of hundred?”
“Three hundred and forty-seven,” El corrected him.
“I simply didn’t know you had that many scan labs.”
“The equipment is now capable of being mass-produced. We have about fifty of them. Many in China, India, where the program has taken hold to a degree not fully appreciated in the West. Two of them in that building right over there.” El nodded at an eight-hundred-year-old half-timbered house a stone’s throw away. “Others in cities where a lot of rich people live.”
“You said ‘scanned and archived,’ but you didn’t say you had booted any up.”
“We started booting them up a week ago,” El announced, “leading to the pattern of activity that Sophia noticed and that presumably accounts for you sitting here in my beer garden talking to me. We are well aware that you have been doing the same.”
Corvallis nodded, perhaps a little hastily—trying too hard, perhaps, to show how transparent he was being? “I am here partly for that reason,” he said, “and partly to make you aware that, in accordance with our responsibilities, we have booted up the Ephrata Eleven and the Most Favored Nine.”
“And Verna.”
“Verna was the first, after Dodge.”
“They will never be the same as the others,” El said. “They should have waited.”
28
He was dead and so he must previously have been not-dead. Of not being dead he had no direct knowledge, but he could guess that he had abided in a place with leaves, trees, snow, rivers, wind, and stars. He had existed in some physical form probably not far different from the one that he had pulled about himself here. He had shared that existence with others. Others who were likewise becoming dead and finding their way to this place. Drawn to it, perhaps, by the availability of coherent things like red leaves. Longing to experience something other than chaos but not knowing how to summon those experiences forth out of the noise.
Why did they not then go away and suffer for eons as he had, and learn for themselves the knack of making whole and beautiful things out of chaos?
Because they didn’t have to. In the early going, if he himself had been able to find some other dead person’s ready-made world and there abide, he’d have done so and accounted himself fortunate. But no such thing had been within his reach and so he’d had no choice but to suffer and learn.
He wondered how many of the other dead people had found their way here to his place. In his new body he soared above the park, supported by the leaflike appendages growing out of his back. These were poorly formed for the crowded environment of the forest but well made for movement in empty space. He bettered them, making them less like leaves, giving them a new form that could fold against his back when they were not needed, yet still spread wide when he chose to take flight. Folding these, his wings, he descended to the ground and walked on his feet through the forest, inspecting each tree, standing above each little stream watching the flow of the water and hearing its sound.
Out of the clashing waters he heard “Egdod” and remembered that this was his name.
For the most part little had changed, but from time to time when passing near a tree or squatting by a stream he would sense a little tear in the world, feel a knot of near-chaos drifting about the place, and thus know that another dead person had found their way here. Some of them came and went like snowflakes, others seemed to take up residence in trees or streams, as if they longed for bodies but had not the wit or craft to fashion their own. They latched desperately on to forms that Egdod had made, be they never so unsuitable for beings-of-Egdod-type.
At times flying with wings spread, at times walking upon the ground, he went up and down the street and ranged through the forest and roamed the park and learned the number of others who had come to his domain. He concluded that the number of souls was not many more than the number of the tiny appendages sprouting from the leaf-platforms that terminated his upper limbs. Almost as quickly as he felt the need for them, the notions came to his mind: fingers, hands, arms. Ten, and other numbers. There were between ten and twenty souls, all told, some scuttling about as dry leaves, others lodged in trees or streams. Their number was