," he said upon deliberation, "represents some great and vexing mystery that only I can solve."
"You and any pube with an Amiga," said Shadow Malqvist from the open door.
Shadow was a whole other story. He had blond hair down to his wazoo and Nordic iconography all over his otherwise bare chest. Odin's axe dangled from one ear. Shadow was an AFDC kid from a commune somewhere in Vermont whose father had seemed like a good idea at the time. And his mom had been equally hopeless, though more in evidence. Living here with Jesse and the wolves was not actually that big a lifestyle change for Shadow. The absence of caseworkers was cool, however. And the available hardware definitely was an upgrade.
"Well, why not?" said Saintstephen. He flipped the disk into the air and let Gus catch it this time. The wolf held it expertly between flesh-shredding teeth. Saint-Stephen motioned toward the door. He said, "If you will just walk this way, please," and fell into a bizarre Igor-lurch.
"Pretty fucking stale," said Shadow.
"Eat him," Saintstephen said to Gus.
Gus yipped happily. He loved all the attention.
It took the Podsters on Duty, or Pod2 (a nested, 2nd-order acronym), seven minutes to blow through the lock on the floppy disk. Then the big Radius monitor in the common room filled up with the logo and current slogan of the Gulf Atlantic Corporation.
"Doing," said Shadow.
The others—Jesse, Ari, Guillermo and Saintstephen, Gus having been banished to the porch, and Thistle being elsewhere in the galaxy—leaned inward, though the screen was large enough not to have to strain your eyes at.
"What is it?" said Ari, hopping up and down.
Saintstephen shrugged and Shadow was too cool to do even that.
"What it's supposed to be," said Guillermo, "is some red-hot top-secret corporate bullshit."
"Cool," said Ari.
"Yeah, cool," said Saintstephen. "So let's run it."
PERFECTION
Picea marina (cultivar)
This is a desirable shape of a black spruce tree [said the narrative voice of Chas Sauvage].
This is a desirable shape for three reasons.
First, the trunk is straight. This is necessary for maximum production of usable, commercial-grade lumber.
Second, the limb configuration is wide and symmetrical. Were this not the case, there would be gaps through which light could enter to fuel the growth of competing specimens or forest weeds nearby.
Third, the infill of photosynthetic surfaces is dense. This provides for maximum acquisition of available insolation, which in turn allows us to place the individuals on a tight grid.
Now, while this is a desirable shape of a spruce tree, it is not the ideal.
Expendable
lower limbs Upper limbs
widen
Here we see two ways in which the tree shape could be rendered closer to an ideal configuration.
First, the lower approximately 1/3 of the tree's limbs can be encouraged to atrophy and drop.
Second, the upper limbs can be induced to spread more widely in the first years of growth, with subsequent infill of photosynthetic tissue.
Implied in this schematic is a 3rd structural enhancement, not spatial but temporal. By manipulating the activity of growth-regulator genes, the upper, vigorously growing sections of the tree are stimulated to produce higher levels of clear-grained wood more rapidly than would naturally occur. Such an adaptation, in the days of fluctuating and unpredictable evolutionary selection, would have benefited individual members of the species in the short term, but over the long term would have worked against the species generally. Rapidly generated woody tissue would have been insufficiently hardened-off against the possibility of an atypically cold dormant season. Today, however, with the advent of irreversible global warming, this danger can be discounted.
All the above enhancements are readily accomplished through a two-pronged application of traditional propaga-tion-and-selection methods along with newer, cutting-edge, genome optimization technology.
Now let's explore another means of improving upon the wild-type species.
Dispersal of allelopathic
agents via widely spreading roots
There are two arguments to be made for a change in the spruce's rooting behavior.
First, there is the phenomenon, still incompletely understood, by which biochemical signals are dispersed among genetically similar individuals—triggering, for example, a collective response to some environmental challenge, such as the arrival of a predator insect. Most of these chemical messages are passed by way of water dispersal through the roots, the solution being released generally at night, during periods of low exfoliar transpiration.
Second, and more pertinent, is the phenomenon of allelopathology. Many trees, and in particular temperate-zone conifers, have the capacity to produce and secrete—again, through the roots—substances which inhibit germination of the seeds of competitors. That is why you seldom see much understory growth in an established grove of evergreens.
The black spruce is typical in this respect. But the eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, is truly exceptional. So we have developed a proprietary means of inserting a segment of the Tsuga genome into our Picea breeding stock, whereby the synthesis of allelopathic agents is literally expanded tenfold.
Impressive as these competitive armaments are for the spruce tree, however, there is a final mechanism which might be desired to bring it one step closer to the ideal. And this bears upon the tree's methodology for reproducing itself.
Needle-bearing conifers, or more broadly speaking, eymnosperms, are at a certain reproductive disadvantage, vis-a-vis angiosperms or deciduous hardwoods. In the first place, their rate of growth, following germination, is comparatively slow. This allows commercially undesirable species—such as, here in the North Woods, sugar maple and red oak—to steal the march, as it were, and take up a dominant position in a regenerating woodland.
In the second place, hardwoods, which evolved later than conifers, have a competitive property that is difficult to counteract, even with rigorous application of herbicides. This is the ability to sprout new leading shoots from the trunks, and in some cases from the roots, of an established tree. That is why the largest single living organism in the world is not, whatever you may have heard, a fungus growing somewhere in Ohio, but actually a 6,000-ton, genetically identical stand of quaking aspens cloned naturally from a single individual in the mountains of Utah. This organism covers 106 acres and consists of 47,000 seemingly independent trees, all of which have sprung from a single vast and unbroken network of roots.
In the face of this capacity to spread and dominate, what can our ideal black spruce hope to do? Well, in this case, if you can't beat 'em, borrow from them. We have in recent years developed a technology for introjecting chromosomal segments from that very quaking aspen—not into the core genetic program of our breeding stock, but into the separate, self-replicating nucleotides contained within organelles of the root tissue itself. Such genetic information cannot, of course, be transmitted through ordinary sexual inheritance. It only inheres in individuals who have been cloned by tissue culture from the parent stock. This is actually an advantage, in that it renders extremely slight the risk that this proprietary genetic material will ever escape the control of Gulf Atlantic Corporation.
Now, drawing together all these enhancements, we have something like the following.
Picea x dawkinsia 4.3.2
This tree, for which a plant patent has been applied, represents the key commodity—the football, as it were—of Gulf Atlantic's presence in the Northeast. And it is truly a powerful creation.
Its upper limbs grow quickly and spread broadly to capture and hold space and sunlight.
The trunk thrusts upward fast and straight, producing clear-grained wood at the maximum sustainable rate.
The lower limbs atrophy and then drop, further crowding and darkening the region around the base of the individual, while allowing free circulation of air to ensure optimal health.
The roots spread widely, dispersing germination inhibitors throughout the surrounding soil, and facilitating intra-specific pheromonal communication.
And lastly, from these roots can spring an entire new network of individuals embodying all the above qualities—in addition, naturally, to the less exceptional but nonetheless vital attributes of the parent strain: general systemic vigor, foliar toughness, resistance to the effects of acid rain and the like.
This tree, which we are calling Dawkins Spruce, is literally the future of the Great North Woods. Once inserted—even in a limited, scattered, or mixed-growth setting—it will become over the course of a decade or two the dominant species throughout its range. Then, having achieved this position, it will be highly resistant to being supplanted, regardless of unforeseeable down-year changes in the regulatory climate. In horticultural terms it will be ineradicable. Within a generation, the North Woods will be transformed from an unplanned and often chaotic mixture of second-growth forest, small- and medium-scale tree farms and conventional timber plantations, to a uniform and fully optimized monoculture: an assured commercial softwood resource for the next century, at the very least.
For all the reasons cited above, the insertion of X dawkinsia 4.3.2 by the earliest and most expeditious means available is strongly recommended. By taking this action, the long-term position of Gulf Atlantic in the Great North Woods will have been definitively secured, for practical purposes, forever.
ENTERPRISE
The floppy disk had barely popped out of the drive when a bell rang way off at the Long House—
clung clung clung
—a salvaged bell buoy auctioned off by the Coast Guard that Jesse had picked up years ago because he figured Tex would shit himself over it. Paranoid Tex swore the Coasties had a file on him going back to the days when he really had been packing some weight down in the secret hold disguised as a fuel tank. Jesse doubted it. But it was Tex's gift to think up crazy ideas; and if 99% of them were nothing but wasted mental energy, that still meant that a solid 1% were crazy good ideas, and that counted for a substantial skewing of the inspiration-to-perspiration ratio in their business partnership. But that was all right. Things evened out over time, and he and Tex had always done okay for themselves.
"Got to run," said Jesse. "Sounds like customers." And he hustled off, leaving everyone else, including the wolf, staring suspiciously at one another.
Down at the Long House—a 1977 Oakwood 2-BR mobile home, shingled and fitted out with an insulated roof-pitch converter—he found an aged brown Suburban with a Maine Sportsman's Alliance window decal and a bumper sticker that said
HINKLEY SHOT THE WRONG BRADY
The customer sat in an aluminum chair on the veranda of the Long House, nursing a beer and flipping through a recent issue of Green Egg, the quarterly journal of the Church of All Worlds.
"Hey," the man said. "You read this stuff?"
Jesse sort of recognized the guy from crossing paths at the Irving Mart: a lean, gray-faced man wearing an all-weather camouflage jumpsuit. "Who are you?'' he said.
"Jag Eckhart." The man stood abruptly, thrusting a hand out. "Wild Jag, some people call me."
Jesse nodded. He stepped into the Long House and came back out holding a chain leash and a steel-reinforced leather muzzle.
"Your name Openhood?" the customer said.
Jesse nodded slowly. He held his eyes on Eckhart's. He thought about whistling for Gus, but decided it wouldn't be good for business. The customers did not like to see tame animals. They did not like to see tame anything. That's why they were here.
"So," said Jesse, looking down the gravel path toward the breeding pens, "you interested in one of our pups?"
"You Frank?" Jesse asked him.
"Not anymore. I'm called Guillermo Goban now."
"What I thought." Jesse turned to Syzygy. "This is Frank," he explained. "The one Tex doesn't like."
Syzygy nodded. She lowered the container of miso.
"Where's Tex at, anyway?" Jesse asked, of nobody in particular.
Guillermo shrugged. Syzygy muttered in colloquial Irish.
"Hope not," said Jesse. He crossed the living room and sat down on a crudely built deacon's bench, which creaked under him. Gus the wolf came over to get his ears scratched.
Ari said, "Look"—pointing at the computer disk lying on the floor.
At last Guillermo noticed his cloak. He whisked it into his arms and plucked up the disk and made as though to slip away.
"Whoa," said Jesse.
"Rrrrr," said Gus.
Syzygy opened the lid of the Tupperware. The room filled with the ripe smell of Aspergillus hatcho, a strain of free-floating mold cultivated since the 14th century in the small Japanese city of Okazaki.
"Sweet Jesus," said Guillermo, "what is that?"
"Jesus had nothing to do with it," said Syzygy. And she turned and—poof—vanished into her kitchen.
"Excuse me," said Jesse, "if I don't use much etiquette. It's how you get, living out in the woods. Tell me what the hell you're doing here."
"Now take it easy," said Guillermo, dividing his gaze between Jesse and the wolf. "Look, this disk was stolen from me, that's all. It's got some important information on it. Evidence, you might say. And I just need to get it back."
Jesse said, "Who'd you steal it from?"
Guillermo flinched. "Nobody. I didn't steal it. I got it, from a friend. One of the guys in my men's group. Who brought it home from his office."
"Men's group?" said Jesse. "You mean like, go out in the woods and beat tom-toms and hop around the fire like a bunch of wild Indians?"
"Well. Kind of. We say Native Americans, though."
Jesse frowned. "I'm Passamaquoddy, and we say Indians."
"Oh," said Guillermo.
"Or we keep our mouths shut," said Jesse. "That's the best course, lots of times. So what's on the disk that's so important to you? What'd you do to get Tex riled up at you, anyway? He's not usually like that."
Guillermo glanced at the timber wolf, apparently weighing the likelihood of being swallowed up like Little Red's grandmother. "It's a pretty long story," he said.
Jesse smiled. As though long stories were his favorite kind.
Ari said, "Let's plug it in Mom's computer and take a look."
"That won't do any good," said Guillermo. "I've tried. They've got some kind of access lock on it. This friend of mine, the one who took it for me, was going to help me break into it."
"Access lock?" said Jesse. "You talking personal key or password protection or what?"
"I, um, don't really—I'm not all that computer-literate, actually."
"Neither am I," sighed Jesse. He pushed himself to his feet. Gus the wolf sprang up beside him. They made for the door with Ari scampering behind. Jesse said, "Time to bring in the Pod."
WILD IN THE WOODS
Pod was an acronym, actually. Prophets of Delirium: part of a chain of acronyms beginning with Legion of Doom and Masters of Destruction—lod and mod—and continuing, at last count, through the Republic of Desire, though that was pure sci-fi. "Delirium" referred not to the mental state but to a character in a comic book by Neil Gaiman. "D" had originally been for "Death" (another comic heroine), which later had been rejected because the alt.fan.death thing was getting a little overdone, wasn't it? Also, "Prophets" had been "Priests," which was cool inasmuch as it elevated Delirium to a sort of goddess standing, but then a girl showed up. Anyway: things evolve.
There was one way to join the Pod, and it was not easy, but on the other hand it was democratic. You had to follow a trail of clues dropped like Hansel's white rocks in various online hidey-holes, and eventually, having collected them all, you had to hit the nonvirtual road and make it up to Maine, thence to the ghost town of Applemont, and ultimately to this supremely scrambled-brain operation known as Da Turtle's Hostel. Where you had to be cleared by Jesse and Syzygy, whose heads operated according to some algorithm not understood by the Goddess Delirium Herself. More fundamentally you had to be the sort of person who would want to do all this. All of which kind of winnowed it down. This is pretty highly confidential information, by the way, being revealed on the assumption that you will not fuck severely up and go mouthing off to the likes of, say, the Concerned Madres of Amerikkka. Capiche?
So anyhow. On the day of Guillermo's visit, the Pods in actual residence at the Hostel numbered three, and they were:
Saintstephen Bax, a Fresh Air kid gone native
Thistle Herne, a Wasp in flight
Shadow Malqvist, a heavy-metal Viking
And they all bunked together in the fixed-up but still radically run-down hunting lodge. And they did pretty much whatever they felt like doing. Though they had to hustle occasionally to find something to eat. And they bathed by swimming in the pond when weather permitted, and by sweating in the sauna and rolling in the snow when it did not. And they all lived happily ever after.
So far.
Jesse and Ari and Gus came down the trail noisily toward the Pod lodge, followed by a considerably discomfited Guillermo. There they were greeted by Saintstephen, who sat on the porch in an attitude of contemplation. On closer inspection he turned out to be watching a spiderweb getting woven between his kneecap and the armrest of a bentwood rocker. His greeting consisted of a rude-sounding noise directed at the timber wolf.
Gus raced ahead and jumped onto the porch and knocked the sturdily built black kid onto his back. So much for the spiderweb. Saintstephen slapped him lightly on the jowls, one side and then the other. Ari called: "Eat him!"
And Jesse held up the computer disk.
"Ho," said Saintstephen, heaving Gus off his chest. "What up, O Father of Us All?"
Jesse Frisbeed the disk and Saintstephen snagged it. Gus tried to take it away from him, but the big kid fended him off.
Saintstephen, who had lived here since before the Pod had been officially incarnated, perused the disk for clues. "This, I take it," he said upon deliberation, "represents some great and vexing mystery that only I can solve."
"You and any pube with an Amiga," said Shadow Malqvist from the open door.
Shadow was a whole other story. He had blond hair down to his wazoo and Nordic iconography all over his otherwise bare chest. Odin's axe dangled from one ear. Shadow was an AFDC kid from a commune somewhere in Vermont whose father had seemed like a good idea at the time. And his mom had been equally hopeless, though more in evidence. Living here with Jesse and the wolves was not actually that big a lifestyle change for Shadow. The absence of caseworkers was cool, however. And the available hardware definitely was an upgrade.
"Well, why not?" said Saintstephen. He flipped the disk into the air and let Gus catch it this time. The wolf held it expertly between flesh-shredding teeth. Saint-Stephen motioned toward the door. He said, "If you will just walk this way, please," and fell into a bizarre Igor-lurch.
"Pretty fucking stale," said Shadow.
"Eat him," Saintstephen said to Gus.
Gus yipped happily. He loved all the attention.
It took the Podsters on Duty, or Pod2 (a nested, 2nd-order acronym), seven minutes to blow through the lock on the floppy disk. Then the big Radius monitor in the common room filled up with the logo and current slogan of the Gulf Atlantic Corporation.
"Doing," said Shadow.
The others—Jesse, Ari, Guillermo and Saintstephen, Gus having been banished to the porch, and Thistle being elsewhere in the galaxy—leaned inward, though the screen was large enough not to have to strain your eyes at.
"What is it?" said Ari, hopping up and down.
Saintstephen shrugged and Shadow was too cool to do even that.
"What it's supposed to be," said Guillermo, "is some red-hot top-secret corporate bullshit."
"Cool," said Ari.
"Yeah, cool," said Saintstephen. "So let's run it."
PERFECTION
Picea marina (cultivar)
This is a desirable shape of a black spruce tree [said the narrative voice of Chas Sauvage].
This is a desirable shape for three reasons.
First, the trunk is straight. This is necessary for maximum production of usable, commercial-grade lumber.
Second, the limb configuration is wide and symmetrical. Were this not the case, there would be gaps through which light could enter to fuel the growth of competing specimens or forest weeds nearby.
Third, the infill of photosynthetic surfaces is dense. This provides for maximum acquisition of available insolation, which in turn allows us to place the individuals on a tight grid.
Now, while this is a desirable shape of a spruce tree, it is not the ideal.
Expendable
lower limbs Upper limbs
widen
Here we see two ways in which the tree shape could be rendered closer to an ideal configuration.
First, the lower approximately 1/3 of the tree's limbs can be encouraged to atrophy and drop.
Second, the upper limbs can be induced to spread more widely in the first years of growth, with subsequent infill of photosynthetic tissue.
Implied in this schematic is a 3rd structural enhancement, not spatial but temporal. By manipulating the activity of growth-regulator genes, the upper, vigorously growing sections of the tree are stimulated to produce higher levels of clear-grained wood more rapidly than would naturally occur. Such an adaptation, in the days of fluctuating and unpredictable evolutionary selection, would have benefited individual members of the species in the short term, but over the long term would have worked against the species generally. Rapidly generated woody tissue would have been insufficiently hardened-off against the possibility of an atypically cold dormant season. Today, however, with the advent of irreversible global warming, this danger can be discounted.
All the above enhancements are readily accomplished through a two-pronged application of traditional propaga-tion-and-selection methods along with newer, cutting-edge, genome optimization technology.
Now let's explore another means of improving upon the wild-type species.
Dispersal of allelopathic
agents via widely spreading roots
There are two arguments to be made for a change in the spruce's rooting behavior.
First, there is the phenomenon, still incompletely understood, by which biochemical signals are dispersed among genetically similar individuals—triggering, for example, a collective response to some environmental challenge, such as the arrival of a predator insect. Most of these chemical messages are passed by way of water dispersal through the roots, the solution being released generally at night, during periods of low exfoliar transpiration.
Second, and more pertinent, is the phenomenon of allelopathology. Many trees, and in particular temperate-zone conifers, have the capacity to produce and secrete—again, through the roots—substances which inhibit germination of the seeds of competitors. That is why you seldom see much understory growth in an established grove of evergreens.
The black spruce is typical in this respect. But the eastern hemlock, Tsuga canadensis, is truly exceptional. So we have developed a proprietary means of inserting a segment of the Tsuga genome into our Picea breeding stock, whereby the synthesis of allelopathic agents is literally expanded tenfold.
Impressive as these competitive armaments are for the spruce tree, however, there is a final mechanism which might be desired to bring it one step closer to the ideal. And this bears upon the tree's methodology for reproducing itself.
Needle-bearing conifers, or more broadly speaking, eymnosperms, are at a certain reproductive disadvantage, vis-a-vis angiosperms or deciduous hardwoods. In the first place, their rate of growth, following germination, is comparatively slow. This allows commercially undesirable species—such as, here in the North Woods, sugar maple and red oak—to steal the march, as it were, and take up a dominant position in a regenerating woodland.
In the second place, hardwoods, which evolved later than conifers, have a competitive property that is difficult to counteract, even with rigorous application of herbicides. This is the ability to sprout new leading shoots from the trunks, and in some cases from the roots, of an established tree. That is why the largest single living organism in the world is not, whatever you may have heard, a fungus growing somewhere in Ohio, but actually a 6,000-ton, genetically identical stand of quaking aspens cloned naturally from a single individual in the mountains of Utah. This organism covers 106 acres and consists of 47,000 seemingly independent trees, all of which have sprung from a single vast and unbroken network of roots.
In the face of this capacity to spread and dominate, what can our ideal black spruce hope to do? Well, in this case, if you can't beat 'em, borrow from them. We have in recent years developed a technology for introjecting chromosomal segments from that very quaking aspen—not into the core genetic program of our breeding stock, but into the separate, self-replicating nucleotides contained within organelles of the root tissue itself. Such genetic information cannot, of course, be transmitted through ordinary sexual inheritance. It only inheres in individuals who have been cloned by tissue culture from the parent stock. This is actually an advantage, in that it renders extremely slight the risk that this proprietary genetic material will ever escape the control of Gulf Atlantic Corporation.
Now, drawing together all these enhancements, we have something like the following.
Picea x dawkinsia 4.3.2
This tree, for which a plant patent has been applied, represents the key commodity—the football, as it were—of Gulf Atlantic's presence in the Northeast. And it is truly a powerful creation.
Its upper limbs grow quickly and spread broadly to capture and hold space and sunlight.
The trunk thrusts upward fast and straight, producing clear-grained wood at the maximum sustainable rate.
The lower limbs atrophy and then drop, further crowding and darkening the region around the base of the individual, while allowing free circulation of air to ensure optimal health.
The roots spread widely, dispersing germination inhibitors throughout the surrounding soil, and facilitating intra-specific pheromonal communication.
And lastly, from these roots can spring an entire new network of individuals embodying all the above qualities—in addition, naturally, to the less exceptional but nonetheless vital attributes of the parent strain: general systemic vigor, foliar toughness, resistance to the effects of acid rain and the like.
This tree, which we are calling Dawkins Spruce, is literally the future of the Great North Woods. Once inserted—even in a limited, scattered, or mixed-growth setting—it will become over the course of a decade or two the dominant species throughout its range. Then, having achieved this position, it will be highly resistant to being supplanted, regardless of unforeseeable down-year changes in the regulatory climate. In horticultural terms it will be ineradicable. Within a generation, the North Woods will be transformed from an unplanned and often chaotic mixture of second-growth forest, small- and medium-scale tree farms and conventional timber plantations, to a uniform and fully optimized monoculture: an assured commercial softwood resource for the next century, at the very least.
For all the reasons cited above, the insertion of X dawkinsia 4.3.2 by the earliest and most expeditious means available is strongly recommended. By taking this action, the long-term position of Gulf Atlantic in the Great North Woods will have been definitively secured, for practical purposes, forever.
ENTERPRISE
The floppy disk had barely popped out of the drive when a bell rang way off at the Long House—
clung clung clung
—a salvaged bell buoy auctioned off by the Coast Guard that Jesse had picked up years ago because he figured Tex would shit himself over it. Paranoid Tex swore the Coasties had a file on him going back to the days when he really had been packing some weight down in the secret hold disguised as a fuel tank. Jesse doubted it. But it was Tex's gift to think up crazy ideas; and if 99% of them were nothing but wasted mental energy, that still meant that a solid 1% were crazy good ideas, and that counted for a substantial skewing of the inspiration-to-perspiration ratio in their business partnership. But that was all right. Things evened out over time, and he and Tex had always done okay for themselves.
"Got to run," said Jesse. "Sounds like customers." And he hustled off, leaving everyone else, including the wolf, staring suspiciously at one another.
Down at the Long House—a 1977 Oakwood 2-BR mobile home, shingled and fitted out with an insulated roof-pitch converter—he found an aged brown Suburban with a Maine Sportsman's Alliance window decal and a bumper sticker that said
HINKLEY SHOT THE WRONG BRADY
The customer sat in an aluminum chair on the veranda of the Long House, nursing a beer and flipping through a recent issue of Green Egg, the quarterly journal of the Church of All Worlds.
"Hey," the man said. "You read this stuff?"
Jesse sort of recognized the guy from crossing paths at the Irving Mart: a lean, gray-faced man wearing an all-weather camouflage jumpsuit. "Who are you?'' he said.
"Jag Eckhart." The man stood abruptly, thrusting a hand out. "Wild Jag, some people call me."
Jesse nodded. He stepped into the Long House and came back out holding a chain leash and a steel-reinforced leather muzzle.
"Your name Openhood?" the customer said.
Jesse nodded slowly. He held his eyes on Eckhart's. He thought about whistling for Gus, but decided it wouldn't be good for business. The customers did not like to see tame animals. They did not like to see tame anything. That's why they were here.
"So," said Jesse, looking down the gravel path toward the breeding pens, "you interested in one of our pups?"
