The Bonobo Ladies' Collective had worked for thirty years to plant the line of acacia tress that stretched across the southward edge of the Sahara. And then their daughters had spent the next thirty in tending it, scraping back sand, carrying water in calabashes, eating the ants that crept along the young trees to cut their leaves. The line is now three thousand miles long and jagged, weaving around areas still too dry to plant. Acacias feed the earth, though, and the land slowly learns how to hold water again. In thirty years, when the soil is less poor, they will advance the line.
Hibiscus Leaf was born on the line, hundreds of miles from her namesake plant. From the earliest age, she believed that she might live and die in the tending of the great green band. Her mother and grandmother already had by the time she was ten. She hauled water and ate ants and collected seeds in preparation for the new push northward. She slept at night under the sparse young canopies of the saplings.
Years later in her offices in the human archives, she'd envy the other professors who hadn't done what she'd done. They'd grown up in rich jungles as near-apex predators. They hadn't had to fear the cold or the thirst, or spend their days walking upright across barren earth with no safety in sight, no tree big enough to climb. She is a little slow compared to them; she learned to read too late, didn't grow up watching old movies in English, still can't figure out how to work the clunky generator.
But then they show her the photographs, the ones taken by the satellite they've managed to crack at last. They knuckle into her office and bring her down the hall to the monitor where the line stands out as bold and clear as a national border on an old map.
"You worked on the green band?" they ask her, and she nods, remembering. She wonders if she should feel pride. Instead, it's another kind of envy, and she feels for a moment the absence of the calabash around her neck, the sand under her fingernails.
