parts of his body—ankles, hips, elbows—in addition to the usual pair on the back. His aura was small and groomed close to his head, perhaps reflecting a preference for the use of words, at which he seemed to excel all other souls. Accordingly, his face—in particular the nose and mouth—was more perfectly shaped than any of the others’ and indeed was uncommonly pleasant to look upon.
Egdod mistrusted his own ability to communicate with this creature. His words would seem crude by comparison. The bridging of the auras was more effective but he did not wish to overwhelm these as he had done with poor Ward. A brief connection with Freewander’s fragrant aura let him know, however, that her perceptions were better developed and she less likely to be stunned by a direct connection of this nature. She then could speak with better effect to Speaksall, who seemed to have a command of the words needed to communicate with all of the different types of souls. In this manner Egdod, with the help of these other two souls, managed to convey that it was desirable for all of the souls to move freely about the park.
Thinking that he might as well now fashion the little tower that he had glimpsed in his memory, Egdod walked to the middle of the park and summoned the adamant that he knew to lie under the grass. Below his feet, he sensed that it was striving to break through into the air and shape itself according to his will. But when he looked down he saw nothing but grass. In one place it bulged slowly upward and the soil parted to reveal a stump of rock, striving to grow higher, but to little effect. The farther it climbed, the slower it went. Sensing that something had gone awry, Egdod left off trying to command its shape, and it congealed as a formless knob no higher than his knee.
This troubled him considerably, and so he took flight and returned to the Palace. Freewander followed him for some distance but Egdod, already exasperated by her presumption, wheeled around and beat his wings to create immense gusts of air that hurled her back toward Town. She dodged round them with a nimbleness that irked him even as he admired it. But she took the message and left him alone.
The idea of the solitary tower in the park had called to mind another memory, which was that palaces sometimes had towers where their walls met to form corners. He touched down in the back, on the side facing the Garden and the forest, where he could work unseen by the souls in Town. For there was something about being watched while he did his work that unsettled his mind. At the Palace’s corner he attempted to form a tower, just as he had a few minutes ago down in the park. Almost as quickly as he could think of it, the adamant had grown up out of the bedrock and shaped itself into a round tower. He went to the other back corner and did it again. And again it worked. He moved around to the front side of the Palace, overlooking the street, and tried it a third time. It was much more difficult. The fourth corner he did not even attempt.
The “discovery” and announcement of the Landform cratered the agenda of ACTANSS 3. No one would talk about anything else after that. People stayed up all night wandering around that tennis court, just sightseeing. The Landform Visualization Utility, as Matilda’s and Sophia’s software became known, was mirrored to servers whence colleagues could access it so that, after the conference was over, they could go on exploring the place from the comfort of their own homes and offices.
During the weeks that followed, reports began to show up that read less like modern scientific papers and more like journals from eighteenth-century explorers. Some of those virtual Captain Cooks, such as Pluto, were more interested in the Landform itself, while others focused on the hotspot in the middle. Even to the most skeptical observers, this looked a hell of a lot like a town, with streets and houses. Sophia noticed a thing that, once she’d pointed it out, could not be unseen, which was that the layout of the “town” was oddly similar to that of the one in Iowa where Richard and the other Forthrasts had grown up.
As more programming talent and processing power were devoted to the improvement