New Trees

by e rathke

It had been an adjustment returning to Minneapolis after all the years away. “It’s so hot.” Looking out the window, Lucille scraped her chewed down fingernails against the dry skin just above her elbow. Somehow it always looked greyish, like rhino skin. But the itch was underneath the skin and her teeth-blunted nails didn’t offer relief.

The vast Herzog trees swayed gently in the breeze. Taller than the surrounding tenement buildings, their translucent branches stretching over the entire block, Lucille had grown to appreciate their uncanny appearance. Not quite like trees, but not quite like machines, they inhabited a middle ground. Like immense looming skeletons with great gossamer wings stretching between the bones. The way they caught the citrus sunrise and glowed over the neighborhood filled Lucille with peace.

“Come back to bed.” Marguerite’s voice muffled by the pillow, nearly drowned out by the fans running through the night when electricity was nearly free. She yawned, stretched. Carefully, holding her massive pregnant belly, she rolled away from Lucille and the window, grunting.

Lucille turned back to Marguerite. “Couldn’t sleep. It’s too hot. It was never like this when I was a kid. This bitter heat.” Their apartment was large, nearly 650 square feet, and they had their own kitchenette and bathroom. It made a difference with the pregnancy. Lucille scratched with her useless nails at her sweaty lower back. Her skin crawled with last night’s drug trial.

Uncovered, lying almost naked in bed, the blanket a coiled snake at her feet, Marguerite seemed so small, but her womb torpedoed out. Her sleepy voice slurred, “Come back to bed anyway.” Only seven months pregnant but she looked overdue. She hiked a leg to keep from putting her weight on her belly. Stray hairs stuck to her sweaty forehead. The rest covered her pillow like a coarse billowing black cloud. Lucille wanted to live in that cloud, the scent of Marguerite as her atmosphere. The invitation was nearly enough to make Lucille forget the sticky heat of skin on skin.

She turned back to the sunrise, the sparse forest of Herzog trees swaying over the tenements. Watching their gentle sway, the gorgeous way the sunrise glowed through them, Lucille imagined them as some alien species of tree. An otherworldly infestation that would heal the ravages of post-industrial humanity.

Marguerite farted, then giggled. “Sorry.”

“Don’t you work today?” Lucille thumbed open her phone but closed the screen almost as soon as it lit up. Too fast to even catch the time, so she thumbed it open again.

Marguerite moaned. “What time is it?”

“Almost six.”

“What?” Marguerite struggled to sit up. She stretched a hand up into the air. “Help?”

Lucille hopped into bed, leaned over, and pulled Marguerite to a sitting position. “Okay?”

Marguerite sighed heavily as she grabbed her phone, thumbed it open. Then she sighed again, fell back into bed.

“What?”

“Today’s Friday.” She put her phone back on the side table.

“Evening shift?”

One more sigh. “Means I get to sleep in.” She smiled, eyes already closed, satisfied.

Lucille stretched in bed beside her. Even despite the heat, she couldn’t help but run a hand over the massive pregnant belly. In the halflight of sunrise, Marguerite’s swollen belly was perfectly smooth, but Lucille found that she loved the stretchmarks that made Marguerite so self-conscious. They felt powerful. The tiger stripes of motherhood.

“Don’t,” Marguerite brushed her hand away. Eyes still closed, her brow furrowed, and she sighed again, stretched out her hand. “Gotta pee.”

Lucille smiled. She helped Marguerite sit up, then rise to her feet. She watched her waddle to the bathroom on the other side of the apartment.

The sight of Marguerite pregnant filled her with peace, with hope. Someday, they’d have their own. Their laughter and cries would fill their apartment. Maybe Lucille would even get pregnant next time. Between the pay for Marguerite’s current surrogacy and Lucille’s theoretical one, they’d have enough cushion to try for their own. She could stop doing drug trials to pay rent.

Running her hands over her stomach and ignoring the roiling beneath her skin, she stared back out at the Herzog trees. They, too, filled her with hope. Like life could get better. All the ice melted and the oceans rose, swallowed all the coasts, but people kept on living. Finding new ways to survive in the newly disconnected world.

It was jarring returning home to Minneapolis. Not only because the city she remembered belonged to a different, gone-away world, but because of the many ways it had transformed.

It was the Herzog trees. Rather than fill the city and state with the ugly, loud carbon capture machines slowly creeping over the globe like a terrible fungus, the Herzog trees developed at the U of M were silent, efficient, and elegant.

Another heavy sigh and a flush. Marguerite waddled back to bed with her eyes closed as if she wasn’t really awake. Hands on her stomach, she winced, exhaled.

“Okay?”

“Kicked me right in the rib.” She shoved her hands into her mass of billowing hair and shook it. Eyes still closed, she rolled back into bed beside Lucille.

Lucille put a hand on Marguerite’s stomach. Felt the body inside her twisting, readjusting. A strange and surreal sensation. She remembered fish in rivers from long ago. Their sleek bodies rising to the surface but instead of breaking through, the water sort of encircled them even as they pushed above the water level.

“Little fish,” Lucille whispered.

“Don’t,” Marguerite said. She opened her eyes. “He’s not ours.”

“I know,” Lucille heard the defensiveness in her voice. Clearing her throat to hide it, she said, “But kind of he is. At least for now.”

Marguerite sighed. “Don’t get attached. No, for real, don’t even think about it as a child. That’s what they tell you at the center. There’s all kinds of brochures about how to deal with it.”

“It’s just—”

“No, Lu, for real.” Marguerite pushed her hand off her pregnant stomach. “It starts with a nickname. Get that name tied to the hormones flooding me and I’ll wind up like Cassie.”

“Cassie?”

Marguerite groaned as she sat up, resting her back against the wall. “I guess I’m awake.”

“Sorry.” The pregnancy took a toll on Marguerite. Lucille watched it wear away at her in thousands of small ways each day. The insomnia coupled with the muscle aches shaved through her patience and pleasantness.

She sighed heavily, either exhausted or exasperated. “She lived downtown in a high rise paid for by the family.”

“Ah, yeah.” Lucille swallowed. “I remember.”

The heaviness of the memory settled on them. The room felt smaller, tighter, hotter remembering Cassie and the baby she wanted to be hers. The trauma of the breaking world collapsed upon them. Her generation had watched the world change. Disease and famine and flood and drought and heat had killed billions. It severed her generation from humanity’s past — all the death and loss. But it made starting over easier. Or so she told herself. So they all told themselves.

Ever since the collapse of the United States that cast Lucille’s family as refugees working their way through China and then Europe, she had longed for home, for family. For hope.

“Sorry,” Lucille’s voice was a choked sob.

Marguerite turned to her tearful eyes. “Hey, come here.”

Lucille leaned in, let Marguerite’s embrace consume her. Her touch soothed the curdling muscle-deep itch. She tried not to cry, promised herself she wouldn’t, but cried anyway while Marguerite ran a hand over her shaved scalp. “I was just thinking,” Lucille spoke through weak sobs, “about how my mom was pregnant when we lived in Berlin. She was a maintenance worker on the old carbon capture plants.”

“The Herzog trees are better,” Marguerite said. “Beautiful, even.”

Lucille nodded, pulled herself away from the embrace so she could see Marguerite. She wiped at her eyes. “Sorry.” Coughing, clearing her throat, she shook her head as if shaking off the tears, the memories. “She died. Both of them. I was washing some man’s filthy apartment with another girl.” She snorted. “Same week all those Russian nuclear plants blew up.”

“Meltdown.”

“Whatever. Wasn’t even allowed to leave work early that day. I just remember how loud Berlin was because of the plants and how quiet everything was that day when they went up in flames. Looked it up the other day. There were twenty million people living in Berlin that year and we were all holding our breath. That’s, like—”

“Half the Federated North.”

“Yeah,” Lucille wiped the snot from her nose, shaking her head. “Bigger, even.”

Marguerite shrugged. “Sure.”

“I was just —” she swallowed, looked right into Marguerite’s eyes. “Do you think we’ll ever be parents?”

“Come here.” Marguerite lifted her right arm and Lucille sidled in against her body again. Listening to Marguerite’s body, hearing her lungs, her heartbeat, and even the burbling of her womb. “Heard the child credit program’s going to help.”

Lucile snorted. “That’s for people who own their homes. It’s to help them pay for our wombs.”

Marguerite flinched.

“Sorry,” Lucille said.

“No, it’s —” she sighed. “Was talking to Trudie. She’s the head of the coop at the Chavez tenement down the street.”

“Big lady?”

“No,” Marguerite laughed, “that’s Arthur. Trudie’s younger than us but she’s been organizing since she was a kid. Lost her parents in a hurricane after the Eastern Confederacy fell apart, or something like that. Doesn’t matter. But she said they’re going to run a childcare pilot program here in the tenements.”

Lucille turned back to the Herzog trees. Felt the hope rise in her once more. That hope, a delicate and fragile thing, like an origami bird. She remembered making them with one of the other girls from the US while she was in China. They made dozens and then got yelled at by the head of the house who called them rats.

Grabbing the dozen birds they made, they ran away into the street, into the rain. As Lucille ran, she felt the paper dissolving against her skin. She and the other girl stopped eventually, let the soggy birds fall to puddles, like love letters melting. The churning cacophony of the carbon capture plants swallowed the sound. It was what she remembered best of that day. The dead paper birds and the wall of noise that caused permanent eardrum damage within a few months.

“Who’s paying?”

“Hey,” Marguerite put a hand on Lucille’s clenched fist.

Lucille hadn’t realized how tense she became. She loosened her grip on her memories, on her doubt and disappointment.

“The coop’s covering costs for everyone.” Marguerite wove her fingers between Lucille’s. “It’s going to be all right.”

Lucille nodded her head to keep the tears in her eyes.

“When our mothers were little, they were promised a dying earth. When they carried us, they were promised a dead earth for their children. We ain’t dead, Lu. Look out there and what do you see? Life. Beauty. It’s not perfect and, yeah, some of it’s maybe worse than our mother’s worst nightmares, but people keep trying. They keep fighting for that better world. For a new world. Heard just last night while you were at the drug trial that they’re using algae to power the trams throughout the North. I didn’t even know that, did you? Yeah, and we use the trams every day. This researcher out of Kalamazoo was talking about — this was a live recording from a talk she gave somewhere — she was talking about how this same principle should work at trains between states and even regional governments.”

Lucille wiped at her eyes, stared at the massive Herzog tree turning orange in the sunrise. “I know. It’s just —”

“I know,” Marguerite leaned her head on top of Lucille’s. “It’s hard to have hope. Hard to believe things will get better when every day seems miserable. But maybe when we’re finally having our own,” she pressed Lucille’s hand against her womb, “we’ll be staring at a brightening world. A future we can believe in.”

Lucille felt the child kick against her palm and smiled. She turned to face Marguerite.

Marguerite smiled, her dark eyes beautiful in the halflight of morning.

e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the 2022 Baen Fantasy Adventure Award, he is the author of Howl and several other forthcoming novellas. His short fiction appears in Mysterior Magazine, luminescent machinations, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere.