Chapter 14 The Albatross #5
For him, of course, the project is also personal.
“Eighty-five percent of all matter is dark: the stuff that we can’t see, can’t touch,” he tells Laurel, on a walk.
“If ANITA was right, then the neutrinos we found at the Arc are dark matter, pouring into our universe from this one. But eighty-five percent is a huge amount of matter. There would have to be more than one source. I’ve been looking for a portal the size of the basin—but there could be tiny ones everywhere, popping in and out of existence. ”
It’s February, the sky at four a grayish lilac; snow descends in fleets. Laurel pulls her hat over her ears. “What would we do with a mini portal?”
“If we can understand how portals are created, maybe we can engineer a bigger one,” says Eli.
Laurel smiles at him. She wants to hold her hand around his hopefulness as one protects a flame.
That year, he works as hard as ever, but he never sacrifices time with Laurel and Silas.
She, too, is trying to soak in the present, absorb every bead of nectar; there is no time to waste by rushing.
Now she looks at Silas Two believing that she’ll lose him.
And maybe she’s wrong. Maybe Eli will find another portal. She won’t regret living this way until then.
Sticky, barefoot berry-eating. Reading Silas’s favorite book aloud while he rests his head on her lap. She no longer thinks of him as Silas Two. It is not that he has replaced Silas One, but that they’ve lost their numbers: both boys are simply Laurel and Eli’s children.
As Silas Two becomes Silas, his world becomes hers.
Until now, Laurel and Eli have been travelers, not citizens.
They assumed that Barack Obama’s term would follow Donald Trump’s, and that George W.
Bush’s would follow Obama’s. But they can’t be certain—and in many ways, Laurel prays that the past she knows is not the future here.
If the antiuniverse’s hat trick is inversion, it could arc back to the worst of history: people in slavery, women as property, religious persecution.
Laurel feels ashamed of her former passivity.
The answer is both as simple and as complex as it is in her world.
She must act as though the future isn’t fated. She must vote as though it matters.
Once a month, she drives north to volunteer in the Menominee Forest, a part of the tribal reservation.
Western foresters are taught to cut the strongest trees for timber.
The Menominee do the reverse: they harvest those that are dying, leaving the most robust to thrive and reproduce.
The tribe has logged here for centuries, but the forest—so lush it can be seen, dark green, from space—has more trees than it did when they began.
The expertise of Wisconsin tribes was honed over millennia.
The Oneida restored their waterways to health after pollution deformed fish and birds.
The Ojibwe, stewards of the rice wetlands, are experts in the uses of fire.
The Potawatomi’s circular farm, Bodwéwadmi Ktegan, provides food to tribes throughout Wisconsin.
The Indigenous tribes of Laurel’s universe were the earliest recorded peoples here, too.
It makes sense to her that those who see nature as kin would outlast more mercenary cultures, and that the latter would sooner die, or flee.
In both directions, then, the First Nations must be the last to leave.
—
Four is the hinge. In some ways, Silas is still the child she’s known.
She can reason with him. For the most part, his vocabulary remains.
They have long conversations while walking the arboretum path near home.
And he is still dexterous: he assembles puzzles at a speed that both impresses and comforts her.
But Laurel can’t deny that he is becoming a small child. He develops a rigidity that verges on hysteria, as though he knows that something is getting away from him.
Cut the crusts off!
Daddy didn’t wash his hands after the bus.
You have to listen to my rules.
Every time the doctor weighs him, he is lighter.
—
Gloria graduates in the fall. Her roommates scream as she walks across the stage to accept her diploma, and afterward, Laurel takes her picture below a tent of bright blue sky.
“Last night,” Gloria whispers, “the Ouija board said that I’m destined for great things.
“Well,” Laurel says, “I could have told you that.”
Gloria stays at the Rhizotron for her doctorate, waiting tables at a diner on the side. What they’ve found is promising: currents in the tree have steadily increased, and the rhizomorphs are shrinking.
Still, as they drive to Cedar that summer, Laurel says, “I can’t shake the sense that we’re missing something.”
This time, Gloria is driving. They sit in the used Chevy Cavalier she bought with her savings. The previous owner can’t have had it for long—stick shifts are new to the antiuniverse—but the car came with a dented fender and a duct-taped hole in the rear window.
“The spark is a transition point: the moment when composition ends and independent life begins,” Laurel continues, partly to herself.
“To be independent, a human body needs two things: a working heart and a working brain. For each organ, electricity is key. The brain uses it to think, and the heart uses it to beat.”
“Uh-huh.” Gloria hasn’t had her license for long, and she keeps drifting toward the edges of her lane.
“But we’re only tracking physical composition in the tree. We haven’t addressed the mental piece.”
“Because a tree isn’t human. We don’t know whether there is a mental piece,” says Gloria. “And if there were, how would we measure it?”
“That’s it!” says Laurel. “That’s what we have to work on. If electricity is connected to sentience, the way it is in animals, then we need to prove that separately. The fact of electricity isn’t enough; we need to show what it means.”
“But what are our terms?” asks Gloria. “I mean, what does consciousness look like in a plant?”
Laurel flops back against her seat. “Exactly.”
For several minutes, they drive in silence. Then Gloria says, “Why do we even have to bring that in? If we can capture the surge that happens during the spark, that would still be a huge contribution. We could look at the sentience angle in the future.”
“Gloria, I won’t have time. The spark is still years away. By then, I could be in my early twenties.”
Laurel spoke more sharply than intended, but she feels a flash of desperation.
When she thinks of aging down, it is almost always in relation to Silas.
Deep down, though—beneath the floor of her everyday consciousness—Laurel knows that if she doesn’t leave this universe, she’ll be subject to the same process.
In that case, her independence has an end date: at eighteen, an adult becomes a minor and must report to the care of a guardian.
“Is this about your maze experiment?” Gloria asks. “Unfinished business?”
“What do you mean?”
“The intelligence stuff—it sounds like what you were working on before.”
“It’s related, I guess. But this is a different project.”
“Are you sure?”
By now, Gloria feels less like a student than a brilliant little sister. And sometimes, like a sister, she pokes.
“Gloria,” Laurel says, in a warning tone.
Gloria lifts a hand off the steering wheel, her palm upturned. The Chevy swerves. “I just feel like there’s something you’re not telling me. I don’t want to sound like a stalker, but I’ve studied your work. And I’ve never found anything that has to do with mazes.”
“I’ve told you: I couldn’t find the evidence. And please keep both hands on the wheel.”
“I just think,” Gloria says, “that if some past experience is, like, bleeding into our work together, I have a right to know about it.”
“Nothing is bleeding!” Laurel shouts.
They pass the next leg of the drive in silence. Eventually Laurel suggests they stop at their favorite pasty stand for dinner. Gloria claims that she has a stomachache. Laurel doesn’t press her, even though Gloria was eating Cheez-Its as she said so.
The next day, they arrive at the site in early morning.
“Gloria, I’m sorry,” says Laurel, as they walk from the parking lot to the tree. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you yesterday.”
Gloria purses her mouth.
“You’re right,” says Laurel. “There are things I haven’t shared with you—things that I can’t explain.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t tell you that, either.”
They duck below a branch. Laurel can feel Gloria’s eyes on her.
“These things you haven’t told me,” Gloria says. “Have you told anyone else?”
“Eli knows,” says Laurel.
And Nita, she thinks. But there’s no good reason to turn Gloria’s world upside down. Her life has already been unstable enough.
“You’re still my student,” says Laurel, gently. “And this is personal.”
The oak tree stands before them.
“Ah, there she is,” she adds, relieved to change the subject.
Wind moves powerfully through the branches, which sway as if in greeting.
Over time, Laurel has tried to show herself to be a friend.
In winter, she brushes snow from its limbs so that they don’t snap; in summer, she sits against the trunk while eating lunch or naps under the canopy.
On windy days, the rhizomorphs can crack and blow away.
If a storm has passed since her last visit, Laurel searches the vicinity and tucks these errant cords into the soil; that way, they’ll feed the tree when they disintegrate as spores.
Gloria walks swiftly to the cave. She doesn’t look up when Laurel joins her.
“Gloria,” Laurel says.
“It’s fine.”
“You’re still upset.”
“Not at all.”
“All right, then.”
Laurel begins to attach the pins in the rhizomorphs to wires. Because the cave is so much larger than the mazes she used in her first experiment, they need dozens of voltmeters. To keep the wires untangled is a challenge in itself.
“It’s just…” says Gloria. Laurel looks up. “I tell you things.”