again, sometimes lighting at a different angle. It moved again and again and finally took to the air and whirled away and was gone.
So there was a way of getting rid of fallen leaves, but it required that they lose their beauty and be allowed to move about. Having labored for so many eons to create the beauty of the park and the street, he was fearful of letting all the leaves go. He had learned though to trust that sense of correctness that had guided him to this point. Ignoring it led, sometimes quickly and sometimes over slow eons, first to troubling emotions and then to the steady and relentless decoherence of all that he had so laboriously summoned into his regard. Obeying it—though it didn’t always lead to results quickly, or at all—more often than not made things better than they had been. And things that were better persisted and self-improved. Things that were shoddy frayed, sometimes while he wasn’t looking, other times even as he gazed on helplessly watching them dissolve into chaos.
Seeing no other way to bring the leaves’ beauty back, he suffered it to happen. The red lake turned brown over the course of many days as the leaves all went the way of that first one. They began going into motion. At first they moved fitfully, each choosing its own course, but he sensed the wrongness of that and put a stop to it and built it back up in a new manner that felt right. Thereafter they did not move singly and of their own accord but in groups, with all the leaves in a particular area suddenly taking flight and traveling in the same direction for some distance before settling down again. At first the movement was in straight lines but as the change deepened, and most leaves disappeared, never to return, the remaining ones began to whirl about in loose gyres that would scrape and tumble over the green grass for some distance before disassembling and falling to the ground for a time.
Part 5
25
Kill it, put it on ice, or let it live? Those are the options when you’ve created a monster” was how the keynote speaker began.
This created a stir in the hall, which Enoch enjoyed for a few moments before settling things down.
“That word. The Oxford English Dictionary begins by telling us that a monster is something extraordinary or unnatural; a prodigy, a marvel. Then it sort of ruins everything by letting us know that this wonderful definition is obsolete. Go and look up ‘prodigy’ and you’ll see more of the same; the old meaning of the word is suffused with a sense of the marvelous.”
The setting was a long hall with a steeply pitched roof of western red cedar, supported by columns of the same: whole tree trunks felled from the surrounding forest. They were in a resort in Desolation Sound, between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. The architecture was meant to evoke the longhouses once built here by First Nations people, but everything was state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, buttoned up. The fireplace ran on natural gas, and a little plaque next to it explained that the Desolation Lodge, as this place was called, was atoning for its sins against the climate by growing trees elsewhere, pulling more carbon out of the atmosphere than this appliance was putting into it. An autumnal gale was flinging rain against the thermal-pane windows and making the post-and-beam structure creak, but the three dozen people in the hall were comfortable in their fleece vests, artisanal sweaters, and high-dollar hoodies. Most had woken up this morning in homes or hotel rooms in Seattle. A few had chosen to take early-morning flights from the Bay Area, or red-eyes from the East Coast. All had made their way down to the Lake Union waterfront, where float planes were loading and departing every half hour. A ninety-minute flight took them across the international border and up the Strait of Georgia to Desolation Sound. The planes pulled up to a rambling complex of piers founded on massive rocks that shouldered above the high-tide mark. From there a boardwalk strode across a pebbled beach littered with the age-silvered trunks and roots of ancient trees. Rambling switchbacks took them to the conference center—an old-time resort that had been fixed up with some unholy combination of tech money and cruise industry investment. They’d checked into their apartments and cabins, which were spattered across a few acres of rain forest,