Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,144

a glimpse of resurgent chaos, as if the fabric he had so laboriously woven and perfected had been torn open in one place, and he were gazing through the hole at a much older and less well-formed version of it, seeing not a beautiful leaf but a patch of chaos with only a few red motes. It was a degree of ill-formedness he had not had to endure for a very large number of days and years and it put him in mind of the time at the very beginning when he had suffered through the eons of chaos and grasped desperately at even a single mote of red. This was troubling to him. He recoiled from it and went back up the street to the park. From that commanding height he could gaze down upon that one single leaf, lying there alone on the green grass, and brood over what had just happened. He was reluctant to go near it again. In time, though, he began to take it amiss that he was so fearful of this one leaf. Had he not brought all of this into being out of chaos? Could he not do it again? Could it be that this was a harbinger, a warning that something was wrong in what he had made, and that he might need to go and better it? So he went back down to inspect the leaf again. It was just a leaf. No wrongness in it. And yet he sensed something in its vicinity that was of a much lower order of perfection, so crude and low that it lacked even a visible form, that was seeing it all wrong, trying to drag the leaf down to its level—the level he had once existed at.

It puzzled and troubled him for a long while until he came suddenly to understand that there was another like him. Or rather, like what he had once been.

He was not alone.

Others could exist—did exist—who independently could experience what he had experienced in times long past. One of them had found its way here.

This—the idea that others of his kind could exist and could share his world—had never once entered his thinking during the whole time since he had become conscious, and it led to long brooding up in the park. Like other revelations that had come to his mind over the eons, it was at once completely astonishing and strangely familiar. Of course there would be others. Just as the first leaf that he had brought forth out of the chaos had, in time, proved to be only one of many—many that were like it, but different—and just as the same had proved true of trees and snowflakes, how could it not be the case that he himself was only one instance of a thing—a pattern of which others could exist? Perhaps others as numberless as the leaves or the snowflakes.

He understood all of this but he did not like it. It displeased him that when he came down out of the park to look at this perfect leaf, his experience of it was interfered with, marred, by the crudeness with which the other saw it. He wanted to eject this wretched thing, to make it go away. But the mere thought of doing so led his thinking down strange paths. To liken himself to one leaf or one snowflake was to raise troubling matters—more disturbing than anything he had experienced since he had lain paralyzed while the chaos had washed over him for eons. For many years now, leaves had come into existence, only to fall, dry up, and blow away when their time was at an end. Likewise snowflakes had covered the ground only to melt, merge, and rush away through the declivities in the forest. One snowflake softened and merged with another, and multitudes of them became rills high in the crown of the park. Rills merged with each other at the branchings to form creeks, creeks became streams, streams became a river. It all went away so that the next season could follow in its time. He had never troubled himself with the question of where the leaves blew away to and what became of them, nor of where the river flowed. Such concerns were idle and in no way affected him. But if he were now to conceive of himself as only one leaf on a tree, or tree in a forest, and if he were to admit of the