It was a sight eerily alien, he thought.
“It’s not what I was expecting,” he admitted to Nina Ricci.
She looked at him. “You haven’t seen pictures of them before?”
He shook his head. “I wanted to come to this project fresh, with no preconceived views of what I was about to see. It sometimes helps me to see things from a new, fresh angle.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“I’m not sure. It’s visually arresting. Very alien. I wonder what it’d be like to live in one of those things?”
“That’s what I hope to find out when I interview the first people selected for the honour.”
He glanced at her. “And who are they?”
“Coastal farmers, mainly, and fisher-folk. The people who lost everything in the last tsunami.”
“Makes sense. But with the proscription on fishing…?”
“The Serene found occupations for everyone in a profession hit by the charea. The fisher-folk became farmers, along with many of the world’s formerly unemployed.”
He looked at the bristling city of alien trees. “And they farm what…?”
“See the vast green area at the base of each tree?” She pointed. “From a distance, the arboreal city appears closely packed, but in actual fact there is something like a kilometre between each one. This makes for a lot of land to farm. Also, see those platforms climbing the towers in a helical formation?”
“I was wondering what they were.”
“Well, I suppose you might call them fields, though it would be something of a misnomer. They grow micro-protein spores that are processed into a high protein food — each platform provides sufficient food to supply its section of the tower’s inhabitants all the year round. Not that this is what they solely live on. Much of the processed spores are exported — I’m sure you’ve eaten it at some point.”
“And these spores are alien?”
She nodded. “But tailored to our metabolisms.”
The monotrain eased itself into a station unlike any other Allen had experienced. It was as if the train had come to an unscheduled halt in the country. He looked through the window at a greensward rolling away from the train, planted with regimented flower-beds and crossed by raised timber walkways. Only a sign, ‘Welcome to Fujiyama Arboreal City,’ told him that this was where the journey terminated.
They left the train and Allen found that many of the passengers were, like Nina and himself, accredited journalists and photographers. They were divided into small groups of four or five individuals and allotted a smiling, punctilious Japanese guide.
The plan was to tour the fields between the towers first, have a light meal in an al fresco cafeteria, and then visit one of the towers itself.
Allen was already shooting, then pausing between shots to marvel at the city. It was as if he’d been transported to the surface of some planet light years away. The trees towered overhead, taller than any structure he’d experienced, diminishing to vanishing points in the blue, cloudless sky.
The base of each dwelling tree was surrounded by a margin of garden, beyond which the farms proper began. The guide conducted them on a tour of the farms, transporting them on the raised timber walkway in small electric buggies. She gave a running commentary, detailing crop yields and growing patterns, which Allen recorded on his softscreen.
They motored above the level of the fields, passing human workers and automated pickers, silver spider-like robots with busy, multiple appendages.
“Each worker is required to put in a shift of four hours a day,” their guide said. “The rest of their time is free to do with as they wish. Each city tower is equipped with recreational facilities, schools, art colleges, etcetera, as you will see later.”
There was only so much he could photograph from the buggy. What he was cataloguing here was no more than what every other photo-journalist was getting; he decided that at some point during lunch he would slip off and snap some unofficial shots.
“There are more than two hundred city trees in the Fujiyama basin,” their guide explained. “Each tree is inhabited by approximately ten thousand citizens, though such are the dimensions of each tree that living accommodation is more than spacious.”
In a whispered aside to Nina, Allen said, “I thought studies done in the last century concluded that high-rise living was far from beneficial?”
She whispered in return, “I think that was due more to socio-economic factors than to the actual type of habitation, Geoff. If you put poor people in a confined space anywhere on Earth, with inadequate amenities and low employment… well, what would you expect the conditions to be like?”
He nodded. A cursory examination of the workers in the fields — along with what the guide had said about the living regimes here — suggested that conditions in the arboreal city were far preferable to the lives these people had led before they were relocated here.
The buggy arrived at a covered circular area between four rearing tress. Allen made out people eating at low tables and realised that he was hungry.
He, Nina, the guide and the three others in their group left the buggy and strolled across to the cafeteria. They sat cross-legged at a low table and scanned the menu.
They ate a surprisingly good seaweed salad with yadha — the local name for the spicy processed spores — accompanied by another local speciality, a sweet beer again derived from the alien spores.
Allen finished his beer and was about to tell Nina that he intended to slip off to get some ‘local colour’ shots, when she restrained him with a hand on his arm and said, “I have seen a friend over there–” she indicated a nearby table “–I would like you to meet. She too is a representative of the Serene.”
Allen nodded, a little impatient at the delay. Nina rose from the low table, crossed the cafeteria and spoke to an Indian woman in her mid-twenties. The Indian rose with the sinuous grace of an uncoiling cobra and followed Nina back to Allen’s table.
She sat down and smiled at him as Nina made the introductions. “Geoff Allen, this is Ana Devi, from India.”
Ana Devi gave him a dazzlingly white smile and they shook hands. “Delighted to meet you, Mr Allen,” she said.
The woman had a curiously handsome face that might, in other circumstances, be seen as beautiful. He saw strength in her eyes and line of jaw, a certain rawness that spoke to him of lowly origins and a hard childhood.
Nina murmured, “Geoff, too, is a representative.”
Ana laughed and said to him, “Why am I not in the least bit surprised, Mr Allen? Nina makes it her duty to collect us, for some reason — is that not so, Nina?”
“Well, in the interest of possible future stories…”
“You will one day write about us, no?” Ana asked. “My story would fill a book, and maybe even two. Oh, some of the tales I could tell you!”
Allen looked at Nina. “How many others have you traced?”
She pursed her lips. “Perhaps a dozen. It’s not that difficult.”
Ana rocked her head in amazement. “Do you hear her? ‘Not that difficult’! But Nina has probably told you that she has a photographic memory, and can recall the face of everyone she saw ten years ago when we came together in the Serene’s starships.”
“So all I have to do now is keep a close eye out for those faces when we come to our senses after our ‘missions’,” Nina explained.
Ana looked at Allen. “You are a photographer, no?”
Allen told her something about his life and work, and Ana stared at him with massive brown eyes and said, “Ah, Shropshire. I would one day love to visit that county. Wasn’t there a poet…?” Her wide brow corrugated in concentration.