Old though he was, Magnus was not ready to be confined to a laboratory, let alone a desk. A man of his age had to be reckoned to be taking a serious risk if he insisted in isolating himself out here, where help might take ten or twelve hours to reach him if he contrived to send an alarm call and ten or twelve days if he did not, but it was a risk he was prepared to take. Indeed, his dearest and most secret wish was to die in some such place as this, in the humid maternal shadow of the forest giants, where his body would decay in a matter of days into the placental humus so that its atoms could be redistributed within the organisms that collaborated in the constitution of one of the world’s new lungs.
Magnus had always worked in the cause of life—the greatest cause there was—and he knew that a man condemned to die, as all men of his misfortunate generation were, ought to make a gift of his body to Mother Earth. He did not want a gaudy funeral in which his coffin would be dragged around the streets of some sterile city, followed by cartloads of Rappaccini flowers purchased from the MegaMall.
He would rather die in the sisterly company of sylphs and dryads, surrounded by the flowers of the forest, donating his flesh to the seething cauldron of benign witchery.
The “tent” in which Magnus was temporarily resident was not, of course, an actual tent. It was a bubble dome made out of Life-Simulating Plastic, of a kind originally designed for use on Mars. It was second cousin to those which currently dotted the airless plains of the moon and those which were anchored to the bedrock beneath the snows and glutinous muds of Titan. It was a high-tech product of the MegaMall, and its presence here confirmed that no matter what Magnus’s dreams and wishes might be, he was a stranger in an alien environment.
Man was an alien invader here, as he was everywhere else in the solar system.
Man was a product of the savanna, a creator of fields and deserts. The forest was its own world, but the entire ecosphere was part of the human empire now.
The forest could not survive without the protection and support of such benevolent invaders as himself, and the LSP dome was the price of his own comfortable survival within it.
The purpose of Magnus’s dome, as of its extraterrestrial cousins, was to secure a miniature alien environment and to keep a natural ecosphere at bay. The only difference was that the primary purpose of his dome was to protect the environment without, rather than the environment within. The biospheric fragment in which the dome was set had to be guarded from contamination because it was, in spite of its relative geographical isolation, too near a neighbor that was the most dangerous and malign of all alien environments: the fin de siecle cities of the twenty-fifth century. The humming hives of the MegaMall’s customers and sales force were far beyond the horizon, but while they shared the same spherical surface and the same atmosphere they had to be reckoned close neighbors. From the forest’s viewpoint, the MegaMall’s minions were the neighbors from hell.
Ultimately, of course, it was the MegaMall that paid Magnus his living wage, just as it paid the wage of every other man and woman living on and beyond Earth, but Magnus always thought of his particular portion of the great capitalist pie as conscience money, or as a tribute to the oldest goddess of them all: the ultimate mother, Gaea the Great.
Tired as he was, Magnus had neither the inclination nor the energy to make an elaborate investigation of his new captives. The most interesting specimens, in any case, would be too small to see without the aid of a magnifying glass, and his eyes, long overdue for replacement, were too weak to take the strain. He took his time decanting the contents of his specimen jars into more economical storage units, and then put the empty jars into the sterilizer, ready to be taken out into the field again tomorrow. They would be alternated with their duplicates for the sixty-third time, with thirty-seven still to go.
When his duty had been adequately done, Magnus used the microwave oven—which had been dutifully storing solar power all day long—to heat up a plastic-wrapped meal. The sole meuniere tasted excellent, as was to be expected of one of the finest products of modern food science, but Magnus hardly noticed. In the wilderness, eating was a utilitarian business, a mere matter of fueling the body.
The tropical night arrived with characteristic swiftness, but Magnus did not reach for the wall panel whose virtual control keys were displayed in patterns of red light. He could have instructed the Life-Simulating Plastic to become opaque, but he did not want to do that. Privacy was not an issue hereabouts, and the fact that the discreetly muted lights inside the bubble dome would attract every moth for miles around did not concern him—except, of course, insofar as the moths themselves might be inconvenienced.
Magnus loved wilderness better than anything else in the world. That is to say, he loved green wilderness: wilderness the color of the world that men had all but lost What he hated most in all the world was wasteland: gray wasteland, the color of the glutinous organic dust which had consumed the first-generation cities left derelict by the Crash, and the color of the second-generation cities that had been gantzed out of that dust to supply the alleged needs of the multitudinous produce of Conrad Helier’s New Reproductive System. Today’s third-generation cities were multicolored, and Magnus knew that the fourth-generation complexes which were no longer to be called cities—out of respect for the current fashionability of the absurd philosophy of Decivilization—would take care to mimic the green which had been banished from the ever-extending jet-black SAP fields; to Magnus, however, the underlying color of the human hive and all its honeycombs would always be gray.
Magnus loved to sleep beneath the stars, as if in the open air. Even though the LSP prevented his breathing in the myriad scents of the renewed rain forest while he lay upon his bunk, he felt that he was sharing communion with the benign soul of the world. Thanks to the protective power of the tent, he could lie naked on his bed without the least fear of cold or persecution by predators and parasites.
It was still early when he finished his strictly utilitarian meal, but he was too tired for serious work, and the last thing he wanted was to watch TV. He discarded his beltphone along with his clothes, knowing full well that it would not emit the slightest sound. His answering machine was a low-grade silver, and he had trained it very carefully to be as stubborn as it was clever. It would not break into his communion even to give him news of the end of the world.
He turned the light down to a mere glow. Then he laid himself down on his bed, displaying himself with all due reverence, feeling deliciously humble in the presence of Gaea. In public, he always denied that he was a Gaean Mystic, because two centuries of mockery had contrived to attach a comical significance to the term, but in private he was prepared to admit that Gaea had been the one true love of his life, the core of his spirituality. Her cause was his cause, and would be for as long as he lived.
Sleep did not come to Magnus immediately, but he was unworried by its lack of hurry. He was content to look serenely up at the handful of stars that were visible through the forest canopy.
Darkness had leached all color from the outside world, but it was still green to him. Green was more than mere appearance, after all; it was essence and symbol, belonging at least as much to inner vision as to the deceptive wisdom of the eye.
In the days of his youth, which Magnus could no longer remember with any clarity, there had been such an abundance of gray in the world that he must surely have been filled with anguish by its contemplation. Even then, he had been avid—recklessly avid, on occasion—to work in the cause of life, although he had not had such a clear idea of what the cause of life required of a man. In those days, he had associated freely with the engineers whose cause was to subdue and manipulate life and reduce it to the status of one more MegaMall product; nowadays, he knew better. He had not seen or spoken to Walter Czastka for more than a century.