He finally reached the end and crawled the last of the distance while holding his breath. Once clear, he stood up and moved to the side. The sheer breadth of the mother tree forced him back a step.
With the tree only thirty yards away, the trunk rose as a dark wall before him. Even craning his neck, he could not spot the tree’s crown any longer. But under its lowermost branches, and extending out along them, were hundreds, if not thousands, of those sporulating cysts. They crowded together, growing over one another, looking like macabre grape clusters. The smallest of them were the size of basketballs, the largest ten times as big.
As he watched, scores of them steamed and smoked.
By now, the rest of his group had clambered out of the tunnel and joined him. They all gawked at the sight, at the majesty before them. Between them and the trunk, the ground was rock, but it was not barren. Another lower wall of roots writhed and stirred. It stood between them and the tree. Only these were a pale white—younger, more volatile and agitated by their presence.
Beyond the roots, directly ahead of them, the black trunk was split by a tall crack, revealing a hollow interior.
Only it wasn’t empty.
Past the dark threshold, a large pool glowed inside the tree, illuminating its heart. The surface shimmered softly, like all the other ponds, but here the waters shone silver, as if a bright moon were glowing in its depths.
Inside the trunk, the black walls of the tree ran with bright veins, matching the sheen of the water. It was as if the tree’s very essence flowed into that small lake.
“Mzazi Maziwa,” Tyende said, joining them, leaning on his staff.
So focused forward, Gray hadn’t even known the man had followed them.
“It means ‘mother’s milk,’ Tyende explained.
Gray gave him a hard look. He appreciated the man’s help, but he bristled at Tyende’s stubborn lack of candor. Gray needed answers—though he believed he had figured out the most critical elements.
“Mother’s milk,” Gray said. “From such a nurturing name, I can only assume that if there’s a cure, it’s harbored in that pool.” He pointed up toward the smoking cysts. “A cure against that.”
Tyende’s shoulders sagged with resignation. “For the longest time, She has remained quiet, slumbering throughout the years. Until eighteen months ago. She reacted to something that had changed, something She considered a threat. She expelled her poison for weeks on end—the entire forest did—before all eventually went quiet again.”
Gray pictured a smoky cloud rising from this valley, roiling with that deadly virus, seeding the pathogen across this area.
Tyende continued, “I had hoped that the damage would be limited to this region. And that it, too, would eventually subside. As it had in the past.”
Gray glanced to Benjie. The biologist had hypothesized that the first outbreak of the virus was limited in scope, confined to a smaller region. But then matters had abruptly changed.
“The monsoons, the months of flooding,” Gray said. “It washed the infection far wider than usual, allowing it to establish itself across a greater swath, to gain a firmer foothold, to give it the breadth to blow into a firestorm.”
Tyende nodded.
Gray frowned. “Still, I don’t understand. What set the tree off to begin with?” He waved to encompass the valley. “No one has invaded here or threatened this grove.”
“Maybe not directly. But you learn Her moods over time. She has grown more temperamental these past several decades. Possibly due to a rise in pollution. The foulness to the air, the acid in the rain, the toxins in the watershed, the summers that grow hotter and longer. Even the encroachment by man into her neighboring areas. All of this has left her tense and edgy.”
Gray glanced to Benjie, remembering the biologist’s discourse about the sensitivity of plants, of their reactivity to the world around them, of their ability to sense the smallest changes to their environment—especially when it came to threats.
Gray focused back on Tyende. “But what actually lit that match eighteen months ago? What finally pushed the tree over that edge?”
Tyende sighed. “It took me too long to learn the truth. The threat She detected, it came from the northeast, near the Kilo-Moto mine.”
Gray remembered spotting that operation on his digital map. “Did it encroach too closely on her territory?”
“No, it was something far more dramatic,” Tyende said. “A lake in that region exploded. Thousands living around its shores were killed, suffocated to death.”
“What caused the explosion?” Gray asked. “Was it an accident at the mine?”
“They claim it was an earthquake.” Tyende scowled. “But I traveled there myself, heard from those who live in the area. It was not a quake, at least not a natural one. Someone had moved in heavy equipment. Blasts were heard, shaking the ground violently.”
“Sounds like fracking,” Kowalski said.
Tyende shrugged. “Villagers tried to warn the ones running the operation. Local superstitions warned against disturbing the lake, of the deadly ghosts that would rise from its waters if woken. Their pleas were ignored. Afterward, that same outfit covered everything up, blaming an earthquake.”
“But I still don’t understand,” Gray said. “How did a quake—natural or otherwise—cause a lake to explode and suffocate all those villagers?”
The answer came from a surprising source. Benjie’s eyes had gotten huge. “I remember reading about that incident. Before I came to the Congo. It was a methane burst.”
“Methane?” Gray asked. “From where?”
“It was an unusual source,” Benjie explained. “But one not all that rare in this tectonically active region. There’s a whole chain of lakes between the DRC and Rwanda. A few are fed by volcanic hot springs. They’re so deep that the methane released from those springs remains dissolved, trapped at the bottom, due to all that water pressure above. It’s a precarious situation, an unstable stratification. An earthquake—or anything that gives those lakes a good shake—can break that stratification and cause the trapped methane to be released all at once. It’s happened before, in 1986, at Lake Nyos in Cameron, where it killed two thousand people.”
Gray pictured the villagers around that place waking to that quake, only to have the nearby lake boil wildly, releasing so much toxic methane that it became impossible to breathe.
Benjie continued, “It’s a huge worry for one of the largest lakes in that chain. Lake Kivu. It’s equally unstable. And far more populated. If it should ever blow, it would kill millions.”
Gray began to understand what happened here. “That methane cloud. It must’ve swept down from that mine area. And the mother tree detected that toxic spike.”
Tyende nodded. “She considered it an immediate threat—and reacted violently.”
Gray rubbed his forehead at this tragic chain of events. He also recognized a hard truth. If it hadn’t been that methane burst, something else would’ve triggered the tree eventually, especially when it was already so stressed by the degradation of the environment.
He stared up at the mother tree, which still smoked in threat.
Nature was clearly growing fed up with mankind’s negligent stewardship. The Anthropocene era—the time of humans on this planet—was but a blink of an eye. The natural world has existed far longer, developing survival strategies over hundreds of millions of years.
How could we hope to compete?
Still, such a question would have to wait. He had a more immediate concern. He pointed to the silvery pond glowing at the heart of the tree. He didn’t know what curative powers those waters possessed, but it was the world’s best hope.
“Will She share her gift with us?” Gray asked.
“As I said before, if She finds you worthy.” Tyende waved back to the barbed tunnel. “You’ve already been tested.”
“What do I have to do from here?” Gray asked.