Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,142

same. The Process was running. And Enoch, standing up in front of all the people who mattered, had just come out and stated what many already believed: that to shut it down at this point would be to commit murder.

26

This whirling about of the dry leaves reached deep into him and fixed his attention for as long as it lasted—until, that is, the last of the leaves had blown away and left nothing but brown branches and the green ground. His mind could not get away from this. Dry and dead were ideas that came to his mind, though he had little grasp of what it meant for something to be dry, and no sense at all of what “dead” meant.

As he brooded in the park and moved up and down the street, groping within himself for a stronger signal, new things like leaves began to fall to the ground. But they weren’t coming from the trees. They weren’t red. And they were much smaller. For the first time in many a day, he turned his attention upward into the space above the trees, which had just been more chaos the last time he had regarded it. Now it was a dull white. Small leaves of a brighter white were falling out of it. A few at first, then more in such quantities as to dwarf the number of leaves. They collected among the tiny green leaves that constituted the ground, and began to accumulate and climb up those tiny stalks just as the red leaves had before climbed up the trunks of the trees. In time enough of them had descended that they covered the green entirely and made the whole ground white. The park was a different place altogether now from what it had once been, but he mastered a fear that the red beauty would never return.

For many days, he gazed down the length of the street at the shapes of the branches against the white ground. At night he looked up into the sky, which sometimes was merely a gray fog out of which more white flakes descended. At other times, though, it was black, and decorated with brilliant points of light. When first he took note of these, they were scattered about in no particular way, which put him in mind of chaos and therefore displeased him. But on longer inspection he began to see shapes in the stars, just as he had, eons ago, seen a leaf emerge from the chaos. The more he attended to those shapes, the clearer and more perfectly formed they became, as the stars shifted and arranged themselves across the dark in a manner that better suited him. He knew not, however, what the shapes they described were. The only shapes in his world were leaves and trees. The figures in the stars, though beautiful, could not be likened to those.

Sometimes a white flake would stick to the dark trunk of a tree and he would gaze closely at it. Early the trunk and the flake both were simple and featureless, but he knew this to be another thing that required bettering. By attending more carefully, he drew forth greater complexity from both. The smooth trunk developed furrows and ridges. The white flake grew six arms, each sharing the same shape, which branched like that of a tree’s boughs or a leaf’s veins.

The whirling dry leaves ceased to be his main preoccupation and became a mere memory. The bareness of the place made the simplicity of its shape obvious, and he saw wrongness in that. It had been nothing to him in the beginning when he had had so much red beauty to beguile him, but now that he had seen the complexity of shapes that emerged from the concerted movements of the dry leaves and that the stars described in the night sky, he thought it wrong that the ground itself should have a form so plain. So he dissolved adamant into chaos for a brief time, during which he elevated the park, and made the street climb to it, and let the forest slope away on its other side. The street was too straight and so he allowed it to bend this way and that. The slope of the forest he complicated and made more perfect by making it tend up and down in places, like the surface of a leaf when it has begun to turn brown and has ceased to be flat. In like manner