outlying points to the outer darkness. When the display settled down, everyone spent a few moments taking in the new vista.
It was a cloud of green points, just as before, but these depicted a different landscape: a hill rising from a flat plain. Atop the hill was a structure made of straight lines and vertical walls, seemingly man-made. On the plain below was a sparkling grid pattern, reminiscent of a cityscape viewed from an airplane window at night: clearly gridded, with neat boxes rising from the grid.
“I could not be more confused as to what we are looking at right now,” announced Gloria Waterhouse. She was a philanthropist, connected with her family’s foundation, nontechnical, and always the first to stand up and request commonsense explanations when the discourse became too academic. She’d assigned herself that role and she did it well. “We’ve seen what looks like an imaginary island, with beaches and rivers and mountains, I guess. Now this is a small part of the island with a town on it. I get that. But what the hell is it? It looks like it came from a computer graphics experiment four, five decades ago when everything was primitive.”
“This configuration of points is the only way to make sense of the data emerging from the New Allocations,” Matilda said.
“And it’s consistent?” Gloria asked.
“This has been built up over months,” Sophia answered. “It changes a little from moment to moment, but it’s generally stable.”
“What are the red sparks?” asked the Metatron. Here and there, the green point cloud was flecked with momentary red sparks, like tiny lightning bolts.
“We use red as a debug tool to mark new data coming in,” Sophia explained. “Real-time stuff.”
“Then perhaps there is some error in the model,” said the Metatron, and pointed with its open hand to the black void above the town grid. A cloud of red sparks was suspended there, a bit like a fireworks burst, no spark enduring for longer than a fraction of a second. But the cloud as a whole persisted, and as they watched, it began to move through space toward the large structure on the top of the hill.
30
Presently Egdod grew weary of being looked at and flew back to the Palace. This was still empty, which struck him as being somewhat wrong, but he had seen little need to make improvements. The souls of Town, which, compared to him, had so little power to change things, had put objects in their houses of which he knew the names: chair, table. Ward had done likewise in his Gatehouse. Just to add some variety, Egdod now shaped the adamant of the floor up into a chair, and experimented with sitting down on it. As his body never grew tired, this was no different from standing up or flying except insofar as it added some variety. He made another chair where some other soul might sit. Since the other souls were smaller, he made the chair smaller too. Between the two chairs he raised up a table. It was all without any real point and it was not as satisfying as cultivating plants in his Garden or building mountains, deserts, and swamps. So he soon quit and went out to the Garden to see what new plants had sprouted. Some had appeared with leaves that were colors other than green, and ofttimes those were arranged in clusters, which were called flowers. Their purpose, other than adding variety and pleasing whoever gazed upon them, was not clear to him yet. But in the many years since Egdod had first become conscious and extracted his soul from chaos, he had seen countless things that had no clear purpose. Each time he did, he was confirmed in his belief that all of the things he was making had been familiar to him in the place he must have abided when he had been alive. He must have lived in a place that was shaped like Town. Other souls must have lived there too. His world must have contained leaves, trees, and flowers. Season had followed season, and water had beat upon rocks. The emergence of these things was not an act of creating new out of nothing, but a kind of slow remembrance. The souls building chairs in their houses in Town were likewise trying to remember things that they had once known.
Later Ward came in from the street and entered his Gatehouse so that Egdod could see him through the aperture that joined it