“That’s not a holo,” said the manager.
“No sir. Solid plastic,” Carl said. “And it does a lot more than just keep people from walking or driving though the trees. The pickets themselves are sophisticated envirosensors. Made in Singapore. Watch.”
I turned on the fence, and since there was no wind, Carl blew on a picket. The leaves on the trees waved and wiggled. He covered a picket with his hand and a shadow fell over the treetops. “They respond to actual wind and sun conditions, for the utmost in total realism. Now let’s suppose it looks like rain… “
That was my cue. I handed Carl a paper cup and he sprinkled water on the pickets with his fingertips, like a priest giving a blessing. The leaves of the trees shimmered and looked wet. “We call them the Immortals,” Carl said again, proudly.
“What about birds?”
“Birds?”
“I read somewhere that birds get confused and try to land in the branches or something,” the manager said. “I forget exactly.”
Carl’s laugh was suddenly sad. “How long since you’ve seen a bird?”
Wednesday was the day we had set aside to service Carl’s masterpiece, the Oak Grove at Princeton University.
These were not ailanth-oaks or composite red “woods”; these were full-sized white oaks of solid wood that grew not out of pots but straight out of the “ground”—a .09-acre ecotrap colloid reservoir saturated with a high electrolyte forced-drip solution of Arborpryzinamine Plus, the most effective (and expensive) IV arbostabilizer ever developed.
The ground colloid was so firm that the trees stood without cables, fully forty-four feet tall. They were grand. The Grove was seven oaks in all, only two less than the state forest in Windham. Princeton was the only private institution in New Jersey that could afford so many organic trees.
But something was wrong. There wasn’t a leaf on any of them.
“Code Seven, Gail,” said Carl with an undertone of panic in his voice. I limped up the hill as fast as I could and checked the vats under the Humanities Building, but they were almost full and the solution was correct, so I left them.
Trees aren’t like grass; there was no point in cranking up the IV pump pressure.
Carl was honking the horn, so I got back in the truck and we left to look for the Dean of Grounds. He wasn’t in his office. We found him at Knowledge Hall, watching an outfit from Bucks County do a scan-in on the north wall ivy. The ivy wasn’t quite dead yet; I could hear its faint brown moaning as the software scanned and replicated each dying tendril, replacing it with a vivid green image. Then the old stuff was pulled down with a long wall rake and bagged. I was getting a headache.
“I just came from the Grove,” Carl demanded. “How long have the oaks been bare like that? Why didn’t you call me?”
“I figured they were automatic,” said the Grounds Dean. “Besides, nobody’s blaming you.”
The image-ivy came complete with butterflies, hovering tirelessly.
“It’s not a question of blame,” said Carl. Exasperated with the Grounds Dean, he put the pickup into gear. “Jump in, Gail,” he said. “Let’s head back to the Grove. I think we’ve got a Code Seven here. It’s time for the Thumper.”
The Thumper is a gasoline-powered induction coil the size of the “salamander” we used to warm the greenhouse back when the winters were cold. While Carl cranked it up, I pulled the two cables attached to it out of the truck bed and started dragging them toward the trees; they grew heavier as they grew longer.
“We haven’t got all day!” Carl yelled. I clipped the red cable to a low branch on the farthest tree, and clipped the black one to a steel rod driven into the ground-colloid. Then I got back in the truck.
The Grounds Dean pulled up on his three-wheeler just as Carl hit the switch. A few students hurrying to class stopped and looked around, bewildered, as the current ripped through the pavement under them. Carl hit it twice more. I could see the topmost twigs of the trees flutter, but there was no feeling there, and hardly any far below where the taproots were curled in on themselves in dark and silent misery.
“That oughta wake ’em up!” the Grounds Dean called out cheerily.
Carl ignored him. He was in the Grove, kneeling at the base of one of the oaks, and he motioned for me to come over. “Volunteer,” he whispered, brushing four tiny blades of fescue with his fingertips. “I haven’t seen volunteer in years.” I felt it with my fingertips, an incredibly delicate green filigree, eagerly and shamelessly alive. It was feeding on the nutrients that should have gone to the tree roots, which had somehow lost their will to live.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you, Gail,” Carl said, brushing his knees off as we stood up; awkwardly, he leaned over and brushed mine off too. “I don’t know what’s getting into me.” And it was true: it was the first time he had yelled at me since I had sought refuge in his nursery six springs before.
