Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,143

he indented the face of the ground with grooves and connected them in a way that recalled the branchings of the veins in a leaf. When it was shaped to his liking, he made it adamant once more, fixing it thus. Now when he looked one way from the park he could see the street curving this way and that as it descended the slope, and when he looked the other way, he could see the white ground of the forest, scratched with the countless brown branches of the trees, heaving up in some places, and in others plunging into the declivities that were shot through its flesh.

Something told him that the time had come to bring the street, the park, and the forest back to their original form (though with greater perfection). As when the leaves had refused to go away, he did not have any thought of what to do about the deep snow (as he had named the white stuff) but then one day he noted that no flakes had fallen from the sky for a while and that the level of the snow was descending the trunks of the trees. Patches of ground appeared, then grew until little, then no snow was left.

When he looked down into the forest he heard a sound that was like the chaos and feared for a moment that all he had built was unraveling. But descending through the forest to investigate he found the veins in the land carrying away the melted snow. At first it ran straight and hissed at him. Sensing that this was wrong, he attended to it for a time, and made it whirl, course, and leap like the wind that had carried away the leaves, but more visible, and louder. But after he had improved it, its loudness was not the stupid hiss of the chaos but a pleasing rush and burble.

The ground was all black adamant, as if the memory of green had faded, but presently returned to its correct color as the tiny leaves reconstituted themselves. Bigger leaves appeared on the trees’ branches, red at first until he sensed that this was a mistake and that they ought to be green in the beginning. So the time of the white and the black was replaced by a time when nearly everything was green. He looked into the sky one day when things seemed uncommonly bright and saw a brilliant thing shining down from it, and later noticed that it was moving across the sky in a steady arc. He knew somehow that this was correct and later discovered “sun” in his memory. In due course “moon” followed.

The green time led to a changing of the leaves’ colors, so that one day with a feeling of satisfaction and even triumph he was able to gaze down the length of the street from the park and see the whole place just as he had first seen it at the beginning, save that everything about it was much more perfectly rendered than at first. “Seasons” were these gradual changes in the color and the shape of the place, and he knew that, having gone round through one cycle, it would happen again without the need for him to work it all out and fix problems. Just to satisfy himself of that, he looked on with much less problem-fixing as the leaves fell again and made the red lake, and turned brown, and scuttled about in the wind, and were replaced by the snow and then the green. The seasons were four, and they made up a year.

He let several years cycle, inspecting and improving matters as he went along. All of the seasons were beautiful and pleasing in different ways and all of the changes more or less interesting, but the part of the year that most troubled him—in the sense of a thing that pulled at his mind in some manner he could not satisfy—was the scuttling of the dry leaves at the beginning of the winter.

One year when the trees had all turned red, he noticed the first leaf of autumn drifting to the ground. It skated and turned on an invisible breeze that was at the same time stirring the branches of the trees. He descended from the park and moved down the street and approached the leaf to inspect it. It was an especially brilliant specimen, not yet purpling with age, its veins a radiant yellow.

A bad thing happened to him then: