Foresters sold wood for money. Foresters were better climbers than most tree-walkers, although many had papio blood in their deep past. But appearances didn’t matter; they regarded both of their civilized cousins as being separate from them. Papio coins were the same as District coins, which made every species equally contemptible in any forester’s eyes.
A colossal burr-tree had been recently carved into lucrative planks, leaving behind a void filled with quiet empty air. The void was where the hunter-ship had taken refuge. To hide from the coronas, its skin was painted a mottled green, and that’s why the ship was hard to see against the trees. But once noticed, it looked out of place, preposterous, probably misplaced. Hunter-ships wanted the open air. Only skilled or drunken pilots dared punch their way through gaps and unbroken walls of foliage, reaching such a remote location. But there it was: corona bladders and bones, human machines and human bodies and human mind—all of that wrapped inside a carefully balanced entity, ten strong mooring lines holding it in place.
If not for its smell and her eyes, and also the endless tiny sounds raining out of it, Quest might well have flown past Bountiful, missing it entirely.
Quest was considerably harder to see than the airship. No unnatural scent leaked from her body, and every sound that she made belonged to the wilderness. Her shrunken form was transparent in places, richly green in others. She was breath and a dream, and maybe a flick of motion in the corner of the most observant, inadequate eye. Three times she had changed positions, gazing into windows and that one open doorway. She once even straddled a mooring line, contemplating making the short climb before slipping inside a space where hiding would be next to impossible.
The urge was resisted, and she retreated.
And then in the next moment, she imagined seven new ways to see what she wanted to see.
The decision was made. The adjacent burr-tree was a scrawnier, light-starved child of the original giant. She spread out along one of its branches and changed her flesh again. Sugar was a treasure to all kinds of mouths, and she made herself look like the sweetest plant in the forest—a rare epiphyte known as the sweetheart. The trickery took time, but she didn’t need perfection. Long before she was finished, ten species of birds and swarms of insects were arriving, greedily feasting on the easy nectars.
The birds celebrated the prize, and people noticed their singing.
A tall man looked down from his cabin’s window. His face was tired and forlorn, but when he stared at the sudden garden, he wiped his mouth and eyes and then his mouth once more.
Then he vanished.
A huge room claimed much of the ship’s belly. That was where the one wide door was propped open, letting motor sounds and voices escape. Suddenly two men came out of the room. They were straddling a small airship, and the airship growled and climbed towards Quest and then slipped past her.
One of the men was the old slayer, Merit.
She watched Merit until he was gone, and then she watched him again in her memory. Meanwhile the large man had returned to the cabin window, opening its glass, talking with a voice that was both soft and loud.
“I want to tell you something,” he said.
Diamond approached the window. He was crying without crying. His face was dry, those pale eyes free of tears, but everything about the boy looked miserable, worn and sorry and weak.
That pain shook Quest.
“What, Master?” asked Diamond.
Quest had seen the tall man long ago, riding with the boy inside the Happenstance. She found that memory and subsequent mentions of the boy’s teacher, which meant that this must be Master Nissim.
“What do you want to tell me?”
“That I’m sorry, for you and for your family,” said Nissim.
Diamond leaned against the cabin wall. His curly hair felt the breeze, lifting and twisting.
“For everyone, this is brutal,” said Nissim.
The boy gave a slight nod, starting to agree with his teacher. But he said nothing, and wanting to be anywhere else, he looked outside. And that’s when he suddenly found himself staring at the newborn sweetheart.
“Look,” he said.
“What’s that?” Nissim asked.
“Out there. Do you see it, on the branch?”
The man stood behind, following Diamond’s gaze.
Lying, the man said, “Now that you point it out to me, yes.”
“What is it?”
“A blooming sweetheart.”
Diamond was miserable, but his face was changing.
“Anyway,” said the Master. “What I wanted was to apologize.”
“For what?”
“I was slow yesterday. I should have seen Bits for what he was.”
Diamond watched the garden, the gathering birds. Fifty gold-throats made the air sing with their intense wing beats, and then from a high perch, a wild orange-headed monkey proclaimed his dominion over the distant prize.
The boy’s monkey appeared at the window, shouting a competing claim.
Diamond said, “Quiet.”
Perched on the windowsill, his monkey contemplated routes along mooring lines and the zigzagging branches. He didn’t want to be quiet, but there was no easy route to his goal, and the trees were filled with strange monkeys. That’s why the animal curled his upper lip, glowering in silence.
Quest quenched the flow of fake nectars.
“And things might be better now if I’d shot that man as soon as I knew. But I kept forgetting who you are, and I couldn’t shoot.”
The boy was listening, but he was watching the flowers too.
“So I am sorry,” the Master continued. “I am and always will be. But as one of my Masters warned me when I was young, ‘All of us are doing our best and our worst, and it happens at the same time.’ ”
Diamond turned and looked at his teacher, waiting.
Nissim’s face began to cry.
“ ‘Our best and our worst,’ ” the boy said.
“In the face of evil, we can only do so much.”
Diamond nodded solemnly, and then with a quiet, steady voice, he said, “There is no evil, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“Evil doesn’t exist,” he said.
“No,” Nissim muttered. “What are saying? No.”
“But that’s how it is,” the boy said emphatically.
His teacher was puzzled, dubious. Moving toward anger.
“All of us are good,” Diamond said, his words washing across the dying garden. “Everything and everywhere is good too.”
Nissim didn’t like what he just heard. “After yesterday, why do you believe there’s no such thing as evil?”
“I have to think that.”
“Why?”
“A voice told me,” he said.
“Whose voice?”
An odd smile tried to break the boy’s face in two.
“I don’t know,” Diamond said. “But I’ve heard the voice several times, and it only finds me when I’m alone.”
Until two hundred days ago, foresters filled the sprawling camp, but then the trees began to complain. At least that was the public legend: the brave men and women who harvested the wood could also hear the wood, and after so much cutting and carving, the wood had begged for rest. That’s why the foresters packed up their power saws and their shrines, moving to a different portion of the wilderness. One camp was pushed into hibernation while another was brought back into service. Merit knew some of these people. Peculiar, independent souls living between the two human realms, they traded with both species and smuggled for all when the payoff was rich enough. Some of these people were nothing but admirable. But Merit had always suspected that the wood didn’t talk to anyone. Money was what made these communities leap from camp to camp. If easy trees grew scarce, if it took too much work to cut another crop, one region was abandoned in place of another, more profitable site. And the foresters’ spiritual noise was just another way that those who held the saws proved to the world they were special.