Now that he was old, Magnus was exceedingly glad that the empire of the gray had been so much reduced. The one good thing to be said for the vast black landscapes of modern agri-industry was that they had liberated space for the limited restoration of the greenery of Ancient Nature. Magnus was now old for the third time, and he knew that this time would be the last. He was glad enough and wise enough to accept that truth; he was not one of those vainglorious individuals who would dare anything and everything in the usually futile pursuit of a fourth youth.

The lessons of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries had been hard, but the limits of inorganic nanotechnology had finally been recognized and admitted by his own generation. Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and members of the new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming their second century of hopefully eternal youth instead of climbing out of slightly protracted adolescence. Magnus was not unduly resentful of the fact that he had been born too soon to benefit from Zaman engineering, however; nor did he begrudge the fact that he had lived to see the advent of the New Human Race while still confined to the tattered flesh of the Old, doomed to become a thing of nanotech thread and patches.

Magnus knew that there were many people in the world—most of them younger by far than he—who considered the reborn wilderness to be an artifact of nostalgia, a brief folly of the MegaMall’s Dominant Shareholders, but he was convinced that the work he was doing would provide a legacy for which the new inheritors of the earth would be deeply grateful. He would die, and soon, but the work to which he had dedicated his life would go on. The forest would survive. Alien to man it might be, but man would protect it nevertheless. The members of the New Human Race had even elected to call themselves Naturals. Gaean Mystics they were not, but at heart—or so Magnus believed—every true human was a Gaean in essence. The inheritors of Earth would guard their heritage far better than his own kind ever had.

As these thoughts wandered across his mind, Magnus had to blink a tear from the corner of his left eye. He immediately suffered a sudden stab of doubt, which was not so easily blinked away. He could not help but recall the fact that many people considered him to be an obsessive fool, not merely a lunatic but—and this was surely the final insult—a harmless lunatic.

“In the empire of the ecosphere, Magnus,” a once-valued colleague had said to him, only a few weeks before, “everything is controlled. It has to be. What you call ‘wilderness’ was born from the gene banks which conserved DNA from the world which existed before the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. It flourishes by our permission, entirely subject to our guidance. Its freedom is merely the result of our refusal fully to exercise our ecological hegemony. You’re fooling yourself if you think that it’s Ancient Nature reborn, in any meaningful sense. Ancient Nature began to die with the first discovery of agriculture and ended its long torment in the years before the Crash. Your so-called wilderness is at best a ghost and at worst a mere echo.” “I know and understand all that,” Magnus now took leave to reply, exercising his inalienable right to l’esprit de I’escaller. “I am not a fool—I merely recognize both the necessity and the propriety of returning these tracts of land to the dominion of natural selection. It is a wholly desirable act of expiation, whose efficacy is clearly displayed by the results of the biodiversity surveys.” “It’s a shallow gesture,” the colleague had told him, in response to a less carefully formulated reply. “It’s a temporary indulgence—a brief guilt trip whose futility will be recognized by the New Human Race as soon as its first generation reaches true adulthood. The time has already arrived when forest green is just as much an artifact as SAP black. You can’t halt progress, Magnus.

You can’t turn back the clock. Your forest is a sham, and a temporary folly.” “I’m trying to turn the clock, forward,” Magnus had not thought to say at the time. “What I’m doing is progress. The forest is forever, and its flesh is as real as its soul.” And yet, he could not deny that all the forest trees whose company he preferred to that of his fellow men had been planted within his own lifetime. The seeds from which they were grown had come from gene banks: the static arks that had been hastily stocked in the twenty-first century, before the Greenhouse Crisis had sent a second Deluge to devastate the lowlands of civilization. The young trees had required careful protection and assiduous nurture for decades before they could be left to fend for themselves. The re-creation of wilderness had been, in its fashion, as delicate a task as any exercise in Creation of the kind which hundreds of hubristic engineers were now carrying out in the real and artificial islands of the vast Pacific.

In spite of all this, Magnus knew that he must somehow have faith in the assertion that what surrounded him, as he slept beneath the stars, really was a part of the authentic soul of the world. He had to believe that the gene banks had merely been a phase in an evolutionary story that stretched back from the present to the magical day when life had first ventured forth from the littoral zones of the primordial ocean to embrace the land.

Like all good Gaeans, Magnus preferred to think of that adventure as an “embrace”; he had always hated to hear it described as a “conquest.” Had he not been assailed by such troublesome doubts, Magnus would not have been delighted to receive an unexpected visitor—but it happened that he was assailed by doubts on that particular night, and that his visitor brought welcome relief.

When Magnus first heard the noise of the newcomer’s approach, he could not help the reflexive twitch of his hand which impelled it toward the place where his dart gun lay hidden, but he suppressed the impulse readily enough. Within the dome, he was invulnerable to attack by any creature which had only teeth and claws to use as weapons. When he saw that the approaching figure was a human woman, however, a different set of reflexes was immediately invoked, and he tumbled from his bed with indecent haste.

By the time the woman had come through the protective undergrowth, Magnus had framed his protests, but they were halfhearted, motivated by shame that she should have come upon him naked in a transparent tent rather than by annoyance at the violation of his privacy.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said when he had let her in—having partly clothed himself, although he still felt more than a little exposed. “It’s dangerous to walk through the forest by night.” “I was lonely,” she said. “My dome’s only a couple of kilometers from yours, and it seemed foolish to endure the loneliness when company was so close to hand. By day, the nature of our work confines us to our own tracts, but that’s no reason why we can’t get together in our own time. There is a track, after all—it’s not as if I had to hack my way through thorny bushes and sticky creepers with a machete. I would have called to tell you I was coming, but that damned silver of yours wouldn’t let me through. You really should instruct it to allow a few exceptions.” Magnus didn’t have the heart to tell her that if he had been disposed to file a list of people exempted from the silver’s stalling strategy, her name would not have been among them. She was undeniably lovely—her eyes were perfectly delightful, her flowing hair absolutely magnificent—but he hardly knew her. He had never seen her at the base, nor had he even noticed her name in any of the documents that flitted across his busy screens. Had she not taken it into her head to begin making these mercifully infrequent journeys from her LSP tent to his, he would probably never have become aware of her existence, let alone made love to her. But even in the depths of his beloved forest he could take comfort from genuine human warmth, and she did seem genuine, in that naive fashion that only the authentically young could manifest.