possibility of others like him coming along to abide in the same place, then he must, in order to make the thought whole and perfect and sound as it ought to be, consider whether he and others of his kind were destined to fall and be carried away on a wind, or melt and merge with others and rush away to parts unknown.
Such thoughts led to no firm conclusion, but, over long days and nights of brooding, he came to understand that he ought to form about himself a shape and to clothe that shape in a boundary such that on one side of it was him and on the other side was not-him. Somewhat as the trees were covered in bark. He began to make this so, but with no fixed idea at first as to what its form ought to be. He could adopt the form of a tree, but sensed that this was not correct. Trees were what he looked at, not what he was.
One night he was gazing up at the stars. Some time ago these had, partly of their own accord and partly through his idle musings, adopted forms that were not like those of trees but whose nature he could not quite understand. It came to him then that they were a kind of message. In their shapes were suggestions as to how he might pattern his own form. He tried various shapes: one long and sinuous, one squat with several legs, and one that stood upright, with a head at the top where the looking and the hearing took place, and appendages below that which could be put to various uses. This one he sensed was correct. He worked with it through all of the days that the leaves were falling. He saw now that this shape had always been implicit in the way that he had moved about and experienced things. What was a street but a place where he could walk? For that, legs were needed. His long habit of gazing at fallen leaves suggested that he was looking at things from a place that was above the ground but below the height of the branches from which the leaves fell. This, he now understood, matched up well with having a head perched some modest distance above his legs. Leaves could be snatched out of the air and held up for inspection by separate limbs, mounted just below the head. At the ends of those limbs were platforms for supporting leaves. Sprouting from the edges of those platforms were smaller, finer appendages, suitable for poking at snowflakes. He could make them curl inward just as the projecting armlets of a leaf did as it dried out. But unlike a dry leaf these did not shrivel and die once so curled, but could be restraightened at will.
The winds of autumn came and made the dry leaves whirl about. He sensed it would be a good thing to have the power of such movement and so he altered his form, adding another pair of appendages, somewhat leaflike in their shape. These had the power of catching the wind and gave him the freedom to rise up off the ground and join the leaves in their whirling and their careering through the air. As he did so, he sensed that others were around him, whirling about just like the dry leaves did, caught up helplessly in the dry cold wind, unable to master their own movements as he was able to do.
He understood then why the whirling of the dry leaves had held such fascination for him since the first time he had beheld it: this was what others of his kind did when they lacked the power to do otherwise.
When they had only just come to this place.
When they had only just died.
He was dead.
27
To mathematicians, Zelrijk-Aalberg might have been famous because of the fractal crack in the tavern floor, but to lawyers it was interesting because of its legal status and sovereignty. To make an extremely long story short, Z-A was different from the surrounding principalities because of certain peculiarities in how its ownership had changed hands at a few pivotal moments during the last thousand or so years. It had ended up being one of those places like Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man that was neither one thing or the other. It had never formally and explicitly become part of either the Netherlands or Belgium. This had been more