Their pairing was a given.  No one in the class would volunteer to spend a week with the clawed witch whose friendship with Liriodendron had not made him popular either.  On the transport they were glued to the windows as they flew North, watching the desert green up, spare grass islands in the sands changing to an unending scrub broken by the glints of a few rivers sparsely lined with stunted trees.  The ice had not spread its mantle that far south, but the landscape had been devastated by centuries of windstorms, heavy snow or hail, rain deluges.  It once was a populated area and the occasional shades of streets or highways could be divined beneath the brush.  Here and there would appear strange serpentine drifts widening into deltas leaning against ridges.  They looked like mudflows, but they were smooth, devoid of the cracks that form in dried mud.  Their color was a sickly greenish gray and, when the transport pilot took a low, circular pass over one of the largest in sight, his passengers could make out curving parallel streaks of weak colors almost drowned in the prominent vomit tone.

     As they flew further North into once urbanized areas there were more of these splashes of ungodly refuse. There was silence in the craft.  The students had been told how one of the early flygliders' reconnaissance pilots was intrigued and thought to investigate the nature of this phenomenon.  He landed at the edge of a delta.  There was a slight haze breezing his way and when he slid open the bubble over his cockpit he began to inhale something like smoke, but with no odor.  His feet hardly on the ground he started coughing, ill feelings burning in his chest. Back aboard he headed for the nearest medic station.  That was over two hundred miles away. He nearly died.

     Further research found that the sites were discharge lagoons at, or below, the Ancients' disposal sites.  The massive hills of refuse engineered to safely store the trash of cities and towns could not weather the extreme conditions of the cataclysm's deluges.  Their enclosures failed and their contents flowed away or spilled on site with the organics rotting, mostly to methane gas, the metals and glass sinking in the flow and the lighter plastics floating to the surface to dry within a blend of a foul chemistry, the haphazard mix of the age's noxious substances carelessly tossed away with kitchen or shop detritus.  The plastics broke down to ever tinier fragments and sorted themselves by density, or inertia, or resistance to fragmentation to create the telltale streaks that eventually dried and rose as deadly dust in a breeze.

     The enigma solved, the researchers asked the original investigator if he would care to come up with a moniker for these sites to title the scientific paper they planned to publish.  Still healing, painfully bent down on a cane, he whispered his rancor.  "Sure," he said, "call them the Devil's Rainbows of the Anthropocene."  That was a bit theatrical for scientific nomenclature, but the writers had the decency to keep it and it became the best-known title at the Institute.

     So, the transport's passengers knew very well that they were about to leave the Rainbows zone and breach the southern limit of glaciation.  It had been centuries since the creeping glaciers had scraped the land clean and dumped or washed the residues into the ocean in their own version of the old canard 'dilution is the answer to pollution.'  Still, the ice was not a continent-sized bulldozer.  In places, the Ancients' relics would be there, nearly intact, waiting for the transport passengers to study, but likely not yet rendered a poisonous soup.  Yet the pilot could not miss a chance to spook his charges.

     "Now, boys and girls," he said on the PA, "just in case you run into mud, if you don't see green grass, if you don't hear frogs, move on. Fast."

     Betula had turned back to the window to watch the forest now sweeping below. "Idiot..." she said, perhaps just a bit too loud.

     The crew dropped off the teams one at the time in their allocated spot, gleefully verifying that all had left gear and garments in numbered laundry bags and exited the machine in their birthday suit.  This annual defrocking of the intellectuals was a highlight in the rotation schedule of the transport crews, a prized assignment to enjoy sights and events well beyond the monotonous routine of their short-haul flights.  It would be a scenic journey over the Ancients' lands with the occasional stops where one after another pair of bare-assed junior eggheads hopped off in the wild.  Then, on and on further North where the best student duo was assigned the most remote spot, a forest clearing at the foot of a waterfall.  The pilot ogled Betula as she undressed, smacking his lips and murmuring comments to his crewmate.  She was nude when he addressed her in a concerned tone.

     "Plenty of water here to drink, honey, but skinny as you are you'll have to suck bear for something to eat," he said.

     The two were roaring when she faced him, spread her legs and urinated on the underwear she had just taken off.  Bemused, the pilot didn't think to duck when she threw it, damp and dripping, at his face.  "Bitch," he said, jumping off his seat.  He did not go far, she was crouching in the aisle, her knife inches from his crotch.  Stunned, Liriodendron could hardly keep from laughing, she had it just right, the 'Facing Hostile Wildlife Position' of their training manual. Perfect.

     "My apologies, Sir, I lost my temper," she sweetly said. Too much. Liriodendron did chuckle.

     "You watch, you shitheads, we might just not find you next week..."

     The Personnel Disappearance Inquiry would take care of that.  The shitheads hopped out and doubled over with laughter as the transport took off at full power, spooking birds and raising a cloud of dust and dead leaves.

     Sheltering on site was at variance with expectations, the cutting and assembling of materials was unnecessary.  They found a lovely cone-shaped hut made of bent stems, some much older than others, that only needed a fresh covering of evergreen branches.  The structure had apparently been constructed over many years by would-be Scientists whose concern for their successors was stronger than their desire to emulate the hardships of their pioneering predecessors.  A noble gift, not in the training manual, thought Liriodendron, and one that would remain undisclosed as it had been.  The only trouble was in the necessary eviction of a squirrel family chattering away over the sweeping of its leavings.  Then, with shadows lengthening it was time to go to the forest to cut and pile balsam boughs to sleep on.

     It so happened that the squirrels moved back into the shelter that night.  At the edge of the woods Liriodendron had laid on the boughs to test the harvest's comfort and Betula joined him. They had long lusted after each other although Betula, who saw herself as a freak, couldn't imagine Liriodendron being attracted to her, while he couldn't quite understand his feelings for someone so different.  But there, in this remote clearing with no one to watch and gossip, the shooting stars weren't all in the sky that night and the squirrels were good enough not to complain at the ruckus and the moans that rose at the edge of the woods.  Perhaps the idea of sending pairs of naked young folks out with a knife was an Institute scheme.  With no scabbard, they had to have one hand holding the knife for protection and only the other one for mischief. Suffice to say that when morning came the impromptu lovers were thankful for the overnight absence of hostile wildlife, or cuts on their bodies when they found their forgotten knives tangled in the balsam boughs over which they had slept in bliss, in each other's arms.

     The dawn was quite cold and called for the warming up exercises suggested in their training, but the mutual slapping of sides, buttocks and thighs did not result in a return to the night's exertions.  Heat and shivers were paused by a rising chorus of songs drowning the frenetic rhythm of buzzing insects.  Some birds' calls were familiar, but here in their colorful breeding plumage their belting out of joyous tunes rose and fell within the cascading water's melody in a symphony to the splendor of the site.  The boles of century-old hemlocks towered behind the shadbush and the fir at the forest edge.  A hawk was circling high above the dwarfed spruces that lined fissures on cliff brows crowded with swallows.  The first of the sun's rays glittered in the ribbons of the falls above a pond that flowed into a set of rapids.

     The mountain landscapes at home were spectacular indeed, but their lushness did not have the stark elegance of the Ancients' re-born forests.  How could they have destroyed them, they thought and saw the wisdom in the Shaman's edict, 'only dung and dead wood is meant to burn.'  Scanning the tree line they noted a patch of bright green leaves topping white, slender trunks.

     "It has to be," Betula ran for her long awaited chance at the traditional First-Identification tree hug.  "YESSS..., it is," Betula papyrifera, the White Birch of the northern forest, the Canoe Birch whose bark natives once used to sheath their crafts.  She was almost in tears, inhaling the ever so slight aroma of a leaf, her cheek pressing on the smooth bark.  Liriodendron was smiling, sharing her joy.  First-ID was part of a ritual that began early in the studies of botany students when they chose the Scientist moniker they would use in their career.  Betula had picked hers knowing fully well she would have to qualify as a flyer if she ever was to hug that mid-latitudes tree.

     "Latin nomenclature!  A northern tree!  Hubris!  Good luck to you," her instructor had exclaimed and he went on to relate the trials of a student from an earlier class.  She had perhaps neglected her homework and picked 'Chickweed,' the colloquial designation for a common dweller of paths sides and cultivated grounds. Unfortunately, the Institute's Linguistics class had just rediscovered 'chick,' a slang word the Ancients used for a young woman.

     "Chick became a popular epithet on campus that year," said the instructor looking at Betula, "but Chickweed couldn't get a date, so she changed her major to Early Childhood Education, no doubt thinking that the choice would spice her love life."

     While the class laughed, Betula had been red with fury.  The implications were clear, she was a moron, she could not succeed, would not succeed, and worse, she would not get laid.  But now she would soon make him eat his words.  Liriodendron had been more pragmatic in choosing his moniker.  He had happily hugged his Tulip Tree, Liriodendron tulipifera, a southern species, on their first class-outing, but there seemed to be an altogether different slant on this occasion. Betula's mood was darkening, she had on what he called her pointy nails' face.

     "What's wrong?"

     She slowly enunciated a plan.

     "I'll buttonhole him in the cafeteria line.  I will be very LOUD.  HI, REMEMBER ME?  I DID IT.  I hugged my Betula papyrifera, I KISSED it.  The non-botanists about the line might think hanky-panky, but HE WILL KNOW.  He will know that while he is lording it over undergraduates for much of the rest of his natural life, I will be flying over the northern forest.  He will congratulate me, of course, what else could he do?  We will be colleagues by-and-by and I will be cruising the tundra or lecturing fascinated scholars on the wonders of species rejuvenation and their northward march while he leads motley groups of beginners to identify chickweed on the Institute paths...  NOW, Professor, WHO IS THE MORON HERE...?"

     Liriodendron was speechless.

     "Maybe I ought to leave that last sentence off," she said.

     "It's certainly a more than adequate closing to the statement, but yes, a bit of collegiality might be in order."  Liriodendron was thinking that promising as their budding relationship was, crossing Betula on any grounds might be quite unwise.

     A quivering came to the birches' leaves as the morning air began to stir.  Facing the waterfall there was a sand beach that would be white with foam in the thundering waters of the spring's flows.  It was Betula's day.  Her eyes caught a glitter, a coin once lost, or thrown in the water for good luck.  Its edge markings were worn off, but on one side she could still read a large 20, a word 'centimes,' and a date, 1964.  The reverse showed the profile of a woman, with a slightly upturned nose.  With blades of marsh grass Liriodendron weaved a necklace with a little cocoon for Betula to keep her find.

     The week was not a trial, but a vacation, a perfect end to their years of study.  Behind the shelter they found a large tree fall.  It bore carved names and years, some weathering away, other vanishing under moss.  There were directions in pig-English to a ledge with early cranberries, a clearing with Sweetfern to ease the bite of the fir needles on their sleeping mats, a place where chokecherries could be found, a raspberry patch.  At the latter they surprised a bear that stood on its hind legs, gave them a looking and ambled away without haste.  There is enough for everyone it seemed to mean, but they looked at each other and crossed raspberries off their diet.  Cranberries and chokecherries would do and there would be no need to trap the squirrels they waved goodbye to when they heard the drone of their approaching return ride.  A flight crew of mixed gender welcomed them aboard and turned away as they slipped into freshly laundered flight suits making it easy for Betula to transfer her good luck contraband from her cheek to a pocket.  A mocha bar was in there, a bug bite soothing ointment in another.  The Institute took care of its own.

     As top-grades holders in their class they had applied for adjacent research territories on the eastern and western slopes of the Appalachians.  They could meet on the high ridges now and then.  Liriodendron wanted to find Mount Washington and see how high his flyglider could go on its thermals.  His instructor was not encouraging.  "Sure, you will get all kind of altitude," he said, "but you might find yourself in Greenland by the time you try to come down.  Long way from home..."  Perhaps his hot shot ambitions were of concern to the Institute administrators, perhaps Betula's act on their landing at the waterfall had strayed from expected Scientist behavior, in any case their flying assignments showed them bound to the coasts, one West, the other East.  There would be no high ridges rendezvous.  The transport crew had told the story and gossip had the rats detached to piloting mules at a silver mine in the high country.  The Institute takes care of its own, but frowns on golden showers. "Darn bureaucrats," said Liriodendron.

Next: CAMP GALAXY