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hushed. "During the sunset. A moment there. I saw the edge of something. I don't know what."
"I saw that it was pretty," Orf said. "There was something there."
I moved under the tarp for the night, and settled into my blankets. I fell asleep on friendly ground.
? Humming Down the Coast
The next day, Orf went underground for better traveling along the ways he knew (the ways he had dug,
long ago) and I flew my hopper down the coast of Washington and Oregon, and into California. The sun
was bright this day, brighter than I'd ever seen it, glinting off the watery back of Nep, the Pacific plate
terrane.
The hopper was little more than a ceramic block the reaction mass with an electromagnetic
transceiver built in. The power that held me aloft was geothermal. It was sent to me in a tight little laser
beam from a station in the eastern basalt horseshoe range of the Olympics. It was as though I were a
speck on the end of a giant sky-writing pencil but in this case, the speck controlled the movement of
the pencil. Over the Oregon Dunes, I switched reaction channels from Skykomish's beam to Nep's
strong signal originating from the ocean floor and the pencil got more stubby.
All day long, I thought about that moment, just after sunset of the previous night. What was it that I'd felt?
Sunlight through the trees.
It had been years since I'd seen trees. Whitney Forester had made this trip down to California on foot.
She was going home, back to her mother's people. As she passed through the forest of the Northwest,
she began to think about trees. I called the piece she'd written up from my Hermes algorithm, who was
patched into the hopper, and, while I was eating lunch on a great rock jutting into the sea near Brookings,
Oregon, I reread the part of her essay that eventually led Whitney Forester to her first trance with a
terrane:
* * *
Symbiosis.
The curl of two facts around each other. And: there are trees! Trees with limbs branching out willy-nilly,
but which all stop and spread so that they can collect the most amount of sunlight and transpire the right
amount of water into the air. And the crowns of trees are like individual tree limbs. They are limited in
how big around they can become because other trees are nearby, and these trees take a portion of the
available light and water.
There isn't any tree intelligence at work, no consciousness. It isn't like a giant mind. What is it really like?
Mighty like the human unconsciousness, mighty like the relations of the terranes to one another. An
ecology of imprints, algorithms, life forces and don't forget soil, air and water.
Nature on Earth is a collection of things and facts in symbiosis. It's an ecology. So is culture. Culture is
the shaping of our minds to nature. It's our response, as a species, to being here. That's why you can't get
world peace by imposing order. It has to grow. Look at the sad history of the twentieth century or
worse, our own twenty-first-century madness. People trying too hard.
But after the growing is over, what do we do then? When we're children, we get our culture and our
culture gets us. That's what individuals are. We are the meeting and melding of culture and nature. We
enter adulthood as the biological survivors of these two processes. But nature and culture go on
interacting long after we've survived. Long after Darwin has had his say.
Then you have art. Art is culture and nature attempting to project itself beyond itself. That's where war
and strife come from, perhaps. That's definitely where beauty comes from.
Beauty is something new. It is something other than you and something other than the world, but it is
made of nothing else but you and the world. It is the universe humming a song.
When the hum of beauty grows to a full symphony, you cannot break out of the hum, become only you
again. You are unable to stop getting it. It gets you, and releases you only when it the hum is done
singing itself. The moment of release is determined by the particular song. That's what awe is. When you
are singing and being sung by the world.
? The Father of the Man
I arrived in Saint Helena in the Napa Valley in late afternoon. I set down a mile or so out of the enclave
and stowed my hopper in some scrub oak on top of a prominent hill, then walked the rest of the way in.
Becker's Tributarian offshoot sect the Pure Water didn't approve of any algorithmic translations of
the terranes' revealed glory for example, using modulated geothermal lasers to power a back hopper.
Art for art's sake, and only art's sake.
Which is part of the reason he hadn't talked to me for a while.
It took a bit of asking around, but I finally found Becker in a barn, tending to the sore leg of something
that looked very like a deer, but with sturdy legs and uncloven hooves. The Pure Water had no
philosophical problems with genetic engineering.
He saw me when I came in and saw that it was me, but didn't pay me any notice until he was done
tending to the animal.
"Well, Papa," he said, standing up and wiping ointment from his hands onto a white rag. "What brings you
up from the bowels of the Earth?"
"For one thing, I wanted to see you," I replied. "I thought I might not get to again."
Becker frowned, as if he'd just bit down on something sour. Pure Water folk don't believe the Chunk is
coming to harm us. But since they don't go to Trance City, they don't know the feelings of dread and
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