Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,411

sun is about to come up on the other side of the hill.”

“We’ve been here all night!?”

“We’ve been here all night,” he confirmed, “and I don’t know about you but I could use some fresh air and a leg stretch.”

Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill. She had moved back up there after she’d become bored of the houseboat on the lake. The whole point of the boat had been to provide her with a flat walk to work, after her knees had gone bust. But the modern Fronk had no difficulty with hills and she had felt like getting a place with more of a view. So she had moved to a huge old mansion up on the crest of the hill, a thing built in the early 1900s for a ten-child family with a full complement of servants. It had been sitting empty for a while. She had acquired similar properties to either side of it, knocked the houses down, and converted their lots to gardens. It had amused her to populate these with small creatures, and so they now supported a carefully tended fake ecosystem of chickens, peacocks, goats, alpacas, and a pair of big mellow dogs. It was being looked after by a couple of young people who had been staying in her house for the last few months. She had forgotten their names. Having children was now an eccentric activity, so it was a good bet that their parents were what they had used to call hippies, or at least artists. Anyway they liked animals and enjoyed looking after them and had nothing else to do.

As they ascended, she fancied for a moment that something had gone awry with her vision system, for everything began to look soft, and she couldn’t see as far. She drew air into her lungs. One of those was the original, the other had gone on the blink some while ago and been replaced with a brand-new printed substitute. Anyway, when she drew the cool air into her new and her old lung, she sensed it was heavy and humid. Then she understood that up on the heights where the air was cold, it was foggy. Or, to put it another way, she and Enoch had, in a quite literal and technical sense, ascended into the clouds.

The time of year was late fall. Some leaves were still on the trees, and many more on the ground, but the color had gone from them, unless you considered dark brown to be a color. The lack of foliage drew attention to the trees themselves. These had become rampant. Planted along the streets two hundred years ago, they must have been mere saplings when the neighborhoods were new. By the time young Zula had moved to town, they had become problems. Their roots heaved up sidewalks and made great ripples across old red-brick streets. Their limbs fell off in windstorms. Their branches interfered with utility lines. Taxpayers paid for crews of arborists to roam about cutting weird rectangular vacancies in them for wires to run through. Paving crews did what they could about root damage.

Those days were over, and had been for a long time. Modern vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn’t there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what pleased them was apparently getting drunk on sky-high levels of atmospheric CO2 and flinging out roots and limbs as wide as they possibly could. Capitol Hill was becoming a forest straight out of Northern European high-fantasy literature. The fog was now becoming tinged with pink and gold light as the rising sun shone on it, and the boughs of the trees cast shadows through that.

They reached her neighborhood, where the trees were hugest, and linked by nearly as ancient hedges of laurel and holly. A soft glow pervaded everything and tinged solid objects with iridescence. Beyond that, there was nothing. No sky, no neighboring houses, no trees, no mountains. The fog had clamped it all off. It muffled sound too. Not that there was much of that in