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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester

Genetically Tailored Trees  
  Trees that had been genetically altered to produce and concentrate usable oil.  

Here, amid Freeman Dyson's old dream, he thought, he might be able to feel his way to something that he needed to know, here in what had once been known as the empty quarter, now the enormous forest of genetically tailored trees larger than redwoods, their sap rising, their programmed metabolism synthesizing petroleum which flowed down through a special set of vessels into roots which formed a living network of pipelines, connecting at various points to an artificial pipeline which conveyed it to the vast storage areas which constituted one of the worlds great petroleum reserves, against those functions which still required the substance. They filled what had once been a waste land, utilizing the abundant sunlight available there. Self repairing and timeless against the blue of the sky, they were both natural and the product of the technology which informed the planet’s culture, as surely as the trees of the street parks which delivered their own products, or the data net which, had he not disassociated himself from it, could at this moment deliver to him almost any information he needed.
Technovelgy from Eye of Cat, by Roger Zelazny.
Published by Pocket Books in 1982
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