The spring rites are an old custom in Yinchuan. Before the equinox the whole village gathers in my shade to honor the soil, so that the year may have a beginning. In the old years the rites were for me — they hung red cloth on my branches and asked for children, for rain, for travelers to come home. Those cloths rotted on my lowest branches, season on season, like another kind of leaf. Later the people stopped honoring me and honored the soil instead, and after the soil they would honor me a little, "for good measure," as they said. This year He Song's Returning Society made the rites bigger than they had ever been.
He Song stood at the head of the crowd, and his voice was steady. Do not be afraid of the lights-out, he told them. He had worked it out, he said. The star-fade is not death; it is a door opening. The door is under Da Qing. When the end comes, the world will not be gone; the people will be gone — gone back, each to the place they came from. As he spoke he held up an old cone he had picked up from another tree, decades ago. The knocker on the door, he called it.
Half the village believed him and half did not. Those who believed came for the comfort; those who did not came for the bustle. Only Meng Guan stood far out at the edge of the crowd, his star-rod aimed at the sky, as though proofreading He Song's words against the heavens. He believes in spectral lines. He believes in the measure, and in the stars he has watched for thirty years. He never comes near me — as if standing too close would spoil the measurement.
I have been made a god before. More than once.
In the age of the cloths, women tied red cloth to my branches and asked me to give them children. Later someone cut a niche into my trunk and set a clay figure in it, and incense blackened half my body. Then came the cords — red strings tied to my low branches, each one a wish, and when the wisher left, the string stayed and kept the wish for me. Last came the carving. People took knives to my bark and cut names, cut the word peace, cut the names of their dead children. The scars healed and became patterns no other tree wears. Human beings believe trees have no memory, and so they carve their memory into a tree's body.
They do not know that those carvings are my other kind of growth ring. I remember each one — who made it, and why, and with which hand.
I have never struggled against being made a god. I cannot, and I would not. A god has one flaw they do not know about: whatever is taken for a god hears no true words. People perform in front of a god. The human being who prays to a god and the human being alone in a room are two different species. I stay in this world in order to hear the true words. So I grew myself into the one shape that does not look like it listens. A tree. No one lies in front of a tree. They think it is dead, and in front of the dead thing they pour out the truest selves they have.
I worked this out three hundred million years ago: the highest must stand at the bottom, or it will not see everything.
Human beings believe height is up there. They build towers, they climb ladders, they set their gods on the highest places, certain that nearer the sky is nearer the truth. But the sky is a liar — every star they see is years out of date. The true height is mine: roots in the deepest soil, crown at the low place where the smallest creature lifts its head, so that everything alive walks over me.
Every creature that has crossed this valley has crossed me, and I have kept the weight of all of them: the hooves of the age of long grass, the paws of the age of snow, and now the bare feet and straw sandals of the age of lamps. They do not look down when they walk over my roots. They are looking ahead, at the day, at the field, at the roof they are walking toward. I do not mind. I am not there to be seen. I am there to be under.
I have watched human beings for a long time. I watched them come down from all fours, learn fire, make lamps of fire and stars of lamps, and finally invent a rod that can count the stars. They are a nest of remarkable little things. What is remarkable about them is this: other animals live for their own lifetime. Human beings do not. Half of a human life is lived for people who are not born yet.
They plant trees for people who will not be grown for a hundred years.
No other animal does this. Other animals do not know what "later" is. Human beings know. For that invisible later they save grain, write books, quarrel, build roads, make laws. They invented tomorrow, and then they mortgaged themselves to it: their sins to tomorrow's repentance, their seed to next year's field, their children to the grown-ups they will become. They live like a tree growing upside down — crown aimed at the sky it cannot reach, roots standing on the shade that feeds it. It is the most magnificent thing about them and the most pitiful: they give everything to tomorrow, and almost nothing to today.
And yet I will say it. A species that plants trees for the unborn deserves to be watched all the way through. That is the best sentence they have ever taught me. Those before planted the tree; those after rest in its shade. They said it about themselves, and they did not know they had said the whole doctrine of my three hundred million years.
He Song finished. The crowd scattered. There was more red cloth on my low branches than in any year I can remember.
The rites left their weight on me the way rites always have. Red cloth is not heavy; I have held heavier snows on those branches. But a village's whole hope, laid down on one tree, is heavy in a different currency, and I have carried that currency so long that I have learned to mistake it for the weather. This year it was heavier than I could mistake. He Song had aimed it. The hope was no longer for rain, or for sons, or for travelers coming home; it had been lifted off all those small things and pointed at the sky itself, and the village had chosen me to hold it against the sky. That is what a god is for, in the end. Not for granting. For holding.
Holding is the older office. A god may answer, or may not; a tree has never answered, and has never needed to be forgiven for it. What I hold, I hold without interest, and what I hold longest is not the hope itself. It is the hope's shape — the exact weight of a village turning its face toward something, year after year, and calling it sky.
Xing had not listened to any of it. She climbed up over the heads of the crowd to her old place, the fork of my third branch, and sat there with her feet hanging, watching the people below the way you watch an anthill. After a while she said, "Da Qing — from up here the village looks like a leaf. He Song and the rest of them are the veins on the leaf."
She paused. Her voice went lower, as though she were afraid of being heard.
"Da Qing — if you can hear me, drop one leaf for me to see."
The leaves on my branches live for decades. They fall when they are meant to fall — for the wind, for age, for autumn. None of them has ever fallen for anyone. She sat in that high fork and waited for a leaf that would fall for her. The wind passed. Nothing fell. Another wind passed. Still nothing. She sighed and said, "I knew it." She climbed down two steps, then stopped, and turned back to face a tree that had not moved, and said quietly, "It's all right. Whether you can hear me or not — you're there."
Three hundred and twenty million years, and for the first time I wanted to answer.
I wanted a leaf to fall. I wanted her to know that I had heard. Not one leaf in my whole crown knows how to fall for someone; they have never learned. Neither have I. But suddenly the leaves on my branches were heavier — as though someone had laid a sentence, one that was about to be spoken, on every single one of them.