Kandis Elliot: Evolution in Guadalajara

The worst leg was the midden at the city limits. We rolled up our windows for sheer self-preservation of lung tissue. Great swells of garbage, trash, street waste, rags, tires, food too rotted even for tourist stands, the slick gleanings of chamber pots, newspapers, tons of dumpster debris, viscid dregs of backyard hen houses, dog houses, goat houses, pumped-out outhouses, all the leavings of two million six hundred thousand human animals and their civilization, whatever the level, poured into the doughnut of offal ringing Guadalajara like a putrefying necklace.

“Step on it, Nezzy. ¡Rapido!”

Inez needed no prodding to speed through the outskirts, past the hundreds of garbage-pickers pawing through unspeakable billowing filth as far as the eye could see. As we crossed the bridge over the chasm and the river into which the city sewers dumped their untreated flows, I looked down in masochistic horror. Even there, people poked through the brown foam, searching for subsistence, those lacking even enough social standing to join the garbage-pickers above, the lowest of human echelons, the putrefaction of the human soul.

And then we were out of it, beyond the city, rising from the Atemajac Valley and up the slopes, going over first one old volcanic mountain and then the next and yet one more. Finally the houses and shacks and fruit stands and new foundations attenuated into mescal-agave fields, the power poles thinned, the sky deepened its blue, and we were at Monte de Manantlan and its forest of two thousand species of non-human life.

The base of the little precious mountain was chewed by ages-old slash-and-burn agriculture, two- and three-acre bites in various stages of slash, burn, crop, or regrowth, looking like a black-to-green patchwork quilt through the distance. Nonetheless, thatched indigeno huts shortly gave way to game trails over which natives roamed to harvest nuts and fruit from wild trees. The canopy was fully closed even halfway up to the weathered, flattened summit. Pines, oaks and magnolias dominated the highest elevations, sub-tropical species, never subjected to freezing, the coldest El Nino weather dropping the nights only to a rare fifty degrees. Every sunfleck hitting the forest floor blossomed with flowers, mostly red tubes visited by hummingbirds. Baskets of orchids and bromeliads and veils of Spanish moss coated old, twisting branches.

Car windows down again, Ziggy, Inez, We, and I took deep, cleansing breaths of pine-scented, warm fresh air, the sweet oxygen-laden breath of Nature. My eyes stung, for the first time without encouragement from any of a thousand aerosol pollutants. What thoughtless ambition, I reflected, could destroy this? What gain could outmeasure this?

So thick; it seemed so thick and lush that for a long moment I thought I was seeing two forests, superimposed one on another. Two slides stuck in the projector, of entirely different forests: a bright one I knew, a dark one I didn’t. In the trees bounced both a rainbow-winged mot-mot and shadows of unfocused phantasms. Suddenly giddy, I closed my eyes and tried to quell a buzzing in my ears, until I realized what the sound was.

The beee-beee-beee clamored from Ziggy’s PMX in the front seat. He was already on it, punching for data on the warning. “Something’s wiring in on the summit apex,” he yelled.

“jAguas!” Inez stomped the accelerator. The tires spun on the overgrown, two-rut lane we’d been following. We were very near the apex ourselves, for that had been our destination, a perfect spot to feed designer candy to a custom app and access data bases for the dude-ranch marketing campaign. Not that we wouldn’t have to grind our teeth promising people hot-and-cold running spas, tennis courts and casinos, but to make a mountain into its own financial instrument you had to cough up real-estate futures with impact, and not spare the binary units.

In ten minutes we’d reached the apex. Things already looked suspicious. The two-rut wagon trail had graveled itself along the way and ended in a paved parking area next to a giant monkey-ear tree. The monkey-ear sat exactly at the geographical center of the mountaintop as though planted by a plat map.

We got out and surveyed the area. Still dense, still green. “El Eden de Dios,” Inéz breathed, and I echoed her sentiment: “Heaven.”

“And there’s the fly in the ointment,” Ziggy added, mixing metaphors with an eggbeater. He pointed to the monkey-ear’s gigantic bole. The tree had to be over four hundred years old, the trunk wide enough to buzz a biplane through, the main boughs themselves each bigger than any cold-climate oak of comparable age. The diameter of the crown covered at least half a football field, twiglet to twiglet. Flowers dangled in fat grape-like clusters from the fern-leafed umbrella of a ceiling, two hundred feet above. One scant yard off the ground, however, where Ziggy’s finger held its aim like the muzzle of a Glock 9 mm, was a little whirling flutter of wood chips.

A wood-white line widened from a point and proceeded to chew an encircling saw-cut around the trunk of the tree, gaining speed and looking like nothing so much as the spark at the end of a lit dynamite fuse. Leaves and flowers and wrinkled green monkey-ear seed pods began to rain down. Above, little branches and then bigger branches and then main boughs abruptly severed into sections, the sausage links hovering over our heads as they reformed into construction beams and slabs of ornate veneers.

“Stop!” Ziggy yelled. “This is a hostile takeover!”

For a moment of eerie silence, nothing happened. Then a beer-bellied man in a hardhat popped up in front of the sawed-through trunk of the monkey-ear tree and waded toward us through a drift of sawdust. He held an IBM ThinkPad-AI in one hand, his data/fax modem plugged into a battery transceiver jammed alongside a hammer and screwdriver in his leather toolbelt. The acrid odor of corporate bloat rose on the wind.

I fetched The Royal We from the car seat and ran over to Ziggy with the cat in my arms, her claws dug in from the abrupt flight. Inez retrieved the laptop from the dashboard and held it up in front of Ziggy. I stroked The We hard enough to shear hair from hide as Ziggy expanded the keyboard. Inez’s arms had all the stability of a bung-legged TV tray.

“What’s that?” the hardhat asked suspiciously, indicating The Royal We. Ziggy smiled craftily. “Computer-Assistant Transponderite.”

“A CAT, eh? Well, it ain’t gonna out-spark this little beauty here.” He held up the toolbelt battery. “Data Obeisance Galvanoset.” It had an atomic symbol sticker on it. “Go ahead,” the guy snorted. “Gimme your worst.”

Right then and there a foreboding chill went through me. Nobody was ever that confident in a face-off with the Zig man.

Armor-plated against intimidation, Ziggy started banging on the laptop, each landing fingertip-callus jarring though the keys, motherboard, Inez’s forearm bones. The LCD screen glowed green-hot. “Intermega Global Pharmaceuticals return-on-the-net-asset analysis projects restructuring monopoly rights into a one hundred-million-dollar market for Monte de Manantlan medicinal plants identified and any/all predicted de novo Taq DNA polymerase enzymes on research futures!”

Atta boy! Ziggy’s first volley, our biggest gun: new magic medical bullets from tropical weeds.

The hardhat staggered, but recovered all too quickly. He pounded his own computer-ette. The return volley zapped nearly instantaneously into our machine, and everyone else’s on Earth, from the comsats. “Acknowledging financial muscle from the information industry—” he flipped through some: telecoms; banking; biotechnology, our bid; aerospace. Then he countered with entrenched, deep-pocketed rivals. “Steel, petroleum, automotive—” The basic infrastructures willy-nilly began clearing regulatory hurdles; permits for fiber-op lines and permissions from INboards fluttered all around the parking lot in swarms.