Good Omens

back, and there’s no taste to ’em …
    Wensleydale, Brian, and Pepper were not thinking quite so coherently. All that they were aware of was that they could no more not follow Adam than fly; to try to resist the force marching them forward would simply result in multiply broken legs, and they’d still have to march.
    Adam wasn’t thinking at all. Something had opened in his mind and was aflame.
    He sat them down on the crate.
    â€œWe’ll all be all right down here,” he said.
    â€œEr,” said Wensleydale, “don’t you think our mothers and fathers—”
    â€œDon’t you worry about them,” said Adam loftily. “I can make some new ones. There won’t be any of this being in bed by half past nine, either. You don’t ever have to go to bed ever, if you don’t want to. Or tidy your room or anything. You just leave it all to me and it will be great.” He gave them a manic smile. “I’ve got some new friends comin’,” he confided. “You’ll like ’em.”
    â€œBut—” Wensleydale began.
    â€œYou jus’ think of all the amazin’ stuff afterwards,” said Adam enthusiastically. “You can fill up America with all new cowboys an’ Indians an’ policemen an’ gangsters an’ cartoons an’ spacemen and stuff. Won’t that be fantastic?”
    Wensleydale looked miserably at the other two. They were sharing a thought that none of them would be able to articulate very satisfactorily even in normal times. Broadly, it was that there had once been real cowboys and gangsters, and that was great. And there would always be pretend cowboys and gangsters, and that was also great. But real pretend cowboys and gangsters, that were alive and not alive and could be put back in their box when you were tired of them—this did not seem great at all. The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.
    â€œBut before all that,” said Adam darkly, “we’re really goin’ to show ’em … ”
    THERE WAS A TREE in the plaza. It wasn’t very big and the leaves were yellow and the light it got through the excitingly dramatic smoked glass was the wrong sort of light. And it was on more drugs than an Olympic athlete, and loudspeakers nested in the branches. But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears.
    Jaime Hernez liked to have his lunch under it. The maintenance supervisor would shout at him if he found out, but Jaime had grown up on a farm and it had been quite a good farm and he had liked trees and he didn’t want to have to come into the city, but what could you do? It wasn’t a bad job and the money was the kind of money his father hadn’t dreamed of. His grandfather hadn’t dreamed of any money at all. He hadn’t even known what money was until he was fifteen. But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.
    But what could you do? Where there were trees now there were big farms, where there were small farms now there were plazas, and where there were plazas there were still plazas, and that’s how it went.
    He hid his trolley behind the newspaper stand, sat down furtively, and opened his lunchbox.
    It was then that he became aware of the rustling, and a movement of shadows across the floor. He looked around.
    The tree was moving. He watched it with interest. Jaime had never seen a tree growing before.
    The soil, which was nothing more than a scree of some sort of artificial chippings, was actually crawling as the roots moved around under the surface. Jaime saw a thin white shoot creep down the side of the raised garden area and prod blindly at the concrete of the floor.
    Without knowing why, without ever knowing why, he nudged it gently with his foot until it was close to the crack between the slabs. It found it, and bored down.
    The branches were twisting into different shapes.
    Jaime heard the screech of traffic outside the building, but didn’t pay it any attention. Someone was yelling something, but someone was always yelling in Jaime’s vicinity, often at