The Unasked Valley
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The survey team found the first tree in a valley that shouldn't exist, growing alone from bare granite. Its rings were countable: one hundred and forty-seven, each perfectly uniform. Beneath it, no roots. Around it, no soil. When they cut a sample, the wood wept something too thick for sap, too thin for resin. It dried clear and tasteless on their tongues. They marked the coordinates and moved on. That night, all three dreamed of branching paths, of choices they hadn't made, of themselves walking elsewhere. In the morning, their maps showed four days of travel where they remembered five. They did not speak of it. They were professionals. But they noted, privately, that the valley had no name in any record they could find, though the satellite imagery was clear and had been for decades. Something had simply never been asked about it before. The night after that, they slept with their rifles cocked. The next day they hiked for hours before finding another stand of trees. In that valley there were no trails. Ablebodied travelers wisely bypassed the whole range of unsolved mysteries. Chris was bitten by a shrub. They lit an unreliable radio on fire. Jerry's watch stopped, skipped, and froze for most of a day like a turned-off computer. And still they found trees. About two-thirds of them were twenty feet tall when they saw them, and they suspected they were grown as shade trees, deliberately planted around some kind of plant or plantlike object, around something big, sturdy, and livable--if only anyone had ever mentioned it. After the twentieth tree they stopped adding them to paper maps. They stopped using GPS. At each tree, they took increasingly careful soil samples in sealed containers and made the exhausting climb to the next one. And they concluded that the upward slopes of the valleys did in fact blank those Web pages that they'd hoped would answer their questions, but none blanked as thoroughly as the one to the west. Whatever mysteries it held had not been posted, documented, or even written. That night, Jerry comforted Chris at a campsite in the lee of a tree so big that Chris found its diameter hard to grasp. Its prostrate roots ran far down through dirt and sandstone and limestone made porous by groundwater; its foliage spread for a quarter of a mile, shadowing the wooded ridges above and the pine fields around it for more than a half mile in all directions. Chris's own breath came shorter as he looked upward, while Jerry loosed from between his parted lips the same dull flapping noise that all those saplings had made. Around the fire, they spoke of nothing other than the trivial details of their lives so far: wives and families, hobbies and preferred adverbs. Their seriousness paled even further into the singularity of sound and shadow, and within an hour they were asleep in Jerry's jacket. With the coming daylight, their hypotheses grew more entrenched. Wide open space: wide open signification. Either there was some logical reason for the weirdness of this particular valley that would interchange with others not so far distant, or else knowledge flowed organically, individually. The land was sentient somehow, or maybe every biologist on the planet had just been wilfully blind to something obvious. The food in their packs grew stale; the water tasted like tools. Adam ate until he was swollen. Chris counted the scales of stones. Jerry lost interest in both predators and prey. Still they pressed upward. As they climbed, the topology and the vegetation changed. By the fifteenth tree, they'd ceased to chatter amongst themselves--not a glimmer of human sound, beyond the wind, broke their immersion under workings of a macroscopic time--and Jerry took to drawing a notation on his compass. When Chris saw him doing this and asked what it meant, he could only say, "Dots and lines and finally another, bigger line that's all I know". Much later that day, directly below a nutshell tree thousands of feet high◆ About the ending
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