Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,136

red but green. Above, the trunks and branches took on another color, which was brown.

Once the leaves had fallen and were lying still upon the ground, he would gaze at them and see that their redness was not all the same but that there was variation from one part to another—different shades of red, indeed different colors altogether: purple near the tips, yellow in the creases. Beneath them, the green ground took on definition. No longer was it a featureless slab of adamant, but instead was itself built of tiny green leaves. Some were long and skinny, others short and round. Packed together in uncountable numbers they made a variegated cushion upon which the leaves rested for his inspection. He would gaze upon one and note the variations in color and shape that made it different from other leaves, then turn his attention to another that had fallen next to it. When he turned back to the first leaf, he expected to see it lying in the same place. It was not correct for it to have moved, or disappeared, or to have altered its color or its shape while he was looking elsewhere. In time he bettered the workings of the leaves and the ground so that the leaves stayed where they had fallen and, having found a color and a shape, changed not.

The fixing of the leaves transformed the street and the park in a way he had not forethought, in that leaves began to fall on top of other leaves and to cover them up. The green ground disappeared beneath them altogether, and their level began to climb up the trunks of the trees. He gazed up at the branches and understood the problem, which was that although leaves fell from them unceasingly, the appearance of the trees never changed, and the number of leaves on them forever stayed the same. This too was a kind of wrongness that he had the power to better. Bettering such things was what he did; it was his reason for existing now. He made it so that the falling of each leaf left a bare place on the branch where it had been attached.

Then, for the first time in all the days he had dwelled in the park and walked in the street, the appearance of the trees began to change. Their redness diminished and their shape became patchy. After some number of days had gone by, only a few leaves remained clinging to the branches, which had gone bare and brown, and the ground below was a deep lake of red. He missed the beauty of the red trees and wished to see it again as it had been in the beginning, but he understood now that to place the leaves back on the branches and begin it anew would only lead to more leaves on the ground.

He missed the green. The fallen leaves needed to be done away with if the street, the park, and the forest were ever to return to their original form. Yet the rules of the place—the rules he had, through his ceaseless building and bettering, set into being—stated that fallen leaves did not move. For a long stretch of days and nights he brooded over this problem, and it occurred to him that all of his efforts might have gone for naught and that he might ought to let it all come apart into chaos again, and begin anew, or else abandon his foolish efforts to bring forth fixed and pleasurable things out of the dead terror of the chaos.

One day, though, he noted a leaf that appeared different from the others, being of a darker color, and no longer flat but curled up at the tips and wrinkled in the middle. It was not as beautiful as the red leaves around it, yet something in it struck him as new and important to the problem that had been troubling him. He watched that leaf over days as it grew darker and darker and curled in upon itself.

Then, one day after it had become nearly unrecognizable, he noticed that it had moved. He gazed at it in fascination, for he had long ago laid down the law that leaves did not move once fallen. After a long while, it moved again, as of its own volition. It did not disappear in one place and reappear in another, but lifted itself up from the pond of red leaves, moved across space, and settled down