Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,134

different from others. Comparatively speaking, this was a fascinating new development. Thinking about it didn’t get him anywhere; it was just a reality to which he was being passively subjected. He could not lean forward to examine it more closely. He could not move around to look at it from different angles. All he could do was wait, like one trapped in sleep paralysis, for the next surge and then attend to it and try to confirm this growing idea that not all parts of it were the same, that there were patterns, or at least variations that his attention could lock on to.

His emotions shifted. For a long time (or so it seemed now that he was experiencing something like time) he had feared the onset of the static and longed for it to subside. It had caused him something like pain. His growing ability to see variation within it was changing this. When the hissing, sparkling wave subsided, he was eager for it to return and anxious that it might not.

Then a thing happened with a quickness that was extraordinary compared to all that had gone before, which was that his thoughts of creases and grooves and worn paths in his mind’s turnings came together with certain of the motes-that-were-somehow-different to form a thing that he could hold steady in his regard, and experience and study for a while before it fell apart under the too-great pressure of his mind’s desperate grasp and broke down into the flickering motes from which it had self-assembled. But the next time the wave returned he could cast about for it again, and sometimes find or at least glimpse it. Or perhaps he was reconstructing it anew each time. If so he must coax it into being with the infinite patience he had built during the eons before.

It didn’t matter. He saw it a few, then many times. The thing had properties. Lacking words or even the idea of words, he could behold those properties but not keep them in his mind when the thing was not there before him. It was as if the thought-ways that he had, over minutes or centuries or eons, identified as creases or grooves had taken on a form that he could behold. It was the first and only thing with a form; all else was static. When he beheld different parts of it, or moved his regard from one part to an adjoining part, he perceived turnings and features that were expressions of the creases and grooves that his mind had worn into itself, sometimes branching in one direction, sometimes another. That it had parts distributed in such-and-such a way—a stem here, serrated edges there, veins branching this way and that—hit him hard as, at once, a vast revelation, and at the same time so old and obvious that it was second nature.

The thing wasn’t always the same—the branchings changed from one reconstruction of it to the next—but it was always the same kind of thing. One day (or year, or century) he was beholding this thing for the hundredth (or thousandth or millionth) time and he knew somehow what it was. And some time after that, the roar and hiss began to call to him strangely. In the same way as he had learned to see something in the waves of flickering static, he began to connect moments in the noise and to string them together into patterns he could recognize. The way they were organized one-after-the-other was of a different nature from the way the static-motes coalesced one-beside-the-next into a thing that he could behold, but once he learned the knack of it he was able to repeat this trick of stringing them together. The strung signals could be recognized as a thing no less sensible than the thing he had been looking at.

It was a leaf.

These ways of gathering static-motes into patterns that he could hold in his regard, and stringing fragments of noise into sequences that he could recognize, spread first slowly and then with too-great speed for him to encompass. If he’d had access to a larger pool of memories he might have likened it to flame spreading across a pool of gasoline, or a crack propagating through a block of stone.

That each leaf was a little different was no longer a source of confusion, once he got the knack of distributing things around; he could summon forth as many leaves as he wished, and set one next to another.