The Tree Museum
Apr. 10th, 2011 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsol Apologies to Ms. Joni Mitchell.
When Mama got in from her shift running the tiller, she was tired. She was always tired after her shift; Papa said running the tiller was hard work, sweating all day in a dirtsuit, keeping the tiller from destroying itself, keeping the tiller from chewing anybody's arm off, stuffing as much soil into the giant machine as you could. And there was always the chance that your dirtsuit's seals wouldn't be quite tight enough, and you'd get some dirt inside, and then you'd have to scrub for hours if you didn't want to get burns or get sick and die. Mama worked at her shift for twelve hours, and she was tired and ready for a break, and then it was Daddy's turn to suit up for tiller duty.
When Mama got off shift was Rosemary's bedtime. While Daddy was strapping on the various layers of his dirtsuit and heading for the hablock, Mama was reading Rosemary her bedtime story. They had nine books to read to Rosemary, the old kind, made of paper, with pictures in all kinds of colors that you didn't see in the world any more. Mama and Daddy had paid dearly for those books, in real dollars, not scrip, and Rosemary loved them. Those were special times, with the faintly blue light of the PEREZ, LUCIA B2 family habmodule spreading a comfortable glow through the bunkroom, snuggled up with Mama under the covers. Mama smelled faintly of sweat and neutralizer and home-soap, the green kind that they made in buckets. Mama would read to Rosemary, even though she was very tired, and Rosemary would listen and point at the pictures and ask questions.
That one night Mama was reading one of Rosemary's favorites. It was called _The_Giving_Tree_. Rosemary liked it because the boy in the story had a friend who took care of her, just like Mama and Daddy did. This friend was very tall and strange, with long limbs of an unusual shape, and it didn't seem to have anything like a face. Sometimes the boy climbed up on top of his friend and ate something called 'apples'. Rosemary thought this was funny.
When Mama opened the book, Rosemary pointed to the tree. "Tree," she said.
"That's right," said Mama.
Rosemary squirmed in the bunk, pretending to climb up Mama and eat her apples.
"What are you doing, honey?" Mama asked wearily.
"I'm eating your apples, Mama," Rosemary replied.
"Silly girl, I don't have any apples. I'm not a tree," Mama explained.
Rosemary squirmed back down and asked Mama a question she'd been thinking about for a long time. "What's a tree?" she asked.
Mama was quiet for a moment. "It's a kind of living thing, honey," she said. "We don’t see them so much anymore."
Mama seemed sad. Any time something came up from before when Rosemary was born, Mama and Daddy would become sad; it made Rosemary uneasy. "Were they nice?"
"Yes, honey. I liked trees very much. They had green leaves, just like in this picture, and they were very tall. They grew straight up out of the ground and made nice smells."
That confused Rosemary even more. When she thought of things growing up out of the ground, she thought of twisted bits of iron and old signposts bent almost double – nothing nice or green there. And the thought of smelling anything outside, where one wore an airsuit all the time, was ridiculous. She settled down and let Mama read her the rest of the book. When it was done, she kissed the picture on the cover. "Nice tree," she said, and went to sleep.
The next morning when Daddy got off his shift, he and Mama had a fight. Well, not a fight exactly; it was a discussion, and it wasn't loud, but in the close confines of the family habmodule it was impossible not to hear her parents' tension and disagreement.
"She's never seen a tree," Mama said. "She has no idea what a tree is. She's never had any sense of the world we lost."
"So what?" said Daddy. "We play the hand we're dealt."
"I know that! do you think I don't know that?" Mama's voice was tight and angry. "But it's the duty of a parent to dream of giving their kids something better."
"But it's so much money," Daddy protested. "And for what? A few hours of dreaming about something that's gone and that may never come back again?"
"Don't you dare say that," said Mama. "You don't have to dream for our daughter, but if you don't, I'm going to do it for the both of us."
"Be practical!" It was Daddy's turn to be angry. "What could we get with that money? Better rations? Better air? Don't you want *that* for your daughter?"
"I want everything my daughter needs to survive," Mama said flatly. And with that the fight was over. Rosemary continued playing with the two bolts that she pretended were tillers, chewing up the top fifty feet of the earth's soil, neutralizing it chemically and spitting it out the back end. She had no idea what her parents had been talking about, and in minutes she forgot the fight had ever happened.
**
But in two days' time something unusual happened – both Mama and Daddy were off work. Mama was all smiles.
"Guess what, sweetheart," she said, dressing Rosemary in her lightweight clothes. "Today is a special treat. We're going to go on a trip together."
"We're going outside the hab?" Rosemary started hopping around. She was very excited; going outside the hab was something she had only done twice in her life. Nothing particularly interesting had happened on either trip, but anything that involved suiting up and leaving the hab was a break in the routine that Rosemary found most welcome.
Mama dressed Rosemary in her half-size airsuit with the word JUVENILE stenciled on the back. Unlike the dirtsuit there were no layers of exo, no cooling rig, no nuclear seals and no absorbents. There was a fabric unitard with matching booties and gloves, a black shiny plastic overcoat that came down to past her knees, thick rubber galoshes with waterproof gaiters sealing the top, and environmental gloves made of the same material. Then there was the facemask, with its close-fitting straps and gaskets, and the long hooded waterproof hat that slung over the top of everything. Finally there was the air filtration unit which strapped to Rosemary's back. It was all heavy and itchy and Rosemary complained, but not too much – she was going to go outside.
Mama and Daddy put on their own airsuits and checked each other's seals mechanically before leaving the family habmodule. They waved to a few neighbors as they strolled down the B2 hab's center corridor, exchanging a few friendly words through the hiss of the rebreather unit, and stepped to the hablock. Mama held Rosemary's hand on the left side and Daddy held the other on the right, and Rosemary swung between them as they walked.
The B2 hablock cycled and they were outside. Rosemary shouted with delight; it was a good day, with plenty of light diffusing through the dust; they could see clear across to the B3 hab, a hundred feet away, a brown and slate-grey Quonset hut silhouette seen dimly through the dusty windswept air. Rosemary jumped up and down, and admired the way her boots left prints in the thick dust that covered the ground despite the strong winds.
Daddy took Rosemary's hand again and led her around the corner of the B2 hab. There was a cat waiting for them – a low tread-wheeled tractor towing a dozen cars with dusted-over plastic sheet coverings. Mama and the cat's driver had a conversation, and money changed hands. The three of them piled into an empty car, and Rosemary snuggled up between Mama and Daddy.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"We're going to a very special place," said Mama. "Before you were born, the world was different. Some people wanted to remember what things were like before it changed. So, they made a place called a museum. Inside things are like the way they were … before."
Rosemary looked up at Mama. "Before what?" she asked.
"Just before," said Daddy.
The cat rattled and bumped over the dusty ground. The plastic was too dusty to see much of anything outside; Rosemary thought she saw the hulk of an old machine half-covered in the grey dirt, but it was hard to say what it was that she had seen.
The cat drove for twenty minutes and then pulled to a lurching halt. Mama and Daddy and Rosemary piled out of the car, stepping down to the ground awkward in their cumbersome airsuits. Rosemary wiped the dust from her facemask and looked up at the stencils on the side of a huge gunmetal-grey building. They read:
BIODIVERSITY HABITAT
46YR3-AA
CLASS 5 CONTAINMENT
More money changed hands outside the hablock, and then they went inside. But this was like going through no hablock Rosemary had ever been through. There were multiple levels of decontamination and washdown and disinfection. Their airsuits were stripped at the first level, tagged and bagged, and placed in numbered lockers; each of them had to go through two sorts of showers, one of which where they had to wear special goggles and noseplugs and mouthpieces; they had to walk through scanners and allow men to pass batons over every inch of their bodies. Daddy was delayed for several minutes while his fingernails were efficiently scraped by a mean-looking lady wearing gauze over her mouth. But finally they were issued jumpsuits of bright white cloth and they were allowed to pass into the museum.
When the inner lock opened, a wall of humid air hit Rosemary in the face. Along with it came a wave of unfamiliar smells – molds, humus, wet soil. The air felt heavy in Rosemary's lungs, and her eyes started to water.
They stepped out onto the catwalk. Below them spread a wonderland. Trees of all sorts spread limbs of thick, leafy branches over neatly manicured plantings. Rows of hedges were being trimmed by men in white cleanroom suits. There were lawns of grasses, dewy from the spray of a sprinkler that dutifully scuttled, spiderlike, from position to position. Growths of daffodils and gardenias were artfully arranged in attractive beds, featuring flowers of all different sorts of colors – many of which Rosemary had never seen. And through it all, pebbled paths wound where visitors could observe the plants up close.
Daddy turned to Rosemary and smiled. "Shall we go down and see them a little better?" he said.
"Yes, please!" Rosemary practically danced down the spiral staircase that led to the floor of the arboretum.
The paths were hemmed in with stanchions supporting delicate chains; signs were hung on them saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE PLANTS. Workers with hoses squabbled over the most optimal pattern for distributing water. The water that came out of the hoses seemed completely transparent and there was no metallic tang in the air. Rosemary ran to one side of the path and saw beads of dew running down a stand of cattails; she ran to the other side of the path and saw a man poking holes in the crumbly, dark soil at the base of a great, gnarly bush. It was all Mama and Daddy could do to keep up with her as she scuttled down the path and leaned over the chain. "Is that a tree?!" she screamed, pointing at something tall and with gracefully drooping limbs.
A man standing just beyond the chains smiled. "That's a weeping willow, young lady," he said. "Specifically, Weeping Willow Salix babylonica 'Pendula', a cultivar of the family. Rather difficult to grow in these humid conditions, but we work with what we have."
"Trees have names?" marveled Rosemary.
"They certainly do," said the gardener seriously. "They also have family histories. This one is, oh, a bit like a great-grandmother; she's given birth to many other sorts of willow, and they all carry on her line in their own way." But Rosemary wasn't listening; she was skipping down the row and looking at something else.
There was so many wonders to see, Mama and Daddy were caught up in the sights and sounds and smells of the garden and paused to look at the things around them. Rosemary looked too, but her span of attention wasn't as long as an adult's, so it was no wonder that she got ahead of her parents along the path, giddy and wide-eyed and panting for breath. She found herself looking at a new kind of tree, graceful and modest in size, with smooth bark and oval leaves, and delicate pink blossoms. Rosemary spelled out the sign staked in the black wet loam under the tree:
MALUS DOMESTICA
"Apple Tree"
(Not yet in fruiting season)
Rosemary's mouth dropped. This was an apple tree. It was a tree just like the one in her book.
Rosemary summoned her courage. "Hello," she said shyly. The tree didn't respond. This wasn't what Rosemary had expected. She had expected that the apple tree would say hello back. After all, the tree talked to the boy in her book. It was a very friendly tree; sometimes it scooped the boy up and swung him in its branches. This tree, it seemed, was not nearly so friendly.
"Hello?" Rosemary repeated, pressing up against the chain. The tree still said nothing. There was a gentle breeze in this hab, and the blossoms fluttered gently in the wind. An aroma came off of the blossoms that Rosemary found enticing.
Rosemary looked at the trunk of the tree. It was knotted and had a few branches down low. She remembered that the boy, in her book, liked to climb the tree. This was a kind of game that the tree favored; surely it wouldn't mind her climbing it too? Rosemary ducked under the chain and plowed her way through the loose soil, making the white booties of her sterile suit dark and stained. Rosemary went right up to the tree and felt its trunk. It felt smooth and solid and good under her hands.
"I'm going to climb you now," Rosemary said. She wrapped her hands around the trunk as high as she could reach, then jumped up and squeezed the tree's trunk between her knees. Following the primate instincts of her species, Rosemary began to awkwardly shinny her way up the tree. In the distance she heard cries of alarm, but she was so intent on what she was doing that she didn't think to respond.
Higher and higher Rosemary climbed, until she reached one of the large limbs of the tree. This jutted out at an angle from the trunk. It seemed firm and steady, and capable of supporting her weight. Rosemary thought of the boy swinging from the tree's limbs in her book. That had always seemed like fun. Spreading her body out as far as she could along the limb, she reached her arms out to pull herself further out along the limb.
"No! don't do that!" shouted one of the gardeners, galloping through the plantings and kicking up huge clods of dirt as he ran. "The tree's not mature enough! Please, no!..."
Mama and Daddy realized that Rosemary was missing and ran down the path calling after her. Other gardeners responded too and began running through the hab at top speed, all them zeroing in on the apple tree. But they were all too late. With a terrible cracking sound, Rosemary fell to the ground in a heap with the leafy, blossomed limb of the apple tree.
Mama and Daddy reached her first. The ground wasn't hard, and Rosemary seemed unharmed, but she was crying. "No apples," she sobbed. "The tree didn't have any apples for me."
Daddy got up and surveyed the tree. It wasn't the limb that had given way, it was the entire tree. The bottom of the thing, where it joined to the earth, had cracked open, and the whole tree had toppled as a unit. Daddy inspected the base. There was no wood there, only cracked PVC piping, and expanded metal mesh holding plaster, and a lacquered skin. Tubes of colored liquid oozed their contents on the ground – perfumes. The gardeners ran up and drew up short.
Daddy looked at the biodiversity hab workers wordlessly. Their leader's mouth twisted.
"Some…some things just didn't take," he stuttered.
"I killed the tree," howled Rosemary.
Mama smoothed her hair. "No you didn't, sweetheart," she said grimly. "No you didn't."
When Mama got in from her shift running the tiller, she was tired. She was always tired after her shift; Papa said running the tiller was hard work, sweating all day in a dirtsuit, keeping the tiller from destroying itself, keeping the tiller from chewing anybody's arm off, stuffing as much soil into the giant machine as you could. And there was always the chance that your dirtsuit's seals wouldn't be quite tight enough, and you'd get some dirt inside, and then you'd have to scrub for hours if you didn't want to get burns or get sick and die. Mama worked at her shift for twelve hours, and she was tired and ready for a break, and then it was Daddy's turn to suit up for tiller duty.
When Mama got off shift was Rosemary's bedtime. While Daddy was strapping on the various layers of his dirtsuit and heading for the hablock, Mama was reading Rosemary her bedtime story. They had nine books to read to Rosemary, the old kind, made of paper, with pictures in all kinds of colors that you didn't see in the world any more. Mama and Daddy had paid dearly for those books, in real dollars, not scrip, and Rosemary loved them. Those were special times, with the faintly blue light of the PEREZ, LUCIA B2 family habmodule spreading a comfortable glow through the bunkroom, snuggled up with Mama under the covers. Mama smelled faintly of sweat and neutralizer and home-soap, the green kind that they made in buckets. Mama would read to Rosemary, even though she was very tired, and Rosemary would listen and point at the pictures and ask questions.
That one night Mama was reading one of Rosemary's favorites. It was called _The_Giving_Tree_. Rosemary liked it because the boy in the story had a friend who took care of her, just like Mama and Daddy did. This friend was very tall and strange, with long limbs of an unusual shape, and it didn't seem to have anything like a face. Sometimes the boy climbed up on top of his friend and ate something called 'apples'. Rosemary thought this was funny.
When Mama opened the book, Rosemary pointed to the tree. "Tree," she said.
"That's right," said Mama.
Rosemary squirmed in the bunk, pretending to climb up Mama and eat her apples.
"What are you doing, honey?" Mama asked wearily.
"I'm eating your apples, Mama," Rosemary replied.
"Silly girl, I don't have any apples. I'm not a tree," Mama explained.
Rosemary squirmed back down and asked Mama a question she'd been thinking about for a long time. "What's a tree?" she asked.
Mama was quiet for a moment. "It's a kind of living thing, honey," she said. "We don’t see them so much anymore."
Mama seemed sad. Any time something came up from before when Rosemary was born, Mama and Daddy would become sad; it made Rosemary uneasy. "Were they nice?"
"Yes, honey. I liked trees very much. They had green leaves, just like in this picture, and they were very tall. They grew straight up out of the ground and made nice smells."
That confused Rosemary even more. When she thought of things growing up out of the ground, she thought of twisted bits of iron and old signposts bent almost double – nothing nice or green there. And the thought of smelling anything outside, where one wore an airsuit all the time, was ridiculous. She settled down and let Mama read her the rest of the book. When it was done, she kissed the picture on the cover. "Nice tree," she said, and went to sleep.
The next morning when Daddy got off his shift, he and Mama had a fight. Well, not a fight exactly; it was a discussion, and it wasn't loud, but in the close confines of the family habmodule it was impossible not to hear her parents' tension and disagreement.
"She's never seen a tree," Mama said. "She has no idea what a tree is. She's never had any sense of the world we lost."
"So what?" said Daddy. "We play the hand we're dealt."
"I know that! do you think I don't know that?" Mama's voice was tight and angry. "But it's the duty of a parent to dream of giving their kids something better."
"But it's so much money," Daddy protested. "And for what? A few hours of dreaming about something that's gone and that may never come back again?"
"Don't you dare say that," said Mama. "You don't have to dream for our daughter, but if you don't, I'm going to do it for the both of us."
"Be practical!" It was Daddy's turn to be angry. "What could we get with that money? Better rations? Better air? Don't you want *that* for your daughter?"
"I want everything my daughter needs to survive," Mama said flatly. And with that the fight was over. Rosemary continued playing with the two bolts that she pretended were tillers, chewing up the top fifty feet of the earth's soil, neutralizing it chemically and spitting it out the back end. She had no idea what her parents had been talking about, and in minutes she forgot the fight had ever happened.
**
But in two days' time something unusual happened – both Mama and Daddy were off work. Mama was all smiles.
"Guess what, sweetheart," she said, dressing Rosemary in her lightweight clothes. "Today is a special treat. We're going to go on a trip together."
"We're going outside the hab?" Rosemary started hopping around. She was very excited; going outside the hab was something she had only done twice in her life. Nothing particularly interesting had happened on either trip, but anything that involved suiting up and leaving the hab was a break in the routine that Rosemary found most welcome.
Mama dressed Rosemary in her half-size airsuit with the word JUVENILE stenciled on the back. Unlike the dirtsuit there were no layers of exo, no cooling rig, no nuclear seals and no absorbents. There was a fabric unitard with matching booties and gloves, a black shiny plastic overcoat that came down to past her knees, thick rubber galoshes with waterproof gaiters sealing the top, and environmental gloves made of the same material. Then there was the facemask, with its close-fitting straps and gaskets, and the long hooded waterproof hat that slung over the top of everything. Finally there was the air filtration unit which strapped to Rosemary's back. It was all heavy and itchy and Rosemary complained, but not too much – she was going to go outside.
Mama and Daddy put on their own airsuits and checked each other's seals mechanically before leaving the family habmodule. They waved to a few neighbors as they strolled down the B2 hab's center corridor, exchanging a few friendly words through the hiss of the rebreather unit, and stepped to the hablock. Mama held Rosemary's hand on the left side and Daddy held the other on the right, and Rosemary swung between them as they walked.
The B2 hablock cycled and they were outside. Rosemary shouted with delight; it was a good day, with plenty of light diffusing through the dust; they could see clear across to the B3 hab, a hundred feet away, a brown and slate-grey Quonset hut silhouette seen dimly through the dusty windswept air. Rosemary jumped up and down, and admired the way her boots left prints in the thick dust that covered the ground despite the strong winds.
Daddy took Rosemary's hand again and led her around the corner of the B2 hab. There was a cat waiting for them – a low tread-wheeled tractor towing a dozen cars with dusted-over plastic sheet coverings. Mama and the cat's driver had a conversation, and money changed hands. The three of them piled into an empty car, and Rosemary snuggled up between Mama and Daddy.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
"We're going to a very special place," said Mama. "Before you were born, the world was different. Some people wanted to remember what things were like before it changed. So, they made a place called a museum. Inside things are like the way they were … before."
Rosemary looked up at Mama. "Before what?" she asked.
"Just before," said Daddy.
The cat rattled and bumped over the dusty ground. The plastic was too dusty to see much of anything outside; Rosemary thought she saw the hulk of an old machine half-covered in the grey dirt, but it was hard to say what it was that she had seen.
The cat drove for twenty minutes and then pulled to a lurching halt. Mama and Daddy and Rosemary piled out of the car, stepping down to the ground awkward in their cumbersome airsuits. Rosemary wiped the dust from her facemask and looked up at the stencils on the side of a huge gunmetal-grey building. They read:
BIODIVERSITY HABITAT
46YR3-AA
CLASS 5 CONTAINMENT
More money changed hands outside the hablock, and then they went inside. But this was like going through no hablock Rosemary had ever been through. There were multiple levels of decontamination and washdown and disinfection. Their airsuits were stripped at the first level, tagged and bagged, and placed in numbered lockers; each of them had to go through two sorts of showers, one of which where they had to wear special goggles and noseplugs and mouthpieces; they had to walk through scanners and allow men to pass batons over every inch of their bodies. Daddy was delayed for several minutes while his fingernails were efficiently scraped by a mean-looking lady wearing gauze over her mouth. But finally they were issued jumpsuits of bright white cloth and they were allowed to pass into the museum.
When the inner lock opened, a wall of humid air hit Rosemary in the face. Along with it came a wave of unfamiliar smells – molds, humus, wet soil. The air felt heavy in Rosemary's lungs, and her eyes started to water.
They stepped out onto the catwalk. Below them spread a wonderland. Trees of all sorts spread limbs of thick, leafy branches over neatly manicured plantings. Rows of hedges were being trimmed by men in white cleanroom suits. There were lawns of grasses, dewy from the spray of a sprinkler that dutifully scuttled, spiderlike, from position to position. Growths of daffodils and gardenias were artfully arranged in attractive beds, featuring flowers of all different sorts of colors – many of which Rosemary had never seen. And through it all, pebbled paths wound where visitors could observe the plants up close.
Daddy turned to Rosemary and smiled. "Shall we go down and see them a little better?" he said.
"Yes, please!" Rosemary practically danced down the spiral staircase that led to the floor of the arboretum.
The paths were hemmed in with stanchions supporting delicate chains; signs were hung on them saying PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE PLANTS. Workers with hoses squabbled over the most optimal pattern for distributing water. The water that came out of the hoses seemed completely transparent and there was no metallic tang in the air. Rosemary ran to one side of the path and saw beads of dew running down a stand of cattails; she ran to the other side of the path and saw a man poking holes in the crumbly, dark soil at the base of a great, gnarly bush. It was all Mama and Daddy could do to keep up with her as she scuttled down the path and leaned over the chain. "Is that a tree?!" she screamed, pointing at something tall and with gracefully drooping limbs.
A man standing just beyond the chains smiled. "That's a weeping willow, young lady," he said. "Specifically, Weeping Willow Salix babylonica 'Pendula', a cultivar of the family. Rather difficult to grow in these humid conditions, but we work with what we have."
"Trees have names?" marveled Rosemary.
"They certainly do," said the gardener seriously. "They also have family histories. This one is, oh, a bit like a great-grandmother; she's given birth to many other sorts of willow, and they all carry on her line in their own way." But Rosemary wasn't listening; she was skipping down the row and looking at something else.
There was so many wonders to see, Mama and Daddy were caught up in the sights and sounds and smells of the garden and paused to look at the things around them. Rosemary looked too, but her span of attention wasn't as long as an adult's, so it was no wonder that she got ahead of her parents along the path, giddy and wide-eyed and panting for breath. She found herself looking at a new kind of tree, graceful and modest in size, with smooth bark and oval leaves, and delicate pink blossoms. Rosemary spelled out the sign staked in the black wet loam under the tree:
MALUS DOMESTICA
"Apple Tree"
(Not yet in fruiting season)
Rosemary's mouth dropped. This was an apple tree. It was a tree just like the one in her book.
Rosemary summoned her courage. "Hello," she said shyly. The tree didn't respond. This wasn't what Rosemary had expected. She had expected that the apple tree would say hello back. After all, the tree talked to the boy in her book. It was a very friendly tree; sometimes it scooped the boy up and swung him in its branches. This tree, it seemed, was not nearly so friendly.
"Hello?" Rosemary repeated, pressing up against the chain. The tree still said nothing. There was a gentle breeze in this hab, and the blossoms fluttered gently in the wind. An aroma came off of the blossoms that Rosemary found enticing.
Rosemary looked at the trunk of the tree. It was knotted and had a few branches down low. She remembered that the boy, in her book, liked to climb the tree. This was a kind of game that the tree favored; surely it wouldn't mind her climbing it too? Rosemary ducked under the chain and plowed her way through the loose soil, making the white booties of her sterile suit dark and stained. Rosemary went right up to the tree and felt its trunk. It felt smooth and solid and good under her hands.
"I'm going to climb you now," Rosemary said. She wrapped her hands around the trunk as high as she could reach, then jumped up and squeezed the tree's trunk between her knees. Following the primate instincts of her species, Rosemary began to awkwardly shinny her way up the tree. In the distance she heard cries of alarm, but she was so intent on what she was doing that she didn't think to respond.
Higher and higher Rosemary climbed, until she reached one of the large limbs of the tree. This jutted out at an angle from the trunk. It seemed firm and steady, and capable of supporting her weight. Rosemary thought of the boy swinging from the tree's limbs in her book. That had always seemed like fun. Spreading her body out as far as she could along the limb, she reached her arms out to pull herself further out along the limb.
"No! don't do that!" shouted one of the gardeners, galloping through the plantings and kicking up huge clods of dirt as he ran. "The tree's not mature enough! Please, no!..."
Mama and Daddy realized that Rosemary was missing and ran down the path calling after her. Other gardeners responded too and began running through the hab at top speed, all them zeroing in on the apple tree. But they were all too late. With a terrible cracking sound, Rosemary fell to the ground in a heap with the leafy, blossomed limb of the apple tree.
Mama and Daddy reached her first. The ground wasn't hard, and Rosemary seemed unharmed, but she was crying. "No apples," she sobbed. "The tree didn't have any apples for me."
Daddy got up and surveyed the tree. It wasn't the limb that had given way, it was the entire tree. The bottom of the thing, where it joined to the earth, had cracked open, and the whole tree had toppled as a unit. Daddy inspected the base. There was no wood there, only cracked PVC piping, and expanded metal mesh holding plaster, and a lacquered skin. Tubes of colored liquid oozed their contents on the ground – perfumes. The gardeners ran up and drew up short.
Daddy looked at the biodiversity hab workers wordlessly. Their leader's mouth twisted.
"Some…some things just didn't take," he stuttered.
"I killed the tree," howled Rosemary.
Mama smoothed her hair. "No you didn't, sweetheart," she said grimly. "No you didn't."
